Letters 52.1–52.17

You ask, dearest Nepotian, in letters from across the sea, and you ask often, that I set out for you in a short volume rules of living, and show how one who has left the service of the world and begun to be either a monk or a cleric may keep to the straight path of Christ and not be carried off into the various byways of the vices. When I was a young man, or rather almost a boy, and was curbing the first impulses of wanton youth by the hardship of the desert, I wrote to your uncle, the holy Heliodorus, a letter of exhortation full of tears and complaints, which showed the feelings of a deserted comrade. But in that work, as befitted my age then, I played, and, with my studies and training in the rhetoricians still warm, I painted some things with the flowers of the schools. Now, with my head already grey and my brow furrowed, with dewlaps hanging from my chin like an ox's, 'the cold blood stands still around my heart.' Hence the same poet sings in another place, 'Age carries all away, the mind as well,' and a little later: 'Now I have forgotten so many songs; now even his voice has fled Moeris.'

So that we may not seem to bring examples only from pagan literature, learn the mysteries of the divine books. David, seventy years old, once a warlike man, could not be warmed because of chilling old age. So a girl is sought from all the borders of Israel, Abishag the Shunammite, to sleep with the king and warm his aged body. Does it not seem to you, if you follow the letter that kills, to be either an invention from a mime or the farce of an Atellan play? A cold old man is wrapped in garments and is not warmed except by the embrace of a young girl. Bathsheba was still living, Abigail survived, and his other wives and concubines whom Scripture mentions; all are rejected as cold, and the aged man grows warm only in the embraces of one. Abraham was much older than David, and yet while Sarah lived he sought no other wife; Isaac had twice David's years and never grew cold with Rebecca, though she was old; I say nothing of the men before the flood who, after nine hundred years, with limbs not merely aged but almost rotten, by no means sought the embraces of girls. Certainly Moses, the leader of the people of Israel, was a hundred and twenty years old and did not change Zipporah.

Who, then, is this Shunammite, wife and virgin, so fervent as to warm the cold, so holy as not to provoke to lust the one she warmed? Let the most wise Solomon explain his father's delights, and let the peaceful man tell of the embraces of the warrior: 'Get wisdom, get understanding. Do not forget, and do not turn aside from the words of my mouth; do not forsake her, and she will lay hold of you; love her, and she will keep you. The beginning of wisdom: get wisdom, and with all your getting get understanding. Encircle her, and she will exalt you; honor her, and she will embrace you, to give your head a crown of graces, and may a crown of delights protect you.' Almost all the virtues of the body change in the old, and while wisdom alone increases, the others decrease: fasting, sleeping on the ground, hurrying here and there, receiving strangers, defending the poor, persevering in standing at prayer, visiting the sick, working with one's hands to provide alms; and, not to prolong my speech, everything that is practised through the body grows less as the body is broken. I do not say this because wisdom is cold in the young and in those still of sturdier age (at least in those who have gained knowledge by toil and most ardent study, by holiness of life and frequent prayer to God), wisdom which in many old men withers with age; but because youth endures many battles of the body, and among the incentives of the vices and the ticklings of the flesh it is choked, like fire in green wood, and cannot display its brightness. But the old age (I repeat the warning) of those who have trained their youth in honorable pursuits and have meditated on the law of the Lord day and night grows more learned with age, more practised with experience, wiser with the passage of time, and reaps the sweetest fruits of its former studies. Hence that wise man of Greece, when he saw that he was dying after completing a hundred and seven years, is said to have lamented that he was leaving life just when he had begun to be wise. Plato died at eighty-one while writing; Isocrates completed ninety-nine years in the labor of teaching and writing. I say nothing of the other philosophers, Pythagoras, Democritus, Xenocrates, Zeno, Cleanthes, who flourished in the pursuit of wisdom at a great age. I come to the poets, Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Stesichorus, who, advanced in years, sang something swan-like and sweeter than usual as death drew near. Sophocles, when because of his extreme old age and neglect of his property he was accused of madness by his sons, recited to the judges the play of Oedipus which he had recently written, and gave such a proof of wisdom in an age already broken that he turned the severity of the court into the applause of the theatre. No wonder, since even Cato, the most eloquent of the Roman race, already a former censor and an old man, neither blushed nor despaired to learn Greek letters. Certainly Homer relates that from the tongue of Nestor, already old and almost decrepit, speech sweeter than honey flowed. And the mystery of the very name Abishag points to the fuller wisdom of the old. For it is interpreted 'my father overflowing' or 'my father's roaring.' The word 'overflowing' is ambiguous: in the present place it sounds a virtue, that wisdom is fuller, abundant, and generous in the old; in another place 'superfluous' is used as 'not necessary.' Sag, that is 'roaring,' is properly used when the waves of the sea resound and, so to say, a roar is heard coming from the deep. This shows that the most abundant thunder of the divine word, beyond the human voice, dwells in the old. Further, Shunammite in our language means 'scarlet,' to signify that wisdom is warm and glows with divine reading; and though this points to the mystery of the Lord's blood, it also shows the glow of wisdom. Hence the midwife in Genesis binds a scarlet thread on the hand of Perez, who, because he had divided the wall that before separated two peoples, received the name of divider, that is, Perez. And Rahab the harlot, as a type of the church, hung out the cord containing the mysteries of blood, so that she might be saved when Jericho perished. And in another place Scripture mentions of holy men: 'These are the Kenites, who came from the heat of the house of Rechab.' And our Lord in the Gospel says: 'I came to cast fire on the earth, and how I wish that it were kindled!' Kindled in the hearts of the disciples, it compelled them to say: 'Did not our heart burn within us while he spoke on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?'

