Letters 35.1–36.16

I did not, as you say, impose on your unwilling will, as a troublesome exhorter or petitioner, the task of judging between bishops. Even if I had wished to persuade you to it, I could perhaps easily show how well able you are to judge between us in so manifest and open a case, and what sort of thing it is that you do, in that you, who dread judgment, do not hesitate to pass sentence for one party without hearing the parties. But this, as I said, I leave aside for now. I had asked nothing else of your honourable Kindness (and I ask you to notice it at last, at least in this letter) except that you should inquire of Proculianus whether he himself said to his presbyter Victor what the public official reported Victor said to him, or whether perhaps those who were sent entered in the record not what they heard from Victor but something false; and then what he thought about discussing the whole question between us. And I do not think a man becomes a judge when he is asked to question someone and deign to write back the answer he received. This, then, I still ask you not to be unwilling to do, since he will not accept my letters, as I have also found by experience. Had he been willing, I would certainly not be doing this through Your Excellency. But since he is not willing, what milder course can I take than to have him questioned through you, such a man as you are and one who loves him, about something on which my burden forbids me to be silent? As for your saying that the mother beaten by her son displeased your gravity, but that he, if he knew, would bar so wicked a young man from his communion, I answer briefly: now he knows; now let him bar him.

I add something else. A former subdeacon of the church of Spanianum named Primus, when he was forbidden undisciplined access to nuns and despised orderly and sound precepts, was removed from the clergy; and he, angered against the discipline of God, went over to them and was rebaptized. Two nuns also, his fellow tenants on an estate belonging to Catholic Christians, either were taken over by him or followed him; at any rate they too were rebaptized. And now, with bands of Circumcellions, among wandering bands of women who shamelessly refused to have husbands so as not to have discipline, he exults proudly in the revels of detestable drunkenness, glad that the widest licence for wicked living, from which he was restrained in the Catholic Church, has been opened to him. And perhaps Proculianus does not know this. So let it be brought to his notice through your gravity and moderation. Let him order that this man, who chose that communion for no other reason than that he had lost his clerical office in the Catholic Church for disobedience and depraved conduct, be removed from his communion.

For I, if it pleases the Lord, keep this rule: whoever among them has been degraded for discipline and wishes to pass over to the Catholic Church is received in the humiliation of penance, to which they too would perhaps have compelled him if he had wished to remain with them. But on their side, consider, I beg you, how execrable it is that those whom we rebuke by church discipline for living wickedly are persuaded to come to a second washing, and, so that they may be found worthy to receive it, answer that they are pagans (a word which so much blood of martyrs was shed to keep from coming out of a Christian mouth); and then, as though renewed and sanctified, having become worse, they insult, under the appearance of a new grace and with the sacrilege of a new madness, the discipline they could not bear. Or if I do wrong in taking care to have these things corrected through your goodwill, let no one complain of me if I have them brought to his notice through public records, which, as I think, cannot be denied me in a Roman city. For since God commands us to speak and preach the word, to refute those who teach what they should not, and to be urgent in season and out of season, as I prove from the writings of the Lord and the apostles, let no man think he can persuade me to be silent about these matters. But if they think they should venture something by violence or brigandage, the Lord will not fail to protect his church, who in her bosom, spread through the whole world, has subjected all earthly kingdoms to his yoke.

For when a certain tenant of the church wished, with fatherly severity, to call back to Catholic communion his daughter, who had been a catechumen with us and had been drawn away to them against her parents' will, so that she was baptized there and even took the habit of a nun; and I had refused to receive a woman of corrupted mind unless she came willingly and chose the better course by free will; the peasant began even to press her with blows to make her agree with him. I at once forbade this to be done in any way. Nevertheless, as we were passing through Spanianum, their presbyter, standing in the middle of the estate of a Catholic and praiseworthy woman, shouted after us in a most impudent voice that we were traditors and persecutors; and he hurled this insult even at that woman, who is of our communion, in the middle of whose estate he stood. Hearing these words, I not only restrained myself from strife but also checked the crowd that accompanied me. And yet if I say, 'Let it be inquired who are or were traditors or persecutors', the answer I get is: 'We do not want to dispute, and we want to rebaptize; let us prey on your sheep with the lurking bites of wolves; you, if you are good shepherds, be silent' (for what else did Proculianus instruct, if he really did instruct it?); 'if you are a Christian, keep this for the judgment of God; whatever we may do, you be silent.' The same presbyter even dared to threaten a peasant who was a lessee of a church estate.

