Letters 24.1–26.6

This is true love, this is perfect charity, which you have shown to be in you toward our lowliness, truly holy lord, deservedly most blessed and longed for. For through our servant Julian, returning from Carthage, we received a letter bringing us such light from Your Holiness that we seemed not to come to know your love but to recognize it again, since that love flowed from him who predestined us for himself from the beginning of the world, in whom we were made before we were born, because he made us, and not we ourselves, he who made the things that are to be. Formed, then, by his foreknowledge and work into a likeness of wills and the unity of faith, or the faith of unity, we have been joined by a love that came before acquaintance, so that we knew each other, the Spirit revealing it, before seeing each other in the body. We rejoice, therefore, and glory in the Lord, who, one and the same, works his love in his own throughout the earth by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out upon all flesh, gladdening his city with the rush of the river; among whose citizens he has deservedly placed you as a leader, with the princes of his people, in an apostolic see; and he has willed that we too, whom he raised up when we were crushed and lifted up from the earth in our need, should be counted in your lot. But we rejoice more in that gift of the Lord by which he has placed us in the dwelling of your heart and deigned to bring us so deep into your inmost affections that we may claim a special confidence in your love, provoked by these services and gifts, so that we may not love you with diffidence or lightly.

For we have received an outstanding mark of your love and care: the work of our brother Augustine, a holy man and perfect in Christ the Lord, completed in five books, which we so admire and look up to that we believe its words were dictated by God. So, trusting in your oneness of heart, which we must revere, we have dared to write to him too, presuming that through you we shall be excused to him for our lack of skill and commended to his love; as also to all the saints, whom you will no doubt take care, with the same affection with which you have deigned to cheer us with your kind services though absent, to have greeted in turn with our respects through Your Holiness, both the companions of Your Holiness in the clergy and the imitators of your faith and virtue in the monasteries. For although you act among the peoples and over the people, ruling the sheep of the Lord's pasture as a watchful shepherd with anxious vigils, yet by renouncing the world and rejecting flesh and blood you have made a desert for yourself, set apart from the many, called among the few.

As a kind of return gift, though unequal to you in every way, I have, as you had requested, provided that History of all times by Eusebius, the venerable bishop of Constantinople. But the delay in obeying was due to the fact that, following your instruction, since I myself did not have this book, I found it at Rome with our truly most holy father Domnio, who no doubt obliged me all the more readily in this kindness because I told him it was to be sent to you. However, since you have deigned to tell me where you are, as you yourself advised, we have written to your venerable fellow in the crown, our father Aurelius, asking that, if you are now staying at Hippo Regius, he deign to send you there our letter and the parchment copied at Carthage. We have also asked the holy men Comes and Evodius, whom we have come to know through your words, which bear witness to their love, to take care to write themselves, so that father Domnio might not be without his book too long and the copy sent to you might remain with you without need of returning it.

But I ask this of you especially, since you have filled me, undeserving and unexpecting, with great love for you: that in return for this history of the times you relate to me the whole history of Your Holiness; that you explain who you are by family, from what home you were called by so great a Lord, by what beginnings you were set apart from your mother's womb and, having renounced the stock of flesh and blood, passed over to the mother of the children of God who rejoices in her offspring, and were transferred into the royal and priestly race. For as to what you indicated, that you learned the name of our lowliness at Milan when you were being initiated there, I confess that I want to learn more about it, so that I may know you in every respect, and may rejoice the more if it was by our father Ambrose, whom I must revere, that you were either invited to the faith or consecrated to the priesthood, so that we both may be seen to have the same author. For although I was baptized by Delphinus at Bordeaux, and ordained by Lampius at Barcelona in Spain through the force of the people, suddenly inflamed, yet I have always been nourished in the faith by the love of Ambrose and am now cherished by him in the order of the priesthood. In short, he wished to claim me for his own clergy, so that, though I live in other places, I may be counted his presbyter.

