Letters 17.1–19.4

We are worn out both with inviting you and with waiting for you, and neither prayers nor words are left us now to add to those so often poured out in vain in entreaties and letters. Since you have left us only this one thing of our common friendship, with the hope of our seeing each other cut off, we pay back words with words and wish to be revived at least by these comforts, which bear no fruit; although you have begun to be sparing in these too, now seeking us only when an occasion offers, and you have tormented us for almost two whole years held in suspense by the daily expectation of seeing you. For that summer which followed our servants’ return to you we closed in such a way, until winter shut it off, that we thought every day was dawning for your arrival; but since not even messengers of your delay had come, we consoled ourselves with the reflection, assuring ourselves that you had sent no one because you were going to come yourself, even if late. Meanwhile, as this summer too was slipping by, still soothing ourselves with that hope or opinion, we set out for Rome for the venerable day of the apostles’ festival, promising ourselves that you would meet us there, in an expectation that was due but festive; and when the grace of the hope we had presumed had been boiled away, since you were not there yourself, we were nevertheless not wholly without some share in it, receiving your letter through the servant of a man very dear to us, our brother Sabinus. At first we wondered at him, in his hardly monastic boots and clothing, since he was also no less red in face than in his military cloak, with cheeks not very spiritual; then at last we knew he was not one of ours, when we learned through him, as the master of the letter-carrier was asking us for a reply, that you are joined to him by close kinship. Hence we embrace him, a friend before, now with a love heaped up.

But there was no opportunity to write back from the city, which we saw for scarcely ten days without seeing it, spending even the hours before noon in the devotions for which we had come, at the holy memorials of the apostles and martyrs. Then, when we had returned to our lodging, occupied with countless visits from people drawn partly by friendship, partly by religion, so that evening barely dissolved the gathering and set us free, we necessarily put off the duty for lack of leisure. Then, when we had returned home, a sickness of the flesh that befell us caused another delay and tested us, not lightly, for not a few days. But he who is our life and resurrection visited our lowliness for good, and though he chastised us sorely, he did not hand us over to death. “For many are the scourges of the sinner, but mercy will surround those who hope in the Lord.” And so we were beaten as sinners, freed as those who hope in the mercy of him who heals the broken of heart and binds up their wounds.

So, now recovering in the power and mercy of the Lord, we have written this by our dearest brother in the Lord Amachius, subdeacon of my lord and our father Delphinus, because the opportunity he offered was at hand; and at the same time, since he said he was very well known to you, we thought him the most suitable person to entrust with our letter to you. We greet you as much as we love you in the Lord and still long for you; for we cannot yet tear from our minds the hope by which we presume that, by the Lord’s gift, we shall see and embrace you in the dwelling and bosom of my lord Felix, our common patron, before whom I have so often attested your vows and recited your promises, as often as you remember giving me pledges. If we have deceived the martyr of truth, I do not think that I alone should be held guilty of this fault, I who pledged what I believed; please see to it, my brother of one heart and most beloved, while there is time, that you do not seem to have gone back on your word to so great a confessor, a saint of such powerful grace with Christ.

I do not know how you can plead weakness rather than laziness or a preference of persons, since within a year you could reach us and return with the same effort with which you have for so many years made pilgrimages around Gaul, and often, in repeated excursions within one summer, visit Tours and places still more remote. I do not begrudge it; rather I proclaim your devotion in the Lord, whom you admire and honor in his servants. I confess that Martin is rightly and deservedly visited; but I say that it is unjust and dangerous for Felix to be mocked with empty promises by the same man who honors Martin, or to be slighted by the careless pretense that the promise is already cancelled. With the same faith with which you hope for Christ’s grace in honoring Martin, fear Christ’s displeasure in offending Felix. Perhaps a stronger mind and a sturdier soul, or the powerful consciousness of perfect love in Christ, gives you such confidence that you think this offense, by which you have, God forbid, wronged my lord Felix, is to be washed away by the compensation of the great merits of your faith and works. Indeed you promise yourself pardon even from his own goodness, which he has in fullest measure from God, Christ himself, whose spirit he has, and you do so in faith. But I confess that I am either so timid through the fault of my weakness or so excessive in my love for you that I fear for you even what is safe, and while I desire the grace of Christ to abound for you in every saint, I would not want you to strike a stone of stumbling precisely in the one in whom the love of God is outstanding and eminent. I know indeed that, according to the riches of God’s goodness, the bowels of compassion abound in my lord Felix too; but I beg you to love and fear him the more for being better and more indulgent. Such fear will bring you a great reward, making you more anxious precisely where you could be more secure, that is, fearing to offend God’s dearest one the more, the more readily he deigns to forgive; because he who does not know how to take offense is wronged with greater impiety, and he who does not seek to be avenged is more severely avenged by the Lord. Weigh this case, I ask you, with the affection of our mutual faith, and see whether you ought, being strong, to make excuses, or, being weak, to lose confidence. For our Lord is near to us everywhere, he who says: “In every place, while you are still speaking, behold, I am here,” and says: “All things are possible to him who believes.”

