Letters 118.1–118.15

You thought that I should suddenly be surrounded, or rather overwhelmed, by a crowd of innumerable questions, even if you believed me to be free and at leisure. For when, with any amount of leisure, could I untie so many knotty matters for one in such haste and, as you write, already almost setting out? I would be hindered by the very number of the matters even if the knots were easy to untie; but they are wrapped up in such intricacy and bound so tightly that, even if they were few, they would occupy me at my most leisured, weary my attention by the great expenditure of time, and wear down my fingernails. But I would like to snatch you away from the midst of your delightful inquiries and pack you in among my cares, so that you might either learn not to be idly curious, or not dare to impose the feeding and nourishing of your curiosity on those among whose cares even the greatest is to repress and rein in the curious. For if time and effort are spent in writing you any letter, how much better and more fruitful it is that they be spent on cutting back your vain and deceitful desires, which are the more to be guarded against the more easily they deceive, veiled and cloaked as they are with some shadow of honor and the name of liberal studies, than that by our ministry and, so to speak, our escort they should be roused more vehemently to the domination by which they oppress your so good mind!

For look: if so many dialogues you have read have not helped you at all to see and grasp the end of all your actions, what use are they? Tell me. For where you have set the end of this whole most ardent study of yours, fruitless to you and burdensome to us, your letter shows clearly enough. For when you were busying yourself to get me to solve by letter the questions you sent, you wrote thus: “I could entreat you more,” you say, “and through many who are dear to you, but I know your mind, which does not wish to be asked but to grant to all, provided only that nothing unbecoming is involved; and in this matter there is absolutely nothing unbecoming. However that may be, I ask you to grant it to me as I am about to sail.” In these words of your letter you judge rightly of me that I desire to grant to all, if nothing unbecoming is involved; but that there is nothing unbecoming in this matter does not seem so to me. For does not the unbecoming look of the thing strike my mind when I think of a bishop, distracted and stretched by church cares that clamor around him, suddenly growing deaf, as it were, holding himself back from all these and expounding little questions on Cicero's dialogues to a single student? How unbecoming this is, although carried away by the ardor of your studies you are quite unwilling to attend to it, you nevertheless feel too. For what else does it show that, having said that in this matter there is absolutely nothing unbecoming, you at once added, “However that may be, I ask you to grant it to me as I am about to sail”? For this sounds as if it seemed to you that there is nothing unbecoming in this matter, yet, whatever unbecomingness there is, you ask me to grant it to you as one about to sail. But what is it, I ask you, that you added, “as one about to sail”? Ought I not to grant you something unbecoming unless you were about to sail? No doubt you think that disgrace is washed off by sea water. If that were so, mine at least would remain unexpiated, since I am not about to sail.

You write also that I know how very irksome it is to you to be a burden to anyone, and you call God alone to witness that you have done this driven by excessive necessity. Here indeed, as I was reading your letter, I turned my mind attentively to learn what your necessity was, when lo, you bring it to me and say: “You are not ignorant of men's ways, how prone they are to find fault, and how, if someone who is asked does not answer, he will be thought unlearned and dull.” At this point I truly blazed up to write back to you; for by this sickness of your mind you pierced my heart and broke in upon my cares, so that I could not leave you untreated, as far as God would help me; not so as to think about untying and unraveling your questions, but to break off your happiness, which hangs on the tongues of men and sways from so unhappy a mooring, and tie it to a seat wholly unshaken and stable. Do you not consider, Dioscorus, even your Persius, who mocks you with a twisted little verse, or rather pounds and checks your plainly childish head, if there is any sense in it, with a fitting blow: “Is your knowing nothing, unless another knows that you know?” You have read, as I said above, so many dialogues; you have inserted your heart into so many disputes of philosophers! Tell me, I beg you, which of them set the end of his actions in the fame of the crowd or in the tongue of men, even of good and wise men? But you, and what is more shameful, already about to sail, testify that you have made quite splendid progress in Africa, since you assert that you are a burden to very busy bishops, intent on matters far removed, getting them to expound Cicero to you, for no other reason than that you fear men prone to find fault, lest, questioned by them, if you do not answer, you be thought unlearned and dull! O matter worthy of the vigils and night studies of bishops!

