Letters 50.1–51.4

Of the few things that have come to my mind now, as the bearer of my letter is already running to the ship and I am hurrying in his haste, I will set out some, so that you may not write back to me without a bonus. If perhaps they are clear and seem obscure to me, let none of the prudent sons of ours who may perhaps stand around you at the hour of reading this little piece laugh at my foolishness; rather let them favor me with the goodwill of brotherly love by instructing me, so that I may become a sharer with those who see and, with minds enlightened by your teaching, consider wonderful things from the law of the Lord.

Tell me, then, blessed teacher of Israel, what is meant by what he says in the fifteenth psalm: ‘To the saints who are in his land he has made wonderful all his wishes among them. For their infirmities have been multiplied; afterward they made haste.’ Whom does he call saints, who are saints on earth? Are they those Jews who, children of Abraham’s flesh and not children of the promise, are excluded from the seed that was called in Isaac? Are they called saints on earth because they are holy by fleshly descent, but earthly in life and understanding, minding earthly things and growing old in fleshly observance in the oldness of the letter, not being reborn into a new creation, because they did not receive him through whom the old things have passed away and become new? For perhaps he calls them saints in this psalm in the same way as he calls them righteous in the gospel, where he says, ‘I came not to call the righteous but sinners,’ that is, those righteous ones who glory in the holiness of their descent and the letter of the law, to whom it is said, ‘Do not boast of Abraham as your father, for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.’ Their type is set forth in that Pharisee who, recounting his righteous deeds as though the Lord did not know them, proclaimed them in the temple, not praying to be heard but demanding, as a debt of merit, for works good indeed but unwelcome to God, because what righteousness had built pride destroyed; and he did not do this in silence but cried it aloud, so that it appeared that he was not speaking to the divine ears, since he wished to be heard by men too. And so he did not please God, because he pleased himself, since the Lord has scattered the bones of men who please themselves. ‘They were confounded,’ it says, ‘because he despised them,’ he who does not despise a humble and contrite heart.

Indeed, in the very parable of the gospel in which the figures of the Pharisee and the tax collector are compared, the Lord himself shows plainly what he accepts in a man and what he rejects, as it is written, ‘God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ Therefore he declares that the tax collector went away from the temple justified rather than the Pharisee, the one for confessing his sins, the other for reckoning up his righteous deeds. Rightly that self-praiser went away rejected from the face of God, who, though he displayed knowledge of the law by his very name, had forgotten the Lord saying in the prophet, ‘On whom shall I dwell but on the humble and quiet and him who trembles at my words?’ But the other, accusing himself in a contrite heart, is accepted and obtains pardon for his confessed sins because of the grace of humility, while that holy Pharisee, holy in the way the Jews are holy, carries back a burden of sins for boasting of holiness. Surely those Jews are a figure of him of whom the apostle says that, ‘seeking to establish their own righteousness,’ which is from the law, ‘they have not submitted to the righteousness of God,’ which is from faith, which was reckoned to Abraham our father as righteousness, not from works, because he believed God according to God’s omnipotence. Before God he is truly righteous who lives by faith, and he is a saint not on earth but in heaven, because he walks not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, whose citizenship is in heaven, glorying not in circumcision of the flesh but in circumcision of the heart, which is done not in the letter but in the Spirit, invisibly, whence his praise is not from men but from God.

Then, as to what he adds in the same verse, ‘He has made his wishes wonderful among them,’ I believe he says it because he first lit for them the lamp of the law and gave them the precepts of living. For ‘he made known,’ it says, ‘his ways to Moses, his wishes to the children of Israel.’ Then he worked among them the very mystery of his love, being born in the flesh of a virgin, God in their nation, and made man from their flesh of the seed of David; then the mighty works of healing which he performed in them and before them, by which he was not only not believed but even blasphemed by them, when they said, ‘If this man were from God, he would not heal on the sabbath,’ and, ‘He casts out demons only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons.’ Because of this mind, blinded by hardened impiety, their infirmities and their darkness were multiplied.

