Letters 14.1–16.11

We rejoiced in what was written and brought to us by Cardamas. For the message announcing your safety, like the oil of gladness, fattened our bones, so that, filled with joy, we said: “The Lord has done great things with us,” he who visited us on the bed of your pain, so that, rising up in your health, we might sing a hymn to our Lord, since he had snatched our eyes from tears, putting off your crown but keeping you for our help; so that, while you lighten our burdens by your earnest prayers and go before us on our journeys, we may run more lightly after the odor of the Lord’s ointments, which, fragrant to us in your holiness, we do not reach by merit but follow by affection, hoping that through the inseparable bond of your love we may be led to arrive under your leadership where you have arrived by your own effort. For your infirmities are not unto death but for the glory of God, that they may bring perfection to your strength and strength to our weakness. For many examples of the Lord’s saints, from the patriarchs onward, already reassure us not to be disturbed about you.

Just as the fathers of faith themselves, besides the other labors of their life, even in that prophetic old age in which, inwardly enlightened, they foresaw the eternity of the world and the course of all ages, were yet heavy in their bodily eyes and brought their spiritual strength to perfection in fleshly weakness: so too blessed Job was tempted that he might be proved, fought that he might conquer, was humbled that he might be exalted, wept that he might rejoice. What of the Holy of holies himself? Did he not conquer when he was judged, and by falling through death rise again into glory? The sufferings of infirmity are for the strong what incitements to virtue are for the weak. For the strong man is made weak so that the weak may be strengthened and, by imitating the robust, learn to overcome in the contest. And therefore the righteous man too is chastised, that the unrighteous may be corrected.

So the bodily weakness of the saints works a twofold benefit: their own spiritual strength is exercised, and he who prospers in his way and, insulting with the strength of unbroken health, says, “I have sinned, and what has happened to me?” may not dare to flatter himself on his bodily happiness, and perhaps, held fast by fear of the divine power, may be corrected to righteousness, as he rightly dreads, for his impious acts, the avenging hand of the heavenly Lord, which he sees is severe even to the righteous. For if you scarcely escape without the blows of chastisement, where shall we, the unrighteous and sinners, appear? And we believe that you have suffered in these recent times weapons of bodily tribulation heavier than usual, troubled first by the heat of fevers and now by a flux in the head, so that in that rest of the Lord you may happily say: “We passed through fire and water, and you brought us into refreshment.” Gladdened, then, by this mercy of God, by which he had looked with favor on our lowliness, so that we profited from the pain of a most grievous anxiety, since you told us at the same time both our anxiety about you and our relief, we received in the same letter another gift of divine grace: namely, that the business that concerned us, about the house of the holy presbyter Basilius, had been settled through your efforts just as we wished.

May all that blessing come upon your head and flower, woven over it, to heap up your crown: the blessing with which they blessed the Lord in you, not only those to whom the benefit belonged, but almost the whole of Capua, and the most famous church of that city, exulting together in the presbyter’s joy, gave praise to God, who had helped the poor man out of beggary and humbled the lofty hearts of the rich; so that they too may have hope of an eternal house in the city of habitation, they who were found worthy, through the intervention of your words, to be enlightened to good understanding, by which, through the just restoration of a small dwelling, they have prepared for themselves eternal hospitality in the heavenly tabernacle of the poor saint of God, by whom they will be received in turn.

We received Cardamas in the joy of love and with the blessing of sweetness, bringing us all good things: your letter, which showed your good health, gladdened our hearts and was sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, and its sweetness penetrated our inward parts like oil; the bones that had been humbled exulted, and with a voice of exultation we said to the Lord: “We have received, O God, your mercy, by which you have delivered the poor from the mighty and the lowly from the hand of the one stronger than he.” Causes for thanksgiving ran together into our mind from every side: that we were receiving your letter, that we found you mindful of us, that we heard you were safe, as we had prayed, that we learned that my lord, our father, had been healed of a grave and long illness. We were gladdened about both of you alike, because, as the same tribulation that had worn him out in body had worn you out in heart, so the same visitation that brought him divine help upon his bed of pain brought you too the refreshment of relief on the couch of compassion. But nonetheless, as we thought of his illnesses and of your mind, our affection pricked us, that at that time of your tribulation we had perhaps been healthy and even cheerful. But thanks to the Lord, who forgives the fault of ignorance and has not dealt with us as we deserved, forestalling our sadness with gladness, since he deigned so to provide that we learned of the flight of your sickness from the same messenger who announced at the same time the return of health.

