Letters 13.8–13.28

The prophet-king has taught well enough, I think, what concern we ought to put on after our dear ones are gone: namely, that we who follow should labor rather over our own journey than over theirs who have gone ahead and already arrived. It is devout to be saddened by separation from those dear to us, but holy to be gladdened by hope and faith in God’s promises and to say to the laboring soul: “Why are you sad, and why do you disquiet me?” “Shall not he who sleeps rise again?” A grateful gladness is more acceptable to God than a long, as it were querulous, sadness. For by that example of David we are taught not to pour out empty tears, which are certainly given in vain to the dead, bringing nothing to the one taken up and burdening the one left behind. Therefore David wept while his son lived and rejoiced when he had died, because while the child still breathed he could obtain a reprieve by prayers and tears; but once he had been summoned by God, he ought then to rejoice, as he did, because there is no doubt that what pleases God is better than our wishes.

Let us therefore pay the duties of devotion without harm to faith, and put first the joys of faith without harm to devotion. Granted that devotion weeps for a time; faith must rejoice continually. Let us long for them as sent on ahead, but let us not despair of receiving them back. For our God is the God of the living, not of the dead, and the apostle says that the dead in Christ sleep, so that you may understand from sleep that death is temporary. For it follows for one who sleeps that he is awakened and rises. Since this is so, let us bear in love the longing for the familiar company of our dear ones, but let us have consolation from our faith in the confidence of the resurrection.

By these authorities, then, most beloved brother, both of heavenly words and of heavenly examples, as you have used them for the devotion of tears, so use them also for their measure. For it is written: “To everything there is a season.” The time for weeping has run its course; now it is time for rejoicing, because the Lord is near. And divine Scripture, which permits us to shed tears as though to let grief evaporate, also prescribes limits for them by a fixed time, when it says that the bitterness of mourning is to be borne for one day. O the riches of the goodness of God! With what tender concern for us he guards against this very thing! Not grudging a devotion that inclines that way, but aware of our weakness and moderating everything immoderate, he bids tears be shed over the dead, but he confines the bitterness of mourning to a single day, allowing that to be extended by which grief is relieved and the soul breathes again, but cutting short that which wears out our mind with immoderate and irrational torment and which our frailty cannot long endure. But the goodness of God explains this more fully in its own word; for it adds: “And comfort yourself soon because of sadness. For from sadness death hastens, and it will cover strength”; because only that sadness is saving which is according to God; but that which is according to man, that is, sadness from carnal weakness, as the apostle says, works death. Though by different authors, yet by the one Spirit of God and the one word through both of the saints, Scripture sings in harmony; for true death is the covering over of strength. For if Christ is the power of God and our life, you see that it is truly said that death hastens by this grief, by which strength is covered and the whole man, as the apostle says, is swallowed up as by some chasm of hell, by too heavy a sadness. But thanks be to God that knowledge of your strength and prudence spares me this labor and fear for you; its light is too abundant in you to be covered by the darkness of sadness; rather, your strength covers sadness and swallows up death itself and the force of harmful grief. I do not grant you this by my words, nor do I speak from conjecture about your strength; your works bear witness to it and compel me to speak of what I have ascertained.