You seem to me to think of nothing else day and night than of being praised by men for your studies and learning. Although I have always judged this dangerous for those who strive toward what is certain and right, I now experience it most of all in you. For it was from no other source than that same ruinous habit that you failed to see by what means we could actually be moved to give you what you asked. For just as perversely as you yourself are carried away to learn the things you ask about for no other reason than to be praised, or not to be blamed, by men, so perversely too you think that we are moved in your petition by the reasons you allege. And would that we could bring it about that you too were not in the least moved by so empty and deceitful a good as human praise, now that we show you that we are moved, not to grant what you ask, since you write these things about yourself, but to correct you! Men's ways, you say, are prone to find fault. What then? If someone who is asked does not answer, you say, he will be thought unlearned and dull. See, I question you, not about something in Cicero's books, whose sense perhaps their readers cannot track down, but about your own letter and the meaning of your words. For I ask why you did not say, “He who does not answer will be shown to be unlearned and dull,” but said rather, “He will be thought unlearned and dull,” unless because you yourself understand well enough that one who does not answer such things is not unlearned and dull, but is thought so. But I warn you that he who fears to be cut down by the tongues of such pruners as by pruning hooks is dry wood, and therefore is not merely “pruned,” that is, thought, unlearned and dull, but truly is so and is shown to be so.

Perhaps you will say: “But since I am not dull of mind, and strive especially not to be, I do not want even to be thought dull of mind.” Rightly; but for what end you do not want it, that is what I ask. For you said that the reason and the end for which you did not hesitate to be a burden to us in opening and explaining those questions to you was so necessary that you called it an excessive necessity: namely, lest, when questioned about them and not answering, you be thought unlearned and dull by men prone to find fault. But I ask whether this is the whole reason why you want these things from us, or whether you do not want to be thought unlearned and dull for some other reason as well. If this is the whole of it, you see, I think, that this is the end of your so vehement endeavor, by which you are a burden to us too, as you confess. But what burden can come to us from Dioscorus, except what burdens Dioscorus himself, even without his knowing it? He will not feel it until he wishes to rise; and would that these burdens may not be so tightly bound on that he tries in vain even to shake them off his shoulders! I do not say this because these questions are studied, but because they are studied for such an end. For you surely already feel that this end is trifling, empty, windy; it also has a swelling, under which a wasting disease is bred, and it spreads over the pupil of the mind so that it does not see the riches of truth. Believe me, it is so, my Dioscorus; so may I enjoy you in that very will and in that very dignity of truth from whose shadow you are turned away. For I find no other way than this to make you believe me on this matter. For you do not see the truth, nor can you see it in any way, as long as you build ruinous joys on human tongues.

But if the end of these actions and of your endeavor is not there, but you do not want to be thought unlearned and dull for some other reason, I ask what that is. If it is so that your access may not be narrower to acquiring temporal riches, obtaining a wife, seizing honors, and other things of this kind that run past in a headlong flow and drag those who slip into them down to the depths, neither is it fitting that we serve you for this end; indeed, it is fitting rather to remove you from it. For we do not forbid you to set your end in the uncertainty of fame in order that you may emigrate, as it were, from the Mincius into the Eridanus, into which the Mincius itself might perhaps thrust you even if you did not emigrate. For when the vanity of human praise has not satisfied the greedy spirit, since it brings nothing for food but what is empty and puffed up, that very greed is compelled to turn it toward something else, as it were richer and more fruitful; and if this too flows past in temporal passing, it is as if one river led into another, so that there is no end of misery as long as the end of our duties is placed in an unstable thing. We wish, therefore, to fix in some firm and unchangeable good the home of your most constant endeavor and the most secure rest of all your good and honorable action. Or perhaps that very earthly happiness which I mentioned, if you could reach it by spreading your sails to the breeze, or even the gusts, of favorable rumor, you think of turning this too toward another good, true, certain, and full? But it does not seem so to me, and truth itself wholly denies that it is reached by such winding detours, when it is so near, or at such cost, when it is so free.

