Letters 158.1–160.4

I press for the reply owed to the letter I sent; and I would have liked first to learn what I asked and afterward to inquire into this. But let me tell, since you deign to hear it, what made me impatient, so that I hasten to know this too, if it can be known in this life. I had a certain young man as my secretary, the son of Armenius, a presbyter of Melonita. When he was already sinking into the world (for he was taking down shorthand for the proconsul's legal assessor), God rescued him through my lowliness. He was, as boyhood is, quick and somewhat restless; but as he grew older (for he died in his twenty-second year), gravity of character and a good, watchful life so adorned him that it is a great delight to keep his memory. He was skilled in shorthand and very diligent in writing; he had also begun to be devoted to reading, so that he himself urged my sluggishness to read in the night hours; for for some time he used to read to me himself at night when all was quiet, and he would not pass over a passage unless he had understood it, but would repeat it a third and a fourth time and not let it go until what he sought was clear to him. I had begun to regard him not as a boy and a secretary but as a friend, quite close and dear; for even his conversation delighted me.

He also desired, and it was granted him, to depart and be with Christ. For he was ill for sixteen days at his parents' house, and, mindful of himself, he spoke of the Scriptures through almost the whole of his illness. But as he began to be near the end of his life, he sang psalms in the hearing of all: "My soul longs and hastens to the courts of God," and after this again he sang: "You have anointed my head with oil, and how glorious is your cup that inebriates!" With this he was occupied, in this consolation he delighted. Then, when he began to be released, he began to sign himself on the forehead, so that his hand was coming down to his mouth, which he wished to sign too, when the inner man, well renewed from day to day, had already left the house of clay. Such joy has grown in me that I think that, having left his own body, he has entered my mind and there grants me a certain brightness of his presence. How greatly I rejoice in his release and security cannot be told. For I had shown no slight concern for him, fearing for his youthful age. Indeed, I took care to ask him whether perhaps he had been defiled by contact with a woman; he testified that he was free, which heaped up our joy all the more. So he was released. We provided obsequies quite honorable and worthy of so great a soul; for during three days we praised the Lord with hymns over his tomb, and on the third day we offered the sacraments of redemption.

But behold, two days later, a certain respectable widow of Figentes, Urbica, a servant of God, who said she had been a widow for twelve years, saw a dream of this kind. She sees a certain deacon, who had departed from the body four years earlier, preparing a palace with servants and handmaids of God, virgins and widows. It was being adorned so that the brightness of the place shone and the whole place was thought to be of silver. When she inquired more eagerly for whom these things were being prepared, that deacon answered that they were being prepared for the young man, the presbyter's son, who had been taken up the day before. And in the same palace an old man in white appeared, who ordered two men in white to go and take the body from the tomb and lift it to heaven. And when, she said, the body had been taken from the tomb and lifted into heaven, branches of virgin roses (for so the closed ones are usually called) sprang up from the same tomb.

I have told what happened. Now deign to hear my question and teach me what I seek; for this soul's departure compels me to ask such things. When we are in the body, we have an inner sense, skillful in proportion to the liveliness of our zeal, and the more watchful and fervent the more zealous we have been; and it seems probable that we are still held back by the hindrance of the body. Who could recount all that the mind suffers from the body? Amid these disturbances and troubles coming from suggestions, temptations, necessities, and various calamities, the mind does not abandon its strength; it resists, it conquers; sometimes it is conquered. Yet, since it remembers itself, roused by such great labors it becomes more agile and watchful, bursts every knot of malice, and passes on to better things. What I mean your Holiness deigns to understand. Since, then, while we are in this life we are hindered by such wants, and yet, as it is written, "we more than conquer through him who loved us," what are we when we go out of the body and escape every burden and agile sin?