Let Proculianus also learn all these things through you, I beg; let him restrain the madness of his clerics, about which, honourable Eusebius, I have not kept silent with you. You will deign, then, to write back to me not what you yourself think of all these things, lest you suppose that I am laying on you the burden of a judge, but what they answer. May the mercy of God keep you safe, excellent lord and brother, deservedly to be esteemed and most beloved.

I do not know how it happened that I did not answer your first letter; yet I know that I did not do it out of contempt for you; for I delight both in your studies and in your very style, and I both wish and urge that at this youthful age you may make progress in the word of God and abound in it for the building up of the church. But now that I have received your second letter, in which you demand, by the brotherly and most just right of the love in which we are one, that you be answered at long last, I did not think the desire of Your Love should be put off any longer, and amid my most pressing occupations I have undertaken to free myself of this debt to you.

As to your question whether it is permitted to fast on the Sabbath, I answer: if it were in no way permitted, certainly neither Moses nor Elijah nor the Lord himself would have fasted for forty continuous days. But by this reasoning it is also concluded that fasting on the Lord's day is not unlawful. And yet whoever thinks this day should be appointed for fasting, as some fast on the Sabbath, will be no small scandal to the church, and not without reason. For in those matters about which divine Scripture has established nothing certain, the custom of the people of God or the institutions of our forefathers are to be held as law. If we wish to dispute about these and to condemn some people by the custom of others, an endless struggle will arise; and since, for all the labour of argument, it instils no certain proofs of truth, we must surely take care that it does not cloud the serenity of love with a storm of contention. This danger was neglected by the man whose lengthy disputation you thought should be sent to me with your earlier letter, so that I might answer it.

But I do not have such ample time as to spend on refuting his individual statements the time I need for completing other works that press more urgently. But with the talent you show me in your letters, a gift of God in you which I greatly love, consider a little more carefully yourself this discourse of a certain man of the city, as you write, and you will see that he did not at all fear to tear apart with most insulting words almost the whole church of Christ from the rising of the sun to its setting. Nor should I say almost the whole, but plainly the whole. For he is not found to have spared even the Romans, whose custom he seems to be defending; but he does not know how the force of his abuse rebounds on them too, because he does not notice it. For when arguments fail him to prove that one must fast on the Sabbath, he inveighs insultingly against luxurious feasts, drunken banquets and most wicked drunkenness, as if not to fast were to get drunk. If that is so, what does it profit the Romans to fast on the Sabbath, since on the other days, on which they do not fast, they must by this man's argument be judged drunkards and belly-worshippers? Further, if it is one thing to weigh down the heart with surfeit and drunkenness, which is always bad, and another to relax the fast while keeping moderation and temperance, which certainly, when it is done on the Lord's day, has no Christian critic, let him first distinguish the meals of the saints from the voracity and drunkenness of belly-worshippers, lest he make the Romans themselves belly-worshippers when they do not fast; and then let him inquire, not whether it is permitted to get drunk on the Sabbath, which is not permitted on the Lord's day either, but whether one should refrain from fasting on the Sabbath, as one usually does on the Lord's day.

