Letters 11.1–11.14

In the Lord God Jesus Christ I feel, and in you above all I gladly experience by the gift and word of God, that “nothing can be compared with a faithful friend,” and that “a gracious tongue abounds in a good man.” For the consolation of your love is to us like a medicine of life, your words like a honeycomb; “as cold water to the thirsty, so is good news to us” about you “from a far country.” And while this news fattens our bones with the evidence of your well-being and with the eloquence of your love, it brings a great heap of gladness and delight in that it is brought and delivered by your servants, our sons in the Lord, so that we enjoy not only your letter but some part of your very side. What shall we render to our Lord, besides all that he has rendered to us, for this grace too, by which he has joined you to us by a spiritual brotherhood: you who were most dear to us before in worldly friendship, and now also, in his own affairs, which we hold to be of incomparable price, an inseparable companion and partner?

“Who is my mother,” he says, “or who are my brothers?” Clearly not those born of the will of the flesh and the union of sleep, but those born of God through Christ, the wisdom of God, who, remaining in himself, makes all things new and gives power to become sons of God, coheirs of his kingdom; for this very reason he was conformed to the body of our lowliness, that he might conform us to the body of his glory, and, tearing us not only from our land but also from our kindred, transfer us into his own lot and generation. By this gift he has deigned to create us for himself and to bind us together in the bond of his love; from a carnal intimacy, in which even then, as we understand, he had been preparing us for this covenant, he has changed us by a stronger affection into an eternal kinship, since this is the love of Christ, which never fails, because it flows down from God and abides in God, and makes every man in whom it abides everlasting by its own everlastingness. This love knows not how to be puffed up, is free of guile, untouched by envy, jealous for God, not with pride of spirit but with a spirit of gentleness and a jealousy of devotion. For our Lord, as he himself has testified and as we experience, is sweet and gentle and lowly of heart.

Born a brother to me from him, not only for present help but for an everlasting partnership, you surpass every affection of bodily kinship toward me by as much as you are my brother by a stronger parent than those whom flesh and blood alone ally to me. For where now is my brotherhood of blood? Where is my old friendship? Where are my former companions? I have vanished before them all, “a stranger,” as it is said, “to my brothers and a foreigner to the sons of my mother.” “My friends and those once near to me now have stood afar off”; and “like a stream rushing down and like a wave passing over,” so they pass me by, and perhaps are confounded in me and, as it is written, are ashamed to come to me; those who were near have become far from me, and those who were far, near. “Instead of your fathers,” it says, “sons have been born to you.” So instead of parents and brothers and friends you have been made ours by the Lord: you, anxious with a parent’s care, solicitous with a brother’s love, assiduous with the whole faithfulness of unfeigned friendship, and pouring out all the bowels of devotion upon us, visit us with constant letters and soothe us with the gentlest comforts.

Nor are you content to visit us at every opportunity unless you also send your servants; and you choose letter-carriers not only from among your household slaves but also from among your holy sons, in whose blessed offspring in the Lord you rejoice, so that you may see us through their eyes and touch us through their mouths. Beautiful to us are their feet, as of those who bring good news. For they announce and bring us the things that make for peace concerning you, when they relate the works of the Lord which you either do in the word of God or write in the spirit of the Word. What riches could give us such precious gifts, what kinships such sweet comforts? Even if we defer the reckoning of what divine generosity promises for eternity, it is easy to see how much better than the things we have put second are the things that are repaid even in this world. For what loss of devotion, I ask, is caused me by an unkind parent, a neglectful brother, or a forgetful friend, when all the loves of these names, pledges, or bonds are repaid to me abundantly even from you alone? To say nothing of the not a few, both in our world and in one unknown to us, who are like you toward God and toward us, whose very great affection the grace of the Rewarder grants us in place of homeland, parents, and patrimony: if we count the good things we have received in you alone, we shall reckon that all that was ours has been repaid to us in you more abundantly and more preciously. “A brother does not redeem,” it says; “shall a man redeem?” Likewise we may say: the world does not love us, but Christ loves us. Man neglects, but God cherishes. “A man’s enemies are those of his own household,” but again, a man’s friends are those of God’s household. We had good and great brothers, friends, and neighbors; but the Lord was not pleased in them toward us, he who chose to give you to us as an inseparable brother and a most beloved neighbor, whom we rightly love as ourselves, because we have one heart and one soul with you in Christ.

