Letters 82.18–82.36

Accordingly, just as you speak to the contrary and, though the world cries out against you, as you write, declare with a free voice that the ceremonies of the Jews are both harmful and deadly to Christians, and that whoever observes them, whether from the Jews or from the Gentiles, has fallen headlong into the devil’s pit, so I wholly confirm this saying of yours and add: whoever observes them, not only truthfully but even in pretence, has fallen headlong into the devil’s pit. What more do you want? But just as you distinguish the pretence of the apostles from the practice of this time, so I distinguish the truthful conduct of the apostle Paul in all these things at that time from any observance of the Jewish ceremonies at this time, even one wholly without pretence, since then it was to be approved and now it is to be detested. Thus, although we have read, ‘The law and the prophets were until John the Baptist,’ and that the Jews sought to kill Christ for this reason, ‘because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God,’ and that ‘we have received grace for grace,’ and that ‘the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,’ and that it was promised through Jeremiah that God would give a new covenant to the house of Judah, not according to the covenant which he made with their fathers, yet I do not think that the Lord himself was deceitfully circumcised by his parents; or, if he did not prevent this because of his age, neither do I think that he spoke deceitfully to the leper, whom certainly not that observance commanded through Moses but he himself had cleansed: ‘Go and offer for yourself the sacrifice which Moses commanded, as a testimony to them’; nor that he went up to the feast deceitfully, so far from doing it for display before men that he went up not openly but secretly.

‘But the same apostle said, “Behold, I Paul say to you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing.”’ Did he then deceive Timothy and make Christ profit him nothing? Or did it do him no harm because it was done deceitfully? But he did not put it that way, nor did he say ‘if you are circumcised truthfully’, any more than ‘deceitfully’; but he said without any exception, ‘If you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing.’ Just as, then, you wish to make room here for your opinion, so that you would have ‘unless deceitfully’ understood, so I ask, not shamelessly, that you allow us also to understand that ‘if you are circumcised’ was said there to those who wished to be circumcised because they thought they could not otherwise be saved in Christ. Whoever was then circumcised with this mind, this will, this intention, to him Christ profited nothing at all, as he says plainly elsewhere: ‘For if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nothing.’ This is also made clear by what you yourself quoted: ‘You are cut off from Christ, you who are justified by the law; you have fallen from grace.’ He rebukes, then, those who believed that they were justified in the law, not those who observed those legal rites in honour of him who commanded them, understanding both for what purpose they were commanded, namely to foretell the truth, and how long they ought to last. Hence his saying, ‘If you are led by the Spirit, you are no longer under the law’; from which, as you conclude, it appears that one who is under the law, not by arrangement, as you think our elders held, but truly, as I understand it, does not have the Holy Spirit.

It seems to me a great question what it is to be under the law in the way the apostle censures. For I do not think he says this on account of circumcision, or those sacrifices which were then offered by the fathers and are not now offered by Christians, and other things of this kind, but also on account of this very thing which the law says, ‘You shall not covet,’ which we certainly confess Christians ought to observe and preach above all with the light of the gospel. He says that the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good; then he adds: ‘Did what is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But sin, that it might appear sin, worked death in me through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.’ What he says here, that sin through the commandment becomes sinful beyond measure, he says elsewhere: ‘The law came in that the offence might abound; but where the offence abounded, grace abounded all the more’; and elsewhere, after speaking above of the dispensation of grace, that it justifies, he asks as it were, ‘What then is the law?’ and at once answers this question: ‘It was added because of transgression, until the seed should come to whom the promise was made.’ Those, then, he says are under the law to their condemnation whom the law makes guilty because they do not fulfil the law, while, not understanding the benefit of grace, they presume in proud self-exaltation to do the commandments of God as if by their own strength. For love is the fulfilling of the law; and the love of God has been poured out in our hearts, not by ourselves, but by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. But to explain this matter sufficiently, a long discourse, perhaps one needing a volume of its own, is required. If, then, what the law says, ‘You shall not covet,’ holds man guilty under it if human weakness is not helped by the grace of God, and rather condemns the transgressor than frees the sinner, how much less could those things which were commanded for the sake of signification, circumcision and the rest, which had to be abolished as the revelation of grace became more widely known, justify anyone! Yet they were not on that account to be shunned like the diabolical sacrileges of the Gentiles, even when the grace itself which such shadows had foretold had begun to be revealed, but were to be permitted for a little while, especially to those who had come from the people to whom they were given; but afterwards, as if buried with honour, they were to be abandoned irrevocably by all Christians.

