Letters 40.1–41.3

There is a time for all, and a time for every thing under heaven; for above heaven there is no time, because eternity has no time, eternity which the Creator has given even to creatures in heaven, he who alone has eternity of his own and dwells in light inaccessible. For true eternity is nowhere but in him, who alone is what he is, as he himself says, ‘I am who I am.’ Other things exist only in him. So there is a time under heaven for every thing: a time for leisure, a time for business; a time for silence and a time for speaking; a time for hungering and a time for feasting; as until now we have had a time of fasting from your words, and now a time has dawned to be fed with them. For you have fed us with your letter, sweet with the word of God and anointed with the oil of gladness, with which we gladly anoint our head, because there is no lying work of the olive in you, in whom dwells love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned. But since no one who is very hungry can be satisfied with one loaf, we confess that we are not yet filled, but rather stirred to desire for your letters by this one letter of yours, which we count as one, because we have received such a letter from you, by which our soul is filled as with marrow and fatness, only once so far.

Yet even if there have been alternations of times among our courtesies, as a time to be silent and a time to speak, there has not likewise been a time to love and a time to neglect. For long ago, as you no doubt recall, Sanctus, my brother, I began to love you, and I have loved you continuously, though not with that love which is Christ’s, but with that friendship of human familiarity which has flattery on its lips and no root in the heart, because what is not built in Christ is not founded upon the rock. Hence it is shaken and dissolved by any breeze of fickleness, and, holding a brief flower by temporal favor, it withers quickly like grass and soon falls like the flower of the field. But the love of the Lord abides for ever, by which we are bound to each other both to live and to die together, because the love of Christ is strong as death. For as the law of death is unbroken, so too the chain of love testifies that the power of love and of death are equal. For as the prophet says, ‘What man is there who will live and not see death?’ so the apostle too cries, ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ?’ Therefore, blessed one, a richer fruit will come to you from it, because, wounded first by the darts of this love, you have anticipated us with the blessing of sweetness through the chaste and faithful words of your letter, in which your tongue has distilled honey and milk from the word of the Lord.

I had written to your oneness of heart before as well, and when I had received from you your short letter in return for the one I had sent, I had poured myself back into long silence as if the debt of courtesy were paid. But with Christ keeping keener watch in your mind, you were the first to flourish again in your care to rouse in us the observance of love, lest it should fall asleep in the death of forgetfulness; and because my lack of kindness had abounded toward you, your kindness has superabounded toward me. For you have multiplied your enrichment of me with the affection and courtesy of your love, in that you took as your partner in visiting us the Lord’s blessed servant, brother Amandus, and have set him before us as a strong patron. For we trust that, as he has become your partner in writing to us, so he may be your colleague in praying for us. Indeed, spiritual brotherhood requires that, as you have one spirit in the faith and confession of Christ, so you should have one love and one labor in championing your neighbors. Hence you will reap a common reward richly from the supreme rewarder, exalted in his towers, because ‘a brother helping a brother will be exalted’; provided only that you remember always to pray and sigh for us, and for the rest take care not to burden us with words of praise, lest perhaps you prepare a stumbling block for yourselves too, if you call sweet what is bitter. For you have read that praise befits the upright, the truly holy, not sinners set in the gall of bitterness and still bound by no slender bond of iniquity, so that destruction and unhappiness cannot but be in our ways.