And first I ask whether there is some body which does not desert the incorporeal thing, that is, the very substance of the soul, when it has left this earthly body; perhaps one of the four elements, either airy or ethereal. For if the soul is incorporeal and lacks all body, then there is one soul of all. And where will that rich man in purple be, and Lazarus full of sores? How, too, will they be distinguished by their merits, so that one has punishment and the other joy, if there appears one soul out of all the incorporeal ones, unless indeed those things were signified figuratively? But it is certain that, if they are held in places, they are held by bodies, as that rich man in the flame and the other in Abraham's bosom. If there are places, there are bodies, and incorporeal souls are in bodies. Or if punishments or rewards are in consciences, whatever this one soul is, made from many souls, let it be afflicted and rejoice in one, as appears: a substance gathered from many souls. Or if it is said that, just as the incorporeal mind is one thing, and in it are memory, will, and understanding, and all these are incorporeal causes and have a fitting share of functions and yet one does not hinder another, then I think it might somehow be answered that punishments accompany some and rewards others in the one substance gathered from many

souls. Or if it is not so, what prevents each mind, when it lacks this solid body, from having another body, so that the mind always animates some body, or one into which it makes its passage, if there is any region to which necessity compels it to go? For even the angels cannot be called many unless they are numbered by bodies, as the Truth himself says in the gospel: "I could ask my Father to send me twelve legions of angels." Further, since it is agreed that Samuel was seen in a body when he was raised at Saul's request, and since it is evident from the gospel that Moses, whose body was buried, came in a body to the Lord on the mountain when they stood together? Although in the apocrypha too, in the Secrets of Moses himself, a writing which lacks authority, it is said that when he went up the mountain to die, it came about by the power of the body that what was committed to the earth was one thing and what was joined to the accompanying angel another. But I do not feel much pressed to bring forward the opinion of the apocrypha, once those earlier points are settled. We must look, then, and investigate either by authority or by reason what is being asked. But it is said that the future resurrection shows that the soul has been without any body. That is not much of an obstacle, since those angels, who are invisible even in their bodies, wished to appear and be seen, and, whatever that disposition of bodies is that is worthy of their spirits, they nevertheless appeared in human form to Abraham and to Tobias. So it may be that the resurrection of this flesh, which is rightly believed, will indeed take place, yet that the soul will be restored in such a way that it is found never to have been without some body. For since this body consists of four elements, it seems to lose one, namely heat, when the soul seems to depart from this body. For what is earthy remains, moisture is not lacking, nor is the element of cold matter absent; only that heat is taken away, which perhaps the mind itself draws with it, if it moves from place to place. This much I would say for now about the body.

It also seems to me that if, placed in the body, as I have said, the mind is vigorous and uses a strenuous intention of mind, how much more, when set free, will it be agile, vigorous, strenuous, fervent, intent, and will become more capable and better, as it tasted virtue while placed in the body. Having laid the body aside, with the cloud as it were wiped away, made wholly serene and placed in tranquillity without temptation, it may see what it desired, embrace what it loved, remember also its friends, and recognize both those it had sent before it and those it left behind. Perhaps it is so; I do not know, I seek to learn. But it troubles me greatly if the mind receives a kind of sleep, so that it is like what it is when it sleeps while placed in the body, as it were buried and living only in hope, but otherwise doing nothing, knowing nothing, especially if it is stirred by no dream. This thing terrifies me greatly and shows the mind as it were extinguished.

I also ask this: if the soul is found to have a body, whether it also has some sense. Certainly, if, as I think, it can have no need of smelling, nor of tasting, nor even of touching, I doubt whether seeing and hearing remain. For what is it that demons are said to hear, not only in the people they torment (for there too there is a question), but also when they appear in their own bodies? As for sight, how do they pass from place to place, if they have a body, if they lack the guidance of the sense of sight? Do you think human souls are not so, when they go out of bodies, that they both have some body and do not lack some sense? What, too, of the fact that many dead persons have been seen entering houses as they used to, by day or by night, by people awake and walking about (I have heard this more than once), and of what is said, that often at a certain part of the night, in places where bodies are buried, and especially in basilicas, there are noises and prayers? For I remember hearing this not from one person only; for a certain holy presbyter is a witness of such a vision, who saw a multitude of such beings coming out of the baptistery in shining bodies and afterward heard prayers in the middle of the church itself. All these things, then, either favor that inquiry of ours, or, if they are tales, I would nevertheless like to know something about this wonderful matter, since they come and visit and are seen apart from dreams.

From these arises another question. For I am not now concerned with the fantasy which an untrained heart invents for itself; I speak of visitations. As Joseph was visited in a dream, as many have been visited, so too our own whom we have sent before us sometimes come; they themselves appear in a dream and speak. For I remember that I myself saw Profuturus and Privatus and Servilius, holy men whom I remember to have gone before us from the monastery, speaking to me, and that it happened as they said. Or if it is some better spirit that takes their form and visits the mind, let him see to it to whom all things are naked from the top of the head. If, then, the Lord deigns to tell your Holiness anything about all these things by reason, I ask you to deign to make me a sharer in this knowledge. And I did not want to pass over this either; for perhaps it bears on my inquiry.

