Letters 20.1–23.3

Keeping the teaching of wisdom, we ought indeed to have put a yoke on our tongue and a balance on our words, to escape the doubled sin of our much talking and your weariness. But from the abundance of your love our mouth is opened wide to you, and we cannot, by bolting the door of our mouth, hold back within the barriers of a silent breast the affection overflowing from our heart. So we speak to your reverence in another letter too; for though the one in which we replied is so long as to suffice to fill you with weariness, yet for us, who, as you recognize, receive your conversation and return our own only at the longest intervals of time, one letter to you is too little. For by this we give our soul some comfort, slight as it is: while we write a letter to your affection, fixed with our whole heart on your face, we suddenly forget that you are absent, and, lingering as if in conversation with you present, we draw out our words further; and so, though we do not quench the burning thirst of our longings, for that would not be good for us, we soften it by setting before our inner eyes the image of your face and conversation. For though our sojourning seems prolonged far from the places of your dwelling, yet the spirit is not separated from the embrace of your love. “For who,” he says, “will separate us from the love of Christ?” If neither death nor life nor any other creature, how much less bodily absence, which cannot dissolve spiritual presence? Because the stronger the spirit is than the flesh, the more powerful is the union of souls than that of bodies, and the presence of inner men is better than that of outer men separated, who are often joined in place to no purpose if they are separated in mind. “For not he,” he says, “is a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, who is circumcised in spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is not from men but from God.” So by this same law, by which the circumcision in the heart is truer than the cutting in the flesh, and the presence that is joined and coheres in spirit is firmer than that in body, we are always with you and you with us. For though we are separated in face for a time, yet we remain always joined in heart, in you, and you in turn dwelling in our inmost being, to die together and to live together. Indeed, since it belongs to the care and comfort of the same love that we be made aware of each other’s doings, so that we may be less anxious about each other when absent if we are not uncertain, we tell your affection, which we know is most anxious about everything we do, that by Christ’s favor, as you pray, we are well, in a bodily frailty that is not robust but healthy, poor in spirit, not our own but God’s, whose goodness we need, while we abound in our own malice.

As for what our Cardamas reminded us of, saying that you had ordered us to report from here too what concerns us in the Lord, let your reverence know that your holy brother Anastasius, the pope of the city, is most loving toward our lowliness. For as soon as he began to have the power to offer us his love, he hastened with most devout affection not only to accept it from us but to press it upon us. Shortly after his ordination he sent letters in our name, full of religion, devotion, and peace, to the bishops of Campania, by which he both declared his own affection and gave others an example of his kindness. Then, when we had come to Rome by our annual custom for the birthday of the blessed apostles, he received us as warmly as honorably. Later too, after some time had passed, he deigned to invite us even to his own anniversary, which he usually grants only to his fellow bishops; nor was he offended at our excuse, but, accepting the service of our letter, which we had sent in place of our presence, he received us in our absence too with a fatherly mind. Finally, if the Lord grants us leave to go back to him at the usual festal time, I hope to obtain from him a letter to your holiness, by which he may begin to commend us to you as well.

The new bishop of Milan too, Venerius, till now your son, now your brother, had already written to us after his ordination; but since Cardamas reported that you had ordered this too, we have written to him through Cardamas, so that he might know that an opportunity was ready, if he wished to acknowledge the duty of due devotion, to write to your blessedness and commend his beginnings to your heart. As for us, we rejoice and glory in the Lord, because both visibly and invisibly you work salvation for our house, truly a good father and a saving patron: invisibly you build us up in your prayers, asking that the kingdom of God come to be within us; visibly you work for us in the building of churches, to give us a share with him whose house was found worthy to be visited by Christ, because he had received the testimony of the devout people for building the synagogue, which is now the church. We confess to your venerable devotion that as we read that part of your letter in which you indicated that the new daughter of the church of Alingo, begotten by your initiative, had already grown in the name of the Lord to the day of its dedication, our spirit so exulted in God our Savior that, as though we were present among the companies of those dedicating it, we sang those words of prophetic joy from the psalms: “Rejoice in God our helper; take up a psalm and bring the timbrel. Bring offerings and enter into the courts of the Lord; worship the Lord in his holy court”; or that word of the same prophet: “Arise, O Lord, into your rest, you and the ark of your holiness. Let your priests be clothed with salvation, and let your saints rejoice. Let them appoint their day.”