But so that you may not be ignorant of anything about me, know that I am a sinner of very long standing, who not so long ago was led out of darkness and the shadow of death and drew the breath of life-giving air, and not so long ago put my hand to the plough and took up the cross of the Lord; that we may be able to carry it to the end, let us be helped by your prayers. This reward will be added to your merits, if by your intercession you lighten our burdens. For the saint who helps one who toils (for we do not dare to say brother) will be exalted like a great city. And you indeed are a city built on a mountain, or a lamp lit on a lampstand, shining with sevenfold brightness, while we lie hidden under the bushel of our sins. Visit us with your letters and bring us out into the light in which you yourself move, conspicuous above the golden lampstands; your words will be a light to our paths, and our head will be anointed with the oil of your lamp; and faith will be kindled when we take from the spirit of your mouth the food of the mind and the light of the soul.

Peace and the grace of God be with you, and may the crown of righteousness await you on that day, lord father, deservedly most beloved, venerable and most longed for. We ask that the blessed companions and imitators of Your Holiness, our brothers in the Lord, if they will allow it, both in the churches and in the monasteries at Carthage, Thagaste and Hippo Regius, and in all your parishes and all places known to you throughout Africa, who serve the Lord in the Catholic faith, be greeted with much affection and respect. If you receive the parchment of holy Domnio, you will deign to send it back to us copied. And I ask you to write and tell me which hymn of mine you recognized. We have sent Your Holiness one loaf as a sign of unity, in which the solidity of the Trinity is also contained. You will make this bread a blessing by deigning to receive it.

The love of Christ, which urges us on and binds us, though absent, through the unity of faith, has itself driven off shyness and given me confidence to write to you, and has set you in my inmost heart through your writings. These, abounding in the resources of the schools and sweet from heavenly honeycombs, I now hold in five books as physicians and nurses of my soul; we received them by the gift of our blessed and venerable bishop Alypius, not for our own instruction only, but also for the benefit of the church in many cities. These books, then, I now have for reading; in them I delight; from them I take food, not the food that perishes, but that which works the substance of eternal life through our faith, by which we are incorporated into Christ Jesus our Lord, since our faith, which neglects visible things and gapes after invisible ones, is strengthened by the writings and examples of the faithful, through the love that believes all things according to the truth of almighty God. O truly salt of the earth, by which our hearts are seasoned so that they may not fade away through the error of the world! O lamp worthily set on the lampstand of the church, which, pouring far and wide over Catholic cities the light fed from the sevenfold lamp with the oil of gladness, scatters the darkness of the heretics, however thick, and clears the light of truth from the confusion of darkness by the splendour of your illuminating speech!

You see, brother of one mind, admirable in Christ the Lord and to be revered, how intimately I have come to know you, with what amazement I admire you, with what great love I embrace you, I who daily enjoy conversation with your writings and feed on the breath of your mouth. For I might rightly call your mouth a pipe of living water and a vein of the eternal spring, because Christ has become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life. Longing for it, my soul has thirsted for you, and my land has desired to be drunk with the abundance of your river. And so, since you have armed me well against the Manichaeans with this Pentateuch of yours, if you have prepared any defences also against other enemies of the Catholic faith (for our enemy, 'who has a thousand arts of harm', must be fought with weapons as varied as the ambushes with which he attacks), I ask you not to refuse to bring out for me from your armoury and confer on me the arms of righteousness. For I am still a toiling sinner under a heavy burden, a veteran in the ranks of sinners, but a new recruit to the eternal King in incorporeal warfare. Wretched man, I have till now admired the wisdom of the world, and through useless letters and reprobate prudence I was foolish and dumb before God. After I had grown old among my enemies and become vain in my thoughts, I lifted up my eyes to the mountains, looking up to the precepts of the law and the gifts of grace, whence my help comes from the Lord, who, not repaying according to our iniquities, gave light to the blind, loosed the fettered, humbled the wrongly exalted, that he might lift up the piously humbled.

