Letters 67.1–68.2

Thank you for sending me a full letter in return for a mere signed greeting; but it was much shorter than I should wish to receive from such a man as you, from whom no discourse is too long, however much time it takes. And so, although we are hemmed in by the pressing cares of other people's business, and worldly business at that, I would not easily forgive the brevity of your letter, were I not considering how few words of mine it was answering. Come, then, I beg you, take up this conversation by letter with us, so that bodily absence may not do much to part us; though we are joined in the Lord by the unity of the Spirit even if we rest our pens and are silent. Indeed the books you have brought out of the Lord's granary show us almost the whole of you. For if we do not know you because we have not seen the face of your body, then in that way you do not know yourself either, for you do not see it either. But if you are known to yourself for no other reason than that you know your own mind, we too know that mind not a little in your writings; and in them we bless the Lord that he has given you to be such a man, to yourself, to us, and to all the brothers who read your works.

Among other things, a certain book of yours came into our hands not long ago. We do not yet know what its title is, for the manuscript itself did not show one on its first page, as is usual. The brother in whose possession it was found, however, said that it was called the Epitaph. We would believe that you had been pleased to give it this name if we had read in it only the lives or writings of those already dead; but since the works of many are mentioned there who were living when it was written and are living still, we wonder why you either gave it this title or are believed to have given it. We fully approve the book, certainly, as a useful piece of writing.

In your exposition of the apostle Paul's Letter to the Galatians, too, we found something that troubles us greatly. For if well-meant lies have been admitted into the holy Scriptures, what authority will remain in them? What statement will at last be brought forward from those Scriptures by whose weight the wickedness of contentious falsehood may be crushed? For as soon as you bring one forward, if your opponent thinks otherwise, he will say that what has been brought forward was a lie told by the writer from some honourable motive of duty. Where will this not be possible, if it could be believed and affirmed that the apostle lied in that very narrative which he introduced with the words, 'What I am writing to you, behold, before God, I am not lying,' at the place where he said of Peter and Barnabas, 'When I saw that they were not walking rightly according to the truth of the gospel'? For if they were walking rightly, he lied; but if he lied there, where did he speak the truth? Or will he be thought to have spoken the truth where he says what the reader agrees with, but whenever something meets the reader that is against his opinion, will it be put down as a well-meant lie? There will be no lack of reasons for thinking that he not only could lie but even ought to have lied, if this rule is given room. There is no need to plead this case at length, especially with you, for whom, in your wise foresight, a word is enough. I would by no means presume to try to enrich your intellect, golden by God's gift, with my small coins; and no one is better fitted than you to correct that work.

Nor do you need me to teach you how to understand what the same apostle says, 'To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews,' and the other things said there, which come from merciful compassion, not deceitful pretence. For one who nurses a sick man becomes as though sick, not when he falsely claims to have a fever, but when with a sympathetic mind he considers how he would wish to be served if he himself were sick. For Paul was indeed a Jew; and when he became a Christian he had not abandoned the sacraments of the Jews, which that people had fittingly and lawfully received at the time when it was right. So he undertook to celebrate them when he was already an apostle of Christ, but in order to teach that they were not harmful to those who wished to keep them as they had received them from their parents through the law, even after they had believed in Christ, provided that they no longer placed their hope of salvation in them, since salvation itself, which those sacraments signified, had come through the Lord Jesus. And therefore he held that they must by no means be imposed on the Gentiles, since by a heavy and unnecessary burden they would turn back from the faith those who were not used to them.

Therefore he did not correct Peter because Peter observed the traditions of his fathers. Had Peter wished to do that, he would have acted neither deceitfully nor unfittingly; for although these things were now superfluous, being customary they would do no harm. He corrected him because he was compelling the Gentiles to Judaize, which he could not have done unless he performed those things as if they were still necessary to salvation even after the Lord's coming; and the truth strongly dissuaded this through Paul's apostleship. Nor was the apostle Peter ignorant of this, but he did it for fear of those of the circumcision. So Peter was truly corrected and Paul told the truth, lest holy Scripture, which was published for the faith of later generations, should, once the authority of a lie was admitted, waver and toss about wholly in doubt. For it neither can nor ought to be set out in a letter how great and how inexplicable are the evils that follow if we grant this; but it could be shown suitably and with less danger if we could talk together face to face.

