Letters 70.1–72.5

That our Sebesius has profited by your admonitions we have learned not so much from your letter as from his own repentance. And, remarkably, he has pleased us more by his amendment than he had hurt us by his fault. A parent's indulgence and a son's devotion have vied with each other, while the one does not remember the past and the other promises his duty for the future as well. So both of us, you and I, have cause for joy: we have received back a son, and you have proved your pupil.

As for your question at the end of your letter, why in my works I sometimes set down examples from secular literature and stain the whiteness of the church with the filth of the heathen, here is a brief answer. You would never ask this if Tully did not possess you wholly, if you read the holy Scriptures, if you set aside Volcatius and turned over their interpreters. For who does not know that in the books of Moses and the prophets some things are taken from the books of the Gentiles, and that Solomon both put some questions to the philosophers of Tyre and answered some from them? So at the opening of Proverbs he admonishes us to understand the discourses of prudence and the subtleties of words, parables and dark sayings, the words of the wise and riddles, which properly belong to dialecticians and philosophers. The apostle Paul too made use of a line of the poet Epimenides when he wrote to Titus, 'Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies'; half of this heroic line was later taken over by Callimachus. And no wonder if a word-for-word translation into Latin does not keep the metre, when Homer turned into prose in the same language scarcely hangs together. In another letter too he sets down a senarius of Menander: 'Evil conversations corrupt good morals.' And when disputing at Athens in the court of Mars he calls Aratus as a witness: 'For we are also his offspring,' which in Greek is tou gar kai genos esmen and is the close of a heroic line. And as if this were not enough, the leader of the Christian army, the invincible orator, pleading the cause of Christ, turns even a chance inscription on an altar into an argument for the faith. For he had learned from the true David to wrest the sword from the enemy's hands and cut off the head of the proud Goliath with his own blade. He had read in Deuteronomy the command given by the Lord's voice that the head of a captive woman must be shaved, her eyebrows, all the hair and nails of her body cut off, and so she might be taken in marriage. What wonder, then, if I too, for the charm of her speech and the beauty of her limbs, wish to make secular wisdom, from a handmaid and captive, into an Israelite; if I either cut off or shave away whatever in her is dead, whether idolatry, pleasure, error, or lust, and, united with her purified body, beget of her servants born in the house for the Lord of hosts? My labour increases Christ's household; my intercourse with a stranger increases the number of my fellow servants. Hosea takes as wife the daughter of Diblaim, that is, 'of sweetnesses', and there is born to him of a harlot a son, Jezreel, who is called 'the seed of God'. Isaiah shaves with a sharp razor the beard and legs of sinners. Ezekiel, as a type of Jerusalem the harlot, cuts off his hair, so that whatever in her is without sense and life may be removed.

Cyprian, a man eminent both in eloquence and in martyrdom, is criticized, as Firmianus relates, because in writing against Demetrianus he used the testimonies of the prophets and apostles, which Demetrianus regarded as fictions and inventions, rather than those of the philosophers and poets, whose authority, as a heathen, he could not have gainsaid. Celsus and Porphyry wrote against us: Origen answered the first most powerfully, and Methodius, Eusebius, and Apollinaris the second. Of these Origen wrote eight books; Methodius goes on for as many as ten thousand lines; Eusebius and Apollinaris composed twenty-five and thirty volumes. Read them, and you will find that by comparison with them I am most unlearned, and after so long an idleness scarcely recall, as if in a dream, what I learned as a boy. The emperor Julian, on his Parthian campaign, vomited out seven books against Christ, and, as in the fables of the poets, wounded himself with his own sword. If I try to write against him, will you forbid me, I suppose, to beat back the mad dog with the teachings of the philosophers and historians, that is, with the club of Hercules? Though he soon felt our Nazarene, or, as he used to call him, the Galilean, in battle, and received the wages of his foul tongue when a pike pierced his loins. Josephus, proving the antiquity of the Jewish people, wrote two books against Apion, the grammarian of Alexandria, and brings forward so many testimonies from secular writers that I wonder how a Hebrew, trained from infancy in the sacred writings, could have gone through the whole library of the Greeks. What shall I say of Philo, whom the critics call a second Plato, or a Jewish Plato?

