Letters 24.11–25.8

So, about to begin his husbandry in us, he says, ‘I have come to cast fire on the earth,’ that is, to cleanse our heart, overgrown with sins like a field bristling with thorns, burning us in our vices and enlightening us in our senses. The devoted farmer pursues the roots of our old deeds with a saving pruning hook, so that the fiery word may set alight the remaining stubble of the old harvest and prepare our soul like a field for new sowing, which, once the thorns are rooted out by the pressed-in plowshare of the divine word, may freely pour forth a glad crop of virtues and, with the root of harmful weeds destroyed, may multiply fruits worthy of the heavenly granaries. But because we are not only God’s husbandry but also his building, cultivated and built by his grace and Spirit and word, he prepares to build us for that road on which he calls us after him by this work: he first urges us to be released by selling our goods. Because care or love for them dims the very sight of the mind and lures the soul, drawn away from its inner self, to outward things, he also says to us through the prophet, ‘Be still and see that I am the Lord.’ Does he not seem here too to say, ‘You cannot serve two masters’? For by this word he who warns us to pray instantly and to watch, lest we enter into temptation, does not urge idleness upon us, but to be free of the world in order to be occupied for him, to be free from those affairs in whose entanglement we are idle toward God.

So, as we build newness of life in us, we must destroy the old; and because there can be no fellowship between darkness and light, or between mammon and Christ, we must exchange the old for the new. With the kind of our occupation and of our freedom reversed, let us be bound up in the things from which we were free, so that in turn we may be free of the things in which we were bound up; let us die to the things for which we lived, and live in turn for those works and pursuits to which we were dead, when we were dead to the things of the living and, doing deadly things, lived among the dead. Hence the holy teacher asks something human and fair: that ‘as we presented our members to serve iniquity, so now we present the same as servants of righteousness’; having changed masters, let us change our pursuits too. For we do not lay aside slavery or freedom by changing masters; we only gain happiness, with both slavery and freedom changed for the better, when we break the bond of iniquity, submit to the yoke of righteousness, and are bridled by divine fear, beginning, with our road turned straight, to be free from sin, which we served when in a wretched freedom we rebelled against righteousness.

So now, in our turn servants of God and rebels against this world, we enter the contest, and, trusting in the Lord, we challenge the very enemy whom we used to serve. You surely recognize, my brother (for I speak as to a fellow soldier of what we have experienced together), how great a conflict there is for us, and how great an enemy within us, not of flesh and blood but, as the apostle says, of invisible powers and of spiritual wickedness, with which the services of the fleshly vices conspire. Hence they are also called rulers of darkness, because according to the apostle sinners are called darkness, and demons rule over them as over those like themselves. Indeed, the whole form of this world, which passes away and entices hearts through the eyes, spread out with the devil’s nets, is in any of its appearances a snare and a sword to the mind. Let us believe the prophet that we walk in the midst of traps, and that life is passed among swords concealed by deadly guile. This world receives us, blooming with various pleasures and poisoned with deceiving allurements. The serpent receives us with countless snares, he who has ‘a thousand names, a thousand arts of harm’; and often he attacks violently in open combat and aims at us with burning darts, if he does not catch us with hidden snares. For ‘the arrows of the mighty are sharp, with desolating coals,’ which burn our soul through with the harmful fires of desires and make it desolate of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. When this happens, various guests come in upon us, and ‘a man’s enemies become those of his own household’: now they puff us up with the wind of ambition, now they bring up the torches of lusts, now they bind us with the chains of avarice, which, armed with every crime, even if it alone captures us, suffices both for the devil’s malice and for man’s death.

What then are you doing, wretched man, sent among so many enemies? How will you, weak, resist the strong, unarmed, the armed? Blessed Job cries out, wounded by many of the devil’s darts without a wound to his heart: ‘Naked I came out of my mother’s womb.’ Who then will arm me against so many columns of the enemy of the air, so that I may not return to the earth naked as I came? See, I breathe again, I am strengthened, I rise up: ‘The Lord is my light, the Lord is the defender of my life; though camps stand against me, my heart will not fear.’ Nor, if I lack the arms of my own strength, shall I despair. I have the armory of Christ, from which I may take the arms of light, with which to storm the rulers of darkness and the columns of the night that oppose me in the heavenly places, that is, in my spiritual way of life, which they strive to overthrow with earthly allurements. But against them he will be my armor bearer and my standard bearer who is God’s chosen vessel. He will bind my loins with the belt of chastity, fit the helmet of salvation to my head, and enclose my breast with the breastplate of righteousness. He will protect the whole of me with the shield of faith, and he will arm my right hand, or rather the whole of me, made into the right hand of Christ, with the sword of the Spirit and the word of truth, so that ‘a thousand may fall at my side and ten thousand at my right hand.’ He will shoe my feet with the preparation of the gospel, so that I may tread unharmed upon the thorns and thistles of this earth and walk safely with protected foot through the rough places of the narrow road; and, not fearing its bite, I shall crush the head of the enemy serpent, put under me, with the very heel that he treacherously watches. I do not claim to say this from the boldness of my own weakness, but promise it to every believer from the power of Christ, who, as he ‘calls the things that are not as though they were,’ so is able, as he always has done and does, to destroy the strong and lofty things of this world by means of his weak and lowly ones. For this reason he has given us a teacher whom he had as his own imitator, through whom we may attain to the imitation of the Lord himself.