I now come to the praise of your works and shall pass from the holiness of your tears to your devout deeds. For you paid each part its due, pouring tears on the body and pouring alms into the soul. Truly aware of the truth and a son of light, where you knew there was death you wept; where you believe there is life you worked, paying empty things to the empty and living things to the living. So you gathered into the court of the apostle the poor, the patrons of our souls, the multitude who beg for alms throughout Rome. I feed indeed on the beautiful spectacle of so great a work of yours. For I seem to see all those devout swarms of the pitiable common people, those nurslings of divine goodness, streaming in such columns into the vast basilica of glorious Peter, through that venerable royal entrance smiling from afar with its sky-blue front, that all the spaces, both inside the basilica and before the doors of the atrium and before the steps of the open ground, are crowded. I see them gathered and so distinctly arranged in their places at table, and all filled with flowing food, that there comes before my eyes the abundance of the gospel blessing and the image of those peoples whom Christ, himself the true bread and the fish of the living water, filled with five loaves and two fishes: not making food grow for men in the usual way, but by a new gift producing food already prepared for men, when a hidden hand, at the divine prompting, served visible feasts and flowed forth into bodily nourishment with spiritual fruitfulness; from ineffable springs of bread and fish, in the hope of the Gentiles still fasting, he fed carnally and watered spiritually the peoples hungering for faith, filling up what was eaten with increase that could not be detected, supplying what was to be eaten, and bringing out fresh fragments to the bites of those eating, so that, as the food grew between their hands or in the mouths of those who took it, they felt rather than saw the plenty of their food, what was consumed returning to their bites and what was to be taken coming up under their teeth.

Carrying out in your work the example of the Lord himself, you ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground; for so Jesus too commanded, as we read, that they recline on the ground. For the Lord himself was in you, as he is, since no one does the works of Christ without Christ; by his gift and blessing, having received abundant loaves in his name, as the disciples had received loaves blessed by him to distribute, you measured them out among the countless mouths of the poor; and they ate and were filled, and all took up what was left over of the loaves, each his basket full. But you gathered up all the overflow of the spiritual fragments: from the twelve baskets the apostolic faith, from the seven hampers the spiritual grace; Christ working no less wonderfully in your loaves, who at this banquet of yours changed your bodily bread into heavenly food and prepared it for your eternal fullness. For you will rightly recline with the fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet of Christ, provided with the wedding garment, because Christ reclines with you here in his poor, and in you the Son of Man has somewhere to lay his head.

It is a pleasure to linger even now over the spectacle and praise of so great a work. For we are praising not the works of a man but the divine works done through a man. What a joyful spectacle, as the saying goes, you presented, a sacred giver of shows, to God and his holy angels from this full house of yours! With what joy you lifted up the apostle himself, when you had packed his whole basilica with dense throngs of the needy: where, under the high roof of its ridge, the wide nave stretches long in the middle under its coffered ceilings, and, gleaming from afar with the apostle’s throne, dazzles the eyes and gladdens the hearts of those who enter; or where, under the same mass of roofing, it spreads its sides in twin aisles on either side; or where the shining atrium lies spread out before it as a vestibule, where a dome topped with solid bronze adorns and shades the fountain that pours out streams to serve our hands and mouths, surrounding the leaping waters with four columns, not without a mystical meaning. For such adornment befits the entrance of a church, so that what is done within by the saving mystery may be signified before the doors by a visible work. For the one faith of the gospel supports the temple of our body too on a fourfold foundation; and since from it flows the grace by which we are reborn, and in it Christ, by whom we live, is revealed, surely there springs up for us, in the four columns of life, a fountain of water leaping up to eternal life, which waters us from within and boils in us, if indeed we can say, or are worthy to feel, that we have a heart burning on the way, set aflame as Christ walks with us.

What a joyful spectacle, then, you offered to God and the angels of peace and all the spirits of the saints! First in veneration of the apostle, whose faith and memory you celebrated with so manifold a devotion of your wealth: first bringing to God holy offerings, pure libations, with a most acceptable commemoration of her; then, by the munificence that followed, offering yourself to Christ as a most acceptable sacrifice in a clean heart and a humbled spirit, in whose tabernacles you offered the sacrifices of true jubilation, refreshing and feeding those who would offer to God a sacrifice of praise with abundant blessing. With what a good uproar our city then resounded, when you, pouring out the bowels of mercy in refreshing and clothing the poor, restored the pale bodies of the hungry, watered the dry throats of the thirsty, clothed the trembling limbs of the cold, and opened the mouths of all in harmony to bless God! But in cherishing needy bodies, as your works returned to the better part of you by divine recompense, you rather fattened your own spirit, and you refreshed the soul of your blessed wife, the hand of Christ pouring into her what was being given of yours to the poor, when bodily food passed over, changed in the twinkling of an eye, into heavenly nourishment. And as much money as you, a cheerful giver and untiring distributor, had poured with heavy right hand into the doubled palms of those receiving it, so much at once, as angels flew between, was carried into the bosom of the rejoicing Lord and laid up to be counted to you as thirtyfold fruits and returns. And not riches only, but also the graces of blessings were added to your rewards. For to you was reckoned as righteousness that shout and joint prayer of the poor by which God was blessed through your gifts. For the voices of the needy are directed by an easy road to the ear of God, since, as it is written, the prayer of the poor man pierces the clouds.

