Letters 57–65

The evil-working powers in the world serve the needs of providence, for they punish those who deserve punishment; yet they are hated by God and to be shunned. 'For I will raise up', he says, 'a nation against you', from which you will suffer such and such things. And at the end he says that he will go out against those very ones whom he sends against them, because, when they took you over, they showed no pity and did not treat you humanely. I have not learned the sacred syllables by heart; but I affirm that there is a place in the books where God is represented as saying this. And he did not say it so and then not do it. The Babylonian king razed the city of Jerusalem and enslaved the nation; and this same king before long went mad, and it came about by the justice of God that his city was so desolated that one would not believe there had ever been a city on the spot. Must one dare to ask God: 'Why do you raise up men as avengers against those who have sinned against you, and then, when they have served the divine will and become executioners of those against whom they were sent, and ought to receive thanks for their service, it is then above all that they are punished?' But has he moved us to the answer to what we ask him? Since the divine law was damaged here below, evils passed over to mankind; and evil-working things are evil in a special degree, for by the abundance of their nature they also become active. Since, then, evils have once come into being, it is the work of the divine wisdom and virtue and power not only to do good (for that is, so to speak, God's nature, as heating is the nature of fire and giving light the nature of light), but also, and above all, by means of evils devised by some, to bring about a good and useful end, and to make profitable use of what seem worthless things. For it belongs to a resourceful wisdom to use even evils when needed. So whenever he needs punishers, he uses now the spirits that lead the swarms of locusts, now those whose works are plagues, now a nation of barbarians, now a wicked ruler, and, in a word, natures fit for doing public harm. Yet he hates them all the same, because they have become fit for this. For God did not make instruments of calamity; but he readily used those who had ranked themselves for this. And that you have become useful for this purpose is the very thing that cuts you off completely from God. So also, of vessels, one is dishonourable and another honourable, both in fact and in reputation; for each is judged by the use it serves. A table, … I will give an account of my own affairs; for with a view to what follows it is well that you should hear these things from me.

From childhood it seemed to me a divine good to have leisure and ease of life: that which someone said belongs to divine natures, namely to nourish the mind and commend to God the one who has it and enjoys its fruit. Of the business that belongs to boys I had the smallest share, and of that of lads and young men. And when I came to manhood I differed in no way from a child in freedom from affairs; but, as if passing my life at a solemn festival, I kept the disposition of my soul gracious and calm through every age. Yet God did not for this reason make me useless to men; often private persons and cities alike made use of us when needed. For God granted me both to be able to do the greatest things and to will the finest. None of these things dragged me away from philosophy or cut short my happy leisure. For to act with jostling and toil and difficulty is what consumes time and drowns the soul in the cares of business; but when one has only to speak, and persuasion follows, and the word is most effective with the hearers, why spare words, so that someone may be freed from misfortune? Man is a precious creature; precious indeed, if Christ was crucified for him. And for me, to persuade men up to the present year was perhaps a divine lot; perhaps it was because I touched affairs only barely that I succeeded. For now the matter seems to have been put to the test. Along with many things that were clearly God's, I attributed this too to him, and I lived with good hopes, as in a sacred precinct, the world, a consecrated animal let loose to roam, dividing my life between prayer, books, and hunting; for, that soul and body may be healthy, one must toil for the one and ask God for the other. In such ease I drew out the years until the choice for the priesthood, before which I proved the greatest coward of all men who ever lived. I call to witness the God who is over all … to be grieved. At once there was passion in my soul, a medley of cares, an image-making of affairs, and God far away. If what is happening through Andronicus is an assault of demons, they have done all they wished. I no longer felt the sweetness I used to have in prayer; there was the outward form of prayer, but I was carried around everywhere among affairs, divided by anger and grief and every passion. Yet it is through the mind that we are with God; the tongue serves men in what concerns men. If, then, I have suffered inattention in prayer, the proof is at hand. Yet not in this alone have I reaped evil from the change of life; having found … I saw dead the one before whom I prayed to die. With such bitter landing-feasts did the city entertain us! As … human affairs go now up, now down, and a stream comes bringing many things at once, now auspicious, now inauspicious. But when it befell me to lose the dearest of my children, I would have done some dreadful thing to myself, so completely was I overcome by the passion. In other respects I am manly (I speak among those who know), and in most things a servant of reason; but I am so much weaker than familiarity that here the unreasoning prevails over reason. So I did not master the present passion even by the doctrines of philosophy. But Andronicus turned me round the other way, and made me keep my mind on the common misfortunes; and misfortunes have become consolations for misfortunes, drawing me toward themselves and knocking out passion by passion. Then, with the bitter perception of the present, comes the memory of past goods: from what to what we have come. And I live wretchedly, deprived of everything at once. The greatest of the evils, which also makes my life hopeless, is this: I was not accustomed to fail in my supplications to God, and now for the first time I know that I have prayed in vain. Then I see my house faring badly, and I am compelled to live in a fatherland in misfortune. Exposed to all, so that they may weep on me and each lament his own lot, I pity them with a useless pity. And there is shame besides: a fellow citizen, a man who had met with misfortunes and had public gold stolen from him, he [Andronicus] pressed for more than ten thousand staters, and, granting no delay, resolved to kill him … the people, through his vain attempt. A man of great mind would have done this even before experience; but we waited until the facts made you share our vote that to join political virtue to the priesthood is to spin together things that cannot be spun together.