I follow, then, with steps not yet equal to theirs, the great footsteps of the righteous, to see whether by your prayers I can lay hold of that for which I have been laid hold of by the mercies of God. Guide, then, a little one crawling uncertainly, and teach him to walk in your steps. For I do not want you to consider me by the age of my bodily birth rather than of my spiritual rising. For in the flesh my age is now that of the man healed by the apostles at the Beautiful Gate by the power of the word. But in the birth of the soul I am still at the age of those infants who were sacrificed by the wounds aimed at Christ, ran ahead of the victim of the Lamb with worthy blood, and inaugurated the Lord's passion. And so, as an infant still nursing on the word of God and in spiritual age, bring me up with your words, as I long for the breasts of faith, wisdom and love. If you consider our common office, you are my brother; if the maturity of your mind and judgment, you are my father, even if perhaps younger in years, because grey-haired prudence has advanced you, though young, to the maturity of merit with the honour of elders. Cherish and strengthen me, then, in the sacred writings and spiritual studies, new as I am in time, as I said, and for that reason, after long dangers and many shipwrecks, unskilled in practice, scarcely emerging from the waves of the world; you who already stand on the solid shore, receive me with your whole bosom, so that, if you think it fitting, we may sail together into the harbour of salvation. Meanwhile, as I strive to escape from the dangers of this life and the depth of sins, hold me up with your prayers as with a plank, so that I may escape from this world naked, as from a shipwreck.

For this reason I have taken care to lighten myself of baggage and strip off burdensome clothing, so that, at Christ's command and with his help, freed from every covering of flesh and from care for the next day, I might swim across this stormy sea of the present life, which separates us from God, with our sins barking in between. Nor do I boast that I have accomplished this; for even if I could boast, I would boast in the Lord, whose it is to accomplish what to will is present with us; but my soul still longs to desire the judgments of the Lord. See when he may attain the fulfilment of the will of God who still desires to desire it. Yet as far as in me lies, I have loved the beauty of the holy house, and, as far as was in me, I had chosen to be cast down in the house of the Lord. But he who was pleased to set me apart from my mother's womb and to draw me from the friendship of flesh and blood to his grace was also pleased to raise me, needy of every good, from the earth, and to lead me out of the pit of miseries and the mire of dregs, to set me with the princes of his people and to place my portion in your lot, so that, joined to you in office, I might be made equal to you who excel me in merits.

So, claiming for myself the bond of your brotherhood, not by my own presumption but by the pleasure and ordinance of the Lord, I, unworthy of so great an honour, deem myself worthy of it, because I know for certain that, in keeping with your holiness (for you have a taste for truth), you do not set your mind on high things but associate with the lowly. And so I hope you will receive readily and inwardly the love of our lowliness, which indeed I trust you have already received through the most blessed bishop Alypius, our father, since he deigns to be so. For he no doubt gave you in himself an example of loving us before acquaintance and beyond our merit, he who, through the spirit of true love, which penetrates and is poured out everywhere, could both see us by loving and reach us by addressing us, though we were unknown to him and separated by a long distance of land and sea. He gave us the first proofs of his affection and pledges of your love in the gift of books mentioned above. And as he strove with great effort that we should be unable to love only moderately Your Holiness, made known to us not only by his words but more fully by your own eloquence and faith, so we believe he took equal care that you in turn, imitating him, should love us very much. May the grace of God remain with you, as it does, for ever, we pray, brother of one mind in Christ the Lord, venerable, most longed for. We greet your whole house and every companion and imitator of Your Holiness in the Lord with the greatest affection of unanimous brotherhood. We ask you to bless, by receiving it, the one loaf which we have sent to your Love as a sign of unanimity.

I have scarcely found an opportunity of writing to you. Who would believe it? But Licentius must believe me. I do not want you to search out the causes and reasons; even if they could be given, I do not owe them to the trust with which you believe me. Besides, I did not receive your letter through people by whom I could send back a reply. As for what you asked me to request, I have taken care of it by letter, as far as seemed proper to put forward; but what I have achieved you will see. If it has not yet been achieved, I will press more urgently, either when I learn of it or when you yourself remind me again. So far I have spoken with you of the things about which the chains of this life clamour; now receive in a few words the surgings of my heart concerning your hope that does not pass away, so that in some way the road to God may open before you.

