Letters 22.39–28.7

All these things that we have set out will seem hard to one who does not love Christ. But whoever has counted all the pomp of the world as refuse, and has considered all things under the sun vain, so that he may gain Christ, who has died with his Lord and risen with him and crucified the flesh with its vices and desires, will freely cry out: "Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation? Or distress? Or persecution? Or famine? Or nakedness? Or danger? Or the sword?" and again: "For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angel nor principality nor things present nor things to come nor might nor height nor depth nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." The Son of God, for our salvation, became the son of man; he waits ten months in the womb to be born, he endures discomforts, he comes forth bloody, he is wrapped in rags, he is laughed at with cooing, and he in whose fist the world is held is contained in the narrowness of a manger. I pass over that until his thirtieth year he lived obscurely, content with his parents' poverty; he is scourged and is silent; he is crucified and prays for those who crucify him. "What, then, shall I render to the Lord for all that he has rendered to me? I will take the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints." This is the only fitting repayment, when blood is repaid with blood, and we who have been redeemed by the blood of Christ gladly die for our Redeemer. Which of the saints was crowned without a contest? Righteous Abel is slain; Abraham is in danger of losing his wife; and, not to stretch this into an immense volume, search and you will find that each suffered different things. Solomon alone lived in luxury, and perhaps that is why he fell. "For whom the Lord loves he rebukes, and he chastises every son whom he receives." Is it not better to fight for a short time, to carry stakes, arms, and provisions, to grow weary under the breastplate, and afterwards to rejoice as victor, than, through impatience of one hour, to be a slave for ever?

Nothing is hard to those who love; no labor is difficult to one who desires. See how much Jacob endured for Rachel, his promised wife. "And Jacob served," says Scripture, "seven years for Rachel, and they seemed in his sight but a few days, because he loved her." Hence he himself later recalls: "By day I was burned by heat and by night by frost." Let us too love Christ, let us always seek his embraces, and every difficulty will seem easy. We shall think short all that is long, and, wounded by his dart, we shall say every hour: "Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged!" For "the sufferings of this world are not worthy to be compared with the future glory that will be revealed in us"; for "tribulation produces patience, patience proof, proof hope, and hope does not disappoint." When what you bear seems heavy to you, read Paul's second letter to the Corinthians: "In very many labors, in prisons more abundantly, in stripes above measure, in deaths often (from the Jews five times I received forty lashes less one; three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned; three times I was shipwrecked); a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea; in journeys often, in dangers of rivers, dangers of robbers, dangers from my own race, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the desert, dangers in the sea, dangers among false brothers; in labors, in hardships, in many vigils, in hunger and thirst, in very many fasts, in cold and nakedness." Which of us can claim for himself even the smallest part of this list of virtues? Surely it was he who afterwards said confidently: "I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; there remains for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord will render to me." If our food is rather tasteless, we are sad and think we are doing God a favor; when we drink wine a little watered, the cup is broken, the table overturned, blows resound, and water that is too lukewarm is avenged with blood. "The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force." Unless you use force, you will not take the kingdom of heaven. Unless you knock persistently, you will not receive the bread of the sacrament. Or does it not seem to you violence when flesh desires to be what God is, and to climb, in order to judge angels, to the place from which angels fell?

Go out, I beg you, for a little while from the body, and paint before your eyes the reward of your present labor, "which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man." What will that day be like, when Mary, the mother of the Lord, will come to meet you accompanied by choirs of virgins; when, after the Red Sea and Pharaoh drowned with his army, holding a timbrel she will lead the singing for those who respond: "Let us sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and rider he has thrown into the sea"? Then Thecla will fly joyfully into your embrace. Then the Bridegroom himself will come to meet you and say: "Rise, come, my near one, my beautiful one, my dove, for see, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone." Then the angels will wonder and say: "Who is she who looks forth like the dawn, fair as the moon, chosen as the sun?" The daughters will see you, the queens will praise you, and the concubines will proclaim you. Then another choir of chastity will come to meet you: Sarah will come with the married women, Anna the daughter of Phanuel with the widows. They will be, as it were, in different flocks, your mothers according to the flesh and according to the spirit. The one will rejoice because she bore you, the other will exult because she taught you. Then truly the Lord will mount the ass and enter the heavenly Jerusalem. Then the little ones of whom the Savior speaks in Isaiah, "Behold, I and the children whom the Lord has given me," lifting palms of victory, will sing with one voice: "Hosanna in the highest; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; hosanna in the highest." Then the hundred and forty-four thousand before the throne and the elders will hold harps and sing a new song, and no one will be able to know that song except the appointed number: "These are they who were not defiled with women, for they remained virgins; these are they who follow the Lamb wherever he goes." Whenever the empty ambition of the world delights you, whenever you see anything glorious in the world, pass over in mind to paradise; begin to be what you will be, and you will hear from your Bridegroom: "Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm"; and, fortified alike in deed and in mind, you will cry: "Many waters cannot quench love, and rivers will not cover it."