But what is it that he says, ‘Afterward they made haste’? Was it to repentance, like those in the Acts of the Apostles who, pricked by the preaching of blessed Peter, believed in him whom they had crucified and, hastening to be cleansed from so great a sin, ran to the gift of grace? Or rather, since the powers of the soul are strengthened by faith in and love of God, were the infirmities of the soul multiplied for those wicked men, empty of both, occupied by the deadly sicknesses of impious crimes? For Christ is the light and life of believers, and healing is under his wings. So it is no wonder if both the darkness and the infirmities of those who did not receive the life and the light, and would not remain under his wings, were multiplied to their destruction. As he himself, weeping, declares in his gospel, he often wished to gather them under his wings, as a hen gathers her chicks, and they would not. With their infirmities multiplied, then, to what did they make haste? Perhaps to crying out for the Lord’s cross and wresting it from an unwilling Pilate with wicked voices, so as to fill up the measure of their fathers, that they might kill the Lord of the prophets, whose fathers killed the prophets themselves, by whom it was announced that he would come as the Savior of the world: ‘afterward they made haste.’ ‘For their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and unhappiness are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known,’ that is, Christ, who says, ‘I am the way.’

In the following psalm I would like this explained to me, what it means: ‘From your hidden things their belly has been filled. They were filled with pork,’ or, as I hear is written in some psalters, ‘they were filled with sons, and they left what remained to their little ones.’

Again, in another psalm I am accustomed to wonder, understanding the Son to be speaking to the Father, in the fifty-eighth psalm, where, about the hostile Jews, of whom he had said above, ‘Behold, they will speak with their mouth, and a sword is on their lips,’ he says a little further on: ‘Do not kill them, lest they ever forget your law. Scatter them by your power and destroy them, O Lord.’ This we see fulfilled in them to this day. For they have been destroyed from their old glory, living without temple, without sacrifices, and without prophets, in dispersion among all nations. But why do we wonder that he was already praying through the prophet that they should not be killed, for whom he prayed also at the very time of the passion, as they were leading him to the cross, saying, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do’? But what he added, ‘lest they ever forget your law,’ as if their life were necessary for this, even without faith in the gospel, I confess is obscure to me. For what does it profit them for salvation, which is sought by faith alone, to be occupied in the memory and meditation of the law? Unless perhaps for the honor of the law itself or of Abraham’s race, so that even in the earthly part of his fleshly seed, which seems to be counted like the sand of the sea, the letter of the ancient law may endure; unless perhaps some, by reading the law, may be enlightened to faith in Christ, who is the end of both the law and the prophets and shines out, prefigured and prophesied, in all their books; or because from those wicked men there is to come a generation of the elect, who, chosen from each tribe, will be sealed by twelve thousands, to whom the very Revelation of blessed John bears this witness, from the voice of the angel announcing it, that they will cling more familiarly to the retinue of the eternal King, wholly spotless and without experience of human union, of whom he specially says, ‘They follow the Lamb wherever he goes, because they have not defiled themselves with women; for they are virgins.’

In the sixty-seventh, besides other things, this is most obscure to me, where it says, ‘But God will shatter the heads of his enemies, the crown of the hair of those who walk about in their sins’: what it means to walk about the crown of the hair in sins. For he did not say ‘the crown of the head,’ but ‘the crown of the hair,’ which has no feeling. Does he want to show a man filled with sins? It is written, ‘Every heart in pain, from the feet to the head.’ And a little further on, what he says: ‘the tongue of your dogs from the enemies by himself’: by whom himself? And can the Gentiles be called God’s dogs, whom he himself in the gospel calls dogs? Or perhaps he calls those God’s dogs who can be reckoned such, if any who bear the Christian name live like Gentiles, whose portion is set with the unbelievers, because they deny in deeds the God whom they worship in words?

