Letters of Celestine I (to and concerning the Council of Ephesus) 25.0–25.17

Celestine, bishop, to the clergy and people dwelling at Constantinople.

The gathering of her children is a mother's exultation; indeed, the church rejoices that she has gathered again the children whom the devil had scattered, so that of them none is lost except the son of perdition, since the Father in no way acknowledged him as his son. For, imitating the one from whom he was, as we read, he was trying to take the inheritance away from you, the legitimate children of God, whom, as the apostle says, we believe for your faith to be heirs of God and future co-heirs of our Christ. So he was not allowed to carry off the palm from those who instead triumphed over him by the arms of faith. The tyrant shut out proclaims you victors, or rather proclaims the victory of our common King over the enemy; he conquered in you whose divinity was thought to be made uncertain. If the birth admitted

a question, a question I would say which each one who believes rightly should simply lay open for himself. For who would dare to call God into examination and discuss how he came to help us? It was not hard for God to be able to do what he willed, since he who was able deigned to set us free. But how could that sinner see light in such darkness of his own? How could he gather by earthly subtleties the truth set on high? These things cannot be seen in their darkness by those who do not know the lamp of his word, which the prophet David testifies is a light to his paths. With this psalmist, as we said above, it delights us to sing of the mother, rejoicing at the return of her children into her womb, which a disputation, ridiculous and blasphemous until now, was disturbing: 'Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity.' I might fittingly have borrowed these words from him; for by the help of the venerable Trinity I claim for myself in very great part the peace of the universal church, the sum of the present joys, I whom until now everyone who was made to stumble set on fire, and whom the weakness of some made weak. Your Charity remembers that some time ago I spoke to you about patience; as a priest I sowed the seeds I ought in Christian minds, and the harvest expected in you has not disappointed me. What the harvest of your patience has brought, you prove by its very fruits. Envying these, the farmer who is to perish had sown perishing darnel within the minds of some; he had sown something far other than he had received to sow or found sown. We certainly have the seeds of our faith, which the word of the Lord himself and the teaching of the apostles sowed; whenever such things happen, it is not the soil that received them that spoils them, but other seed scattered over them. The Lord of the harvest will be able to charge nothing to your simple faith, he who, when asked, showed in the Gospel the author of the darnel. They then said: 'Whence the darnel in good seed?' Let us say: whence faithlessness in so great a kingdom of faith? Let us answer you, however, with the words of Christ: 'An enemy has done this.' The strength of your mind has shown how the wrestling school of earlier teachers trained you. To them you owe your recognition of this error, and of their praise this man was unworthy, who despised such glorious goods. He studied not in part but wholly the serpent's cunning, not the simplicity of the dove. Nor is it surprising if, preparing to kill simple souls, he followed by persuading the one who first killed by persuading. Indeed, we read that he deceived by words;

this man tried to bring death only through words. Yet he did not follow his author with impunity, since, after the example of Judas, another has taken his office as bishop. One sentence rightly holds both, since, as we read, both sinned in one. Though each stands before our eyes, the slanderer and the betrayer of our Saviour, it is still hard to decide between the one who disputed his birth and the author of his death. Judas, at least, repented of his deed at once, though in vain; the punishment of the betrayer came before the end of the one betrayed. He chose the noose at once, confessing his sin; this man glories in the obstinacy of impiety. Nor will I give this faithlessness the name of error; not all impiety is error. Indeed, whenever the envious devil turned against the church or its peace, the contention born within it kept safe the cause of the contest itself. To what end did this conflict advance, in which the struggle was not

