Letters 116.33–117.12

As for my having written that I had sent no book against you to Rome, I wrote this because I distinguished the name of "book" from that letter, and so I had supposed you had heard of something else entirely; and I had sent not even the letter itself to Rome, but to you; and I did not think it was "against you," since I knew I had written it in the sincerity of friendship, either to admonish you or to be corrected by you, or to have you correct me. But, setting aside your intimates, I beseech you yourself by the grace by which we have been redeemed: do not think that whatever good things of yours, granted you by the Lord's goodness, I set down in my letters, I set down with treacherous flattery; and if I have sinned against you in anything, forgive me. And do not draw toward yourself, further than I meant, what I mentioned—perhaps more foolishly than learnedly—about the fate of some poet or other; for I added at once that I did not say it so that you might recover the eyes of your heart—"far be it," I said, "that you should have lost them"—but so that you might take note that you have them sound and watchful. I thought it should be touched on only for the sake of imitating the palinode, if we have written something that we ought to undo by a later writing, and not for the blindness of Stesichorus, which I neither attributed to your heart nor feared for it. And again and again I ask you to correct me confidently wherever you see that I need it. For although, according to the titles of honor that 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 lesser.

About your translation you have now persuaded me of the usefulness with which you wished to translate the Scriptures from the Hebrew: namely, to bring into the open what had been passed over or corrupted by the Jews. But I ask you to be so good as to indicate by which Jews: whether by those who translated before the coming of the Lord—and if so, by which of them, or by whom—or by those later ones who might be thought to have removed something from the Greek manuscripts or corrupted something in them, so as not to be convicted by those testimonies concerning the Christian faith. Why the earlier ones should have wished to do this I cannot find. Next, I beg you to send us your translation from the Seventy, which I did not know you had published. I also wish to read your book that you mentioned, On the Best Kind of Translating, and to learn further how, in a translator, skill in the languages is to be balanced against the conjectures of those who treat the Scriptures in commentary. These, even if they are of the right and one faith, must bring forth various opinions because of the obscurity of many passages, although that variety in no way disagrees with the unity of the same faith—just as even one commentator, within the same faith, can explain the same passage in one way and another, because its obscurity allows it.

I desire your translation from the Seventy for this reason: that we may be free, as far as we can, from the great lack of skill of the Latin translators who, whatever their quality, have ventured on this; and that those who think I envy your useful labors may at last, if possible, understand that the reason I do not want your translation from the Hebrew read in the churches is that we may not, by putting forward something new against the authority of the Seventy, disturb with great offense the peoples of Christ, whose ears and hearts are accustomed to hear that translation, which was also approved by the apostles. Hence, as for that shrub in Jonah, if in the Hebrew it is neither ivy nor gourd but something else, which rises supported by its own trunk and needs no props to hold it up, I would rather that "gourd" were now read in all the Latin copies. For I do not think the Seventy put this without reason, except that they knew it too was like it.

I think I have answered enough—or perhaps more than enough—to your three letters, two of which I received through Cyprian and one through Firmus. Write back whatever you think fit, for instructing us or others. And I shall take more careful pains, as far as the Lord helps me, that the letters I write to you reach you before anyone through whom they might be spread more widely. For I confess that I would not wish to have happen to me with your letters to me what you most justly complain has happened with mine to you. Yet let us be pleased to have between us not only the love but also the freedom of friendship, so that neither you with me nor I with you keeps silent about what troubles us in each other's letters—in that spirit, of course, which does not displease the eyes of God in brotherly love. But if you do not think this can happen between us without harmful offense to that love, let it not happen. For the love I would wish to have with you is certainly greater; but this lesser one is better than none.

A certain brother from Gaul told me that he has a virgin sister and a widowed mother, who live in the same city in separate little dwellings, and who, either because of the loneliness of their lodging or to guard their small property, have each taken certain clerics as protectors, so that they are joined to strangers with greater disgrace than that with which they were separated from each other. When I groaned and conveyed much more by silence than by speech, he said: "I beg you, rebuke them by your letter and call them back to harmony, so that the mother may acknowledge the daughter and the daughter the mother." I answered him: "You lay on me a fine task indeed: that I, a stranger, should reconcile those whom a son and brother could not—as if I held a bishop's chair, and were not shut up in a cell and far removed from crowds, lamenting past faults or striving to avoid present ones. Besides, it is unfitting to hide in the body and wander through the world with the tongue." And he said: "You are too timid. Where is that old boldness of yours, with which you scoured the city with much salt and produced something in the style of Lucilius?" "That," I say, "is what puts me to flight and will not let me part my lips. For after I became a criminal by accusing crimes, and—according to the proverb worn by common talk—since everyone swears and denies, I neither believe I have ears nor touch them, and the very walls echoed curses against me, and 'those who drank wine sang against me,' I have learned, under the compulsion of evil, to keep silent, thinking it more right 'to set a guard on my mouth and a fortified door on my lips' than 'to incline my heart to words of malice,' and, while I pick at vices, to fall into the vice of detraction." When I had said this, he replied: "It is not detraction to speak the truth, nor does a private rebuke make a general doctrine, since there is rarely or never anyone who falls under the charge of this fault. So I beg you, do not let me have come in vain, wearied by so long a journey. For the Lord knows that, after seeing the holy places, this was my chief reason: that by your letter you might restore me to my sister and my mother." And I said: "Very well, I will do what you want; for the letter goes overseas, and a discourse dictated for a particular case can find few to bite. But I warn you to keep this discourse secret. When you have carried it as provision for your journey, if it is heeded, let us rejoice together; but if it is scorned, as I rather expect, I shall have lost my words, and you the length of your journey."