Let me run through them one by one. Quadratus, a disciple of the apostles and bishop of the church of Athens, did he not hand a book in defence of our religion to the emperor Hadrian when he came to see the Eleusinian mysteries, and win such admiration from all that his outstanding genius calmed a most severe persecution? Aristides the philosopher, a most eloquent man, presented to the same emperor an Apology for the Christians woven from the opinions of the philosophers. Justin, himself a philosopher, later imitated him and handed to Antoninus Pius, his sons, and the senate a book against the Gentiles, defending the shame of the cross and preaching the resurrection of Christ with all freedom. What shall I say of Melito, bishop of Sardis; of Apollinaris, bishop of the church of Hierapolis; of Dionysius, bishop of the Corinthians; of Tatian and Bardesanes; and of Irenaeus, successor of the martyr Photinus, who in many volumes set out the origins of the several heresies and from what springs of the philosophers they flowed? Pantaenus, a philosopher of the Stoic school, because of the fame of his outstanding learning was sent by Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria, to India, to preach Christ among the Brahmans and the philosophers of that nation. Clement, presbyter of the church of Alexandria, in my judgement the most learned of all, wrote eight books of Stromata and as many of Hypotyposes, another against the Gentiles, and also three volumes of the Paedagogus. What is unlearned in them, or rather, what is not drawn from the heart of philosophy? Origen imitated him and wrote ten Stromateis, comparing the opinions of Christians and philosophers and confirming all the doctrines of our religion from Plato and Aristotle, Numenius and Cornutus. Miltiades too wrote an excellent volume against the Gentiles, and Hippolytus and Apollonius, a senator of the city of Rome, composed works of their own. There are also the books of Julius Africanus, who wrote histories of the times; of Theodore, later called Gregory, a man of apostolic signs and miracles; of Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria; of Anatolius too, bishop of the church of Laodicea; of the presbyters Pamphilus, Pierius, Lucian, and Malchion; of Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea; Eustathius of Antioch and Athanasius of Alexandria; Eusebius of Emesa too, Triphyllius of Cyprus, Asterius of Scythopolis, and Serapion the confessor; Titus, bishop of Bostra, and the Cappadocians Basil, Gregory, and Amphilochius. All of these so filled their books with the teachings and opinions of the philosophers that you do not know which to admire first in them, their secular learning or their knowledge of the Scriptures.

I come to the Latins. What is more learned, what more acute than Tertullian? His Apology and his books Against the Gentiles contain the whole learning of the world. Minucius Felix, an advocate of the Roman forum, in the book entitled Octavius and in another against the astrologers (if indeed the title does not falsely name the author), what part of pagan literature did he leave untouched? Arnobius published seven books against the Gentiles, and his pupil Lactantius as many, who also wrote two volumes, on the anger and on the workmanship of God; if you care to read them, you will find in them an epitome of Cicero's dialogues. The martyr Victorinus, though learning is lacking in his books, does not lack the desire for learning. Cyprian, on the fact that idols are not gods, with what brevity, what knowledge of all histories, what splendour of words and meaning he touched on it! Hilary, a confessor and bishop of my own time, imitated the twelve books of Quintilian both in style and in number, and in a short book that he wrote against the physician Dioscorus showed what he could do in literature. The presbyter Juvencus under Constantine set out in verse the history of the Lord and Saviour, and did not fear to subject the majesty of the gospel to the laws of metre. Of the rest, dead or living, I say nothing; their strength and purpose are evident from their own writings.

And do not be misled at once by a wrong opinion, that this is lawful against the Gentiles but to be concealed in other discussions; for almost all the books of all writers, except those who, like Epicurus, never learned letters, are full of erudition and learning. Yet I am more inclined to think (it came into my mind as I was dictating) that you are not ignorant of what learned men have always practised, but that the question is being put to me through you by someone else, who perhaps, from his love of Sallust's Histories, might be called Calpurnius, surnamed Lanarius. Please persuade him not to envy, toothless as he is, the teeth of those who eat, nor, as a mole, to despise the eyes of goats. The material for discussion is rich, as you see, but it must now be brought to an end within the narrow limits of a letter.