What shall I say of that work of your holiness, by which you have brought us as great a heap of present grace as you have brought yourselves an abundance of eternal reward? I mean the business of the holy presbyter Basilius, whose lament you have turned into joy and whose old age you have settled in rich mercy. A voice of gladness and salvation has sounded in his tent, and he does not cease, rejoicing with his whole house amid the harmonious thanksgivings of the church, to bless the Lord, who has looked upon his lowliness, bound up his bruises, covered with confusion those who rejoiced at his misfortunes, and, tearing his sackcloth of sadness, girded him with the vigor of gladness.

Therefore, on behalf of those brothers of ours whom we had earlier asked you to petition, we now ask your oneness of heart to love them beyond your usual affection, and if perhaps they come to Bordeaux, as they usually do, to give them thanks in person also for the feelings of our heart and inmost being. Or if the opportunity of meeting them is slow to come, at the first occasion deign to send them due thanks and a deserved blessing for their work, so that they may know and understand how acceptable a sacrifice to God they have offered by this obedience of their faith, with which, yielding to entreaty, they received our petition through your intervention, giving us indeed present joy by their devotion, but providing an eternal benefit for their own salvation. For even if they did what was owed in recognizing justice, by ordering what belonged to another to be returned, yet they deserve abundant thanks for that very disposition of good will by which they could have transgressed and did not transgress, and preferred to do what was expedient rather than what was lawful; and because they deigned to obey us with so free and pure a heart that their kindness could not be disputed, since they ordered the house to be restored to the holy presbyter without difficulty even if he could not prove it his own, so that, if he could not possess it by his own right, he might yet possess it by their gift. Nor have they lost the grace of so holy a generosity; for that most holy man himself, for whom the Lord provided you as intercessors according to his merit, gives thanks and proclaims it as if he had received an undeserved gift. But we have put off answering these brothers of ours for now, because, through their own men who often travel from Campania, there will be no lack of more suitable opportunities, which will carry our letter straight to them wherever they are.

As for Cardamas himself, we confess that we owe your oneness of heart no small thanks, for we have received him not only advanced in ministry but progressing in spirit. For when he arrived during the days of Lent and we had received him with brotherly affection as a cleric, he did not shrink from the daily fasts, did not shudder at our poor little table as an evening guest, and, what is more wonderful, was content with our cups; so that we understood that he, reformed as he is in your holiness’s company, is being taught by the apostle, and is no longer drunk on a measure but on a little wine, by which the belly is not swollen but the heart is gladdened, drunk unto sobriety, belching out to God, from a spiritual surfeit, a hymn which he sings not only with his voice but with his silent heart, since he receives the Lord’s will with faithful hearing, tells it with devout speech, and fulfills it with vigorous action. Blessed be the Lord who does wonders, who turns the rock into waters: he has made Cardamas both a cleric, as we saw, and sober, as we believed. For when the Easter festival brought back the days of midday meals, he began to grumble to us around noon, saying: “My throat is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws. My soul and my belly have failed, and from hunger and thirst my bones cleave to my flesh.” He was answered indeed: “Son, endure in humility, and let not the desires of the belly take hold of you, for man does not live by bread alone but by every word of God.” But he, like a deaf man, did not hear, and like deaf adders stopped his ears against us, but in vain. He longed to fill his belly at a midday meal, and no one gave him even a pod, until the day declined to evening, and, the hymn having been said, however sad from hunger for the midday meal, he was pacified with us by the refreshment of supper. But lest by joking longer we seem to wrong his gravity, which now delights more in drops from the cups than in the drunkenness of rivers, I will speak seriously of his needs: he says his wife is sickly and therefore of no use to him. If this is so, I ask that some little slave be provided for her.

When our sons Posthumianus and Theridius were seeking their homeland from Campania, to which they had come for our sake, I thought it contrary to duty and affection not to write to your oneness of heart: not only taking care lest I seem to pass over, by a negligence toward you unusual in me, the zeal of our common regard, but much more lest I be thought to judge otherwise of your mind toward God, if, while I carefully take every occasion of writing to you through men of religion, I passed you over without a greeting, as though you shrank from holy men; since you are certainly shown to be devoted to the Christian name and an approver of our way of life also by your love for us. Receive gladly, then, not them on the strength of my letter, but my letter on the strength of them, who with the utmost holiness took care to make it a matter of conscience either not to revisit their homeland without coming to you or not to come to you without a letter from me. And such letter-carriers seemed to me fitting for this purpose also, that I might answer something of that former letter which you sent in reply to the letter in which I had proclaimed the manifest kindness of divine power in the elements and of its care for us. For surely you remember that I had learned from your letter what I then answered with thanksgiving; and so I urged you not to ascribe God’s gift to chance, nor to think that it was by luck rather than by divine power that the silver of that holy transaction was preserved amid winter storms and greedy sailors, after its guardian was lost, the ship being cast up on that very shore where a town familiar to us and an estate of yours received our property in the safest of bays.