You could, Rome, not fear those threats leveled in the Apocalypse, if your senators always gave such shows. Then truly would that nobility of yours be noble, which the holy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would receive into their fatherly bosoms, which the prophets, apostles, and martyrs, that is, the senate of heaven, would acknowledge, which Christ, after a toga defiled by no gore of unclean blood, would clothe with the royal robe of the promised light and enroll in the white book, that is, the book of everlasting life. Truly would those riches be rich by which not the bloody savagery of the ancient dragon but the immense goodness of God the Savior was fed, if what is wickedly squandered on buying and feeding beasts or gladiators were given for our own salvation, and living were dearer to us than perishing. But we are both stingy and perversely generous: needy toward God, who acts for us, and prodigal toward the devil against us. We count loss as gain and gain as loss; we do not care to redeem our life even sparingly, we who buy death instead of life at great expense. Blessed would our condition be if we were equally afraid of displeasing God as men, or equally careful to please him; if we feared the commands of Christ as much as the hisses of the people; and if the praise that comes from God were bought at as high a price as this applause of the crowd.

Blessed are you, who have not walked in such counsel nor sat in the chair of pestilence, but in the seat of the apostle and in the assembly of the church, that is, in Christ’s theater, are praised by tiers of spectators who bless rather than riot, with God himself as onlooker: a giver of shows for the church, a seeker not of the arena nor of empty glory but of eternal praise. You do not buy gladiators or wild beasts, but you provide the means by which you may slay the true gladiators, that is, the princes of this darkness, and overcome the true beasts, that is, all the power of the devil, and with foot pressed down unharmed trample on the lion and the dragon. Blessed are you, in whom the name of the Lord will be blessed, and who have seed in Zion and household members in Jerusalem, who in turn may receive you into eternal tabernacles. For you will not fear the place of that rich man who, in Tartarus, that is, in the lower hell and the outer darkness, deservedly surrounded by fire, begged to be sprinkled even with the fingertip of the poor man despised in this life, to whom father Abraham rightly answered: “Remember, son, that you received good things in your life, and Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are tormented.”

For this reason, I think, those rich men should shudder at this reversal of punishments and delights who here, abounding only for themselves and their vices, either brood over hidden wealth and have set aside no share for the poor, or, being wickedly prodigal, are deservedly in want and will be punished with eternal want; men who held themselves so cheap through love of luxury that a single day’s table is shown to have been more precious to them than the life of their whole time. These, then, will never share in the heavenly goods of the poor, whose poor here they did not know with earthly goods. And their tongue will be scorched more grievously who now either shudder at or mock the infirmities of the poor, fatally fastidious and witty, who pass by and leave the ulcers of their neighbors for the dogs to lick, since by nature every man is neighbor to man. Are not these, I ask you, more truly to be called dogs, who have not imitated even the dogs in caring for and soothing men, and who order their brothers, that is, those born of the same mother nature, longing to be filled at least with the crumbs that fall from their table, not only to be shut out with barred doors but even to be driven off with savage blows? Hence I believe that the rich man of Tartarus in the gospel, though, as he cries, wholly in misery and tormented in that flame of the fiery whirlpool, yet asked for relief for his tongue alone, because it was doubtless burned more fiercely, since with proud and greedy mouth he had often sinned against Lazarus lying before his gate and left to the dogs. For this reason too we are warned elsewhere to set a guard on our mouth, wisdom teaching through Solomon that “life and death are in the power of the tongue,” and elsewhere: “By your words,” he says, “you will be justified, or by your words you will be condemned.”

