Letters 138.1–138.20

To the illustrious and most eloquent Volusian, most dear to us, I had to reply to no more than what he thought fit to ask. But the points that you yourself sent me in your letter to be discussed and resolved, whether they are suggested or pressed upon you by him or by others too, ought rather to be sent to you, discussed and resolved as far as my strength allows: not in the way these things must be treated in the business of books, but in the way that can suffice for conversation by letter; so that, if you think fit, since you experience their objections in daily discussions, this letter may be read to them also. But if this discourse is not enough for their ears, which have not yet been prepared by the piety of faith, let what you think will suffice for them be first worked out between us, and then at last let what has been worked out be carried to them. For there are many things from which, if their minds still shrink and recoil, they may perhaps someday be persuaded by a fuller or subtler reasoning, or at least by an authority which they would think it unworthy to resist.

In your letter, then, you stated that some are troubled as to why this God, who is also affirmed to be the God of the Old Testament, scorned the old sacrifices and was pleased with new ones. For they assert that nothing can be corrected unless what was done before is shown not to have been done rightly, or that what was once done rightly ought by no means to have been changed. For they say that things rightly done cannot be changed except unjustly. These words I have transferred from your letter into mine. If I wished to answer them at length, time would fail me sooner than examples by which the very nature of things and human works are changed by sure reason according to the suitability of the times, while the reason by which they are changed is not itself changeable. So I will mention a few, so that the mind, roused by these, may run alertly through many similar ones. Does not summer succeed winter as heat is gradually added? Are not the times of night turned into those of day? How often our ages vary! Childhood yields to adolescence, never to return; youth succeeds adolescence, not to remain; old age, ending youth, is ended by death. All these things change, yet the reason of divine providence by which they change does not change. Nor, I think, when a farmer orders one thing in summer and another in winter, does the reason of agriculture change. And when one who was resting at night rises in the morning, he has not changed his plan of life. A teacher imposes one thing on a young man and another on a boy; so the teaching, constant, changed the precept and was not itself changed.

The great physician of our times, Vindicianus, was consulted by someone and ordered a remedy to be applied to his pain that seemed suitable at the time; it was applied, and health followed. Then some years later, when the same bodily complaint arose again, the man thought this same remedy should be applied; it turned out worse. Astonished, he ran back to the physician and told him what had happened. And he, being very sharp, replied: "It did you harm because I did not prescribe it"; so that all who heard and did not know the man well thought that he trusted not in the art of medicine but in some unlawful power. So when he was asked by those who could, in their astonishment, he explained what they had not understood: that he would not have prescribed this for that age. So much depends, while reason and the arts do not change, on what according to them must be changed for the variety of times.

It is not true, then, as is said, that what has once been done rightly must by no means be changed. For when the circumstances of the time change, true reason often demands that what had been rightly done before be changed in such a way that, while they say it is not rightly done if it is changed, truth on the contrary cries out that it is not rightly done unless it is changed; for both will then be right, if they are different according to the difference of the times. For what can happen at one time with different persons, that one may do something with impunity and another may not, not because the thing is different but because the doer is, so with one and the same person at different times something ought to be done at one time and not at another, not because the doer is different from himself, but because the time when he does it is.

How widely this question extends is surely seen by anyone who can and does not neglect to observe the distinction between the beautiful and the fitting, scattered as it were through the whole universe of things. For the beautiful is considered and praised in itself, and its opposite is the base and the ugly. But the fitting, whose opposite is the unfitting, hangs as if tied to something else, and is judged not from itself but from what it is connected with; and no doubt the becoming and the unbecoming are either the same as this or regarded as such. Now refer what we have said to the matter in question. The sacrifice which God had commanded was fitting in the first times, but now it is not so. For he commanded another, fitting for this time, he who knows far better than man what is suitably applied to each time, what he should impart, add, take away, withdraw, increase, or diminish, and when: the unchangeable ruler, as he is creator, of changeable things, until the beauty of the whole course of the ages, whose small parts are the things fitting to their several times, runs out like a great song of some ineffable composer, and from there those who worship God rightly, even while it is the time of faith, pass over into the eternal contemplation of his form.

