Letters 12.1–13.7

I confess that I marvel at the holy kindness and patience of your love, that from the letters I usually write to you, very talkative and fuller of annoyance than of grace, you nevertheless conceive a longing for my speech rather than weariness of it; since you provoke me to frequent and longer letters and stir me by the grace of your own writings, in which love from a pure heart and unfeigned faith speaks a sincere affection in the unleavened bread of truth, and in turn draws out mine from my inmost mind. What, then, shall I do? Shall I obey you with an abundance of letters? But you have no need of my goods, and it is more fitting that I be enriched by you, because the rich man ought to give to the poor, that there may be equality. Or shall I rather consult my own advantage and set a guard on my mouth, to escape the danger of sin that comes from much talking? But again I fear that I may be found guilty of disobedience and perhaps offend more gravely if I sin against you by not obeying than if I fear for myself by not writing.

May the Lord, then, at the Lord’s bidding, give me the opening of my mouth to you, and hold out the lamp of his word before my feet, so that the night of my foolishness may be lit up like the day. May he loosen my tongue to a good word, he who loosed even the mouth of an ass to human speech. For I too am one of those stones or beasts of burden in whose prefiguring the ass then spoke, signifying that the dumb nature of pagan hardness and stupidity would speak when its tongues were loosed for God. And, if you like, let us extend the fabric of this letter on this very grace of God, since all our discourse ought to be occupied with the commands and praises of the Most High, and everything we say, everything we live, should be paid back with perpetual thanksgiving to him by whose work and gift we speak and live. For he made us, and not we ourselves. He, I say, the Lord, made us, and he also remakes us, having from the very beginning, through all that he has done and spoken in his saints, been working out the sacraments of our salvation, that is, of the restoration of mankind. For the righteous Abel was at once restored by a holy offspring in Seth, who, with a like face, reproduced his father, formed in the image of God. From there, flowing down through the others from the first spring, the vein of righteousness ran on; and although the flood intervened, the seedbed of the destroyed universe stood firm in one man, but a righteous one, the mystery of the only Redeemer already then at work, so that reconciliation might come through one, since the offense had come through many. But again, as the human race went on and righteousness slipped back, and nations and crimes grew together, lest the iniquity of men should again deserve the destruction of the race, again one was chosen to be called the father of faith, from whom should spring both the promise of the kingdom and the seed of the eternal King. That seed, multiplied by the faith of the Gentiles, Christ fulfilled: he who appeared to the patriarchs, was foreshadowed by the law, foretold by the prophets, and came himself, to fulfill the law and the prophets and to give by grace the healing that the law could not confer by works.

For by now sin had so pervaded the whole body, that is, the entire human race, that neither poultice nor bandage was of use to the weak and wounded; for, the strength of the vices being confirmed, the disease, stronger than the remedies, had shut out every cure of human help. And therefore he came who is also to come, conformed to the body of our lowliness, that he might conform us to the body of his glory; because no one but the craftsman is master of his own work, and only the potter has rights over his clay. So the Lord of all, who had made all, deigned to come down to our condition and to take us up in his body, that he might remake us by the same art or power by which he had made us. And he came, not in the loftiness of a lord, which he was, but in the form of a servant, which he was not. He who is the power of God and the Lord of hosts, the helper and protector of all, became like a man without help. He who was free among the dead died to set free. He who justifies the ungodly through faith was reckoned among the wicked. That Lamb who takes away the sins of the world was led like a sheep to the slaughter. He suffered death who gives eternity.