At about the third hour today we had begun to read the seventy-second psalm, that is, the beginning of the third book, and had been obliged to explain that part of its title belongs to the end of the second book and part to the beginning of the third (namely, that "the hymns of David, son of Jesse, are ended" is the end of the former, while "a psalm of Asaph" is the beginning of the following one); and we had reached the place where the righteous man says, "I said: If I speak thus, see, I have betrayed the generation of your children," which is not rendered this way in our Latin manuscripts, when suddenly it was announced to us that the most holy Lea had departed from the body. And there I saw you turn so pale that truly there are few souls, or none, that do not burst forth sadly when the earthen vessel is broken. And you grieved, not because you were uncertain of her future, but because you had not paid her the sad service of a funeral. Then, in the middle of our talk, we learned further that her remains had already been taken to Ostia.

You may ask what the point of this recital is. I will answer you in the apostle's words: "Much in every way." First, that she should be followed by the joy of all, since she has trampled on the devil and already received the crown of safety; second, that her life may be briefly set out; third, that we may show that the consul-elect, that disparager of his own times, is in Tartarus. Who, indeed, could extol with fitting praise the way of life of our Lea? She was so wholly turned to the Lord that she became head of a monastery and mother of virgins; after soft garments she wore down her limbs with sackcloth; she spent her nights in prayer and taught her companions more by example than by words. She was of such great and submissive humility that she, once mistress of many, was thought a servant; except that she was all the more Christ's servant because she was not thought mistress of men. Her dress was unkempt, her food cheap, her head neglected; yet in such a way that, while she did all this, she avoided displaying it before anyone, lest she should receive her reward in this present age.

So now, for her brief labor, she enjoys eternal blessedness: she is welcomed by the choirs of angels, cherished in the bosom of Abraham, and, with Lazarus, once a poor man, she sees the rich man in purple, a consul not in the palm-embroidered robe but consecrated, begging for a drop from her little finger. O what a change of things! He whom a few days ago the highest of all offices went before, who climbed the citadel of the Capitol as if triumphing over conquered enemies, whom the Roman people received with applause and dancing, at whose death the whole city was moved, is now desolate and naked, held not in the milky palace of heaven, as his unhappy wife pretends, but in filthy darkness. But she, whom the privacy of a single room walled in, who seemed poor and humble, whose life was thought madness, follows Christ and says: "As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of our God," and the rest.

Therefore I warn you, and with tears and groans I adjure you, that while we run the way of this world we should not be clothed with two tunics, that is, with a double faith; not be weighed down by shoes of skins, that is, by dead works; not let the bag of riches press us down to the earth; not seek the help of a staff, that is, of worldly power; not wish to have both Christ and the world together; but let eternal things take the place of short and perishable ones, and, since (I speak according to the body) we die beforehand daily, let us not think ourselves permanent in other things, so that we may be permanent.

Let no one blame me for either praising or criticizing some people in my letters, since in rebuking the wicked others are corrected, and in proclaiming the best the zeal of the good for virtue is stirred up. The day before yesterday I said something about Lea of blessed memory; at once it pricked my mind, and it came to me that I ought not to be silent about a virgin, having spoken of the second order of chastity. So the life of our Asella must be briefly set out. Please do not read this letter to her (for she is burdened by her own praises), but rather deign to read it to those who are young girls, so that, forming themselves on her example, they may take her way of life as the rule of a perfect life.

I pass over that she was blessed in her mother's womb before she was born; that in a dream a virgin was given to her father in a bowl of shining glass, purer than any mirror; that while still wrapped in the cloths of infancy, scarcely past her tenth year, she was consecrated to the honor of future blessedness. Let everything before her own labor be of grace, although God, foreknowing the future, both sanctifies Jeremiah in the womb and makes John leap in his mother's womb, and sets Paul apart before the foundation of the world for the gospel of his Son. I come to what, after her twelfth year, she chose, seized, held, began, and fulfilled by her own sweat.