But those are mistaken who think that God commands these things for his own benefit or pleasure, and they are rightly troubled as to why God changed them, as if with a changeable delight he ordered one thing to be offered to him at that earlier time and another at this. But it is not so. God commands nothing that benefits himself, but only the one to whom he gives the command. That is why he is the true Lord: he does not need a servant, and the servant needs him. Indeed, in the Scripture called the Old Testament, and spoken at the time when those sacrifices which are not offered at this time were still being offered, it says: "I said to the Lord: You are my Lord, since you have no need of my goods." God, then, did not need those sacrifices, nor does he ever need anyone's; but they are signs of things divinely bestowed, either for imbuing the mind with virtues or for attaining eternal salvation; by their celebration and performance the duties of piety are exercised, useful not to God but to us.

It would take too long to discuss fittingly the variety of signs, which, when they concern divine things, are called sacraments. But just as God is not changeable because he commands one thing in the morning and another in the evening, this in one month and that in another, not in this year what he commanded in that, so God is not changeable because in the earlier volume of the whole course of the ages he commanded one thing to be offered to him and another in the later, so that he might fittingly arrange, without any change in himself, through changeable times, the significations belonging to the most wholesome teaching of religion. For in order that those who are troubled by these things may know that this was already in the divine plan, and that when these new things were established the earlier did not suddenly displease him as by a changeable will, but that this had already been fixed and decreed in the very wisdom of God, to whom the same Scripture says, concerning even greater changes of things, "You will change them and they will be changed, but you are the same," it must be impressed upon them that this change of the sacraments of the Old and New Testament was also foretold by prophetic voices. For so they will see, if they can, that what is new in time is not new with him who established the times and has without time all things which he distributes to their several times according to their variety. For in that psalm from which I quoted something to show that God does not need our sacrifices, in which he is told, "I said to the Lord: You are my Lord, since you have no need of my goods," a little later we read in the person of Christ: "I will not gather their assemblies from blood," that is, from the sacrifices of cattle, by which the assemblies of the Jews were formerly gathered; and elsewhere he says: "I will not take calves from your house, nor goats from your flocks"; and another prophet says: "Behold, the days will come, says the Lord, and I will establish over the house of Jacob a new covenant, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt." And there are many other testimonies on this matter in which it was foretold that God would do this, which it would take long to mention now.

If it is now sufficiently established that what was rightly instituted at one time can likewise be rightly changed at another, the work of the one who changes it being changed but not his plan (that plan is contained by intelligible reason, where things that cannot happen at the same time in times exist together without time, since times do not run together), someone may perhaps expect to receive from us the causes of the change itself, which you yourself know to be a lengthy business. Yet it can be said briefly, which may perhaps suffice for a keen mind, that Christ had to be foretold by some sacraments when he was going to come, and announced by others when he had come; just as now, in speaking of this very thing, the difference of the matters has compelled us also to change words, since "to be foretold" is one thing and "to be announced" another, "when he was going to come" one thing and "when he had come" another.

Now let us see what follows in your letter. For you added that they say that Christ's preaching and teaching are in no way compatible with the customs of the state, since his precept is well known that we should render evil for evil to no one, and offer the other cheek to one who strikes us, and give our cloak to one who persists in taking our tunic, and go twice the distance of the journey with one who wishes to press us into service; all of which are asserted to be contrary to the customs of the state. "For who," they say, "would allow something to be taken from him by an enemy, or not wish to repay, by the law of war, evils to the plunderers of a Roman province?" These and similar words of detractors, or of those who say such things not as detractors but as inquirers, I would perhaps refute more laboriously were these discussions not being held with men of liberal education. Why then need we labor longer, and not rather ask them how those men could govern and enlarge the state, which they made great and wealthy from small and poor, who "preferred to pardon an injury received rather than avenge it"? How did Cicero, praising the character of Caesar, who was certainly the administrator of the state, say that he "was accustomed to forget nothing except injuries"? He said this as either so great a praiser or so great a flatterer; but if as a praiser, he knew Caesar to be such; if as a flatterer, he was showing that the ruler of the state ought to be such as he falsely proclaimed him to be. And what is not rendering evil for evil but shrinking from the lust for revenge, which is to prefer to pardon an injury received rather than avenge it, and to forget nothing except injuries?

When these things are read in their own authors, there is acclaim and applause; they seem to describe and proclaim the character worthy of a state destined to rule so many nations: that "they preferred to pardon an injury received rather than avenge it." But when it is read, by command of divine authority, that evil is not to be repaid for evil, when this so wholesome admonition resounds from a higher place to the congregations of the people, as in public schools of both sexes and of all ages and ranks, religion is accused as an enemy of the state. Yet if it were heeded as it deserves, it would establish, consecrate, strengthen, and enlarge the state far better than Romulus, Numa, Brutus, and those other famous men of the Roman nation. For what is a state (res publica) but the property of the people (res populi)? A common property, then, the property of the city. And what is a city but a multitude of human beings brought into a certain bond of concord? For in their authors it is read thus: "In a short time a diverse and wandering multitude had become, by concord, a city." Yet what precepts of concord did they ever decree should be read in their temples, since the wretched people were compelled to ask how they might worship their gods, who were in discord among themselves, without offending any of them? If they had chosen to imitate those gods in discord, the bond of concord would have been broken and the city would have fallen; which afterward began to happen through the civil wars, as their morals were gradually tarnished and corrupted.