For that teacher himself teaches me to stand in the battle line, to run in the stadium, to wrestle in the contest, bruising his own body, forgetting what lies behind and stretching out to what lies ahead, and so founded on the rock that he glories even in weaknesses, and when he is weak, then he is strong, able for all things, as he himself declares, in Christ, who strengthens his own, if he fights for us and conquers in us. This was the apostle’s reason for saying, ‘So run that you may all lay hold of it.’ In an earthly contest it is the opposite: there a wrestling bout can end only with unequal lots for the wrestlers, so that one man’s glory is another’s disgrace. But in Christ, because we, being many, are one, we all run as one, and the course of all is shared toward one good. Therefore we are told, ‘So run that you may all lay hold of it,’ because, as the same apostle says, there can be no division in the body whose head is Christ, whom, as their common crown, the one frame of his members accompanies. Since these cannot be at odds with themselves, let us run together, so that we may all lay hold of it without envious rivalry, with equality of victory, so that, as in the strain of the race we are Christ’s labor, so at the goal of arrival we may be Christ’s triumph, and he may bless us ‘in the crown of the year of his kindness.’

But I see that in this contest it is no more expedient for us to conquer than to be conquered, because both an enemy and a friend dwell within us. Who is more my friend than the spirit, which opposes the flesh, so that it may not drag me into the law of sin? Or who is more our enemy than the flesh, which lusts against the spirit for our destruction? So ‘better to me are the wounds of a friend,’ which Christ received in order to heal me, ‘than the willing kisses of an enemy,’ with which the flesh, that evil counselor, flatters me through the allurements of its delights, in order to betray me, as with that parricidal kiss of Judas, to enemies made ready for my captivity. Yet the Lord did not receive that kiss in order to accept the peace of the traitor, but to take back his own peace from the one who had estranged himself. Although it is also wholesome to hold to it as an example to contemplate of perfect goodness: with the same affection by which he commands that even enemies be loved, he gave a friendly kiss of peace to an enemy, returning love for hatred, he who received hatred in return for his love.

So it is easy to discern … the devil contend with the flesh; for it is better to be conquered by good than to conquer by evil. So in this world the man whose tunic another has taken seems to be conquered; but in Christ he triumphs who lets the one who takes his tunic have his cloak as well. To pay back injury in turn is human revenge; but to love even an enemy is heavenly vengeance. To sell one’s inheritance and give to the poor is foolishness to this world but wisdom to God; on the other hand, to brood over riches, to increase money by usury and possessions by auctions, to extend one’s boundaries by violence, is industry and profit in this world, but with God it is crime and punishment. So if you conquer by evil, you are a conquered conqueror, because when you conquer by wickedness you are overcome by greed. But conquered, you will conquer, if you yield to the just man and the divine will prevails over your will. Let us then be emptied of our own strength, so that we may be filled with divine strength. Let us be conquered in body, but conquer in salvation. Let us remember that we are members of him who conquered when he was judged, who overcame by yielding, and by falling into death rose into glory, establishing out of the setting of his passion the rising of our resurrection.