My Licentius, while you again and again refuse and dread the fetters of wisdom, I fear that you are being fettered most strongly and most ruinously by mortal things. For those whom wisdom first binds and tames by certain labours of training, it will later loose, and give itself to them, once freed, to enjoy; and those whom it first trains with temporal bonds it will later bind with eternal embraces, and no bond more delightful or more solid than this can be thought of. These first bonds I confess are somewhat hard; but those last I would call neither hard, for they are most sweet, nor soft, for they are most firm. What then are they, except what cannot be spoken, but can yet be believed, hoped for, and loved? But the bonds of this world have real harshness and false delight, certain pain and uncertain pleasure, hard labour and fearful rest, a reality full of misery and an empty hope of happiness. Is it into these that you thrust your neck and hands and feet, when you aspire to be yoked to honours of this kind and think your deeds fruitful in no other way, and strive to cling to a place to which you ought not to have gone even under compulsion, let alone when invited?

Here perhaps you will give me the reply of Terence's slave: 'Oho! You pour out words here, Wisdom?' Take them, then, so that I may pour them into you rather than pour them away. Or if I sing and you dance to another tune, even so I do not regret it. For the singing itself has its own cheerfulness, even when the one to whom it is sung with a melody full of love does not move his limbs to it. Certain words in your letters troubled me, but I thought it foolish to deal with them while concern for your deeds and your whole life is burning me up.

If your verse were distorted by disordered quantities, if it did not stand by its own laws, if it offended the listener's ear with unequal measures, you would surely be ashamed, and you would neither put it off nor stop until you had ordered, corrected, set straight and evened your verse, learning and practising the art of metre with the keenest zeal and any labour. What then? When you yourself are distorted and disordered, when you do not stand by the laws of your God, and do not harmonize in the conduct of your life with the honourable wishes of your family and with this very learning of yours, do you think this should be thrown behind your back and neglected? As if you were worth less to yourself than the sound of your tongue, and offending the ears of God with ill-composed morals were a lighter thing than having the authority of grammar angry at your ill-composed syllables. You write: 'O if the dawn of old, with its gladdening wheels, would bring back to me the days we spent with you, trying out free leisure and the bright laws of the good in the midst of Italy and through the high mountains! Neither hard cold with hoary frost, nor fierce storm, nor the Zephyr and the roaring of the north wind would keep me from pressing on your footsteps with eager pace. Only bid me do this task.' Woe is me, if I do not bid, if I do not compel and command, if I do not ask and beg! But if your ears are closed against my voice, let them be open to your own mouth, open to your own poem; hear yourself, most hard, most cruel, most deaf! What use to me is a golden tongue with an iron heart? With what, not poems, but laments, could I be equal to bewailing your poems, in which I see what a soul, what a talent I am not allowed to lay hold of and offer to our God? You wait for me to bid you be good, be quiet, be happy; as if any day could dawn more welcome to me than one on which I might enjoy your talent in the Lord; or as if you really did not know that I hunger and thirst for you; or as if you did not confess it in this very poem. Recall the mind with which you wrote these things, and now say to me: 'Only bid me do this task.' Here is my bidding: give me yourself, if this is the only task; give yourself to my Lord, who is the Lord of us all, who gave you that talent. For what am I but your servant through him and your fellow servant under him?

Or does he not bid? Hear the gospel. 'Jesus stood,' it says, 'and cried out: Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls; for my yoke is gentle and my burden is light.' If these words are not heard, or heard only as far as the ears, do you wait, Licentius, for Augustine to give orders to his fellow servant, rather than lament that his Lord gives orders in vain, or rather does not order, but invites and in a way asks, that those who labour may be refreshed by him? But clearly, to a very strong and overconfident neck the yoke of the world is more pleasant than the yoke of Christ. If he were compelling us to labour, see who would be compelling, and for what reward. Go to Campania, learn from Paulinus, that outstanding and holy servant of God, how unhesitatingly he shook off the great pride of this world, with a neck all the nobler for being humble, in order to put it under the yoke of Christ, as he has done; and now, with Christ guiding his journey, he exults quietly and modestly. Go and learn with what riches of talent he offers him sacrifices of praise, pouring back to him whatever good he has received from him, lest he lose all if he does not lay it up in him from whom he has it.