As for your deigning to tell us that some of the party of him through whose envy death entered the world gnash their teeth and waste away, we do not wonder, since in Jerusalem too, when the temple of God was being rebuilt, the Assyrians were envious and tried to hinder the rising building by frequent hostile attacks. But since he who is in us is mightier than he who is in this world, their desire will perish, while ours will be confirmed, because we hope in the mercy of him who never confounds those who hope in him. Only let your holiness take care, as you do, that a house may be built in us too by Christ and in Christ, because unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it have labored in vain; and unless this house is founded upon the rock, which is Christ, it will not be able to resist the winds of spiritual wickedness and the torrents of worldly temptations.

Pray that the Lord Jesus may come into our heart as into his temple, shake out the scourge of his love, with which he beats every son whom he receives, and drive out from the senses of our mind, as from the traders of the temple, all the commerce and contagion of iniquity. May he drive out from us the oxen and the sellers of doves and the tables of the money-changers, so that, cleansed of all uncleanness and greed, we may keep the chaste simplicity of faith and love; because the figure of Christ is kept where Caesar’s coin is driven out, and where there are no oxen the mangers are clean, and faith is kept uncorrupted where the dove is not sold. For unless we hand ourselves over to God, we sell ourselves to the devil. Hence also the old man, who bound himself over to the counsel of the ill-advising serpent, is said to be sold under sin. And, as one sold, he needed a redeemer, who bought us at a great price, so that we might no longer belong either to the devil or to ourselves, and, changed from a brood of vipers into a royal and priestly race, might become his own blood, who made precious, by the commerce of his blood, souls fallen from the noble state of our first origin and made cheap by persisting sin, and in his ungrudging love granted them to become coheirs with him and sons of God. Let us exult and glory in him who has become the refuge of the poor, to humble the eyes of the proud. Let us present to him both a temple and a sacrifice in ourselves, cleansing ourselves, if we can, of the old leaven, so that we may become unleavened and Christ, who was sacrificed for us, may himself feast in us.

Let us remember that, set apart from the womb of our land and kindred, we have been made sons of Delphinus, that we might become those fish that pass through the paths of the sea. Let us remember that you have become to us not only a father but also a Peter, because you cast the hook to draw me out of the deep and bitter waves of this world, that I might become a catch of salvation and die to the nature for which I lived, so as to live to the Lord, to whom I was dead. But if I am your fish, I ought to bear in my mouth the precious coin on which shines not the figure and inscription of Caesar but the living and life-giving image of the eternal King: namely, the faith of truth, which has stamped the coinage of your teaching and the seal of your ring on the coin of my heart and the wax of my mind. For your teaching is silver tried by fire, proved in the earth, purified seven times.

May the Lord grant to your prayers that I may be a coin of your coinage, a fish of your hook, a branch of your vine, a son of the womb of your chastity. For the sons of Delphinus will be reckoned among the sons of Aaron, but not with those who offered strange fire to the Lord and were burned by divine fire because of the fire they had quenched in their hearts. Let your sons have a heart burning, not with the wicked fires of desires and worldly allurements, but with that fire which the Lord came to kindle in us, of which he says: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and what do I will, if it is already kindled?” Let not avarice, then, not the lust of the eyes and harmful love of temporal things burn in us with a pestilent fire, which is a fire strange to God; but let our God himself, who is a consuming fire, recognize his own fire in us, so that we may say: “The Lord is our light and our salvation; whom shall we fear?” This fire enlightens hearts and consumes sins, extinguishes the darkness by which we are put to death and kindles the light by which we are given life. If our lamps are always burning with this fire, we shall say with confidence: “Even though I walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Enlightened by this fire, and kindled by its ardor to a thirst for living water, in longing for the Lord we shall truly say: “As the deer longs for the springs of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we shall see light.”