To what end is all this, brought up from so far back? So that you may not look to me for boyish declamations, little flowers of epigram, the allurements of words, and, at the end of each chapter, pointed sayings neatly concluded to rouse the applause and cheers of the hearers. Let wisdom alone embrace me, and let our Abishag, who never grows old, rest in my bosom. She is undefiled and of perpetual virginity, and, like Mary, though she conceives daily and is always in labor, she is incorrupt. Hence, I think, the apostle said 'fervent in spirit,' and the Lord foretold in the Gospel that at the end of the world, when, according to the prophet Zechariah, the foolish shepherd begins to be, as wisdom decreases 'the love of many will grow cold.' Hear, then, as the blessed Cyprian says, 'not eloquent things but strong ones.' Hear one who is your brother by fellowship and your father by age, who would lead you from the cradle of faith to full maturity and, setting out rules of living for each stage, would instruct others in you. I know, indeed, that from your uncle, the blessed Heliodorus, who is now a bishop of Christ, you have learned and daily learn what is holy, and have in his way of life a model of virtues. But take ours too, such as they are, and join this little book to his, so that, as he has trained you as a monk, this may teach you to be a perfect cleric.

So let the cleric who serves the church of Christ first interpret his own title, and, having set out the definition of the name, strive to be what he is called. For if κλῆρος in Greek is sors, 'lot,' in Latin, clerics are so called either because they are of the Lord's lot, or because the Lord himself is the lot, that is, the portion, of clerics. And he who is himself the Lord's portion, or has the Lord as his portion, must show himself such that he both possesses the Lord and is himself possessed by the Lord. He who possesses the Lord and says with the prophet, 'The Lord is my portion,' can have nothing apart from the Lord; if he has anything else besides the Lord, the Lord will not be his portion. For instance, if he has gold, silver, estates, or varied furniture, the Lord does not deign to become his portion together with these portions. But if I am the Lord's portion and the line of his inheritance, and do not receive a portion among the other tribes, but, like the Levite and the priest, live on the tithes and, serving the altar, am supported by the altar's offering, then having food and clothing I will be content with these, and, naked, follow the naked cross. I beseech you, therefore, and will warn you again and again: do not think the clerical office a kind of your former military service; that is, do not seek the gains of the world in the service of Christ, lest you have more than when you began to be a cleric, and it be said to you, 'Their clergy will not profit them.' Let the poor and strangers, and Christ with them as a guest, know your little table. Flee like a plague a cleric who is a businessman, who has become rich from poor and famous from obscure. 'Evil conversations corrupt good morals.' You despise gold, another loves it; you trample on riches, he pursues them; you love silence, gentleness, retirement, he loves talkativeness and a brazen face, the forum, the squares, and the doctors' shops. In so great a discord of habits, what concord can there be? Let the feet of women seldom or never wear down the threshold of your little lodging. Either ignore equally or love equally all girls and virgins of Christ. Do not live under the same roof with them; do not trust in your past chastity. You cannot be holier than David or wiser than Solomon. Remember always that a woman drove the tiller of paradise from his possession. When you are ill, let any holy brother attend you, and your sister or mother, or any women of faith