that someone might win by religion, but that religion itself might be conquered? You surely remember him, since one must remember a blasphemer; but now I want forgetfulness of such great evils to be enjoined on holy minds. Let him be taken from your minds who has been taken from your eyes; let him be taken away, I say, for so he must be called, the slayer of the inner man. The sinister preacher laid frequent ambushes, he often bent his bow, as we read, and shot poisoned arrows from his mouth; yet he found no one among your number to strike. His darts turned back upon himself, after he could not shoot in the dark at the upright in heart, and nothing was permitted to the son of darkness against the children of light. What care, what anxiety held us for you then, set as you were in an internal war! We spent the nights like days, since in such causes all time is short; we did not let our eyes sink in sleep nor loosen our mind in rest. For whom would the delight of sleep seize, with the robber so watchful? We knew what fear there was within the folds, how great the dread within the pens, whenever the hunger of wolves nearby seeks by a long circuit an entrance to its prey and rages, threatening destruction to those who are away. Of how great praise for its caution is this flock worthy, which the robber shut in with it did not touch? The cause of this protection is plain; it is in the open who resisted the enemy. Let us all understand and confess that the shepherd who in the Gospel says that he is the shepherd protected you; he who suffered in you was with you and did not desert you. For against him the tongue was sharpened with daily blasphemies; against him the impious expounder armed his teeth. Yet he was always mocked by an empty bite, since the rod and staff of the same shepherd comforted you, who, when about to go to heaven, even handed over his flock to be fed. These pastures have not been changed for you until now; you have been filled with the same fodder; apostolic and pious teachers have always fed you with their word. But a harmful food had been substituted for healthy fare, when the adversary presented to hungry souls thorns mixed with flowers; yet this fraud did not deceive you, who are the sweet fragrance of Christ in the Lord. After something smelled to you quite different from what it used to, you shrank from the herb of deadly grass; you hedged your ears with thorns, so as not to hear the wicked tongue. What

offended the hearing did not reach the mind, and what the outer man did not receive could not strike the inner. You avoided him, and, as we have learned, you even resisted him to his face; you avoided him, according to the sentence of the blessed apostle Paul, as one whom you knew had already been rebuked. For you have read, and already hold in memory, since they are all worthy of memory, the writings of the priest of the Alexandrian church, that is, of a catholic teacher, to him, by which he so rebuked him as to want him corrected. He strove to call back a slipping colleague; he stretched out the right hand of his teaching, wishing in one man to help very many. The ruin of many, as their bishop wavered, struck the mind of the aged priest. He did, as it is written, the blessed work of the Lord diligently. The apostolic man failed in no part of the apostle's office: he besought, admonished, rebuked. But the other, sinking into the depths by the weight of his blasphemies, refusing the teaching of so great a man and abusing his exhortation, would not be teachable, though he could not be a teacher. The champion of perversity attacks with insults one who holds fast to what is right; yet the brother gloried in this and was not saddened, reckoning that one who so disparaged his Lord would naturally not spare his fellow servant. By his diligence he has been found to be that thrifty son and provident servant of the Gospel. For he both kept the father's substance and increased the number of the talents. I would say that he did not double but multiplied the sum, since we see him helping even those far away with pious interest. O usury of holy preaching! What favour before the common Lord will this merchant of the faith find, who for the gain of souls carried on business even where another had received the trust? Will he not deservedly hear from the householder: 'Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your Lord'? These words fit him who kept also what was entrusted to others. What will that other hear, or what will he say, when an account is required of him for what was entrusted to him? He is surely entangled in guilt, even if you, though lost through others, had been kept by him. You surely know, in your learning, what punishment awaits negligent priests, since the apostle commands them to rule diligently even their own houses. Eli, indeed, blameless in himself, incurred God's displeasure through his sons. The high priest and father offended on account of his sons; his authority and his tenderness offended. If, then, he incurred it when he did not restrain his sons' presumption, how much more does this man offend the Lord when he does not even spare himself? I would not call him idle; I would not call him negligent.

You had a man of constant speech and, since I speak to those who know, you had a watchful destroyer. Yet the blessed apostle Peter did not desert one labouring so grievously. For when the putrefaction, horrifying to all, urged that such a wound be separated from the body of the church, we offered a poultice together with the knife. But he, abusing our zeal (for we follow him who wills that not one of the little ones should perish), chose death in his despair. Indeed, rejecting the medicine, he chose to be cut off; agreeing with us at least in this, he himself pronounced on himself the apostolic judgment, that he who troubled us and wished to pervert the gospel of Christ should be cut off. As we have said, we failed in no skill of a physician toward one sick by his own fault; it was not by the haste of our sentence that he became to us a tax collector or a Gentile. We know how, and how often, Scripture commands that those who tend toward these names be admonished, and this is seen to have been fulfilled now too. First brother admonished brother; then, being obstinate, he was admonished with one and another witness, indeed with many; and consequently he was rebuked by the universal church, and by our word also. We did nothing premature, nothing unripe in this, since the order of divine ordinance, duly observed, condemned him. We could not put it off any longer, lest, as it is written, we seem to run with the thief and set our portion with the adulterer of the faith, especially since the eye that causes stumbling is commanded to be removed.