What did not happen for a long time while we wished for it has suddenly come about, by the Lord’s gift, when we did not hope for it: an opportunity has been given us to write to your venerable holiness by one of the household of faith, and above all by a brother who is in the Lord both yours and ours. For it happened that at Rome, on the most celebrated birthday of the apostles, our blessed brother the deacon Paschasius met us. Besides the grace of brotherly fellowship in the sacred ministry, we received him the more reverently and lovingly because we learned that he belonged to your holiness’s clergy both in body and in spirit. But we confess the violence we used: though he wished to return from the city to your holiness, and though we approved the devout haste of his most just longing, we nevertheless embraced him in your love and brought him to Nola, so that some breath of your spirit might bless the lodging of our lowliness there through his coming, and so that we might enjoy longer, as it were, a portion of your grace, seeing and holding him whom the modesty of his character, the humility of his heart, the gentleness of his spirit, the faith of truth, and his speech in all things seasoned with salt proved to be both a disciple of your teaching and a companion of your way. So pardon our brother in us, or us in him; for whether his slowness is blamed or our presumption censured, the love of the Lord will excuse both faults to you, by which either he was compelled to obey us or we did not fear to seize him and keep him by our right; not out of stubborn arrogance, but with a pure heart and unfeigned faith, believing that what is yours is ours and not doubting that you would reckon it so in turn, so that you would consider him not to have been absent from you during the time you knew he was with us. For even if we are separated in body by distances of regions, we are nevertheless joined by the Spirit of the Lord, in whom we live and abide, poured out everywhere, as members of one body having one heart and one soul in the one God.

Therefore, contemplating your mind toward us in a spiritual mirror, and joined to you in turn by the affection of our heart, we have claimed for ourselves your oneness of heart by keeping your brother, the grace of the Lord, which has been given you abundantly, working this very thing, that you are loved even in the members of your body and in the fringes of your garment; although we lost many days of his stay while, the Lord correcting us in his mercy, we were beaten with a bodily sickness for our spiritual amendment. But he who comforts the lowly and heals the broken of heart comforted us with the presence of our blessed brother Paschasius, by which, while we were refreshed in spirit, we were also restored in body; for a good friend is a medicine of the heart, and where two are gathered together in one, Christ stands in their midst.

And he not only shared our tribulation and suffered with us in our weakness, but was long worn down by the very grave sickness of our dearest son Ursus, whom he had had as the inseparable companion of his journey. In this we saw clearly his faith and his full love in the Lord. For as much as the one labored in body, so much was the other wasted in spirit. And therefore the Lord looked upon the one in the humility of the other, heaping up this benefit too: that one weakened even to death should nevertheless, by the faith and labor of Paschasius, in whom the Lord willed to show the power that his holy and most beloved confessor Felix, our patron, has with him, find salvation out of danger. For, begotten through this man’s hands, he was baptized on his sickbed and has recovered. The same Lord who has given him back, at the prayers of the saint, to our brother Paschasius and to our anxiety along with his, and above all to your church, regarding you, without doubt, always in your own wherever they are, will grant it: may he bring him into your presence safe and sound, free from sin and a servant of righteousness. We do not doubt that he too, if he is found worthy to reach you, will make great increases in faith, equal to Paschasius, with you as the teacher of both.