But to perceive the reason for so great a design and gift is his own light, who enlightens us from the everlasting mountains, to which, lifting up our eyes, we may see that we have been found again by the same paths by which we had perished: again from a tree, again from a virgin, but not again to be cast down by pride; on the contrary, to return by humility. For this reason the King of glory and Lord of majesty emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and covered his invisible greatness with a visible abasement, so that us, who were through that old disease of wrongly conceived arrogance lofty outside but crushed within, he might raise to the form of his own loftiness through the pattern of our humility in himself. For to this end the good Lord has worked and works daily, that we may attain the glory of being conformed to God if we follow the example of our own conformation in Christ, recognizing in the government of the Most High the measure set for our nature, so that we may be carried above ourselves by his grace if we walk within ourselves, mindful of ourselves. To this measure we are fitted by that prophetic saying in Numbers, which says: “We will turn neither to the right nor to the left, but we will go by the king’s highway.” This for us is Christ, the mediator of God and men, holding us in balance between the divine and the human and leading us to his kingdom by the king’s highway, so that, humble in heart and lofty in work, we may be lifted from the left, that is, from sins, which drag down to death, and, called back by the law of humility from the excessive right, that is, from proud presumption, may keep a wholesome middle course; lest either, bending our eyes to the earth, we be compared to beasts that have no understanding, or, searching things too high for us, we become vain in our thoughts. Therefore, not minding high things but consenting to the lowly, let us measure ourselves by the measure with which the Lord has measured to us, so that we may be narrowed in ourselves and enlarged in the Lord; not like those wise men of this world, whose wisdom the Lord has rejected and destroyed and shut out by the foolishness of preaching. For “they argued,” it says, “to hide snares”; since the whole art of the philosophers labors at this, to obscure the light of truth by the assertion of fictions, to entangle in the snares of empty disputes minds drawn away from the truth, to deceive by the fraud of talent and to mislead by the cosmetic of speech.

But after the light arose in the darkness, the Lord merciful and compassionate and righteous, those men set their mouth against heaven in vain, who, ignorant even of earthly things and of their own nature, search the regions of the sky and seek God without God. Therefore those who searched failed in their searching, and the arrows of little ones became their wounds; because the Lord, catching the wise in their own craftiness, confounded them through the mouths of infants and sucklings, and established his kingdom not in word but in power. Hence I too, least of all the Lord’s least, slightest of the little ones and most infantile of infants, dare to burst out into the voice of his praise, giving thanks to the Lord Most High that he has brought forth to his little ones the mystery of lofty godliness, which he kept stored in the treasures of his wisdom, and hidden it from the wise of the world, lest this world should glory in the vanity of its wise men, through which, with darkness poured over it, it had not known the wisdom of God. But our peace is Jesus, who came to make both one and to set all things in equality; he destroyed the strong and chose the weak, despised the wise and took up the foolish, so that there might be equality, with no one claiming anything as his own, since every man, sharing in salvation and wisdom only by the divine gift, must glory in the Lord. Let us therefore rejoice with trembling in the Lord our God, who is humble of heart and lofty in majesty, having the same mind in ourselves as in Christ, who, as I said above, conferred on us the grace of salvation through the pattern of humility, so that we, who had deserved to fall by a spirit of exaltation, might learn to rise again by a heart of humility.

That the good Lord was crucified and rose again was done not only to destroy our death and restore eternity, but also to shape the present life, in which we acquire the merit by which the possession of that eternally blessed life is prepared. With what mystery of godliness and design, then, was the Lord fixed to the cross? The apostle teaches: that he might break down, he says, the dividing wall, kill the enmities, strip all the ambition of this world, and, taking captive from the whole power of the enemy, triumph over captivity itself, taking up in his flesh, he says, the likeness of sinful flesh: not, of course, the likeness of flesh, since God is truth in all things and therefore the Word was truly and bodily made flesh, but the likeness of the sin of the flesh; so that he who did no sin by his inviolable and impassible nature nevertheless, for our sake, as it is written, was made sin, that is, bore the sinner he had taken up in the form of a servant. For he was made a curse for us, to free us from the curse of the law; by sin he condemned sin, that is, the material of sin, which still lived in that flesh of Adam, he made void in that very flesh of Adam which he deigned to take up. And so, destroying the dividing wall, that is, the sin that separated us from God, he made both one, not only so that the faith of Jews and Gentiles might come together in Christ, but so that in each of us who believe our nature might agree with itself, and the discord which before was at work in us, when the carnal soul fought against spiritual affection, might be dissolved by the peace of faith. For now that ancient war, in which the law of sin fought against the law of God, is abolished in Christ, when the spirit, serving God, governs by faith the soul subdued to it, and the flesh, as servant, accompanies in all obedience the soul serving God in its turn.