And how many precepts of concord, not devised by human disputations but written by divine authority, are constantly read in the churches of Christ: who, even a stranger to that religion, is so deaf as not to know? For to this end belong also those things which they prefer to attack rather than learn: that the other cheek is to be offered to one who strikes, that the cloak also is to be given to one who wishes to take the tunic, that the road is to be doubled with one who presses us into service. For in this way the bad man is overcome by good, or rather, in the bad man the evil is overcome by good, and the man is freed from an evil not external and foreign but inward and his own, by which he is ravaged more gravely and more destructively than by the savagery of any enemy from outside. He, then, who overcomes evil with good patiently gives up temporal advantages, so as to show how much those things are to be despised for the sake of faith and justice, by loving which too much the other becomes bad. And so the one who did the injury may learn from the very person he injured what sort of things those are for which he did the injury, and may be won back, repentant, into concord, than which nothing is more useful to a city, overcome not by the force of one who rages but by the goodwill of one who endures. For it is rightly done when it seems likely to benefit the one for whose sake it is done, by working correction and concord in him. Certainly it must be done with this intention, even if another outcome follows, and the one for whose correction and pacification, as for his treatment and healing, this medicine was applied refuses to be corrected and pacified.

Otherwise, if we attended to the words and thought we must keep to their strict sense, the right cheek would not have to be offered if the left had been struck, since he says: "If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left also." But the left is more often struck, because a blow is easier from the right hand of the striker. But it is usually understood as if it had been said: If anyone has attacked your better things, offer him your lesser things too, lest, more eager for revenge than for patience, you despise eternal things for temporal, when rather temporal things are to be despised for eternal, as the left for the right. This was always the intention of the holy martyrs; for final just vengeance is demanded when no room for correction remains any longer, namely at the last and supreme judgment. But now we must beware lest, through desire for revenge, we lose, if nothing else, patience itself, which is to be valued more than all that an enemy can take away even against our will. For another evangelist, in the same saying, made no mention of the right cheek, but named only the cheek and the other one, so that it might be understood somewhat more distinctly in the one, while he himself simply commended the same patience. The just and devout man, then, ought to be ready patiently to bear the malice of those whom he seeks to make good, so that the number of the good may rather increase, not that he too, by like malice, should add himself to the number of the bad.

Finally, that these precepts belong more to the inward disposition of the heart than to the outward act, so that patience with goodwill is kept in the secret of the mind, while openly that is done which seems able to benefit those to whom we ought to wish well, is clearly shown by the fact that the Lord Christ himself, the unique example of patience, when he was struck in the face, answered: "If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike me?" So, if we look at the words, he by no means fulfilled his own precept; for he did not offer the other side to the one who struck him, but rather prevented the one who had done it from adding to the injury; and yet he had come ready not only to be struck in the face but also to be crucified and killed for those very people from whom he was suffering these things, for whom he said as he hung on the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Nor does the apostle Paul seem to have fulfilled the precept of his Lord and Master when he too, struck in the face, said to the chief priest: "God will strike you, you whitewashed wall. You sit to judge me according to the law, and contrary to the law you order me to be struck." And when the bystanders said, "You are insulting the chief priest," he wished to admonish them ironically of what he had said, so that those who were wise might understand that the whitewashed wall, that is, the hypocrisy of the Jewish priesthood, was already to be destroyed by the coming of Christ; for he said: "I did not know, brothers, that he is the chief priest; for it is written: You shall not speak evil of the ruler of your people"; when without doubt one who had grown up among that same people and been educated in the law there could not fail to know the chief priest, nor could he in any way deceive those to whom he was so well known into thinking that he did not know him.

