The Conferences 17.20–17.30

Taught by these examples, blessed James the apostle too, and all the chief leaders of that primitive church, urged the apostle Paul to descend to a feigned pretence because of the weakness of the weak, and compelled him to be purified according to the observance of the law, to shave his head, and to offer vows. They counted as nothing the present loss that arose from this hypocrisy, and looked rather to the gains that would come from his long preaching. For the apostle Paul would not have gained as much from his strictness here as all the nations would have lost by his swift death. And this would without doubt have happened then to the whole church, had not this useful and salutary hypocrisy preserved him for the preaching of the gospel. For then we may necessarily and pardonably accept the loss of a lie, when, as we have said, a greater loss threatens from confessing the truth, and the benefit that the truth brings us cannot outweigh the harm that would follow. The same blessed apostle testifies in other words that he always kept to this measure everywhere. For when he says: “I became to the Jews as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to those who were under the law as if I were under the law, though I myself was not under the law, that I might gain those who were under the law; to those without law as if I were without law, though I was not without the law of God but was in the law of Christ, that I might gain those who were without law; I became weak to the weak, that I might gain the weak; I became all things to all, that I might save all”, what else does he show but that he always condescended according to the weakness and measure of those being taught, and relaxed something of the rigour of perfection, and did not hold to what strictness seemed to require, but preferred what the benefit of the weak demanded? And to trace these same things more carefully and set out one by one the marks of the apostle's virtues, someone will ask how the blessed apostle is shown to have adapted himself to all in all things. Where did he become to the Jews as a Jew? Surely there, where, while keeping in his inmost heart the sentence he had declared to the Galatians, “Behold, I Paul say to you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing,” he nevertheless in the circumcision of Timothy took on in a way the appearance of Jewish superstition. And again, where did he become to those under the law as if he were under the law? Surely there, where James and all the elders of the church, fearing lest that multitude of believing Jews, or rather of judaizing Christians, who had received the faith of Christ in such a way that they were still bound by the rite of the legal ceremonies, should fall upon him, came to his aid in his danger with this counsel and persuasion, saying: “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews who have believed, and all these are zealous for the law. They have heard of you that you teach the Jews who are among the Gentiles to depart from Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children”; and below: “Do therefore what we tell you. We have four men who have a vow on them; take them and purify yourself with them, and pay for them so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that the things they have heard about you are false, but that you yourself also walk keeping the law.” And so, for the salvation of those who were under the law, trampling for a little while on the strictness of his own sentence in which he had said, “For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God,” he is compelled to shave his head, to be purified according to the law, and to offer vows in the temple by the Mosaic rite. You will also ask where, for the salvation of those who were wholly ignorant of God's law, he became as if he himself were without law. Read what opening of preaching he used in the city of Athens, where pagan impiety flourished: “As I passed by,” he says, “I saw your images and an altar on which was written: To the unknown God.” And having begun from their superstition, as if he too were without law, he brought in the faith of Christ on the occasion of that profane inscription, saying: “What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.” And a little later, as if he were wholly ignorant of the divine law, he chose to bring forward a verse of a pagan poet rather than a saying of Moses or of Christ: “As some,” he says, “of your own poets have said: For we are also his offspring.” And when he had approached them with their own testimonies, which they could not refute, confirming true things from false, he added: “Since then we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, the sculpture of art and man's device.” He became weak to the weak when, by way of concession, not of command, he allowed those who could not contain themselves to come together again; or when, giving the Corinthians milk to drink and not solid food, he says that he was among them in weakness and fear and much trembling. And he became all things to all, that he might save all, when he says: “Let him who eats not despise him who does not eat, and let him who does not eat not judge him who eats”; and: “He who gives his virgin in marriage does well, and he who does not give her does better”; and elsewhere: “Who is weak,” he says, “and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?” And in this way he fulfilled what he had commanded the Corinthians, saying: “Give no offence to Jews and Greeks and to the church of Christ, just as I also please all in all things, not seeking what is profitable to me but what is profitable to many, that they may be saved.” For it would doubtless have been profitable not to circumcise Timothy, not to shave his head, not to undertake the Jewish purification, not to practise going barefoot, not to offer the legal vows; but he does all these things because he does not seek what is profitable to himself, but what is profitable to many. And though this was done with a view to God, yet it was not without pretence. For he who through the law of Christ had died to the law, that he might live to God, and who had counted as loss and as dung that righteousness of the law in which he had lived blamelessly, that he might gain Christ, could not offer the things of the law with the true affection of his heart; nor is it right to believe that he who had said, “For if I build up again the things I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor,” fell into what he himself had condemned. And so much is the disposition of the doer weighed, rather than the thing done, that on the contrary truth is found to have harmed some and a lie to have helped. For Doeg the Edomite, when King Saul complained before his servants about David's flight and said, “Will the son of Jesse give all of you fields and vineyards, and make you all tribunes and centurions, that you have all conspired against me, and there is no one to inform me?”, what did he reveal but the truth, saying: “I saw the son of Jesse in Nob with Abimelech the son of Ahitub the priest, who consulted the Lord for him and gave him provisions, and also gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine”? For this truth he deserved to be rooted out of the land of the living, and it is said of him through the prophet: “Therefore God will destroy you for ever; he will pluck you out and remove you from your tent, and your root from the land of the living.” He, then, is torn out with everlasting uprooting, for disclosing the truth, from that very land in which Rahab the harlot, for a lie, is planted with her kindred. So too we remember that Samson most ruinously betrayed to his wicked wife the truth he had long hidden by a lie; the truth, most imprudently disclosed, brought deception upon him because he neglected to keep that prophetic command: “From her who sleeps in your bosom, guard the doors of your mouth.”