So much for the psalms for now; now I will set out something from the apostle too. He says to the Ephesians what he had said in another letter about the grades or orders of God’s arrangements, the Holy Spirit working the divisions of graces: ‘And he gave some apostles, some prophets, others evangelists, others pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints,’ and the rest. I would like you to distinguish for me in this diversity of names what is the property of offices or graces for each name: what is proper to apostles, what to prophets, what to evangelists, what to pastors, and what to teachers; for in all these different names I see that a similar and almost one office of teaching was carried on. These prophets, whom he placed after the apostles, I do not think are those who in the order of time were before the apostles, but those to whom, already under the apostles, there was given by grace either the interpretation of the Scriptures and insight into minds, or the foretelling of the time to come, as Agabus discerned, who both foretold the coming famine and announced in word, and showed by the sign of his belt, what blessed Paul was to suffer in Jerusalem. I wish to know what difference there is especially between pastors and teachers, since both names are usually given to those set over the church.

Likewise, what he says to Timothy: ‘I exhort, therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men’: I ask you to explain to me what distinction there is in this diversity of words, since all the things he said should be done seem to me to belong to the office of prayer.

Likewise I ask and beg you to expound to me what he says to the Romans. For I confess that I am quite blind about this saying of the apostle concerning the Jews, where he says, ‘As regards the gospel they are enemies for your sake; but as regards election they are most beloved for the sake of the fathers.’ How are they enemies for the sake of us who have believed from the Gentiles, as though the Gentiles could not have believed unless the Jews had not believed? Or was the one God, Creator of all, who wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, not capable of acquiring both, unless he possessed the one in place of the other? Then, most beloved for the sake of the fathers: how or why most beloved, if they do not believe and persist in being enemies to God? ‘Did I not,’ it says, ‘hate those who hated you, O God, and waste away over your enemies? I hated them with a perfect hatred.’ Surely, I think, the Father’s voice says this to the Son through the prophet in the same psalm, where he had said above about the part that believes, ‘But to me your friends, O God, are exceedingly honored; their rule is exceedingly strengthened.’ And what does it profit them for salvation, which is obtained only through faith and the grace of Christ, if they are most beloved by God for the sake of the fathers? For what good are they loved who must be condemned for this reason, that, through their unbelief differing from the faith of their parents, the prophets and patriarchs, they are enemies of the gospel of Christ? If, then, they are most beloved by God, how will they perish? And if they do not believe, how will they not perish? If they are loved for the sake of the fathers without merit of their own, how will they not be saved for the sake of the fathers too? But ‘even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in their midst, they would not save their wicked sons; they alone would be saved.’

Dig up for me from the deep yet another more obscure thing and bring it out into the shallows. In the letter to the Colossians I cannot at all make out what he says: ‘Let no one lead you astray, wishing in humility and the religion of angels, walking in what he has not seen, vainly puffed up by the sense of his flesh, and not holding the head.’ Of what angels does he speak? If of hostile and evil ones, what is their religion or what their humility, and who is the teacher of this seduction, who, under the pretext of some angelic religion or other, teaches as if seen and discovered what he has not seen? Without doubt they are heretics, who both follow and bring forth doctrines of demons, inventions conceived from their spirit, feigning as seen phantasms that they have not seen and sowing them by pestilent arguments in ill-believing hearts. These are the ones who do not hold the head, that is, Christ, the fountain of truth, whatever opposes whose teaching is madness. And these are the blind leaders of the blind, of whom I think it is said, ‘They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug for themselves broken cisterns that cannot hold water.’