But what, I pray you, is the meaning of your phrase, ‘not by arrangement, as our elders held’? Either this is what I call a dutiful lie, so that this ‘arrangement’ is a duty, as it were, of lying honourably; or I cannot see at all what else it is, unless perhaps by adding the name ‘arrangement’ it comes about that a lie is not a lie. If that is absurd, why then do you not say openly that the dutiful lie is to be defended? Unless perhaps the name troubles you, because the word ‘duty’ is not so commonly used in church writings; but our Ambrose did not fear it, who chose to call certain books of his, full of useful precepts, ‘On Duties’. Or is a man to be blamed if he lies dutifully, but approved if he lies by arrangement? I ask you: let him who thinks this lie where he chooses (for this too is a great question, whether it is ever right for a good man, nay, for a Christian man, to lie, to men to whom it was said, ‘Let your speech be yes, yes; no, no,’ and who hear with faith, ‘You will destroy all

who speak a lie’; but, as I said, that is another and a great question): let him who thinks so choose where he will lie, provided only that it is believed and defended without wavering that a lie is altogether absent from the writing authors of the holy Scriptures, and especially of the canonical Scriptures; lest the stewards of Christ, of whom it is said, ‘Here it is required among stewards that one be found faithful,’ should seem to have learned, as some great thing to be faithful in, to lie for the sake of the stewardship of the truth; when in the Latin language fides itself is said to be so called because what is said is done (fit quod dicitur). But where what is said is done, there is certainly no room for lying. The apostle Paul, then, a faithful steward, beyond doubt shows us good faith in his writing, because he was a steward of truth, not of falsehood. And therefore he wrote the truth when he said he had seen Peter not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel and had withstood him to his face, because he was compelling the Gentiles to live as Jews. And Peter himself received what Paul did usefully with the freedom of love, with the holy and kind devotion of humility, and so gave posterity an example rarer and holier than Paul’s: that they should not disdain, if they had perhaps left the straight path anywhere, to be corrected even by their juniors; whereas Paul’s example was that even lesser men might boldly dare to resist greater ones in defence of the truth of the gospel, while keeping brotherly love. For while it is better not to turn aside from the road at all than to turn aside in anything, it is much more wonderful and praiseworthy to accept a corrector gladly than boldly to correct one who strays. So the praise of just freedom in Paul and of holy humility in Peter ought, as far as it seems to me in my small measure, rather to have been defended against the slanderer Porphyry, than that he should be given a greater occasion for disparagement, by which he could accuse Christians much more bitingly of either writing their letters deceitfully or carrying out the sacraments of their God deceitfully.

You demand that I show at least one person whose opinion I have followed in this matter, since you have named so many who went before you in what you maintain, asking that, if I rebuke you as in error in this, I should allow you to err with such men; of whom, I confess, I have read none. But though there are some six or seven of them, you yourself weaken the authority of four. For the Laodicean, whose name you do not mention, you say has lately left the church; Alexander you call a heretic of old; and Origen and Didymus I read are criticized by you in your more recent works, and not mildly nor on minor questions, although you formerly praised Origen wonderfully. To err with these, then, I think you will not allow even yourself, although this is said as if they had not erred in this opinion. For who is there who would wish to err with just anyone? There remain, then, three: Eusebius of Emesa, Theodore of Heraclea, and, whom you mention a little later, John, who not long ago governed the church of Constantinople in the episcopal rank.