The ancient time brought forth the same men as priests and judges; for both the Egyptians and the Hebrew nation were ruled for a long time by priests. Then, since, it seems to me, the divine work was being done in a human way, God separated the two lives: the one was declared sacred, the other a ruler's. For he turned the one kind of men toward matter, and ranked the others with himself; the one are ranked to be in affairs, we to be in prayers. And God requires what is good from both. Why, then, do you bring things back? Why do you try to join what God has separated? You who think fit not to administer us but to misadminister us. What could be more wretched than that? Do you need a protector? Go to the one who has charge of the laws of the state. Do you need something of God? Go to the priest of the city. Not that it is wholly possible to succeed here, but that I will be eager. If someone allows me to be at rest, perhaps I shall be able some day; for in one and the same act one turns away from matter and turns toward God. Contemplation is the end of a priesthood that does not belie its name; and contemplation and action do not consent to be together. For impulse is the movement of actions, and no impulse is free of passion; but the soul that is to become a receptacle of God must be empty of passions. 'For it is not lawful', he says, 'for the impure to touch the pure.' 'Be still, and know that I am God.' He who serves as priest together with philosophy needs leisure. I do not condemn those bishops who are engaged in affairs; but, knowing myself barely equal to one of the two, I admire those who are able for both. I have not the power to serve two masters. If there are some who are not harmed even by such condescension, they could both serve as priests and preside over cities. A ray of the sun, even if it touches mud, remains clean and undefiled; but if I suffered the same, I should need springs and the sea. And if it were possible for an angel, living as a man among men for more than thirty years, to take on nothing of the evils of matter by attachment to them, why should the Son of God have had to come down? But it is a superabundance of power to consort with lower things and remain in one's own nature, and to be affected in no way. This is a hymn to God; for a man it becomes a plea for excuse, as he reverently guards against the weakness of his own nature. On these terms I will be with you. … I shall not, however, deprive myself of judging occasions, so that whenever I can descend with profit, I do not refuse to descend, that is, to do some great good by an occasional turning to affairs. So God too governs. But to be stuck fast is the dreadful thing, which neither God's nature tolerates nor anyone who directs himself toward God. If I have been careful of money or possessions, if you know me as one who receives accounts of daily or yearly expenses, and then I am sparing of my time in your affairs, I am an impostor, and I ask no pardon. But if, having neglected my own household first, I ranked my life with the activity of the mind, what is strange if I ask the same of you? But since we do not please you in this, there being others who can do well in both at the same time, you may deliberate about what is better for the city and the churches and for me. I will not abjure the priesthood; may Andronicus never have so much power! But just as I did not become a public philosopher, nor set myself to playing to the theatre, nor opened a school, and nonetheless was and may be a philosopher, so I do not wish to be a public priest either. Not everyone can do everything. Having been alone with myself, and through the mind with God, and coming down from contemplation, I can hold conversations not without use with one or two; and not with men of the herd, but with any who, by the lot of nature or the good fortune of upbringing, have come to admire mind above body. And touching affairs at long intervals, with my own ease, I could be … useful at the right time. But buried under them, … I forget myself and do harm to the affairs. For it is not possible to do anything well while hating it. He who does not do what he has resolved with his whole mind comes dispirited to the action over which he must preside. But one who is a stranger to leisure, and could make no use of leisure, but is all that a man most useful to the people is, a soul most capacious, sufficient for the cares of all; one who is so formed and so wills: such a man would even be grateful for the circumstances that draw him to themselves. For they grant occasions to his nature, and the greatest provision for success is love of the work. Such a most profitable man, then, must be chosen by all of you, and chosen by us of our own accord, who alone are barely saved. What holds you back? Because it has not yet been done, is it right that it should not be done now? Time has found out and corrected many needed things. Not everything happens according to precedent; each thing that has happened had a beginning, and before it happened it had not yet happened. It is more right that the useful should be preferred to custom. Let us give a beginning to a better custom. He must, then, be chosen in place of us, or along with us, but in any case chosen, … the man. Whoever he is, he will certainly appear far wiser than I in political matters, and will be able to deal with these wretched little men on your behalf and to handle them. So if it does not yet seem good, let us put this off until another time; for it will be possible to deliberate about it alone and with one another. But now … since the council has gone after the madness of Andronicus, …