Shut in the narrowness of a single cell, she enjoyed the breadth of paradise. The same patch of ground was her place of prayer and of rest. She took fasting for play and hunger for refreshment; and when it was not the desire to eat but human weakness that drew her to food, she aroused rather than quenched her hunger with bread, salt, and cold water. And since I almost forgot what I ought to have said at the beginning: when she first took up this resolve, she sold, without her parents' knowledge, the gold necklace (which people call a murenula, because the metal is drawn out into thin rods and woven into a kind of flexible chain), and, putting on a darker tunic, which she could not get from her mother, by this devout beginning of trade she suddenly consecrated herself to the Lord, so that her whole family might understand that nothing more could be wrung from one who had already condemned the world in her clothing.

But, as we had begun to say, she always behaved with such restraint and kept herself within the privacy of her room that she never set foot in public, never knew conversation with a man, and, what is more to be wondered at, loved her virgin sister rather than saw her. She worked with her own hands, knowing that it is written: "He who does not work, let him not eat." She spoke with her Bridegroom either praying or singing psalms; she hurried almost unseen to the shrines of the martyrs, and while she rejoiced in her resolve, she exulted the more because no one recognized her. And while throughout the year she lived on continual fasting, going two or three days thus, then in Lent she spread the sails of her ship, joining almost all the weeks together with a joyful face. And, what is perhaps impossible for men to believe but possible with God's help, she reached the age of fifty in such a way that her stomach did not ache, her bowels were not tormented, the dry ground did not break her limbs as she lay, her skin, roughened by sackcloth, did not acquire any stench or mold; but, sound in body and sounder in mind, she thought solitude a delight and found a monks' desert in the turbulent city.

And you know these things better, from whom I have learned a little, and whose eyes have seen the hardness, like that on camels' knees, which from frequent prayer had grown callous on that holy little body. I set out what I can know. Nothing is more cheerful than her seriousness, nothing more serious than her cheerfulness, nothing sadder than her smile, nothing sweeter than her sadness. There is such pallor in her face that, while it shows her abstinence, it has no smell of display. Her speech is silent and her silence speaks; her walk is neither fast nor slow; her dress is always the same; her neatness neglected, and in unkempt dress her very adornment is without adornment. By the quality of her life alone she has deserved that in a city of pomp, wantonness, and luxury, in which to be humble is misery, the good praise her and the wicked dare not disparage her; widows and virgins imitate her, married women respect her, the guilty fear her, and priests look up to her.

Reading the ninetieth psalm, at the place where it is written, "He who dwells in the help of the Most High will abide in the protection of the God of heaven," I had said that among the Hebrews, in place of "God of heaven", saddai is put, which Aquila translates as "sufficient", and which we can take to mean "mighty and sufficient to accomplish all things"; and that it is one of the ten names by which God is called among them. At once you very eagerly asked me to send you all the names with their interpretation. I will do what you asked.

The first name of God is hel, which the Seventy translate "God", and Aquila, expressing its etymology, "strong". Next, eloim and eloe, which likewise are rendered "God". The fourth is sabaoth, which the Seventy translated "of powers", Aquila "of armies". The fifth is elion, which we call "Most High". The sixth is eser ieie, which is read in Exodus: "He who is has sent me."

The seventh is adonai, which we generally call "Lord". The eighth is ia, which is used only of God, and also sounds in the last syllable of alleluia. The ninth is the tetragram, which they considered "unutterable", and which is written with these letters: iod, he, uau, he. Some, not understanding it because of the likeness of the letters, when they find it in Greek books, are accustomed to read it as PIPI.

The tenth is saddai, mentioned above, which is left untranslated in Ezekiel. But we should know that eloim is of common number, since both one God and many are so called, just as "heavens" and "heaven" are called samaim. Hence the translators often vary. We can have an example of this in our own language: Athenae, Thebae, Salonae.

Recently, when we were together, you asked me in person, not by letter as you used to, what those words which we do not have rendered from Hebrew into Latin mean in their own language, and why they have been left untranslated, such as alleluia, amen, maran atha, ephod, and the others you mentioned, which are scattered through the Scriptures.