Would that he inquired or asserted in such a way as not to blaspheme most openly the church spread throughout the whole world, apart from the Romans and a few other Westerners! As it is, who could bear this man saying of so many and such great men and women servants of Christ among all the Eastern and many Western Christian peoples, who take their meal soberly and modestly on the Sabbath, that they are in the flesh and cannot please God, that of them it is written, 'Let the wicked depart from me; I do not wish to know their way', that they are belly-worshippers who prefer Judaea to the church, sons of the slave woman, consulting the belly by a law not just but pleasure-seeking, not submitting to discipline, that they are flesh and savour of death, and other such things? If he said them of any single servant of God, who should listen to him, who should not avoid him? But since he assails with these reproaches and curses the church that bears fruit and grows throughout the world and takes its meal on the Sabbath almost everywhere, I warn him, whoever he is, to restrain himself. For in wishing me not to know his name, you surely did not wish me to pass judgment on him.

'The Son of Man', he says, 'is Lord of the Sabbath', on which it is permitted to do good rather than evil. If, then, we do evil when we take a meal, we never live well on the Lord's day. As for his admitting that the apostles ate on the Sabbath, and saying that it was not then the time for fasting, because of the Lord's words, 'The days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then the sons of the bridegroom will fast', since there is a time of joy and a time of mourning: he ought first to have noticed that there the Lord was speaking of fasting, not of fasting on the Sabbath. Next, since he wants mourning to be understood by fasting, and joy to be attributed to food, why does he not reflect that, whatever it is that God wished to signify by what is written, that he rested on the seventh day from all his works, what is signified there is not mourning but joy? Unless perhaps he is going to say that in that rest of God and sanctification of the Sabbath joy was signified for the Jews and mourning for Christians. And yet neither when God sanctified the seventh day, because on it he rested from all his works, did he express anything about fasting or eating on the Sabbath, nor, when he later commanded the Hebrew people about the observance of that day, did he say anything about taking or not taking food. Only rest from one's own works, or from servile works, is commanded to man; and the former people, receiving it in the shadow of things to come, rested from works in the same way as we now see the Jews resting; not, as is thought, because the carnal Jews do not rightly understand what Christians rightly understand. For we do not understand these things better than the prophets, who nevertheless, at the time when it was proper to do so, kept this Sabbath rest which the Jews think must still be kept. Hence it is that God ordered a man to be stoned who had gathered wood on the Sabbath; but nowhere do we read that anyone was stoned or judged worthy of any punishment either for fasting or for eating on the Sabbath. Yet which of these two befits rest and which befits labour, let him see for himself, who has attributed joy to those who eat and mourning to those who fast, or understood the Lord to attribute it so, where in answer about fasting he says: 'The sons of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them.'

As for his saying that the apostles ate on the Sabbath because it was not yet the time for them to fast on the Sabbath, since, as he says, the tradition of the elders forbade it: was it then already the time for them not to rest on the Sabbath? Did not the tradition of the elders forbid this too and compel them to rest? And yet on the very Sabbath day on which we read that Christ's disciples ate, they certainly plucked ears of grain, which was not permitted on the Sabbath, because the tradition of the elders forbade it. Let him consider, then, whether it might not be answered him more fittingly that the Lord wished these two things to be done by the disciples on that day, the plucking of ears and the taking of food, the former against those who want to rest on the Sabbath and the latter against those who compel fasting on the Sabbath; since he had indicated that the former, with the change of times, was now superstitious, but wished the latter to be free in both times. I do not say this as asserting it, but to show what could be answered him much more aptly than the things he says.

'How', he says, 'shall we not be condemned with the Pharisee, if we fast twice in the week?' As if the Pharisee were condemned because he fasted twice a week, and not because he puffed himself up above the tax collector. But by this reasoning he could say that those too who give tithes of all their produce to the poor are condemned with the Pharisee, because the Pharisee also proclaimed this among his works (something we wish many Christians would do, and we scarcely find a very few); or that whoever has not been unjust, an adulterer or a robber will be condemned with the Pharisee, because he boasted that he was not such: anyone who thinks this is certainly mad. Further, if these undoubtedly good things which the Pharisee said were in him are not to be had with the proud boasting that appeared in him, but are nevertheless to be had with the humble piety that was not present in him, so too fasting twice a week is fruitless in a man such as that Pharisee was, but in a humbly faithful, or faithfully humble, man it is a religious act. And yet the gospel did not say that the Pharisee was condemned, but rather that the tax collector was justified.

