Letters 243.1–247.4

I have read the letter you sent the brothers, wishing to console you because your novitiate is being shaken by many temptations; in it you also indicated that you wanted a letter from me. I grieved with you, brother, and could not refrain from writing, lest I deny not only your desire but also my own what I saw I owed by the duty of love. If, then, you profess yourself a recruit of Christ, do not desert the camp in which you must also build that tower of which the Lord speaks in the Gospel. For no temptations can penetrate at any point one who stands in it and fights under the arms of the word of God; from it weapons hurled at the adversary come with heavy weight, and those seen in advance are avoided by its firm defense. Consider also that our Lord Jesus Christ, though he is our King, yet by that fellowship by which he deigned to be also our brother called his soldiers kings, and warned beforehand that each must be fit, with the equipment of ten thousand, to fight with the king who has twenty thousand.

But note what he said a little before he proposed the exhortatory comparisons of the tower and the king: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and sons and brothers and sisters, yes, and his own soul too, he cannot be my disciple; and whoever does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” Then he adds: “Which of you, wishing to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it, lest, when he has laid the foundation and cannot build, all who pass by and see begin to say, ‘This man began to build and could not finish’? Or what king, going to wage war with another king, does not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Otherwise, while the other is still far off, he sends an embassy asking for peace.” What these comparisons referred to he made clear enough by the conclusion itself; for he says: “So, then, any one of you who does not renounce all that is his cannot be my disciple.”

So both the cost of building the tower and the strength of ten thousand against the king who has twenty are nothing other than that each should renounce all that is his. And the earlier preface agrees with the final conclusion. For in renouncing all that is one's own is included also hating one's father and mother and wife and sons and brothers and sisters, yes, and one's own soul too. For all these are one's own, and they often entangle and hinder one from obtaining not these private things that pass in time but common things that abide forever. For insofar as a certain woman is now your mother, by that very fact she is not mine too. Therefore this is temporal and passing, as you see that it has already passed that she conceived you, carried you in her womb, bore you, nursed you with milk. But insofar as she is a sister in Christ, she is so to you and to me and to all to whom one heavenly inheritance, God as Father and Christ as brother, is promised in the same fellowship of love. These things are eternal; these are worn away by no decay of time; these are hoped to be held the more firmly the less they are proclaimed as obtained by private right and the more by common right.

You can recognize this very easily in your own mother. For from what source does she now entangle and involve you, and turn you back and bend you, held back from the course you had set, except from the fact that she is your own mother? For insofar as she is a sister to all who have God as Father and the Church as mother, she does not hinder you any more than me or all our brothers, who love her not with a private love in your house, as you do, but with a public love in the house of God. That you are bound to her also by a fleshly tie ought to count toward the privilege of speaking with her more familiarly and of advising her with a more open door. Let that very thing by which she loves you privately be slain in her, so that she may not value more highly that she bore you from her womb than that she was born with you from the womb of the Church. What I have said of a mother is to be understood of other such kinship as well. Let each one think this too of his own soul, so that in it also he may hate the private affection, which is without doubt temporal, but love in it that communion and fellowship of which it was said, “They had one soul and one heart toward God.” For thus your soul is not your own but that of all the brothers, whose souls are also yours, or rather whose souls together with yours are not souls but one soul, the only one of Christ, which sings in the psalms that it may be rescued from the hand of the dog. From there one comes very easily to contempt of death.

Let parents not be angry that the Lord commands this, that we hate them, since this is commanded us about our own soul. For as here it is commanded about the soul that we hate it for Christ's sake together with our parents, so what the same Lord says about the soul in another place can also apply most fittingly to parents: “Whoever loves his soul,” he says, “will lose it.” I will even say confidently: whoever loves his parents will lose them. For of the soul he said there “hate,” what here he says “lose.” But just as this command, by which we are told to lose our soul, does not mean that anyone should kill himself, which is an inexpiable crime, and yet does mean that he should kill in himself the fleshly affection of the soul by which the present life delights to the hindrance of the future life (for this is what is said, “he shall hate his soul and lose it”; yet this is done by loving, since in the same command he plainly mentions the fruit of gaining that same soul, saying, “Whoever loses it in this world will find it unto eternal life”), so it is said most rightly of parents that whoever loves them should lose them, not killing them in the manner of parricides, but striking piously and confidently with the spiritual sword of the word of God their fleshly affection, by which they try to bind both themselves and those they have begotten in the entanglements of this world, and slaying it, so that he makes that live in them by which they are brothers, by which together with their temporal children they acknowledge their eternal parents, God and the Church.