To this, since I am pressed by lack of time for dictating, I answer briefly that either the Seventy translators or the apostles took care, since the first church had been gathered from the Jews, not to innovate anything, lest believers be scandalized, but to hand these words on as they had absorbed them from childhood; and that afterwards, when the word of the gospel had spread to all nations, what had once been received could not be changed. Origen also asserts in the books he calls Stromateis that, because of the native idiom of each language, words cannot sound the same among others as they were spoken among their own people, and that it is much better to set them down untranslated than to weaken their force by translation.

Alleluia, then, means "praise the Lord"; for ia is one of the ten names of God among the Hebrews. And in the psalm in which we read, "Praise the Lord, for a psalm is good," in Hebrew we read: alleluia chi tob zammer.

Amen Aquila renders by a word we can express in Latin as "faithfully", an adverb derived from the noun for faith, amuna; the Seventy render it "so be it". Hence at the end of the books (for the Psalter is divided among the Hebrews into five volumes) they translated "so be it, so be it" where the Hebrew reads amen amen, so that what was said above may be confirmed as truly said. Hence Paul too asserts that no one can answer amen, that is, confirm what has been said, unless he has understood what was spoken. Maran atha is more Syriac than Hebrew, although, from the borderland of the two languages, it sounds somewhat Hebrew too; and it is interpreted "Our Lord comes", so that the sense is: "If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema"; and, that said, it is added: "Our Lord comes", meaning that it is pointless to strive with stubborn hatred against one who has plainly already come.

I would like to write to you also about diapsalma, which among the Hebrews is called sela, and about ephod, and about what is found in the title of a certain psalm, "for aieleth", and other such things, were it not that I would exceed the measure of a letter and that questions put off ought to make you all the more eager. For it is a well-worn proverb that goods offered unasked stink. So I deliberately keep back what should be said, so that you may want the more eagerly to hear what has been left unsaid.

After my previous letter, in which I touched briefly on some Hebrew words, it was suddenly reported to me that certain little men are zealously disparaging me for having tried to correct some things in the Gospels against the authority of the ancients and the opinion of the whole world. Although I could by right despise them (for it is useless to play the lyre to an ass), yet, lest they accuse me of pride, as they usually do, let them have this answer: I was not so dull of heart and so crudely rustic (which alone they take for holiness, calling themselves disciples of fishermen, as if they were righteous because they knew nothing) as to think that any of the Lord's words needed correcting or were not divinely inspired; but I wished to bring back the faultiness of the Latin manuscripts, which is proved by the variety of all the copies, to the Greek original, from which they themselves do not deny that they were translated. If they dislike the water of the purest spring, let them drink from muddy streams, and let them lay aside, in reading the Scriptures, the diligence with which they know the flavors of game birds and the waters rich in shellfish; let them be simple in this matter alone, and think the words of Christ rustic, on which the minds of so many great men have labored for so many ages that they have guessed at the meaning of each word rather than expressed it; let them accuse the apostle of ignorance, who was said to be mad because of much learning.

I know that when you read this you will wrinkle your brow and fear that my frankness is again a seedbed of quarrels, and that you would like, if possible, to close my mouth with your finger, so that I do not dare to say what others are not ashamed to do. What, I ask, have I said so freely? Have I described idols engraved on dishes? Or, at Christian banquets, before the eyes of virgins, the embraces of Bacchantes and satyrs? Has any bitter word struck anyone? Have I complained that beggars have become rich? Have I criticized inherited burial places? One thing, wretch that I am, I said: that virgins ought to be more often with women than with men; I have offended the eyes of the whole city; I am pointed at by everyone's finger. "They are multiplied above the hairs of my head who hate me without cause," and "I have become a byword to them"; and do you think I will say anything more?

But lest Flaccus laugh at me ("A wine jar was begun: as the wheel turns, why does a pitcher come out?"), I return to my two-footed asses, and blow in their ears a trumpet rather than a lyre. Let them read, "rejoicing in hope, serving the time"; let us read, "rejoicing in hope, serving the Lord." Let them think that no accusation at all should be received against a presbyter; let us read, "Against a presbyter do not receive an accusation except before two or three witnesses; but those who sin rebuke before all." Let them be pleased with "a human saying, and worthy of all acceptance"; let us err with the Greeks, that is, with the apostle, who spoke in Greek: "a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptance." Finally, let them delight in Gallic geldings; let us take pleasure in that ass of Zechariah, loosed from its bonds and prepared for the mystery of the Savior, which, after it offered its back to the Lord, began to agree with the proclamation of Isaiah: "Blessed is he who sows beside every water, where the ox and the ass tread."

