Letters 102.25–103.4

But since he said, “With the measure you measure, it will be measured to you”, and it is clear that the measure in which something is measured is one thing and the thing measured another, it can happen that in the measure in which men measured, say, a peck of wheat, thousands of pecks may be measured to them, so that there is a great difference in the quantity of grain and none in the measure; not to mention the difference of the things themselves, since it can happen not only that in the measure in which someone measured barley, wheat is measured to him, but that in the measure in which he measured grain, gold is measured to him, one peck of grain and very many of gold. So, though both kind and quantity differ beyond comparison of the things themselves, it can still be said most correctly: “In the measure in which he measured, in it it was measured to him.” And why Christ said this is quite clear a little earlier: “Judge not,” he says, “that you be not judged; for with the judgment you judge you will be judged.” If they judge with unjust judgment, will they be judged with unjust judgment? Far from it; for there is no injustice with God. But it was said, “With the judgment you judge you will be judged”, as if it were said, “In the will in which you have done good, in it you will be set free”, or, “In the will in which you have done evil, in it you will be punished”; as, if someone who used his eyes for shameful lust were ordered to be blinded, he would rightly hear: “In the eyes in which you sinned, in them you have deserved punishment.” For each uses the judgment of his mind, good or bad, either to do good or to sin. Hence it is not unjust that he be judged in that in which he judges, that is, that he pay the penalty in the very judgment of his mind, when he suffers the evils that follow a mind that judges badly.

For there are other, manifest torments prepared to come afterwards, they too drawn from the same hinge of the evil will; but in the mind itself, where the desire of the will is the measure of all human deeds, punishment follows guilt at once, often greater in one who does not feel it, by a heavier blindness. Therefore, having said, “With the judgment you judge you will be judged”, he went on to add: “And with the measure you measure, it will be measured to you.” For in his own will the good man will measure good deeds, and in it happiness will be measured to him; and likewise in his own will the bad man will measure evil works, and in it misery will be measured to him; since where each is good, when he wills well, there too he is bad, when he wills badly. And so there too he becomes either happy or miserable, that is, in the very disposition of his will, which is the measure of all deeds and deserts. For we measure right deeds or sins by the qualities of wills, not by lengths of time. Otherwise it would be thought a greater sin to fell a tree than to kill a man; for the one is done over a long time with many blows, the other with one blow in a very short time. Yet if a man were punished with perpetual deportation for so great a sin of so short a time, it would be said that he was treated even more mildly than he deserved, though in temporal duration the length of the punishment can in no way be compared with the brevity of the crime. What contradiction is there, then, if punishments are equally long, or even equally eternal, but some milder and others harsher than others, so that for those whose time is equal the severity is not equal, because the measure of sins too lies not in the extension of times but in the will of the sinners?

For the will itself is punished, whether by punishment of the mind or of the body, so that the will that delights in sins is itself struck in penalties, and so that “he who judges without mercy will be judged without mercy.” In this saying the measure is the same only in this respect: that what he did not grant is not granted to him; and so his being judged will be eternal, though his judging could not be eternal. In the same measure, therefore, eternal punishments are measured back for evil deeds not eternal, so that, because he wished to have eternal enjoyment of sin, he may find eternal severity of vengeance. But the brevity I have set myself in my reply does not allow me to collect all, or at least very many, of the things the holy books contain about sins and the punishments of sins, and to draw from them one sentence without any ambiguity, if indeed I could do so with the strength of my mind, even if I found suitable leisure. Yet I think it has now been sufficiently shown that it is not contrary to the eternity of punishments that they are rendered in the same measure in which sins were committed.

V. On the Son of God according to Solomon. After this question, he who put them forward from Porphyry added this: “Please also instruct me about this: whether Solomon truly said, ‘God has no son.’”

The answer is quick: not only did he not say this, but he even said that God has a son. For in his book Wisdom speaks and says: “Before all the hills he begot me.” And what is Christ but the Wisdom of God? Again, in a certain place of the Proverbs he says: “God taught me wisdom, and I have known the knowledge of the holy. Who has ascended into heaven and descended? Who has gathered the winds in his bosom? Who has turned water into a garment? Who has held the ends of the earth? What is his name, or what is the name of his son?” Of these two things I mentioned last, he referred one to the Father, namely, “what is his name”, because he had said, “God taught me wisdom”; and the other plainly to the Son, when he says, “or what is the name of his son”, because of the other things, which are understood rather of the Son: that is, “Who has ascended into heaven and descended?”, which Paul recalls thus: “He who descended is the same as he who ascended above all the heavens”; “Who has gathered the winds into his bosom?”, that is, the souls of believers into a hidden and secret place, to whom it is said, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God”; “Who has turned water into a garment?”, so that it could be said, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ”; “Who has held the ends of the earth?”, he who said to his disciples, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.”

