Letters 23.4–23.19

So he served me; he served me, I say, and, woe is me, wretched man, I allowed it; he served even a sinner, he who was not a servant of sin; and I, unworthy, was ministered to by a servant of righteousness. But I hope for some relief from so great a burden in this, that I did not claim the service of a holy brother out of pride, but admitted it from fear of saddening his love and in faith of receiving a blessing. For holy service in the name of God and loving service in the spirit of freedom was a blessing to me. For this reason I accepted his voluntary good also for his own benefit, presuming that he would be the more powerful in praying for me the more merit he had gained from works of religion. He will surely see to it by his prayers that what was added to his fruits from me does not add to my burdens. For I confess that I loved the blessing in his service, fearing that if refused it would go far from me, since I held what is written: “He would not have blessing, and it shall be far from him.” So I gave myself wholly to his hands and his heart, because through the bowels of love he applied serving hands to my limbs as anointer and to my feet as washer, full of the feelings of a free man but snatching away the tasks of a slave, so that he scarcely let me pour water on his hands. For from your book I came to love the grace of this servitude, so that I might taste at least the smallest drop of the holy acts of Martin. He himself daily desired not only to wash my feet but also, if I had allowed it, to wipe my shoes, greedy for inner mastery and therefore untiring in bodily servitude.

But as to washing my feet, I confess that only once did I yield, by the example of the apostles, who I had read offered their feet to be washed by the Lord serving them. For they would not have received a share in the inheritance except by the obedience of one who serves, since the good Lord and Master of saving things conferred, by the ministry of serving, the merit of ruling, and gave an example of human humility to those for whom he was preparing a share in divine loftiness. Hence, having perceived the mystery of so great a gift and understood the greatness of the good, those who at first had trembled to offer their feet at the appearance of the one ministering asked to be washed no longer only on their feet but wholly, even to the head. And I, venerating the Lord Jesus in brother Victor, since every faithful soul is from God and a heart humble is the heart of Christ, confess that I wished, as a remedy for my weakness, that my better fellow servant should touch me with oil or water. Nor was I disappointed in the help I had presumed; for the oil, as if medicated by his devout hands, glided more gently into my marrow from the very gentleness of the ointment, and the humbled bones exulted. My soul blessed the Lord, and all that is within me his holy name. For this exercise of devotion rather than of the body helped to invigorate my senses; by it the good brother, setting my frail limbs in order with his molding hand, raised up also the vigor of my mind with my bones restored, faith without doubt working with his hands, so that while the hand of one who loved handled the weak flesh, the grace of a believer washed the soul that suffered with it, and what was outwardly the oil of health became within me the oil of gladness.

Hear now another of his services toward our senses, by which, taking care not only of our refreshment but also of our frugality, he taught us to take an easy diet of simple food, porridges cooked with a drop of oil and plenty of water; but he seasoned them with so much salt of grace, with so much sweetness of love, that we did not miss cooks and seasonings, because simplicity joined to love mixed into the pure water the oil of sweetness, which no troublesome flies spoiled. But the spiritual cook, more skilled at feeding the inner man, to destroy the food of the gullet made our porridges not of fine wheat but of coarse flour or millet. And lest he seem to deal too delicately with us even in this, he who was preparing to train us in the appetite of monks crumbled beans into the panic-grass, so that we might the sooner lay aside a senator’s fastidiousness. But in the blessing of sweetness we had delights for the soul, rejoicing that the brother, spiritual even in bodily ministries, fed us with prophetic food. For in the mixed crushing he imitated those loaves of tribulation which the prophet Ezekiel was commanded to make for himself from various kinds of grain and meal, and, to express the confusion of the Jews, who forgot God and changed their glory into the likeness of a calf eating hay, to bake in cow dung and, when baked under the foul ash, to eat by measure with the tears of captivity; namely, so that they might foresee the punishment coming upon their faithlessness, signified bodily in the prophet, and so at least return to the Lord, if the wrath of an offended God, not only announced in words but also expressed in the bodies of the prophets, might call them back to repentance.