Therefore by the Lord’s passion and resurrection we are instructed not only in the hope and faith of the resurrection, so that we may know how to die not only by the dissolution of the flesh but also by a voluntary withdrawal from this world, and by dying through faith to this world be made alive to God. For the life that is friendly to this world is the death of the soul. For this reason the apostle tells us: “Put to death your members which are on the earth.” He testifies that he himself dies daily, bruising his body, forgetting what lies behind and stretching forward to what lies ahead. In this he teaches humility and loftiness together, because the body cannot be crushed without a spirit of humility, nor can the soul rise to heavenly things except by the mortification of the members. And yet the measure of humility itself must be kept by us, so that we humble ourselves only in divine fear to the one Lord: for “you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve,” whom to serve is freedom. For he who has subjected himself to God alone is subject to no one; but on the contrary, he who wants to be free from righteousness serves all the lowest things, whether spirits or other creatures or his own vices and desires. There is, moreover, a holy pride and a wicked humility. For that pride is justified which is proud toward this world, despises this age, and uses all its great, sweet, and beautiful things as of no account, intent on heavenly things and subject to the divine commands. On the other hand, that humility is condemned which is brought before men not from faith but from slackness of mind and cares more for human favor than for its own salvation: the handmaid of falsehood, the enemy of truth, without freedom, bound to iniquity, mixing wine with water, that is, weakening the pure wine of truth with the wateriness of flattery. Against this kind of humility especially, it seems to me, is aimed that voice which declares: “Woe to those who call evil good and bitter sweet,” and to those who proclaim righteousness to the unrighteous, whom truth also curses through Solomon, as you know.

The blessed psalmist, in a short psalm but with full teaching, shapes us well to the balance of our self-government when he puts forward the merit of humility in his prayers, saying: “Lord, my heart is not exalted, nor are my eyes lifted up. Nor have I walked in great things, nor in wonders above me.” And then he who had asked to be regarded for his humility of heart says: “If I was not humbly minded, but exalted my soul; as a child weaned upon its mother, so you will reward my soul.” He asks for reward precisely because he was not humbly minded but exalted his soul. Will not the prophet’s statement seem to disagree with itself, unless we distinguish these things in understanding, as they were distinguished in his spirit and heart so as to agree with each other? For it was said fittingly and humbly in divine fear by one who offered to God as a sacrifice, as he himself testifies, a troubled spirit and a humbled heart. Yet, keeping humility of heart, the same man exalted his soul, not being humbly minded, because, not minding earthly things, he had his mind fixed on God, holding it the one good to cleave to God and put his hope in God. So too the apostle, who teaches us humility, saying that we should strive above all to be imitators of Christ in it — “Let this mind be in you,” he says, “which was also in Christ, who did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” — yet the same apostle calls us to exalt the soul to things above and divine, when he says: “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is at the right hand and in the glory of God the Father.”

Holding, therefore, this rule of both humility and exaltation, let us keep each of these, which in the perversion I spoke of above is sin but in the right direction in which we are taught obtains grace, in its own order and measure, devoutly both humbling the heart to God and exalting the soul to our Lord. Let us fear nothing but him, love nothing above him. Let us bow our necks only to his yoke, which is easy, and to his burden, which is light, so that, free above every yoke of the hostile power, we may be carried up into heavenly things. For this too is why our Lord’s yoke is easy and his burden light: because it lifts us from earthly and infernal things and raises us to the heights of the heavenly kingdom. For all lightness seeks the heights and is carried upward by the force of its fineness.