But you, again more querulous to me about the injury of the storm than grateful for God’s clemency, have subjected all the motions of the elements, amid which the divine hand alone can protect human safety, and our actions, which the power of the supreme Lord rules and turns or directs according to our merits, to the empty names of the fates and fortune, as though they were powers rivaling God. In this do not think that you have deferred to God, since you have rather insultingly refused to let God’s kindness be what it was, saying that these things should be separated from divine power because evils befit chance rather than God, and that without doubt that is evil by which men often incur danger or loss. Among these evils, as I see, you place storms, by which either devastation of fields is suffered on land or the distress of shipwreck in a ship. But I see that this opinion arose from those teachers who, proud in their own wisdom and disdaining to seek the wisdom of God, live as exiles from the bounds of truth, champions of their own opinions, who, sending their minds through the great void, have become vain, as is written and proved, in their thoughts, and have fashioned the works and counsels of God after their own fancies. To them sea or sky may seem ruled and moved by chance, who argue either that this world, empty and without a ruler, or neglected by an idle God, is whirled about by fortuitous falls, or that, put together by no author, it is without end as without beginning, which bodily nature, to which this world, of which each of us is a portion, belongs, cannot have, because every structure can be dissolved; or, what is more foolish, they would have it created from itself, as though anything could be the cause of its own birth, so that the same thing would be creator and creature alike, that is, craftsman and work, which, as they differ in name, plainly differ also in kind and state. For who does not see that this bodily world is governed by an incorporeal force, and that its whole mass is moved to life, tempered for use, held together in being, and ordered for duration by the mind of the divine Spirit, poured into and mingled with the great body of the universe, by which it was made?

Since, then, it is clear that what is seen or perceived needs another’s help in order to stand and remain, it cannot be doubted that it also needed another in order to be created. That being so, we must confess that all things have arisen from God, since only the profane can doubt that the world was made with God as its author; and accordingly that the winds and all things within the world, which are parts of the same mass and as it were the inward parts of its body, are not to be referred to the rule of another, because the forces of the divine works, that is, the substances of all natures, in such discord among themselves, would not allow themselves to be ruled and held together except by that nature and power alone, that is, by God, the one creator of all, by whom alone they could be made and ordered, and without keeping whose laws they would not maintain their state. It is much more foolish to blame any nature and call it evil, since, if all things are from God and God is good, then surely all things that God made are good. And if in the secrets of his decrees there are some things too high for our senses and thoughts, even if we cannot follow and gather their reason, it is safer for us to believe that the reasons are hidden than that there are none, because it must not be doubted that all God’s works, even if not clear to us, are planned with counsel.

So if God, who made the whole world, also governs it, in what place or over what creature will chance and fate or fortune rule? If they depend, as some would have it, on the motions or orders of the stars, they draw this power, which you make a rival to God, from little fires smaller not only than God but than the world itself, indeed adorning a third part of the world with the service of a handmaid light. For certainly it belongs to the divine power to stir up the elements, and either to rouse the violence of the winds when it is lulled or to rein it in when roused, and either to hand over mortals to the fury of storms or to snatch them from it. Since every creature, subject to the one creator of all, obeys this power, how is divine force and power given to these which lack not only the name of creator but even the form of creature: empty names, neither of spirits nor of bodies, fitted to carrying on or signifying things, since “chance” (fors) is a word of one who doubts, “fate” (fatum) an expression of one speaking out, and “accident” (casus) a term for things falling or befalling? Yet from the habit of an ancient error, through ignorance of God, those without reason fashion empty names in their foolish thoughts into bodily form, as though they were therefore gods as well, and, more foolishly than they fashioned them, give them divine honor. Hence Hope and Nemesis and Love and even Madness are worshiped in images, and Opportunity is consecrated with a bald back of the head, and that Fortune of yours is portrayed resting badly on a slippery globe. And with no less falsehood the Fates are depicted spinning men’s lives from wool baskets or weighing them in scales. Lest we impute this raving to the common people or admire the philosophers too much, it is told even by Plato in his raving, who sets out the spinning of Necessity in an old woman’s lap and gives her three daughters singing together, turning the spindle and playing among the threads, supposing, no doubt, that by this woolwork they accomplish the affairs of men and weave the times assigned to each. So far did the arrogance of empty eloquence abuse human ears that he did not blush to insert the ridiculous chant of an old wives’ tale into his writings, in which he dared to discuss even the divine nature as though he knew it. But in him we should look only at the charm of his Attic style, not at the neatness of an empty fable; what was produced only to soothe the ears ought not to tear up the foundations of our understanding.