So brother Victor wished us to learn to humble our soul not only by fasting but also by food, and, in remembrance of old sins and understanding of present ones, to eat sorrowfully the bread of grief; although he partly spared us, mixing only beans with the millet and panic-grass, which, however, was perhaps a matter of forgetfulness rather than restraint. For the holy man, with faithful caution, would have feared to withhold anything of holy Scripture from us, and, to fulfill the whole preparation of the prophetic bread according to the word of God, would have mixed in lentils too and barley and vetch, so that, as the heats of grains unlike one another boiled over its lips as though the cooking were fighting itself, the pot would split and crackle with cracks. Nevertheless, filling a capacious earthenware vessel with fewer grains, he brought us dishes steaming with much savor and filled with a smelly haze not only the whole round of our little table but the whole space of our little cell; and, to multiply the blessing for us, he brought to our little supper the meal of another prophet too, setting before us the pot of Elisha, into which he threw meal; and he cooked in it not a poisonous herb but a seasoning of salvation, doing everything he did in the name of the Lord. Safe and secure in this, we did not cry out to him: “Man of God, there is death in the pot,” because there is now life in our pot, since the Lord Jesus, the Word of God, was made flesh and dwelt in us; and he took up into himself the earthen vessels of our body, which had slipped from his hands through the slipperiness of our willful depravity and had been crushed by long sins, so that the potter himself might renew them for a better use, having himself been made from the clay of our body, as he says, like a lost vessel, that is, in the likeness of sinful flesh, that he might condemn sin by sin. And therefore he says, “Moab is the pot of my hope,” because he took a body not only from Judah but from Moab, that is, not only from the line of the saints but also from that of sinners. He, having cooked away, as through the pot of our flesh, its rawness, sanctified his flesh as food for us forever. For his flesh, as he himself says, is truly the food of life. He is also that pot, according to Jeremiah, burning sins and consuming them with that fire of which he says: “I came to cast fire on the earth”; let us pray that this fire be kindled in us too, so that we may be cooked in the pot of the Lord’s body, that is, the church, and, our vices burned out and purged, may become silver tried by fire, proved in the earth, purified seven times; so that we may remain, no longer branches to be burned but fruitful shoots, in the same Lord, that is, the true vine; and that the same Lord may become for us as food that sweet cluster which, hung on the pole of the cross from the land of promise, both showed us the fruit and gave us its taste; so that we may no longer pursue the cheap grasses of the untilled country, among which we risk picking even the poisonous clusters of wild vines. This certainly happens to us when, with our soul, whose cultivation is the word of God, overgrown with the thorns of worldly cares, longing for this life, short in time and barren of good, we gather harmful sins among superfluous actions, like poisonous growths among the wild herbs, and so put death into the pot of our body or heart. But thanks be to God, who has delivered us from the body of this death through Christ Jesus our Lord, by whom, mixing the power of his Spirit with our weakness, both the bitterness of our malice and the barrenness of our uselessness, the word of God being poured into our hearts as by the sprinkling of saving or living salt, have been changed into sweetness and fruitfulness.

Let us run back to brother Victor, who, by the use he took upon himself in the name of God, made the jar of our little supply of flour abundant with blessing, so as to give us something too of blessed Elijah’s jar, by which the heavenly prophet, filled in the sacred word to unfailing sufficiency, fed the blessed widow of Zarephath with her sons through the three years’ famine. In that widow, I think, Christ was already then, through the prophet, feeding his church with the bread not of grain but of the word; of whom he says: “Blessing I will bless her widow,” that widow, namely, whom the apostle says is free, when her husband is dead, to marry whom she will; because, as the law ceased, whose end is Christ, the church, passing over to the freedom of grace, married Christ as the widow of the law. Now the oil of grace and the flour of blessing in this jar have not failed during the famine of all the nations outside, whose wretched hunger for the food of life and the faith of the Trinity that famine of three years once fittingly prefigured. But, to conclude this topic, our flour felt the grace of the Lord in brother Victor’s hand so much that what before was scarcely enough for loaves now abounds even for porridges, and fills our monastic brotherhood, eager for food in the evening after fasts, with a double service, of leavened loaves or of boiled meal.

