Letters 130.2–130.13

Away with detraction, let envy depart; let there be no charge of seeking favour. We, unknown, write to one unknown, at least as regards the bodily face; otherwise the inner man knows himself well with that knowledge by which the apostle Paul also knew the Colossians and many of the believers whom he had not seen before. How great the merit, or rather the wonder, of our virgin is in my eyes can be judged from this: that while I was busy explaining the temple of Ezekiel (a work that is perhaps the most difficult in all the holy Scriptures), and was at that part of the sanctuary where the holy of holies and the altar of incense are described, I preferred to take this short digression, to pass from altar to altar and to consecrate to eternal chastity a living sacrifice, pleasing to God and without any blemish. I know that at the bishop's prayer the virginal veil has covered her holy head, and that the famous saying of the apostle has been fulfilled in solemn rite: 'I wish to present you all as a chaste virgin to Christ,' when 'the queen stood at his right hand in gilded clothing, surrounded with variety.' With that many-coloured garment, woven of the diversity of many virtues, Joseph too was clothed, and the daughters of kings once wore it. Hence the bride herself also rejoices and says, 'The king has brought me into his chamber,' and the chorus of her companions answers, 'All the glory of the king's daughter is within.' But our speech too will bring some profit. The course of horses is made swifter by applause; the strength of boxers is spurred on by shouts; the general's speech kindles the lines drawn up for battle and the drawn swords. So in the present work too, the grandmother and mother have planted, but we shall water, and the Lord will give the increase.

It is a rule of the rhetoricians to adorn the person they praise with great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers and all the nobility of the past, so that a fruitful root may make up for the barrenness of the branches, and what you cannot find in the fruit you may admire in the trunk. So now, of course, I ought to recall the famous names of the Probi and the Olybrii and the illustrious line of the Anician blood, in which there is no one, or hardly anyone, who has not deserved the consulship; or I ought to bring forward Olybrius, our virgin's father, whom Rome mourned when he was taken by an untimely death. I fear to say more, lest I reopen the wound of her holy mother, and the remembrance of his virtues become a renewal of grief. He was a dutiful son, a lovable husband, a kind master, an affable citizen; consul indeed in boyhood, but more illustrious as a senator by the goodness of his character. Happy in his death, since he did not see his country falling; happier still in his offspring, since he made the nobility of Demetrias, his great-grandmother, more illustrious by the perpetual chastity of Demetrias, his daughter.

But what am I doing? Forgetting my purpose, while I admire the young man I have praised some worldly goods, when our virgin is rather to be praised in this, that she despised all these things, that she thought of herself not as noble, not as mighty in wealth, but as a human being. Incredible strength of mind: amid jewels and silk, amid troops of eunuchs and girls, the flattery and services of a bustling household, and the exquisite banquets that the abundance of a great house supplied, she sought the labour of fasting, roughness of clothing, restraint in food. For she had read the words of the Lord, who says, 'Those who wear soft clothing are in the houses of kings.' She marvelled at the way of life of Elijah and of John the Baptist, both of whom bound and mortified their loins with a leather girdle; the second is said to have come in the spirit and power of Elijah as forerunner of the Lord, prophesying in his parent's womb, and praised before the day of judgment by the voice of the Judge. She admired the ardour of Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, who served the Lord in the temple with prayers and fastings to extreme old age. She longed for the choir of the four virgin daughters of Philip and desired to be one of them, who by virginal chastity obtained the grace of prophecy. With these and similar thoughts she fed her mind, fearing nothing so much as to offend her grandmother and her mother. Though she was spurred on by their example, she was frightened by their wishes and plans; not that her holy purpose displeased them, but because, given the greatness of the thing, they did not dare to wish for it or seek it. The young recruit of Christ was restless; she hated her finery and said to the Lord with Esther: 'You know that I hate the emblem of my head' (that is, the diadem she wore as a queen) 'and count it as foul as the rag of a menstruous woman.' Holy and noble women who saw her and know her, whom a fierce storm of enemies drove from the shores of Gaul through Africa to dwell in the holy places, say that at night and in secret, known only to the virgins of God who were in her mother's and grandmother's company, she never used linen or the softness of feather beds, but had a little haircloth on the bare ground for a bed, and watered her face with constant tears, kneeling in spirit at the Saviour's knees, that he would accept her purpose, fulfil her desire, and soften the minds of her grandmother and mother.