But if he thought the Lord's saying, 'Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven', should be understood to mean that unless we fast more than twice a week we cannot fulfil this precept, it is well that there are seven days, which return along their own tracks in the turning of time. When, then, one has subtracted two days from them, so as not to fast on the Sabbath and the Lord's day, five days remain in which one can surpass the Pharisee who fasted twice a week. For I think that one who fasts three times a week already surpasses the Pharisee who fasted twice a week. But if one fasts four times, or even five times a week, so that no day except the Sabbath and the Lord's day is passed over (which many do all their life, especially those living in a monastery), not only the Pharisee who fasted twice a week, but also the Christian who is accustomed to fast on the fourth and sixth day and on the Sabbath itself, as the Roman people often do, will be surpassed in the labour of fasting. And yet this disputer from the city, as you call him, whoever he is, calls carnal even one who fasts on the five continuous days apart from the Sabbath and the Lord's day without refreshing his body at all on any of them, as if food and drink on the other days did not pertain to the flesh, and judges him a belly-worshipper, as if only the Sabbath meal went down into the belly.

He is certainly not satisfied with what already suffices to surpass the Pharisee, fasting three times a week, but compels fasting on the other six days, apart from the Lord's day, saying: 'The old stain removed, two in the one flesh of Christ, now remaining under discipline, ought not to hold pleasure-seeking Sabbath banquets with the sons without law, with the princes of Sodom and the people of Gomorrah, but with the dwellers in holiness and those devoted to God ought to fast more and more lawfully by solemn and ecclesiastical right, so that even the slight error of six days may be washed away by the fountains of fasting, prayer and almsgiving, and we may all, refreshed by the Lord's-day alogia, sing worthily with equal heart: "You have satisfied, O Lord, the empty soul and given drink to the thirsty soul."' In saying this, and excepting only the Lord's day from frequent fasting, he improvidently and incautiously accuses not only the Christian peoples of the East and the West, among whom no one fasts on the Sabbath, but even the Roman church itself. For when he says that those remaining under the discipline of Christ ought not to hold pleasure-seeking Sabbath banquets with the sons without law, with the princes of Sodom, with the people of Gomorrah, but with the dwellers in holiness and those devoted to God ought to fast more and more lawfully by solemn and ecclesiastical right, and then, defining what it is to fast lawfully, adds 'so that even the slight error of six days may be washed away by the fountains of fasting, prayer and almsgiving', he clearly thinks that those who fast less than six days a week do not fast lawfully, are not devoted to God, and do not wash away the stains of error contracted from this mortal state. Let the Romans see what they are doing, then, since they too are treated very insultingly in this man's disputation; for among them, apart from a very few clerics or monks, how many are found who keep daily fasts on all those six days, especially since there it is not thought right to fast on the fifth day of the week?

Next I ask: if the slight error of each day is loosed or washed away by that day's fasting (for so he says: 'so that even the slight error of six days may be washed away by the fountains of fasting'), what shall we do about the error that creeps in on the Lord's day, on which it is a scandal to fast? Or if no error creeps up on Christians on that day, see how much honour and benefit this man, who accuses belly-worshippers as though he were a great faster, gives to bellies, if there is no erring when one takes a meal. Or perhaps he places so great a good in the Sabbath fast that the Sabbath fast alone can abolish the 'slight error', as he calls it, of the other six days, that is, even of the Lord's day itself, and that only on that day, on which one fasts the whole day, there is no erring? Why then does he set the Lord's day above the Sabbath as by Christian right? See, according to him the Sabbath is found to be much holier, since on it there is no erring, because one fasts throughout it, and by that same fast the error of the other six days, and hence even of the Lord's day itself, is washed away. I think this presumption does not please you.