Further, if you inquire or recall what our Ambrose thought on this, and likewise our Cyprian, you will perhaps find that we too have not lacked men to follow in what we assert. Although, as I said a little before, I owe this willing servitude only to the canonical Scriptures, by which I follow them alone in such a way that I do not doubt that their writers erred in nothing at all in them and set down nothing deceitfully. So when I look for a third, so that I too may set three against three, I could, I think, easily find one if I had read much. But the apostle Paul himself comes to my aid in place of all these, nay, above all these. To him I flee; to him I appeal from all the commentators on his letters who think otherwise; him I question and challenge and ask, about what he wrote to the Galatians, that he saw Peter not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel and withstood him to his face because by that pretence he was compelling the Gentiles to live as Jews: did he write the truth, or did he perhaps lie with some falsehood of arrangement? And I hear him, a little earlier, at the beginning of the same narrative, crying out to me with a solemn voice: ‘Now in what I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie.’

Let those who think otherwise pardon me; I would rather believe so great an apostle swearing in and for his own letters than any most learned man discussing the letters of another. Nor do I fear being said to defend Paul by claiming that he did not pretend to the error of the Jews but was truly in error. For he was not pretending to an error, who, with apostolic freedom, as suited that time, commended those old sacraments by practising them where there was need, as instituted not by the cunning of Satan to deceive men but by the providence of God to foretell things to come prophetically; nor was he truly in the error of the Jews, who not only knew but also insistently and sharply preached that those were in error who thought that these things should be imposed on the Gentiles or were necessary for the justification of any of the faithful.

As for my saying that he became as a Jew to the Jews and as a Gentile to the Gentiles, ‘not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who has compassion’, you seem to me to have paid too little attention to how I said it; or perhaps I was not able to explain it well enough. For I did not say this because he pretended those things out of mercy, but because he did not pretend the things in which he acted like the Jews, just as he did not pretend those in which he acted like the Gentiles, which you too mentioned, and in that, I confess not ungratefully, you helped me. For when I had asked you in my letter how he can be thought to have become as a Jew to the Jews because he deceitfully took up the sacraments of the Jews, since he also became as a Gentile to the Gentiles and yet did not deceitfully take up the sacrifices of the Gentiles, you answered that he became as a Gentile to the Gentiles in this, that he received the uncircumcised and permitted them without distinction to eat foods which the Jews condemn. Here I ask whether he did this too in pretence. If that is most absurd and most false, then so too he did those things in which he conformed to the custom of the Jews with prudent freedom, not by servile necessity, or, what is more unworthy, by a deceitful rather than a faithful arrangement.

For to the faithful and to those who have known the truth, as he himself testifies (unless perhaps he deceives here too), every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving. Therefore to Paul himself, not only a man but a most faithful steward, not only a knower but a teacher of the truth, every creature of God among foods was certainly good, not in pretence but truly. Why, then, did he become as a Gentile to the Gentiles without taking up in pretence any of the Gentile rites and ceremonies, but by truly thinking and teaching about foods and uncircumcision, and yet could not become as a Jew to the Jews except by deceitfully taking up the sacraments of the Jews? Why did he keep the truthful faith of his stewardship toward the grafted wild olive, and yet hold out some veil or other of pretended arrangement before the natural branches, which are not outside but in the tree? Why, having become as a Gentile to the Gentiles, does he teach what he thinks and think what he does, while having become as a Jew to the Jews he shuts up one thing in his heart and brings out another in words, deeds, and writings? Far be it from us to think so. For he owed to both love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned. And so he became all things to all men that he might gain all, ‘not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who has compassion’, that is, not by deceitfully doing all the evils of men, but by attending, with the diligence of merciful healing, to all the evils of all others as if they were his own.