First, I want you to know, sister and daughter, that I am not writing because I suspect anything wrong of you, but I pray for your harmony so that others may not suspect it. Otherwise—far be it!—if I thought you were bound by the glue of sin, I would never write, and I would know I was telling a tale to the deaf. Next, I beg that, if I write something rather biting, you will think it due not so much to my severity as to the disease. Rotting flesh is treated with the knife and the cautery; poisons are expelled by an antidote made from serpents; what gives great pain is driven out by greater pain. Finally I say this: even if the conscience has no wound, the reputation still has disgrace. Mother and daughter—names of devotion, words of duty, bonds of nature, the closest alliance after God—it is no praise if you love each other; it is a crime that you hate each other. The Lord Jesus was subject to his parents: he venerated his mother, of whom he himself was the Father; he honored his foster father, whom he had fed; and he remembered that he had been carried in the womb of the one and the arms of the other. Hence, hanging on the cross, he commends to the disciple the mother whom he had never left before the cross.

But you, daughter—for I stop speaking to the mother, whom perhaps age, weakness, and loneliness make excusable—you, I say, daughter, do you find her house narrow, whose womb was not narrow for you? You lived shut up for ten months in her womb, and can you not bear one day in one room with your mother? Or can you not bear her eyes, and do you flee a witness in the house because she who bore you, fed you, and brought you to this age understands all your movements more easily? If you are a virgin, why do you fear careful guardianship? If you have been corrupted, why do you not marry openly? It is the second plank after shipwreck to temper by this remedy at least what you have begun badly. I do not say this in order to take away repentance after sin, so that what began badly should continue badly, but because I despair of separation in a union of this kind. Otherwise, if you move to your mother after your fall, you will more easily be able to weep with her over what you lost through her absence. But if you are still intact and have not lost it, guard it, lest you lose it. Why must you live in a house in which you must every day either perish or conquer? Does any mortal sleep securely next to a viper? Even if it does not strike, it certainly troubles him. It is safer not to be able to perish than not to have perished beside danger. In the one there is calm, in the other steering; in the one case we rejoice, in the other we escape.

But perhaps you will answer: "My mother's ways are not good; she desires the things of the world, loves riches, does not know fasting, paints her eyes with antimony, wants to go out adorned, and harms my way of life; I cannot live with such a woman." First, even if she is such as you allege, you will have a greater reward if you do not desert her as she is. She carried you long, fed you long, and bore with gentle devotion the more difficult ways of infancy. She washed the filth of your swaddling clothes and was often soiled with dirt. She sat by you when you were sick, and she who had endured her own nausea for your sake endured yours too. She brought you to this age; she taught you to love Christ. Let not the conduct of her who consecrated you as a virgin to your Bridegroom displease you. But if she cannot be borne, and you flee her luxuries, and, as you women commonly say, "Mother is worldly," you have other virgins, you have a holy choir of chastity. Why, deserting your mother, do you choose a man who perhaps left his own sister and mother? "She is difficult, but he is easy; she is quarrelsome, he is placable." I ask whether you followed him or found him afterward. If you followed him, it is plain why you left your mother; if you found him afterward, you show what you could not find in your mother's house. A hard teacher, wounding myself with my own blade: "Whoever walks in simplicity," it says, "walks confidently." I would keep silent if my conscience pricked me, and I would not censure my own crime in others, nor see another's speck through the beam in my own eye. But now, since I live far away among brothers and enjoy their company, and honorably, with witnesses, rarely see or am seen, it is most shameless for you not to follow the modesty of one whose example you claim to follow. And if you say: "My conscience is enough for me; I have God as judge, who is witness of my life; I do not care what people say," hear the apostle writing: "Providing good things not only before God but also before men." If anyone criticizes you for being a Christian, for being a virgin, do not care; if for having left your mother to live in a monastery among virgins, such detraction is your praise. Where it is not self-indulgence in a girl of God that is criticized, but strictness, that cruelty is devotion. For you prefer to your mother him whom you are commanded to prefer even to your own soul; and if she too prefers him, she will feel you to be both daughter and sister.