And to bring forward some examples from our own unavoidable and almost daily necessities, which, however watchful we are, we can never so guard against that we are not forced, willing or unwilling, to run into them: what, I ask, is to be done when we have decided to put off our meal, and a brother arrives towards evening and asks whether we have eaten? Is our fast to be concealed and the virtue of abstinence covered, or disclosed by professing the truth? If we conceal it, so as to satisfy the Lord's command in which it is said, “Do not appear to men as fasting, but to your Father who is in secret”; and again, “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,” we certainly lie. If we make known our virtue of abstinence, the gospel sentence will rightly strike us: “Truly I say to you, they have received their reward.” And what if someone decidedly refuses a cup offered by a brother, absolutely denying that he will accept what the brother, rejoicing at his arrival, humbly begs him to take? Is it right that he should yield, even at the cost of his own effort, to a brother who has thrown himself at his knees and prostrated himself on the ground, and who believes that only by these services can he fulfil the affection of love; or should he persist in the obstinacy of his word and resolution?

Germanus: In the first example there is no doubt, we believe, that it is better to hide our abstinence than to disclose it to those who ask; and in cases of this kind we too admit that a lie is unavoidable. But in the second no necessity of lying presses upon us: first, because we can refuse what is offered by the brothers' service in such a way as not to bind ourselves by any tie of a decision; and then, because once we have refused we can hold to our judgment without wavering.

Joseph: There is no doubt that these decisions belong to those monasteries in which, as you say, the rudiments of your renunciation were formed, whose leaders are accustomed to put their own wills before the refreshment of the brothers and most obstinately carry out whatever they have once conceived in their minds. But our elders, to whose faith the signs of apostolic powers have borne witness, and who did everything by the judgment and discernment of the Spirit rather than by rigid obstinacy of mind, held that those who yielded to the weaknesses of others reaped far richer fruits than those who persisted in their own decisions; and they declared that it was a sign of higher virtue to conceal abstinence by this necessary and, as has been said, humble lie than to disclose it by a proud revelation of the truth.

In fact abba Piamun, after twenty-five years, when grapes and wine were offered him by a certain brother, accepted them without hesitation and at once tasted what had been set before him, contrary to his custom, rather than make known the virtue of a continence unknown to all. For if we wish also to consider what we remember our elders doing without hesitation, who, when it was necessary to bring forward in conference the wonders of their own virtues or their own deeds for the instruction of the younger, used to disguise them under the persons of others, what else can we judge of these things but that they were plain lies? And would that we too had something worthy that could be put before the younger to stir up their faith! We would certainly not fear to follow such fictions of theirs. For it is more right to lie under the colour of such a figure than, for the sake of observing this unreasonable truthfulness, either to cover by unfitting silence what could edify the hearers, or, if they are told truthfully in our own person, to incur the boasting of harmful vanity. The teacher of the Gentiles too plainly instructs us in this by his teaching, for he preferred to bring out the greatness of his revelations in the person of another, saying: “I know a man in Christ, whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows, caught up to the third heaven. And I know that such a man was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”