But though my Victor tried to accustom our stomach to stronger foods, yet the brother, so needful to us, also took account of our weakness in this: he made up what our faith lacked in taking those porridges and completed the work of his hands with one helper on our behalf at this dish: a man taken in from among the country folk whom we are nursing at home, old in bodily age but an infant in mind, since, already failing in old age, he has been reborn to grace and has blossomed from the oldness of the flesh into newness of life. Brother Victor’s kitchen fattened him, with food he was used to, as one from the country, and suitable, as toothless. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him. He snatched him from darkness and the shadow of death; and now, sprinkled with hyssop and cleansed, he feasts with a voice of exultation and praise and cries: “I have gone astray like a sheep that was lost. I will bless the Lord at all times, who has given me understanding and snatched me from the mire of the dregs and put a new song in my mouth. I have been young, and now am old; but my days have not failed in vanity, because he who is mighty has done great things for me. He has given me to drink from the torrent of his delight, and my flesh has flourished again. He has sent me grain in abundance and satisfied the empty soul, and now my old age is in the mercy of fatness, until I sleep in peace and rest for length of days.”

I come now to a greater service of brother Victor toward me, by which he deigned to cut my hair with his own hands; yet he wished me to owe this very kindness to you, saying that he was revealing his art to me at your command. So I asked him that what he did with skilled hand you both might do with earnest prayers: namely, that the Lord, prevailed upon by your prayers, may have our sins, multiplied above the hairs of our head, by which we have an uncombed soul, not trimmed by cutting off the middle but removed down to the quick as by a shaving razor. For we have a razor sometimes of saving, sometimes of deadly cutting. The razor of remedy and beauty for us is Christ, God, who circumcises our heart, shaves off our vices, smooths the head of the soul, and tends the face of the mind; and, like that captive woman in the law, he cleanses us and frees us from the rough hair of miserable slavery, so that, to be joined to the Lord, as she was to pass into marriage with an Israelite man, we may be stripped of the crimes of our flesh as of barbarian locks; then, with our senses renewed, we may shine as with fresh hair, and, nourishing our life like the hair of a Nazirite, may consecrate it to God in chastity and frugality.

But we must beware lest that hostile razor from the other side, which shaved the head of the human race in our first parents, deceived by harmful fraud, should climb up to our head, that is, to faith, by which Christ is made our head, and strip us of spiritual grace as of that Nazirite hair. How good that hair remains for those who keep it, and how ruinous its cropping is for the unwary, is shown by that hero consecrated by oracles in the book of Judges: unconquered while his hair was kept, a captive when it was cut off, and strong again when it grew back. Would that he had been as prudent in guarding against a woman as he was strong in strangling a lion! But he who had conquered by spiritual grace was conquered by fleshly allurement, and, having prevailed over the strong, was overcome by weakness. This must be suffered by those who do not subject their woman, that is, the flesh, to their husband, that is, the spirit, in the laws of God, and who, like soft husbands with melting minds, give in to an ill-counseling wife; degenerate from that master who, as soon as he knew Christ, already a victor in a great contest in the very first lessons of his soldiering, did not give in to flesh and blood.