To these remedies, so often offered without delay, he answers by demanding a field for combat; he asks for a priestly examination which he was not going to attend; he goes out to war, a leader of the camp who has declared himself an enemy, a teacher of the faith bearing the arms of faithlessness against the faith, though he seemed not so much to have set out as to have been expelled. I do not ask what prayers you poured out then to our Lord, since the outcome teaches what you could have wished for. And do not think us ignorant of what was done, the course of which the report of our holy brother Cyril has made plain to us. The summons, according to custom, admonished the man, which would make him inexcusable; he scorned to attend. Who would believe that the one who demanded a synod would be absent from the synod? There the lightness of falsehood was pressed down by the weight of truth, and the darkness of the hidden faithless one did not dare to mingle with the brilliance of the radiant priests. The darkness fled from the light, since we read that they can have no fellowship; contraries always offend each other. Where is what was said to him, that what is said in darkness he should speak in the light, and what he heard in the ears he should preach on the housetops? But he wished to hide while present for this reason, that shame might anticipate the sentence to be passed, his conscience judging him. Why did he want to keep his lamp under a bushel, if he thought it was well lit? It ought to have shone to the whole holy assembly, so as to be approved by the true light of all. The divine sentence does not deceive, that those who are in darkness cannot see the light. He remained hidden and, by avoiding the priestly college, in a manner renounced his very dignity. So the first man, Adam, conscious of his sin, hid himself naked before the face of the Lord, and, having sinned not against him but against his commands, he was terrified at the voice he had despised, and, deceived, fell into fear, after he had lost the confidence of simplicity through the vice of transgression. Confession of hiding

does not allow doubt about the crime; no one hides innocently in grave cases. Let him, then, having lost the garment of honour and glory, follow the example of that author of our death; rightly has he done this with the first man Adam, who so denied the Godhead of the last Adam. He could not face the vexation of so many priests, a council gathered from almost every part of the world; he was absent from those with whom he knew he did not stand. What did it profit him to avoid this? He wished to flee those whom he was not granted to escape. For by what means could he escape, when the pursuer is the one from whom no one hides? Or, since he had such companions, thinking himself without sin, did he not deign to consider what the prophet cried: 'Where shall I go from your face, and from your Spirit where shall I flee? If I go up into heaven, you are there; if I go down into the underworld, you are present'? The prophet cries that his sins have no hiding place and cannot be concealed from God; for he confesses as present everywhere the one whom this man tries to assert was absent within the womb

as assumed. At last, in his holy priests, as always, the one living Spirit in all decided what would help all. He received nothing from putrefaction, nothing from a spreading wound, since what the spiritual hand cut off was diligently amputated. 'Cast out,' says Solomon, 'the quarrelsome man from the council, and strife will go out with him.' He carried back with him the scandal he had brought, since what he found among you he left. As the Lord says, the plant which the Father had planted, and which was proved to bear abundant fruit in it, could not be uprooted; the Lord kept his vineyard, Israel. His house is the vineyard of the Lord, and so it is no wonder if it escaped the thief of his house, whose guardian, we read, neither sleeps nor slumbers. What does the obstinate impious man do? What hope is left him, what help? He has no place for pardon, of whom it is written that he cannot be forgiven either here or in the future. Every proud man is brought low; against exaltation, humility brings forth for the Christian, since he who rests upon him exalts him. His words through the prophet are: 'He who acts proudly shall not dwell in the midst of my house,' he who through the apostle promises that he will destroy the foolish wisdom of the world.

Let him now hear from you what Paul once heard, though he was already preaching: 'He has come to madness by the road of many letters.' Yet far be that example from him; for the unlearned man does not deserve to hear what was said of a teacher. Why, besides, should we bring forward the vessel of election against a vessel of rejection? To reproach him, that man suffices whom the benefit of punishment, as he hung on the cross with Christ after so many crimes, made confess the Lord. He asks to be remembered by him in his kingdom; by this brief word he washes away whatever he had committed, helping the crimes of years by one moment of time. Nor does the reward keep the one confessing waiting; at once his recompense and return answered from him who gladly receives one turned to him at any hour: 'With me,' he says, 'you will be in paradise.' He promises fellowship in the things to come to one who was suffering the present things with him. In so great a concord, belief of the heart became for him righteousness, and confession with the mouth became salvation. At this contrast of things we must both rejoice and weep; it is a wickedness that a bishop should have lost what a thief could find. O the reward of faith and of faithlessness! 'O the judgments of God, a great abyss!'

