Letters 50.1–50.5

Your letter sounds of love and of complaint alike: of your love, by which in your careful warnings you fear even for what is safe in us; and of the complaint of those who do not love, and who, seeking occasion in sins, chatter against their brother and set a stumbling block against their mother's son. You write that they, or rather some monk from the crossroads, the street corners, and the squares, a hanger-about of the forum, a rumor-monger, a brawler, clever only at disparaging, who tries to pull the splinter out of another's eye through the beam in his own, is haranguing against me and gnawing, tearing, and pulling apart with a dog's tooth the books I wrote against Jovinian. This dialectician of your city, this pillar of the Plautine family, has not read Aristotle's Categories, nor his On Interpretation, nor the Analytics, nor even Cicero's Topics, but among circles of the ignorant and at women's gatherings he weaves unsyllogistic syllogisms and, as it were, undoes our sophisms by clever argument. Fool that I am, to have thought that I could not know these things without the philosophers; to have read that the better part of the pen is the one that erases rather than the one that writes! In vain, then, did I translate the commentaries of Alexander; to no purpose did a learned master introduce me to logic through Porphyry's Introduction; and, to set aside human learning, it was for nothing that I had Gregory of Nazianzus and Didymus as my teachers in the holy Scriptures; the learning of the Hebrews did me no good, nor my daily meditation from youth to this age on the law, the prophets, the Gospels, and the apostles.

A man has been found who is perfect without a teacher, Spirit-bearing and taught by God, who surpasses Tully in eloquence, Aristotle in argument, Plato in wisdom, Aristarchus in learning, Didymus 'of the brazen guts' in the number of his books, and all the commentators of his time in knowledge of the Scriptures. Indeed he is said to ask for a subject, and, reproducing something of Carneades, to argue on both sides, that is, both for justice and against it. The world has been delivered from danger, and inheritance cases and suits before the centumviral court have been rescued from the abyss, because this man neglected the forum and moved over to the church. Who would have been innocent if he did not wish it? What criminal would his speech not have saved, once he began to count off the case on his fingers and to spread the nets of his syllogisms? For if he had stamped his foot, fixed his eyes, wrinkled his brow, waved his hand, and turned his phrases, he would at once have poured darkness over the judges' eyes. No wonder, then, if a man so very Latin and so very eloquent defeats me, who am absent and, having long been without the use of the Latin tongue, half a barbarian, when he has crushed Jovinian to his face under the weight of his eloquence: Jovinian (good Jesus, what a man, and how great!), whose writings no one could understand, who sang only to himself and the Muses!

I ask you, then, dearest father, to warn him not to speak against his own profession, not to destroy in words the chastity he promises by his dress, not, as a virgin or one continent (let him see for himself what he boasts of being), to compare husbands to virgins, and so to have fought in vain for so long against a most eloquent man. I hear besides that he likes to go round the cells of virgins and widows and, with knitted brow, to philosophize among them about the sacred writings. What does he teach the women in secret, in the bedroom? That virgins should know they are the same as married women; that they should not neglect the flower of their youth; that they should eat and drink, go to the baths, seek elegance, and not spurn perfumes? Or rather chastity, fasting, and neglect of the body? Surely he teaches what is full of virtue: then let him confess in public what he says at home; or, if he teaches the same at home as in public, he must be separated from the company of girls. That a young man, a monk, and eloquent (as he thinks himself), from whose mouth the Graces flow, who has such elegance in conversation that he is sprinkled with the salt and charm of comedy, should not blush to frequent the houses of the nobility, to cling to the morning receptions of matrons, to make our religion a battle and twist the faith of Christ with verbal contention, and meanwhile to disparage his brother! Surely, if he thought I was in error (for we all stumble in many things, and if anyone does not sin in word, he is a perfect man), he ought either to have rebuked me or questioned me by letter, as that learned and noble man Pammachius did, to whom I made my defense as best I could and explained in a longer letter in what sense I said each thing. He might at least have imitated your modesty: you extracted from the volume and set out in order the passages that seemed to give offense to some, asking me either to correct or to explain them; and you did not think me so mad as to write for marriage and against marriage in one and the same book!

