Letters 73.1–75.7

Although I suppose that, before you received this, my letter reached your hands, the one I sent by the servant of God, our son the deacon Cyprian, from which you would learn with full certainty that the letter of which you said copies had reached you is mine (and so I think that I, like the bold Dares, have already begun to be struck and tossed about by your replies as by the great and fierce gauntlets of Entellus), I nevertheless now answer the very letter which you were pleased to send me by our holy son Asterius. In it I found many signs of your most kindly love towards me, and again some signs that you have taken some offence at me. And so, where I was soothed as I read, there at once I was struck; and what I wondered at most of all was this: you say that you did not think the copies of my letter should be rashly believed, for fear that, if you answered, I might justly complain of being injured, because you ought first to have established that the words were mine and only then reply; and yet you go on to bid me, if the letter is mine, to write plainly or to send truer copies, so that we may engage in the discussion of the Scriptures without any rancour of feeling. But how can we engage in this discussion without rancour if you are preparing to injure me? Or, if you are not preparing to, how could I, when you were not injuring me, justly complain of being injured by you, because you ought first to have established that the words were mine and only then reply, that is, only then injure? For unless you had injured me by replying, I could not justly complain. Therefore, when you reply in such a way as to injure, what room is left us for engaging in the discussion of the Scriptures without any rancour? For my part, far be it from me to be injured if you are willing and able to show me by sound reasoning that you have understood that passage of the apostle’s letter, or anything else in the holy Scriptures, more truly than I. Nay rather, far be it from me not to count it as gain, with thanksgiving, if I am instructed by your teaching or set right by your correction.

And yet you, my dearest brother, would not think that I could be injured by your reply unless you thought that you had been injured by my writings. For I could in no way have formed such an opinion of you, that you, not thinking yourself injured, should still reply in such a way as to injure. Or, if you did not so reply, and I was thought, through my great folly, capable of being injured, then you have plainly injured me by that very thing, by thinking so of me. But you would by no means rashly believe me to be such a man, never having found me so, you who would not rashly believe the copies of my letter even though you knew my style. For if you saw, not without reason, that I would justly complain if you rashly believed a letter to be mine that was not mine, how much more justly would I complain at being rashly thought to be such a man as the one who thought so did not know me to be? You would never, then, have slipped so far as to think me so very foolish that I could be injured even by such a reply of yours, when you were not replying in order to injure me.

It remains, then, that you intended to injure me by your reply, should you know by certain proof that the letter was mine. And so, since I do not believe that you would think I should be injured unjustly, all that is left is for me to acknowledge my sin, that I first injured you by that letter which I cannot deny is mine. Why then do I strive against the stream instead of asking pardon? I beseech you, therefore, by the gentleness of Christ, that, if I have injured you, you forgive me, and do not in turn injure me and so render evil for evil. But you will injure me if you keep silent to me about my error, should you perhaps find one in my deeds or words. For if you rebuke in me things that do not deserve rebuke, you injure yourself more than me; and far be it from your character and holy way of life that you should do this with intent to injure, faulting in me with a slanderous tooth something which your truthful mind knows is not to be faulted. And therefore either you will reprove with a kindly heart what you think should be reproved, even if it is free of fault, or you will soothe with a father’s affection one whom you cannot win over. For it can happen that something seems otherwise to you than the truth holds, provided only that you do nothing otherwise than love requires. And I shall most gratefully receive a most friendly rebuke, even if what cannot rightly be defended did not deserve rebuke; or I shall acknowledge both your kindness and my fault, and, as far as the Lord grants, I shall be found grateful in the one and corrected in the other.

Why then should I dread your words, harsh perhaps but certainly wholesome, as if they were the gauntlets of Entellus? He was beaten, not cured, and so he was conquered, not healed. But if I receive your medicinal correction calmly, I shall not grieve; and if human weakness, or my own, cannot but be somewhat saddened even when I am truly rebuked, it is better that a swelling on the head should hurt while it is being cured than that it should be spared and not healed. For this is what was keenly seen by the man who said that quarrelling enemies are often more useful than friends who are afraid to rebuke; for the former, while they wrangle, sometimes say true things that we may correct, whereas the latter show less freedom of justice than they ought, for fear of embittering the sweetness of friendship. Therefore, although you are, as you think yourself, an ox wearied perhaps by bodily old age, yet not in vigour of mind, sweating with fruitful labour on the Lord’s threshing floor, here I am: if I have said anything amiss, ‘plant your foot more firmly.’ The weight of your years ought not to trouble me, so long as the chaff of my fault is trodden out.