Rather, as reason and truth teach, let us refer to him all the works of God, in which we exist and of which we are part, and all his gifts, by which we are ruled and preserved amid the uncertainties of this fragile and perishable life; and let us remove nothing from his power by our error, because, whether we will or not, he is the creator and God of us as of all things. And since, as he is goodness and wisdom and the source of reason, he has established nothing except by reason and has created for the material of his goodness, let us spend on him all that we are, and strive to learn and take care to do what pleases him. Then, looking more purely with a cleansed mind, we shall see that this is the truth: that all things that are are from God; and that this follows: that all God’s works are most beautiful, and that nothing is evil that has a good author, who prepared all things throughout the world for our uses and acts for our benefit, and so founded the work of this universe that he created some things to serve, others to exercise, others to rule. So we men rule by reason over bodily and animal natures. But lest we be undone by the very license of our power, we are usefully exercised by adversities, whether spirits of demons, or difficulties of affairs, or often the motions of the elements themselves, namely so that, stirred up by cares, we may be sharpened to prudence and to fear of the deity. From this, security, which ought rather to make us more grateful to the eternal Lord, makes us negligent. Hence the apostle and teacher of the Gentiles says that, by a hidden counsel of divine goodness and to the great profit of human salvation, certain obstacles are set against our courses and prosperity is changed into adversity, such as sicknesses, losses, and dangers; because tribulation works the strength of patience, and patience produces the proof of faith and confers the reward of glory. This virtue certainly cannot obtain unless victorious, and it will not have the means of victory unless it has first contended with some difficulty.

Since this could have been made known to your prudence, which you have both by birth and by education, even through those very letters (would that you now put them below the sacred writings in study as you do in judgment), in which it is recorded that the virtues of men famous as generals or philosophers shone out to noble fame only through labors and dangers, I greatly wonder why you have chosen to be so darkened in the plain truth of the divine gift that you have given over to chance events that wonderful safety of the storm-tossed ship and the protection of our property, granted by God on land and sea with evident signs, and have poured away so great an occasion for proclaiming God. Lift your mind to the height of wisdom and seek Christ, the very kindling of the true light, who enlightens faithful souls and glides into chaste hearts. You have shown that you think so too, though you put forward as an excuse that you are still unequal to it and therefore not capable of God, because, beset by earthly affairs and cares, you are kept, as by clouds set between, from looking up higher to heavenly things. But would that you could plead this as truly as you can plead it eloquently! For the very richness of your eloquence and learning proves that what you lack for the sacred writings is will rather than leisure or ability. For you did not, I think, gather such riches of mouth and mind while asleep or doing something else. You breathe the flowers of all the poets, you overflow with the rivers of all the orators, you are watered also by the springs of philosophy, and, rich too in foreign letters, you fill a Roman mouth with Attic sounds. Where, I ask you, are those taxes then, when you read through Cicero and Demosthenes? Or when, wearied by surfeit of more common reading, you turn over again Xenophon, Plato, Cato, and Varro, read through already, and many others besides, of whom we perhaps do not even hold the names while you hold the volumes? To be occupied with these you are exempt and free; to learn Christ, that is, the wisdom of God, you are tax-burdened and busy. You have leisure to be a philosopher; you have no leisure to be a Christian. Turn rather your judgment, turn your eloquence. You need not lay aside the philosophy of your mind, provided you season it with faith and religion; use what you have joined together more wisely, so that you may be God’s philosopher and God’s poet, wise not by seeking God but by imitating him, so that, learned not in tongue but in life, you may both discuss and do great things.

