Letters 96.19–98.11

If souls are sent to earth after sin, to be born in bodies, there was no reason for Adam and Eve to be blessed, since because of sin they would rather have deserved a curse. In fact, after he formed them he followed them with words of blessing, whom afterwards, when they sinned by their own will, he struck with a curse. From this it follows that the nature of bodies by no means came into being because of the sins of souls. Let them hear God again saying, 'I made the earth and man upon it,' and David, 'The heaven of heaven is the Lord's, but the earth he has given to the sons of men'; and let them cease to follow the errors of their own thoughts and be led rather by the authority of the Scriptures. For just as those who are enervated by pleasures and in whose breast lust reigns, looking at the beauty of bodies, seek not the beauty of character but of limbs, and their mind, weighed down by earthly dregs, sees nothing higher; so those who are led by elaborate composition of words and, captured by the sound of eloquence, do not look at the truth of doctrines, are ashamed to confess their former error, and, blinded by the swelling of arrogance, do not wish to be disciples, lest, after they have been corrected, they should seem to have erred before.

So, casting aside the evils of Origen and leaving behind the snares of the Scriptures called apocryphal, that is, hidden (for 'I have not spoken in secret,' says the Lord), let us again and again, dearest brothers, celebrate the feast of the Lord's passion. Adorning faith with conduct, let us imitate God by mercy toward the poor, God, to whom no form of bodily natures is like; let us have in all things the image of his goodness; let us amend our errors by repentance; let us pray for our enemies and intercede for our detractors, emulating Moses, who by his prayer blotted out the fault of his sister who spoke against him; let us wash away the filth of our sins with the oil of almsgiving. Let the chains of captives seem to bind us, and let us pray God to be merciful to them; let daily kindness support those shut up in prison; and let us serve with anxious ministry, for the reward laid up in heaven, those whose bodies jaundice has seized and whose limbs dissolve with continual wasting. If ever the power of judging is given to us, and the case of quarrelling brothers is brought before us, let there be no regard for persons but for facts. With those who fall and are in tribulation, let us too fall in affection; let the laws keep the rule of truth; let love be inclined to mercy, not insulting sinners but suffering with them; for the slip into vices is easy, and the frailty of the human condition ought to fear in itself whatever it sees in another. And when another has been rebuked for an error, let his correction be our caution. And above all, as the summit and crown of the virtues, let piety toward God be kept with the whole fear of the heart; and, abhorring a number of gods, let us confess the one and undivided substance of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, in which, being baptized, we received eternal life. And, if the mercy of God grants it, we shall be counted worthy to celebrate the Lord's Pasch with the angels, beginning Lent on the eighth day of the month which the Egyptians call Phamenoth; and, with his giving us strength, let us fast more earnestly in the great week, that is, of the venerable Pasch, laying its foundations on the thirteenth day of the month Pharmuthi; in such a way that, according to the gospel traditions, we end the fast late at night on the eighteenth day of the said month Pharmuthi, and on the next day, which is the symbol of the Lord's resurrection, that is, the nineteenth of the same month, we celebrate the true Pasch, adding to these the seven remaining weeks in which the feast of Pentecost is woven, and showing ourselves worthy of communion in the body and blood of Christ. For so we shall deserve to receive the kingdom of heaven in Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom and with whom to God the Father be glory and power, with the Holy Spirit, now and always and for all ages of ages. Amen.

Greet one another with a holy kiss; the brothers who are with me greet you.