These precepts of patience, then, are always to be kept in the readiness of the heart, and that same goodwill, not to render evil for evil, is always to be fulfilled in the will. But many things must also be done with those who are unwilling, who must be punished with a kind of kindly severity, whose benefit must be considered rather than their wishes; and their writers have most brilliantly praised this in the ruler of a city. For in correcting a son, however harshly, a father's love is certainly never lost; yet what the son does not want and what pains him is done, since even against his will he seems to need healing by pain. And so, if this earthly state kept the Christian precepts, even wars themselves would not be waged without goodwill, so that the conquered might more easily be brought into a peaceful fellowship of piety and justice. For he from whom the license of wickedness is taken away is conquered to his benefit, since nothing is more unhappy than the happiness of sinners, by which a penal impunity is nourished and a bad will, like an enemy within, is strengthened. But the perverse and contrary hearts of mortals think human affairs happy when the splendor of buildings is regarded and the ruin of souls is not regarded, when huge theaters are built up and the foundations of virtues dug away, when the madness of extravagance is glorious and works of mercy are mocked, when actors live in luxury on what abounds to the rich and the poor scarcely have necessities, when God, who cries out against this public evil by the public voices of his teaching, is blasphemed by ungodly peoples, and such gods are sought in whose honor those very theatrical disgraces of body and soul are celebrated. If God allows these things to flourish, then he is more gravely angry; if he lets them go unpunished, then he punishes more severely. But when he overthrows the supports of vices and makes abundant lusts poor, he opposes them mercifully; for mercifully, if it were possible, even wars would be waged by the good, so that by taming licentious desires those vices might be destroyed which ought to have been either rooted out or suppressed by just rule.

For if Christian teaching condemned all wars, this would rather have been said in the Gospel to the soldiers who asked for counsel for their salvation: that they should throw away their arms and withdraw from military service altogether. But it was said to them: "Do not extort from anyone, do not falsely accuse anyone, let your wages suffice you." When he told them that their own wages ought to suffice them, he certainly did not forbid them to serve. Therefore, let those who say that Christ's teaching is opposed to the state give us an army of such soldiers as the teaching of Christ commanded soldiers to be; let them give such provincials, such husbands, such wives, such parents, such children, such masters, such slaves, such kings, such judges, and finally such payers and collectors of what is owed to the treasury itself as Christian teaching commands them to be; and then let them dare to say that it is opposed to the state; nay rather, let them not hesitate to confess that, if it is obeyed, it is the great salvation of the state.

And why should I answer the claim that many evils befell the Roman Empire through certain Christian emperors? This general complaint is slanderous. For if they mentioned anything more openly about particular past emperors, I too could mention similar or perhaps even worse things about emperors who were not Christians, so that they might understand that these are the faults either of men, not of the teaching, or not of the emperors but of others without whom emperors can do nothing. For from what time the Roman state began to go to ruin is clear enough; their own writings speak. Long before the name of Christ had shone on earth it was said: "O city for sale, and soon to perish, if it finds a buyer!" In the book on the war of Catiline too, certainly before the coming of Christ, the same most noble historian of theirs does not keep silent about when the army of the Roman people first became accustomed to make love, to drink, to admire statues, paintings, and embossed vessels, to seize them privately and publicly, to plunder shrines, and to pollute everything sacred and profane. When, therefore, the avarice and rapacity of corrupt and abandoned morals spared neither men nor even those whom they took for gods, then that praiseworthy glory and well-being of the state began to perish. What progress the worst vices then made, and with how great harm to human affairs that wickedness prospered, would take long to tell now. Let them hear their own satirist speaking truth in his chatter: "Once a humble fortune kept the Latin women chaste, and toil and short sleep and hands roughened and hardened by Tuscan wool did not let their small houses be touched by vice, nor Hannibal close to the city, and husbands standing on the Colline tower. Now we suffer the evils of long peace; luxury, more savage than arms, has settled on us and avenges the conquered world. No crime and no deed of lust is lacking since Roman poverty perished." Why then do you expect me to enlarge on how great evils wickedness brought in when raised up by prosperity, since even those who looked at it somewhat more wisely saw that the passing of Roman poverty was more to be lamented than that of Roman wealth? For in the former integrity of morals was preserved; but through the latter dire wickedness, worse than any enemy, broke in, not upon the walls of the city but upon the minds of the citizens themselves.