VI. On the prophet Jonah. The last question proposed was about Jonah, and not as if from Porphyry but as from the mockery of the pagans; for it was put thus: “Then what are we to think,” he says, “of Jonah, who is said to have been three days in the belly of a whale? It is quite implausible (apithanon) and incredible that a man swallowed with his clothes should have been inside a fish. Or, if it is a figure, please explain it. Then, what is the meaning of the gourd that sprang up above Jonah after he was vomited out? What was the reason for its springing up?” For I have noticed that this kind of question is greatly mocked by the pagans with much laughter.

To this the answer is that either all divine miracles are not to be believed, or there is no reason why this one should not be believed. We would not believe in Christ himself, that he rose on the third day, if the faith of Christians feared the laughter of pagans. But since our friend did not put the question whether it is to be believed that Lazarus was raised on the fourth day, or that Christ himself rose on the third, I wonder greatly that he put forward as incredible what happened to Jonah; unless perhaps he thinks it easier for a dead man to be raised from the tomb than for a living man to be preserved in so vast a belly of a sea monster. For, to omit mentioning how great a size of sea monsters is reported by those who have seen them, who would not guess how many men that belly could hold in its space, protected by those ribs which are set up in public at Carthage and known to the people? How wide a gape that mouth must have opened, which was like the door of that cave! Unless perhaps, as he put it, the clothing was an obstacle to Jonah's being swallowed unharmed, as though he had squeezed himself through a narrow place, he who, thrown headlong through the air, was so received that he was taken into the beast's belly before he could be torn by its teeth. And yet Scripture did not say whether he was cast into that cavern naked or clothed, so that it can be understood that he rushed in even naked, if perhaps it was necessary that his clothing be stripped off him like a shell from an egg, so that he might be swallowed more easily. For men are as anxious about this prophet's clothing as if he were said to have crept through a small window or entered the baths; where, even if he had to enter clothed, it would be barely inconvenient, and certainly not a marvel.

But they really have grounds for not believing that, by a divine miracle, the heat of the belly, by which food is softened, could be so tempered as to preserve a man's life! How much more incredible, then, would they find it that those three men, thrown into the furnace by the ungodly king, walked about unharmed in the midst of the fire! Therefore, if they will believe no divine miracles at all, they must be refuted by another discussion. For they ought not to put forward one thing as incredible and question it, but all things that are narrated, whether of this kind or even more marvellous. And yet, if what is written of Jonah were said to have been done by Apuleius of Madauros or Apollonius of Tyana, of whom they boast many marvels with no trustworthy authority (though demons too do some things like the holy angels, not in truth but in appearance, not by wisdom but plainly by deceit), still, if something of the kind were told, as I said, of these men whom they praise by calling them magicians or philosophers, it would no longer be laughter but pride that puffed their cheeks. So let them laugh at our Scriptures; let them laugh as much as they can, while day by day they see themselves becoming rarer and fewer, either by dying or by believing, while all those things are being fulfilled which were foretold by those who so long ago laughed at these people who would fight vainly against the truth, bark idly and gradually fail, and who left them to us their descendants not only to be read but promised that we would experience them.

It is not at all absurd or out of place to ask what these things signify, so that, when this has been explained, they may be believed to have been not only done but also written for the sake of some meaning. First, then, let him who wishes to examine why it was done not doubt that the prophet Jonah was three days in the huge belly of a sea monster; for it was not done in vain, but it was done. For if things said only figuratively, not done, move us to faith, how much more ought those to move us which were not only said figuratively but done! For as human custom speaks by words, so divine power speaks also by deeds; and as new or less used words, sprinkled moderately and fittingly, add splendour to human speech, so in marvellous deeds that fittingly signify something the divine eloquence is in a way more brilliant.