approved by all. If you have no persons of such kinship and chastity, the church maintains many old women who can both give their service and receive a benefit by ministering, so that even your sickness may bear the fruit of almsgiving. I know some who have recovered in body and begun to be sick in soul. She ministers to you dangerously whose face you often look at. If for the duty of the clerical office you visit a widow or a virgin, never enter the house alone, and have such companions that you are not disgraced by their company. If a reader, an acolyte, or a psalm singer attends you, let them be adorned not with clothes but with character, and not curl their hair with the tongs, but let their dress promise modesty. Do not sit alone with a woman alone, in secret and without a witness. If something rather private must be said, she has a nurse, a housekeeper, a virgin, a widow, a married woman; she is not so friendless as to have no one but you to whom she dares to entrust herself. Beware of all suspicions, and whatever can plausibly be invented, avoid beforehand, lest it be invented. Frequent little gifts, handkerchiefs, ribbons, garments put to the lips, food tasted first, and flattering, sweet little notes, holy love does not have. 'My honey, my light, my desire,' and the other follies of lovers, all the endearments, pleasantries, and laughable witticisms, we blush at in comedies and detest in men of the world; how much more in clerics, and in clerics who are monks, whose priesthood is adorned by their vow and their vow by their priesthood! I do not say this because I fear these things in you or in holy men, but because in every calling, in every rank and sex, both good and bad are found, and the condemnation of the bad is the praise of the good.

I am ashamed to say it: priests of idols, mime actors, charioteers, and prostitutes receive inheritances; to clerics and monks alone this is forbidden by law, and forbidden not by persecutors but by Christian emperors. I do not complain of the law, but I grieve that we have deserved this law. Cautery is good; but why do I have a wound that needs cautery? The precaution of the law is provident and strict, and yet even so avarice is not checked. We make sport of the laws by trusts, and, as though the decrees of emperors were greater than those of Christ, we fear the laws and despise the Gospels. Let there be an heir, but let it be the mother of the children, that is, of her flock, the church, which bore them, nourished them, and fed them. Why do we put ourselves between the mother and her children? It is the glory of a bishop to provide for the needs of the poor; it is a disgrace for all priests to be eager for their own riches. I, born in a poor house and a country hut, who could scarcely fill my rumbling stomach with millet and coarse bread, now turn up my nose at fine flour and honey; I know the kinds and names of fish, I am expert on which shore a shellfish was gathered, I tell provinces apart by the flavor of birds, and rare foods, and in the end their very cost, delight me. I hear besides of the shameful servility of some toward old men and old women without children. They bring them the chamber pot, besiege the bed, and receive with their own hands the discharges of the stomach and the phlegm of the lungs. They tremble at the doctor's entrance and with quivering lips ask whether the patient is better; and if the old man is a little livelier, they are in danger, and under a feigned joy the avaricious mind is tormented within. For they are afraid of losing their service, and compare the long-lived old man to the years of Methuselah. How great a reward he would have with the Lord if he did not hope for payment in the present! With what sweat an empty inheritance is sought! The pearl of Christ could have been bought with less labor.