The young man himself of whom we speak, at the time when he was being released, departed as if summoned in a certain way. For a fellow pupil and fellow reader of his, with whom he took shorthand for me, who had left the body eight months before, was seen in a dream to have come. When he was asked by the one who then saw him why he had come, he said: "I have come to take my friend from here." And so it happened. For in that very house there also appeared to a certain old man, almost awake, a man carrying a laurel branch in his hand, with something written on it. And besides what was seen there, this is further added: after the young man's death, his father the presbyter had begun to stay in the monastery with the old bishop Theasius for the sake of consolation; but on the third day after the boy's death the same boy was seen to enter the monastery, and was asked by a certain brother in a dream whether he knew that he had died; he said that he knew; whether he had been received by God; and this too he reported with great rejoicing. And when the reason was asked why he had come, he then said: "I have been sent to fetch my father." The one to whom these things were shown awakes and tells it. It reached the ears of Bishop Theasius, who, disturbed, rebuked the man who told it, lest it should easily reach the presbyter's ears and he be troubled by such news. In short: about four days after the visitation, while he was speaking (for he had felt a slight fever, there was no danger, the physician was away, and he testified that there was no cause for anxiety at all), when he lay down on his bed, the same presbyter was released. Nor shall I be silent about this: on the very day on which the boy was being released, he asked his father for the kiss of peace, asked three times, and at each kiss said to his father, "Let us give thanks to God together," and compelled his father to say it with him, as if exhorting him to depart from this life in common. For between the two deaths seven days are counted. What shall become of such great things? Who will be the most faithful teacher of these hidden causes? The heat of my heart has poured itself out to you in a time of distress. The ordering of the departure of the young man and of his father is manifest, since "two sparrows will not fall to the ground without the Father's will."

That the soul cannot be wholly without any body is shown, I think, by this: that God alone is always without any body. But that the soul will be much more watchful after its passage is shown, I think, by its laying aside so great a bodily mass; for then, freed from so great a bond in action and knowledge, it appears, I think, more excellent; and all that spiritual rest shows it free from all disturbances and errors, and does not make it withered or as it were sluggish, torpid, and entangled, since it is enough for it to enjoy even the freedom it has obtained, when it is without the world and the body. For you have said wisely that it feeds on understanding and puts its spiritual mouth to the fountain of life, where it is happy and blessed in the proper character of its mind. For once I saw brother Servilius after his death in a dream, while I was still living there in the monastery … that we labor by reasoning to strive toward understanding, whereas he and such as he remain in the very delight of contemplation.

I ask also that you show me in how many ways wisdom is spoken of: as wisdom is God; as wisdom is the wise mind; in what way it is spoken of as light; as the wisdom of Bezalel, who made the tabernacle or the ointment; as the wisdom of Solomon; or any other; and how they differ from one another; and whether that one eternal Wisdom, coeternal with the Father, is to be understood in these degrees, as the different gifts of the Holy Spirit are spoken of, who distributes to each his own as he wills; or whether, apart from that one Wisdom which was not made, these others were made and have their own substance, or are effects and have received their name from the definition of the work. I ask many things; may the Lord give you both the grace of finding and the wisdom of dictating and of writing to us quickly. I have written unskillfully and rustically; but since you deign to know what I ask, I beseech you through Christ the Lord to correct me in these things and to teach me what you understand I desire to know.

This brother, named Barbarus, a servant of God who has long been settled at Hippo and is a fervent and zealous hearer of the word of God, has asked for a letter from us to your Holiness, in which we commend him to you in the Lord and through him send you the greeting we owe. As for your Holiness's letters, in which you have woven enormous questions, to answer them is a most laborious task even for people with leisure and endowed with a far greater power of discussion and sharpness of understanding than we have. Of your two letters, in which you inquire into many great matters, one somehow went astray and, though long sought, could not be found; the other, which was found, contains a most charming commendation of a good and chaste young servant of God, telling how he departed this life and by what testimonies of the brothers' visions his merit could be made known to you. Then, taking this occasion, you propose and turn over a most obscure question about the soul: whether it goes out of the body with some body by which it can be carried to bodily places or be contained in bodily places. The treatment of this matter, then, if indeed it can be examined to clarity by such as we are, demands most laborious care and effort, and therefore a mind wholly free from these occupations. But if you wish to hear briefly what I think, I by no means believe that the soul goes out of the body with a body.