Let us see, then, all that Samson endured, corrupted by a faithless wife, since we sinners shall bear spiritually the same things which he bore bodily, set forth for our instruction. For if the grace of Christ is violated in us, as his hair was cut in him, the enemy will mock us; he will take away our eyes, put us in prison, and assign us to turn mills like asses. Hence the Lord warns us through the prophet, lest we make our neck, not submitted to the yoke of Christ, worthy of the ass’s millstone: “Do not become like the horse and the mule, which have no understanding.” For man, as the same prophet says elsewhere, not understanding his honor, that is, the dignity of his nature, which rules the other living things on earth by reason, having been made rational so that he might know how to understand and worship his author, abusing so great a gift of the Creator for the license of his error, is compared to the beasts and made like them. This we see plainly fulfilled in the king of Babylon, who, stripped of human sense, suffered in a beast’s heart the penalty for his impious stupidity and senseless pride. For man, set in error and fallen from righteousness, justly deserted, like Samson, by the power of wisdom and grace alike, is punished with blindness and the mill, because he deserves the work of a beast of burden who has bereaved himself of the light of reason and cast himself down, a slave of the body, into the likeness of beasts.

Consider the life of such mortals, and the whole picture of a beast grinding at the mill will meet you. As that beast has the eyes of its body sewn shut with rags, so this man, the eyes of his mind sewn shut by the filth of his life, wretchedly turns in laborious station through the wanderings of his senses as round the circuits of the mill, empty for his own use and busy for another’s; he stands in the way of sinners, shackled with the chains of his desires, and he is his own prison, beset by the darkness of his error and caked with the squalor of his conscience; within himself he suffers the workhouse of the mill, and turns like a millstone the rock of his heart, hardened by the obstinacy of iniquity, making flour for his enemies from the corrupted grain of his soul. For as, it is written, the sinner runs from his own soul, so he who works sin grinds grain for the enemy from the mill of his life, to feed the devil, to whom that soul becomes bread which is a famine to itself. But if he becomes a spirit not always going but sometimes returning, he will be made whole as grace flowers again, like hair growing back.

But, to weave the whole letter out of hair, it is a pleasure to indulge my discourse and follow that strong man of the Lord to his end. For both in his blindness and in his death we shall marvel at the sacraments of the divine mystery foreshadowed; and as for what is written, that dying he laid low more enemies than he had struck down in the whole of his life before, I think it should be interpreted in the first place of the power of the Lord’s passion, by which the house of the devil fell and the kingdom of death was dissolved. For although Christ always lived, as he lives, and before his coming in the flesh was, in the majesty of his nature, God the Word with the Lord the Father, yet, the ages having been arranged in their order, from Adam to Moses the power of death had reigned with raving license and had grown through sin understood from the law and not avoided; this kingdom the King of kings and dispenser of times, the Son of God, divided and destroyed by his passion: God made under the law, to free those subjected to the law; made through a woman, but a woman in sex, a virgin in childbearing, so that the Creator of both sexes might sanctify both, by taking up the Word and by being born through a woman. So by dying he destroyed death itself, abolishing, as it is written, the enmities in his flesh, and making both one, that is, man and God, which the God and man Christ Jesus joined in himself, in whom the substance of both natures laid aside discord and acknowledged an eternal covenant of unifying grace. Stripped by the devil’s robbery and wounded on the road, we had been passed by our brother in the Levite and our brother in the priest, since the law redeemed us neither by sacrifices nor by prophets. But that Samaritan did not pass by, who for our sake bore even the insult of this name; he did not pass by, because he was not a hireling but the true and good shepherd, who had come to lay down his life for the sheep. He, taking pity on his man, passed over and not cared for by those who went before, came near and took him up on his beast, that is, on the incarnation of the Word, and, having entrusted him with the oil of grace and the wine of his passion to the innkeeper, that perfect teacher of the Gentiles, healed him with the payment of a denarius in the two Testaments; he will repay that innkeeper, from the countless fruits of this good, rich thanks and innumerable crowns for blessed virginity as well, because he paid out more from his own, adding this counsel to the commandment.