Read the divine Scriptures often; rather, never let the sacred reading be put out of your hands. Learn what you are to teach. 'Hold fast the faithful word which is according to the teaching, so that you may be able to exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict.' 'Continue in the things you have learned and that have been entrusted to you, knowing from whom you learned them,' 'always ready to give satisfaction to everyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.' Let not your deeds put your words to shame, lest, when you speak in church, someone silently answer: 'Why then do you not do these things yourself?' He is a dainty teacher who discusses fasting on a full stomach; even a robber can accuse avarice. Let the mind and the mouth of a priest of Christ agree. Be subject to your bishop and receive him as the father of your soul. To love belongs to sons, to fear to slaves. 'If I am a father,' he says, 'where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear?' In the same man you have several titles to respect: monk, bishop, uncle. But let bishops too know that they are priests, not lords; let them honor clerics as clerics, so that clerics may pay them the deference due to bishops. There is that well-known saying of the orator Domitius: 'Am I to treat you as a leading statesman, when you do not treat me as a senator?' What Aaron and his sons were, let us recognize the bishop and presbyters to be: one Lord, one temple, and let there be one ministry. Let us always remember what the apostle Peter commands priests: 'Feed the flock of the Lord which is among you, overseeing not by constraint but willingly according to God, not for shameful gain but freely, not as lording it over the clergy but being examples to the flock from the heart, so that when the chief shepherd appears you may receive the unfading crown of glory.' It is a very bad custom in some churches for presbyters to keep silent and not to speak when bishops are present, as if the bishops were jealous or did not deign to hear them. 'If anything is revealed to another who is seated,' says the apostle Paul, 'let the first keep silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged; and the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets; for God is not a God of dissension but of peace.' 'A wise son is the glory of his father': let a bishop rejoice in his own judgment when he has chosen such priests for Christ.

When you speak in church, let what is roused be not the applause of the people but their groans; let the tears of your hearers be your praise. Let a presbyter's preaching be seasoned with the reading of the Scriptures. I do not want you to be a declaimer, a ranter, and a chatterer, but skilled in the mystery and most learned in the sacraments of your God. To roll out words and win admiration from the ignorant crowd by rapid speech is the mark of unlearned men. A brazen face often explains what it does not know, and after persuading others lays claim to knowledge for itself too. My former teacher, Gregory of Nazianzus, when I asked him to explain what Luke meant by the sabbath deuteroprōton, that is, the 'second-first,' made an elegant joke: 'I will teach you about this in church, where, with the whole people acclaiming me, you will be forced to know against your will what you do not know; or else, if you alone keep silent, you alone will be condemned by all for stupidity.' Nothing is so easy as to deceive a cheap rabble and an unlearned assembly by glibness of tongue; the less it understands, the more it admires. Marcus Tullius, of whom that fine tribute was said, 'Demosthenes prevented you from being the first orator, you prevented him from being the only one,' in his speech for Quintus Gallius, see what he says of popular favor and of unskilled speakers: 'At these games (for I speak of what I myself have lately experienced) a certain poet holds sway, a very well-read man, whose are those banquets of poets and philosophers where he makes Euripides and Menander converse together, and in another place Socrates and Epicurus, whose lifetimes we know were separated not by years but by centuries. And how much applause and shouting he stirs up with them! For he has many fellow pupils in the theatre, who did not learn their letters either.'

Avoid dark clothes as much as white; adornment and squalor alike are to be shunned, because the one smells of luxury, the other of vainglory. To go about without a linen garment is not praiseworthy; not to have money for linen clothes is. Otherwise it is ridiculous and full of disgrace to boast, with a stuffed purse, that you have no handkerchief or napkin. There are some who give a little to the poor in order to receive more, and under pretext of almsgiving seek riches; this should be called hunting rather than almsgiving. So are beasts caught, so birds, so fish too: a little bait is put on the hook so that the purses of matrons may be hauled up on it. The bishop, to whom the church is entrusted, knows whom he should put in charge of distributing to the poor and caring for them. It is better not to have anything to give than to ask shamelessly. But it is also a kind of arrogance to wish to seem more merciful than the bishop of Christ. 'We cannot all do all things.' In the church one is the eye, another the tongue, another the hand, another the foot, another the ear, the belly, and the rest. Read Paul to the Corinthians: different members make one body. Let not the rustic and merely simple brother think himself holy because he knows nothing, nor the learned and eloquent one measure holiness by his tongue. Of two imperfect things it is much better to have a holy rusticity than a sinful eloquence.