Then in the following chapter he added: ‘Do not touch, nor taste, nor handle, things that all perish by their very use, according to the precepts and doctrines of men, having indeed a show of wisdom in superstition and humility, for not sparing the body, not in any honor, to the satisfying of the flesh.’ What are these things, in which the teacher of truth testifies that there is a show of wisdom, and yet denies that the truth of religion is in them? Is he perhaps speaking of such men as he speaks of to Timothy: ‘having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power’? So I ask you especially to unravel for me, word by word, these two chapters from the letter to the Colossians, because he has mixed things to be abhorred with things to be praised. For what is so praiseworthy as a show of wisdom? And what so abhorrent as the superstition of error? Humility too, both pleasing to God and most praiseworthy in true religion, is attributed, along with the show of wisdom, to those very men about whose doctrines and acts we are told: ‘Do not touch nor taste things that perish,’ because they are not from God, and ‘everything that is not from faith is sin.’ And God has scattered the counsels of the wise, who are foolish to God through the prudence of the flesh, which cannot be subject to the law of God. For he knows the thoughts of men, that they are vain. I ask what kind of humility and what kind of show of wisdom he says is in a superstition that comes from the doctrines of men. And what he says, ‘for not sparing the body, not in any honor, to the satisfying of the flesh,’ I understand very little, because in the same sentence there seems to me to be a great difference. For I think he says ‘for not sparing the body’ of some feigned or useless abstinence, such as is commonly affected by heretics; and that he added ‘not in any honor’ because those who practice the appearance of a holy work not in the faith of truth do it for no honor of glory or fruit, which they bring about to the great reproof of their perverse error, transforming themselves into ministers of righteousness. But what he added, ‘to the satisfying of the flesh,’ seems to me contrary to what he says, ‘for not sparing the body.’ For he seems to me not to spare the body who subdues the flesh by fasting, as the apostle says, ‘I bruise my body and bring it into subjection,’ from which work satisfying the flesh is foreign. Unless perhaps he called even that very care for satisfying the flesh, which is especially shameful in those who make a show of religious observance, a not sparing of the body, according to that precept of decency which he gives elsewhere, that each should know how to possess his own vessel in honor, so as to present his body as a living sacrifice pleasing to God, not to the satisfying of the flesh, because the bloating of the body kills the sobriety of the soul and is an enemy to chastity.

It remains for me to put something to your blessedness about passages of the Gospels too; not, indeed, as many as usually come to mind when one reads at leisure (for I had no leisure now to search for things scattered through the books or to stir up my memory in recalling them), but I will ask about at least the few things that come to mind at the hour of this dictation. As for the letter on the form of the resurrection, not long but full of instruction in the faith, with which you replied to my second inquiry while I was spending the winter at Carthage, if you have it copied on sheets, I ask you to send it, or at least to compose it again for me, which is easy for you. For even if the writing does not survive, because perhaps a short letter, as an improvised one, was disdained to be kept among your books, renew it for me with the same sense, brought out of the treasury of your heart, and send it to me among the other replies which you will give me, as I hope, Christ granting a supply of days to me and to you, so that I may receive them, by which your labor may bear fruit in me, according to these chapters of the Scriptures about which I have asked you, who see as through God, so that I may hear what God speaks to me in you or from you.

But I ask you to make this clear to me: how, or for what reason, the Lord after the resurrection was both not recognized and recognized, by the women who first came to the tomb, then afterward by those two on the road, and then by his disciples. For he rose in the same body in which he had suffered. And how was the form of the same body not the same as it had been? Or, if it was the same, how was it not recognized by those who had known it? I believe it belongs to a mystery that he who had not been recognized by those walking on the road was revealed in the breaking of bread. Yet I want to hold this very point by your understanding, not by mine.

And what he says to Mary, ‘Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father’: if she was not allowed to touch him standing close by, how would she touch him when he had ascended to the Father, unless perhaps by the progress of faith and the ascent of the mind, by which God becomes far from or near to a man? And she had doubted about Christ, whom she thought to be the gardener. Perhaps that is why she deserved to hear, ‘Do not touch me.’ For she was judged unworthy to touch Christ with her hand, whom she had not yet grasped by faith nor understood to be God, since she had thought him the gardener, of whom a little before she had heard from the angels, ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?’ So: ‘Do not touch me, because for you I have not yet ascended to the Father, you to whom I still seem only a man; afterward you will touch me, when you have ascended by believing to know me.’