For your Tychicus, a dearest brother and faithful minister in the Lord, has made known to us, proclaiming not you so much as God in you, what great lights the Lord has kindled through you in regions formerly dark, he who, bringing up clouds from the end of the earth, has brought you too out of the farthest part of the world into the light of his people and made the bright lightning into abundant rain. As once the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, the way of the sea beyond the Jordan, of Galilee, those who sat in the region of the shadow of death saw a great light: so now too the land of the Morini, at the farthest edge of the world, which the ocean pounds roaring with barbarian waves, a people of remote nations who sat in hiding places on the sandy way of the sea outside the Jordan, before the borders of the desert grew fat in it, rejoicing in the light that has risen for them from the Lord through your holiness, have laid aside their rough hearts as Christ entered. Where once foreign barbarians or native robbers frequented the deserts of the forests and the equally unsafe shores, now venerable and angelic choirs of saints fill cities, towns, islands, and forests with churches and monasteries, numerous in people and harmonious in peace. And though Christ works this in the peoples of all Gaul as everywhere among the nations, he who goes round the whole world seeking those worthy of him, passes through the nations into holy souls, shows himself cheerfully in the ways of right direction, and with all providence meets those who love him: yet in the most remote stretch of the Nervian shore, which the faith of truth had before breathed upon with but a faint breath, and which he chose above all as a vessel of election, he shone in you first more brightly, grew warmer more ardently, and appeared nearer; and he took you up in whom he might sanctify his name there, and through whose name his sound might go out into all the earth, even from the setting of the sun.

Indeed we now hear that Rouen, formerly known only by a slight name in the neighboring regions, is named with veneration even in distant provinces and numbered with divine praise among the cities famous for holy places. Not undeservedly, since the merit of your holiness has brought there, even by the presence of the apostles, the whole appearance of Jerusalem as it is recalled in the East; for the apostles, by the affection of their holy spirits and the effect of their divine works, make the city, a stranger to their memorials, equal to their own seats, and have found in you yourself a lodging most fitting for them. It pleases the friends of God and the princes of the people of the true Israel, that is, of the people drawing near to him, to stay in that city and to work with you, a city in which, with the holy angels, they are soothed day and night by the continual preaching of Christ the Lord; in which many friendly virtues prepare for them, through the most devoted hearts of faithful servants, a welcome rest and a familiar lodging; where, in the daily harmony of those who sing psalms wisely through many churches and secluded monasteries, they delight in both the most chaste hearts and the voices of your sheep. And now untouched virginity holds them in the temple of a holy body, so that it makes them guests of Christ resting in chaste inward parts. With no less pleasure the unconquered purity of widows serving day and night in holy works and devout ministry feeds them, as does the hidden brotherhood of married couples subjected to God, which by constant prayers invites Christ, glad in their works, to visit no longer a marriage bed but a brotherly couch, when, mingled in turn with him and his saints in a union of chastity, it is joined by spotless love with the spirits of those who visit. And now they are refreshed through the bowels of mercy and rest in the sons of devotion and righteousness, loving you in all the sons of your teaching and in you loving Christ, and therefore working the miracles of God, that is, their own power in Christ, above all in your city, to show that you are their partner.

Grace and glory to him who, not neglecting the works of his hands, wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, and who, running through the whole world on the feet of the gospel, has deigned to make you too a beautiful foot of his word, in which he might rejoice like a giant to run his course, and to shoe you with the preparation of the gospel of his peace, so that through you too he might walk upon the asp and the basilisk and trample the lion and the dragon. And lest so bright a lamp should lie hidden, darkened under the bushel of silence, he has so set you, by raising you to the apostolic see, as on a lofty lampstand, that you might shine with the illumination of many throughout the whole house.