So what we said briefly above about the love of many others who are equally spiritual we did not say fittingly or worthily; for in no one’s person can there be for us the same grace that we have in you. For though they may deign to love equally the grace of the Lord in our lowliness, yet this is a special gift to us in you: that the friendship of our former life too marked us out as predestined for each other in the closest union of Christ’s love, while we were still lovers of the things from which we are now turned away through Christ. And yet, through the habit of that intimacy, we grew into this bond in which we are now joined by God’s intervention, so that by loving each other faithfully even on an unbelieving road we learned to love spiritually as well; for each of us always loved the other so scrupulously that no affection could be added to our love for each other except the love of Christ, which alone surpasses every sense and affection. All the more warmly do we owe thanks to the good Lord, that he deigned to look upon our lowliness, and, having found us alike in the field, drew us out alike, as twins from the womb of the flesh, and took us up alike. For truly, as you wrote, we were two in the field; but by the goodness and almighty power of God, I would dare to say, one of us was taken up in such a way that neither was left. For each of us singly was also two, when the rebellious flesh in us was at odds with the spirit and our man had no peace, since the outer fought against the inner. But now, by the favor of him who made both one, we are both two and one, because there is one spirit in two, and there is no distinction between those whose body is one. But this, as I said, we share with all our brothers in Christ; one thing is peculiarly welcome to us and to be welcomed in you, in whose friendship we have received this most blessed gift of God: that we were not separated from each other by a change of road, a loss we have experienced with regard to many who were once, as you recall, most dear to us.

Truly, then, you are to us parent and brother and neighbor; you do in our regard the will of God and the fullness of the law, you love us as yourself, a friend to us in the love of Christ and a brother in God’s regeneration. Since you see and recognize this, why do you speak burdensomely of us and falsely of yourself, saying, “We were two in the field, and one was taken”? Let us not be ungrateful to God, who took up not one of us, but one in us. We were two, but at the time when we were paired with those brothers from whom a division has been made by this resolve of ours; for the same Scripture shows clearly enough that “one” is said not of a single body but also of the oneness of heart of many, since it presents these persons not in two men but in peoples, as the faith of the Gentiles and the remaining-behind of the Jews shows. For those two women grinding, too, of whom likewise one is taken, bear, I think, the figure of the synagogue and the church; for there is no other person treated in the whole scheme of the sacred writings except either the distinction, in the universal human race, between believing and unbelieving peoples, or, in the nature of every man, the creation of a twofold substance. And therefore, my brother, since we always cleaved to each other in one heart, as we now cleave together in Christ, we have been either taken up together or left together. But taken up, not by our merit but by the grace of God, whose gifts and callings are without repentance; nor from any prior claim of works, but by the faith of a good will, by which, inspired together with love for him, as appeared from the single tenor of our resolve and the single time of our conversion, we ought to glory and exult together in him who justifies the ungodly through faith and gives food to all flesh: not this food which perishes, but that which is prepared for eternal sustenance, such as either a soul busy in the things of God or the catholic church cooks. For it is the body of the true bread that came down from heaven and gives life-giving food to those who hunger for righteousness. For it does not stuff the flesh but strengthens the heart of man. This bread is also a fountain: the more it is eaten, the more it is hungered for, and the more it is drunk, the more it is thirsted for. That we may eat this bread forever, let us grind in the mill of this world the good wheat, which is the working of faithful obedience and love from a pure heart and unfeigned faith.

Since you are full of this grace and virtue, you grind good grain for God and present yourself to be feasted on by God in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth; for whoever, by carrying out his will, is turned into a member of his body is food for him, as he himself says that whoever joins himself to God becomes one spirit. This we attain if we bear the image of the heavenly with the same care and diligence with which we have borne the image of the earthly. For by imitating the imitator of Christ we shall come to the imitation of God, to whom we are a good odor in Christ, if we present a living sacrifice in reasonable service, so that we offer him pure fine flour sifted by the mill of a clean heart from the inner chambers of our being, and, setting up a chaste altar in our breast, slay in our vices the animals commanded by the law for sacrifices: sacrificing a he-goat when we destroy sin, in which is the odor of death; striking down a bull if we lay aside pride; offering a sheep if, not lukewarm in love and fervent in spirit, we cast out softness and sloth; offering in ourselves also a lamb if we live unblemished, and a calf if we become children in malice, so that we reproduce the purity of the one by chastity and the foolishness of the other by simplicity. Such a sacrifice I see you presenting to God in the temple of your body, in the sanctuary of your heart, in the immolation of your flesh, in the oblation of your soul. You sacrifice a bull when, brought low by devout humility, you have struck your lofty neck with the fear of God. You sacrifice a kid when, as a follower of righteousness, you kill all the works of the left side. You cut the throat of a sheep when, as a diligent worker and zealous meditator on the divine will and law, you lay low in yourself inertia and sloth like a soft beast, and with the shears of the heavenly word cut away from yourself the hindrances of this life, like fleeces, useful to the one who shears but burdensome to the one who bears them. With these shears Christ holds us gripped by the two Testaments, and either strips us of worldly burdens as of wool, or again, cutting them away like fleeces from bodily vices as from the sickly and soft bodies of sheep, he draws them into the spinning of the church for the clothing of his body, which he covers with the works of believers (since, when we in turn put on Christ, we are clothed by Christ), and weaves them into the fringes of his garment.