Be a Peripatetic for God, a Pythagorean to the world. As a preacher of the true wisdom in Christ and silent at last to vanity, shun this pernicious sweetness of empty letters, as those Lotus-eaters who blotted out the homeland with the sweetness of their berries, and as the songs of the Sirens with their harmful blandishments. And since it is permitted to take some things often from empty fables, as from common proverbs, for the use of true and serious speech, I will say that not only letters but all the forms of temporal things are Lotus-eaters or Sirens to us. For the pestilent sweetness of pleasures makes us forget our homeland when it blots out from man God, who is the common homeland of all; and the allurements of desires imitate that fable of the Sirens with the reality of disaster. For what the Sirens are imagined to have been, that the allurements of desires and the blandishments of vices truly are; for they have seduction in their appearance and poison in their taste; their use is counted in crime, their price in death. We must flee them, more cautious than Ulysses’ cunning, with not only our ears but our eyes shut, and with our mind flying past them like a ship, lest, enticed by deadly delight, we be swept onto the rocks of crime and, fastened on the reef of death, suffer the shipwreck of our salvation.

And would that we might be allowed to escape from the salt sea of this world even naked, if in this time, in which we float in bodily frailty and the slipperiness of possessions as in the untrustworthy framework of a ship coming apart, we remember to strip ourselves, in order to swim out, of choking hindrances as of soaked clothes, and to seize as a plank of refuge the saving faith by which we lean, in the power of Christ, on the standard of the cross; so that from flowing things we may acquire a solid hope, and from the harmful material of desires snatch something for innocence and salvation: namely, that, serving God and ruling our desires, we may limit our wants to the measure of necessity, and, having the clothing we need, not seek superfluous display, since we are reminded that we brought nothing into this world and cannot take anything out. This truth is so strong that even some of the pagan philosophers, who with loftier minds touched at least the outermost lines of the truth, felt that one cannot have leisure even to seek wisdom, let alone to follow it, unless one throws away the burdens of money like dung, some even into the sea.

But make a division with God, and, as for a mutual kindness, render thanks to the supreme Father, who, of all that he has given you by birth or added from outside, asks back from you only yourself. You may keep for yourself and your family all that you possess, taking care only to confess that God is the giver of these things also. For we have nothing that we have not received, we who, as I said, came naked into this world. But dedicate to God the abilities of your talent and all the riches of your mind and tongue, offering him, as it is written, the sacrifice of praise with an eloquent mouth and a devoted heart. As soon as you direct the gaze of your mind to the inner sanctuaries above, truth will open her face to you and will disclose you to yourself. For in the knowledge of divine truth we attain this too, that we know ourselves. For whence do you think so great a perversity of pride or of sloth has grown into wretched mortals that, not worshiping God, they serve demons or the elements subject to them, venerating waters, fire, stars, trees, and images, with the most impious insult to the divine majesty? In whose name, whether they worship demons or creatures, they honor servants, for which they deserve to be blinded by this darkness, so that, because they will not understand the true God, they are also struck with ignorance of themselves. From this a man enlightened by faith is set free, so that, understanding the order and measure of his kind, he knows that he is subject to God alone, whose unity is reckoned in an ineffable Trinity, but is equal to all other creatures if they are rational, and superior to them if they are bodily.

Kept in balance by this middle measure, a man neither slips from the lot of salvation nor from the dignity of his nature, and becomes aware of the truth, possessed of wisdom, a servant of righteousness, free of error, and master of the vices to which the soul that does not serve God is condemned to serve; a soul which then, as an exile from its proper state, is scattered through all the byways of its own thoughts or of others’ opinions, wandering through the philosophers and curious through the soothsayers, religious toward superstition and profane toward religion, always hanging between hope and fear with wavering feelings. Hence, carried about by every wind of any doctrine, because it is empty of the fear of God, it does not have the head of wisdom, as though its senses were maimed, from which to draw the understanding of things, and, ignorant, has nowhere to fix its judgment; when it has distracted itself in vain, wandering in thought through every region of heaven and earth, it places the whole force by which the world is moved in visible creatures and in the empty names of chances and fates, as tenacious of what is false and wrong as it is ignorant of the truth.

But let your mind, which, kindled from heavenly seed, already breathes a divine ardor, be directed by faith going before it to Christ, the very citadel of wisdom. You will have a better supply of the philosophers’ eloquence to possess even in our studies, provided you cease to love the wisdom that is opposed to the truth. For it is better that you hold divine things by seeking them than seek them by disputing. Let go of those men always wallowing in the darkness of ignorance, consumed in the contentions of learned talkativeness, enslaved with their phantoms to mad altercation, always seeking wisdom and never finding it, because they do not deserve to understand the God in whom they will not believe. Let it be enough for you to have taken from them abundance of language and adornment of speech, as spoils from enemy arms, so that, stripped of their errors and clothed in their eloquence, you may apply that coloring of eloquence, by which vain wisdom deceives, to things of substance; so that, adorning not an empty body of fictions but the marrow-filled body of truth, you may compose what will not only please the ears but also profit the minds of men.