It is impossible for us to run through everything briefly. For who could count almost all the patriarchs and innumerable saints who, so to speak, took up the protection of a lie: some to safeguard life, some from desire for a blessing, some from mercy, some to conceal a mystery, some from zeal for God, some to test the truth? As they cannot all be counted, so they ought not all to be passed over entirely. For love compelled blessed Joseph to charge his brothers with a false crime, even with an oath by the king's life, saying: “You are spies; you have come to look at the weaker parts of the land”; and below: “Send one of you,” he says, “and bring your brother here; but you will be kept here until your words are made plain, whether you speak the truth or not; otherwise, by the life of Pharaoh, you are spies.” For if he had not frightened them by this merciful lie, he could not have seen his father and brother again, nor fed them in such dangers of want, nor finally cleansed his brothers' consciences from the guilt of selling him. So it was not so much blameworthy to have struck fear into his brothers by a lie, as holy and praiseworthy to have driven his enemies and sellers to salutary repentance on the occasion of a feigned danger. Indeed, when they were pressed by the odium of a most grave accusation, they were broken not by the conscience of what was falsely charged but of their earlier crime, saying to one another: “We deserve to suffer this, because we sinned against our brother, because we disregarded the distress of his soul when he pleaded with us, and we did not listen to him; therefore all this distress has come upon us.” This confession, we believe, with most wholesome humility, atoned for so great a crime, not only before the brother against whom they had sinned with ungodly cruelty, but also before God. What of Solomon, who showed the gift of wisdom he had received from God in his first judgment only by taking up a lie? For in order to extract the truth that was hidden by a woman's lie, he himself used the help of a lie, certainly most cleverly devised, saying: “Bring me a sword, and divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.” When this pretended cruelty had moved the heart of the true mother, and was praised by the one who was not the mother, then at last, by a most sagacious disclosure of the truth, he pronounced the sentence which no one doubted was inspired by God: “Give the living child to this one,” he said, “and let it not be killed; she is its mother.” Accordingly, we are taught more fully by other testimonies of the Scriptures that we neither ought nor are able to carry out everything that we decide, whether with a calm or a disturbed mind; for we often read that holy men, or angels, or almighty God himself, changed what they had decided. For blessed David decreed with the resolution of an oath, saying: “May God do so to the enemies of David, and more also, if I leave of all that belongs to Nabal, by morning, one who pisses against the wall.” And at once, when Abigail his wife interceded and pleaded for him, he remits his threats, softens his sentence, and prefers to be judged a breaker of his purpose rather than to keep faith with his oath by carrying out cruelty, saying: “As the Lord lives, if you had not come quickly to meet me, there would not have been left to Nabal by morning light one who pisses against the wall.” As we judge that the rashness of that headlong oath, which came from the agitation of a disturbed mind, is by no means to be imitated, so we decide that the remission and correction of his resolution is to be followed. The vessel of election, writing to the Corinthians, promises his return with an absolute decision, saying: “But I will come to you when I have passed through Macedonia, for I shall pass through Macedonia; and I shall stay with you, or even winter, so that you may send me on my way wherever I go. For I do not wish to see you now in passing; for I hope to stay with you some time.” He recalls this in the second letter too: “And in this confidence I wished to come to you first, that you might have a second grace, and to pass through you into Macedonia, and again come from Macedonia to you and be sent on by you into Judaea.” But when a more salutary counsel came upon him, he most plainly confesses that he did not carry out what he had promised: “When I wished this,” he says, “did I act lightly? Or do I plan what I plan according to the flesh, so that with me there is yes, yes and no, no?” Then he declares, even with the solemnity of an oath, why he preferred to go back on the decision of his word rather than bring burdensome sorrow on his disciples by his coming: “But I call God as witness upon my soul that it was to spare you that I did not come again to Corinth. For I decided this with myself, that I would not come to you in sorrow.” When the angels refused to enter Lot's house in Sodom, saying to him, “We will not enter, but will remain in the street,” they are at once compelled by his prayers to change their fixed word, as Scripture adds: “And Lot pressed them, and they turned in to him.” If they knew that they would turn in to him, they refused the request of the one inviting them with a feigned excuse; but if they excused themselves truthfully, they are plainly proved to have changed their decision. We believe that the Holy Spirit placed these things in the sacred books for no other reason than that we might be taught by these examples not to persist obstinately in our decisions, but to subject them to our judgment and so to keep our judgment free from every bond of law, so that it may be ready to follow wherever salutary counsel calls, and may not delay or refuse to pass without any hesitation to what salutary discernment has found more useful. And to rise to still higher examples: when King Hezekiah lay on his bed, suffering from a grave illness, Isaiah the prophet addressed him in the person of God, saying: “Thus says the Lord: Set your house in order, for you will die and not live. And Hezekiah turned his face to the wall,” it says, “and prayed to the Lord and said: I beseech you, Lord, remember, I pray, how I have walked before you in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done what is good in your eyes. And Hezekiah wept with great weeping.” After this it is said again to the same prophet: “Go back, and say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Thus