The thief earned paradise and the priest exile; let us, however, take both as interpreters of this matter. The one, placed among torments, recognized him whom the other, placed in honour, did not know. Is this not that saying: 'And man, when he was in honour, did not understand; he was compared to the senseless beasts'? What other sign of understanding is there than to know wisdom and discipline and to understand the words of prudence? That is true wisdom which, as Solomon himself says, takes its beginning from the fear of the Lord, which the blessed Paul affirms that he speaks among the perfect, and it is not so grave that the world did not recognize it then as that a bishop has now not known it. Here I use the words of our God through the prophet Jeremiah: 'Those who handle my law did not know me,' and 'The priests clapped their hands at the prophets prophesying iniquity.' And through the same prophet elsewhere. He was already using, falsely, the defence and praise

of the pagans, who testified that there had never been such a bishop. Truly and plausibly did they say this. For when could a bishop be found who did not know how to be a Christian? He was approved by enemies for this reason, that traitors never displease the enemy. We have heard that he was acting against the law, and what comforts attended the wicked man. Among others, the workers of the Caelestian iniquity were with him and did not desert him, whom the plain sentence of our psalmist pursues: for long since 'the enemies of God are scattered, and those who work iniquity perish.' As the same says, they were devouring the Lord's people as a meal of bread. So he had with him the masters of his own exile; the novice had perfect teachers in this matter. For it is hard to separate those whom crimes alone have joined, since alliances of vices are bound by a stronger glue. Yet what is their end? Surely the one we read: 'The Lord will provoke them, and after this they will fall without honour, in disgrace among the dead forever.'

But why do we linger longer? A longer speech may perhaps cause weariness; let us leave the dead to bury their own dead. Hear now and grasp the words of a simple teacher; hear from him what, living among us, he often heard from our elders; hear things certainly always heard and not discovered by a zeal for novelty. Our colleague speaks to you with our mouth, since one faith must be preached as one. We do not here borrow anyone's testimony concerning his person; he who was chosen from among us has been given by us. He is not unknown, not brought in from elsewhere. You have had a praiseworthy judgment about one present, you whom fame formerly deceived with its prejudgment of one

absent. To say more of him calls for caution, since it is superfluous labour to praise what is known; yet we wish, after our custom, to admonish you with our own words. Let no one among you shake that foundation which the firm rock and that cornerstone laid. Build upon it as catholics, as you are accustomed; you have learned what it is to build on it what remains and what it is to build on it what burns. The one will be weighed against the loss of the other, when the testing fire begins to prove the works of each. I rejoice that you have placed on this foundation not stubble, not wood, not hay, but those riches which the precepts of wise architects commanded to be placed there. You will remain well, you who build so carefully. Such expenditure promises a great dwelling; with gold, silver, and precious stones you are building for yourselves that mansion which cannot be valued. Eternal things are rated by no price, since they are dissolved neither by injury nor by age, for the Lord prepared them for the righteous from the foundation of the world. Let the tired hands of the faithful be strengthened; let the failing knees, as the prophet exhorts, be made firm; let the faint-hearted grow strong. There is nothing they can fear any longer; behold, our Saviour has appeared as victor; God has shown falsehood what it is to strike and assail the truth, after controversy was raised against him over the very thing by which he came to help. Therefore, dearest brothers, abide in him who is in you, so that you may conquer; be perfect in the same mind and in the same judgment, so that from the Son of Man, when he comes in his majesty, you may hear not 'Depart from me, you cursed,' but 'Come, you blessed.' Let the rejection by the one who is coming await the goats; we wish you to be found such that, while they stand cast into the fire on the left, he may invite you on the right to the kingdom. You will not wait for it to be prepared; it has long been waiting for you to reign. Enter quickly now the narrow gate, which has received those whom the wide one never pleased. Let these words to your Love for the joy of catholics suffice; we wish you to review them often, so that, rejoicing in the triumph of faith, you may understand that the God of love and peace is with you.