See, zeal for truth and for knowing and grasping the will of God in the holy Scriptures carries you off; the duty of preaching the gospel carries you off. The Lord gives the signal to keep watch in the camp, to build the tower from which we can see and drive back the enemy of eternal life. The heavenly trumpet carries off the soldier of Christ to battle, and his mother holds him back: a mother certainly not like the mother of the Maccabees, nor even like the Spartan mothers, of whom it is recorded that they roused their sons, to shed their blood for an earthly fatherland, into the battles of war far more and more ardently than the sound of the trumpets. For a mother who does not allow you to be withdrawn from worldly cares in order to learn how to live shows clearly enough how she would allow you, if need be, to renounce the world entirely in order to undergo death.

But what does she say, or what does she plead? Perhaps those ten months in which you burdened her womb, and the pains of childbirth and the labors of rearing? This, this kill with the saving word; this lose in your mother, so that you may find her in eternal life; this remember to hate in her, if you love her, if you are a recruit of Christ, if you have laid the foundations of the tower, so that passers-by may not say, “This man began to build and could not finish.” For this is a fleshly affection and still sounds of the old man. This fleshly affection, both in ourselves and in our own, the Christian soldiery urges us to destroy; yet not so that anyone should be ungrateful to his parents and mock the very benefits by which he was brought into this life, received and nourished, when they are listed. Let him rather keep filial duty everywhere; let these things have their place where greater things do not call.

Mother Church is the mother of your mother too. She conceived you both of Christ; she brought you forth in labor through the blood of the martyrs; she bore you into everlasting light; she nursed and nurses you with the milk of faith, and, preparing stronger food, she shudders that you still wish to cry like toothless infants. This mother, spread through the whole world, is shaken by such varied and manifold attacks of errors that even her miscarried sons do not hesitate to wage war against her with unbridled arms. She grieves too that through the laziness and torpor of some whom she holds in her lap, her members grow cold in many places and become less fit to cherish the little ones. From whom, if not through other sons, from whom, if not through other members, of whose number you are, does she ask just and due help? Will you desert her needs and turn to fleshly words? Does she not sound in your ears with weightier complaints? Does she not show you dearer womb and heavenly breasts? Add her Husband's taking of flesh, so that you might not cling to fleshly things, and his taking up by the eternal Word all that your mother reproaches you with, so that you might not be entangled in them; add insults, scourges, death, and death on a cross.

Conceived from such seeds and begotten to new life by such a marriage, do you languish and waste away into the old man! Did your Commander not have an earthly mother? Yet when she was announced to him while he was doing heavenly things, he answered: “Who is my mother, or who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand to his disciples, he said that none belonged to his kindred except him who did the will of his Father; in which number he kindly included Mary herself, for she too did the will of the Father. So the best and divine Teacher set aside the name of mother, which they had announced to him as if private and his own, because it was earthly, in comparison with heavenly kinship; and, mentioning that same heavenly kinship in his disciples, he showed by what fellowship of kind that virgin was joined to him again with the other saints. And lest the error by which some deny that he had a mother should take support from this most wholesome teaching, by which he taught that fleshly affection toward parents is to be despised, in another place he warned his disciples not to say that they had a father on earth, so that, as it is clear they had fathers, so he might make clear that he had a mother, whose earthly kinship he nevertheless despised to give his disciples an example of despising such ties.