This shepherd has already shorn you, I think, and set you on his threshing floor and soaked your fleece with heavenly dew. For the grace that has been poured on your lips, and flows abundantly through your mouth like a stream from the fountains of Israel or … , as it is written, from paradise, teaches us that the Lord has come down on you like rain on a fleece and has given you water from Jacob’s well, because you too had become one of the sons of Israel drawn near to the Lord. If, then, you have been shorn, you feel that you have received a double benefit: in the heat of the world you crop the light pastures of the word sprinkled with the dew of morning gladness, and you are not scorched by the heat of the noonday demon, because you rest under the shadow of the Lord’s wings. Meanwhile a tunic is being prepared for you from your own wool, with which you may be clothed on that day of winter, so that you may be able to stand before the face of his cold, if, stripped of the body, you are not found naked of works. Then in turn Christ will offer himself to you as a sheep, that Lamb who was led to the slaughter for us and before his shearer did not open his mouth, allowing his fleece, that is, the covering of his flesh, to be stripped from him. For he laid down both his soul and his flesh for us and took them up again, he who is priest and victim, lamb and shepherd; who was slain as shepherd for his sheep and as lamb for his shepherds. For the Lord himself is the victim of all priests, who, offering himself to the Father for the reconciliation of all, was the victim of his own priesthood and the priest of his own victim; and now to him, as the one Lord of all, every new creature is a sacrifice, and the victims themselves are priests. If we now present ourselves to him to be shorn in the silence of humility and patience with which he presented himself for us, he will take on himself the burdens of our fleece and will not disdain to carry the wool of his sheep, he who deigns to carry back on his shoulders to the fold the very sheep that he has called back from straying.

And since he himself has no need of our goods, while we need all of his, being good to us only for our own good, he takes what is ours, which is his; and yet he does not want it as his by right, but credits it to us as if it were ours, though we have nothing that we have not received, and we cannot even exist without his assent. So to us, who brought nothing into this world, he adds the substance of temporal things like a fleece to be shorn: not that the burden may hinder those whom he bids to be born unencumbered, but that he may set before us material for virtue in which to bring forth merits, and that we may have the means to give proof of our faith and devotion toward God, that is, our true Father and Lord, if we have things that are dear or sweet which, preferring God, we disregard for a great reward. And through his immense goodness these things, though they were neither brought with us into this world nor are to be carried out from it with us, are nevertheless, if we obey his commands, so ordered that they are changed for the better and from temporal become eternal. For the things which, as we did not bring them in, so we cannot take away by our nature and by the passing form of this world, these, turning them by the work of almighty God through a blessed kind of trade, we not only carry out with us but even send on ahead of us, sown in the bosom of the Lord.

Hence, I think, it is prescribed that the lazy worker shall not eat bread: not, of course, this bread of perishing food, but that by which one lives into true life; because each one, as it is written, will eat of his own fruits and live by his own works. And so each man’s work is his bread, and the true and living bread is Christ, whom the lazy worker cannot eat, because he is also our Passover, which we are commanded to eat in all haste, unencumbered and girded and firmly shod, without putting our staffs out of our hands, that is, never slackening the works on which we lean; for the time is short, and it is expedient for us to be free from care, as the apostle urges, because of the present necessity, so that we may be found ready and not fear to open to the Lord when he knocks, dreading what we deserve from a conscience of sleep or negligence. That fear will indeed profit us nothing, when we must nonetheless be dragged out, and to death after death, to pay the just penalties of negligence and impiety, if we are caught serving another’s master rather than our own, busy with the affairs of the world rather than of Christ, and do not open to the Lord when he knocks, and are led unwilling to the Father. Therefore we are told beforehand to labor and pray for this, that is, for the soul, at the opportune time, that is, the present, into whose span we are brought for this purpose, that through this short and passing life we may seek the true life. The plain and field of this life is this world, or man himself, who is sent into this world, from whom one is taken up when, as we said above, with the flesh subjected to the spirit, he has made the two one; for in each of us, according to the apostle, there are two minds and two laws, and as they grind within us, flour acceptable or rejectable to God is produced.

