Against Vigilantius

Many monsters have been born in the world. We read in Isaiah of centaurs and sirens, screech owls and pelicans. Job describes Leviathan and Behemoth in mystical language. The stories of the poets tell of Cerberus and the Stymphalian birds, the Erymanthian boar and the Nemean lion, the Chimaera and the many-headed Hydra. Virgil describes Cacus. The Spains produced the three-bodied Geryon. Gaul alone had no monsters, but has always abounded in brave and most eloquent men. Suddenly Vigilantius has arisen, or more truly Dormitantius, to fight with an unclean spirit against the Spirit of Christ, and to deny that the tombs of the martyrs are to be venerated; to say that vigils are to be condemned; that Alleluia must never be sung except at Easter; that continence is heresy and chastity a seedbed of lust. And as Euphorbus is said to have been reborn in Pythagoras, so in this man the depraved mind of Jovinian has risen again, so that in him, as in the other, we are compelled to answer the snares of the devil. To him it is rightly said: "Most wicked seed, prepare your sons for slaughter for the sins of your father." The other, condemned by the authority of the Roman Church, among pheasants and pork did not so much breathe out his spirit as belch it out. This innkeeper of Calagurris, a dumb Quintilian (in reverse, because of the name of his village), mixes water with wine, and by his old trade tries to blend the poisons of his unbelief with the catholic faith: to attack virginity, to hate chastity, to declaim at the banquets of worldly men against the fasts of the saints, while he philosophizes among the wine bowls and, licking at the cakes, is soothed by the melody of psalms, so that only at dinner does he deign to hear the songs of David and Jeduthun, of Asaph and of the sons of Korah. I have poured this out in a spirit of grief more than of laughter, since I cannot restrain myself and cannot let the wrong done to the apostles and martyrs pass with a deaf ear.

Shameful! He is said to have bishops as partners in his crime, if indeed they are to be called bishops who do not ordain deacons unless they have first married wives; who believe no celibate is chaste, or rather show how holy their own lives are when they suspect evil of everyone; and who do not give the sacraments of Christ unless they see the wives of the clergy pregnant and infants wailing in their mothers' arms. What will the churches of the East do? What will the churches of Egypt and of the Apostolic See do, which accept as clergy only virgins or men who are continent, or, if they have had wives, men who cease to be husbands? This is what Dormitantius taught, giving free rein to lust, and by his exhortations doubling the natural heat of the flesh that usually boils up in youth, or rather quenching it in intercourse with women, so that there is nothing to set us apart from pigs, nothing to distinguish us from brute animals, from horses, of which it is written: "They became to me like maddened horses after the mares; each neighed after his neighbor's wife." This is what the Holy Spirit says through David: "Do not become like the horse and the mule, which have no understanding." And again of Dormitantius and his companions: "With bit and bridle bind fast the jaws of those who do not draw near to you."

But now it is time to set out his own words and try to answer them one by one. For a malicious critic might again say that I have invented a subject to answer with a rhetorical declamation, like the letter I wrote to Gaul about a mother and daughter at odds with each other. The authors of this little dictation of mine are the holy presbyters Riparius and Desiderius, who write that their parishes have been stained by his nearness, and who have sent, by our brother Sisinnius, the books he vomited out while snoring in his drunkenness. And they declare that some have been found who, favoring their own vices, assent to his blasphemies. He is indeed unskilled in both words and knowledge, and rough in speech; he cannot defend even what is true. But for the sake of worldly men and of silly women laden with sins, always learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth, I will answer his nonsense in one night's work, so as not to seem to have rejected the letters of the holy men who begged me to do this.