Or do you think that human praise itself should be used as an instrument, so that through it you may prepare access to men's minds for persuading them of what is true and wholesome, and are you taking care lest, if they think you unlearned and dull, they judge you unworthy to receive from them an ear either most attentive or most patient, whether you are exhorting someone to right action or rebuking the malice and wickedness of a sinner? If you had this end of justice and beneficence in mind in asking those questions, it was unfair to us that in your letter you did not rather set this before us to move us, so that we might either gladly give what you asked or else decline because some other cause perhaps prevented us, but not because we were ashamed not only to serve your vain desire but even not to resist it. For how much better and more wholesome it is, I ask you, to receive the very rules of truth far more surely and briefly in themselves, by which you could refute everything false yourself, rather than to think yourself learned and intelligent, which is false and shameful, if you have learned the aged and decrepit falsehoods of many people with more ostentatious than prudent zeal! I do not think this now seems right to you; for not in vain have we said such true things to Dioscorus for so long, since the point from which we set out in this letter.

Therefore let us now consider this. Since you judge that a man is by no means unlearned and dull through ignorance of these things, but rather through ignorance of the truth itself, so that, whoever has written or will write about these matters, either the things are what you already hold for certain, or, if they are false, you are untroubled not to know them, and you need not waste away with empty anxiety about learning the diversity of other men's opinions, as though to avoid remaining unlearned and dull; since this is so, let us also consider, if you please, whether the false opinion of others, who are, as you write, prone to find fault, so that if they perceived you were ignorant of these things they would think you unlearned and dull, falsely indeed but still think it, ought to move you so much that you may not unfittingly ask even bishops to expound these things to you. For we now believe that you desire these things for this end, that you may help those people by persuading them of the truth and correcting their lives, who, if they thought you unlearned and dull about those books of Cicero, would consider you unworthy to be someone from whom they should receive any useful and wholesome knowledge.

That is not so, believe me. First, because I do not see at all that there are any people in those lands where you fear to seem unskilled and not at all sharp who would question you about these questions, since you have experienced both here, where you came to learn them, and at Rome how negligently they are regarded, and that for this reason they are neither taught nor learned; and in Africa you suffer from such a lack of anyone to question you about them that you find no one to put up with you yourself, and by that dearth you are compelled to send them to bishops to be expounded; as if these bishops, even if as young men they took care, with the same ardor, or rather error, of mind by which you are carried away, to learn these things as something great, would suffer them to last in their memory down to their episcopal grey hairs and their church chairs; or, if they themselves wished it, as if greater and graver cares would not shut these things out of their hearts even against their will; or, if some of them remained in their minds through excessive habit, as if they would not prefer to bury them in oblivion once remembered rather than answer questions about them with ineptitude. Indeed, even in the frivolity of the schools and in the chairs of rhetoric they seem to have fallen so silent and torpid that they are thought to need sending from Carthage to Hippo to be expounded, where they are so unusual and wholly foreign that, if in my care to answer I wanted to look up something, to see how the passage to be expounded is reached from what precedes, or what discourse is connected with it afterward, I could not find a copy at all. But those rhetoricians of Carthage, if they failed this zeal of yours, are not only not blamed by me but are even approved, if perhaps they now recall that these used to be the contests not of the Roman forums but of the Greek gymnasia. But you, when you had cast your thoughts toward the gymnasia too and found them also bare and cold in such things, thought of the Christian basilica of Hippo as the place to lay down these cares of yours, because a bishop now sits in it who once sold these things to boys. But I do not want you still to be a boy; and it is not fitting for me now, as I am no longer a seller of boyish things, to be a giver of them either. Since this is so, that is, since two such great cities, masters of Latin letters, Rome and Carthage, neither are troubled to question you about these things nor care about your troubles so as to listen to you when you inquire about them, I wonder beyond words that you, a young man of such good intellect, fear that in Greek and Eastern cities you may have to bear some troublesome questioner about these matters. You would sooner hear crows in Africa than this kind of talk in those parts.