Yet even so there ought to be contrition in our minds, because God does not despise a contrite and humbled heart. And who will give us a heart of flesh, so that, with the hardness of our feeling softened, we may feel the arrows of the Lord piercing our flesh with holy fear, and, the pain of our wounds aroused, weep before the Lord who made us? May Jeremiah lend us that fountain of tears with which he lamented his day and his people; may David too pour over us the rivers of his eyes, with which he watered his bed, and bathed with overflowing tears not only the cheeks of his face but the whole bed of his body. For our iniquities have gone over our head, and they are multiplied above the hairs of our head, because more works of iniquity than of righteousness are counted in us; and therefore our scars have festered and grown worse because of our folly, and our bones have grown old, because we kept silent to God; and adding iniquity to iniquity, when we had set our eyes to bend down to the earth, we have slowly and with difficulty raised them to the mountains of God, from where our help comes from the Lord, who alone is able to heal all our sicknesses and rescue us from the body of this death, because, bound through Adam, we are loosed through Christ, provided that we bear the image of the heavenly man as we bore that of the earthly, that is, if we serve righteousness and truth for our salvation as faithfully as we diligently served unrighteousness and unkindness for our death. For the apostle asks of us something human: as we presented our members to serve iniquity unto destruction and shame, so let us present the same to serve righteousness unto life and glory. For we have with us the fruit of those works of which we are now ashamed.

But thanks to the wisdom of God, Christ God, who, abiding in himself, renews all things and orders all things sweetly, so that there is a time for all things: a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to build and a time to destroy. May the time of killing, destroying, and laughing now have passed for us, I pray, and the time at last have come of healing, building, and weeping. ‘For behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.’ ‘The night is far spent, and the day is at hand. Let us cast off the works of darkness and take up the arms of light.’ Let us walk in the light as children of the day, since behold, our enemies have prepared arrows in the quiver to shoot in the dark. For they will not be able to shoot those placed in the light, who can foresee before they strike and, being on guard, easily avoid them. But the reckoning of both times can be joined in the same work, so that those times distinguished above work together in us. For in that by which we are made alive we are killed, or in that by which we are killed we are made alive, through him who said, ‘I will kill and I will make alive.’ For unless Christ kills us, we shall not live; of him it is written, ‘The Lord puts to death and makes alive,’ because unless he destroys our sins, he will not make our souls alive. Therefore the prophet says to him, ‘I have risen, and I am still with you. If you would kill, O God, the sinner.’ We shall rise, emerging from the mire of the dregs and the shadow of death, and we shall remain with him, if he kills the sinner in us and creates the righteous man, because the cup of our frailty is in the hand of the Lord, in which he humbles this one and exalts that. For unless the outer man is humbled, the inner is not exalted. And so the times of killing and healing, or of destroying and building, come together into one work, when the life of sin is destroyed in us so that the life of righteousness may be built. For newness cannot be built unless oldness is destroyed, nor can we love Christ unless we begin to hate mammon. Nor shall we be able to rejoice in that age unless we mourn in this one, because those who sow in tears will reap in joy.

So that prayer in the psalms of the poor man, anxious and mourning, suits us now, since our days have almost failed like smoke, and our malice has not yet failed. For see, age has made our days old, drawn out in the course of life; old age does not merely sprinkle our head with grey but floods it; and we still pass the infancy of our spiritual life, crawling with its first efforts, with childish senses, barely now beginning to speak in the word of God, loosing, as the soul wails its first cries, a tongue mute and unskilled in the sacred letters; and we who were once talkative in the literature of human fables now stammer in the words of truth, wise in folly and fools in wisdom, robust in vices and still tender in virtues, recruits with a will barely born to righteousness and veterans with an age spent in sins. For a long time, as you, Sanctus, blessed brother, know, we have grown old wallowing in this world among our enemies; and would that we had grown old to our enemies, so that that life of the broad road might have failed us, now idle to it, and our youth be renewed in Christ like the eagle’s, so that we may put off the old age of the old man, putting on that new man who is created according to God. But we, who cannot yet be like the pelican of the wilderness, when shall we become like the night-raven in the house? When shall we be roused to that vigor of a lofty mind, so that, winged with spiritual alacrity and perfected in the heights of virtues with an arduous end, we may say, ‘I have watched, and I have become like a sparrow alone on the housetop’? Let us see here, if you please, for what reason the prophetic word arranges these kinds of birds, and in this order, in the person of the poor man in anguish, that is, the penitent, reduced to poverty of hope through some fall. You will bear, I think, the talkativeness of my folly, which you have provoked to your own scorn. For I have learned from a certain holy and very learned man, very dear to me, who has come to know much not only by reading but also by travel, that the pelican is a bird common in Egypt or the regions near it, that it roams the deserts near the river Nile and feeds on serpents, which it strikes down by fighting. So it fights in order to conquer, and, if conquered, dies; but as victor it both escapes death and gains food. As for what is written ‘night-raven’ (nycticorax), he asserted that it is more truly nycticora; and he seemed to show this with a probable argument, saying that the bird placed here is the one we call the owl, because it practices its songs and flights secretly by night, and is given light by the obscurity of darkness, in which almost all animals are blind; hence it is more aptly called nycticora than nycticorax, because nycticorax means ‘night raven,’ but nycticora ‘seeing by night,’ since the pupil of the eye is called korē by the Greeks. And it is plain that the owl has nothing like a raven. Further, it is clear that it, as I said, like certain other birds of the night, sees better in darkness and is blind in light, suffering night by day and using light by night.