Now, though he wishes to appear a spiritual man and accuses those who eat on the Sabbath as carnal, notice how on the Lord's day he refreshes himself not with a sparing meal, but delights in alogia. And what is alogia, a word borrowed from the Greek language, except indulgence in feasting to the point of straying from the path of reason? Hence animals lacking reason are called aloga, and those given to the belly are like them. For this reason an immoderate banquet, in which the mind, where reason rules, is in a way overwhelmed by gorging on food and drink, is called alogia. Moreover, he says that, because of food and drink not of the mind but of the belly, this should be sung at the alogia of the Lord's day: 'You have satisfied, O Lord, the empty soul and given drink to the thirsty soul.' O spiritual man! O great faster! O reprover of the carnal, and no worshipper of the belly! See the man who warns us not to corrupt the law of the Lord by the law of the belly, not to sell the bread of heaven for earthly food, and adds: 'For by food Adam perished from paradise, by food Esau lost his birthright.' See the man who says: 'For the temptation of the belly is Satan's customary slander; he persuades it to take a little, in order to take away everything.' 'And the interpretation of these precepts', he says, 'bends the belly-worshippers less.'

Does he not by these words of his seem to be working to have fasting even on the Lord's day? Otherwise the Sabbath, on which the Lord rested in the tomb, will be holier than the Lord's day, on which he rose from the dead. For the Sabbath is certainly holier if, according to this man's words, on the Sabbath every sin is avoided by fasting and what was contracted on the other days is abolished, while on the Lord's day the temptation of the belly is not guarded against through food, place is given to the devil's slander, paradise is lost, and the birthright forfeited. Why then does he, contradicting himself, urge us to refresh ourselves on the Lord's day not with a moderate, sober, Christian meal, but to sing, rejoicing and applauding in alogia, 'You have satisfied, O Lord, the empty soul and given drink to the thirsty soul'? Surely, if we do not err when we fast, and if we wash away the errors of the other six days when we fast on the Sabbath, no day will be worse than the Lord's day and none better than the Sabbath. Believe me, dearest brother, no one understands the law as this man does except one who does not understand it. For if it was not food but forbidden food that destroyed Adam, and not food but food desired to the point of despising the sacrament he had in his birthright that condemned Esau, the grandson of holy Abraham, then the saints and faithful eat piously just as the sacrilegious and unbelieving fast impiously. And the Lord's day is set above the Sabbath by faith in the resurrection, not by the custom of refreshment or by the licence of drunken singing.

'Moses', he says, 'did not eat bread or drink water for forty days.' And why he said this, he explains by adding: 'See, Moses, the friend of God, dweller in the cloud, bearer of the law and leader of the people, celebrating three pairs of Sabbaths with fasting, earned not offence but merit.' Did he notice what could consequently be objected from this? Surely, if he puts forward the example of Moses fasting because in those forty days he fasted on three pairs of Sabbaths, as he puts it, and from this wishes to persuade us to fast on the Sabbath, then from this let him persuade us to fast on the Lord's day too, because in those forty days Moses fasted no less on three pairs of Lord's days. But he adds and says: 'And the Lord's day was still being kept by God with Christ for the coming church.' Why he said this I do not know. If it is because one must fast much more after the Lord's day came with Christ, then, God forbid, let there be fasting even on the Lord's day itself; but if he feared that, because of the fast of forty days, it might be objected that one should fast on the Lord's day too, and therefore added that the Lord's day was still being kept with Christ for the coming church, so that Moses might be understood to have fasted even on the day that follows the Sabbath for this reason, that Christ had not yet come, through whom that Lord's day was made on which it is not fitting to fast: why then did Christ himself likewise fast for forty days? Why did he not break the fast on those six days in the forty which followed the Sabbath, so as to commend the Lord's-day meal even before his resurrection, as he gave his blood to drink before his passion? You surely see that the forty days' fast which this man mentions has no more to do with our fasting on the Sabbath than with our fasting on the Lord's day.