But your words, as eloquent as they are chaste, testify that you, having conquered the law of the members and with the outer man brought to ruin, are preparing a pure dough and making unleavened bread for Christ. For it would not have been granted you to tell the story of Martin unless you had made your mouth worthy of sacred praises by a clean heart. Blessed, then, are you by the Lord, you who have recounted the history of so great a bishop and so manifest a confessor in words as worthy as your affection is just. Blessed too is he for his merits, who deserved a historian worthy of his faith and life, and who is consecrated both to divine glory by his own merits and to human memory by your writing. These words of yours are also fleeces, and they cover the Lord Jesus with a most welcome covering; they surround … with beautiful furnishing and adorn it with the flowers of your talent. That Lamb will clothe you in return from his own fleece on the day of recompense, putting his immortality over your mortality.

Only remember us and look back to us, not looking back as one who turns away, but as one mindful of a friend. For it is certain that, as a more skillful farmer, you have larger fruits, and, as a swifter runner, you fly ahead of our slowness to the prize of the upward calling. For, weaker in mind than in body, I follow you at a long interval, yet separated from you only by distance, not by road; and I turn the same mill with a sick and unequal hand, your partner at the mill but worse in grain, because I grind tares mixed with the wheat. That these may be wholly turned into good grain I need your prayers, by which I hope to escape both my riches and my poverty, since both are evil for me, being poor in righteousness and rich in sin. For I would truly believe myself rich in good if I were already as poor as you think. In this matter, however, I will shake you a little out of your words, in which you disagree with yourself. Even if you did not proclaim virtues of my own in me, yet since you thought others’ virtues might be granted me by your words, how is it fitting that you, the same man, should admit that you shudder at the poverty which you profess to admire? If you believe that this virtue has been given me which you confess you wish for but cannot attain, namely that having food and clothing I am content with it and take no thought beyond the day, why do you think either that I shall be overcome by the necessity of want, so that I stop inviting you, whom I cannot help longing for, or why do you show yourself so weak and distrustful of Christ that you fear to come to such a friend as you describe, if in truth you follow him who said: “Take up your cross and come, follow me”? How else do you think Christ is to be followed except by the law he taught and the pattern he displayed? Though he came to his own, yet among his own possessions he had no place to lay his head.

Imitate the imitator of Christ, that you may live by dying, crucifying yourself to the world and the world to yourself, dying daily through faith in the word and living in the word of faith. For man does not live by bread alone, especially a Christian, of whom it is properly written that he lives by faith. Did he say “by bread”? Why then do you fear hunger from me, if you have faith? Your bread is with you. If you are fed by the word of God, you will not long for the food of the belly; for God will destroy both the one and the other while he builds himself up in us, if we stand founded in his love and do not set our house on the sand of wavering distrust. Did we not both believe him and swear allegiance to him who said: “Do not take thought for tomorrow; for sufficient for the day is its own evil; seek first the kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be added to you”? If you believe him, why do you fear hunger from the want of this brother of his, whom you know to have preferred poverty to riches in the security of this word? Or do you believe that the one who trusts the earth abounds more than the one who trusts God? And the one fed by his own care more than the one fed by God’s? What can that wretched man have who does not have himself? For he does not have himself who hopes more from himself than from God; and he is truly dead who fears not to live if he entrusts his whole self to God and commits himself to God. I hope, therefore, that it was rather a jest of your good humor than a confession of weakness when you wrote that you believe I shall soon be so poor that I would not dare invite you any more. I confess that I prefer nothing to the good of such freedom, since so inward a circumcision is full perfection. But if you have true faith in Christ, true admiration of heavenly virtues in man, and emulation of a man living in God, how would you not seek me all the more the more perfect you heard I was, unless you were openly confessing that you do not believe in your heart what you profess with your mouth? But you, a frequent visitor of the most blessed Martin, are shown to be fleeing in me the sinner, not the poor man; for you would surely never have longed for Martin if you had feared to go hungry for bodily food.

I certainly, since in the progress of spiritual work love, which is the fullness of the law, must above all make progress, shall not cease to invite you as I do not cease to long for you. Come to us, and if you can, fly to us. We have nothing but Christ; and see whether we have nothing, we who have him who has all things. For we did not leave Ebromagus for the sake of a little garden, as you write, but preferred the garden of paradise to both patrimony and homeland, because the true home is rather there, where it is eternal, and the homeland is more truly there, where is our original land and first dwelling. For if you believe, by the favor of Christ, for whose sake, if we have nothing, we possess all things in him, then now in this ground of thorns and toil the mud of the earth does not hold us even in the little clod of a garden; would only that no dust of sin clung to us in the same way! If you believe this good to be such as you proclaim, and believe that I am in it, as you write that you believe, and yet long for me more sluggishly, then you offend no longer against me, a sinner always and always unworthy of your sight, but against the Lord himself, if you think that the sustenance of mortal life will fail us precisely when God has begun to be our possession.