But the weights of sin, contrary to this grace, press down and lead into the depths; how heavy a burden they are the prophet testifies when he cries out groaning: “My iniquities have gone over my head, and like a heavy burden they weigh upon me.” But thanks be to the Lord Jesus our God, who is able to deliver us from the body of this death through the multitude of his compassions and the riches of his goodness, by which he superabounds over the abundance of our sins and saves those who hope in him. With him, we believe, the vigils of your prayers for us are also kept. For we know that, serving as his soldier from boyhood and nourished on the sacred writings, polluted by no stain of earthly and fleshly living, you have found grace in the sight of the Most High, even for us, who were caught late from the forest of this world for the Lord’s flock or chariot; since our iniquities have multiplied above the hairs of our head, and we are unworthy that our names should be brought to the divine ears, lest perhaps your lips too become unclean when you name us, and your mouth have to be touched with a fiery coal. Yet you can say, with the humility or the confidence of the ancient prophet: “Lord, forgive them, or blot me out of your book.” This he, a sharer in converse with God, dared to say, not careless of his own salvation nor insolent toward the Lord, but by the art of a profound design: when the just Lord threatened the destruction owed to a sinful people, he set against it the offering of his own blotting-out, being sure, of course, of the divine goodness and justice, that the Lord’s mercy would spare even the unjust while justice could not blot out the just.

Bind the Lord Most High for us too by this condition, so that, since he cannot remove you from his book, he may receive the unjust for the sake of his just one. For since he who is in us is greater than he who is in this world, righteousness is therefore stronger in defending sinners than iniquity against the patronage of the saints. I would like, as far as I am able, to prolong my discourse further, if the running out of paper and the fear of tiring you did not force me to put a limit on my words and end the letter. Indulge my rashness in everything, and answer me, that I may be comforted and instructed by your letter.

Now we commend specially to your oneness of heart Sanemarius, the bearer of this letter, that he may be provided for by you as we have asked our holy bishop and father. For we have made him our fellow servant by giving him freedom in the Lord; but let him serve us in the house of the Lord, in duties assigned to the memorial of our parents, so that through this religious servitude he may deserve to obtain a firm freedom under your protection. Act also with our holy brother the presbyter Exsuperius, that he may receive a small plot of land on the church’s estate from which to provide his living. Further, I ask you to have my letter to our son Daducius, even if he is in Gaul, sent on without any delay by the bishop through a faithful and energetic fellow servant. If perhaps he does not wish a cleric to be taken up with it, deign to send one of the men of Alingo with your letters, by which ours may be supported; for you will learn from the letter I have written to him that the cause is worthy of your intervention. Above all, speed of action is needed, so that the most holy presbyter, venerable in life and age, who is suffering such violence as I have described, may be freed as soon as possible from his exile out of his own house.

As till now I kept the time for silence with fitting humility, so now with due love I have recognized the time for speaking, my venerable and most beloved brother in Christ the Lord. For from the letter of the holy man our brother Olympius, our common friend of one heart, I lately received word of your grief, as unexpected as it was unwelcome to me. In it the love of Christ, our Lord and God, did not permit that the fellowship of my sadness and the service of my voice should then be lacking to you, even if the feelings of private affection might be silent, because in him and through him we are joined together as members of one body. For our Lord God himself, the teacher alike of our life and of our devotion, taught us through that heavenly vessel of his election to rejoice with those who rejoice, to weep with those who weep, to suffer with one another, and to bear one another’s burdens, so that by mutual consolations we might strengthen our common faith and cherish weary hearts. To this service God has granted so much that he promised the one who performs it would be magnified like a great city, declaring through the prophet that “a brother helping a brother will be exalted like a great city”: namely, because brotherly compassion brings a defense to a soul in combat and stands like a wall against the various blows of an afflicted mind.