Many build walls and take away the pillars of the church: the marbles gleam, the ceilings shine with gold, the altar is studded with gems, and there is no choice of the ministers of Christ. And let no one object to me the rich temple in Judea, the table, the lamps, the censers, the dishes, the cups, the little mortars, and the rest skilfully made of gold. These things were approved by the Lord then, when the priests offered victims and the blood of cattle was the redemption of sins; although all these things went before in figure, 'and they were written for us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.' But now, since the poor Lord has consecrated the poverty of his house, let us think of the cross, and we shall count riches as mud. Why do we admire what Christ calls unrighteous mammon? Why do we look up to and love what Peter declares that he does not have? Otherwise, if we follow only the letter and the simple narrative pleases us in gold and riches, let us observe the other things along with the gold: let the priests of Christ marry virgins; let one who has a scar and is deformed be deprived of the priesthood, however good his mind; let leprosy of the body be counted worse than the vices of the soul; let us increase and multiply and fill the earth; let us not sacrifice the lamb or celebrate the mystical Passover, since the law forbids these things to be done without the temple; let us pitch our tent in the seventh month and proclaim the solemn fast with the trumpet. But if we understand all these things by 'comparing spiritual things with spiritual,' knowing with Paul that 'the law is spiritual,' and singing the words of David, 'Open my eyes, and I will behold wonderful things out of your law,' as our Lord too understood and interpreted the sabbath, then let us either reject gold with the other superstitions of the Jews, or, if gold pleases us, let the Jews please us too, whom we must either approve along with the gold or condemn.

You must avoid the banquets of men of the world, and especially of those who are puffed up with honors. It is shameful that before the doors of a priest of the crucified and poor Lord, who even lived on other people's food, lictors of consuls and soldiers should keep watch, and that the governor of the province should dine better at your house than in his palace. If you plead that you do this in order to intercede for the wretched and oppressed, a worldly judge pays more deference to a continent cleric than to a rich one and reveres your holiness more than your wealth; or, if he is the kind who will not listen to clerics except over the wine bowls, I will gladly do without such a favor and will pray to Christ for the judge, who is better able to help. For 'it is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in man; it is better to hope in the Lord than to hope in princes.' Never smell of wine, lest you hear that saying of the philosopher: 'This is not offering a kiss but offering a drink.' Both the apostle condemns drunken priests and the old law forbids them: 'Those who serve the altar shall not drink wine and strong drink.' In Hebrew, 'sikera' is the name of every drink that can intoxicate, whether it is made by fermentation, or from the juice of fruit, or honeycombs are boiled into a sweet and barbarous drink, or the fruit of the palm is pressed into liquor, or water is strained thick from boiled grain. Whatever intoxicates and overturns the state of the mind, flee like wine. I do not say this because a creature of God is condemned by us, since the Lord himself was called a wine drinker, and a little sip of wine was allowed to Timothy for his aching stomach; but we require measure in drinking, according to age, health, and the constitution of the body. And if without wine I burn, and burn with youth, and am inflamed with the heat of the blood, and have a sappy and strong body, I will gladly do without the cup in which there is suspicion of poison. It is well said among the Greeks (but I do not know whether it sounds as well in our language): 'A fat belly does not beget a fine mind.'

Impose on yourself as much fasting as you can bear. Let your fasts be pure, chaste, simple, moderate, not superstitious. What good is it not to eat oil and to seek out troublesome and hard-to-get foods: dried figs, pepper, nuts, dates, fine flour, honey, pistachios? The whole cultivation of the gardens is harassed so that we may not eat coarse bread. I hear besides of some who, against the nature of things and of men, do not drink water or eat bread, but sip dainty little broths, pounded vegetables, and beet juice, not from a cup but from a shell. For shame! Do we not blush at such follies, and are we not weary of such superstition? On top of this, we even seek a reputation for abstinence amid delicacies. The strongest fast is water and bread; but because it brings no glory, and we all live on bread and water, it is not thought a fast, as though it were public and common.