Thanks be to the Lord our God, who sent us unique help against these evils. For where would this river of the horrible wickedness of the human race not have carried us, whom would it not have engulfed, into what depth would it not have plunged us, had not the cross of Christ been fixed, more prominently and more firmly, on so great a mass, as it were, of authority, so that by grasping its strength we might stand firm and not be swallowed up, swept away in the vast whirlpool of this world by those who counsel evil or drive us into evil? For in this sink of the worst morals and of the ancient discipline lost, heavenly authority above all had to come and come to our aid, to persuade us to voluntary poverty, to continence, goodwill, justice, concord, and true piety, and the other bright and strong virtues of life, not only for living this life most honorably, nor only for the most harmonious fellowship of the earthly city, but also for attaining everlasting salvation and the heavenly and divine commonwealth of a certain everlasting people, to which faith, hope, and love enroll us as citizens; so that, as long as we are pilgrims away from it, we may bear with those, if we cannot correct them, who want the state to stand with vices unpunished, the state which the first Romans established and enlarged by virtues, even though they did not have true piety toward the true God, which could also have led them by a saving religion into the eternal city; yet they kept a certain uprightness of its own kind, which could suffice for founding, enlarging, and preserving an earthly city. For God showed in the most wealthy and famous empire of the Romans how much civic virtues could achieve even without true religion, so that it might be understood that, when this is added, human beings become citizens of another city, whose king is truth, whose law is love, whose measure is eternity.

But who would think it even worth a laugh that they try to compare Apollonius and Apuleius and the others most skilled in magical arts with Christ, or even to prefer them to him? Though it is more tolerable when they compare these men to him rather than their gods; for Apollonius was, it must be admitted, far better than that author and perpetrator of so many acts of debauchery whom they call Jupiter. "These things," they say, "are fables." Then let them go on praising the luxurious, licentious, and plainly sacrilegious prosperity of the state which invented these disgraces of the gods, which not only set them forth to be heard in fables but also displayed them to be seen in theaters, where crimes were more numerous than deities, and which the gods themselves were glad to have shown to them, when they ought to have punished their worshipers for watching them even patiently. "But they themselves," they say, "are not the ones celebrated in the lie of such fables." Who then are these who are appeased by the celebration of such disgraces? Because Christian teaching has exposed the perversity and deceit of these demons, through whom magical arts also deceive human minds, because it has laid it open to the whole world, because it has distinguished the holy angels from their malignity, because it has warned that they are rather to be guarded against, and how, it is called an enemy of the state; as if, were temporal happiness wholly to be obtained through them, any unhappiness whatever were not rather to be chosen. But God did not wish there to be doubt on this point either; for he honored the first people, who worshiped the one true God and despised utterly false gods, with such prosperity in earthly things, as long as the Old Testament, in which the New Testament is veiled, was to be overshadowed, that anyone may understand that even that prosperity is not in the power of demons but of that One whom angels serve and before whom demons tremble.

For Apuleius, to speak of him above all, who as an African is better known to us Africans, with all his magical arts could not attain, I will not say to a kingdom, but not even to any judicial office in the state, though he was born of an honorable family in his homeland, liberally educated, and endowed with great eloquence. Or did he perhaps, as a philosopher, despise these things voluntarily, he who as priest of the province made much of giving games and clothing the hunters, and went to law, against the opposition of some citizens, to have a statue of himself set up among the people of Oea, from which city he had his wife? Lest this escape posterity, he committed to memory the written speech of that same lawsuit. As far as this earthly happiness is concerned, then, that magician was what he could be. Hence it appears that he was nothing more, not because he did not wish it, but because he could not. And yet he defended himself most eloquently against certain people who had brought against him the charge of magical arts. Hence I wonder at his admirers, who proclaim that he did some miracles or other by those arts, that they try to be witnesses against his own defense. But let them see whether they themselves bear true testimony and he made a false defense. Let those, if they are wise, take note, who seek magical arts only for earthly happiness or out of damnable curiosity, or who, though innocent of them, praise them with dangerous admiration; and let them see our David, who without any such arts came from shepherd of sheep to royal dignity, whose sins and merits alike faithful Scripture did not keep silent, so that we might know both by what means God is not offended and by what means, when offended, he is appeased.

As regards the miracles that are shown to human senses as astonishing, those greatly err who compare magicians with the holy prophets, who excel in the renown of great miracles; how much more if they compare them with Christ, whom those prophets, to whom no magicians whatever can in any way be compared, foretold would come, both according to the flesh which he took from the virgin and according to the divinity by which he is never separated from the Father! I see that I have written a very long letter, and yet I have not said everything about Christ that might somehow suffice either for those who, by a slower mind, cannot attain divine things, or for those whom, though they are keenly moved, a contentious zeal and the preoccupation of long-standing error keep from understanding. But find out what further moves them against it, and write back, so that, with God's help, we may take care to answer everything, either in letters or in books. May you be happy in the Lord by his grace and mercy, my excellent lord, deservedly distinguished, most dear and most longed-for son.