Accordingly, I read and reread with a sigh of great longing what you put at the end of your letter: ‘Would that we were worthy of your embrace, and that by talking together we might either teach or learn something!’ But I say: would that we lived at least in neighbouring lands, so that, if our conversations cannot be joined, our letters might be more frequent! As it is, we are separated from each other’s perceptions by so great a distance that I remember writing to your Holiness as a young man about those words of the apostle to the Galatians, and here I am now an old man and still have not been favoured with a reply; and copies of my letter reached you more easily, through some chance or other that came first, than the letter itself through my care; for the man who had then received it neither delivered it to you nor brought it back to me. And so great is the learning that appears to me in those of your writings that have been able to reach our hands that there is nothing I would rather do in my studies, if I could, than cleave to your side. Since I cannot do this, I am thinking of sending to you one of our sons in the Lord to be instructed for our benefit, if I am favoured with your reply on this matter too. For there is not in me so much knowledge of the divine Scriptures, nor can there now be, as I see is in you; and whatever ability I have in this matter I spend, as best I can, on the people of God. But because of my church duties I am altogether unable to give time to instructing the studious more thoroughly than the congregations hear.

What abusive writings concerning you may have reached Africa, we do not know; we have, however, received what you were pleased to send in answer to those abuses. When I had read it, I confess, I grieved greatly that so great an evil of discord had arisen between persons so dear and intimate, joined by a bond of friendship known to almost all the churches. And indeed how far you restrain yourself, and how far you hold back the stings of your indignation so as not to return abuse for abuse, stands out plainly enough in your writing. And yet, if I wasted away with grief and grew stiff with fear when I read even this, what would the things he wrote against you have done to me, had they happened to come into my hands? ‘Woe to the world because of offences!’ See, it is happening; see, it is being wholly fulfilled, what the Truth said: ‘Because iniquity will abound, the love of many will grow cold.’ For what faithful hearts can now pour themselves out safely to each other? Into whose mind may trusting love cast itself wholly and securely? In short, what friend is not to be feared as a possible future enemy, if what we lament could arise between Jerome and Rufinus? O wretched and pitiable condition! O untrustworthy knowledge of friends’ present wills, where there is no foreknowledge of the future! But why should I think this a thing for one man to lament about another, when not even a man himself is known to himself for the future? For he knows, perhaps, and barely, what he is now; but what he will be afterwards he does not know.

Moreover, if the holy and blessed angels have not only this knowledge of what each one is, but also the foreknowledge of what he will be, I do not see at all how the devil was ever blessed while he was still a good angel, if he knew his future iniquity and everlasting punishment. On this question, if indeed it is necessary to know it, I should like to hear what you think. See what the lands and seas that separate us in body bring about. If this letter of mine that you are reading were I myself, you would already be telling me what I asked; but as it is, when will you write back? When will you send? When will it arrive? When shall I receive it? And yet, would that it might happen some day! We bear with all the patience we can that it cannot happen as quickly as we wish. So I return to those most sweet words of your letter, full of holy longing, and make them mine in turn: ‘Would that we were worthy of your embrace, and that by talking together we might either teach or learn something,’ if indeed it were possible in any way that I should teach you.

But in these words, which are now not only yours but mine as well, where I am delighted and refreshed, and where I am in no small part consoled by our mutual longing itself, though it hangs unfulfilled and does not reach its goal, there again I am pierced by the sharpest goads of grief, when I think how, between you two, to whom God had granted generously and abundantly the very thing that each of us has wished, that, most closely joined and intimate, you might together taste the honey of the holy Scriptures, so great a bane of bitterness has crept in. When, where, to what man is it not to be feared, if it could befall you, men of mature age dwelling in the word of the Lord, at the very time when, having cast off the baggage of the world, you were following the Lord unencumbered and living together in that land where the Lord, walking on human feet, said, ‘My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you’? Truly, human life on earth is a trial. Alas for me, that I cannot find you anywhere together! Perhaps, moved, grieving, fearing as I am, I would fall at your feet, I would weep; I would plead as much as I could, as much as I love, now with each of you for himself, now with both for each other, and for others, especially the weak, for whom Christ died, who watch you as in the theatre of this life to their own great peril, that you would not, by writing such things about each other, spread abroad things which, since you will not be able to blot them out once reconciled, would make you unwilling to be reconciled, or which you would fear to read once reconciled, lest you quarrel again.