Beware of hunting for men's little rumors, lest you exchange God's displeasure for the praise of the people. 'If I were still pleasing men,' says the apostle, 'I would not be a servant of Christ.' He ceased to please men and became a servant of Christ. Through good report and bad, on the right hand and on the left, the soldier of Christ marches on; he is neither lifted up by praise nor broken by blame, neither puffed up by riches nor shrunk by poverty, and he despises both the glad and the sad. 'The sun shall not burn him by day, nor the moon by night.' I do not want you to pray at the corners of the squares, lest the breeze of popularity break the straight course of your prayers. I do not want you to broaden your fringes and make a show of phylacteries and, against your conscience, to be wrapped in Pharisaic ambition. It is better to carry these things in the heart than on the body, to have God as your supporter, not the eyes of men. Do you want to know what adornments the Lord seeks? Have prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Be enclosed within these regions of heaven; let this four-horse chariot carry you, as Christ's charioteer, at full speed to the goal. Nothing is more precious than this necklace, nothing more varied than this array of gems. On every side you are adorned, girded, and protected; they are both ornament and defense to you: the gems are turned into shields.

Beware too of having an itching tongue or itching ears, that is, of disparaging others yourself or listening to others who disparage. 'Sitting,' it says, 'you spoke against your brother and set a stumbling block against your mother's son. These things you did, and I kept silent. You thought wickedly that I would be like you; I will rebuke you and set them before your face': understood, your words and all that you said about others, so that you may be judged by your own sentence, caught yourself in the things you rebuked in others. Nor is this a just excuse: 'When others tell me things, I cannot insult them.' No one willingly tells tales to an unwilling hearer. An arrow never sticks in a stone; sometimes it rebounds and strikes the one who aimed it. Let the slanderer learn not to slander easily when he sees that you do not listen willingly. 'Do not mix with slanderers,' says Solomon, 'for their destruction will come suddenly, and who knows the ruin of both?' that is, both of him who slanders and of him who lends an ear to the slanderer.

It is your duty to visit the sick, to know households, matrons and their children, and not to be ignorant of the secrets of noble men. Let it be your duty, then, to keep not only your eyes chaste but also your tongue. Never discuss women's looks, and let no household learn through you what is done in another. Hippocrates makes his pupils swear before he teaches them and compels them to swear by his words; he extorts silence by oath and prescribes their speech, gait, dress, and manners. How much more should we, to whom the medicine of souls has been entrusted, love the houses of all Christians as our own! Let them know us rather as comforters in their sorrows than as guests in their prosperity. A cleric who, often invited to dinner, does not refuse is easily despised.

Let us never ask, and rarely accept when asked. For somehow even the one who begs you to let him give, once you have accepted, thinks you cheaper; and, remarkably, if you refuse his request, he admires you more. A preacher of continence should not arrange marriages. Why does one who reads the apostle, 'It remains that those who have wives be as though they had none,' press a virgin to marry? Why does a priest, who is chosen from the once-married, urge a widow to become twice-married? How can those who are told to despise their own property be agents and stewards of other people's houses and estates? To take something from a friend is theft; to defraud the church is sacrilege. To have received something to be given to the poor, and while so many are hungry to wish to be cautious or timid, or (what is the most open crime) to take anything from it, exceeds the cruelty of all robbers. I am tormented with hunger, and do you judge how much is enough for my stomach? Either distribute at once what you have received, or, if you are a timid steward, let the donor go, so that he may distribute his own things himself. I do not want your purse to be full on my account. No one can keep what is mine better than I. The best steward is the one who keeps nothing for himself.

You have compelled me, dearest Nepotian, after my little book on virginity, which I wrote at Rome for the holy Eustochium, had already been stoned, to open my mouth again in Bethlehem ten years later and expose myself to be pierced by everyone's tongues. For either I should have written nothing, so as not to submit to men's judgment, which you forbade me to do, or, in writing, I should know that the darts of all the slanderers would be hurled against me. I beg them to be quiet and stop slandering; for I have written not as an adversary but as a friend, and I have not inveighed against those who sin, but warned them not to sin. Nor have I been a severe judge only of them, but of myself too, and, wishing to take the splinter from another's eye, I first cast out my own beam. I have hurt no one; no one has been marked even by description; my words have struck at no one in particular: it is a general discussion of vices. Whoever wishes to be angry with me first confesses of himself that he is such a man.