Now, then, my blessed ones, see how this bird fits the sorrowful poor man, that is, the penitent: made poor in the riches of grace, mourning the loss of his glory with a mind conscious of wretched falls, laboring in pitiful affliction in his groaning, striving to recover the life of the soul from the death of his own flesh, and seeking, through the outlay of prayers and the support of groans, the eager remedies of tears for his wounded salvation. How aptly is such a poor sinner called an Egyptian or a nocturnal bird! For in that, to weep over and confess his sins, he shuts himself up, sorrowful, apart from the common gathering of the church, within the prison of his little cell, and withdraws far from this world, fleeing so that he may remain in the solitude of lamentation, and there fights against the desires of his flesh and battles in spiritual combat to crush his sins, surely he becomes like the pelican of the wilderness both in dwelling and in battle, and, fighting to overcome the devil himself and the rulers of darkness in the sins and thoughts of the flesh, he imitates that bird hostile to serpents. And if he overcomes in that contest, he will live, surviving his enemies; he seeks food for himself from his victory, because, as victor over sin and the devil, he gains the merit of life. We experience daily, in the dangers of our inner man, how that devil, with the whole army of spiritual wickedness, creeps by various arts to our destruction. But thanks to God, who has given us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord, so that we may walk upon the asp and the basilisk and trample the lion and the dragon, against such arts, that is, against the rulers of darkness, men mighty in sins, whom the apostle calls darkness, with whom we have a rival contention for salvation. Pray that, while we live in the desert of this world, we may destroy these serpents after the example of that solitary bird. When they are crushed and devoured through victory, our inner man will be enlightened, as though a cloud of darkness had been scattered, and then he will become like the night-owl in the house, that is, in the house of the Lord, so that amid the darkness of this world he may direct the keen sight of a mind that had failed, and, enlightened with such eyes, may say with the prophet, ‘For darkness will not be dark to me, and the night will be lit up like the day.’ This surely happens when both substances in man agree together, so that the flesh too, denying its earthly nature, passes over with spiritual affection into harmony with the soul; and then the night will be lit up like the day, when the flesh too becomes spiritual like the soul.