What Paul had given up, then, was what was bad in the Jews: first of all, that 'being ignorant of the righteousness of God and wishing to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to the righteousness of God'; next, that after the passion and resurrection of Christ, when the sacrament of grace according to the order of Melchizedek had been given and made manifest, they still thought that the old sacraments were to be celebrated, not as a customary solemn rite, but as necessary for salvation (though if these had never been necessary, the Maccabees would have become martyrs for them fruitlessly and in vain); and finally, that the Jews persecuted the Christians, the preachers of grace, as enemies of the law. These and similar errors and vices are what he says he counted loss and dung, that he might gain Christ; not the observances of the law, if they were celebrated after the custom of the fathers, as he himself celebrated them, without any of the necessity for salvation with which the Jews thought they had to be celebrated, nor yet with the deceitful pretence which he had rebuked in Peter. For if he celebrated those sacraments because he pretended to be a Jew in order to win the Jews, why did he not also offer sacrifice with the Gentiles, since to those without the law he also became as one without the law, to win them too? Is it not because he did the former as a Jew by birth, and said the whole of the latter not to feign falsely that he was what he was not, but because he felt that he must help them mercifully, as if he himself laboured under the same error: not, that is, with a liar's cunning but with the feeling of one who suffers with another? So in that same place he added as a general statement, 'To the weak I became weak, to win the weak,' so that the conclusion that follows, 'I have become all things to all, to win all,' should be understood as referring to this: that he shows he pitied each person's weakness as though it were his own. For when he said, 'Who is weak, and I am not weak?', he did not wish to be understood as having feigned another's weakness rather than having suffered with it.

So I beg you, take up a frank and truly Christian severity joined with love, to correct and amend that work, and sing a palinode, as the saying goes. For the truth of the Christians is incomparably more beautiful than the Helen of the Greeks. For this truth our martyrs fought more bravely against this Sodom than those heroes fought for Helen against Troy. I do not say this so that you may recover the eyes of the heart (God forbid that you should have lost them), but so that you may turn them to the matter; for though you have them sound and watchful, by some kind of pretence you have turned them away, so as not to consider what harmful consequences follow if it is once believed that a writer of the divine books could honourably and piously lie in any part of his work.

I had once written you a letter from here, which was not delivered, because the man to whom I had given it to carry did not set out. As I was dictating this letter, one point from that one came to my mind which I ought not to leave out of this one either: that if your view is different and is the better one, you should gladly forgive my fear. For if you think otherwise and think truly (for unless it is true it cannot be better), then my error, which favours the truth, is, I will not say no fault, but certainly no great fault; if in anyone truth can rightly favour a lie.

As to what you were good enough to write back about Origen, I already knew that we should approve and praise what we find right and true, not only in church writings but in all writings, and disapprove and censure what is false and wrong. But what I wanted from your prudence and learning, and still want, is that you should make known to us those very errors of his by which so great a man is proved to have departed from the true faith. In the book, too, in which you listed all the church writers you could remember, and their writings, it would have been more convenient, I think, if after naming those you know to be heretics (since you did not wish to pass over even them) you had added in what respects they are to be guarded against; though you have also passed over some, and I should like to know for what reason that was done. Or if perhaps you did not wish to overload that volume by adding, after naming the heretics, the points on which catholic authority had condemned them, I beg you, let it not burden your literary labour, by which through the grace of our Lord you have in no small degree kindled and aided the studies of the saints in the Latin tongue (this is what brotherly love asks of you through my lowliness), to publish, if your occupations allow, in one little book and briefly arranged, the perverse doctrines of all the heretics who up to this time have tried, through shamelessness or obstinacy, to corrupt the uprightness of the Christian faith, for the information of those who have no leisure because of other business, or who cannot read and learn so much because it is in a foreign language. I would ask you at greater length, were this not usually a sign of one who presumes too little on love. Meanwhile I warmly commend to your kindness our brother in Christ Paulus, to whose good reputation in our regions we bear witness before God.