So he was not a brother (for he differed from servants by his condition as Lord and from mortals by his nature as God), and yet he was also a man, of whom it is written: “And he is a man, and who shall know him?” Nor is he therefore our brother, though divine goodness, for the humility of his heart, has allowed his servants this name too, saying, “I will declare your name to my brothers”; yet our arrogance must not dare to call him brother, nor because he deigned to become man, since even in his human birth he has nothing in common with us, for he was made flesh of the Holy Spirit apart from the way of our generation, both conceived and born of the untouched virginity of his holy mother. And therefore, made our body without any contagion of our body, he did not give God his own appeasement, since he himself was the propitiation, nor the price of the redemption of his own soul, but of ours, since the Savior did not need salvation. For we, sold under sin, needed the price of redemption; and therefore for us he became man, for us the form of a servant, for us the son of a handmaid. He who is blessed and the sanctifier of the saints was nevertheless made for us both sin and a curse, which he was not, so that he might free us, who were sin by transgression and a curse by condemnation, from both, nailing both to the cross in his flesh. Therefore I think it was said: “A brother does not redeem; a man will redeem,” because those whom a brother had not redeemed, that is, a prophet or lawgiver who was only man, this man redeemed, who was also God. For “God,” it says, “was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” Only such a man could prevail against the sentence of death and the sting of sin, to blot out the bond of death and humble the slanderer; yet meeting him not in the majesty of his own nature but in the guise of ours, and wresting nothing from him by violent domination, but overcoming him by the law of justice: so that, since, the woman having been deceived and the man cast down through the woman, the devil claimed all the offspring of the first man as sinful under the laws of death, with a malicious desire indeed to harm but yet as by a most equitable right of victory, his power should last until he killed the just man, in whom he could show nothing worthy of death; not only because he was killed without fault, but also because he was born without lust, to which the devil had subjected those he had captured, so that whatever was born from it he might keep, as the fruit of his own tree, with a wicked desire to have indeed, but yet by no unjust right of possession. Most justly, therefore, he is compelled to release those who believe in him whom he most unjustly killed, so that they both pay the debt in dying temporally and, in living forever, live in him who paid for them what he did not owe.

For this reason I think that he is also for us that lion in whose dead mouth we find the food of honey. For what is sweeter than the word of God? And what is stronger than the right hand of God? Or in whose dead mouth are the honeycomb and the bees, if not in his in whose word is the good of our salvation and the gathering of the nations? Many have rather placed the figure of the nations in this lion, because the people of the nations who believed was before a body of fierceness, and is now Christ’s, in whom the apostles, like bees, have stored the honey of wisdom from the dew of heaven and the flowers of divine graces; and food came out of the mouth of the eater because the nations, formerly wild toward God, taking the word of God received with faithful heart, have brought forth a belching of salvation. But those who see Christ rather in this lion make Samson a figure of the Jews, namely that the Jew killed that lion as being Christ; and they assign this too to the mystical preparation, that it was at the very time when he was seeking a marriage that he carried out the desired slaughter of the powerful beast, because, of course, the marriage which has been covenanted in Christ and the church could not be confirmed unless the lion from the tribe of Judah were slain. For the same Lord is that lion who conquered, and also the lion’s whelp, laid to sleep of his own will and raised by himself, of whom it is written: “Who shall rouse him?” For, offering for us voluntarily to the Father the sacrifice of his body, he, the supreme and eternal priest, took up his life again, as he himself testifies, by the same power by which he laid it down. He is the lion’s whelp because Son of God, and the same is the lion because equal to the Father. Therefore, as it seems to me, this fits this lion better: “Out of the eater came forth food, and out of the strong came forth sweetness,” namely from our Savior, whose word is life: he both chewed this food for us by teaching and brought it out by imparting it. And, if you prefer another sense, food comes out of the eater in this way: this lion of the tribe of Judah, victorious for us, snatching us from the mouth of the opposing lion, hunts in order to save, captures in order to free, breaks in order to make solid, chews in order to make whole, eating in us that by which we are corrupted. Therefore let us pray to become the prey of this lion, lest we be the prey of the enemy lion. Let us become food for God, lest we be food for the serpent. Let Christ eat us, lest the devil devour us. For when Christ eats, as I said, that in us is consumed by which we are consumed. For Christ is life, and we cannot lay aside this mortality unless we are swallowed up, because Christ devours our death. But we cannot be Christ’s food unless we do his will, so that he in turn may become food for us, in whom we live forever if we live by his commandments. So, then, out of the strong comes sweetness when, the bitterness of our malice changed through him into the sweetness of goodness, we come forth from his word as sweet food, he who restored to life those whom, eating them, he consumed for sin. He alone is strong, sweetly strong, who has delivered the poor from the greedy mighty one, who, destroying the fierceness of my body through the mystery of his goodness in the death of his own body, gives the food of life there where the famine of wretched death was parching; who has changed for me offense into grace, sin into righteousness, weakness into strength, death into life, confusion into glory, exile into a kingdom. We who used to hear, “You are earth, and to earth you shall go,” now hear: “Your citizenship is in heaven.”