Let him spare himself, spare me, spare the Christian name; let him recognize that he is a monk not by talking and running about but by keeping silence and sitting still. Let him read Jeremiah, who says: 'It is good for a man when he has borne the yoke from his youth. He will sit alone and keep silence, because he has taken the yoke upon himself.' Or if he has indeed received the censor's rod over all writers, and thinks himself learned because he alone understands Jovinian (for the proverb says that a stammerer understands a stammerer's words best), we writers all appeal from such a judge. Jovinian himself too, that illiterate writer, will cry out with perfect justice: 'That the bishops condemn me is not reason but conspiracy. I do not want this man or that to answer me, whose authority can crush me but cannot teach me. Let a man write against me whose language I too can understand; when I have beaten him, I shall have beaten all men at once. I know him well (believe one who has tried "how he rises against the shield, with what a whirlwind he hurls his spear"): he is strong and, in argument, knotty and tenacious, and he fights with a sidelong and pointed head. Often we have shouted against each other in the squares from night till evening; he has lungs and the strength of an athlete and is handsomely stout. He seems to me to be secretly a follower of my doctrine. Besides, he never blushes and considers not what he says but how much; and he has come to such a reputation for eloquence that his sayings are used as dictation for curly-haired schoolboys. How often he has made me lose my temper in company and roused me to anger; how often he spat and went off spat upon! But these are vulgar things and can be done by any of my followers. I appeal to books, to a memory to be handed on to posterity. Let us speak in writing, so that the silent reader may judge of us; so that, as I lead a flock of disciples, his too may be called after his name, Gnathonians or Phormionians.'

It is no great thing, my Domnio, to chatter in corners and in doctors' shops and to pass sentence on the world: this man spoke well, that one badly; this one knows the Scriptures, that one is raving; this one is talkative, that one utterly tongue-tied. By whose judgment has he earned the right to judge everyone? To make a din against anyone at random in the streets and heap up insults, not charges, belongs to buffoons and to those always ready for a quarrel. Let him move his hand, fix his pen, bestir himself, and show in writing whatever he can. Let him give us an opportunity to answer his eloquence. I can bite back if I wish; when wounded I can sink in my back tooth. We too have learned our letters; 'we too have often pulled our hand away from the cane'; of us too it can be said, 'He has hay on his horn; run far away.' But we would rather be disciples of him who says, 'I gave my back to the scourges and did not turn my face from the shame of spitting'; who, when he was cursed, did not curse in return, and after the blows, the cross, the scourges, and the blasphemies, prayed at the last for those who crucified him, saying, 'Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.' I too forgive my brother's error; I understand that he has been deceived by the devil's art. Among women he seemed to himself learned and eloquent; after my little works reached Rome, he shrank from me as a rival and sought glory from me too, so that there should be no one on earth whom his eloquence did not displease, except those whose power he does not spare but yields to, or rather whom he does not honor but fears. The most skilful man wanted, no doubt, like a veteran soldier, to strike both of us with one sweep of the sword, and to show the people that whatever he wished, Scripture meant. Let him deign, then, to send us his treatise and correct our chatter not by finding fault but by teaching. Then he will understand that the force of the forum is one thing and that of the dining room another; that the doctrines of the divine law are not discussed in the same way among the spindles and wool baskets of girls and among learned men. Now he boasts freely and shamelessly to the crowd and makes a din: 'He has condemned marriage'; and amid swelling wombs, the wailing of infants, and the beds of husbands, he says nothing of what the apostle said, so as to make me alone the object of ill will. But when he comes to books and meets me foot to foot, and either puts forward something from the Scriptures or hears someone else put it forward, then he will sweat, then he will stick fast. Far away with Epicurus, away with Aristippus; the swineherds will not be present, the sow with young will not grunt. 'We too, father, scatter darts and steel no weak one from our right hand, and blood follows from the wound we make.' Further, if he does not want to write and thinks he must act only by insults, let him hear across so many lands, seas, and peoples at least the echo of my cry: 'I do not condemn marriage, I do not condemn wedlock.' And so that he may hold my opinion more certainly, I want all who, perhaps from fears at night, cannot sleep alone to take wives.