My holy son Heraclius the deacon has told me that in your longing to see me you came as far as Cissa, and that, though a Pannonian, that is, a land animal, you did not fear to face the surges of the Adriatic and the dangers of the Aegean and Ionian seas; and that you would have carried out your wish in deed, had not the loving affection of the brothers held you back. I thank you, then, and count it as received; for among friends it is not the deed that is looked for but the will, since the first is often supplied by enemies, while only love bestows the second. At the same time I beg you not to think that the bodily weakness you bear has come upon you because of sin. The apostles suspected as much of the man born blind from the womb, and asked the Lord and Saviour, 'Did this man sin, or his parents, that he should be born so?', and they heard, 'Neither this man nor his parents; but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.' For how many heathens, Jews, heretics, and men of various doctrines we see wallowing in the mire of lust, drenched in blood, outdoing wolves in ferocity and kites in rapine; and yet the scourge does not come near their dwelling, nor are they scourged like other men, and so they grow proud against God and their mouth reaches up to heaven. On the other hand we know that holy men are tormented by sicknesses, miseries, and want, and they perhaps say, 'Then in vain have I sanctified my soul and washed my hands among the innocent'; yet at once they rebuke themselves and say, 'If I should speak thus, behold, I should condemn the generation of your children.' If you think that sin is the cause of blindness, and that something which physicians often cure is brought on by God's anger, you will accuse Isaac, who was so utterly deprived of this light that, deceived by a mistake, he blessed one whom he did not wish to bless; you will lay a charge against Jacob, whose sight had grown dim, and who, although with the inner eyes and the prophetic spirit he foresaw things far in the future, and sang of Christ who was to come from the royal tribe, could not see Ephraim and Manasseh. Who among the kings was holier than Josiah? He was run through by an Egyptian sword. Who was more exalted than Peter and Paul? They stained Nero's sword with blood. And, to say nothing of men, the Son of God endured the shame of the cross; and do you think those blessed who enjoy the happiness and delights of this world? It is great wrath when God is not angry with sinners. So in Ezekiel he says to Jerusalem, 'I will no longer be angry with you, and my jealousy has departed from you.' For 'whom the Lord loves he rebukes, and he chastens every son whom he receives.' A father does not train a son unless he loves him; a teacher does not correct a pupil unless he sees in him a more ardent mind. When a physician stops treating a patient, he has given up hope. If you answer, 'As Lazarus received evil things in his life, so I will gladly suffer torments now, that future glory may be kept for me; for the Lord will not punish twice for the same thing,' [you answer well]. Why Job, a holy man, blameless and righteous in his generation, suffered so much is contained in his own book.

So as not to be tedious by going over old stories and exceed the limits of a letter, I will tell you a short tale of something that happened in my childhood. When the blessed Antony had been summoned to the city by the holy Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, to refute the heretics, Didymus, a most learned man who had lost his sight, came to him. Among the other conversations they had about the holy Scriptures, Antony admired his intellect and praised the sharpness of his mind, and then asked, 'Surely you are not sad that you lack the eyes of the flesh?' When Didymus kept silent out of modesty, Antony asked a second and a third time, and at last drew from him a plain confession of the grief in his heart. Antony said to him, 'I am surprised that a wise man grieves at the loss of a thing that ants and flies and gnats have, and does not rejoice in possessing the thing that only saints and apostles have been counted worthy of.' From this you see how much better it is to see with the spirit than with the flesh, and to have those eyes into which the mote of sin cannot fall. Though you have not come to us this year, we still do not despair of your coming. And if the holy deacon who carries this letter is caught once more in your embrace and you come here in his company, I will gladly accept the delay in repayment, doubled by the size of the interest.