Your letter reached me suddenly and unexpectedly, and as it was unhoped for, so it was full of joy, and roused my sleeping soul, so that at once I embraced with love one whom I did not know by sight, and murmured silently to myself: 'Who will give me wings like a dove, and I will fly and be at rest', that I may find him whom my soul loved? Truly the Lord's saying is now fulfilled in you: 'Many will come from east and west and recline in the bosom of Abraham.' Cornelius, the centurion of the Italian cohort, already prefigured the faith of my Lucinius. The apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, 'When I begin to set out for Spain, I hope to see you as I pass through and to be sent on there by you,' has shown by such rich fruits what he was seeking in that province. In a short time, laying the foundations of the gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum, he enters Rome in chains, to set free those chained by the errors of superstition. He stays for two years in a hired lodging, so as to give you the eternal house of both Testaments. The fisher of men cast the apostolic net and drew you too to shore, like a most beautiful gilt-head among countless kinds of fish. You have left the bitter waves, the salt eddies, the clefts of the mountains, and you have despised Leviathan who reigns in the waters, seeking the desert with Jesus, so that you may sing the prophet's words: 'In a desert land, pathless and waterless, so in the sanctuary I appeared before you,' and again: 'Behold, I fled far away and remained in the wilderness. I waited for him who saved me from faintness of spirit and from the storm.' I beg you, then, and warn you with a parent's affection: you who have left Sodom and are hurrying to the mountains, do not look back; do not ever let go of the handle of the plough, the fringe of the Saviour's garment, his locks wet with the dew of the night, which you have once begun to hold; do not come down from the roof of the virtues to look for your former clothes; do not return home from the field; do not love, with Lot, the plains and the pleasant gardens, which are not watered from heaven like the holy land but from the muddy river Jordan, after it has changed the sweet waters by mixing with the Dead Sea.

To begin is the part of many; to reach the goal, of few. 'Those who run in a race all run, but one receives the crown.' But to us, on the contrary, it is said: 'So run that you may obtain.' Our president of the games is not envious, and one man's palm does not bring disgrace on another; he wants all his athletes to be crowned. My soul rejoices, and from the greatness of my joy I suffer what belongs to sorrow, so that my words break out into tears. Zacchaeus the tax collector, for one hour's conversion, was counted worthy to have the Saviour as his guest; Martha and Mary, to receive the Lord at a banquet they had prepared. A harlot washes his feet with her tears and with the ointment of good works consecrates the burial of the Lord's body. Simon the leper invites the Master with his disciples and is not despised. To Abraham it is said, 'Go out from your land and from your kindred and from your father's house, and go into the land that I will show you.' He leaves Chaldaea, he leaves Mesopotamia; he seeks what he does not know, so as not to lose him whom he had found. For he did not think he could have both his country and the Lord at once; but already then he fulfilled in deed the words of the prophet David: 'I am a stranger with you and a sojourner, like all my fathers.' He was a Hebrew, that is, a perates, one who passes over, because he was not content with present virtue but, forgetting what lies behind, reached forward to what lies ahead, and knew the saying, 'They will go from strength to strength'; so he received a mystical name, and he opened the way for you not to seek your own things but those of others, and to think of those as your parents, brothers, relations, and kin who are joined to you in Christ. 'My mother,' he says, 'and my brothers are these, who do the will of my Father.'

You have with you one who was formerly your partner in the flesh and is now your partner in the spirit: once your wife, now your sister; once a woman, now a man; once subject, now an equal; who under the same yoke hastens with you to the heavenly kingdom. The careful management of a household, always going back to its accounts, is not quickly laid aside. Joseph could not escape the Egyptian woman with his tunic. The young man who was following Jesus wrapped in a linen cloth, because he had been seized by the servants, threw off his earthly covering and escaped naked. Elijah, carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot, left his mantle on earth. Elisha turned the oxen and yokes of his former work into offerings. The wisest of men says, 'He who touches pitch will be defiled by it.' As long as we are occupied with the affairs of the world and our soul is bound up in managing possessions and revenues, we cannot think freely of God. 'For what partnership has righteousness with iniquity, or what fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial? What share has a believer with an unbeliever?' 'You cannot,' says the Lord, 'serve God and mammon.' To lay aside gold is the part of beginners, not of the perfect. Crates the Theban did it; Antisthenes did it. To offer oneself to God is what belongs properly to Christians and apostles, who, casting their two mites into the treasury with the widow of poverty, gave to the Lord the whole living they had, and deserve to hear: 'You will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.'

You yourself understand with what purpose I set this out, and that in other words I am inviting you to make your home in the holy places. Your abundance has supported the need of many, so that their riches too may overflow to supply your want. You have made yourself friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness, who may receive you into the eternal dwellings. It is a praiseworthy thing, to be ranked with the virtues of the apostolic age, when believers sold their possessions and brought the money and poured it out at the feet of the apostles, showing that avarice must be trampled under foot. But the Lord seeks the souls of believers more than their wealth. We read: 'The ransom of a man's soul is his own riches.' We can indeed understand 'his own riches' as those which do not come from what belongs to others or from plunder, according to the saying, 'Honour the Lord from your just labours'; but the better understanding is that we should recognize as our own riches the hidden treasures which no thief can dig through and no violent robber can seize.