But if, through your prayers, it is granted us both to imitate the pelican of the wilderness in crushing the viperous enemy and to see with the eyes of the night-owl amid the dark places of this world, then at the end, with our feet set on the heights of perfect virtue, by watching in prayers and meditating on the law of the Lord, we shall become like the lone sparrow on the housetop, and, with body and spirit in harmony in the will of God, we shall rightly say, ‘I am alone until I pass over.’ And who is this sparrow, in whom is the form of the perfect, but that sparrow which has found itself a house, and, with the turtledove, has made its nest your altars, O Lord of hosts? This perhaps is that sparrow of the two, one of which does not fall to the ground without the will of the Father. For this supreme sparrow fell in the body, but he also rose again. He fell by the consent of his will, made obedient to the Father unto the death of the cross. This sparrow is that Wisdom which gladly shows herself in the ways to those who seek her, now meets them in the gates, now runs to meet them in the streets, now, high on the walls or towers, calls her lovers to herself and invites them to the heights of her dwellings, so as to fulfill his word, that, when lifted up, he draws all things to himself. Who will give us the silvered wings of a dove, so that, winged by the chaste words of the Lord, like silver tried by fire, we may fly through to the prize of the upward call, following this lone sparrow, who is the only Son of God, flying above, because he dwells on high and looks upon lowly things, and he who descended into the lower parts of the earth is the same who ascended above all the heavens, leading captivity captive, that he might fill all things? If we can follow this sparrow in direct imitation, walking in the same footsteps in which the beautiful feet of those who preach the gospel have gone, then, set on high, we shall be able to say, ‘I have watched and become like a lone sparrow on the housetop.’

Yet, even when raised on high, let us remember that word of the Lord, that he who is on the housetop should not go back into his house to take his goods, that is, that we should not run back into ourselves and seek again fleshly works, like goods left below. ‘For no one,’ he says, ‘who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ But even if we are on the housetop, that is, have flown above earthly nature, not consenting to the flesh, let us fear, after the example of birds, to fly down to low places. For it is written that not without cause are nets spread for birds. And we know that fowlers, lying in wait for the simplicity of birds, set snares on the ground; and very often scattered bait or blind decoys bring birds down by fraud and entangle the credulous ones in nooses hidden under treacherous turf. But let us, armed with faith and enlightened by truth, say to the fowlers of spiritual wickedness, who tempt us by a like art through the spread-out allurements of this world: ‘In the Lord I trust; how do you say to my soul, Flee to the mountain like a sparrow? Depart from me, all you who work iniquity.’ Therefore let us pray to the Lord, who enlightens every man coming into this world. I think ‘every man’ is said because no one is a man unless he acknowledges God and rather deserves to be acknowledged by God. Those who do not acknowledge him have been compared to beasts and made like them. Let us, then, justified from ungodliness by his great mercy, through faith and not by works, run to the fragrance of his ointments, so as to draw from his name the fragrance of life and become a good fragrance of Christ to God, given to drink, as it is written, of the wine of ointments from the cup of salvation, in which he himself, like a perfumer, as is written in Ecclesiasticus, mixes ointments of sweetness, dividing his gifts to each as he wills, so that all may be filled in all, and he may show the fragrance of his knowledge in us, because his name is ointment poured out. That this name may always be invoked over us and named in us, let our citizenship be in heaven. For so we shall become like the lone sparrow on the housetop, if we do not mind or seek the things that are on earth, but those that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of the Father, with countless eyes the watcher of our deeds and spectator of this contest, in which, walking in the flesh, we do not fight according to the flesh.