So I think that the picture woven again in Samson, whether when his hair grew back or when he died, fits every servant of Christ. For a man who has been overtaken in some sin, when by wholesome repentance he returns to the restoration of grace as with hair growing again, setting his arms like a bow of bronze, that is, faith in true hope and hope in unfeigned faith, and training his hands for battle in works of devotion, whose training is profitable for all things: then, strong as with certain arms of good conscience and firm faith, he will dare to attack and will be able to overturn the pillars of the enemies. These are the pillars of the enemy house on which it rests, in which the enemy, as our conqueror, feasts and mocks his captives, if he uses our members as the weapons of his iniquity. We cast this enemy down from his house by the death of the subjugated flesh; with the flesh as his helper, the enemy, shut up within us, shakes our soul with civil war, having become master of us by the fault of our own will; he has our own vices as attendants against us and attacks our inner man by the service of the outer.

But let us remember the covenant by which, buried with Christ through the grace of baptism, we swore an oath to the sacraments of the cross, that we should no longer act as living in this world, and that now not we but Christ should live in us. When he is restored to us in the honor of the head, the devil’s house will fall, and the whole troop of enemies will die with the death of our sin. Therefore from Samson’s death I learn not only to die together with my enemies, that is, by mortifying my flesh to kill sin at the same time, so that with the spirit surviving I may triumph as a victor of salvation and say to my soul, “Return to your rest, for the Lord has dealt well with me”; but also by Samson’s blindness, by which, captured only in his bodily eyes, he did not lose his spiritual ones, I am enlightened to good understanding, to know by his example which eyes I ought rather to have. For that man would not have called on the Lord to help his strength unless he had had the eyes of his mind unharmed, for which the light is Christ, in whose light we shall see light. If this light always burns in the lamp of our body, then the works of darkness will perish, and the prince of this world is cast out: not, of course, out of this world, with which, as it is written, he will be brought to nothing in condemnation with those judged at an end shared with them, but out of our hearts, from which, if we receive Christ, he is expelled.

Therefore, since those who are of his party imitate the devil, let us imitate the Lord Jesus, who has called us into the lot of his inheritance and bidden us take up his easy yoke, to shake off from us that heavy yoke of the law and of death. And hair, too, is like a yoke of lightness; for, as divine Scripture teaches us, the hair of the saints is light, that of the wicked heavy. The one is of strength, as in Samson, or of sanctification, as in Samuel; the other of weight, as in Absalom, or of squalor, as in Nebuchadnezzar. By this difference of men and of hair we are taught to judge works by hair, since in the Assyrian king, condemned to the wilderness and savagery, the mournful matting of his unshorn head bristled into a lion’s mane, so that even in bodily appearance he passed into a beast, he who was exiled not only from his kingdom but from human senses, recalling a lion by his grim hair, a vulture by his hooked nails, an ox by his mind and fodder, so that he who had been like many beasts in his morals should not bear the likeness of only one beast in his punishments.