Andronicus of Berenice, who was born, raised, and grew up to the evil fate of the Pentapolis, and who bought the governorship of the land that bore him: let no one consider him a Christian or call him one, but as one accursed by God let him be driven out of every church, with all his household. Not because he has become the last plague of the Pentapolis, after earthquake, after locust, after famine, after fire, after war, coming upon what they had left and going over it thoroughly; the first to bring into the country strange kinds and shapes of instruments of torture (and let it be said that he alone has used them): the finger-press, the ear-trap, the lip-twister; so that those who escaped the experience and the sight of them by dying first in the war were called blessed by those who survived to a wretched fate. No, but because he was the first and only one among us to blaspheme Christ in deed and in word: in deed, from the time when he nailed his own decrees to the door of the church, shutting off from those whom he treated unlawfully the right of supplication at the inviolable table, and threatening the priests of God with things from which even Phalaris of Acragas, or Chephren the Egyptian, or Sennacherib the Babylonian would have shrunk, he who sent to Jerusalem the men who reproached Hezekiah and God. That day, I say, bore a second cross of God; for that insulting placard hung from the sacred door to the reproach of Christ. And the sun looked on these things, and men read them; not when Tiberius Claudius governed the state, under whom Pilate was sent to govern the Jews, but while the pious house of Theodosius holds the sceptres of the Romans, from whom Andronicus secretly courted office for himself, with the mind of a Pilate. It was a laughingstock to those of other faiths who passed by …

The man to whom I have given this letter, though a philosopher in soul, is a rhetor by profession. As long as Anysius was here and the Pentapolis still existed, he practised it among us. But since the time after you, having sold us to the enemy, has made peace from lawsuits, he has decided to sail to another market, where the tongue is for sale, the rhetors' merchandise, and makes the rhetor known. Win for him the friendship of a man who has been appointed to govern provinces; and, yes, by the god of friendship, mine and yours, the man of whom you ask the favour will thank you for it when he comes back after making trial of him.

If I indict you for wronged friendship, with God and godly men as judges, you will be convicted by every vote. For what sort of appendage did I become to your hostility toward my brother? Since he, not with my approval, was acting against Sabbatius on behalf of the late Phaus, and you could not persuade him by talking to him, you turned your anger on me and did me all the harm you could; and I, since it was then permitted, accepted the challenge to quarrel. But now it is neither permitted, nor do I wish it. For my age, happily, is withering my love of contention, and sacred laws, they say, forbid it. At the same time I remember our common upbringing and education, and the time we spent at Cyrene, which one ought to think stronger than Sabbatius's lawsuits. Begin, then, a good thing, friendship; and receive a greeting from me, who count as loss the time I have kept silent. How stung do you think I was even then? But I held out as well as I could. Such an evil is contentiousness.

Asterius the shorthand-writer saw a large Egyptian rug, not one to be laid under bedding but one that is itself the whole bedding, and asked us for it at the time when I had to sleep in front of the great government offices. I promised to leave it to him as a gift when I departed; for, compared with the Thracian snow, it was not possible to give such things away. Now, then, I send it, since I did not leave it then; and you will give it to him, together with the apology, of which you yourself will be witness, if you recall the times, and before that, when I was withdrawing from the city, God shook the earth many times a day; and …

Praise is the wage of virtue, and we bring it to the most illustrious Marcellinus now that he has laid down his office, now that every suspicion of flattery is at rest. He took over cities that were at war: from without, through the multitude and madness of the barbarians; from within, through the disorder of the soldiers and the greed of their officers. Like a god appearing, he made the enemy more sober by one battle, and his subjects by daily care, and obtained for the cities peace from both terrors. He disdained gains which custom has made seem lawful. He did not plot against wealth; he did not insult poverty; he was devout toward God, just toward the citizens, humane toward the needy. Therefore a priest who is a philosopher is not ashamed to praise him, with whom no one ever found testimony corrupted by favour. We would have wished the court to be present among you, and that jointly and singly each of the people of Ptolemais might have made him a return, the possible, if not the just one, since word falls far short of deed. I would certainly have spoken then for the community. But since he happens to be abroad, we set down our testimony in a letter, not being pressed to it, but …

One must use the friendships of the powerful, not abuse them.

Do not ask for great things, so that one of two things may not happen: either you cause pain by obtaining them, or you suffer pain by not obtaining them.

I have sent both Dionysiuses, so that of the books you may have the one as received and the other as received back.