For you, then, my brother of one heart in Christ, who are under no fear of this punishment and share in that other seat, whose mouth is full of blessing, whose riches are the breasts of the poor, whose house is Christ’s, who do not allow a beggar to lie before your gate while you feast, but on the contrary gladly bring him under your roof, either to feast with you or even to be filled while you fast: for you there is a happy poverty of sins and blessed wealth in virtues. You will rightly be numbered both among those poor whose is the kingdom of heaven and among those rich whose possession is a strong city, because you are rich in God’s spirit and poor in your own. For such rich men, together with their poor, God loves, and he celebrates them in the sacred writings and ennobles them by the authority of everlasting pages.

For I want you to consider this very point, that the names of those rich men whose crimes or punishments are recorded in the Scriptures are not given, because without doubt they were unworthy to be named by the divine word, men whom the impiety of their life blotted out or their avarice erased. Therefore the Lord had foretold of them in the prophet: “Nor will I remember their names by my lips,” that is, by the two Testaments of immortal words, which are well called the lips of the divine mouth, because they cleave to each other and are opened by the one Word of God, and through them God kisses us with the kisses of his mouth. Divine justice, then, would not have these lips defiled by the names of the ungodly; and so the name of that rich man does not appear whose vanity and avarice is recorded, to whom, when his life was already spent and he was thinking of the furnishing of his barns, it was said: “Fool, this night your soul is required of you; whose will be the things you have prepared?” Nor is the name of this rich man from Tartarus given, which we understand was not omitted by chance, since the poor man’s name is given. Of that rich man too who boasted of having fulfilled the law, and out of love for his riches turned away from the condition for attaining perfection, we read of the blindness but do not have the name. For “he had,” it says, “many possessions”; and therefore that sentence followed which had almost closed the kingdom of heaven to every rich man, had not God, as the only good one, excepted from it this gift of his omnipotence, that he should enrich the rich by the will of the poor. These rich men, then, are hateful to God and blotted from memory, who have put perishable things before eternal ones and preferred to trust the earth rather than God, heaping up food for moths and plunder for thieves, and, as it is written, they treasure up, not knowing for whom, because they will not understand to whom they owe their treasures; they deserve not to know to what successor they leave them, since they do not know by what giver they possess them. For what have you, O man, that you did not receive? And since you have received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it, and grow proud toward God of his own gifts? The names of such rich men, my brother, are not written in the gospel, because they are not held in the book of life either.

Finally, that you may know that it is not riches but men who, for the use they make of them, are blameworthy or acceptable to God, read of the holy fathers Abraham and Job, who were made friends of God by means of their wealth. For in the gospel, in which that rich man of Tartarus who despised Lazarus is passed over, we see that the rich Joseph of Arimathea is named. For he is blessed who in a special way considered the needy and the poor, honoring the body of Christ with devout service, not afraid to petition the judge against the wrong done to the Lord’s body, and rich, at the Lord’s burial, in the devout expense of a costly shroud and a new tomb. Among these names the holy page will enroll you, and you will be numbered in the lot of such rich men, whose wealth you equal in spirit as well. For having, they did not have for themselves, but no one called anything his own, and they thought nothing human foreign to themselves, like that multitude that once led the faith, which had one heart and one soul and all things in common. And consider the reasoning; you will easily judge that it is by a crime like parricide that the poor are despised by our choice, whom we see distinguished from us by no work of God. For how do we shut out of our modest dwellings those whom God has enclosed with us in the one house of this world? How do we disdain to make partners in the use of earthly possession those whom, even unwillingly, we have as sharers in the unity of divine origin? Holding to this, Abraham was made a friend of God; observing this, Lot escaped from Sodom; following this, Job triumphed over the devil.