Then, if I am wrong and someone there perhaps should turn up who asks questions of this kind (the more odious, surely, the more out of place in those regions), should you not rather beware that there will much more easily turn up Greeks who will question you, now settled in Greece and brought up first in the Greek tongue, about things in the actual books of the philosophers which Cicero did not put in his writings? If that happens, what will you answer? That you preferred to know these things from the books of Latin authors rather than of Greek? By that answer you will first insult Greece, and you know how those men do not bear that; then, already sore and angry, how quickly they will judge you, what you so much do not want, both dull, since you preferred to learn the doctrines of the Greek philosophers, or rather certain torn and scattered fragments of doctrines, from Latin dialogues rather than whole and connected in the Greek books of the authors themselves, and unlearned, since, not knowing so many things in your own language, you sought to collect scraps of these matters in a foreign one! Or perhaps you will answer that you did not despise the Greek books on these matters but took care to know the Latin first, and now, learned in Latin, want to seek the Greek? If you are not ashamed of this, that a Greek learned Latin as a boy and now wants to learn Greek as a bearded man, will you then be ashamed to be ignorant of some things in Latin itself, of which you may perceive how many learned Latins are as ignorant as you from this very fact, that you say you are burdening us out of great necessity, though you are living at Carthage among so great a multitude of learned men?

Finally, suppose that, when questioned about everything you ask us, you have been able to answer. See, now you are called most learned and most acute; see, now a little Greek puff of breath raises you to the skies with praise. Only remember your seriousness, and the end for which you wanted to earn that praise: namely, that you may teach something most serious and wholesome to those who lightly admired these light things and now hang most benevolently and eagerly on your lips. Whether you hold that very thing, whatever is most serious and wholesome, and know how to hand it on rightly, I should like to know. For it is ridiculous, when you have learned many superfluous things so that men's ears may be prepared for you to hear necessary things, not to hold the necessary things themselves, for receiving which you prepared their ears by the superfluous; and, while you are busy learning how to make them attentive, to be unwilling to learn what is to be poured into them once they are attentive. But if you say that you already know this, and answer that this is the Christian teaching, which we know you set above everything and in which alone you hold that the hope of eternal salvation lies, it has no need of a knowledge of Cicero's dialogues and a collection of other men's begged and discordant opinions to procure hearers. Let those who are to receive anything of the kind from you be made attentive by your conduct. I do not want you first to teach something that must be unlearned, in order to teach the truth.

For if knowledge of other men's dissenting and conflicting opinions helps somewhat the one who introduces Christian truth, so that he knows how to destroy the falsehoods opposed to it, this is only so that no one arguing against him may fix his eye solely on refuting your views while carefully hiding his own; for knowledge of the truth is able to judge and overturn all falsehoods, if only they are brought forward, even those not heard of before. But so that not only open errors may be struck down but hidden ones dug out too, if one needs to know other men's errors, lift up your eyes and ears, I beg you, and see and listen whether anyone brings anything against us from Anaximenes and Anaxagoras, when not even the ashes of the much more recent and very talkative Stoics or Epicureans are still warm enough for any spark to be kindled from them against the Christian faith. But the circles and small gatherings, partly furtive, partly boldly open, of the Donatists, or Maximianists, or Manichaeans, or also, to whose flocks and crowds you are now going, of the Arians, Eunomians, Macedonians, Cataphrygians, and the other plagues without number, make a din. If it is irksome to learn the errors of all these, what need have we, for the defense of the Christian religion, to inquire what Anaximenes thought, and with empty curiosity to recook quarrels long put to sleep, when even the dissensions and questions of certain heretics who chose to glory in the Christian name, such as the Marcionites and Sabellians and many others besides, have now fallen silent? Yet if, as I said, it is necessary to know in advance and to have examined some opinions opposed to the truth, we ought to have thought about the heretics who call themselves Christians rather than about Anaxagoras and Democritus.