says the Lord, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tear; and behold, I will add fifteen years to your days, and I will deliver you from the hand of the king of the Assyrians, and I will protect this city for my own sake and for the sake of David my servant.” What is plainer than this testimony, in which the Lord, out of regard for mercy and pity, prefers to annul his word and to extend the life of the one who prays by fifteen years beyond the appointed limit of death, rather than to be found inexorable by the unchangeableness of his decree? Likewise the divine sentence says to the Ninevites: “Yet three days, and Nineveh will be overthrown”; and soon, by their repentance and fasts, so threatening and abrupt a sentence is softened, and with ready kindness is turned aside to the side of mercy. But if someone maintains that the Lord, foreknowing their conversion, threatened them with the overthrow of the city in order to provoke them to salutary repentance, it follows that those who are over the brothers may, if need be, threaten those who need correction with even stricter things than they intend to do, without blame for lying. But if he says that God revoked that severe sentence of his in view of their repentance, according to what he says through Ezekiel, “If I say to the wicked, You shall surely die, and he repents of his sin and does justice and righteousness, he shall surely live and not die,” we are likewise taught that we ought not to persist obstinately in our decisions, but to soften with merciful compassion a threat made out of necessity. And lest it be thought that the Lord granted this specially to the Ninevites alone, he declares through Jeremiah that he will always do the same generally towards all, and will, when necessary, change his sentence without hesitation according to our deserts. He promises, saying: “Suddenly I will speak against a nation and against a kingdom, to root up and pull down and destroy it. If that nation repents of its evil, which I have spoken against it, I too will repent of the evil which I thought to do to it. And suddenly I will speak of a nation and a kingdom, to build and plant it. If it does evil in my sight and does not listen to my voice, I will repent of the good which I said I would do to it.” And to Ezekiel: “Do not hold back a word, if perhaps they will hear and turn each from his evil way; and I will repent of the evil which I thought to do to them because of the wickedness of their doings.” By these testimonies it is declared that we ought not to cling obstinately to our decisions, but temper them by reason and judgment, always choose and prefer the better things, and pass without any hesitation to the side that has been judged more useful. Above all, that inestimable judgment of God teaches us this: that although the end of each person is foreknown to him before birth, he so orders all things by a common order and reason and, in a way, by human affections, that he judges everything not by his power nor according to the ineffable knowledge of his foreknowledge, but according to the present acts of men, and either rejects or draws each one, and either pours in his grace daily or turns it away. That this is so is shown also by the choice of Saul. Although God's foreknowledge could not be ignorant of his blameworthy end, he chose him out of so many thousands of Israel and anointed him king, rewarding the merit of his present life, not looking to the sin of his future transgression; so that, after he had become reprobate, God, as if repenting of his choice, complains of him in a way with human words and feelings, saying: “I repent that I made Saul king, for he has forsaken me and has not fulfilled my words in deed”; and again: “But Samuel mourned for Saul, because the Lord repented that he had made Saul king over Israel.” Then what he had carried out in deed the Lord later declares through the prophet Ezekiel as well, that he will deal with all men by daily judgment: “Even if I say to the righteous that he shall surely live, and he, trusting in his righteousness, does iniquity, all his righteousnesses will be forgotten, and in the iniquity which he has done, in that he shall die. But if I say to the wicked, You shall surely die, and he repents of his sin and does justice and righteousness, if that wicked man restores the pledge and gives back what he has robbed, walks in the commandments of life and does nothing unjust, he shall surely live and not die. None of the sins which he has committed shall be imputed to him.” Again, when the Lord had turned away the regard of his mercy from that people whom he had adopted out of all nations, because of their sudden transgression, the lawgiver intervenes for it and cries out: “I beseech you, Lord, this people has sinned a great sin; they have made for themselves gods of gold. And now, if you forgive their sin, forgive; but if not, blot me out of your book which you have written.” To him the Lord says: “Whoever has sinned before me, I will blot him out of my book.” David too, lamenting in the prophetic spirit about Judas and the persecutors of Christ, says: “Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” And because they did not deserve to come to salutary repentance for the guilt of so great a crime, he adds: “And let them not be written with the righteous.” In the end the force of the prophetic curse was plainly fulfilled in Judas himself. For when he had completed the crime of betrayal he killed himself by hanging, lest after the blotting out of his name he should turn to repentance and deserve to be written again with the righteous in heaven. So we must not doubt that the name of Judas too, at the time when he was chosen by Christ and received the rank of the apostolate, was written in the book of the living, and that he heard with the rest: “Do not rejoice that the demons are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” But because, corrupted by the plague of love of money, he was thrown down from the heavenly enrolment to earthly things, it is fittingly said through the prophet of him and those like him: “Lord, let all who forsake you be put to shame; let those who depart be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters”; and elsewhere: “They shall not be in the council of my people, nor be written in the register of the house of Israel, nor shall they enter the land of Israel.”