Let us too open our dwellings to our brothers, either fearing the danger shown by the example of the fathers mentioned above, lest perhaps in shutting out a man we also drive away an angel, or hoping to deserve angels as guests while we receive with ready kindness the passing of every stranger. For father Abraham, while receiving strangers, received also the Lord Christ with the angels, and in his hospitable tent saw that day of which the Savior in the gospel speaks of himself. The wrong done to guests condemned the people of Sodom, and Lot deserved to be delivered above all by this disposition, that he put his guests before his daughters. He was not impious, but perfectly devout; for he did not hold his daughters cheap, he who earned his reward from this, that he put the justice of love, that is, the fear of God, before domestic devotion; by God’s command and spirit he was serving in receiving guests, and so already then that mind fulfilled the perfection of faith by which it is said to us: “Everyone who has left brothers and sisters or mother or sons or daughters for my name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and will possess eternal life.” The perfection of this mind, or the mind of this perfection, already from the beginning of the world delivered righteous Lot from that fire of the five cities, and he deserved, in return for his hospitable house, to receive by God’s gift a whole city as his house; because he who in an incestuous and impious city alone was both devout and chaste, surpassing devotion itself by holiness, did not hesitate, as far as it lay with him, to redeem the chastity of his guests with the virtue of his daughters. And Job, that silver tried by the Lord’s fire, testifies that he was always the eye of the blind and the foot of the lame, and in the very contest of his temptation he claims back and receives the reward of these works. He is stripped of the wealth of his patrimony, not of his mind; but, unwounded in heart, he does not sin with his lips either; stripped of the trappings of property but armed with the strength of patience; bereaved of offspring but not of the light of his heart, he embraces the children of his mind, that is, the works of righteousness, crying: “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb; naked I must return to the earth. We brought nothing into this world, nor can we take anything out.” But because he had not lost his spiritual riches, he also received back temporal wealth for the triumph of his patience and was enriched threefold, because he had been tried and purified sevenfold. For, as it is written, he had eaten the labors of his fruits by laboring in devout works, and therefore he ate the fruit of his labors by receiving the rewards of his works even in this world.

Your lot is with these rich men, you who have remembered that the same God is the source of your riches, free from avarice because a servant of righteousness. You use the mammon of iniquity justly, and you are not a captive but truly the master of your money, because you are possessed by Christ, to whom captivity itself is captive. Glory, then, in the Lord, because not flesh and blood but he himself who is the true light and the wisdom of God, Christ, has revealed to you the prudence of this foresight, by which you understand that in every needy and poor person Christ is fed, given drink, clothed, and visited, as with those whom, for this merit mentioned above, the Lord will deliver in the evil day.

May the Lord himself preserve you and give you life and make you blessed, and bring you help now upon your bed of sorrow; may he turn your devout lament into holy joy. May he tear the sackcloth of your sadness and give you back the joy of his salvation; with his guiding Spirit strengthening you, may he make your arms firm in prayers and almsgiving like a bow of bronze; may he make your feet like those of a deer, so that you may be swift both to flee the devil and to pursue Christ, and, with your steps fixed by the double hoof of both Testaments, may stand firm in the way of the Lord, your feet snatched by the Lord’s hand from slipping and your eyes from weeping, so that with your blessed wife you may please the Lord forever in the land of the living. For it will be done to you according to your faith, because the Lord, faithful in his words, will remember this sacrifice of yours forever, and your burnt offering will be made rich; and he will receive you yourself as a living victim for himself, for an odor of sweetness, the rewarder of your loan on that day when the debtor, richer than his creditors, will return to each his deposit with interest multiplied. Nor is the day of repayment far off, since the regions are already white with the harvest near.