Let us follow this Lord who calls us, that he may teach us to conquer by yielding and to come alive by dying, killing in us that by which we are put to death and quickening that by which we may live. ‘This is our God; no other shall be reckoned beside him,’ he who ‘was seen on earth and lived among men.’ Because flesh and blood cannot reveal this to us, he says, ‘Be still and see that I am God.’ At this point I am roused to the boldness of asking, and I say: who then are you, God, who made heaven and earth and appeared in the bush, who did great things in Egypt, wonders in the land of Ham, terrible things at the Red Sea? Up to now, Lord, there is no one who does not believe in you; not only the Jews, though loving you with their lips and far from you in heart, as a people formed in the law, but even the Gentiles, living without the law, confess by natural sense one Lord of supreme power. What difficulty is there, then, in seeing that you are God, when ‘the heavens tell your glory’ and ‘your invisible things are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made’? What hinders a man from possessing property? What harm is there in caring for other things too, when even busy men can readily discern the conspicuous truth of God and see the manifest light of the supreme providence? ‘Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night shows knowledge’; and yet I am bidden to be still, so that I may see that you are the Lord, when even the nights, that is, the rulers or workers of darkness, know this light.

But it is not for nothing that the truth, which has often shown itself in many marks of divinity, testifies that it cannot be perceived except when stillness has been secured. For it is easy to see only that God is God. This, as I said, every soul sees; to this no mind is blind; this even the faith of unbelievers receives. But that God is in Christ, or Christ in God, the busy man, surrounded by a cloud of earthly cares, does not see. For the Word made flesh is foolishness to the wisdom of this world; and so it pleased God, to the confounding of that wisdom through whose pride this world did not know the wisdom of God, ‘through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.’

And this is the treasure of the field, to obtain which even the field must be bought, because the price of our salvation lies in this, that we confess that God the Son of God came in the flesh to save the flesh; and this is the pearl to be bought with inheritances squandered. But it is not bought at once when its price is made ready, because very many difficulties come in the way of the trade itself: either the sea lies between, or a robber intercepts, or a greedier buyer gets there first, or a wealthier one is preferred. So do not think that we have already bought the jewel because you see that we have made ready its price, nor that we have already built the house for whose building we have made room, when we carried out visible riches, furniture, money, and estates like filthy heaps and troublesome rubble, so that in a cleansed heart, as in living ground, we might lay more firmly the foundations of a more stable building. But as when rubble has been cleared and the soil laid bare beneath the filthy heaps, many knots of tree trunks, or remains of ruins, or many creatures of a harmful kind, and especially the young or the dens of vipers, are found, so when the possession and care of temporal things have been removed from our breast, and we are now free to examine our heart, free from the things that drew us outside, we find in our senses the knots of long-standing sins and the hiding places of spiritual enemies. Now the inner house begins to appear to us, ‘and there creeping things without number.’ Now the whole darkness of our unhappiness lies open. Now at last we see how far from God we are, and how dead in comparison with the living.

Understand this and sigh with an anxious heart in care for us, foreseeing that the praise of the same Lord is sung at the end, so that we may be perfected by the grace of the Spirit in which we began, and may obey the command to the end, as we seem to have obeyed it at the head of the counsel. For he gives counsel, not command, who does not say, ‘Be perfect,’ but, ‘If you wish to be perfect,’ because freedom of the will, which, when it is good, is above the law, is not forced but persuaded, and is a law to itself. How great a thing it is to follow Christ you can gather from the apostle’s saying: ‘He who says he follows Christ ought himself to walk just as he walked.’ How Christ walked another teacher shows: ‘He did no sin,’ he says, ‘nor was guile found in his mouth; when he was reviled, he did not revile in return, but gave himself up to death to the one who judged unjustly.’ But we can also know from his own action and commands how he walked. For he came for this, to set his own life before us as a pattern and a mirror of life. ‘I came not to destroy the law,’ he says, ‘but to fulfill it,’ and he himself teaches what that fulfilling is, saying, ‘Unless your righteousness abounds more than the righteousness of the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.’ For to fulfill is to add what is lacking. The law says, ‘You shall not kill’; but he says, ‘Nor shall you be angry with your brother without cause.’ The law forbids adultery; but the Truth itself condemns a curious look at women. From this you see how much greater than the law is faith, ‘whose praise is not from men but from God,’ because the circumcision of the law is in the open, that of faith in secret. The law breaks off the branches of sin; faith digs out the roots, making us spotless not in deeds only but in our inner senses, so that we may truly be re-formed to our original dignity, that is, the likeness of God, cleansed not only in body but in heart. Hence the apostle also testifies that, having laid aside the appearance of the earthly man, we put on the heavenly, and elsewhere the same apostle declares that the man, as already clothed with Christ, is the glory of God.