But by what paths did he lead you to the way of his truth? Training you through fleshly duties for the spiritual works of his power, he made you at first a soldier whom he afterward chose as a bishop, and he allowed you to serve Caesar as a soldier so that you might learn to serve God as a soldier; so that while you trained the strength of the body in the labor of the camp, you might strengthen yourself for spiritual battles, firming your spirit for confession and hardening your body for suffering. That this had been the counsel of divine providence concerning you, your departure from the army and your entry into the faith later showed in a great way. When first, kindled by the love of Christ, at the Lord’s own ordering, you went out to the parade ground in a certain display of his work on a day famous for a military assembly, girded with all that adornment of warlike defenses which you had already rejected in your mind, and while all admired the most careful dress and terrible equipment upon you, suddenly, before the astonished army, you turned and, changing your military oath, threw down your arms of blood at the feet of the sacrilegious tribune, so as to put on the arms of peace, scorning to be armed with steel, you who were armed with Christ. And at once, the tribune being driven to fury by the envy of the ancient serpent, you were stretched out for beating and broken with huge cudgels, yet not conquered, because you leaned on the wood of the cross. And soon, the punishment of your body being doubled, you were laid on sharp fragments of potsherds, your limbs torn by cruel wounds, Christ then supporting you more softly, whose bosom was your bed and whose right hand your pillow. From there, with your wounds not yet closed, restored, kindled rather by their pain than broken in strength, you sprang forth stronger to a greater enemy, and, brought before the count, triumphed more gloriously over the more powerful foe. When the devil’s attendants dared not inflict further tortures, since these had been overcome, and were planning a capital sentence, so that at least by the end of your bodily life they might cease to be defeated, our Lord, strong and mighty and unconquered in battle, confounded their hearts, however hardened, by conspicuous miracles. For the executioner who, on the road by which you, a holy victim, were following your executioner, had insolently and threateningly dared to touch your neck, feeling with his hand as though anticipating the place of his sword’s blow, at once had his eyes struck out and was struck with blindness. O ineffable goodness of Christ, how great an affection it shows toward its own! He who asked that his crucifiers be forgiven did not let the wrong done to his confessor go unpunished; he who would not have his own passion avenged at once avenged the insult to his martyr. But that very anger is of mercy. For one was blinded so that many might be enlightened, and perhaps he himself, who had lost the eyes of the flesh, might receive the light of the mind. Then at once, as a greater proof, those who carried out the grim service of the deadly custody saw the chains, which they had tied very tightly and pressed down to the bone and had refused to loosen even a little when you asked for that small kindness, flow of their own accord from your loosened hands, your prayer being turned to God, Christ, before their eyes; and not daring to retie what God had loosed, they ran in fear to the count, confessing God’s truth on behalf of the confessors. When this had been heard with reverence and believed, the count reported it to his emperor with the testimony of the soldiers; and, so that his sudden turning from fury to clemency might also be counted among the wonders of God, he became in your case a preacher of Christ, in whose case he had vowed to be a persecutor. I think the Lord had filled him too with the Holy Spirit, like Saul once, because he loved you as he loved his David; so that, as that king was once affected while he was setting out to persecute the prophets, so that count too, sprinkled with the grace of the Lord which overflowed from the abundance of your faith, who had come to punish a confessor, might himself depart having confessed. For he believed, and those whom in his rage he had condemned in advance as guilty he dismissed with praise as saints, and he bore witness to the truth who had wished to punish the witnesses of the faith.

Why, then, should we wonder that you are so powerful in merits, so rich in graces, when what was for you the first lesson of virtues in Christ is for few the completion of long labors? Shall we doubt even now whether you are perfect, you who began from perfection? Or whether you must be lawfully crowned when the contest is run, since you began to run from the crown? Who would give us wings like a dove? Then we would fly to you and rest in the sight of your holiness, admiring and venerating Christ the Lord in your face; we would wipe his feet with our hair in your feet and water them with tears, and in those scars of yours we would kiss, as it were, the imprinted marks of the Lord’s passion. For the wounds of a friend are sweeter than the kisses of an enemy. Woe is me, wretched sinner with unclean lips, to whom this fruit did not fall when it was within reach!