I tell your Charity truly that nothing made me tremble more than this example when I read in your letter to me certain signs of your indignation: not so much the remarks about Entellus and the weary ox, where you seemed to me to be joking cheerfully rather than threatening angrily, as that which you plainly wrote in earnest, about which I spoke above more, perhaps, than I should have, but not more than I feared, where you said, ‘Lest perhaps, being injured, you should justly complain.’ I ask you: if it is possible for us to inquire and discuss something between us by which our hearts may be fed without the bitterness of discord, let it be done. But if I cannot say what seems to me to need correcting in your writings, nor you in mine, without suspicion of envy or injury to friendship, let us leave these things alone and spare our life and salvation. Let that which ‘puffs up’ certainly achieve less, so long as that which ‘builds up’ is not offended. I feel that I am far from that perfection of which it is written, ‘If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man.’ But plainly I think that, by God’s mercy, I can easily ask your pardon if I have given any offence. You ought to open it to me, so that when I have heard you, you may gain your brother. Nor, because you cannot do this between you and me alone owing to the distance of our lands, ought you therefore to let me go on erring. As for the matters themselves that we wish to know, if I know or believe or think that I hold some truth in which you think otherwise, I shall try, as far as the Lord grants, to maintain it without wronging you. But as for your offence, when I perceive that you are indignant, I shall do nothing but beg your pardon.

Nor do I think at all that you could have been angry unless I had either said what I ought not, or not said it as I ought; for I do not wonder that we know each other less than we are known by those most closely joined and intimate with us. Into their love, I confess, I readily cast myself wholly, especially when wearied by the offences of the world, and in it I rest without any anxiety; for I feel that God is there, into whom I cast myself securely and in whom I rest securely. Nor in this security of mine do I fear at all that uncertain tomorrow of human frailty which I lamented above. For when I feel that a man is aflame with Christian love and has by it become a faithful friend to me, whatever of my plans and thoughts I entrust to him, I entrust not to a man but to Him in whom he abides, so that he is such; ‘for God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God.’ If he forsakes that love, he must cause as much pain as the joy he caused while he abided in it. Yet even so, let one who from an intimate friend has become an enemy have to seek what he may cunningly invent, rather than find what he may betray in anger. And this anyone easily achieves, not by hiding what he has done, but by not doing what he would wish hidden. This the mercy of God grants to the good and godly, that among any future enemies they may live free and secure: they do not betray the sins of others entrusted to them, and they themselves commit none that they would fear to have betrayed. For when something false is invented by a slanderer, either it is not believed at all, or at least one’s reputation alone is troubled while one’s salvation remains whole. But an evil that is committed is an inward enemy, even if it is not published by the talk or quarrel of any intimate. Therefore what sensible man does not see how bearable you, too, find the incredible enmity, now, of one once your dearest and most intimate friend, since your conscience consoles you; and how you count what he boasts of, or what perhaps some believe, among the weapons on the left hand, with which one fights the devil no less than with those on the right? Yet I would rather he were somehow milder than that you were so much better armed. It is a great and sad marvel to have come from such friendship to such enmity; it will be a joyful and much greater one to have returned from such enmity to the former concord.

As I asked your Sincerity when I was with you, so now too I remind you not to be reluctant to send my letter to our holy brother and fellow presbyter Jerome. And so that your Charity may know how you too ought to write to him on my behalf, I have sent copies of my letters to him and of his to me; when you have read them, in your holy prudence you will easily see both the restraint which I thought I should keep and his agitation, which I did not fear in vain. Or, if I have written anything I ought not, or in a way I ought not, send a word, in brotherly love, not to him about me but rather to me myself, so that, being corrected, I may ask him to forgive me, if I myself come to recognize my fault.

I have received from your Worthiness, by the deacon Cyprian, three letters at once, or rather three short books, containing various questions, as you call them, but, as I perceive, criticisms of my little works. If I wished to answer them, it would take a book of great size; yet I shall try, as far as I can, not to go beyond the limit of a longer letter, and not to delay our brother, who is in a hurry and asked me for letters only three days before he was to set out, so that I am forced to blurt out these things, such as they are, almost under arms, and to answer in hasty language, not with the deliberation of one who writes but with the rashness of one who dictates, which mostly turns out to be not a matter of learning but of chance, just as sudden wars throw even the bravest soldiers into confusion, and they are forced to flee before they can snatch up their arms.