Why do I delay any longer? When the day of the wedding was already approaching and the bridal chamber was being prepared for the coming marriage, secretly and without witnesses, with the night for her only comfort, she is said to have armed herself with counsels like these: 'What are you doing, Demetrias? Why do you defend your chastity with such fear? You need freedom and boldness. You who are so afraid in time of peace, what would you do if you had to undergo martyrdom? You who cannot bear the faces of your own family, how would you endure the tribunals of persecutors? If the examples of men do not rouse you, let the blessed martyr Agnes encourage you and make you secure, who overcame both her age and the tyrant and crowned the title of chastity with martyrdom. You do not know, poor girl, you do not know to whom you owe your virginity. Not long ago you trembled in the hands of barbarians; you were covered by the bosom and cloaks of your grandmother and mother; you saw yourself a captive, and your chastity not in your own power; you shuddered at the savage faces of the enemy; you saw with silent groaning the virgins of God carried off. Your city, once the head of the world, is the grave of the Roman people; and will you, an exile yourself, receive an exiled husband on the Libyan shore? Whom will you have as matron of honour? With what escort will you be led? The harsh sound of the Punic tongue will sing wanton wedding songs to you. Break off all delay. Perfect love casts out fear. Take up the shield of faith, the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation; go forward to battle. Preserved chastity also has its own martyrdom. Why do you fear your grandmother? Why do you dread your mother? Perhaps they too want what they do not believe you want.' Inflamed by these goads, she threw away all bodily adornment and worldly dress as hindrances to her purpose. Precious necklaces and pearls of great price and fiery gems are put back in their cases; she puts on a cheap tunic, covers herself with a cheaper cloak, and unexpectedly throws herself suddenly at her grandmother's knees, showing who she was only by weeping and lamentation. The holy and grave woman was astonished to see the strange dress on her granddaughter; her mother stood thunderstruck with joy. Neither could believe true what they longed to be true. Their voices stuck in their throats, and between blushing and paleness, fear and joy, their thoughts shifted this way and that.

I must give way here, and I will not attempt to narrate what I would diminish by telling it. To set out the greatness of that incredible joy, the river of Tully's genius would run dry, and the tight-packed, hurled sentences of Demosthenes would move more slowly and feebly. Whatever the mind can think, whatever speech cannot explain, we have heard was done at that moment. Grandmother and mother rush to kiss granddaughter and daughter. They weep abundantly for joy; they lift her from the ground with their hands and embrace her as she trembles; they recognize their own mind in her purpose and rejoice that a virgin was making a noble family more noble by her virginity. She had found something to confer on her house, something to soften the ashes of the city of Rome. Good Jesus, what exultation there was in the whole house! As if from a fruitful root many virgins sprang up at once, and a crowd of dependants and servant girls followed the example of their patroness and mistress. In every house the profession of virginity was aglow; though their condition in the flesh was unequal, the reward of chastity was one. I say too little: all the churches throughout Africa exulted in a kind of dance. The famous report reached not only the cities, towns, and villages, but even the very huts. All the islands between Africa and Italy were filled with this rumour, and the joy ran far without stumbling. Then Italy changed its mourning clothes, and the half-ruined walls of the city of Rome recovered in part their former splendour, thinking God favourable to them in the complete conversion of their foster-daughter. You would have thought the band of the Goths wiped out, and the rabble of deserters and slaves struck down by the thunderbolt of the Lord thundering from above. Not so did the Roman people raise itself up after the Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae, places where thousands of Roman armies were slain, at Marcellus's first battle at Nola. With less joy before this did the nobility, ransomed with gold, and the seed-bed of the Roman race in the citadel, learn that the hosts of the Gauls were laid low. This report reached the shores of the East, and in the inland cities too the triumph of Christian glory was heard. Which of the virgins of Christ did not boast of fellowship with her? Which mother did not call your womb blessed, Juliana? Let the rewards of the future be uncertain among unbelievers; meanwhile, virgin, you have received more than you offered. One whom only one province would have known as the bride of a man, the whole world has heard of as the virgin of Christ. Wretched parents, Christians not of full faith, are accustomed to hand over to virginity daughters who are misshapen and weak in some limb, because they cannot find worthy sons-in-law; glass, as they say, for the price of a pearl. At any rate, those who think themselves more religious give the virgins a small allowance that is barely enough for food, and lavish their whole fortune on their worldly children of both sexes. So recently in this city a certain rich presbyter did, leaving two daughters in the virgin's profession poor, and providing for the luxury and pleasures of his other children in all abundance. Many women of our profession, alas, have done this; and would that the example were rare! The more frequent it is, the happier are those who have not followed the example even of the majority.