Why do you surge? Why do you waver? Why do you lend your ear to the imaginings of deadly pleasures and turn it away from us? They lie, they die, they drag into death. They lie, Licentius, as surely as you pray, 'so may truth be opened to us by reason, so may it flow more fully than the Eridanus.' No one speaks the truth but the Truth: Christ is the Truth; let us come to him, so that we may not labour. That he may refresh us, let us take his yoke upon us and learn from him, for he is meek and humble of heart, and we shall find rest for our souls. For his yoke is gentle and his burden light. The devil seeks to be adorned by you. If you had found a golden chalice in the earth, you would give it to the church of God. You have received from God a talent that is spiritually golden, and with it you serve your lusts, and in it you drink yourself to Satan! Do not, I implore you; so may you one day feel with what a wretched and pitiable heart I have written these things, and have pity on me now, if you have become worthless to yourself.

While I search out the secret path of profound Varro, my mind grows dull and flees in terror from the light that confronts it. No wonder; for all my care for reading lies prostrate without you to lend a hand, and alone it fears to rise. For as soon as love persuaded me to unroll the intricate abridgements of so great a man and to touch his sacred meanings (by what number he taught the Thunderer's tones and the world to sing and move in equal dances), the violence of the matter wrapped my heart in manifold darkness and brought a cloud over my mind. Then, mad, I demand the forms of figures laid down without the sand, and stumble upon other heavy darkness; and finally upon the causes of the stars and their bright courses, whose positions he shows obscure, as through clouds. So I lay faltering, in such ruin as neither he who forbids us to know the hiding places of heaven would cause, nor the mask that gives the dead their straits from caverns. For the inventions of the old Pelasgians tell of Proteus, who, unwilling to reveal the future to anxious enquirers, foams as a boar, flows as water, roars as a lion, hisses as a serpent, yet once caught gives way at last for the small gifts of birds. But to me, who am tormented by heavier cares and seek every sweetness for the soul, half-sweet pastures, the answers of Varro lie hidden. With what suppliant song should I ask for help, which nymph should I beseech, what rivers should I invoke? Or should I call with my voice on you, whom the ruler of bright Olympus set over the springs of infants and bade pour forth far and wide the hidden streams of a rich mind? Bring help, master, at once; do not abandon my feeble strength, and begin with me to turn up the sacred clods; for time, unless mortal things deceive me, glides away and drags toward old age. For you our Apollo fills the heart, reconciles his Father, the Father of the gods, shows the good law and the bloody peace, and, drawing aside the veil, opens each thing. For you had perhaps traversed twenty long circuits of the sun when the most beautiful reason of the world, richer than empires and sweeter than any nectar, seized you, steadied you in your wandering, and placed you in the midst, from where you could direct your gaze on all things. O good man, pluck the road of the years; how wisdom grows by love of itself, ever finding new heights! Go on along the way by which the glorious offspring of the Thunderer leads you, levelling the steep into plains. And when evening has put off your heart until the light-bringing dawn, and you have blessed the holy fire above, be mindful of me. You who lend a thirsty ear to unconquered laws, beat your breasts with your palms, throw your limbs on the ground, stir up deserved griefs, and forbid wickedness. God commands one thing to all, the high priest admonishes, and the thunderbolts to come terrify.