But our armour is Christ and the teaching of the apostle, who writes to the Ephesians: ‘Take up the armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day’; and again: ‘Stand, therefore, having your loins girded with truth and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, above all taking the shield of faith, with which you may be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.’ Armed with these weapons, King David once went forth to battle, and, taking five smooth stones from the brook, showed that there was nothing rough or filthy in his mind amid the whirlwinds of this world, drinking from the brook by the way; and therefore, being exalted, he cut off the most proud head of Goliath with Goliath’s own sword, striking the blasphemer in the forehead and wounding him in that part of the body in which Uzziah too, who presumed to take the priesthood, was struck with leprosy. And the saint glories in the Lord, saying: ‘The light of your countenance, O Lord, is sealed upon us.’ Let us also, then, say: ‘My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready; I will sing and give praise in my glory. Awake, psaltery and harp; I will awake at dawn,’ so that in us may be fulfilled, ‘Open your mouth and I will fill it,’ and, ‘The Lord will give the word to those who preach the good news with great power.’ I do not doubt that you too pray that, as we contend, the truth may prevail. For you seek not your own glory but Christ’s; and when you win, I too shall win, if I understand my error; and conversely, when I win, you are the victor, because children do not lay up for their parents but parents for their children. And in the book of Chronicles we read that the children of Israel went forth to fight with a peaceful mind, thinking even amid swords and the shedding of blood and the corpses of the fallen not of their own victory but of the victory of peace. Let us answer, then, everything, and, if Christ so commands, resolve these many questions in brief language. I pass over the greetings and courtesies with which you stroke my head; I say nothing of the flattery with which you try to soften your rebuke of me; I shall come to the matters themselves.

You say that you received from a certain brother a book of mine without a title, in which I listed the church writers, Greek as well as Latin, and that, when you asked him (to use your own words) why the first page had no title, or by what name it was known, he answered that it was called ‘Epitaph’; and you argue that it would rightly be so called if you had read there only the lives or writings of those who were already dead; but since the works of many who were living when it was written, and are living still, are recorded there, you wonder why I gave it this title. I think your Prudence understands that you could have gathered the title from the work itself. For you have read both the Greeks and the Latins who described the lives of illustrious men, and they never gave the title ‘Epitaph’ to such a work, but ‘On Illustrious Men’, for example generals, philosophers, orators, historians, epic, tragic, and comic poets. An epitaph, on the other hand, is properly written of the dead, such as I remember I once composed on the falling asleep of the presbyter Nepotian of holy memory. This book, therefore, should be called either ‘On Illustrious Men’ or, properly, ‘On Church Writers’, although many unskilled correctors are said to have titled it ‘On Authors’.

In the second place you ask why I said, in my commentary on the Letter to the Galatians, that Paul could not have rebuked in Peter what he had done himself, nor censured in another a pretence of which he himself was guilty; and you assert that the apostle’s rebuke was not a matter of arrangement but real, and that I ought not to teach falsehood, but that everything written means just what is written. To this I answer first that your Prudence ought to have remembered the little preface of my commentary, which says in my own person: ‘What then? Am I foolish or rash to promise what he could not? Not at all! Rather I think I am more cautious and timid in this, that, feeling the weakness of my powers, I have followed the commentaries of Origen. For that man wrote five volumes specifically on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, and filled the tenth book of his Stromata with a brief discussion of its explanation; he also composed various treatises and excerpts, which alone might suffice. I pass over my Didymus the Seer, and the Laodicean who has lately left the church, and Alexander, the heretic of old, and also Eusebius of Emesa and Theodore of Heraclea, who themselves also left some commentaries on this matter. Even if I culled only a little from these, something would result that would not be altogether despised. And, to confess it simply, I read all of these, and, heaping up a great deal in my mind, I called a secretary and dictated either my own thoughts or those of others, sometimes not remembering the order, or the words, or the sense. It now rests with the Lord’s mercy that what others said well should not perish through my lack of skill, and fail to please among strangers what pleases among its own.’ If, therefore, you thought anything in my explanation worthy of rebuke, it was for your learning to inquire whether what I wrote was to be found in the Greeks, so that, if they had not said it, you might then condemn the opinion as properly mine; especially since I openly confessed in the preface that I had followed Origen’s commentaries and dictated either my own thoughts or those of others, and since at the end of the very chapter you criticize I wrote: ‘If anyone does not like this interpretation, by which it is shown that Peter did not sin and that Paul did not insolently rebuke his superior, he ought to explain by what consistency Paul censures in another what he himself committed.’ By this I showed that I was not defending as settled what I had read in the Greeks, but had set out what I had read, so as to leave it to the reader’s judgment whether it should be approved or disapproved.