Once again I enrich you with Eastern wares and send the riches of Alexandria to Rome in early spring. 'God will come from the south, and the Holy One from Mount Paran, thickly shaded'; so the bride too rejoices in the Song of Songs, saying, 'In his shadow I desired and sat, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.' Truly now is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, who proclaims, 'In that day there will be an altar of the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt,' so that where sin abounded grace might abound all the more. Those who had cherished Christ as a little child now defend him grown up with the warmth of faith, so that he who by their help escaped the hands of Herod may escape the blaspheming heretic. The man whom Demetrius drove from the city of Alexander, Theophilus drives from the whole world: Theophilus, to whom Luke wrote his gospel, who found his name from the love of God. Where now is the crooked serpent? Where is the most venomous viper? Where is the heresy that hissed in the world and boasted that I and Pope Theophilus were of its error, and with the barking of most shameless dogs lied about our consent in order to lead the simple astray? It has been crushed by his authority and eloquence, and, like demonic spirits, speaks from the earth. For it does not know him who, coming from above, speaks the things that are above.

Would that the brood of serpents would either simply confess our faith or firmly defend their own, so that we might know whom to love and whom to beware of! But as it is (a new kind of repentance) they hate us as enemies, whose faith they do not dare to deny in public. I ask, what grief is this, which is healed neither by time nor by reason? Amid flashing swords, lying bodies, and flowing streams of blood, enemies' right hands are often joined, and sudden peace changes the rage of war: only the followers of this heresy cannot make a treaty with men of the church, because what they are forced to say in words they condemn in mind. And if ever an open blasphemy is revealed to public hearing, and they see the audience murmuring against them, then, feigning simplicity, they say they have heard for the first time what they well knew their master says. And when their writings are held against them, they deny with the voice what they confess in their letters. What need is there to besiege the Propontis, to change places, to go round various regions, and to tear with rabid mouth the most illustrious bishop of Christ and his disciples? If you speak truly, change your former ardour for error into ardour for the faith. Why do you sew together rags of slander from here and there and pick at the lives of those whose faith you cannot resist? Are you therefore not heretics, if some believe us sinners on your assertion, and will you not have a mouth foul with impiety if you can show a scar on our ear? What does it help your faithlessness, or what good is an Ethiopian skin and the spots of a leopard, if a mole appears on our body? See, Pope Theophilus with all freedom proves Origen a heretic: they do not defend his words, but pretend they were altered by heretics and say that the books of many were likewise corrupted, so as to protect him not by his own faith but by the errors of others. But let this be said against the heretics, who, raging against us with unjust hatred, confess their secret in their mind and testify to the poisons of their breast by incurable grief.

You, lights of the Christian senate, receive this year too the letter both in Greek and in Latin (lest the heretics lie again that we have added or changed much). In it, I confess, I have laboured to preserve the elegance of the words with equal grace of translation, and, running within fixed lines and nowhere going beyond them, not to lose the streams of his eloquence, and to render the same things in the same language; whether I have achieved this or not I leave to your judgement. Know that it is divided into four parts: in the introduction he exhorts believers to celebrate the Lord's Pasch; in the second and third parts he cuts down Apollinaris and Origen; in the fourth, the last, he exhorts the heretics to repentance. If anything less is said here against Origen, it is contained in the letter of the previous year, and this one, which we have just translated, aiming at brevity, ought not to say more. Further, against Apollinaris his concise faith and pure profession is not lacking in dialectical subtlety, which pierces its adversary with the dagger wrested from his hands.

Pray the Lord, then, that what pleases in Greek may not displease in Latin, and that what the whole East admires and proclaims Rome may receive with glad bosom, and that the chair of the apostle Peter may confirm by its preaching the preaching of the chair of Mark the evangelist; although it has been widely reported that the blessed Pope Anastasius too, with the same fervour, since he has the same spirit, has pursued the heretics lurking in their holes, and his letter shows that what was condemned in the East has been condemned in the West. We pray that he may have many years, so that through his zeal the reviving shoots of heresy may wither over a long time and die.