Are these things, then, to be interrupted by your mother's voice, and among them does mention of her pregnancy and nursing find a place, so that you were born and nourished as another Adam from Adam and Eve? Look rather, look to the second Adam from heaven, and now bear the image of the heavenly, as you have borne that of the earthly. Even so, let your mother's earthly benefits themselves, which are listed to unnerve your heart, have their place here too; let them indeed have their place. Do not be ungrateful; repay your mother's kindness; repay spiritual things for fleshly, eternal for temporal. But she will not follow? Let her not hinder. She will not be converted to better things? Take care that she does not pervert and overturn you to worse. What difference does it make whether in a wife or in a mother, as long as Eve is guarded against in any woman? For that shadow of filial duty comes from the leaves of that tree with which our first parents first covered themselves in that damnable nakedness. And whatever she holds out to you in those words and suggestions as a duty of love, to twist you away from the most genuine and sincere love of the gospel, belongs to the cunning of the serpent and to the duplicity of that king who has twenty thousand, which we are taught to overcome by the simplicity of ten thousand, that is, of the heart in which we seek God.

Attend rather to these things, dearest, and take up your cross and follow the Lord. For when you were with me and I noticed that you were held back from divine study by household cares, I felt that you were rather being carried and led by your cross than carrying and leading it. For what does our cross, which the Lord commands us to carry so that we may follow him unencumbered, signify but the mortality of this flesh? For it torments us until death is swallowed up in victory. This very cross, then, must be crucified and pierced with the nails of the fear of God, lest, its members loose and free, we be unable to carry it as it resists. For you cannot follow the Lord at all unless you carry it; for how will you follow him if you are not his? “But those who belong to Jesus Christ,” says the apostle, “have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires.”

If your family estate has any money, with whose business you ought not and it is not fitting to be entangled, it should indeed be given to your mother and your household. For if you have resolved to distribute such things of yours to the poor so as to be perfect, their need should have first place with you; for “if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for his household,” says the apostle, “he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” If you left us to arrange these matters, so that you might free your neck to put on the bonds of wisdom, what harm do your mother's tears, flowing for the flesh, or a slave's flight, or the death of maidservants, or your brothers' sickly health do you, or how do they tear at you, if there is in you ordered love that knows how to put greater things before lesser and to be moved by mercy so that the poor may have the gospel preached, so that the Lord's abundant harvest may not lie as prey to the birds for want of workers, and to have a heart ready to follow the Lord's will in whatever he decides to do with his servants, whether by scourging or by sparing? Meditate on these things, be in them, so that your progress may be evident in all things. I beg you, take care not to give the good brothers greater sadness by your torpor than the joy you had already given them by your eagerness. As for commending you by letter to those you wished, I thought it as superfluous as if someone had wished to commend you to me in the same way.

Rumor has brought me word (may God grant it is not so!) that you are so disturbed in mind that I greatly wonder that your prudence and Christian mind give so little thought to the fact that the condition of earthly things can in no way equal heavenly ones, where our heart and our hope must be placed. Man of sense, was your whole good in these things which you now seem to be losing, or did you count them so great a good that, when it is taken away, your mind grows dark with excessive sadness, as if its light were not God but the earth? For I have heard (I have said it already: God grant I heard falsely!) that you even wished to lay hands on yourself. I do not believe that it entered your heart or came out of your mouth. But still, since you are so disturbed that this could be said of you, I am deeply saddened about you and have thought to console Your Charity with this address by letter, although I do not doubt that the Lord our God speaks better things in your heart; for I know with what devout zeal you have always heard his word.

Lift up your mind, then, dearest brother in Christ; our God is neither lost to his own nor will he lose his own. But he wishes to warn us how fragile and uncertain are these things that men love too much, so as to loosen from them the chain of desire by which they drag us along entangled, and so that we may accustom all our love to run to him in whom we fear no loss. He himself exhorts you through our ministry to consider manfully that you are a faithful Christian, redeemed by the blood of him who, not only by his eternal wisdom but also by his human presence, taught us to despise with moderation the prosperity of this world and to bear its adversity with courage, promising the reward of that happiness which no one can take from us. I have also written to the praiseworthy count; it will be at your discretion whether you want that letter delivered. For I do not doubt that, with the Lord's help, there cannot be lacking someone to deliver it, whether a bishop or a presbyter or anyone…