As for how those visions and predictions of the future come about, let him try to explain it who knows by what power such great things are produced in every mind when it thinks. For we see and plainly perceive that innumerable images of many visible things, and of things belonging to the other bodily senses, are formed in it (it does not matter now how orderly or confusedly they are formed); but simply because they are formed, which is evident, whoever can explain by what power and in what way they are formed (and all these are certainly daily and continuous) may dare to presume something and to define something even about those very rare visions. But I dare the less to do so, the less able I am to explain how there comes about even that which we experience in ourselves in continuous life, waking and sleeping. For while I was dictating this letter to you, I was beholding you yourself in my mind, though you were certainly absent and unaware of it, and I was imagining, according to the knowledge I have of you, how you might be affected by these words; and how this came about in my mind I could not grasp or investigate, though I was certain that it did not come about by bodily masses or bodily qualities, though it was formed most like a body. Take this meanwhile as dictated by a busy man in haste. In the twelfth of the books which I have written on Genesis, this question is vigorously handled, and that discussion grows into a forest of many examples of things experienced and credibly heard. What I have been able to do or accomplish in it you will judge when you read it, if the Lord deigns to grant that I may now publish those books, corrected as suitably as I can, and no longer keep the expectation of many brothers in suspense with a long delay.

I shall tell you one thing briefly, for you to think about. Our brother Gennadius, a physician known to almost everyone and very dear to us, who now lives at Carthage and was eminent at Rome in the practice of his art, a religious man as you know and most kind in his care of the poor with untiring mercy and a most ready spirit, nevertheless once doubted, as he recently told us, when he was still a young man and most fervent in these almsgivings, whether there was any life after death. Since God would by no means abandon his mind and his works of mercy, there appeared to him in his sleep a striking youth worthy of attention, who said to him: "Follow me." As he followed him, he came to a certain city, where he began to hear on the right side the sounds of a most sweet song, beyond the usual and familiar sweetness; then, when he wondered what it was, the youth said it was the hymns of the blessed and the saints. What he said he saw on the left side I do not quite remember. He woke up, the dream vanished, and he thought of it only as much as of a dream.

But on another night, behold, the same youth appeared to him again and asked whether he recognized him; he answered that he recognized him well and fully. Then the youth asked where he knew him from. Nor did his memory fail him as to what he should answer; he told the whole vision and the hymns of the saints, to hear which he had come under his guidance, with the ease with which one recalls very recent things. Here the youth asked whether he had seen what he had told in sleep or awake; he answered: "In sleep." And the youth said: "You remember well; it is true that you saw those things in sleep; but know that you are seeing even now in sleep." Hearing this, he believed it was so and confirmed it by his answer. Then the one who was teaching him added: "Where is your body now?" He answered: "In my bedroom." "Do you know," he said, "that your eyes are now bound, closed, and idle in that same body, and that you see nothing with those eyes?" He answered: "I know." Then the youth said: "What, then, are these eyes with which you see me?" At this he could not find what to answer and fell silent. While he hesitated, the youth disclosed what he was trying to teach by these questions, and at once said: "Just as those eyes of your flesh are now idle and do nothing while you sleep and lie in bed, and yet there are these eyes with which you behold me and enjoy this vision, so, when you have died, while the eyes of your flesh do nothing, there will be life in you by which you live, and sense by which you perceive. Take care from now on not to doubt that life remains after death." So the faithful man says that his doubt on this matter was taken away; by whose teaching but the providence and mercy of God?

By this story, someone might say, we have not solved the question of so great a matter but increased it. But although everyone is free to believe or not believe these words, each has himself to turn to as a most profound question. Every day a man wakes, a man sleeps, a man thinks. Let him say where these things come from that are like the forms, like the qualities, like the motions of bodies, and yet are not of bodily matter. Let him say, if he can; but if he cannot, why does he rush to pronounce as it were a definite judgment about very rare or unexperienced things, when he cannot solve continuous and daily ones? For my part, although I cannot at all explain in words how these quasi-bodily things come about without a body, yet, just as I know that they do not come about by the body, I wish I knew in the same way how to discern the things that are sometimes seen through the spirit and are thought to be seen through the body, and in what way the visions of those whom error or impiety often deludes are distinguished, since many things are told that are similar to the visions of the godly and holy! If I had wished to mention examples of these, I would have lacked time rather than abundance. Remembering us, may you flourish in the Lord's mercy, most blessed lord, venerable and longed-for brother.

