Letters 4.1–4.5

The love of Christ, which urges us on and, though we are absent, binds us through the unity of faith, has itself driven away my shyness and given me confidence to write to you, and has made you dear to my inmost being through your writings. These, overflowing with the resources of the schools and sweet from heavenly honeycombs, I hold meanwhile in five books, as physicians and nurses of my soul. We received them by the gift of our blessed and venerable bishop Alypius, not only for our own instruction but also for the benefit of the church in many cities. These books I now have for reading; in them I delight; from them I take food, not the food that perishes, but that which works the substance of eternal life through our faith, by which we are incorporated into Christ Jesus our Lord, since our faith, which disregards the visible and gapes after the invisible, is strengthened through love by the writings and examples of the faithful, who believe all things according to the truth of almighty God. O truly salt of the earth, by which our hearts are seasoned, so that they cannot become tasteless through the error of the world! O lamp worthily set upon the lampstand of the church, which, pouring far and wide over the catholic cities a light fed from the sevenfold lamp with the oil of gladness, scatters the thick darkness of the heretics, however dense, and clears the light of truth from the confusion of shadows by the brilliance of your illuminating speech.

You see, admirable brother, one in heart with me in Christ the Lord and to be revered, how familiarly I have come to know you, with what amazement I admire you, with how great a love I embrace you, I who daily enjoy conversation with your writings and feed on the breath of your mouth. For I may rightly call your mouth a pipe of living water and a vein of the eternal fountain, since Christ has become in you a fountain of water springing up to eternal life. For desire of him my soul has thirsted in you, and my land has longed to be drunk with the abundance of your river. Therefore, since you have armed me well with this Pentateuch of yours against the Manichees, if you have prepared any defenses also against other enemies of the catholic faith (for our enemy, who has a thousand arts of harming, must be fought with weapons as varied as the snares with which he attacks), I beg you not to refuse to bring out for me from your armory and bestow on me the weapons of righteousness. For I am still a sinner laboring under a great burden, a veteran among sinners, but a new recruit to the eternal King in incorporeal warfare. Wretch that I am, until now I admired the wisdom of the world, and through useless letters and reprobate prudence I was foolish and dumb before God. After I had grown old among my enemies and become vain in my thoughts, I lifted up my eyes to the mountains, looking up to the precepts of the law and the gifts of grace, whence my help came from the Lord, who, not repaying according to my iniquities, gave light to the blind, freed the shackled, humbled one wrongly lifted up in order to lift up one humbled in godliness.

I follow, therefore, with steps still unequal, the great footprints of the righteous, if by your prayers I may lay hold of that for which I have been laid hold of by the mercies of God. Guide, then, a little one crawling uncertainly, and teach him to walk with your steps. For I do not want you to consider me by the age of my bodily birth rather than of my spiritual rising. My age according to the flesh is now that of the man who was healed by the apostles at the Beautiful Gate through the power of the word; but in the birthdays of the soul I am still at the age of those infants who were sacrificed by the wounds aimed at Christ, ran ahead of the victim of the Lamb with their worthy blood, and inaugurated the Lord’s passion. So, as an infant still and a suckling in the word of God and in spiritual age, bring me up with your words, as I gape after the breasts of faith, wisdom, and love. If you consider our common office, you are my brother; if the maturity of your mind and judgment, you are my father, even if perhaps younger in years, because a gray-haired prudence has advanced you, though young, to maturity of merit, the honor of elders. Cherish and strengthen me, then, in the sacred letters and in spiritual studies, recent as I am, as I said, in time, and for that reason, after long perils and many shipwrecks, still unskilled in practice, barely emerging from the waves of the world. You, who already stand on solid shore, receive me into a safe harbor, so that, if you think me worthy, we may sail together in the port of salvation. Meanwhile, as I strive to escape from the perils of this life and the depths of sins, hold me up with your prayers as with a plank, that I may escape naked from this world as from a shipwreck.

For this reason I have taken care to lighten myself of baggage and to strip off the clothes that weigh me down, so that, at Christ’s command and with his help, freed from every covering of flesh and from care for the next day, I may swim across this stormy sea of the present life, which separates us from God with sins barking between. Nor do I boast that I have accomplished this; even if I could boast, I would boast in the Lord, to whom it belongs to accomplish what lies at hand for us to will. But my soul still longs to desire the judgments of the Lord. Consider when one who still desires to desire may attain the fulfillment of God’s wishes. Yet so far as in me lies, I have loved the beauty of the holy house, and, so far as I could, I had chosen to be an abject in the house of the Lord. But he who was pleased to set me apart from my mother’s womb and to draw me from the friendship of flesh and blood to his grace was also pleased to raise me, needy of every good merit, from the earth, and to lead me out of the pit of misery and the mire of dregs, to set me with the princes of his people and put my portion in your lot, so that, joined in office, I might be made equal to you, though you surpass me in merits.

Not by my own presumption, then, but by the Lord’s will and ordering I claim for myself the bond of your brotherhood, unworthy as I am of so great an honor, and deem myself worthy of it; because I know for certain that, being holy (for you savor of truth), you do not mind high things but condescend to the lowly. I therefore hope you will receive readily and heartily the love of our lowliness, which indeed I trust you have already received through the most blessed bishop Alypius, our father, since he deigns to be so. For he without doubt has given you in himself an example of loving us before acquaintance and beyond our merit: we were unknown to him and separated by a long gap of land and sea, yet by the spirit of true love, which penetrates and is poured out everywhere, he was able to see us by loving and to reach us by addressing us. He gave us the first proofs of his affection and the pledges of your love in the gift of the books mentioned above. And as much as he took pains that we should not love your holiness moderately, once we knew it not only by his words but more fully through your own eloquence and faith, so much, we believe, he has taken care that you in turn, by imitating him, should love us very greatly. We pray that the grace of God may abide with you forever, as it does, brother one in heart with us in Christ the Lord, venerable and most longed for. We greet your whole household and every companion and imitator of your holiness in the Lord with the deepest affection of one-hearted brotherhood. We beg you to bless, by accepting it, the one loaf we have sent to your love as a sign of oneness of heart.