See then how much we must do so that we may travel the length of the road, not as perfect, as you say, but as beginners, as we show: we who are commanded to exceed the righteousness of the law so that we may become the righteousness of God, and whose action is not to come from the law, but for whom the law is in the will: to follow Christ and imitate God. And he who wishes us to be more righteous than the very law of his righteousness, and perfect after the likeness of his Father, asks us not only to flee human faults but also to fulfill divine virtues. Because you see that this is as difficult for those still engaged in the contest as it is glorious for victors whose fight is finished, do not, while we are still in the arena, while there are fightings without and fears within, think or speak high things of us; rather fear, and labor together with us in spirit as we labor, and help us with your prayers, so that through us too he may destroy the enemy and the avenger, he who chose the weak things of the world to confound the strong.

Ask humbly that he give us understanding in this way on which he calls us, so that we may see that he is God who ‘was crucified out of our weakness, but lives by the power of God’; that he weaken in us the power of sin, so as to strengthen the spirit of his power; that he reverse both our poverty and our abundance, so that we may abound in the righteousness we lack and lack the iniquity in which we abound; that we may be stripped of sins and clothed with virtues; that he bring us help against our own wills and not hand us over to the desires of our heart, and that against flesh and blood, the devil and death, he give us victory, as he gave it to Abraham against the four kings. The father of faith overcame them by this mystery, by which our faith, if it is strengthened by the princely spirit, will subject to the word of God the same number of elements of our body. And as he was victor over kings on behalf of a kinsman, so faith, victorious on behalf of the soul, which flourishes with as many senses, will triumph over the outer man, in whom, composed of as many elements, the figure of the four kings is contained. But as he defeated the hostile princes not by the number or strength of legions, but already then in the mystery of the cross, whose figure is expressed by the Greek letter T in the number three hundred (by the power of that mystery the ark, built three hundred cubits long, overcame the flood, as now the church sails over this world), so let us too, trusting not in our own resources or strength but in the sole knowledge of the Crucified, lift up our eyes to him, that he may make wonderful his mercies upon us, he who saves those who hope in him, because he is ‘the Lord who crushes wars, mighty in battle.’ He has given us both the confidence to fight and the way to conquer, when, bearing in himself our human nature already triumphant, he said, ‘Be steadfast, for I have overcome the world.’

Although I am unknown to you by face, I have already come to know you in heart, because my son, most dear in the Lord, Victor, by telling me of your devout life, has made me know you though absent, and has made me begin to love you as one who will be a partner in Christ. For he told me how he was your comrade and follower in your tent-fellowship even in the worldly military service in which you are still held. So I have all the more presumed to write to you through him. For I hope that from that same road you will come to the true road, since you have sent him on ahead to us from among your comrades, and the church holds him as your pledge, so that after him it may take you. For there is nothing, blessed son, that can or should be preferred to him who is the true Lord and true Father and eternal Emperor. Or to whom should we more rightly spend our life than to him from whom we received it, and for whom we ought to keep it to the end, since we live by his kindness? If we serve as his soldiers in this world, then we shall deserve to pass over to him. But if we love this world more and prefer to serve as soldiers of Caesar rather than of Christ, afterward we shall be carried over not to Christ but to Gehenna, where the case of the rulers of this world is decided.

So we must not prefer affection, or homeland, or honors, or riches to God, because it is written thus: ‘The form of this world passes away.’ And those who love this world will perish with it. Therefore the Lord himself solemnly declares in the gospel: ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he who does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.’ Of the riches of this world, which some embrace and love as the highest and necessary good, he says this: ‘Treasures will not profit the wicked, but righteousness rescues from death.’ And again he says through the prophet: ‘All who had been exalted by gold and silver have been destroyed.’ In the gospel too he cries out and condemns the rich of this world, saying: ‘Woe to you rich, who have your consolation! Woe to you who are full, for you will hunger! Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep!’

Do not, then, love this world any longer, nor its military service, because according to the authority of Scripture ‘whoever is a friend of the world is an enemy of God.’ And he who serves as a soldier with the sword is a servant of death; whether he sheds his own blood or another’s, he receives from it the fruit of his pay. For he will be held guilty either by the outcome of death or by crime, because the soldier in war, in which he fights not so much for himself as for another, must necessarily either meet his own death as a coward or, as victor, become the cause of death, since he cannot be victor unless he has first been a shedder of blood. Therefore the Lord says, ‘You cannot serve two masters,’ that is, the one God and mammon, namely Christ and Caesar, although Caesar himself now strives to be Christ’s servant, so that he may deserve to be king over some nations. For no earthly king is king of the whole world; Christ God is, because ‘all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made’; and he is ‘King of kings and Lord of lords’; he does whatever he wills on earth, in the sea, and in the depths.