For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against invisible enemies and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places: not that wicked spirits act in heavenly places, but that they oppose those who live a heavenly way of life. Let us therefore put on the arms of light; in our God let us leap over that wall which separates us from God, and let us not, because of fleshly weakness, fear an adversary violent by his spiritual nature, because strength is made perfect in weakness, and a man is not strong in his own strength, but the Lord makes his adversary weak. The Lord of hosts himself, the King of glory, confounds him for us by such a kind of encounter that on the cross of Christ not divine strength but human weakness overcame him. Let us therefore follow Jesus in his triumph, and let his truth surround us with the shield of faith, so that we may not fear the terror of the night and the arrow that flies by day. A thousand will fall at our side and ten thousand at our right hand, not by our strength but by Christ’s, whose battle it is in which we fight, and whose crown by which we conquer, because we are members of his body, provided that we put to death our members on earth, so that they may become arms of righteousness. Girded with them, let us offer to Christ, to his angels, and to ourselves a joyful spectacle from our contest, and, flying out of the hunters’ snare, let us sing with chattering thanksgiving: ‘Our soul has been rescued like a sparrow from the snare of the hunters; the snare is broken, and we are set free,’ because our help is in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. ‘For there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.’ Triumphing in this name, let us confess to the Lord his mercies and glory in his praise, not in our own. For, as the prophet says, if there is any good in us, it is from him, and if anything best, it is his: ‘for he made us, and not we ourselves.’ And therefore he says, ‘What do you have, O man, that you have not received? But if you received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it?’ In this he warns that he who glories should glory in the Lord. Hence the distress of seeming to be praised becomes light for us: for we are conscious of no good of our own, so that the praiser might press upon us the shame of those who recognize it; because we know that it is not we ourselves who are proclaimed but the gifts and works of the divine goodness. For if any good is seen or believed to be in us, it belongs to him who alone is good, of whose fullness we have all received, and with which we are sprinkled according to the capacity of our merit or faith. For the dew that is from him is health to us, and we rejoice in his droppings. So this error too, by which you praise us, will be harmless to you. Moreover, so devout a faith heaps up a rich reward for you, because, in thinking that we, wicked in our own mind and crooked from the perverse generation of this world, have been made good, you believe the Lord almighty, who is able to justify the ungodly, to make the dead alive, to lighten darkness, and to make scarlet white.

Therefore pray earnestly that we may receive a heart worthy of so great a work or gift of God, and that we who have received contempt for our inheritance may receive also contempt for ourselves. For we walk a narrow way, and we go uncertainly as on a stretched rope; and unless we fix our steps with a sure balance of mind, so as not to turn aside to right or left, the enemy will easily push us into a fall on this side or that. Therefore Wisdom sings to us in Solomon: ‘Do not turn aside from the Lord, lest you fall.’ For the Lord Jesus himself is the way, the truth, and the life, who says, ‘Keep your heart with all watchfulness,’ because through the very ways of the virtues we can slip into vices, and unless, as I said, we balance the movements of the mind, guiding them in a sure stance, we shall take pride from humility itself, and the appearance of godliness will vanish if puffing up creeps in through the praise of poverty. And what will it profit us to have been without riches if we remain rich in vices? So we beg you not to flatter us on the strength of that word of the Lord, as if we had done it: ‘Sell what you possess,’ because what remains is greater: ‘and come, follow me.’ It is easy to see how great a thing it is to follow Christ, that man should imitate God. But you know this too: ‘God spoke once; I heard these two things.’ For this saying too, like almost all of divine Scripture, opens in two directions: ‘Go and sell all that you have.’ For we possess not only money and estates, outward resources, but also the inward wealth of our mind, which is truly our substance. To sell this, that is, to alienate it from ourselves, is a victory as much greater as it is harder to separate what is inborn than what is added, and to tear away what is fixed within than to throw off what is fastened on outwardly. For he changes and overcomes himself who renounces his own ways and disowns himself, so as to fulfill that strongest word of God: ‘He who loses his soul for my sake will find it.’ Remembering these words of the Lord, let us pour out our soul to him, and he will nourish us and cherish our life hidden in him, and will reveal himself with glory, provided we pray for this same soul in the fitting time, that is, now in this age. ‘For in hell who will confess to him?’ Here we die to sins, so that we may not live there in punishments. For the death which is called the second is nothing other than a life of punishments.

Let us beware, then, of the lower hell, where Gehenna will torture body and soul eternally, while the sinner’s soul dies, its feeling remaining and the matter of corruption enduring. For the dead too, as it is written, will rise incorrupt, not in the immortality of glory but of punishment. ‘Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle, who has broken the iron bars and humbled the oppressor, so as to lift me up from the gates of death, that I may tell his wonders in the gates of the daughter of Zion. May the Lord bless you from Zion, and may you see the good things of Jerusalem and pray for us all the days of your life, so that our portion may be in common in the land of the living.