The divine word of the august feast, shining from the regions of heaven and surpassing the sun's radiance with its splendour, pours the brightest light into the souls that long for it; and when they have been able to bear its rays with the full gaze of the heart, it draws them to the very inner shrines of the heavenly Jerusalem and, so to speak, to the holy of holies. So, if we wish to share in salvation, and, clinging to the pursuit of virtues, to cleanse the vices of our souls and wash away whatever filth is in us by constant meditation on the Scriptures, let us, beholding the knowledge of doctrines as though open under a clear sky, hasten to celebrate the feast of heavenly joy and join ourselves to the choirs of the angels, where there are crowns and rewards and sure victory, and the longed-for palm is set before those who triumph. And let us not delay, freed from the swelling waves of the flesh, to hold the helm of the virtues amid the various shipwrecks of pleasures on every side, and after the great dangers of the sea to enter the safest harbour of heaven.

Therefore let us, as if waking them from a heavy sleep, call to the gains of wisdom those too whom the empty care of this life troubles, and around whom the depths of disturbances roar like raging whirlpools; and let us show them the true riches of the divine meanings and the unhoped-for joys of the holy feast, for which every labour of the present is to be undertaken; so that we may prepare for eternal glory both those who are a little negligent and ourselves. So in Proverbs Wisdom, inviting those who lack understanding to her banquet, cries out: 'Come, eat of my bread and drink the wine I have mixed for you.' For the heaven we look up at is not so lit up by the choirs of the stars, nor do the sun and moon, the two brightest eyes, so to speak, of the world, by whose course the year rolls on and the seasons change in turn, pour so bright a light on the earth, as our feast shines and gleams with the choir of the virtues. Those who seek its treasures and riches sing with David in harmonious voice: 'Who will give me wings like a dove, and I will fly and be at rest?' And exulting and leaping as in a kind of dance, and, as it is written, filled in heart with unspeakable joy, they cry again: 'We have here no lasting city, but we seek the city to come, whose builder and maker is God.' For they know that this is the hope laid up for all the labours with which they fight and run in this world, and that these rewards are appointed in the future; for which, fearing no dangers, they direct the course of their life daily, avoiding above all the impiety and snares of the heretics, by which the blind lead the blind into the pit, and, as with a kind of lethargy and most unclean decay, stain the hearts of the deceived. Not content with this goal, they drink the inmost marrow of the Scriptures, condemning, by the truth of doctrines, the knowledge falsely so called.

Understanding this, the patriarch Jacob sees in sleep a ladder whose top reached to heaven, by which one climbs to the heights by the various steps of the virtues, and men are called, leaving the low places of earth, to celebrate the feast of the Lord's passion with the church of the firstborn. 'This is none other,' he says, 'than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' David, looking at it more keenly and seeking it with the whole desire of his mind, pondering the reasons for this journey in his thoughts, and, as it were, grinding precious spices more strongly and breaking them up so that they might spread the fragrance of a sweet odour far and wide, calls those who hasten to the feast, saying: 'Open to me the gates of righteousness, and I will enter them and give thanks to the Lord: this is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall enter by it.' There is no feast, then, no feast at all, for heretics, nor can those deceived by error rejoice in its communion. For it is written: 'If a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.' Nor can those who contradict the divine doctrines of the church receive the mysteries of the heavenly words. So, purifying our souls with all our strength from every contagion, let us make them worthy of the feast that is at hand, so that we may sing with the saints: 'The Lord is God, and he has shone upon us.' Of it another prophet too, aware of what was to come, testifies in a mystical voice: 'The Lord will appear among them and destroy all the gods of the nations,' when words were changed into deeds and the truth of things was shown to the eyes of the doubters, so that through the fulfilment of what was foretold the truth of the words might be proved; God making us partakers of his victory, so that we may have fellowship in the feast with the saints and frequently proclaim his glorious coming. For since the whole earth had been corrupted by various allurements, thinking virtues vices and, on the contrary, vices virtues, and, as time went on, thinking custom the law of nature, through tyrannical pride those who had gone before and had strengthened falsehood by time were thought fathers and teachers of truth. So it had come about that human error grew, and, like brute animals, not knowing what was useful, men despised the true shepherd, the Lord, and, carried away by fury, worshipped tyrants and princes as gods, consecrating their own weakness in men of the same nature. By this it happened that they escaped the present danger of death and won over those whose clemency was more savage than cruelty.