For I believe you deign to remember that I once saw your holiness at Vienne in the company of our blessed father Martin, to whom the Lord made you equal, though unequal in age. From that time, then, though I touched you in a brief acquaintance, I embraced you with great love and venerated your holiness as fully as was then possible, and I commended forever to you myself and my own, who, though absent, saw you through me, since we are one by Christ’s joining; and I rejoice now that at least this boast is allowed me, that I have seen your face in the flesh. But I mourn the negligence of my unhappiness, that I unknowingly lost the opportunity of so great a good, and, darkened at that time not only by sins, by which I am pressed even now, but also by the cares of this world, from which by God’s favor I am now free, I saw in you only the bishop, which was in plain view, and did not know how to see what was more remarkable within, a living martyr.

Remember us, I beg you, on that day when the hands of angels coming to meet you will bring you, escorted by the countless troop of your merits, adorned with happy ornaments, crowned alike with fillets and with the garlands of victory, the snow-white bands of consecrated bishops and the bright purple of confessors; and when the supreme refiner of his gold and silver will himself receive you, as silver tried by fire and gold proved in the furnace of this world, and the eternal King will set you like a precious pearl in his diadem; and when the just Judge will acknowledge that he owes you rewards not only for your own virtues, seeing the countless flocks of saints of both sexes around you whom you beget for him daily by your teaching, as a pattern of perfect virtue and faith for all: as brother Paschasius too shows, in whose grace and kindness we have gathered, as a mirror gives them back, certain outlines, so to speak, of your virtues and graces. Truly you are blessed, the parent of so many blessed, the sower of so great a harvest, bringing forth for God from the fruitfulness of your soil fruit a hundredfold, sixtyfold, and thirtyfold, and destined to receive an equal measure from the various fruits of your offspring. The Most High has named you among the greatest of his kingdom, granting you to make your word equal to your deed, so that your life is your teaching and your teaching your life. Hence no disciple dares excuse himself on the plea of the hardness of the command, since he is first bound by the example of virtue.

We were waiting, like a thirsty threshing floor, for the refreshment of your letter, and our soul, like earth without water, panted with hearts thirsting for your words; for almost two years were now running out since you had bedewed us through our fellow servant Cardamas with small but most sweet drops from your mouth, and we no longer hoped meanwhile to be sprinkled with even a little drop of your speech, since, held in suspense the whole summer by vain expectation of Uranius, who did not come, we thought much more that the winter season would have to be passed in your silence. And behold, the merciful and compassionate Lord, who gives food to the hungry and comforts the lowly and is able to give us what we desire beyond what we hope, brought our Cardamas to us again by a sudden arrival, unhoped for but longed for; and as the voice of your greeting sounded in our ears through him, our heart leapt with joy, and all our bones said: “Lord, who is like you? What is our lowliness, that you are mindful of it and visit it? You have blessed, O Lord, our land and given us drink from the torrent of your delight. Our lips will pour out a hymn evening, morning, and noon. We will sing and make music to the Lord who has given good things to us.” For he has sent good news from a far country, by which we have learned the safety and received the words of our sweetest and dearest father. Hence our heart has been turned from the sadness of anxiety to the joy of relief, and, the turn of our anxious feeling changed for the better, we were delighted on that day, made festive by your letter, in return for the days in which the long duration of your silence had humbled us.

Let us therefore confess to the Lord his mercies and offer him a sacrifice of praise, because he has satisfied the empty soul: not, by his favor we say it, empty of his grace, but fasting from the fruit of our longing, since it had long hungered for the comforts of your letters, which, as I said, had been denied us for almost two years. May the Lord not lay their transgression to the charge of those whose iniquity has lied to itself and wasted our soul with a long famine of the bread of your mouth. Let them stay where they wish, since they do not wish to be where they ought to have preferred. Let them do what is lawful for them, since they do not do what is expedient. As the addition of such men could have brought us no good, so it can take nothing away. Would that our sins did us as little harm, if they too, with such neighbors, were removed far from us through the multitude of the compassions of him who does not repay us according to our sins, but as a father has compassion on his son, so he has compassion on those who fear his name and hope in his mercy; of whom we are partakers, because we both love his coming, wretched as we are, in hope of his mercy, and shudder at it, sinners as we are, in fear of his justice. But, appeased by your prayers for your sons, may he not enter into judgment with his evil servants, of whom we are the first, as we are the last of the good. We even turn into a heap of condemnation this very glory, that in Christ and from Christ we received you as the father of our regeneration, because, useless servants and degenerate sons, we show to the Lord Most High nothing worthy of you as father; we who even now keep the unhappy hardness of the natural wild olive in a thorny heart, though long ago, by the goodness of the Lord, we were torn from the root of our kindred and seem to have been grafted into your tree, from which we should draw the sap of your richness into the marrow of our soul, and, rooted in the spirit of gentleness in the way of peace, be recognized by generous fruits as shoots of the good olive.