He simply does not notice what can be objected to him about the Lord's day, when, just as drunken banquets and all voracious and drunken luxury are to be condemned, so he condemns Sabbath meals, though these too can be those of moderate and sober people. And so one need not answer him point by point, since in place of the Sabbath meal he rebukes the vices of luxury and says the same things over and over, finding nothing else to say except what is empty and irrelevant. The question is whether one should not fast on the Sabbath, not whether one should not indulge in luxury on the Sabbath, which those who fear God do not do on the Lord's day either, though on that day they certainly do not fast. But who would say what this man dared to say? 'How', he says, 'will things be ratified or worthy for God, for us or through us, which compel us to sin on a sanctified day?' He confesses that the Sabbath is a sanctified day and says that men are compelled to sin because they take a meal; and therefore, according to him, either the Lord's day is not sanctified and the Sabbath becomes better, or, if the Lord's day too is sanctified, we are compelled to sin because we take a meal on it.

He also tries to prove from divine testimonies that one must fast on the Sabbath, but he finds nothing at all to prove it from. 'Jacob ate', he says, 'and drank wine and was filled, and departed from God his saviour, and twenty-three thousand fell in one day'; as though it said, 'Jacob dined on the Sabbath and departed from God his saviour.' And the apostle, when he recalled that so many thousands fell, did not say, 'Neither let us dine on the Sabbath, as they dined', but, 'Neither let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in one day.' And what does he mean by quoting, 'The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play'? The apostle too used this testimony, but to forbid the service of idols, not the Sabbath meal. That this happened on the Sabbath this man does not prove, but conjectures as he pleases. And just as it can happen that one fasts and, if one is a drunkard, gets drunk when the fast is broken, so it can happen that one does not fast and, if people are temperate, dines most modestly. Why then, in wishing to persuade us to fast on the Sabbath, does he bring in as witness the apostle saying, 'Do not get drunk with wine, in which is all debauchery', as if he had said, 'Do not dine on the Sabbath, for therein is all debauchery'? But just as this apostolic precept, not to get drunk with wine, in which is all debauchery, is observed by God-fearing Christians when they dine on the Lord's day, so it is observed when one dines on the Sabbath too.

'To contradict the erring more expressly,' he says, 'no one will offend God by fasting, even if he does not earn merit; and not to offend is itself to earn merit.' Who would say this, except one unwilling to consider what he was saying? So when pagans fast, do they not offend God the more? Or, if he wanted what he said to be understood of Christians, who does not offend God if he chooses to fast on the Lord's day, to the scandal of the whole church spread everywhere? Then he added testimonies from the Scriptures that have no force for the cause he took up. 'By fasting', he says, 'Elijah, granted paradise, reigns in the body'; as if those who do not fast on the Sabbath did not preach fasting, just as those preach fasting who nevertheless do not fast on the Lord's day; or as if Elijah fasted at a time when the people of God fasted on the Sabbath too. What we answered about Moses's forty days of fasting I think should be answered also about Elijah's forty days. 'By fasting', he says, 'Daniel escaped unharmed the mouths of lions with their dry rage'; as if he had read that he fasted on the Sabbath, or even that he was with those lions on the Sabbath, where in fact we read that he also dined. 'By fasting', he says, 'the faithful brotherhood of the three, mastering the prison flashing with fire, adored the Lord received as guest of the pyre.' These examples of the saints have no force to persuade us to fast on any day, how much less on the Sabbath, since not only is it not read that the three men were thrown into the burning fiery furnace on the Sabbath, but it is not even read that they were there long enough for anyone to say they fasted; indeed, the space in which their confession and hymn are sung is scarcely one hour, and they walked among those harmless flames no longer than it took to finish that song; unless perhaps this man counts even the space of one hour as a fast. If so, he has no reason to be angry with those who dine on the Sabbath; for until the hour of the meal one fasts much longer than they did in that furnace.