Let us follow him, then, let us serve as soldiers for him, whose soldier, once girded, is never ungirded, who bestows on those who serve him the glory of eternal life, the honor of the heavenly kingdom, the riches of his inheritance, and a lasting share in the knowledge of God. It is written: ‘He who loves money will not be justified’; and he who covets earthly possessions will, as it is written, be entangled in them. Hence in Ecclesiasticus the divine Wisdom speaks through Solomon: ‘Many have been brought to ruin for the sake of gold, and their destruction came before its face. Gold,’ it says, ‘is a tree of stumbling, and it throws down those who pursue it. But none will perish in it except the foolish.’ Therefore flee from it, son, as from the face of a serpent, believing Christ, who testifies to all men in the gospel ‘that a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.’

But perhaps confidence in your age, and the wages of rank, and the growth of riches tempt you to say: ‘I am still young and have time to finish my service, to marry a wife and have sons, and afterward to serve God.’ To this not I but the Lord answers you, who speaks in his prophets and apostles. The prophet says, ‘Do not delay to turn to the Lord, and do not put it off from day to day, lest his wrath come suddenly.’ And in the gospel he shows with what ardor one must hasten to conversion, when he says, ‘From the days of John until today the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent seize it.’ Such violence is pleasing to God; it strikes no one, and is committed to no one’s loss. Turn your hands to this robbery, which carries no crime and confers salvation. And why should you concern yourself with the business of military pay, with the odium of violence, when perhaps, for your honor’s sake, you are even a moderate collector of debts? You can be violent without anyone’s ill will and with God’s favor, so as to seize the kingdom of heaven, which suffers violence; and Christ rejoices to be invaded, because in the abundance of his love and power he is able both to give what he holds and to keep what he has given. For when he grants his saints to reign in his kingdom, he himself will reign in those whom he has taken up as partners of the heavenly kingdom. For it is written both that the kingdom of God will be with the saints and that the saints themselves are the kingdom of God, which, by God’s favor, when you have been converted, you will come to know by reading and understand by believing.

As for the bloom of youth and early manhood, who would dare to boast of it? For divine Scripture warns us, saying, ‘All flesh is grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass has withered and the flower has fallen; but the word of the Lord abides for ever.’ Hence the prophet too, longing rather for those things in which the eternal glory of the body brought back to life can abide after the resurrection, cries out, ‘How lovely are your dwellings, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs and faints for the courts of the Lord.’

And about the bonds of marriage and the other cares of temporal things, as thorny as they are empty, the apostle, in whom Christ speaks, warns us not to send vain hopes into the long time of this world, and bids us know that ‘the time is short,’ and says: ‘It remains that those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who weep as though they wept not, and those who rejoice as though they rejoiced not, and those who buy as though they possessed not, and those who use this world as though they used it not.’ When he says this, he shows that those who are free ought not to entangle themselves, since he urges those who are entangled to be set free. If, then, you are perhaps already bound to a wife, do not seek a release; but if you are still free, do not seek to be entangled. For the apostle does not compare the sacredness of this covenant to the great mystery of Christ and the church in order to condemn marriage; but, because of the present necessity, he asserts that it is good for a man to be as he himself was. ‘I want you,’ he says, ‘to be without anxiety,’ that is, to think of nothing but God and our salvation. For wife and children, though they too are pledges given us by God, are nevertheless burdens of the heaviest cares. Hence the same apostle says that ‘such will have trouble of the flesh,’ because our fleshly ties torment and weary us the more, the dearer they are to us. For once a wife has been taken, children are first longed for, and if none are born, barrenness is mourned; if they are born, their loss is feared. And so the mind never rests in fleshly affections so as to be free from torment, as long as it either loves its kin when they are good, with fear of losing them, or hates them when they are bad, with a wish to lose them, in either case always liable to suffer miseries. For he is wretched who loses a good wife, more wretched who has a bad one; between these two chances he is far happier who knows neither. Likewise with children: very often the most wretched parents are either those who are bereaved of good ones or those who have such as force them to envy the childless.

Hear then, my son, and incline your ear to me, and break all your bonds, whatever they are that hold you entangled in this world. Exchange the soldiering of the world for something better, so that you may begin to serve the eternal King. And now, as I hear, you who are a helper and guardian of citizens, become a companion of Christ. Then too, in this service you are accustomed to hope for promotion to the post of protector. But if you prove yourself to God, you will begin to have God himself as your protector. See to what service I invite you as a colleague: that what you wish to be to a man, God may be to you. If you begin to follow him, you begin to serve in his retinue, and the end of your service will be a kingdom not of earth and time but of eternity and heaven.