Therefore, when all had been led astray by error, the living Word of God came to our help on earth, which did not know the worship of God and was enduring a desert of truth. Witness to this is he who says, 'All have sinned, together they have become worthless,' and the prophets, praying for Christ's help: 'Lord, bow your heavens and come down'; not that he, in whom all things are, should change place, but that for our salvation he should take on the flesh of human frailty; as Paul says in harmony, 'Though he was rich, he became poor for us, so that by his poverty we might become rich.' And he came to earth and, coming forth as man from the virgin womb which he sanctified, confirming by his dispensation the interpretation of his name Emmanuel, that is, 'God with us,' he began in a wonderful way to be what we are and did not cease to be what he had been, so taking our nature that he did not lose what he himself was. For although John writes, 'The Word was made flesh,' that is, in other words, man, yet he was not turned into flesh, because he never ceased to be God, to whom the saint too says, 'But you are the same,' and the Father testifies from heaven and says, 'You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'; so that, even when made man, he is said by our confession to remain what he was before he became man, as Paul proclaims the same with us: 'Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and for ever.' For in saying 'the same' he shows that he did not change his former nature nor diminish the riches of his divinity, who, made poor for us, had taken the full likeness of our condition. He assumed a man, sin only excepted, made of as many and such elements as all of us are created from; not in part, but whole, the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; and he lacked nothing of our likeness except sin alone, which has no substance. For he did not have soulless flesh, with God the Word himself in it in place of a rational soul, as the drowsy disciples of Apollinaris suppose; nor, when he says in the gospel, 'Now my soul is troubled,' does he testify that his divinity was subject to disturbance, as those must say who contend that the divinity was in his body in place of a soul. Nor again did he complete the man he assumed by joining only a soul to himself, lest he be believed to have fulfilled a half-assumption, being like us in the flesh but, in the soul, like irrational beasts, if indeed, as they hold, the Saviour's soul is irrational and without mind and sense; which is impious to believe and far from the church's faith. Otherwise he would at once be struck by that saying with which the prophet rebukes the offender, 'Ephraim is like a senseless dove, having no heart,' and, as irrational, would hear, 'He is compared to senseless beasts and has become like them.' For no one doubts that an irrational soul, without sense and mind, is compared to senseless beasts. So Moses too writes, 'You shall not muzzle the ox that treads the grain,' and Paul, explaining the text, says: 'Is it for oxen that God cares? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake?'

For us, then, the Saviour became man, not for brute and irrational beasts, so as to take on the likeness of a beast's soul, without sense and reason. Nor does the church accept what the followers of the same heresy cavil and chatter, that the Saviour's soul should be called 'the mind of the flesh', since the apostle plainly calls the mind of the flesh hostile to God and death; which it is wicked to say of the Lord, as if his soul were believed to be death and hostile to God. For if he commands us, 'Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul,' they will be forced by their foolish argument to accept that our souls are better than the Saviour's soul, since his is asserted to be the mind of the flesh, which is death and hostile to God, while ours cannot die. This, dearest brothers, is by no means to be so understood, since not even the prudence of the soul can be called the soul, and they differ greatly from each other. For although the prudence of the soul is in the soul whose prudence it is, yet the one has and the other is had; the soul comes first, and prudence dwells in the soul. If the prudence of the soul is not the soul, how much less can the prudence of the flesh be called the soul! Let them spread the nets of their syllogisms as far as they like, and, setting out the snares of their sophisms, entangle themselves in their own nooses, not knowing even that science in whose empty knowledge they glory; and let them learn from us, whom they force against our will to take up a discussion of this kind, that the one who is wise is one thing, wisdom another, and what is known another again, and that these differ not only in words but in meaning. For that which is wise is the rational soul; what comes from it and belongs to it and is not itself the wise thing is called wisdom; and what is known is the object it looks at, which is produced by the wisdom of the wise, and is neither the wise one nor wisdom itself. Let them cease at last to pervert the simple decrees of the church's faith by the tricks of dialectic, calling the Saviour's soul the mind of the flesh, which the apostle declares to be death and hostile to God.