No doubt he answers to his stock, being born of the seed of robbers and Convenae, whom Gnaeus Pompey, after subduing Spain and hurrying back to his triumph, brought down from the heights of the Pyrenees and gathered into one town, from which the city of the Convenae took its name. So he continues his brigandage against the Church of God to this day, and, descended from the Vectones, the Arrebaci, and the Celtiberians, he raids the churches of Gaul, carrying not the standard of the cross but the badge of the devil. Pompey did the same in the East as well: after defeating the Cilician and Isaurian pirates and brigands, he founded a city named after himself between Cilicia and Isauria. But that city today keeps the decrees of its ancestors, and no Dormitantius has arisen in it. The Gauls endure a home-bred enemy; they see sitting in the church a man with a disordered head, who ought to be bound in the bonds of Hippocrates, and among other words of blasphemy saying this too: "What need is there for you not only to honor with such great honor, but even to adore, that something-or-other which you worship as you carry it about in a little vessel?" And again in the same book: "Why do you kiss and adore dust wrapped in a linen cloth?" And in what follows: "We see a practice almost of the pagans brought into the churches under the pretext of religion: while the sun is still shining, heaps of candles are lit; and everywhere people kiss and adore some bit of dust or other, wrapped in a costly linen cloth in a little vessel. Great honor such men pay to the most blessed martyrs, whom they think must be lit up with paltry candles, when the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne lights them up with all the brightness of his majesty!"

For who, you madman, has ever adored the martyrs? Who has thought a man God? Did not Paul and Barnabas, when the Lycaonians took them for Jupiter and Mercury and wanted to offer sacrifices to them, tear their garments and say that they were men? Not that they were not better than Jupiter and Mercury, men long dead; but because, under the error of paganism, the honor due to God was being paid to them. We read the same of Peter, who raised Cornelius with his hand when he wished to adore him, and said: "Stand up, for I too am a man." And you dare to say: "That something-or-other which you worship as you carry it about in a little vessel"? I want to know what that "something-or-other" is. "Explain more plainly," so that you may blaspheme with complete freedom, "some bit of dust or other in a little vessel wrapped in a costly linen cloth." He grieves that the relics of the martyrs are covered with a costly veil, and are not tied up in rags or haircloth or thrown on the dunghill, so that Vigilantius alone, drunk and asleep, may be adored. Are we then sacrilegious when we enter the basilicas of the apostles? Was the emperor Constantius sacrilegious, who transferred to Constantinople the holy relics of Andrew, Luke, and Timothy, in whose presence the demons roar, and those who inhabit Vigilantius confess that they feel their presence? Is the present Augustus Arcadius to be called sacrilegious, who after so long a time transferred the bones of blessed Samuel from Judea to Thrace? Are all the bishops to be judged not only sacrilegious but fools, who carried a most worthless thing and crumbled ashes in silk and a vessel of gold? Are the peoples of all the churches fools, who went out to meet the holy relics and received them with as great joy as if they saw the prophet present and alive, so that swarms of people were joined from Palestine to Chalcedon and resounded with one voice in the praises of Christ? No doubt they were adoring Samuel, and not Christ, whose Levite and prophet Samuel was! You suspect him to be dead, and therefore you blaspheme. Read the Gospel: "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob: he is not the God of the dead but of the living." If, then, they are alive, they are not shut up, as you would have it, in an honorable prison.