It is reported, and celebrated with the praise of all Christians, that whatever had been prepared for the wedding was handed over to the virgin by the holy pair devoted to Christ, so that no wrong should be done to the Bridegroom, but rather that she should come to the Bridegroom endowed with her former riches, and that what would have perished in worldly affairs should relieve the poverty of the household of God. Who would believe it? Proba, that name more illustrious than all ranks and all nobility in the Roman world, whose holiness and goodness poured out on all was revered even among the barbarians, who was not wearied by the ordinary consulships of her three children, Probinus, Olybrius, and Probus, nor by the burning and plundering of houses and the captivity in the city, is now said to be selling her ancestral estates and making friends for herself with the mammon of unrighteousness, who may receive her into the eternal dwellings; so that every rank of the church's ministry and monks, empty names, who buy estates, may blush when so great a noblewoman sells. She had scarcely escaped the hands of the barbarians and wept for the virgins torn from her embrace, when suddenly she was struck by the unbearable loss, which she had never feared, of her most beloved son; and as if she were the future grandmother of a virgin of Christ, she received the deadly wound in the hope of things to come, proving true in herself what is said in the lyric poem in praise of the just man: 'If the world should break and fall upon him, its ruins will strike him unafraid.' We read in the book of Job, 'While he was still speaking, another messenger came'; and in the same book, 'Temptation', or, as it is better rendered from the Hebrew, 'warfare', 'is the life of man upon earth.' For this is why we labour and are in danger in the warfare of this world, that we may be crowned in the world to come. And it is no wonder to believe this of men, since the Lord himself was tempted; and Scripture testifies of Abraham that God tempted him. For this reason the apostle too says, 'Rejoicing in tribulation,' and, 'Knowing that tribulation produces patience, patience approval, approval hope, and hope does not put to shame'; and in another place, 'Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or the sword? As it is written: For your sake we are put to death all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.' And Isaiah encourages people of this kind, saying, 'You who are weaned from the milk, who are torn from the breast, expect tribulation upon tribulation, hope upon hope.' 'The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, which will be revealed in us.' Why I have recalled these things the following account will show. She who had seen her country smoking from the middle of the sea and had entrusted her own safety and that of her household to a fragile boat found the shores of Africa crueller still. For she was received by a man of whom you could not tell whether he was more greedy or more cruel, to whom nothing was sweet but wine and money, and who, on the pretext of supporting the most merciful emperor, became the most savage of all tyrants; and (to say something from the fables of the poets) like Orcus in Tartarus he had a Cerberus, not three-headed but many-headed, to drag, tear, and destroy everything. He snatched betrothed girls from their mothers' laps, sold the marriages of noble girls to merchants and to the Syrians, the greediest of mortals; he spared neither the poverty of orphans, nor of widows, nor of the virgins of Christ, and looked at the hands of those who begged rather than at their faces. Fleeing the barbarians, the matron endured this wild beast, this Charybdis and Scylla girt with many dogs, who spared no shipwrecked people and was not moved by captivities. Cruel man, imitate at least the enemy of the Roman empire! The Brennus of our time took only what he found; you seek what you do not find. And her rivals wonder (for virtue is always exposed to envy) why she bought the chastity of so many women with her, by a silent confiscation, when he who could have taken the whole deigned to accept a part, and she did not dare refuse him, as one would not refuse a count, knowing that under the title of a private rank she was at the mercy of a tyrant. I feel that I lie open to the bites of enemies, as though I seemed to flatter a most noble and most illustrious woman. They will not be able to accuse me if they know that I have kept silence until now; for I have never praised in her the antiquity of her family or the greatness of her wealth and power, whether while her husband was alive or after his death, things that others perhaps have praised in hired speeches. My purpose is to praise, in the style of the church, the grandmother of my virgin, and to give thanks that she aided the virgin's will with her own. Besides, a monastery cell, cheap food and despised clothing, and an age now near to death with provision for only a short time are free of any disgrace of flattery. Finally, in the remaining parts all my speech will be directed to the virgin: a noble virgin, noble no less in holiness than in family, whose fall is the more dangerous the higher her ascent. (One) thing I will tell you, daughter of God, one thing above all, and I will warn you again and again: fill your mind with love of sacred reading, and do not receive in the good soil of your heart a sowing of darnel and wild oats, lest, while the householder sleeps (that is, the nous, or mind, which always cleaves to God), the enemy sow tares over it. But always say, 'In the nights I sought him whom my soul loved. Where do you pasture, where do you rest at noon?' and, 'My soul has cleaved to you; your right hand has upheld me,' and that saying of Jeremiah, 'I have not grown weary following you.' For there is no pain in Jacob nor toil in Israel. When you were in the world, you loved the things of the world: to polish your face with rouge and paint it with white lead, to adorn your hair and build a turreted head with false hair, to say nothing of costly earrings, of white pearls that bear witness to the depths of the Red Sea, of the green of emeralds, the flames of thunder-stones, the sea-blue of hyacinths, for which the zeal of matrons burns and runs mad. But now, since you have left the world and, in a second stage after baptism, have made a pact with your adversary, saying to him, 'I renounce you, devil, and your world and your pomp and your works,' keep the treaty you have made; agree with your adversary and keep the pact while you are on the way of this world, lest he hand you over to the judge and convict you of having taken something of his, and you be handed over to the officer, who is himself enemy and avenger, and be sent into prison and into the outer darkness, which surrounds us with the greater horror the further we are separated from Christ, the true light; and you will not come out from there until you pay the last farthing, that is, every least sin, since we shall give account even for an idle word on the day of judgment.