Perfect reason is that which provides knowledge of all things, and above all of eternal things, which are grasped by the intellect. That it is eternal, that it must have been eternal, that that is eternal which neither began nor ends nor changes nor varies, reason itself teaches and shows; and reason must necessarily be eternal, not only because it teaches and demonstrates eternal things, but much more because eternity itself cannot be without reason; and eternity, I think, would not exist if reason itself had not been eternal. Further, reason itself demonstrates that God exists, or must have existed, and that it could not be otherwise than that God should exist. Whether or not there were any who knew this, nevertheless, since God is eternal, there is no doubt that reason is eternal, which showed that God must exist, and showed itself in such a way to be coeternal with him.

There are some things which are compelled by reason to exist, so that reason is prior and the effect posterior of the thing which reason shows will exist; as, for example, when the world was made, reason held that the world should be made. Reason, then, is prior to the world. The things which reason knew would exist followed, so that reason is first, and afterward the working of the world. Now, then, since reason shows that God exists, or that it is necessary that God exist, which shall we put before which? Reason before God, as reason before the world, or God before reason, without which it is probable that God could in no way exist? For if for God to exist eternally is to exist by reason and to exist eternally, then reason either is God or is God's, as reason itself teaches. If it is God himself, reason shows that God is reason, and these can be coeval and coeternal with each other. But if this reason is a likeness of God, it shows likewise that reason is God's, and this will be coeval and coeternal. Reason itself shows that God could not exist in such a way unless he were God. If this reason were taken away (it is wicked to say it), there would be no God, if reason did not show that God is necessary. God exists, then, when there is reason for God to exist. Because God exists, then, there is without doubt reason, which taught that he exists.

What, then, if it can be said, is first in God, reason or God? But God will not exist unless there is reason to teach that God must exist; reason too will not exist unless God exists. Nothing, then, is first or last there. This divine nature, then, in a certain way has reason and God together. But one begets one: either reason begets God or God reason. Reason and God might perhaps be called subject or in a subject: God and reason, one in one. God rightly begets reason, because reason demonstrates that God exists. God is understood from reason as the Son from the Father, and reason from God as the Father from the Son. For reason itself, with God, is God. For God was never without reason, nor reason without God. For God exists if reason exists, and the Son exists if the Father exists; so that, if reason is taken away, as has been said (what it is not right to say), not even God himself exists; for through his reason there is the act and working by which God exists. Let us say the same things again. If reason did not exist, God did not exist; and if God does not exist, reason did not exist. Reason, then, and God are an everlasting thing; God and reason likewise an everlasting thing. The connection and union of reason with God and of God with reason, of the Father with the Son and the Son with the Father, in a way provide each other with the principles and causes of existing, because the one cannot exist without the other. Words fail, and whatever is said is said so as not to be silent. Shall we call God the offspring of reason, or reason the offspring of God, since neither can the fruit exist without the root nor is the root anything without the fruit? Let a comparison be drawn, so that something of understanding about God may be signified: for in a grain of wheat too there lives a fruitful reason by which it is not allowed to be barren; but again, if there were no grain of wheat, reason would have nothing from which to produce this.

Since, then, reason, which is God, shows either that God is reason or that reason is God, in a certain way showing the one by the other, the Father is not shown except through the Son, and the Son is not shown except through the Father; so that the Father is as it were in silence when one comes through the Son to the Father, and the Son is as it were in silence when one comes through the Father to the Son; so that in a certain way one is hidden and the other shown, so that the one in showing himself shows the other too, and one cannot be known while the other remains hidden; for "whoever has seen me," he says, "has seen the Father," and "no one comes to the Father except through me," and "no one comes to me unless the Father draws him." We have entered upon an arduous and exceedingly difficult business, to understand something about God while not understanding. Yet, just as all things that exist are not understood and are unknowable without a certain form, so much more is nothing known without the Son, that is, without reason. For what? Was the Father ever without reason, irrational (alogos)? Who would dare say so? We must recognize, then, by reason that God is one from one, or one in one, at once into one, because God is one, in whom there must also be that love, since reason itself teaches that love must always be had, or God commands that love be shown.