For you say that the souls of the apostles and martyrs have their seat either in Abraham's bosom, or in a place of refreshment, or under the altar of God, and that they cannot leave their tombs and be present where they wish. They are, of course, of senatorial rank, and are confined not in a foul prison among murderers but in free and honorable custody, in the Isles of the Blessed and the Elysian Fields! Will you lay down laws for God? Will you put chains on the apostles, so that they are kept in custody until the day of judgment and are not with their Lord, of whom it is written: "They follow the Lamb wherever he goes"? If the Lamb is everywhere, then those who are with the Lamb must be believed to be everywhere too. And while the devil and the demons wander through the whole world and, by their great speed, are present everywhere, shall the martyrs, after shedding their blood, be shut up and covered in a chest, unable to come out? You say in your pamphlet that while we live we can pray for one another, but that after we have died no one's prayer for another is to be heard, especially since the martyrs, praying for vengeance for their blood, could not obtain it. If the apostles and martyrs, while still in the body, can pray for others, when they still ought to be anxious for themselves, how much more after their crowns, victories, and triumphs? One man, Moses, obtains pardon from God for six hundred thousand armed men; and Stephen, the imitator of his Lord and the first martyr in Christ, begs pardon for his persecutors; and once they have begun to be with Christ, will they have less power? The apostle Paul says that two hundred and seventy-six souls in the ship were granted to him; and after he has been set free and begun to be with Christ, is he then to shut his mouth, and be unable to utter a word for those who throughout the world have believed through his Gospel? And will Vigilantius, a living dog, be better than that dead lion? I would rightly apply this text from Ecclesiastes if I admitted that Paul was dead in spirit. In short, the saints are not called dead but sleeping. That is why Lazarus, who was to rise again, is said to have slept, and the Apostle forbids the Thessalonians to grieve for those who sleep. You sleep while awake and write while asleep, and you put before me an apocryphal book that is read under the name of Ezra by you and those like you, in which it is written that after death no one dares to pray for others. I have never read that book. For what need is there to take into one's hands what the Church does not receive? Unless perhaps you bring forward Balsamus and Barbelus and the Treasure of Mani and the ridiculous name of Leusibora; and because you live at the foot of the Pyrenees and are a neighbor of Iberia, you follow the incredible marvels of Basilides, a most ancient heretic of ignorant knowledge, and put forward what is condemned by the authority of the whole world. For in your little commentary, as if it made for you, you take a testimony from Solomon which Solomon never wrote at all, so that you who have a second Ezra may have a second Solomon too. And, if you please, read the forged revelations of all the patriarchs and prophets, and when you have learned them, sing them among the women's weaving rooms; or rather set them out to be read in your taverns, so that by these trifles you may the more easily provoke the ignorant crowd to drink.

We do not light candles in broad daylight, as you vainly slander us, but to temper the darkness of night with this comfort, and to keep vigil by the light, so as not to sleep with you, blind, in the darkness. But if some people do this in honor of the martyrs through the ignorance and simplicity of laymen, or certainly of devout women, of whom we can truly say, "I confess, they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge," what do you lose by it? Once the apostles too complained that the ointment was being wasted, but they were rebuked by the Lord's voice. For Christ had no need of ointment, nor have the martyrs of the light of candles; and yet that woman did this in honor of Christ, and the devotion of her mind is accepted. And whoever lights candles has his reward according to his faith, as the Apostle says: "Let each one be fully persuaded in his own mind." Do you call such people idolaters? I do not deny that all of us who believe in Christ have come from the error of idolatry. For we are not born Christians but reborn. And because we once worshiped idols, ought we not now to worship God, lest we seem to venerate him with an honor like that paid to idols? That was done for idols and is therefore to be detested; this is done for martyrs and is therefore to be accepted. For even without relics of martyrs, throughout all the churches of the East, when the Gospel is to be read, lights are lit, though the sun is already shining: not, of course, to put darkness to flight, but to show a sign of joy. That is why those virgins of the Gospel always have their lamps lit, and the apostles are told: "Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning in your hands"; and of John the Baptist: "He was a burning and shining lamp"; so that under the figure of bodily light that light may be shown of which we read in the Psalter: "Your word is a lamp to my feet, Lord, and a light to my paths."