Let these things be said not as an ill-omened prophecy against you, but in the duty of a fearful and careful adviser, who fears for you even what is safe. 'If the spirit of one who has power', it says, 'rises up against you, do not leave your place.' We stand always as if under arms and in the battle line, ready for the fight. The enemy wants to move us from our place and make us yield our ground; but our footsteps must be made firm, and we must say, 'He has set my feet upon a rock,' and, 'The rock is a refuge for the hares', for which many read 'hedgehogs', a small, timid animal weighed down with thorns. But this is why Jesus was crowned with thorns and bore our sins and suffered for us: that from the thorns and tribulations of women, to whom it is said, 'In anxieties and pains you shall bring forth, woman, and your turning shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you,' the roses of virginity and the lilies of chastity might spring up. Hence the Bridegroom too feeds among the lilies, and among those who have not defiled their garments (for they remained virgins, and heard the command, 'Let your garments be always white'), and as the author and prince of virginity he speaks confidently: 'I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys.' The rock, then, belongs to the hares, who in persecutions flee from city to city and do not fear that prophetic word, 'Flight has perished from me.' But 'the high mountains are for the harts', whose food is serpents, which the little child brings out of their hole, when the leopard and the kid lie down together, and the ox and the lion eat straw, so that the ox does not learn fierceness, but the lion is taught gentleness. Let us return to the text we set out: 'If the spirit of one who has power rises up against you, do not leave your place.' After this follows, 'For healing makes the greatest sins cease.' This little verse has this sense: if the serpent rises up into your thoughts, keep your heart with all watchfulness and sing with David, 'Cleanse me, Lord, from my hidden faults, and spare your servant from those of others'; and you will never come to the greatest sin, which is committed in deed, but you will at once slay the incitements of the vices in the mind and dash the little ones of Babylon against the rock, on which no traces of the serpent are found; and you will promise the Lord with care, 'If they have not ruled over me, then I shall be spotless and cleansed from the greatest sin.' This is what Scripture testifies elsewhere too: 'I will repay the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation,' meaning that he does not punish our thoughts and the decisions of the mind at once, but repays them in their offspring, that is, in evil works and in persistence in sin, as he says through Amos: 'For three and for four impieties of this and that city, shall I not turn away from it?'

Let it be enough to have plucked in passing these few small flowers, as from a most beautiful meadow of the holy Scriptures, to remind you to close the chamber of your heart and to fortify your forehead with the frequent sign, so that the destroyer of Egypt may find no place in you, but the firstborn, who perish among the Egyptians, may be saved in your mind, and you may say with the prophet, 'My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready; I will sing and make music. Awake, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp.' Tyre too, pierced with the many wounds of her sins, is told to take up this harp, that she may do penance and wash away with bitter tears, like Peter, the stains of her former foulness. But let us not know penance, lest we sin easily. Let it be as it were the second plank for the wretched after shipwreck; in a virgin let the ship be kept whole. It is one thing to seek what you have lost, another to possess what you have never let go. That is why the apostle too chastised his body and brought it into subjection, lest while preaching to others he himself should be found rejected; and, inflamed by the heats of the body, he spoke in the person of the human race: 'Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?' And again: 'I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, no good dwells; for to will is present with me, but to do the good, not at all. For the good that I will, I do not do; but the evil that I do not will, that I do.' And again: 'Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.'