Why, then, do they ask us what it prefigured that the monster which swallowed the prophet gave him back alive on the third day, when Christ explains it? “An evil and adulterous generation,” he says, “seeks a sign, and no sign will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah; for as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.” How an account is to be given of the three days of the death of the Lord Christ, since the whole is understood from a part in the first and last day, so that three whole days, that is, with their nights, are counted, would take long to discuss, and has already been said very often in other discourses. As, then, Jonah passed from the ship into the belly of the whale, so Christ from the tree into the tomb or into the depth of death; and as Jonah for those in danger in the storm, so Christ for those tossed on the waves of this world; and as Jonah was first commanded to preach to the Ninevites, but the prophecy of Jonah did not reach them until after the whale vomited him out, so prophecy was sent ahead to the Gentiles, but did not reach the Gentiles until after the resurrection of Christ.

Now, in setting up a booth for himself and sitting opposite the city of Nineveh, waiting to see what would happen to it, the prophet bore the person of another meaning. For he prefigured the carnal people of Israel. For they too were sad at the salvation of the Ninevites, that is, at the redemption and liberation of the Gentiles; whence Christ came to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. The shade of the gourd over his head, then, was the promises of the Old Testament, or the gifts themselves already given, in which, as the apostle says, there was “a shadow of things to come”, offering protection from the heat of temporal evils in the land of promise. But the morning worm, by whose gnawing the gourd withered, again turns out to be Christ himself, from whose mouth the Gospel was spread abroad, and all those things which flourished temporally among the Israelites with a shadowy meaning before are emptied and wither. And now that people, having lost the kingdom of Jerusalem and the priesthood and the sacrifice, all of which was a shadow of what was to come, is scorched in captive dispersion by a great heat of tribulation, like Jonah, as it is written, by the heat of the sun, and grieves heavily; and yet the salvation of the Gentiles and the penitent is preferred to its grief and to the shade it loved.

Let the pagans laugh still, and with prouder chatter deride Christ as a worm and this interpretation of the prophetic mystery, provided he consumes them too, slowly and little by little. For Isaiah prophesies about all such, through whom God says to us: “Hear me, you who know judgment, my people, in whose heart is my law. Do not fear the reproaches of men, and do not be overcome by their slander, nor think it a great thing that they despise you. For like a garment they will be consumed in time, and like wool they will be eaten by the moth; but my righteousness remains for ever.” Let us, then, recognize the morning worm, for in that psalm whose title is inscribed “For the morning help”, he deigned to call himself by this name: “I am a worm,” he says, “and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people.” This reproach is one of those reproaches which we are commanded not to fear through Isaiah, saying: “Do not fear the reproaches of men.” By this worm, as by a moth, those are eaten who under his Gospel tooth marvel day by day at their fewness as they dwindle. Let us recognize him and for divine salvation endure human reproaches. He is a worm because of the lowliness of the flesh, perhaps also because of the virgin birth; for this animal is usually born from flesh or from some earthly thing without any mating. He is a morning worm because he rose at dawn. The gourd could surely have withered without any little worm. Finally, if God needed a worm for this, what need was there to add “morning”, except that that worm might be recognized who sings “for the morning help”: “But I am a worm and not a man”?

What is clearer than this prophecy, now that it is fulfilled in the very event? For if this worm was mocked when he hung on the cross, as is written in the same psalm, “They spoke with their lips and shook their heads: He hoped in God, let him rescue him; let him save him, since he delights in him”, when those things were fulfilled which he foretold there, “They pierced my hands and feet, they numbered all my bones; they looked and stared at me, they divided my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing”, which is prophesied in the ancient book as going to happen with as much clarity as it is read in the new Gospel as having happened; but if, as I had begun to say, this worm was mocked in this lowliness, is he still to be mocked, when we see fulfilled what the psalm itself contains next: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him, for the kingdom is the Lord's and he shall rule over the nations”? So the Ninevites remembered and turned to the Lord. This salvation through the repentance of the Gentiles, prefigured so long before in Jonah, Israel grieved over, as it now grieves, stripped of its shade and wounded by the heat. Let anyone indeed explain in any other way he likes, provided it is according to the rule of faith, all the other things about the prophet Jonah that are covered with mysteries; but that he was three days in the belly of the whale may not rightly be understood otherwise than as we have recalled it revealed in the Gospel by the heavenly Master himself.

We have explained the questions put forward as best we could; but let him who put them now become a Christian, lest, while he waits first to settle the questions of the holy books, he end this life before he passes from death to life. For it is reasonable that, before being imbued with the Christian sacraments, he should ask about the resurrection of the dead; it may perhaps also be allowed that he asked about Christ, why he came so late, or if there are some other few and great questions which all the rest serve. But if he intends to settle all such questions as “With the measure you measure, it will be measured to you”, or this one about Jonah, before he becomes a Christian, he gives very little thought either to the human condition or to his own age. For there are countless questions which are not to be settled before faith, lest life end without faith; but once faith is held, they are to be investigated most zealously for the exercise of the devout delight of faithful minds; and what has become clear in them is to be shared without the conceit of arrogance, and what has remained hidden is to be borne without loss to salvation.