Explain to me too what you think about those words of most blessed Simeon, so that I may follow your understanding, which he spoke when, having come into the temple by the Spirit’s leading to see Christ according to God’s oracle, and having taken the infant Lord in his arms and blessed him, he said to Mary: ‘Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that will be spoken against; and a sword will pierce through your own soul too, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.’ Is he to be believed to have prophesied this of a passion of Mary, which is nowhere written? Or rather of her maternal affection, by which afterward, at the time of the passion, standing by the cross on which was fixed what she herself had borne, she was pierced with the pain of a mother’s heart, and the sword of the cross, which pierced her son according to the flesh while she looked on, pierced her soul too? For I see that in the psalms too it is said thus of Joseph, ‘They humbled his feet in fetters; iron passed through his soul,’ just as Simeon said in the gospel, ‘and a sword will pierce through your own soul.’ He does not say ‘flesh’ but ‘soul,’ in which the affection of love is contained and the sting of pain works like a sword, when either some injury is done to one’s flesh, as with Joseph, who suffered the passions not of death but of injuries, sold as a slave, bound as a criminal, and put in prison; or when one is tormented by the sorrow or pain of inward affection, as in Mary, whom her mother’s mind had brought to the Lord’s cross, in whom she then thought only of the son of her own body, so that, when she saw him dead, she mourned with human weakness and gathered him for burial, presuming nothing for herself about his resurrection, since the penalty of the passion set before her eyes blinded the faith of the wonder that was to follow. And yet the Lord consoled her as she stood by his cross, not trembling with the weakness of a dying man, but, having in his power the very death by which he was willingly passing away, he admonishes her from the cross with the full power of one living and the constancy of one about to rise, saying of the blessed apostle John, ‘Woman, behold your son,’ and likewise to him standing there, ‘Behold your mother.’ Now, passing over through the death of the cross from human frailty, by which he was born of a woman, into the eternity of God, so as to be in the glory of God the Father, he delegates the rights of human affection to a man, and from his disciples he, the younger, chooses the younger, so as fittingly to assign the virgin mother to the virgin apostle. He teaches two things at once in the same saying: leaving us a pattern of devotion, when he is concerned for his mother, so that he whom he was leaving in body might not leave her in care (yet he was not to leave her in body either, because the one she saw dying she was soon to see alive again); and also signifying under this saying, by the hidden reason of divine counsel, the saving mystery of his devotion, which pertains to the faith of all: that he both delegated his mother to another to be held as a mother and comforted in his place, and in turn handed over to her a new son in place of his own body, or rather, so to speak, begot one for her, by which he showed that apart from himself, who was born of that virgin, she neither had nor has a son, because the Savior would not have been so concerned about her desolation if he had not been her only son.

But let us return to the words of Simeon, at whose close I confess that my understanding grows dim. ‘And a sword,’ he says, ‘or blade will pierce through your soul, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.’ According to the letter this is wholly obscure to me, because we nowhere read that most blessed Mary was killed, so that that holy man should seem to have prophesied a future passion for her by a bodily sword. But as to what he added, ‘that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed’ (for ‘God,’ it says, ‘searches hearts and reins’), and the apostle says of the future judgment that ‘then God will make manifest the hidden things of hearts and the secrets of darkness’; and likewise the apostle, expressing spiritually the heavenly arms with which we should be armed in our inner man, calls the word of God the sword of the Spirit, of which he says to the Hebrews, ‘The word of God is living and effective, and sharper than any two-edged sword, reaching,’ he says, ‘even to the dividing of soul and spirit,’ and the rest you know: what wonder, then, if the fiery force of this word and the sharper edge of the two-edged sword passed through the soul of holy Joseph of old and afterward of blessed Mary? For we do not know that iron passed through the body of either the one or the other. And to make it clearer that the prophet there put ‘iron’ for the sword of the word, he says in the very next verse: ‘The word of the Lord set him on fire.’ For the word of God is both fire and sword, as the Word, God himself, says both of himself: ‘For I have come,’ he says, ‘to cast fire on the earth, and what do I wish but that it be kindled?’ And likewise elsewhere he says, ‘I have not come to bring peace but a sword.’ You see that he designated the one power of his teaching by the different names of fire and sword. Or how would a passion or tribulation inflicted by a sword benefit Mary? So I want to know what it had to do with Mary that the thoughts of many hearts should be revealed, or where it appeared that, from the fact that either a fleshly sword of iron or a spiritual sword in the word of God passed through her soul, the thoughts of many hearts were thereafter revealed. Explain to me, then, especially this close of Simeon’s words, because I do not doubt that it is clear to your holy soul, which by the purity of the inner eye has deserved the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, through whom it can search and see even the deep things of God. May God have mercy on me through your prayers and make his face shine upon me through the lamp of your word, holy lord, most blessed brother of one heart in the Lord Christ, my teacher in the faith of truth and my protector in the bowels of the love of Christ.