After the most careful watch over your thoughts, you must take up the weapons of fasting and sing with David, 'I humbled my soul with fasting,' and, 'I ate ashes like bread,' and, 'When they troubled me, I put on sackcloth.' Eve was cast out of paradise through food. Elijah, trained by a fast of forty days, is carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Moses for forty days and nights is fed by the intimacy and conversation of God, and proves most true in himself the saying, 'Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.' The Saviour of the human race, who left us the example of his virtues and his way of life, is taken up by the Spirit immediately after his baptism to fight against the devil, so that he might hand him over, overthrown and crushed, to his disciples to be trampled underfoot. Hence the apostle too says, 'And may God crush Satan under your feet swiftly.' And yet after the fast of forty days the old enemy lays his snares through food and says, 'If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.' In the law, in the seventh month, after the blowing of trumpets, on the tenth day of the month there is a fast for the whole Hebrew nation, and that soul is cut off from its people which prefers fullness to self-restraint. In Job it is written of the dragon, 'His strength is in his loins, and his force over the navel of his belly.' He takes advantage of the heat of youth against young men and girls, and sets on fire the wheel of our birth, and fulfils that word in Hosea, 'All adulterers, their hearts are like an oven'; these are restrained by the mercy of God and the cold of fasting. These are the fiery darts of the devil, which both wound and inflame at once; they are prepared by the king of Babylon for the three young men, who kindles a furnace of forty-nine cubits, himself holding for destruction the seven weeks which the Lord had commanded to be kept for salvation. But as there the fourth, who had the appearance of a son of man, softened the immense heat and taught the flames amid the fires of the raging furnace to lose their heat, threatening the eyes with one thing and offering the touch another, so too in a virgin's mind the heat of youth is quenched by the dew of heaven and the cold of fasting, and the way of life of the angels is obtained for a human body. For this reason the vessel of election too says that he has no command of the Lord concerning virgins: because it is against nature, or rather beyond nature, not to practise that for which you were born, to kill in yourself your own root and to pluck only the fruits of virginity, to know no marriage bed, to shudder at every touch of men, and to live in the body without the body.

But we do not command you immoderate fasts and excessive abstinence from food, by which delicate bodies are at once broken and begin to be sick before they lay the foundations of a holy way of life. It is also a saying of the philosophers that 'the virtues are means, the extremes are vices', which the Latin tongue can render thus: the virtues are measured, and whatever exceeds measure and proportion is counted among the vices. Hence one of the seven sages says, 'Nothing too much'; which became so famous that it was also put into a comic verse. You should fast in such a way that you do not tremble and can hardly breathe and have to be carried or dragged by the hands of your companions, but so that, with the appetite of the body broken, you do nothing less than usual in reading, in psalms, or in vigils. Fasting is not perfect virtue but the foundation of the other virtues; and sanctification and chastity, without which no one will see God, provide steps for those climbing to the heights; yet if it is alone, it will not be able to crown a virgin. Let us read the Gospel of the wise and foolish virgins: some enter the Bridegroom's chamber, others, without the oil of good works, are shut out with their lamps gone out. The field on fasting is wide; we too have often run in it, and many have written books of their own on it. I send you to read them, that you may learn what good self-restraint has and, on the other hand, what evil fullness has.

Imitate your Bridegroom: be subject to your grandmother and your mother. See no man, and especially no young man, except with them. Know no one whom they do not know. There is a worldly saying too: 'To want the same things and to refuse the same things, that in the end is firm friendship.' That you desired virginity, that you came to know Christ's commands, that you knew what was good for you and what you ought to choose: their examples taught you, the holy life of your home instructed you. So do not think that what is yours is yours alone; it is also theirs, who expressed their own chastity in you and, from an honourable marriage and an undefiled bed, brought you forth as a most precious flower, which will bear perfect fruit if you humble yourself under the mighty hand of God and always remember what is written: 'God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.' Where there is grace, there is not repayment for works but the generosity of the giver, so that the saying of the apostle is fulfilled: 'It is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.' And yet to will and not to will is ours; but even what is ours is not ours without the mercy of God.

Choose your eunuchs, your girls, and your servants for their character rather than for the elegance of their faces; for in every sex and age, and even in the forced chastity of mutilated bodies, it is their minds that must be considered, and these cannot be cut except by the fear of Christ. Let buffoonery and wantonness have no place in your presence. Never hear an indecent word, or if you hear one, do not be angry. The depraved minds of men often test the barriers of chastity with a single light word. Leave it to worldly people to laugh and be laughed at; gravity befits your person. Cato too (I mean the Censor, once the first man of your city), who as censor was not ashamed in extreme old age to learn Greek letters, nor as an old man despaired of learning … And Lucilius writes that Marcus Crassus laughed once in his life. That may have been an affected severity, seeking glory and popular favour; but as long as we dwell in the tent of this body and are surrounded by fragile flesh, we can moderate and govern our emotions and passions; we cannot cut them off. Hence the psalmist too says, 'Be angry, and do not sin'; and the apostle, explaining this, says, 'Let not the sun go down upon your anger'; for to be angry is human, and to put an end to anger is Christian.