My little works, which you say you want, not for their merit but out of your kindness, I have given to your men to copy; I have seen them copied on paper manuscripts and have often warned them to compare them carefully and correct them. For I could not reread so many volumes because of the constant stream of visitors and the crowds of pilgrims, and, as they themselves saw when they were here, I was held by a long illness and only began to recover in the days of Lent, when they were setting out. So if you find mistakes in the letters, or things left out that hinder the reader's understanding, you must not blame me but your own men, and the lack of skill of the stenographers and the carelessness of the copyists, who write not what they find but what they understand, and while they try to correct others' errors show their own. Further, a false rumour has reached you that I have translated the books of Josephus and the volumes of the holy Papias and Polycarp; I have neither the leisure nor the strength to render such great works into another language with the same elegance. I have translated a little of Origen and Didymus, wishing to show our people in part what Greek learning contains. The canon of the Hebrew truth, except the Octateuch, which I now have in hand, I have given to your servants and stenographers to copy. The edition of the Seventy translators I do not doubt you have already, and many years ago I gave it, most carefully corrected, to students. The New Testament I have restored to the authority of the Greek. For as the reliability of the old books must be tested by the Hebrew volumes, so that of the new requires the standard of the Greek language.

As to your question about the Sabbath, whether one should fast on it, and about the Eucharist, whether it should be received daily, as the Roman church and the churches of Spain are said to do: Hippolytus, a most eloquent man, has written on this, and various authors have published extracts from various writers. But I think I should briefly advise you that church traditions, especially those that do no harm to the faith, should be observed as they were handed down by our forebears, and that the custom of some churches should not be overturned by the contrary practice of others. Would that we could fast at all times, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles that the apostle Paul and the believers with him did in the days of Pentecost and on the Lord's day! (Yet they are not to be charged with the Manichaean heresy, since carnal food ought not to have been preferred to spiritual.) Would that we could also always receive the Eucharist without condemnation of ourselves and a pricking conscience, and hear the psalmist saying, 'Taste and see how sweet the Lord is,' and sing with him, 'My heart has poured out a good word!' I do not say this because I think one should fast on feast days and take away the continuous holiday of the fifty days; but let each province abound in its own sense and regard the precepts of its forebears as apostolic laws.

Two small cloaks and a woollen mantle from your own wardrobe I have received, either to use or to give to the saints. I have sent you and your sister tokens of poverty and symbols of daily penitence: four small haircloths suited to your way of life and your needs, and a manuscript, namely the very obscure visions of Isaiah, which I have lately explained in a historical commentary; so that whenever you see my little works you may remember your dearest friend and prepare the voyage which you have put off for a while. And since 'a man's way is not in himself' and 'a man's steps are directed by the Lord', if perhaps (God forbid) something should prevent you, I beg that those whom love joins distance of lands may not separate, and that by exchanging letters we may always feel our absent Lucinius present.

Zeno the shipmaster, by whom you say your Holiness's letter was sent to me, delivered only one short letter, from the blessed father Amabilis, with the usual little gifts. I wonder greatly what reason there was why, having proved faithful in carrying both your greetings and his, he should be found careless in delivering a letter. For I do not think that you, a disciple of truth, are mistaken, unless perhaps a Latin letter strayed among the papers of a Greek. So I am replying to your second letter, which my holy son Heraclius the deacon delivered to me, in which among other things you ask me to explain why Solomon and Ahaz are said to have begotten sons when they were eleven years old. For if Solomon received the kingdom over Israel in his twelfth year and reigned forty years in Jerusalem, and his son Rehoboam succeeded his father on the throne in his forty-first year, it is plain that Solomon was eleven, or even ten, years old, since a mother claims ten months from conception to birth. Again, Ahaz son of Jotham was made king over the two tribes, that is, Judah and Benjamin, when he was twenty years old, and reigned sixteen years; and when he died Hezekiah succeeded his father on the throne in his twenty-fifth year. From this it is understood that Ahaz too begot his son Hezekiah in his eleventh or tenth year.