Nor should the usefulness of this precept be passed over: that even if, at the prompting of anger or any other passion, we have bound ourselves by some oath (which indeed no monk ought ever to do), the case for each course must still be weighed with sound judgment of mind; the thing we resolved on must be compared with the one to which we are compelled to pass, and we must pass without hesitation to the one that, on sounder consideration, has been judged more just. For it is more right to go back on our word than to suffer the loss of a more wholesome and pious thing. In short, we never remember reasonable and approved fathers being hard or unbending in decisions of this kind; rather, like wax by heat, they were softened by reason, and when a more wholesome counsel intervened they yielded without hesitation to the better side. But whomever we saw clinging obstinately to their decisions, we always found to be unreasonable and without discernment.

Germanus: As far as this reasoning is concerned, which has been set out clearly and fully, a monk should decide nothing, lest he be found either a transgressor or obstinate. And where shall we put that saying of the Psalmist: “I have sworn and resolved to keep the judgments of your righteousness”? For what else is it to swear and resolve than to keep one's decisions without wavering?

Joseph: We are not deciding these things about the principal commandments, without which our salvation cannot stand at all, but about those which we can either relax or keep without danger to our state: for example, the unremitting rigour of fasting, perpetual abstinence from wine or oil, keeping altogether from going out of one's cell, the unceasing continuance of reading or meditation. These can be practised when one pleases, without loss to our profession and purpose, and can be omitted without blame when necessary. But concerning the observance of those principal commandments we must resolve most firmly, and for them even death, if necessary, is not to be avoided; for them we must say without wavering: “I have sworn and resolved.” This must be done for the keeping of love, for which all things are to be despised, lest the good and perfection of that tranquillity be stained. Likewise we must swear for the purity of chastity; and we must do no differently for faith, for sobriety and for righteousness. All these are to be held with unchanging perseverance, and to depart from them even a little is damnable. But concerning those bodily exercises which are said to be of little profit, we must resolve, as we have said, in such a way that, if some surer occasion of piety arises which advises relaxing them, we are held by no law about them, but may freely leave them and pass to more useful things. For in those bodily exercises there is no danger if they are left for a time; but to turn aside from these even for a moment is deadly.

This too must be looked after with similar caution: if some word you wish to keep secret has perhaps slipped from your mouth, do not trouble the hearer with any instructions to keep it hidden. For it will stay hidden better if it is passed over carelessly and simply, because no brother will be so tormented by temptation to divulge it, reckoning it a trivial thing brought out in passing conversation, and all the lighter because it was not commended to the hearer's mind with a most careful command of silence. For if you bind his faith with some solemn oath, you need not doubt that it will be betrayed all the sooner; for a greater force of diabolical temptation will rise up against him, so as both to grieve or expose you and to make him a breaker of his oath as quickly as possible.

And therefore a monk ought to decide nothing abruptly, at least about things that belong to bodily exercises, lest, by rousing the adversary all the more to attack what he keeps as if under the observance of law, he be compelled to break it all the sooner. For whoever, though set under the grace of liberty, prescribes a law for himself binds himself by a harmful slavery, so that what he could have taken lawfully, and even laudably with thanksgiving, he is compelled, if necessity perhaps forces him, to take as a transgressor, with the guilt of sin. “For where there is no law, there is no transgression.” Strengthened by this instruction and teaching of the most blessed Joseph as by a divine oracle, we chose to stay in Egypt. But although after this we were little anxious about our promise, yet when the number of seven years was completed we gladly fulfilled our pledge. For hastening to our monastery at the time when we were confident of obtaining our return to the desert, we first paid due honour to our elders; then we restored the former love in the minds of those who, in the ardour of their love, had by no means been soothed by the many apologies in our letters; and at last, with the sting of our pledge fully drawn, and with them too sending us on our way with joy, we returned to the secret places of the desert of Scetis. This knowledge and teaching of illustrious fathers, O holy brothers, our ignorance has worked out as well as it could. Even if our unpolished speech has perhaps confused rather than set it in order, I beg that the censure of our rusticity may not empty the praise of these distinguished men. For it seemed safer to us, in the sight of our Judge, to publish the magnificence of this teaching even in unpolished words than to keep silent; since the fact that the reader is offended by the unskilfulness of our speech cannot hinder his progress, if he looks to the loftiness of the thoughts, and our concern is more for usefulness than for praise. I warn all into whose hands these little works come that whatever pleases them in them belongs to the fathers, but they should know that what displeases is ours.