Letters 108.16–110.6

But you, brother, with whom I am now dealing and in whom I desire to rejoice in Christ, as he himself knows: if you should wish, with all the resources of your mind and eloquence, to undertake the defense of the party of Donatus in this case of Maximian, and not to argue falsely, since the memory is fresh, the very men against whom these proceedings were taken are still alive in the body, and everything has been attested by so many proconsular and municipal records, will you not take refuge in the defenses of the truth with which the Catholic Church has always been furnished against you? Then you will confess that the texts about foreign water, about lying water, and about the washing of the dead, and any others of this kind, are not to be understood as you are wont to understand them, but rather in this way: that the baptism of Christ, given to the church for participation in eternal salvation, is neither judged foreign outside the church nor reckoned alien among aliens, but avails to destruction for strangers and aliens and to salvation for its own; and that in those, when they turn to the peace of the church, the error is amended, and the sacrament is not destroyed in punishing the error; so that what harmed the perverse man outside begins to profit the corrected man inside. Nor will you take the texts about not sharing in others' sins, about separation from the wicked, about not touching the unclean and polluted, about guarding against the corruption of a little leaven, and others of this kind, as you are wont to, lest you entangle yourselves inextricably in the case of Maximian; but, being wise, you will assert and hold what sound doctrine commends, what the true rule proves by the examples of prophets and apostles: that the wicked are rather to be tolerated, lest the good be destroyed, than the good deserted so that the wicked may be separated; provided only that the reprobate are separated from imitation, from consent, from likeness of life and conduct, while they grow together, are mingled together in tribulation, and are gathered together within the nets until the time of harvest, winnowing, and the shore. And as for persecution, whatever was done by your people through the judges to drive the Maximianists out and dislodge them from their sees: how will you defend it, except by saying that the more prudent of your people did this with moderate terror, with the intention of correcting, not of harming; and that if some exceeded the human measure, as in what the city itself testifies that Salvius of Membresa suffered, this does not prejudice the others, who are like chaff with the wheat, joined in one communion of the sacraments but separated by unlikeness of life?

Since this is so, I embrace this defense of yours. For this is what it will be, if it is truthful; and it will be overcome by the truth, if it is not this. I embrace, I say, your defense; but you see that it is mine too. Why then do we not labor together to be wheat in the unity of the Lord's threshing floor, and tolerate the chaff together? Why not, I beg you: what is the cause, for whose good, for what benefit? Tell me. Unity is fled, so that peoples purchased by the blood of the one Lamb are inflamed against one another with contrary passions, and the sheep are divided between us as though they were ours, the sheep of that householder who said to his servant, “Feed my sheep,” not “Feed your sheep,” and of whom it was said, “That there may be one flock and one shepherd”; who cries in the gospel, “By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have true love among you,” and, “Let both grow until the harvest, lest perhaps, when you wish to gather the tares, you root up the wheat together with them.” Unity is fled, so that the husband goes to one place and the wife to another; he says, “Keep unity with me, because I am your husband,” and she answers, “I stay where my father is”; so that in one bed they divide Christ, they whom we would detest if they divided the bed. Unity is fled, so that relatives, fellow citizens, friends, guests, and whoever are bound to one another by human ties, both being Christians, agree in holding banquets, in giving and taking in marriage, in buying and selling, in contracts and agreements, in greetings, in assents, in conversations, in all their affairs and business, and disagree at the altar of God; for those who ought to end there whatever discord they had conceived elsewhere, and, according to the Lord's command, first be reconciled to their brothers and then offer their gift at the altar, agree elsewhere and disagree there.