But if perhaps the very fact that I perform this duty of love rather late is judged a fault rather than a kindness, please believe that I wrote at once, as soon as I learned of it. Nor let me seem to have heard late because I neglected you, since both the remoteness of the place and the character of my way of life excuse me: living withdrawn and silent in it, I can see only the few who pass by, and I do not wish to ask about the holy brothers except those dear to me. Yet always, even in my silence, mindful of you, now that love seemed to demand it, I have opened the affection hidden in my breast and brought it out through this letter to you, by which I have set out, by the way I could, to your holiness, of one heart with me; for I could not keep my body and my mind within the same bounds, since my flesh, weak as always, refused to be moved far in winter, while the spirit, which is always readier, flew to you with fervent longings, so that I might embrace in mind the one I could not hold in body. I have run to you, then, in the thirst of my longings, my brother in Christ, of one heart and venerable; and if you in turn look at me with your mind, you will see and feel that I am wholly with you. For if it is true that we see and hear rather by the mind, I am certainly present to you, and by the better part of myself, since I have come to you in mind; for unless we are present by it, even where we are present in body we do not show real presence, the image of us being empty when the mind is absent. Therefore I have bestowed the sealed gift of friendship and made it fit for our faith, to visit you by a spiritual approach. In turn I ask that I may deserve this kindness from you, that you too, seeing me with inner eyes as though standing near and speaking face to face, sighing with your anxiety over our common necessity, or rejoicing with your patience over the hope of faith, may receive and behold me in this discourse. For a man’s speech is the mirror of his mind. The very word of God confirms this, since out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and the treasure of the breast is made public by speech. For this reason, in the truth in which we stand in Christ, receive my mind expressed to you in this letter, and I do not want you to measure our friendship by time. For it is not like worldly friendship, which is more often begotten by hope than by faith, but that spiritual friendship which is begotten with God as its author and grows together by the hidden kinship of spirits. So it does not grow into love by long familiarity or hang on waiting for proof, but, as befits a daughter of truth, is born at once firm and great, because it begins from fullness, having arisen through Christ.

Embracing you, then, with this love, I revere you as a member of Christ and love you as a member shared with me. For how can those not have one mind who have one faith? How can those not have one spirit who have one God? And so how can those have different hearts in the feeling of endurance who are one body in the framework of belief? I speak the truth, I do not lie: when I think of the movements of your mind, I feel my own heart too drawn by your sighs, and, as truly allied members, pierced by the pain of your wound; although the thought of your prudence and faith refreshes me no less than concern for your grief affects me. In short, I confess that I hesitated whether to offer you words of sorrow for my affection or rather of congratulation for your faith. For I heard both of the calling to God of my holy sister and likewise of the devotion of your piety in Christ, since this householder, through whom I write, also told of the prudence and holiness of your true love for your wife. You attended her, not empty of tears, like most mortals, nor, as those without our hope usually do, with the vain honor of empty pomp, but escorted her with saving remedies and living works, that is, with almsgiving; first paying in due order to her dear funeral its rites, steeped in devout tears and in an abundant dew of love, you honored her obsequies more religiously.

So I will first praise this work of devotion in you; for divine Scripture shows that this too is pleasing to God when it says: “Son, shed tears over the dead, and as one who has suffered grievously begin to lament, and do not neglect his burial.” Indeed our patriarchs too are examples of this observance. For the father of faith wept for his Sarah, the mother of our calling, not, of course, out of distrust of receiving her back, but out of longing for her who had gone ahead. For how could the father of faith and the first hearer of the blessed promise distrust the resurrection? Yet, mindful of humanity, he did not disregard care for the body because of the soul’s security, but, buying a field for a tomb, laid his dead to rest in a precious resting-place; teaching at the same time what men ought to provide for themselves here, since he, who at God’s word had gone out from the land of his fatherland and kindred and had acquired nothing else in all the regions of different nations through which he wandered, a stranger in all the earth, bought only a field for a tomb, that is, not a temporal but an eternal possession, not a land of avarice but of rest. Jacob too honored his beloved and long-awaited Rachel with a famous tomb and a pillar, both to discharge a religious duty in his present grief and to bear witness to it for posterity. Yet he marked that place with the monument of his wife’s death with a prophetic mind, foreseeing that the law was to be laid to rest by the gospel’s birth. By this mystery the patriarch’s wife, who in many places lived as an image of the church, yet died, as I think, as a type of the synagogue, and, bringing forth a son of sorrow, died there, where the end of the law was to be brought forth by a virgin’s childbirth; for Christ is the end of the law. And Tobit teaches the holy and sanctified hope of caring for burial, justified by the Lord especially for the merit of this service and praised by the voice of the archangel, because he had put the burial of a poor man before his own dinner. For, neglecting his belly because he cared for his soul, he preferred to hunger in body rather than in spirit, so that he might be an example to us also, to choose to fast from the food of the flesh in order to bring fullness to the soul. Good, therefore, is the observance of burial. Good are the tears of love, which father Abraham shed for the mother of the promise. Good are the tears of devotion which righteous Joseph spent on his father. Good also the tears of prayer with which David watered his couch every night. But why should I proclaim the weeping of mortal saints? Jesus too wept for a friend, deigning to take even this feeling from our unhappiness, to shed tears for one dead and to mourn with human weakness the one he was about to raise by divine power; although in that one man the merciful and compassionate Lord lamented the whole condition of the human race together, and with those tears with which he wept for our sins he also washed them away.