What then? Is it a crime to live with a holy man? You drag me into court by the throat, so that either I approve what I do not wish to or incur the ill will of many. A holy man never separates a daughter from her mother; he respects both, he venerates both. However holy the daughter may be, a widowed mother is a sign of chastity. If this man, whoever he is, is your own age, let him honor your mother as his own; if older, let him love you as a daughter and submit you to your parent's discipline. It does not help the reputation of either of you that you love him more than your mother, lest he seem to choose in you not affection but youth. And I would say this even if you had no brother who is a monk, if you lacked protection at home; but as it is—alas!—why does a stranger thrust himself between a mother and a brother, a widowed mother and a brother who is a monk? It is good for you to know yourself both a daughter and a sister; but if you cannot be both, and your mother is rejected as harsh, let at least your brother please you. If your brother is too harsh, let her who bore you be gentler. Why do you turn pale? Why do you burn? Why do you flush your face with red and show the impatience of your heart with trembling lips? Nothing surpasses love for a mother and a brother but a wife's affection alone.

I hear, besides, that you go around the suburbs and the pleasant country houses with relatives by marriage and kinsmen and people of that sort. I do not doubt that it is a cousin or a sister whose companion you are taken along to be as a new kind of attendant—far be it that I should suspect you of seeking the company of men, even though they are near kin and relatives. So I beg you, virgin, answer me: do you go alone in the company of your relatives, or with your lover? However shameless you are, you will not dare to thrust him before the eyes of worldly people. For if you do, the whole household will make songs about you and him, everyone's fingers will point you out, and even that sister or relative by marriage or kinswoman who, to flatter you, calls him "holy" and "father" in your presence will laugh at your monstrous husband as soon as she turns away a little. But if you go alone—as I rather suppose—then you, a girl in dark clothes, will walk among young slaves, among married women and women about to marry, among playful girls and long-haired young men in linen. Some young fellow with a little beard will give you his hand and support you when you are tired, and with a squeeze of the fingers he will either be tempted or will tempt. You will have a banquet among men and married women; you will wait for others' kisses and for dishes already tasted, and you will admire, without offense to yourself, the silk and gilded clothes on others. At the banquet itself you will be compelled, as if unwilling, to eat meat; to get you to drink wine, God's creation will be praised; to get you to wash in the baths, dirt will be disparaged. And when, with some hesitation, you have done any of the things they urge, they will all shout that you are pure, simple, a lady, truly well-bred. Meanwhile some singer will make the table ring, and amid the psalms running with sweet melody, since he will not dare to look at other men's wives, he will look more often at you, who have no guardian. He will speak with nods, and whatever he fears to say he will convey by his feelings. Amid such great allurements of pleasure, lust tames even minds of iron—a lust that in virgins suffers a greater hunger, since it thinks everything it does not know sweeter. The pagans' fables tell of sailors driven headlong onto the rocks by the songs of the Sirens, and of trees and beasts and hard flint softened by the lyre of Orpheus. Chastity is hard to keep amid feasting. A shining skin displays a dirty soul.

As boys we read in school—and we have seen the breathing bronzes in the streets—of someone barely clinging to his bones who burned with illicit love and lost his life before his plague. What will you do, a girl of sound and delicate body, plump, rosy, glowing amid meats, amid wines and baths, next to married women, next to young men? Even if you do not give when asked, still you will think it a tribute to your beauty to be asked. A lustful mind pursues honorable things more ardently, and imagines what is forbidden to be sweeter. Your very clothing, cheap and dark, is a sign of the silent mind, if it has no crease, if it is dragged along the ground so that you seem taller, if your tunic is purposely slit so that something within may show, covering what is ugly and revealing what is beautiful. Your little black shoe too, shining as you walk, calls the young men to you with its creaking. Your breasts are bound with bands, and your bosom is drawn tighter with a close-fitting girdle. Your hair falls over your forehead or your ears. Your little cloak sometimes slips, to bare your white shoulders, and, as if you had not wanted to be seen, you hastily hide what you had willingly uncovered. And when in public you cover your face as if from modesty, with a harlot's art you show only what, once shown, can please the more.