Does the Roman bishop do wrong, then, when over the bones of the dead men Peter and Paul, venerable bones according to us, worthless dust according to you, he offers sacrifices to the Lord, and regards their tombs as altars of Christ? And not only the bishops of one city but of the whole world are in error, who, despising the innkeeper Vigilantius, enter the basilicas of the dead, in which lies most worthless dust and some ash or other wrapped in linen, so that, being polluted, it pollutes everything, and, like the whitewashed sepulchres of the Pharisees, they are white outside while within, as you say, everything is unclean and stinks with unclean ash. And after this, vomiting up the muddy filth from the pit of his breast, he dares to say: "So do the souls of the martyrs love their ashes, and hover around them, and are always present, lest perhaps, if some suppliant comes, they should be absent and unable to hear?" O monster, to be deported to the ends of the earth! You laugh at the relics of the martyrs, and with Eunomius, the author of this heresy, you build up a slander against the churches of Christ; and you are not frightened by such company, so as to say against us the same things that he says against the Church? For all his followers do not enter the basilicas of the apostles and martyrs, so that, of course, they may adore the dead Eunomius, whose books they consider of greater authority than the Gospels, and in whom they believe the light of truth to be, just as other heresies maintain that the Paraclete came into Montanus and say that Mani himself is the Paraclete. Against your heresy, which once broke out against the Church (lest in this too you glory as the inventor of a new crime), Tertullian, a most learned man, wrote a notable volume which he called Scorpiace, a most fitting name, because with a curved wound it pours poison into the body of the Church; it was once called the Cainite heresy, and after long sleeping or lying buried it has now been awakened by Dormitantius. I am surprised that you do not say that martyrdoms should not be undergone at all, since God, who does not seek the blood of goats and bulls, much less requires the blood of men. Even if you do not say it, you are held to have said it. For in asserting that the relics of the martyrs are to be trodden underfoot, you forbid the shedding of blood that is worthy of no honor.

On the vigils and night watches frequently held in the basilicas of the martyrs I answered briefly in another letter, which I had written almost two years ago to the holy presbyter Riparius. But if you think they are to be rejected so that we may not seem to celebrate Easter often, and to keep vigils other than the solemn yearly one, then neither should sacrifices be offered to Christ on the Lord's day, lest we celebrate the Easter of the Lord's resurrection often and begin to have not one Easter but many. The error and fault of young men and of the lowest women, which is often detected at night, must not be imputed to devout people; for at the vigils of Easter too something of the kind is usually proved to happen, and yet the fault of a few does not prejudice religion, since they can go wrong without vigils, either in their own houses or in others'. The betrayal of Judas did not destroy the faith of the apostles. So neither will the bad vigils of others destroy our vigils; rather, let those who sleep for lust be compelled to keep vigil for chastity. For what is good to do once cannot be bad if it is done more often; or if some fault is to be avoided, it is blameworthy not because it is done often but because it is done at all. Then let us not keep vigil on the days of Easter either, lest the long-awaited desires of adulterers be fulfilled, lest a wife find an occasion to sin, lest she be unable to be shut in by her husband's key. Whatever is rarer is sought more ardently.

I cannot go through everything contained in the letters of the holy presbyters; I will bring forward a few things from his pamphlets. He argues against the signs and miracles that are done in the basilicas of the martyrs, and says that they benefit unbelievers, not believers, as though the question now were for whom they are done, and not by what power they are done. Granted that signs are for unbelievers, who, since they refused to believe the word and teaching, are brought to faith by signs; the Lord too worked signs for unbelievers; and yet the Lord's signs are not to be disparaged because those people were unbelievers, but will be all the more wonderful because they were of such power that they tamed even the hardest minds and compelled them to faith. So do not tell me that signs are for unbelievers; but answer how there is such a presence of signs and miracles in most worthless dust and some ash or other. I see, I see, most unhappy of mortals, what grieves you and what you fear. That unclean spirit who compels you to write these things has often been tortured by this most worthless dust, indeed is tortured to this day; and while in you he hides his wounds, in others he confesses them. Unless perhaps, after the manner of the pagans and the impious, of Porphyry and Eunomius, you pretend that these are tricks of the demons, and that the demons do not really cry out but feign their torments. I give you advice: go into the basilicas of the martyrs, and some day you will be cleansed. You will find many of your fellows there, and you will be burned, not by the martyrs' candles that displease you, but by invisible flames; and then you will confess what you now deny, and you will freely proclaim your name, you who speak in Vigilantius: that you are either Mercury, for your greed for money; or Nocturnus, according to Plautus's Amphitryon, during whose sleep Jupiter joined two nights together in the adultery with Alcmena, so that Hercules of great strength might be born; or certainly Father Liber, for your drunkenness, the tankard hanging from your shoulders, your ever-red face, your foaming lips, and your unbridled abuse.