In the sacred history of the Kingdoms we admire Asahel, brother of Joab, winged of foot and light in running, so that he could compete with deer or wild goats in rival swiftness. And we are no less astonished when we read of that giant among the Philistines who had grown beyond the measure of the human body and the size of limbs, whom hands armed with six fingers and feet jointed with as many toes made stronger and swifter than the rest; except that against David, fighting by the hand of God and ever unconquered in the image of Christ, no hand or strength of enemies, however great, prevailed; by which the proud exaltation of the devil was cast down in the great ones of the aliens, and in the little ones of ours the saving form of God, all-powerful in humility, conquered.

But let us run back to the head of the letter, which we began from the feet, that we may praise the Lord’s runner Cardamas with the examples of the swift men of old recorded in the divine law. There comes to mind also from the gospel that blessed swiftness of the young apostle, by which he outran Peter, his equal in eagerness to run but slower under the weight of greater age, to the tomb of the Lord, so that he who alone reclined on the breast might be the first to look into the resurrection of the body. From there he had drawn into the channel of his heart the twin springs which he later, as herald of the Revelation and the gospel, poured out into the world; and that bodily quickness of feet he afterward fulfilled with spiritual swiftness, running through the whole world among the peoples on the beautiful feet of the word.

The same John, his life prolonged beyond the times of all the apostles, is recorded to have been the last writer of the gospel, so that, as the vessel of election says of him, he might, like a pillar, add support to the foundations of the church, confirming the earlier writers of the gospel with harmonious authority: the last author in the time of his book but the first at the head of the mystery, since he alone of the four rivers, running down from the very highest spring of the divine head, thunders from the lofty cloud: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He surpasses Moses, who extended the bounds of knowledge with the keenness of his mind to the head of the world and the beginnings of visible creatures. While the other evangelists began the gospel of the resurrection either from the Savior’s human birth, or from the typical sacrifice of the law, or from the prophetic proclamation of the forerunner, the Baptist, he flew higher and pierced even the heavens; nor did he stop at the angels, but, passing beyond the archangels too and all the creatures above, the virtues, principalities, dominions, thrones, he directed himself with lofty mind to the Creator himself, and, starting from that ineffable generation, proclaimed the Son coeternal, consubstantial, co-omnipotent, and co-creator with the Father, discerning God with God in the Holy Spirit, because in him the Trinity of the Godhead is fulfilled and the one Godhead of the Trinity is discerned. For the Spirit of God, like the Word of God, is God, both remaining in the one head and flowing from the one spring of the Father, but the Son by being born, the Spirit by proceeding, each distinguished rather than divided, with the property of their persons kept.

So the blessed John, who lay on the Lord’s breast, who had drunk from the very heart of the Wisdom that created all things an understanding higher than all creatures, drunk with the Holy Spirit, who searches even the depths of God, began his gospel from the very innermost and infinite beginning of all beginnings; by this one word all the mouths of the devil that bark in the heretics are shut. The tongue of Arius is cut off first, but the blasphemy of Sabellius is also made void, since by the same sentence of our fisherman both the unity of the Godhead in Father and Son and the distinction of persons are expressed. By the same chapter Photinus, the mad teacher of a merely human beginning in Christ, is hissed off the stage; Marcion, who separates the God of the law from the God of the gospel, is extinguished; and Manichaeus, the denier of the true Creator and inventor of a false one, is crushed, confounded at once by the voice of the same supercelestial gospel that follows (I have called this gospel supercelestial because its opening begins from that origin which is above all heavens and before all ages), since he hears of this Word of God, God: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.” And the Gnostic, who glories in the name of a false knowledge and turns all the understanding of his perverse mind into certain airy phantoms, as by a spiritual imagining of bodily things, the same author compels to faith in the flesh in Christ, when he says of the same Word, which was God with God: “And the Word was made flesh.” Not, however, made flesh in such a way, as certain others of the serpents are said to hiss, that he passed from his own nature into ours, but so that, remaining what he was in himself, he began for our sake to be what he was not.