You will answer: "How do you know me? And how do you cast your eyes on me from so far away?" Your brother's tears told me this, and his sobs, unbearable at every moment. And would that he had lied, and said this more from fear than from accusation! But believe me, sister: no one weeps who is lying. He grieves that a young man has been preferred to him—not, indeed, a long-haired one, nor one in silk clothes, but a dandy, fastidious even in his squalor, who himself seals the money bag, controls the weaving room, distributes the spinning tasks, governs the household, buys whatever is needed from the market; a steward and master, forestalling the services of the servants, whom all the servants run down, crying that whatever their mistress did not give them, he has taken away. The race of servants is a complaining one; however much you give, it is always too little for them. For they do not consider from how much, but how much, is given, and they console their grief with the only thing they can: detraction. One calls him a parasite, another an impostor, another a legacy-hunter, another some new name or other. They boast that he sits by the bed, brings midwives to you when you are ill, carries the chamber pot, warms the linens, folds the bandages. People more easily believe evil, and whatever is invented at home becomes public rumor. Nor should you wonder if maids and servants invent these things about you, when your mother too and your brother complain of the very same.

Do, then, what I advise and what I beg: be reconciled first to your mother, and next, if that cannot be done, at least to your brother. Or if you detest these dear names like an enemy, separate yourself from the man you are said to have preferred to your own. But if you cannot do even this—for you would return to your own people if you could leave him—at least treat your companion more honorably. Let your houses be separated and your table divided, lest slanderers accuse you, living under one little roof, of sharing a bed too. You can still have such help as you wanted for your needs, and to some extent be free of public infamy—although we must beware of a stain which, according to Jeremiah, can be washed out by no soda and no fullers' herb. When you want him to see you—and he will visit—have witnesses present: friends, freedmen, servants. A good conscience will flee no one's eyes. Let him come in without fear and go out secure. Silent eyes and speech without words and the bearing of the whole body sometimes speak of either anxiety or security. Open your ears, I beg you, and hear the outcry of the whole city. You have already lost your own names and taken nicknames from each other: you are called his, and he yours. Your mother hears this, and your brother; they are ready and they beg you to separate yourselves for their sakes and to turn the private infamy of your union into common praise. You be with your mother; let him be with your brother. You boldly love your brother's companion: a mother will more honorably love her son's friend than her daughter's. But if you refuse, if you scorn my warnings with a wrinkled brow, this letter will cry out to you with a free voice: "Why do you besiege another's servant? Why do you make a minister of Christ your own servant?" Look at the people; watch each face. He reads in church, and everyone looks at you—except that, with almost a wife's freedom, you boast of your infamy and are no longer content with a secret disgrace. You call impudence freedom. "You have acquired a harlot's face; you do not know how to blush."

Again you shout that I am malicious, again suspicious, again a rumor-monger. Am I suspicious, am I ill-willed, I who, as I said at the beginning of the letter, wrote precisely because I did not suspect? Or are you careless, loose, contemptuous, who at twenty-five years old have shut up in your arms, as in a net, a young man whose beard has hardly grown? A fine tutor indeed, to admonish you, to frighten you with a stern brow, and—though at no age is lust safe—to defend you from open disgrace at least by his gray hair! The time will come, it will come—the day is gliding on while you do not know it—when this pretty boy of yours, since women age quickly, especially those who live with men, will find someone richer or younger. Then you will regret your plan and be weary of your obstinacy, when you have lost both your property and your reputation, when what was badly joined will be well divided—unless perhaps you feel secure and do not fear a parting, since the affection of so long a time has grown firm.

You too, mother, who because of your age do not fear abuse, do not avenge yourself in such a way as to sin. Let your daughter rather learn from you to be separated than you be parted from her. You have a son and a daughter and a son-in-law—or rather your daughter's housemate; why do you look for comfort from strangers and rekindle fires already laid to rest? It is more honorable for you at least to bear your daughter's fault than to look for an occasion for your own. Let your son, a monk, be with you, the protection of your devotion and widowhood. Why have a strange man, especially in a house that could not hold your son and daughter? You are of an age now to have grandchildren by your daughter. Invite both to you. Let her who went out alone come back with a man—I said "man," not "husband"; let no one slander me: I meant to indicate the sex, not marriage. Or, if she is ashamed and hesitates, and thinks the house in which she was born too narrow, you go to her little lodging. Narrow as it is, it can more easily hold a mother and a brother than a strange man, with whom she certainly could not live in one room. Let there be two women and two men in one house. But if that third one, that "support of your old age," will not leave and stirs up quarrels and disturbances, be it a pair or a team of three, your brother and son will show himself both sister and mother to them. Let others call him stepfather and son-in-law; let him call the man foster father and brother.

I have dictated these things in rapid speech for one short evening's work, wishing to satisfy the desire of the one who asked, and exercising myself as if on a school theme—for he who was to set out was knocking at the door early the same day—and at the same time to show my detractors that I too can say whatever comes into my mouth. So I have touched on few passages of the Scriptures and have not woven my speech with their flowers, as I usually do in my other books. It is an extempore piece, poured out by lamplight with such ease that my tongue outran the secretaries' hands and the rapidity of speech overwhelmed their signs and abbreviations. I have said this so that whoever does not pardon my talent may at least pardon the time.