But now, poor in paternal goods through the abundance of our vices, how shall we order our words on the day of recognition, not having attained your virtues and showing no likeness from your stock in us by which we may be recognized as yours? Who will snatch us from the wrath to come? Who will rescue us from ourselves, so that, cleansed of our own senses, we may be emptied of the material of heavenly wrath by the cleansing of faith? For we feel within us the causes of eternal punishments, the roots of thorns and thistles living in our heart. For the former offshoot of our old self, like the vine of Sodom, bore a grape of gall in the bitter fruits of the fleshly life, and the mind, drunk with the poisons of malice, vomited the wrath of asps; but he who is mighty has done great things for us; he sent from heaven and delivered us; he sent his mercy through you and renewed the face of our land and made us your planting for himself in his vineyard. Therefore, blessed and most venerable father, you must say to the Lord with constant care and assiduous prayer that he look down from heaven and visit these vines which your right hand has planted, so that, fixed in the true vine, we may live as branches to be pruned for fruit, not cut off for the fire. May he himself, who is the vine and the life, direct us in every rule of his discipline of truth, watering us from his upper rooms through your chaste and devout words, as fiery as they are sweet. For your words are drops of that voluntary rain which God has set apart for his inheritance, which came down upon the fleece, poured, that is, with silent gliding into the Virgin. He is the one in whose drops we rejoice, when he rises in us and distills on the newborn soul the first dew of his knowledge, to heal all our diseases. For the dew that is from him is health to us, because he is the fountain of life, who sent his word and healed us. This is the Word of God of whom the rain is voluntary, because not by the necessity of a subject but by the assent of one equal to God and by the duty of devotion, the Son, obedient to the Father, humbled himself to the death of the cross, as he had said through the prophet: “I will sacrifice to you voluntarily”; because the same Lord, priest and victim, offered himself for us and by his own power both laid down his life and took it up again. And so this rain is voluntary, which poured itself out freely on the parched lands, to turn the desert into rivers. And how it was made weak, he teaches who says: “For he was crucified out of weakness”; and how it was strengthened and established, you have in the same place, “since,” he says, “he lives by the power of God.”

Pray to this Lord until you prevail, that he may not allow our fleeces, which he washed by your hands in the water of refreshment, to be soiled again, stained by our sins, and once more turned to scarlet, dyed by the coloring of vices; but may he guard in us, by the watches of your prayers, the gift of his grace, and not abandon the work of your hands in us, until he ripens and perfects from us fruit and a crown for you; so that on that day, coming with exultation and carrying your sheaves in a full bosom, you may say even of us, numbered among your offspring and your harvest: “Here am I, Lord, and the children whom you have given me.” But now the fear of tiring you warns us, and not only that but also the fear of sin, which is not escaped in much talking, to put a bridle on our mouth and to close the door of speech, though with a late end to the letter. Let the close be a commendation of Cardamas, whom we congratulate on being so renewed by the blessing of your hand that in him, where before the frivolity of a mime’s name gave ridicule, now the gravity assumed with the name of exorcist has given reverence. Yet we were the more astonished and rejoiced at this, that he has changed even the disposition of his former condition along with his religious office. For, as a constant sharer of our little table, he so narrowed himself to the measure of our throat that he avoided neither our little vegetables nor our cups, as he will be able to testify by the thinness of his body and the paleness of his face, unless perhaps, on his way back, he restores himself along the laborious road by renewing his old familiarity with his cups.