Unity is fled, so that we seek public laws against the outrages of your people (for I do not want to say yours), and the Circumcellions are armed against those very laws, which they despise with the same fury with which, in their raging, they provoked them against you. Unity is fled, so that rustic audacity is raised up against its landowners, and runaway slaves, contrary to the apostolic discipline, are not only estranged from their masters but even threaten their masters; and not only threaten them, but plunder them with most violent assaults, with your “agonistic” confessors as instigators and leaders and chiefs in the very crime, men who with “Praise to God” adorn your honor and with “Praise to God” shed the blood of others. So it is that you, because of public resentment, having assembled your people and gone round among them, promise to return the plunder to those from whom it was taken, and yet you do not wish to be able to fulfill even this, lest you be compelled to offend too much the audacity of those men, which your presbyters thought necessary to them. For they boast, showing and counting up their earlier services to you before that law by which you rejoice that liberty has been given back to you: how many places and basilicas your presbyters held through them, after our people had been laid waste and driven out; so that, if you wished to be severe toward them, you would appear ungrateful for their benefits.

Unity is fled, so that whoever among us refuse to bear discipline flee to them to be defended, so that they may be offered to you to be rebaptized; like this country subdeacon Rusticianus, on whose account I have been compelled with great sorrow and fear to write these things to you. Excommunicated by his presbyter because of his reprobate and perverse conduct, and having also become a debtor to many in that region, he sought no other protection against the rigor of the church and against his creditors than to be wounded again by you and loved by those men as though he were perfectly pure. Already your predecessor rebaptized a deacon of ours of the same kind, who had likewise been excommunicated by his presbyter, and made him your deacon; not many days later, joined, as he wished, with the audacity of those same abandoned men, he was killed in a night attack, in the midst of his robbery and arson, by a crowd that ran together to bring help. These are the fruits of this division, which you refuse to heal, fleeing unity in the very way in which the division itself ought to have been fled, a division foul in itself and damnable before God, even if these and other such horrible and abominable things did not happen because of it.

Let us therefore acknowledge, brother, the peace of Christ and hold it together; and, as far as God grants, let us strive together to be good, and together correct the wicked with as much discipline as we can while preserving unity, and for the sake of that unity tolerate them with as much patience as we can; lest, as Christ warned, while we wish to gather the tares before the time (tares which blessed Cyprian testified are seen and perceived not outside but in the church), we root up the wheat together with them. For in truth you do not have some special privileges of holiness, so that our wicked pollute us and your wicked do not pollute you; so that the ancient timidity of the traditors, which we do not know, contaminates us, and the present audacity of abandoned men, which you see, does not contaminate you. Let us recognize that ark which prefigured the church; let us be clean animals in it together, and let us not refuse that unclean animals too be carried in it with us until the end of the flood. They were together in the ark, but they did not together please the Lord as an odor of sacrifice; for after the flood Noah offered God a sacrifice from the clean, not from the unclean. Yet the ark was not on that account deserted before the time by any of the clean because of the unclean; the raven, however, did desert it and separated itself before the time from the communion of that ark, but it was of the pairs of unclean animals, not of the sevens of clean ones. Let us detest the uncleanness of this separation. For whoever are praiseworthy for such conduct, this separation alone makes them damnable, because “a wicked son calls himself righteous, but does not wash away his going out,” though, insolently puffed up and blinded by his own swelling, he dares to say what the prophet foresaw and detested: “Do not touch me, for I am clean.” Whoever, then, before the time, as if because of the uncleanness of certain people, deserts the congregation of this unity, like the ark in the flood carrying clean and unclean, shows that he is rather what he flees. The Lord willed this, that in this city too your people through the mouth of a certain …

Thanks be to God, brother Augustine, whose gift is whatever good joys are in us. I confess, it is well with me with you; I read you a great deal. I will say something marvelous but plainly true: as your presence used to be absent to me, so your absence has become present to me. No troubling business of temporal affairs comes between us. I do what I can, even if I cannot do as much as I wish. Why, then, do I say “as much as I wish”? You know very well how greedy I am for you; and yet I do not murmur that I do not do as much as I wish, since, on the other hand, I do no less than I can. Thanks be to God, then, sweetest brother; it is well with me with you. I rejoice to be more closely joined with you and, if I may say so, made most wholly one with you; clinging to you as far as I can, receiving the overflow of your breasts, I gather strength, in case I can be made fit to shake and press them, so that whatever they guard more secretly and keep shut up within, the skins being removed which they still offer me to suck as a nursling, they may deign to pour out to me their very inmost parts, if that is possible. Your inmost parts, I say, I long to have poured out for me: your inmost parts, fat with heavenly nourishment and seasoned with every spiritual sweetness; your inmost parts, pure, simple, except that they are bound with the double bond of twofold love; your inmost parts, filled with the light of truth and shining with truth. To their flowing out and reflected light I submit myself, so that my night may fade away in your light and we may walk together in the brightness of day. O truly skillful bee of God, building honeycombs full of divine nectar, flowing with mercy and truth, through which my soul ranges and delights, and with life-giving food strives to repair and prop up whatever it finds lacking or feels weak in itself.