But whoever asks you the things you ask us, let him hear that you are more learned and prudent in not knowing them. For if Themistocles did not care that he was considered rather unlearned when he refused to play the lyre at a banquet, and, when he had said that he did not know how and was asked, “What then do you know?”, answered, “How to make a state great from a small one,” should you hesitate to say that you do not know these things, when to one who asks what you know you can answer that you know how a man can be happy even without them? But if you do not yet hold this, you seek these things as perversely as you would, if you were weighed down by some dangerous bodily disease, seek luxurious and very delicate garments rather than medicines and doctors. For in no way is that knowledge to be put off, or this other to be preferred to it by you, especially at your present age, even in the order of learning. But see how easily you could know this if you wished. For he who seeks the way to reach the happy life is surely seeking nothing else than where the end of good is, that is, where the highest good of man is placed, not by depraved and rash opinion but by certain and unshaken truth. And no one finds it placed anywhere but either in the body or in the mind or in God, or in some two of these, or indeed in all. If you have learned that neither the highest good nor any part of the highest good is in the body at all, two will remain, the mind and God, in one or both of which it lies. But if you go on to learn the same about the mind as about the body, what else will present itself but God, in whom the highest good of man is placed? Not that there are no other goods; but that is called the highest to which all are referred. For each person is happy by enjoying that for whose sake he wants to have the rest, since that is loved no longer for the sake of something else but for its own sake; and therefore it is called the end, because nothing further is found to which it runs on or is referred. There is the rest of desire, there the security of enjoyment, there the most tranquil joy of the best will.

Grant, then, someone who quickly sees that the body is not the good of the mind, but rather that the mind is the good of the body; then one will give up inquiring whether that highest good, or any part of it, is in the body. For it is most foolish to deny that the mind is better than the body; likewise it is most foolish to deny that he who gives the happy life, or some part of the happy life, is better than he who receives it; therefore the mind does not receive from the body either the highest good or any part of the highest good. Those who do not see this, blinded by the sweetness of carnal pleasures, do not perceive that it comes to them from a lack of health. (The perfect health of the body will be that final immortality of the whole man; for God made the soul of so powerful a nature that from its fullest blessedness, which is promised to the saints at the end of time, there overflows into the lower nature too, which is the body, not blessedness, which belongs properly to the one who enjoys and understands, but fullness of health, that is, the vigor of incorruption.) Those, I say, who do not see this wage war with restless disputes, each according to his capacity placing the highest good of man in the body in different ways, and they stir up mobs of carnal rebels; among them the Epicureans flourished with greater authority among the unlearned multitude.

Grant likewise someone who quickly sees that the mind itself, too, is not happy by its own good when it is happy, otherwise it would never be miserable; then one will give up inquiring whether that highest and, so to speak, beatifying good, or any part of it, is in the mind. For when the mind rejoices in itself as its own good, it is proud. But when it perceives that it is changeable, if only by this one fact, that from foolish it is made wise, and discerns that wisdom is unchangeable, it must at the same time discern that wisdom is above its own nature and that it rejoices more richly and surely by participation in it and illumination by it than by itself. So, ceasing and subsiding from its own boasting and inflation, it strives to cling to God and to be refreshed and reformed by that unchangeable one, from whom it now grasps that there comes not only every form of all things, whether those reached by the sense of the body or by the understanding of the mind, but even the very capacity for being formed, before formation, as when something formless is spoken of that can be formed. And so it feels that it is the less stable the less it clings to God, who supremely is; and that he supremely is because he neither advances nor declines by any change; but that for itself that change is beneficial by which it advances so as to cleave to him perfectly, whereas the change that consists in falling away is vicious; and that every falling away tends toward destruction; and although it is not evident whether anything actually reaches that point, yet it is evident to all that destruction leads to this, that a thing is not what it was. Hence it gathers that things fall away or can fall away for no other reason than that they were made from nothing; so that whatever in them is, namely that they exist and endure and, even in their failings, are ordered into the embrace of the universe, belongs to the goodness and omnipotence of him who supremely is and is the creator, who is able to make from nothing not only something but even something great; and that the first sin, that is, the first voluntary falling away, is to rejoice in one's own power; for it rejoices in something less than if it rejoiced in the power of God, which is certainly greater. Those who do not see this, and look at the powers of the human mind and the great beauty of its deeds and words, even if they were ashamed to place the highest good in the body, yet, by placing it in the mind itself, placed it lower than where it should be placed by the purest reason. Among the Greek philosophers who think thus, the Stoics prevailed both in number and in subtlety of argument; yet they, holding in natural philosophy that all things are corporeal, were able to turn the mind away from the flesh rather than from the body.