But it seems we should argue against them in this way too. It is written of the Word of God, 'All things were made through him'; is it credible that wisdom or the mind of the flesh, which they understand as the Saviour's soul, was created by the Word of God, so that he himself became the maker of death and of enmity against God and joined them to himself, which is wicked to say? But if that is wicked to believe, and the Saviour's soul is strong in all virtues, then the mind of the flesh will not be his soul, lest he be believed to have joined death and enmity against God to himself. Let the disciples of Apollinaris stop defending, on account of his other writings, what he said against the church's rules. For although he wrote against the Arians and Eunomians, and overthrew Origen and other heretics by his arguments, yet one who remembers the precept, 'You shall not respect persons in judgement,' must always love the truth, not persons, and know that, in the dispensation of the man whom the only-begotten Son of God deigned to assume for our salvation, one who both understood and wrote perversely about his soul is not free from fault. For as the apostle says, 'If I give away all my substance and hand over my body to be burned, but have not love, it will profit me nothing,' so, whether this man of whom we now speak, or Origen and other heretics, though they wrote some things that do not conflict with the church's faith, they will not be without guilt when they conflict with the church's faith in things that are principal and belong to the salvation of believers. For our Lord and Saviour did not, as he tries to prove with his followers, take a soul without sense and mind, or half of it, or two parts out of three, or a third, so as to save imperfectly the man he assumed; for neither the half nor the remaining parts will receive the name of perfect. And as what is perfect lacks the defect of the imperfect, so what is imperfect cannot be called perfect. And if he had taken our likeness imperfectly or in part, how could he say in the gospel, 'No one takes my soul from me. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it up'? What is taken and laid down cannot be called irrational or without mind and understanding, but, on the contrary, rational, intelligent, having mind and sensing.

And so the very order of the argument proves that nothing imperfect was assumed by the Lord, but that the man assumed by him was fully and perfectly saved. For no one doubts that the souls of irrational beasts are not laid down and taken up again, but perish with their bodies and are dissolved into dust. But the Saviour, taking his soul and separating it from his body at the time of his passion, received it again in the resurrection. And long before he did this he said in the psalm: 'You will not abandon my soul in hell, nor let your holy one see corruption.' Nor is it credible that his flesh went down to hell, or that the mind of the flesh, called his soul, appeared in hell; rather, his body was laid in the tomb, and he said, 'You will not abandon my soul in hell,' neither of his body and the mind of the flesh nor of his divinity, but truly of the soul of our nature, to show that a perfect, rational, intelligent, and sensing soul went down to hell. We urge those who think such things to leave heretical errors and accept the church's truth, and not to make the feast of the Lord's passion imperfect, nor deny in the Saviour the principal and greater part of man by asserting that his body was without soul and mind. For if it was so, what did he mean us to understand of himself when he said, 'The good shepherd lays down his soul for the sheep'? And if he had taken only the flesh of man, why did he say in his passion, 'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak'?