The Lord is blessed through the proclamation of your mouth and your faithful ministry, which you make sing in harmony with the Lord who sings to you, and answer him, in such a way that whatever overflows to us from his fullness becomes more pleasant and welcome through your elegant service, your trim neatness, and your faithful, chaste, and simple ministry. You make it shine so brightly by your subtlety and vigilance that it would dazzle our eyes and draw them to itself, did you not yourself point us to the Lord, so that, referring to him whatever delightful thing shines in you, we may recognize that it is his, by whose goodness you are so good, and by whose purity, simplicity, and beauty you are pure, simple, and beautiful; and so that, as we give thanks to him for your good, which is his gift, he may deign to join us to you, or in some way to place us under you, that we may be more fully subject to him under whose guidance and governance we rejoice that you are what you are, and that it may also befall you to rejoice in us. This I do not doubt will come about, if you help me with your prayers; for by imitating you I have already made some progress, so that I desire to be such. You see what you bring about by being so good: how you carry us away into love of neighbor, which is for us the first step to the love of God and the last, and as it were the boundary at which both are joined together, the love of God and of neighbor; standing on it as on a boundary, as I said, we are touched by the warmth of both and burn with the love of both. But the more that fire of love of neighbor burns us out and purifies us, the more it drives us into that purer fire of God. There no measure of loving is any longer imposed on us, since there the measure itself is to love without measure. We need not fear, then, that we may love our Lord too much; we must fear that we may love him too little.

This preceding letter, which presents me to you as more cheerful, my sadness as it were wiped away by the lightening of business, from the liberal leisure I was allowed to enjoy with you while staying on this country estate (for so it was possible), was written as a kind of finishing post of those joys, before the venerable bishop indeed deigned to visit us; and, what I truly marvel at, he came on the very day on which it was written. What does this mean, I ask, my soul, unless perhaps that what delights us, although it is honorable, is nevertheless not useful enough, because it is only in a part? Meanwhile, let us strive to fit this very part, that is, ourselves, to the whole, made more polished and better jointed, if you will allow the word, as far as the material yields to us because of our sins, that is, as far as we yield to ourselves. You have a letter longer, not in proportion to your greatness but to my littleness, by which I hope I have also provoked you, so that a letter may now be sent to me in proportion not to my littleness but to your greatness. Yet however great it is, it will not be long for me, for whom all time is short for reading. Write back to me when or where I ought to meet you on account of that matter for which you bade me meet you. If it is still unsettled and nothing better has perhaps been decided, then I will come; if not, I beg you, I would not have you call me back from my course; for that alone seemed something I would put ahead of my own plans. All the brothers who are our fellow servants in the Lord I greatly long for and greet.

My letter, which our dearest son and fellow deacon Timothy delivered, was already prepared for him as he was setting out, when our sons Quodvultdeus and Gaudentius came to us with your letter. So it happened that, setting out at once, he did not bring my reply, since after their arrival he stayed with us only a very short while and seemed to be about to leave from hour to hour. But even if I had replied by him, I would still be a debtor. For even now, when I seem to have replied, I am a debtor: I do not mean of love, which we owe the more the more we have spent it, and of which the apostle shows us to be perpetual debtors when he says, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” but of your letter itself; for when shall I be equal to your sweetness and to the great eagerness of your mind which it announced to me when it was read? It conveyed to me something about you that I knew very well; yet although it brought me nothing new, it was a new demand for a reply.