So when he did not refuse to practise those sacraments of the old covenant himself, he was not deceiving out of mercy, but, not deceiving at all, he was in this way commending them as commanded by the Lord God for the arrangement of a fixed time, and distinguishing them from the sacrilegious rites of the Gentiles. But he became as a Jew to the Jews, ‘not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who has compassion’, when he desired to free them from that error by which they either refused to believe in Christ or thought that they could be cleansed from sins and saved by their old priesthoods and the observances of their ceremonies, as if he himself were held by that error, loving his neighbour as himself and doing to others what he would wish others to do to him if he needed it. When the Lord had given this counsel, he added, ‘For this is the law and the prophets.’

This affection of compassion he commands in the same Letter to the Galatians, saying: ‘If a man is overtaken in any fault, you who are spiritual instruct such a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself, lest you too be tempted.’ See whether he did not say to become as that man in order to gain him: not, of course, that one should deceitfully commit the fault itself or pretend to have it, but that in another’s fault one should consider what could happen to oneself too, and so help the other mercifully, as one would wish to be helped by another; that is, ‘not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who has compassion.’ So to the Jew, so to the Gentile, so to any man set in some error or sin, Paul became all things to all men, that he might gain all, not by pretending to be what he was not, but by having compassion, because he could have been such, as one who considered that he was a man.

Look at yourself for a moment, I beseech you, if you please; at yourself, I say, in relation to me; and recall, or, if you have it in writing, reread the words of that shorter letter which you sent me by our brother, now my colleague, Cyprian, how truthfully, how brotherly, how full of loving affection, after you had complained that I had committed certain offences against you, you added gravely: ‘In this friendship is injured, in this the rights of close relationship are violated; let us not seem to contend like boys and give our supporters or detractors matter for dispute.’ These words of yours I feel were spoken not only from the heart but also with a kindly heart, to counsel me. Finally you add what would be evident even if you did not add it, and you say: ‘I write this because I wish to love you purely and in a Christian way, and not to keep anything in my mind that differs from my lips.’ O holy man, beloved by me, as God sees my soul, with a truthful heart: this very thing which you put in your letter, and which I do not doubt you have shown to me, this very thing I believe the apostle Paul showed in his letters, not to some one man but to Jews and Greeks and all nations, his sons, whom he had begotten in the gospel and was in labour to bring to birth, and then to so many thousands of faithful Christians of later generations, for whose sake that letter was committed to memory: that he kept nothing in his mind that differed from his lips.

Certainly you too became as I am, ‘not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who has compassion’, when you considered that I should no more be left in the fault into which you thought I had fallen than you would wish to be left if you had fallen in that way. So, thanking you for your kind mind toward me, I ask at the same time that you also not be angry with me because, when some things in your works troubled me, I made my concern known to you, wishing all to observe toward me what I myself observed toward you: that whatever they think deserves disapproval in my writings they should neither shut up in a deceitful heart nor criticize before others while keeping silent before me; thinking rather that it is by this that friendship is injured and the rights of close relationship are violated. For I do not know whether those friendships are to be thought Christian in which the common proverb, ‘Compliance breeds friends, truth breeds hatred,’ has more force than the church’s proverb, ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend, rather than the willing kisses of an enemy.’

Accordingly let us rather teach our dearest friends, who most sincerely favour our labours, with all the urgency we can, so that they may know that it is possible for one dear friend to contradict another in conversation without love itself being diminished and without truth, which is owed to friendship, breeding hatred, whether what is said in contradiction is true or, whatever it is, is said with a truthful heart, keeping nothing in the mind that differs from the lips. Let our brothers, then, your intimates, to whom you bear witness that they are vessels of Christ, believe that it happened against my will, and that there is no small grief in my heart over this, that my letter came into many hands before it could reach you, to whom it was written. How this happened would be long to tell and, if I am not mistaken, superfluous, since it is enough, if I am believed in this, that it was not done with the intent that is supposed, nor was it at all of my will or arrangement or consent or even thought that it should happen. If they do not believe this, which I say with God as witness, I have nothing more I can do. Yet far be it from me to believe that they suggest these things to your Holiness with malicious intent, to stir up enmity between us, which may the mercy of the Lord our God turn away from us; rather, that without any intention of harm they easily suspect human failings in a man. For it is right for me to believe this of them, if they are vessels of Christ made not for dishonour but for honour, and set by God in a great house for good work. But if, after this testimony of mine, should it come to their notice, they wish to do so, you too see how wrongly they act.