What you have received must be repaid with interest, and delay of the principal breeds usury. You had demanded my view on diapsalma; I pleaded the brevity of a letter and made the excuse that a matter for a book could not be explained in a letter. But what good has my evasion done? Your desire is only aroused more by silence. So, not to keep you waiting longer, take a few words in place of many.

Some have said that diapsalma is a change of meter, others a pause for breath, some the beginning of another sense; there are those who say it is a division of rhythm and, since psalms were then sung with the voice joined to an instrument, a variation of some music. We think none of these, since Aquila, the most careful interpreter of Hebrew words, always translated sela, that is, diapsalma, which is written with samech, lamed, he, as "always"; and since we find diapsalma put even at the end of psalms, as in the third, "You have broken the teeth of sinners; salvation is the Lord's, and your blessing upon your people, sela," that is, "always"; and in the twenty-third, "Who is this King of glory? The Lord of powers, he is the King of glory, always"; and, on the other hand, in psalms of many verses it is not found at all, namely in the thirty-sixth, the seventy-seventh, and the hundred and eighteenth; and again the ninth psalm is headed "a song of diapsalma", whereas, if diapsalma were a sign of silence, as some think, there could not be a song of silence.

From this we notice that this word either connects what goes before with what follows, or at least teaches that what has been said is everlasting, as in the third psalm: "Many say to my soul: There is no salvation for him in his God, always"; and again: "With my voice I cried to the Lord, and he heard me from his holy mountain, always"; and in the fourth: "Why do you love vanity and seek falsehood? Always"; and elsewhere: "What you say in your hearts, be sorry for on your beds, always."

You should know, too, that among the Hebrews one of three words is usually added at the end of books: they write either amen, or sela, or salom, by which they express peace; hence Solomon too is called "peaceable". So, just as we, when we finish short works, usually put between them and what follows, to mark it off, "explicit" or "happily" or something of the kind, so too the Hebrews either confirm what has been written by saying amen, or recall that what has been written and what is to be written is for ever by putting sela, or declare that what has been done has been happily completed, writing "peace" at the end.

These things I have drawn from the inmost spring of the Hebrews, not following streams of opinion nor frightened by the variety of errors with which the whole world is filled, but wishing both to know and to teach what is true. But if you are not satisfied, I will translate word for word what Origen thought about diapsalma, so that, since you despise new wine, you may at least be led by the authority of the old.

"Often looking into the reasons why diapsalma is inserted in certain psalms, I observed very carefully in the Hebrew and compared it with the Greek, and I found that where the Hebrew language has sela, and the Greek 'always' or something of the kind, there the Seventy, Theodotion, and Symmachus translated diapsalma. Nor is it harmful to confirm what we say with examples. In the seventy-fourth psalm, whose beginning is 'We will confess to you, O God, we will confess and call upon your name,' after 'I have established its pillars,' there is diapsalma in the Seventy, Theodotion, and Symmachus; in its place Aquila has 'I have weighed its pillars, always'; the fifth edition, 'I am he who prepared its pillars, always'; the sixth, 'I have strengthened its pillars, continually.' And in the Hebrew, after ammuda, which is 'its pillars', there is sela. And again in the seventy-fifth, whose beginning is 'God is known in Judah,' we found in the Seventy and Theodotion after 'shield and spear and war' diapsalma; in Symmachus after 'buckler and sword and war' likewise diapsalma; in its place in Aquila after 'buckler, sword, and war' 'always'; in the fifth edition after 'shield and blade and war' 'always'; and in the sixth after 'shield and sword and war' 'to the end'; and again in the Hebrew after umalama, which is 'and war', there was sela. And in the same psalm, after the place 'that he might save the meek of the earth,' diapsalma; in Symmachus likewise diapsalma; in Aquila 'always', and also in the fifth; in the sixth 'to the end'; and in the Hebrew, after anie ares, which is 'the meek of the earth', there was sela. And so, having found each edition's view to be such, we have noted these things. But whether those who translated diapsalma meant a change of some musical melody or rhythm, or understood something else, I leave to your judgment."

Thus far Origen, whose ignorance, at least in this discussion, I have preferred to follow rather than to have the foolish knowledge of those who know nothing.