You are perhaps surprised that I call myself unequal to paying this debt, since you think so much of me, you who know me as though I were your own soul. But this is the very thing that makes it so difficult for me to reply to your letter: out of regard for your modesty I refrain from saying how great you seem to me; and certainly, if I say less, when you have bestowed such praise on me, what shall I remain but a debtor? I would not care about this if I knew that what you said to me about myself was spoken not out of the most sincere love but out of flattery, the enemy of friendship. In that case I would not even become a debtor, since I would not owe a return for such things; but the better I know with what faithful mind you speak, the more I see how heavy a debt weighs on me.

But see what has happened to me: I have in a way praised myself, by saying that I was praised by you faithfully. But what else could I say than what I reminded you of about yourself, which you know? See, I have raised a new question for myself, which you did not raise, and which perhaps you expect me to resolve. So it was not enough that I was a debtor; I had to heap a greater debt on myself. And yet it is easy to show, and if I do not show it, easy for you to see, that true things can be said unfaithfully and untrue things faithfully. For one who believes as he speaks, even if he does not speak the truth, speaks faithfully; but one who does not believe what he says, even if he speaks the truth, speaks unfaithfully. Do I then doubt that you believe what you wrote about me? Since I do not recognize these things in myself, you were able to say faithfully things about me that are not true.

But I do not want you to be deceived in this way, even by goodwill. To that goodwill I am a debtor, because I too could say about you, with equal faithfulness and goodwill, things that are true, did I not, as I said above, spare your modesty. But when I am praised by the closest and most intimate friend of my soul, I feel as though I were being praised by myself. You see how irksome that is, even if true things are said; how much more so because, though you are my other soul, or rather your soul and mine are one, you are deceived about me, thinking that things are present in me that are lacking, in the way that a single man can be deceived even about himself! I do not want this, not only so that you, whom I love, may not be deceived, but also so that you may not pray less that I may be what you already believe me to be. Nor is my debt to you such that, with the same advance of goodwill, I should believe and speak good things of you which you yourself know are still lacking in you; it is rather that I should, with an equally kindly mind, speak of those goods of yours, the gifts of God, of which I am certain in you. I refrain from this, not for fear of being deceived about them, but lest, when praised by me, you should seem to have praised yourself; and because of that rule of justice, since I do not want it done to me. If it ought to be done, I choose to remain a debtor as long as I think it ought not to be done; but if it ought not to be done, I am not a debtor either.

But I know what you could reply to this: “You speak as though I had wanted a long letter from you in praise of me.” Far be it from me to believe this of you; but your letter, full of praises of me, I will not say how true or how untrue, demanded, even against your will, that I pay you back in this. For if you wanted me to write something else, you desired me as a giver, not as one who repays. Now the order of justice is that we first pay what is owed, and then afterward, if it pleases, also give something to the one we pay. And yet even such things as you wanted me to write, if we consider the Lord's precepts more carefully, we pay rather than give, if nothing is to be owed to anyone except to love one another. For love itself demands its due, that, serving brotherly love, we help as far as we can one who rightly wishes to be helped. But, my brother, I believe you too know how much I have on my hands, so that against the cares that the necessities of our service bring, scarcely the fewest drops of time trickle down to me; and if I spend them on other things, I seem to act against my duty.

As for your wish that I write you a long letter, this too I owe, I confess; I owe it wholly to your will, so sweet, so sincere, so pure. But since you are a good lover of justice, I remind you of this from justice itself, so that you may hear it from me more willingly about the justice you love. You see that what I owe both to you and to others comes before what I owe to you alone; and my time is not sufficient for everything, since it is not sufficient even for the things that come first. Hence all my dearest and most intimate friends, among whom in the name of Christ you are among the first, will be doing their duty if they not only do not themselves lay other writing on me, but also, with all the authority and holy kindness they can, forbid others, lest I seem harsh when I do not give individuals what they ask, because I wish rather to pay what I owe to all. Finally, when Your Venerableness comes to us, as we hope and as we hold you to your promise, you will know with what literary works and how much I am occupied, and you will more urgently do what I have asked: fend off from me any others you can who want to lay on me something else to write. May the Lord our God fill the so great and so holy bosom of your heart, which he himself made, most blessed lord.