You should think more about what to do with those who will not obey than about how to show them that what they do is not permitted. But just now Your Holiness's letter found me very busy, and the very quick return of the bearer allowed me neither not to reply to you nor to answer your questions as I should. Still, I do not want you to be too hasty in forbidding ornaments of gold or dress, except for those who, neither married nor wishing to marry, ought to think how they may please God. But the others think of the things of the world, how husbands may please their wives or wives their husbands; except that it is not fitting even for married women to uncover their hair, since the apostle commands women to veil their heads. But to paint oneself with cosmetics so as to appear more rosy or more fair is an adulterous deceit, by which I do not doubt even husbands themselves do not wish to be deceived, and only for them may women be permitted to adorn themselves, by way of concession, not of command. For the true adornment, especially of Christian men and women, is not only no lying paint, but not even a display of gold and dress, but good character.

But the superstition of amulets is to be abhorred, among which are counted even men's earrings hung from the top of the ear on one side; they are used not to please men but to serve demons. Who could find specific prohibitions of wicked superstitions in the Scriptures, when the apostle says in general, “I do not want you to become partners of demons,” and again, “What harmony has Christ with Belial?” Unless perhaps, because he named Belial and forbade fellowship with demons in general, Christians may sacrifice to Neptune, since we read no prohibition specifically about Neptune! Meanwhile let the wretched people be warned that, if they will not obey more wholesome precepts, they at least should not defend their sacrileges, so as not to entangle themselves in a greater crime. But what is to be done with them, if they are afraid to take off their earrings and are not afraid to receive the body of Christ with the sign of the devil? As for ordaining one who was baptized in the party of Donatus, I cannot advise you to do it; for it is one thing to do it if you are compelled, another to advise that you do it.

On the question of fate and fortune, by which I noticed when I was with you that your mind is not lightly moved, and now have learned more pleasantly and more certainly from your letter, I owe you a reply of no small volume, which the Lord will grant me to set out as he knows suits you and the health of your faith. For it is no small evil to be led by perverse opinions not only to commit sin by the allurement of pleasure but also to be turned from the remedy of confession to defending it.

Know this, however, the sooner and more briefly the better: all laws and all institutions of discipline, praise, blame, exhortation, threats, rewards, punishments, and all the other things by which the human race is administered and governed, are utterly shaken and overturned, and no justice at all remains in them, unless the will is the cause of sinning. How much more freely and justly, then, do we reject the errors of the astrologers than we would be forced to condemn and cast away the divine laws, or even the care of our own households, which not even the astrologers themselves do! For when one of them has sold foolish fates to moneyed men, as soon as he turns his eye from his ivory tablets to the management and care of his own house, he corrects his wife not only with words but with blows, I do not say if he finds her jesting too wantonly but if he notices her looking out of the window too much. Yet if she says to him, “Why do you beat me? Beat Venus, if you can, by whom I am forced to do this,” then indeed he does not care what empty words he puts together to deceive strangers, but what just blows he lays on to correct his own.

When, therefore, anyone, on beginning to be reproved, turns the cause onto fate and does not want to be blamed because he says he was forced by fate to do what he is accused of, let him come back to himself and keep this rule with his own: let him not punish a thieving slave, not complain of an insolent son, not threaten a wicked neighbor. For what does he do justly in doing any of these, if all from whom he suffers wrongs are driven to do it not by their own fault but by fate? But if by his own right and the diligence of a head of household he exhorts to good whatever persons he has under his power for the time being, deters them from evil, commands them to obey his will, honors those who obey him at a nod, punishes those who despise him, repays kindness to benefactors, hates the ungrateful, shall I wait for him to argue against fate, when I find him saying so much, not in words but in deeds, that he seems almost to break with his own hands all the astrologers' pebbles over their heads? If your eagerness is not content with these few words and you want some book on this matter to read at greater length, you must wait patiently for our leisure and ask God to deign to grant both the leisure and the ability to satisfy your mind on this matter. I will be the more eager, however, if Your Charity does not mind reminding me often by letter, and lets me know by writing back what you think of this letter.