O if the dawn of old, with its gladdening wheels, would bring back to me the days we spent with you, trying out free leisure and the bright laws of the good in the midst of Italy and through the high mountains! Neither hard cold with hoary frost, nor fierce storm, nor the Zephyr and the roaring of the north wind would keep me from pressing on your footsteps with eager pace. Only bid me do this task: though blood should drench my limbs, at midsummer we will follow the Neuri, in midwinter the Hister. The unknown Garamantian will loose for me the bonds of his race, and the river Hypanis, fleeing the Exampaean lakes, may resound in foam to the Scythian waves of the Callipidae. We will go even to the Leuci, where Leucia stretches toward the sunrise, and to the desert peaks of vast Cassius, in which Cassia rivals the Epidaphnean cliffs, from where I might see the dawn at rest, the chariot unyoked, and the day asleep in the middle of the night; at your urging I will seek them, for no labour or fear terrifies where God hears the innocent, open to their prayers. And even now I would desert the seat of Romulus's sons, the empty roofs of Remus, the houses full of revelling and vain tumults, and come once and for all wholly into your heart, did not a mind bent on marriage hold me back as I go. Believe my ills, O learned one, and my true grief: without you the sails promise no harbour, and we wander far over the troubled seas of life, like sailors headlong in thick darkness, whom the shrieking fury of the south wind and the blast from Eurus have struck, and the whirlwind has robbed of their pilots, snatched away; at once the wretches are rolled in broken waves; neither the decks nor the prows, nor then the sails can bear the storms, and the skill of steering lies stunned: so the wind drives me and the surges of desire roll me into the deadly sea. Nor is land far off; but, pondering your bright words with myself, master, I think rather that this must be entrusted to you: it is a cunning thing, it deceives and weaves nets for our minds. You have forgotten the past and now hold the present dear; yet we have not slipped from your heart. Alas, where am I borne? from where would I open my mind to you! Sooner will doves fit their pious roofs beneath the Aegean, and the halcyon build her nest in an upturned tree; sooner will a hungry lioness feed the calves that follow her, and a she-wolf long unfed nurse tender lambs, and, the world divided into its parts exchanging places, the Barcaean plough the Taurus or Hyrcania the land of the Moors; sooner will the day, interrupted and again terrified by the banquet of Thyestes, vanish into the retreating dawn; sooner will rains produce the Nile, deer wander above the sky, and mountains sing and rivers praise, than your gifts, master, fall behind me. Love prevents it, and holds the bond of a common good. Here, here reigns the glory of friendship, the enemy put to flight. For it is not for glassy riches or rebellious gold that we join the assent of our minds; nor did the crashing fortune of the crowd, which separates the lofty, join us; but the labour of reading the inner matters made public in books and found by your minds, and the noble doctrine not yet proclaimed, and the replies brought against the good. And though my Calliope dreads you, lofty as you are, at close quarters and hides her face, busy with useless things, yet this bond of mind, these faithful ties, not even he who broke the Alps, made firm with mountain rocks, and crushed the cities of Italy with their walls, could break, or wear away any of our strength. Go far off, you waters risen in swelling windings, whether to divide the Ripheans from the Arimphaeans, or the towns of the Caspian and the Cimmerian homes with a broad river; and let the regions of the Maeotians and the sea that overwhelmed Helle stretch far the boundaries of Europe and Asia. Did not Dodona, wearying herds of oxen on either side, cut off the Molossians from the bounds of Talarus, … and the kindred Arabs? Nor did the friendly treaty of peace remain between the Sidonians, the kingdom of the Pelasgians and the sacrilegious Phrygians, although for a time all had shared a common hospitality. Why, finally, should I sing of the quarrels and battles of brothers? why the honourable blows of parents? why the fury of mothers and proud sons? There is even a harmonious discord in the affairs of the gods above, and as many rites flow as opinion gives laws. One love holds us. Not if Boreas gave me a hundred murmurs and as many breaths, and a tongue stiff with adamant roared through a hundred mouths, could we recount the things which nature first joined and then the glory of ancient places put asunder and polished for the rounded world. But we, besides the fact that we rise from one city, that one house bore us, that we are tinged with one blood of the ages, have been bound together by the Christian faith; and as for the immense journey that divides us and the stretch of sea poured between that confines us, love despises both; scorning the joys of the eyes, it always enjoys the absent friend, since it hangs from the depth of the heart and searches the pastures of the inmost fibres. Meanwhile, whatever writings of saving discourse are yet to come, and those worthy to be set beside the shrines of the ancients, which, pondering in the depth of your breast what you had conceived, you have poured out into the light like nectared honey, will themselves make you present to me, if you will humour me and hand over the books in which music lies at rest in you; for I am all aflame for them. Grant it: so may truth be opened to us by reason, so may it flow more fully than the Eridanus, and so may the contagions of the world flutter in vain around the fields of our farmer.