On the back of your letter we read the list of letters which you said were mine. Truly I had so nearly forgotten almost all of them that I would not have recognized them as mine had I not trusted your letter. So I received a greater proof of your love, for I saw that I am better known to you than to myself. I rejoice that I have received the hymns I longed for; by this gift, holy brother, you have warned me to prepare my little torch carefully while there is time, lest I be shut out with the foolish, if I should fail to go out to meet him with the wise. Pray that our souls may be both virgin and fruitful: virgin without barrenness, fruitful without corruption. For by this mystery both in the law ‘cursed is he who has not given seed in Israel,’ and in the gospel there is the wise virgin who, with oil procured with watchful care, awaits the bridegroom’s coming with her torch anointed, and, as he now comes, lights a flame not to be quenched with rich fuel.

So let our mind be fertile to God and bring forth the fruits of life in good works. Let our spirit be a virgin, so that it may be corrupted by no allurement of the world and remain whole from every stain of vices. For those foolish virgins seem to me to be souls that are barren in virtues, and the wise ones souls that are uncorrupted by vices. Indeed, five are set in each kind of virgins, so that it may be understood that they refer to the wholeness or corruption of man’s senses; for we are all endowed with five senses, through which we receive either life or death. Of these the prophet says in grief: ‘Death has entered through your windows.’ Let us block them with the fear of God, so as to be deaf and blind to all the forms and voices of this world; let us hedge our ears with thorns against the wicked tongue and alluring melodies; let us turn away our eyes, lest they see vanity; let us block our nostrils too, lest we draw the smell of death from the corruption of this world; let not the disease of the gullet creep in through the enticing taste and enervate the strength of continence with the foods of lusts; and let us not flatter the body with soft clothing, lest limbs wrongly caressed by delicate coverings shake us with fleshly touches and unlawful embraces. So it will come about that, in each of us, with all the senses chaste and imbued with the oil of faithful teaching, all five virgins remain wise and, with oil stored in their vessels, rest in secure expectation, ready to meet him with torches soon prepared, when they are awakened by the first stir of the bridegroom’s coming. For among such great peoples of the church, in which are seen not only virgins, whose number is countless, but also married women and widows of different ways and fruits, I do not think that only five foolish virgins and as many wise are set out for any other reason than this: that each kind of person is found diversely in the whole people, but the number, for the reason given above, is contained individually in all, so that each one has in himself either foolish or prudent virgins according to the quality of his senses, in which virginity is wise when they are provident, foolish when they are slack. For this is why the foolish, like the wise, are alike called virgins, despite their great unlikeness: because the virgins according to the flesh have an unfruitful barrenness, and those according to the spirit a fruitful chastity. Therefore neither have the wise a barren virginity, because they are wise, nor the foolish a fruitful one, because they are foolish. Their type seems to me to be the wisdom of this world, which is foolishness with God, and the wisdom of the flesh, which is truly a foolish virgin, because it is not joined and subject to the law, and to the law and wisdom of God; and its lamp is easily put out, because it has not the oil of truth, being empty of the Holy Spirit, by which the inner eye is enlightened and the head of the soul, which is our faith, is anointed, whose oil is the infusion of heavenly teaching.

So let not the oil of the sinner anoint our head, nor dying flies destroy the oil of sweetness, so that Christ may always be our head, and oil may never fail on our head, because his name is ointment poured out. And then, perfect in all our senses, we shall be wise virgins, if the wisdom of God remains in us, through whom virginity was made fruitful even in the body. I weary you too much and presume much on the patience of love. But I must listen to Solomon, speaking in the wisdom of God, so as to set my foot of words more sparingly, even with those who love me most, lest when they have had their fill they hate me. Yet I know that, as no one can hate his own bowels, so you cannot hate our lowliness, which you have mingled with your bowels. May the peace and love and grace and humility of Christ, the Lord most high, abound in you, blessed brothers, deservedly venerable and most beloved.