On taking up your Excellency's letter, in which you demolished the worship of idols and the ceremonies of temples, I seemed to hear the voice of a philosopher; not of that one whom they record as sitting in the dark corners of the ground in the Lyceum of the Academy, sunk in some deep thought, his head wrapped up and drawn down to his knees, so that, poor in learning of his own, as a kind of slanderer he might attack the brilliant discoveries of others and accuse what was brilliantly asserted, while defending nothing of his own; but, plainly, roused by your speech, there stood before my eyes the consular Marcus Tullius, who, having saved the lives of countless citizens, crowned with laurel, carried the victorious standards of the forum into the astonished schools of Greece, and turned round that trumpet of his resonant voice and tongue, which he had blown breathlessly with the spirit of just indignation against criminals and parricides of the commonwealth, and, loosening the folds of his toga, twisted it back into the likeness of the philosopher's cloak.

So, when you urged us toward the worship and religion of the most exalted God, I heard it gladly; when you persuaded us to contemplate the heavenly fatherland, I received it with thanks. For you did not seem to me to speak of that city which some circuit of walls encloses, nor of that which philosophers' treatises, calling it the world-city, declare common to all, but of that in which the great God and souls that have truly deserved it dwell and live, which all laws seek by different ways and paths, which we cannot express in speaking but may perhaps find in thinking. Though this is to be sought and loved first of all, yet I do not think we should desert that city in which we were born and begotten, which first poured into us the enjoyment of this light, which nourished us, which brought us up, and, to say what properly belongs to the case, about which most learned men say that for men who have deserved well of it a dwelling is prepared in heaven after the death of the body, so that a kind of promotion to the city above is given to those men who have deserved well of the cities of their birth, and those dwell more with God who are shown to have brought safety to their fatherland by counsel or by deeds. As for what you deigned to say jestingly, that our city is burning not with arms but with flames and fires, and produces thorns rather than flowers, it is not the greatest reproach, since we know that flowers are very often produced from thorns. For who doubts that roses spring from thorns, and that the very crops are fenced with a palisade of beards? So sweet things are very often mixed with harsh.

The last point in your Excellency's letter was that the vengeance of the church did not demand life or blood, but that they should be stripped of the things they most fear to lose. But I, unless I am mistaken, think it more grievous to be stripped of one's means than to be killed; since, as you know is often repeated in literature, death takes away the sense of all evils, while a life of want produces endless calamity; for it is more grievous to live in evils than to end evils by death. This is shown also by the character of your works, in which you support the poor, relieve the sick with care, apply medicine to afflicted bodies, and in short do everything in every way so that those consigned to it may not feel the length of their calamity. As to the measure of sins, it makes no difference what kind of sin it seems to be for which pardon is asked. First, if repentance both grants pardon and cleanses the offence, he who asks, who embraces your feet, certainly repents; and if, as some philosophers hold, all sins are equal, pardon ought to be common to all. Someone spoke insolently: he sinned. He heaped insults or accusations: he sinned equally. Someone plundered another's goods: it is counted among offences. He violated places profane or sacred: he is not to be excluded from pardon. Finally, there would be no room for pardon unless sins came first.

Now, since I have answered, not as much as I ought but as much as I could, more or less, as they say, I pray and beseech you (would that I were present, so that you might see my tears too) to consider again and again who you are, what you profess, what you do; to consider what the appearance of that city is from which men are dragged out to be led to punishment; what the lamentation of mothers, of wives, of children, of parents; with what shame those set free, but tortured, can come back to their fatherland; what sorrows and groans the sight of their wounds and scars renews. And having weighed all these things, consider God first and think of men's reputation, and seek rather friendly goodness and familiar union, and praise by pardoning rather than by punishing. And let this be said of those whom the real guilt of their confession binds, to whom indeed you have granted pardon out of regard for your law (that is, your religion), for which I do not cease to praise you. But it can hardly be expressed how great a cruelty it is to attack the innocent and to summon to a capital trial those who are clearly separate from the crime. If it happens that they are cleared, consider, I beg you, with how much ill will toward their accusers they will be set free, since the accusers released the guilty of their own accord and let the innocent go only when defeated. May the supreme God guard you and preserve you, the defence of his law and our ornament.