As for my having written that I had sent no book against you to Rome, I wrote it because I distinguished the name ‘book’ from that letter, so that I supposed you had heard of something else altogether; and because I had sent not even that letter to Rome but to you; and I did not think it was against you, since I knew I had written it in sincere friendship, either to admonish you or to correct you or be corrected by you. And, setting aside your intimates, I beseech you yourself, by the grace by which we were redeemed, not to think that I set down with insidious flattery whatever good qualities of yours, granted you by the Lord’s goodness, I mentioned in my letter; and, if I have sinned against you in anything, to forgive me. Nor should you draw to yourself more than I said in my mention, perhaps more foolish than learned, of the fate of some poet or other, since I at once added that I did not say it so that you might recover the eyes of your heart (‘which far be it,’ I said, ‘that you have lost’), but so that you might turn them, sound and watchful as they are, to the matter. I thought fit to touch on it, then, only for the sake of the palinode, which we should imitate if we have written anything that we ought to undo by a later writing, not for the sake of the blindness of Stesichorus, which I neither attributed to nor feared for your heart. And again and again I ask you to correct me confidently wherever you see I need it. For although, according to the titles of honour which the usage of the church has now established, the episcopate is greater than the presbyterate, yet in many things Augustine is less than Jerome; although correction is not to be shunned or disdained even from anyone who is less.

As to your translation, you have now persuaded me of the usefulness for which you wished to translate the Scriptures from the Hebrew, namely to bring into the open what was omitted or corrupted by the Jews. But I ask you to deign to tell me by which Jews: whether by those who translated before the coming of the Lord, and if so, by which of them, or by those later ones, who may be thought to have removed or corrupted some things in the Greek manuscripts so as not to be refuted by those testimonies of the Christian faith. But why the earlier ones should have wished to do this I cannot find. Next, send me, I beg you, your translation from the Seventy, which I did not know you had published. I also want to read your book, which you mentioned, ‘On the Best Kind of Translation’, and to learn further how in a translator the knowledge of languages is to be balanced with the conjectures of those who treat the Scriptures in commentary; who must necessarily, even if they are of the right and one faith, produce various opinions in the obscurity of many passages, though this variety in no way departs from the unity of the same faith; just as one commentator, too, can expound the same passage in different ways according to the same faith, because its obscurity allows this.

I desire your translation from the Seventy for this reason: that we may be free, as far as we can, of the great unskilfulness of the Latin translators, of whatever sort, who have ventured on this; and that those who think I envy your useful labours may at last, if possible, understand that the reason I do not wish your translation from the Hebrew to be read in the churches is that we may not, by bringing forward something new, as it were, against the authority of the Seventy, disturb with great scandal the peoples of Christ, whose ears and hearts are accustomed to hear that translation, which was also approved by the apostles. Hence, as to that plant in Jonah, if in the Hebrew it is neither ivy nor gourd but something else that stands upright, resting on its own stem, needing no props to support it, I would rather that ‘gourd’ were now read in all the Latin copies; for I do not think the Seventy put this without reason, but because they knew that this too was similar.

I think I have answered your three letters sufficiently, or perhaps more than sufficiently; two of them I received by Cyprian, one by Firmus. Write back what you think fit, for the instruction of us or of others. And I will take greater care, as far as the Lord helps me, that the letters I write to you reach you before they reach anyone by whom they may be spread more widely. For I confess that I would not wish that to happen with your letters to me which you most justly complain has happened with mine to you. Yet let us agree to have between us not only the love but also the freedom of friendship, so that neither you with me nor I with you keep silent about what troubles us in each other’s writings, in that spirit, namely, which does not displease the eyes of God in brotherly love. But if you do not think this can happen between us without hurtful offence to that love itself, let it not happen. For the love I would like to have with you is certainly greater; but this lesser one is better than none.