So also in this province, when a sudden earthquake in the middle of the night woke everyone from sleep, you, the most prudent and wise of mortals, were praying naked, and you recalled to us Adam and Eve in paradise. They indeed, when their eyes were opened, blushed to see that they were naked and covered their private parts with the leaves of trees; you, naked of both tunic and faith, terrified by sudden fear and with something of the night's drunkenness still on you, thrust the shameful part of your body before the eyes of the saints, to show your prudence. Such are the adversaries the Church has: these leaders fight against the blood of the martyrs; orators of this kind thunder against the apostles, or rather such rabid dogs bark against the disciples of Christ.

I confess my fear, lest perhaps it come from superstition. When I have been angry and have thought something evil in my mind, and some phantom of the night has deluded me, I do not dare to enter the basilicas of the martyrs; so completely do I tremble in body and soul. Perhaps you laugh and mock this as the ravings of silly women. I do not blush at the faith of those women who first saw the Lord risen, who are sent to the apostles, who in the mother of the Lord and Savior are commended to the holy apostles. You belch with the men of the world; I will fast with the women, or rather with devout men, who show chastity in their faces and, bearing countenances pale with constant continence, display the modesty of Christ.

You seem to me to be grieved by something else as well: that if continence, sobriety, and fasting take root among the Gauls, your taverns will have no profits, and you will not be able to keep the devil's vigils and drunken banquets all night long. Moreover, I have been informed by the same letters that, against the authority of the apostle Paul, or rather of Peter, John, and James, who gave Paul and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship and charged them to remember the poor, you forbid any help for expenses to be sent to Jerusalem for the use of the saints. Of course, if I answer this, you will at once bark that I am pleading my own cause; you who gave everyone such great largesse that, had you not come to Jerusalem and poured out your money or your patrons', we should all be in danger of famine! I say what the blessed apostle Paul says in nearly all his letters, and what he commands the churches of the Gentiles: that on the first day of the week, that is, on the Lord's day, all should contribute what is to be sent to Jerusalem for the relief of the saints, either by his disciples or by those whom they themselves approve; and that, if it is fitting, he himself should send or carry what has been collected. In the Acts of the Apostles too, speaking to the governor Felix, he says: "After many years I came to Jerusalem to bring alms to my nation, and offerings and vows, in which they found me purified in the temple." Could he not have distributed what he had received from others in another part of the world and in the churches that he was instructing in their new faith? But he wanted to give to the poor of the holy places, who, leaving their little means for Christ, had turned with their whole mind to the service of the Lord. It would take long now if I wished to go through all the testimonies from all his letters in which he works for this and hastens with his whole mind that money be sent to Jerusalem and to the believers in the holy places: not for greed but for refreshment; not for heaping up riches but for supporting the weakness of the poor body and warding off cold and hunger. This custom continues in Judea to this day, not only among us but also among the Hebrews: that those who meditate on the law of the Lord day and night, and have no father on earth but God alone, are supported by the services of the synagogues and of the whole world; on the basis of equality, of course, not so that some have relief and others distress, but so that the abundance of some may support the need of others.