So, to avoid doing what I had asked, you found a new argument: you assert that the Gentiles who had believed in Christ were free of the burden of the law, but that those who believed from among the Jews were subject to the law; so that, in the person of each, Paul rightly rebuked those who kept the law, as teacher of the Gentiles, and Peter was justly rebuked because, as chief of the circumcision, he had imposed on the Gentiles what only those who were from the Jews ought to observe. If this is your view, or rather since it is your view, that all who believe from among the Jews are bound to keep the law, you, as a bishop known throughout the whole world, ought to promulgate this opinion and draw all your fellow bishops into agreement with you. I, in my little hut with the monks, that is, with my fellow sinners, do not dare to decide great matters, except to confess frankly that I read the writings of my elders and, according to the custom of all, set down various explanations in my commentaries, so that from many each may follow what he wishes. This I think you too have read and approved, both in secular literature and in the divine books.

This explanation, which Origen first gave in the tenth book of his Stromata, where he interprets Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, and which the other interpreters followed after him, they introduce chiefly for this reason: to answer the blasphemous Porphyry, who accuses Paul of insolence for daring to rebuke Peter, the chief of the apostles, to censure him to his face and to pin him down by argument for having done wrong, that is, for being in the same error as the man who censured another for his fault. What shall I say of John, who not long ago governed the church of Constantinople in the episcopal rank, and wrote a very long book specifically on this passage, in which he followed the view of Origen and the ancients? If, then, you rebuke me as in error, allow me, I beg you, to err with such men; and when you see that I have many companions in my error, you ought to produce at least one supporter of your truth. So much for the explanation of one passage of the Letter to the Galatians.

But so that I may not seem to rely on the number of witnesses against your reasoning, and to evade the truth under cover of illustrious men without daring to join battle, I shall briefly put forward examples from the Scriptures. In the Acts of the Apostles a voice came to Peter, saying, ‘Rise, Peter, kill and eat,’ that is, all kinds of four-footed animals and creeping things of the earth and birds of the air. By this saying it is shown that no man is unclean by nature, but that all are called equally to the gospel of Christ. To this Peter answered, ‘Far from it, for I have never eaten anything common and unclean.’ And a voice came to him a second time: ‘What God has cleansed, you must not call common.’ So he went to Caesarea, and, having entered Cornelius’s house, he opened his mouth and said, ‘In truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation whoever fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him.’ Then the Holy Spirit fell upon them, and the believers from the circumcision who had come with Peter were astonished that the grace of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also. Then Peter answered, ‘Can anyone forbid water, that these should not be baptized, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Now the apostles and brethren who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles too had received the word of God. And when Peter had gone up to Jerusalem, those of the circumcision disputed with him, saying, ‘Why did you go in to men who are uncircumcised and eat with them?’ When he had explained everything to them in order, he concluded his speech with these words: ‘If, then, God gave them the same grace as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could hinder God?’ When they heard this they held their peace and glorified God, saying, ‘Then God has granted to the Gentiles also repentance unto life.’ Again, when a long time afterwards Paul and Barnabas had come to Antioch and, having gathered the church, had reported how much God had done with them and that he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles, certain men coming down from Judea taught the brethren, saying, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.’ So, since no small dissension arose against Paul and Barnabas, they decided that both the accused and the accusers should go up to the apostles and presbyters at Jerusalem about this question. And when they had come to Jerusalem, and some of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed in Christ rose up, saying, ‘They must be circumcised and commanded to keep the law of Moses,’ and a great debate arose over this matter, Peter, with his usual boldness, said: ‘Men and brethren, you know that a good while ago God chose among us that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel and believe. And God, who knows the hearts, bore them witness, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you tempt God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, just as they are.’ And all the multitude kept silence, and the apostle James and all the presbyters together came over to his opinion.