Meanwhile, promising yourself with festive meditation the wealth you are to receive, you will console your mind much more richly by faith in what is to come than by my words or anyone’s. For it is no small delight to the souls of believers to anticipate in sweet thought the goods promised to the faithful and already to walk in paradise in their souls. If it pleases the farmer to admire the hope of the harvest in the growing crop while he waits for the fruit of his labor from the harvest, and the greed of his wishes bears the delay of the seasons more easily if it feeds his eyes while he hopes for the outcome, how much greater delight can we take, sinners though we are, yet faithful little servants, the account of whose scattered seed has been entrusted not to the doubtful faith of the earth but to the unchangeable truth of God, since we hope for what truth itself has promised.

For we do not gather what follows man’s death from human opinions, nor from the fabulous dreams of the poets or the phantoms of the philosophers, but we draw the faith of things from the very fountain of truth. And who could know divine things better than God himself, who is aware of his own works and decrees? We shall not falsely say that souls pass into other bodies, so as to become monsters after being men, nor that they will remain wholly without a body, nor that they perish in the body. Let those flatter themselves with the lies of the poets who do not have the prophets of truth. Let those be blinded by the wandering opinions of the philosophers who are not enlightened by the testimonies of the apostles; and let those console themselves with despair who have no hope, saying: “Our time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our end, for it is sealed, and no one returns”; those who, blinded by the darkness of their wickedness and unbelief, cannot say: “I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.” But we have no need of such poor remedies, we to whom truth itself, the Word of God, God, both promised by his teaching and proved by his rising the resurrection of the flesh to eternal life. For the Son of God himself, through whom are all things and without whom nothing, himself testified: “I am the resurrection; he who believes in me, though he die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” That he might not assert this by word only, he confirmed it by example, and showed to the disciples his own man, in whom is the whole taking up of humanity, raised from the dead, sealing in himself the faith of the flesh when he says to Thomas: “Put your finger here and see my hands; and put out your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believing, because a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.”

Having these testimonies, then, these proofs, this light of faith, on what pretext shall we be able to doubt the resurrection, which we have both heard from the word of God and seen with the eyes of the apostles and touched with their hands? We who through Christ are so bound and grafted into God that we hold in our land the pledge of God, the Holy Spirit whom he has given us, and have in God the pledge of ourselves, the flesh of Christ; because that immense interval by which mortal things are set apart from divine he bridges by his mediation, standing between and common to both, as by a kind of bridge, if I may say so, so that by its path earthly things are joined to heavenly, when supernal incorruption has suffused this corruptible of ours, and, as it is written, immortality has swallowed up our mortality, and life, victorious in Christ and from Christ, has swallowed up for us conquered death. To attain this, we can doubt not the truth of so great a good but only our capacity to deserve it. But let us do what Christ commanded, that we may obtain what Christ promised. His truth is with us; let our faith in him not be lacking. He is life to all, the way to all, the door to all. He closes his kingdom to no one, and even allows it to be taken by force.

Press on where you are running, that you may lay hold of that for which you have been laid hold of; strive through the narrow way, that you may come into the wide possession of the eternal inheritance. You already have in Christ a great pledge of yourself and an eager advocate, your wife, who prepares for you in heaven as much grace as you supply her with wealth from earth, honoring her, as I said, not with vain mourning but heaping her with living gifts, in which she now rejoices; and already she enjoys the fruit of this work of yours, whose gift is still for you in seed.

Already she is honored by your merits, already she is fed with your loaves and abounds in your wealth, “in gilded clothing, wrapped about with variety,” with precious light; she has no need to be cooled by the finger of another’s hand, being herself steeped in the dew of her own fingers, that is, in the works of your right hand. You did not enrich her as a bride with so ample a dowry as you now enrich her in her rest. For how great a share of your gifts did she take then, when she enjoyed only what she could wear? Now, however much you give, she will possess it all at once in her soul, rich with the delight of all the senses. Blessed is she who has so many advocates with Christ, and whose head is encircled by so manifold a crown of illustrious jewels, not woven of others’ flowers but flashing with lights of her own house. Truly precious to the Lord is that soul which takes its value from three pearls. For she is wife of faith, sister of virginity, daughter of perfection: Paula her mother, Eustochium her sister, you her husband.