For this reason your tears too, brother, are holy and devout, because they flowed from a like affection and wept for the worthy companion of a chaste bed, not out of distrust of the resurrection but out of the longing of love. For “a gracious wife raises up glory for her husband” while she is held, and so she also raises up longing when she is sent on ahead. But she, as she always was, so she will be forever a crown to her husband, and her lamp will not be put out; for, as it is written, she stretched out her arms to useful works, she opened her mouth wisely, she did her husband good. She has crowned you with glory and honor, that she might rejoice with you in the last days; and for this reason she is more worthy of weeping than of mourning, and is rather to be longed for persistently than lamented. For the very thought of her merits, as it commands bitter grief in the survivor, since “the righteous man who has died will leave regret,” so also offers rich consolation to the believer, because there is immortality in the memory of the righteous. Nor, holy brother, let a sharper goad of grief be thrust upon you from this, that she died in her first youth, since the divine word offers comfort for this very case: “The righteous man,” it says, “if he is overtaken by death, will be in refreshment.”

But lest she seem to you to have come to her death untimely, the same Wisdom proves to you in the following words that she was also an old woman: “Old age,” it says, “is venerable, not long-lasting nor reckoned by the number of years. For understanding,” it says, “is gray hair for men, and a spotless life is old age.” Let us therefore rejoice in her just summons and ripe end, for though she was still green in the flower of her years, she had grown gray in holiness of character and adorned the age of a girl with the service of old age. Hence the very causes that make your soul’s wound bitter can bring you greater comfort: that you had so holy a woman, even if you have her no longer. For to have lost a mortal you share with all; but to have deserved the best is yours with few. So I marvel the less that she did not linger in this world and was summoned sooner to Christ; for her soul was pleasing to God, and therefore, as it is written, he hastened to bring her out from the midst of iniquity, lest wickedness should change her understanding; because, as it is written, this whole world lies in the evil one, and evil conversations generally corrupt good manners, and he who touches pitch will be defiled by it. In this fear a certain saint, afraid of delay and anxious about a slow old age, prays God to make known to him his end and the number of his days; and since by the revelation of the Spirit through which he prophesied he learned that his time had been prolonged, he groans, saying: “Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged!” He testifies that the cause of his groaning and fear is this, that he dwelt with the tents of Kedar, that is, in the darkness of this world. For Kedar in Hebrew means the same as what is called obscurity in the Roman tongue.

Indeed David himself, losing two sons of different merit, set out the mystery of this truth: he did not weep when he had lost the most beloved son for whom he had wept while he was sick, sure that the infant had been carried over to the blessedness of eternal peace; but the same man lamented Absalom, whom he had had as an enemy, when he was dead, because, as a prophet aware of divine justice, he despaired of rest for the ungodly and knew that the good of the resurrection was not owed to a parricide. And yet the same man, as I said, had spent tears on that little son of his while he was sick, and, changing his royal attire for black clothing, propped up by sackcloth, ashes, and fasting, had sent prayers to God. But after the end of life released his son from his illness, he made for himself, as though the matter for his cares had failed, the same end of mourning as the little one had received of living. So as the son was released in body, the father was released from grief; and, laying aside at once his sad heart and his clothes, he both took food and resumed his attire and anointed his head, squalid with dust; and when his servants asked him, astonished at so unusual an order of a father’s devotion, that he who had mourned before his bereavement rejoiced when bereaved, he answered: “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.”