Blessed be the Lord our God, who grants a wish to him who longs for it, and always surpasses our wishes and answers our prayers, who has deigned to offer me, when I did not hope for it, an occasion as timely as it is longed for, through the devout young men, my sons and our common fellow servants in the Lord, Gelasius, Augendus, and Tigridius, whom a man praiseworthy and illustrious in Christ, our brother and my fellow presbyter Honoratus, sent from the holy and most chaste number of his community, at the Lord’s inspiration, to cheer my lowliness after the example of your love. For when I anxiously asked them, out of the love due to your merits, about your doings and your welfare (for about your devout and heavenly doings I could not be in doubt), they answered what refreshed my soul: that they had left you, by God’s favor, in good health, attending to the works of your venerable way of life, practicing its pursuits, and seeking heaven with that one heart with which you left earthly things.

For I remembered that my sons, whom you had sent a year ago to visit my lowliness for my sake, had made known to us the place of your dwelling, and also that of the venerable lord Honoratus, saying that you lived in the neighboring islands, separated by a short stretch of sea and rocks, with the related names of Lero and Lerinum. So, when these sons of ours said they had come from the one called Lerinum, I recognized it and easily remembered the island of the related name, in which I already knew that your holiness lived, fleeing from the din of this world. Therefore, knowing that the courtesy of my letter would be welcome to your love, since it is owed by me to you in perpetual gratitude, I gladly embraced this opportunity of spiritual sons to be the bearers of my letter to your oneness of heart, blessed in Christ the Lord; and they, as sons or ministers of obedience, as they have been taught by God or according to God, most readily accepted. Receive, then, in these small words of my littleness the marks of no small love, and keep these writings of mine as pledges, so to speak, of your soul and testimonies of my mind and love toward you.

I hope, by the mercy of Christ the Lord, that you will receive these words of mine in good health, and that, if he grants an opportunity hereafter through such letter-carriers too, you will be prompt to write back. Your affection would doubtless have done this through these sons of mine as well, if you had known of their journey directed to me. For when I asked them about this, since I knew you were neighbors, they said they had sailed from their monastery without your knowledge. Nevertheless, since, as the kingdom of God is not in word but in power, so love too, in whose perfection and fullness the kingdom of God is contained or gained, consists in the treasure of the heart and the power of faith, I desire letters as a familiar grace of your oneness of heart. For the rest, trusting in the most devout affection of your minds, I do not doubt that I cling to your minds even when you are silent. For we have come to know each other and been joined not by human friendship but by divine grace, through the bowels of the love of Christ. And therefore a perpetual concord must remain between our hearts, which has been joined with Christ as its author. For what force or forgetfulness could separate what God has joined?

May the Lord bless you out of Zion with that blessing with which the man who fears the Lord is blessed, perpetual spouses and parents, together with the offspring dedicated with you to God, of your most noble holiness. May you see the good things of Jerusalem and together deserve to dwell in the house of the Lord for length of days, holy children, deservedly venerable, loved by me with inmost love and always to be longed for.