So it must be known that, showing forth the mystery of the human condition balanced in every respect, he took the perfect likeness of our condition: not only flesh, nor an irrational and senseless soul, but, uniting to himself the whole body and the whole soul, he showed forth a perfect man in himself, so that in himself and through himself he might grant perfect salvation to all men. And having fellowship with us, who were made from the earth, he neither brought flesh down from heaven, nor joined to his body a soul that had existed before and had been created before his flesh, as the disciples of Origen try to teach. For if the Saviour's soul dwelt in the regions of heaven before he assumed a human body, and was not yet his soul, it is most impious to say that it existed before the Lord's body, active and flourishing, and was afterwards changed into his soul. It would be another matter if they could teach from the Scriptures that God the Word had this soul before he was born of Mary, and that it was called his soul before he assumed flesh. But if both by the authority of the Scriptures and by reason itself they are forced to accept that Christ did not have a soul before he was born of Mary (for in the assumption of the man his soul too was assumed), they are plainly convicted of saying that the same soul both was and was not his. But let them cease their raging impiety of new doctrines! Let us, following the rule of the Scriptures, proclaim with all boldness of heart that neither his flesh nor his soul existed before he was born of Mary, and that no soul dwelt in heaven beforehand which he afterwards joined to himself; for the Lord, coming from heaven, brought nothing of our condition with him. So, cutting down with the gospel sickle whatever is contrary to the truth, he says, 'Every plant which my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up,' completing the word by deed and the threat by its fulfilment, and proving the power of his sayings by the accomplishment of things, so that the truth of deeds might show whatever his word had promised.

Let those, then, know that they are strangers to this feast and cannot celebrate the Lord's passion with us, who follow Origen (to borrow something from the fables of the poets), the hydra of all heresies, and glory in having him as master and chief of their error. For although he wove countless books and left the world the inheritance of his garrulity as of a ruinous estate, yet we know the command of the law: 'You may not set over you a foreigner, who is not your brother.' For he who strayed by a different path from the rules of the apostles is cast out of the feast of Christ as unworthy and profane for the choir of Christ and the fellowship of his mysteries, and is driven far off by the fathers and elders who founded the Saviour's church, since he tries to sew the rags of the philosophers onto the new and very strong garment of the church and to join the false to the true, so that the weakness of the one is shown by its neighbourhood with the stronger, and the beauty of the other is violated.

What reason, what order of argument led him to take away the truth of the Scriptures by the shadows of allegory and empty images? What prophet taught him to think that God was compelled to make bodies because of the falls of souls from heaven? Which of those who, according to blessed Luke, were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word of God handed down to him to teach that God was provoked to create the diversity of this world by the negligence, movement, and flowing down from higher places of rational creatures? For Moses, in explaining its creation, (neither) said nor indicated that for any preceding causes sensible things were produced from rational ones, visible from invisible, worse from better, which Origen most openly proclaims. For he says that the world began because of the sins of intelligible creatures; not wishing to celebrate the Pasch with the saints, nor to say with Paul, 'The invisible things of God are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood through the things that are made,' nor to cry out with the prophet, 'I considered your works and was amazed.' For the beauty of the world could not otherwise exist unless the varied adornment of creatures filled it. In fact the sun and moon, the two great lights, and the other stars, were not without bodies before they were what the service of their daily course testifies they were created to be, nor were they surrounded with bodies because, for some causes, they left their original simplicity, as he dreams, building doctrines contrary to the faith. Nor did souls sin in any way in the regions of heaven and for that reason were banished into bodies. For if this were so, the Saviour ought not to have taken a body himself, but to have freed souls from bodies; at the time when he forgives sins in baptism he ought at once to have released the baptized from the chains of the body, which Origen says were made because of sins, in condemnation of sin. And he promises the resurrection of bodies in vain, if it is better for souls to fly up to heaven without the weight of bodies. He himself too, in rising, ought not to have raised his flesh, but to have joined only the soul to the divinity, if it is better to live without bodies than with them.

What does he mean by often preaching that souls are both bound to bodies and separated from them, and bringing upon us many deaths? He does not know that Christ came, not to release souls from bodies after the resurrection, or to clothe them, once freed, with other bodies again, and to dress in blood and flesh souls coming down from the regions of heaven, but to endow bodies, once raised, with incorruption and eternity. For as Christ, having died, dies no more, and death has no dominion over him, so bodies raised do not perish a second time or often after the resurrection, nor will death have dominion over them any more, nor will they be dissolved into nothing, because the coming of Christ saved the whole man.