Truth is both sweet and bitter. When it is sweet, it spares; when it is bitter, it heals. If you do not refuse to drink what I offer in this letter, you will prove what I have said. Would that, as the insults you heap on me do me no harm, so they did you no harm; and would that the injustice you do to the wretched and poor harmed you only as much as it harms those to whom you do it! For they suffer for a time, but you see what you are storing up for yourself in the day of wrath and of the revelation of the just judgment of God, who will repay each according to his works. I pray his mercy to correct you here, as he knows how, rather than reserve you for that day when there will be no more room for correction; that he who gave you his fear, because of which I do not despair of you, may open your understanding, and you may see what you are doing, shudder at it and amend it. For the things that seem small and almost nothing to you are such great evils that, when your desire is tamed and lets you consider them, you will water the ground with tears so that God may have mercy on you. Or if I am unjust in pressing you about this, that poor and needy men should not pay twice what they owe, since the tenants gave to your agent, serving the overseer placed over them as he commanded, and he could not deny having received it; if, then, I am unjust because it seems unjust to me that those who can barely pay once should be made to pay twice, do what you wish. But if you see that it is unjust, do what is fitting. Let him do what God commands and I ask.

Not for them more (he whom I fear knows it) but for your own sake I ask you yourself, as it is written, to have mercy on your soul by pleasing God. And now indeed you should not be asked but rebuked; for this too is written: “Those whom I love I rebuke and chasten.” Yet if you had to be asked on my behalf, perhaps I would not ask you; but since you must be asked on your own behalf, I ask you, angry as you are, to spare yourself, to be reconciled to yourself, to have him whom you ask reconciled to you. I sent to you on the Sabbath, while you were still at lunch, asking you not to leave without seeing me. You sent back word that you would do so. You rose on the Lord's day, and, as I have heard, came to church and prayed and left, and would not see me. May God forgive you. What else shall I say to you except what he knows I desire? But I know that, unless you correct yourself, he is just. When you spare yourself, you spare me too; for I am not so wretched and so estranged from the heart of Christ that my heart is not struck with a most grievous wound when those whom I begot in his gospel behave like this.

You will say again: “I did not order them to give to Ponticanus.” The answer to you is: “But you did order them to serve Ponticanus; and they could not distinguish how far they should serve him and how far not, especially when he asked for what they knew they owed.” They ought to have had your letter to produce to the agent, if he was demanding against your will, and to read out to him that they need not give except on receiving your letter. For if you once ordered by word that they give nothing to the agent, it is a lot to expect them to remember, a lot to expect you yourself to remember whether you really ordered it, and whether to them or to others or to all; especially since even now you have heard that it was given to another agent and the money itself is safe, and you were not displeased that they gave it. But when I had said, “What if he too had embezzled it, would it then have to be demanded from them again?”, you began to be displeased again that they had given it. And although you had often told me that you never delegated your authority to Valerius or Aginesis, suddenly, when the matter of the wine came up, since they ought to have shown it if it had begun to turn sour, and you were told that he was absent, I suppose you forgot what you had so often told me, and said that they should have shown it to Aginesis and acted at his discretion. Then, when I said, “Surely you do not usually delegate your authority to these men,” you answered, “But Aginesis had my letter,” as if those to whom you assign anything always read out your letter to country people so that they may believe you ordered it! But since they see them so assigned by you, they certainly do not believe that they would rashly dare to presume anything except by power given by you. So amid these uncertainties it is not clear what you order, and they can hold nothing firm unless they have your letter to produce to all, and obey only when your letter is produced, when something has to be given.

But what need is there to argue with you so long and burden your busy life with words, so that perhaps, angered by my words, you may want to rage against the poor men? It will be counted to them as good merit that they endure your anger for the sake of your salvation, for which I say so much to you; but to you I do not want to say anything harsher, lest you think I speak so not from fear but from ill will. Fear God, if you do not wish to be deceived. I call him as witness upon my soul that I fear more for you, when I say this, than for those for whom I seem to intercede with you. If you believe it, thanks be to God; but if you do not believe it, I am consoled by what the Lord says: “Say, ‘Peace to this house’; and if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest upon it; if not, it will return to you.” May God's mercy protect you, my lord, dearly beloved son.