You will answer that everyone can do this in his own country, and that there will be no lack of poor people to be supported by the Church's resources. Nor do we deny that alms are to be given to all the poor, even Jews and Samaritans, if there is so much to give. But the Apostle teaches that alms are indeed to be given to all, but especially to those of the household of faith. Of them the Savior too spoke in the Gospel: "Make friends for yourselves by the mammon of unrighteousness, who may receive you into the eternal dwellings." Can those poor, amid whose rags and filth of body burning lust reigns, have eternal dwellings, who possess neither present things nor future? For not simply the poor but the poor in spirit are called blessed, of whom it is written: "Blessed is he who considers the needy and the poor; in the evil day the Lord will deliver him." In supporting the common poor there is no need of consideration, but of alms. With the holy poor there is the blessedness of considering, so as to give to one who blushes to receive, and who, when he has received, is pained, reaping carnal things and sowing spiritual ones. As for his assertion that those do better who keep the use of their property and divide the income of their possessions among the poor little by little, than those who sell their possessions and give everything away at once, it will be answered him not by me but by the Lord: "If you would be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and come, follow me." He speaks to one who wishes to be perfect, who with the apostles leaves father, boat, and net. The one you praise is the second or third grade, which we also accept, provided we know that the first is to be preferred to the second and third.

Nor are monks to be frightened away from their pursuit by your viper's tongue and savage bite. You argue about them and say: "If all shut themselves up and live in solitude, who will serve the churches? Who will win worldly people? Who will be able to exhort sinners to virtue?" On this reasoning, if all are fools with you, who can be wise? And virginity will not be approved either. For if all are virgins, there will be no marriages; the human race will perish; infants will not cry in their cradles; midwives will beg without wages; and Dormitantius alone, shriveled and cramped with the heaviest torpor, will keep vigil in his bed. Virtue is rare and is not sought by many. And would that all were what few are, of whom it is said, "Many are called, few are chosen": the prisons would be empty. A monk has the office not of a teacher but of a mourner, to weep either for himself or for the world and await the Lord's coming in fear; who, knowing his weakness and the fragile vessel he carries, fears to stumble, lest he strike against something and fall and be broken. That is why he avoids the sight of women, especially young women, and is so strict a chastiser of himself that he fears even what is safe.

"Why," you will say, "do you go off to the desert?" Of course, so that I may not hear you or see you; so that I may not be moved by your fury; so that I may not suffer your wars; so that a harlot's eye may not capture me; so that a most beautiful form may not lead me to forbidden embraces. You will answer: "This is not fighting but fleeing. Stand in the battle line, armed, and resist your adversaries, so that after you have won you may be crowned." I confess my weakness. I do not wish to fight in the hope of victory, lest I lose the victory some day. If I flee, I have avoided the sword; if I stand, I must either conquer or fall. What need is there to give up the certain and pursue the uncertain? Death must be avoided either with the shield or with the feet. You who fight can be defeated as well as win. When I flee, I do not win by fleeing; but I flee so as not to be defeated. There is no safety in sleeping next to a snake. It may be that it will not bite me; yet it may be that some day it will bite me. We call women mothers, sisters, and daughters, and do not blush to cover our vices with names of affection. What is a monk doing in women's cells? What is the meaning of conversations alone and in private, and of eyes that shun witnesses? Holy love has no impatience. What we have said of lust let us apply to avarice and to all the vices that are avoided in solitude. And that is why we shun the crowds of cities, lest we be compelled to do what not so much nature compels us to do as the will.

These things, as I said, I dictated at the request of the holy presbyters in the work of a single night, since our brother Sisinnius was in a great hurry and was eager to go to Egypt for the relief of the saints. Otherwise the subject itself contained open blasphemy, which called for the writer's indignation rather than a multitude of testimonies. But if Dormitantius wakes up again to abuse me, and thinks he should disparage me too with the same blasphemous mouth with which he tears the apostles and martyrs, I will keep vigil against him, not with a short night's work but all night long, and against his companions, or rather his disciples or masters, who think the husbands of women unworthy of the ministry of Christ unless they see the women's wombs swelling.