If in these histories the Seventy translators had one reading and the Hebrew truth another, we could have fled to our usual defences and held the citadel of the original language. But now, since the original itself and the other translators agree with equal authority, the difficulty is not in the text but in the meaning. What mortal will believe that a boy of eleven begets a son? Many other things are said in the Scriptures that seem incredible and yet are true. For nature has no power against the Lord of nature (can the pot say to the potter, 'Why have you made me so, or so?'), although what happens as a miracle, sign, or portent cannot make a law of nature. Because in our time a double man was born at Lydda, with two heads, four hands, one belly, and two feet, must all men be born so? Let us read the old histories, especially the Greek and Latin ones, and we will find that portentous offspring, of men as well as of cattle and flocks, were expiated by lustral sacrifices, according to the old error. I have heard (the Lord is my witness that I do not lie) of a certain woman who was nursing an abandoned infant, feeding him drop by drop and acting as his nurse, and the little boy slept with her until he reached his tenth year. It happened that she drank more wine than modesty allows, and, inflamed with lust, taught the child intercourse by obscene movements. The drunkenness of the first night made a habit of the second and of the following nights. Two months had not yet passed, and behold, the woman's belly swelled. What more? By God's dispensation it came about that she who, against nature, was abusing the child's innocence in contempt of God was exposed by the Lord of nature; and so the saying was fulfilled: 'Nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest.'

At the same time let us consider that Scripture covertly accuses both Solomon and Ahaz of lust and impiety. For both of them, though of the line of David, departed from the Lord. The one followed his lust so far that he had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and young girls and male prostitutes without number, and neglecting the God of his fathers built idols of many nations; and he was no longer, as before, Jedidiah, that is, 'beloved of the Lord', but a lover of women. The other sent to the king of Assyria asking for help, and in the time of his distress increased his contempt for the Lord; he sacrificed victims to the gods of Damascus, who had struck him, built altars in every city of Judah for burning incense, and provoked the Lord God of his fathers to anger, so much that he plundered and broke the vessels of the house of God, shut the doors of God's temple, made himself altars in every corner of Jerusalem, walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, cast images for the Baals, burned incense in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, and passed his sons through the fire after the rite of the nations whom the Lord destroyed at the coming of the children of Israel. From this it is clear that men given to lust from an early age are shown to be so by their premature offspring, because they began to sin even at an age when nature does not allow it.

In short, it can be said that Solomon took his father's throne when he was twelve, while David was still reigning, and that afterwards (since Scripture leaves it uncertain) David lived for some years while his son was already reigning, and these years are counted to David and not to Solomon; and that after his father's death the son reigned forty years, which he reigned without his father. So history shows both the beginning of Solomon's reign and the time he reigned alone, and yet all the years of his life are not contained within a span of only fifty-two years. But if you doubt that, when sons reign while their fathers are living, the time of their reign is counted not to the sons but to the fathers, read the book of Kings itself, and you will find that Uzziah, king of Judah, after he was struck with leprosy, lived in a separate house, and his son Jotham governed the kingdom and judged the people of the land until the day of his father's death; and yet after his father's death, when he was twenty-five years old, he is said to have reigned sixteen years, the number he reigned alone. What we have understood of Solomon must likewise be understood of Ahaz, who was the son of Jotham and the father of Hezekiah. I have heard a Hebrew tell a story of this kind, based on the prophecy of Isaiah which I have lately explained among the ten visions: that when Ahaz died Philistia rejoiced, and Scripture afterwards threatens her and says: 'Do not rejoice, all Philistia, because the rod of him who struck you is broken; for out of the serpent's root will come forth a basilisk, and its offspring will swallow the bird,' that is, from Ahaz is raised up King Hezekiah. From this he meant it to be understood that the son was not put in charge of the kingdom immediately after his father's death, but that his reign was delayed, either by popular uprisings, or by some interregnums, or certainly by pressing troubles and wars rising on every side.

In obscure matters we set down different opinions, so that we may seem not so much to be writing to you as speaking face to face. For the rest, the apostle, in forbidding endless genealogies and Jewish fables, seems to me to prohibit questions of this sort. For what good is it to stick to the letter and cavil at a copyist's error or the series of years, when it is written most plainly, 'The letter kills, but the spirit gives life'? Reread all the books of the Old and the New Testament, and you will find such a disagreement of years, and the numbers between Judah and Israel, that is, between the two kingdoms, so confused, that to give oneself to questions of this sort seems the mark not so much of a studious man as of an idle one. I gladly received the little gifts you sent, and I earnestly ask that you persevere to the end in the love with which you began to seek us; for virtue lies not in having begun but in having persevered. Please accept in return what I send by Desiderius.