I am carried too far, abusing the indulgence of your oneness of heart so as to fear neither to tire you with much talking nor to err before you through folly. For I know that, wise as you are, you gladly bear with your fool through that love which endures all things and never fails. Yet I will now say to myself that I should guard my ways, so as not to sin with my tongue, and I will come down briefly to Cardamas, that is, our Asahel, whose feet you have made like a deer’s, renewing his youth like the eagle’s by the abundance of your love, by which, out of regard for our lowliness, you took him up and set him in the courts of the house of the Lord, so that he might be more fully free from man since he had begun to be Christ’s freedman. By this kindness you have made him flourish again not only in spirit but also in body, so that he too, filled from your inmost being with the affection with which you love us, brings your longings to us and in turn soothes ours, and, traveling almost regularly across such great distances between us, keeps hard ways for the sake of the words of your lips. We believe indeed that from the very letters of your holiness that he carries he takes on wings like a dove, and besides receives from your prayers the strength of feet by which he is carried to us; yet we congratulate him on this very grace, by which he has been placed in the service of so great a love, so that he serves in freedom, runs about in old age, and prefers to spend the rest of a well-earned retirement in the labor of travel rather than at home; because he declines to tread the ways of the lazy, strewn with thorns, lest he be turned into misery while the thorn of wretched anxiety pierces him from the fruitless idleness of sloth. So he exults, unwearied, to run his course, lest the want that follows the lazy should meet him like a good runner while he wastes away in sluggish leisure. And when he comes to us, with what joy he floods and fills our soul with good news of your health! He fattens our bones, and a voice of gladness sounds in our tents, when, our minds refreshed with the longed-for comfort, we say: “The Lord has been mindful of us and has blessed us.”

Let us exult and rejoice in him who grants the wish of one who desires and has given us the desire of our soul, since he has gone before us with the blessing of sweetness. For what blessing is now sweeter to us, or what sweetness more delightful, than the fruit and comfort of love, which is given us most of all by your letters? In them we embrace pledges, as it were, of your mouth and heart, because your words are the offspring of your soul; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Therefore we love Cardamas both when he comes, in your words, and we commend him in ours when he goes; for he deserves that his old age, which labors for the longings and duties of love, should rest in rich mercy. Besides, what we admired in him more than his very swiftness in his gray hairs, he has so advanced to frugality since receiving the title of exorcist that he did not shun being our almost daily table companion, and when he was sprinkled with rare and tiny cups, with which he barely wetted the tips of his lips, he made no complaint of the injury of an empty belly or a dry throat. Altogether, in every respect Cardamas appeared so fine to us that we saw in him a cleric acceptable to men and an exorcist terrible to demons. For the rest, brother, we commend to you both him and all our people and ourselves, that through you we may be commended to the Lord by earnest prayers, so that the freedom of all our people may serve the eternal Lord, and our service in Christ may obtain the reward of eternal freedom.

The letter you had sent by that unspiritual monk of ours was intercepted and delivered by a truly spiritual letter-carrier, our son Sorianus; in him we saw that the Lord had conferred a twofold grace: that he, who had longed for us with affection drawn from your inmost being, should not come to us empty of your words, and that Marracinus should not again bring us your letter. He, by a shame at seeing us, or by a laziness about extending his journey beyond the city, inspired in him, I believe, by God, gave your letter at Rome to the brother I mentioned, glad of the chance of the shortcut he had wished for, by which he thought he had provided for himself against your instructions, so as not to be forced either to pretend to be a monk in his own person, as you had ordered, or to see one in mine, as he would have had to. So let him keep his military cloak and his boots and his cheeks, of which he was afraid to change the one or to bring down the other.

Let those come and visit us who are our fellow servants and fellow pale ones: not proud in embroidered clothes but humble in rough hair-shirts, not cloaked in a short military mantle but in little cloaks, not girded with a belt but with a rope, not with long hair on a shamelessly trimmed forehead but with hair cut to the skin in chaste unsightliness, unevenly half-shorn and shaved in front, leaving the forehead bare. Let them be unadorned with the adornment of modesty, becomingly unkempt and honorably despicable, since, scorning even the natural beauty of the body for the sake of inner adornment, they deliberately disfigure themselves, so as to become modestly unsightly in face while they are made, to their salvation, comely in mind. The face, the dress, and the smell of such men make those people sick for whom the odor of death is in place of the odor of life, to whom what is bitter is sweet, what is chaste is shameful, and what is holy is hostile. Therefore it is just that we repay them in kind, so that their odor is to us as an odor of death, lest we cease to be the odor of Christ. For why should they be justly angry with us, if in turn the odor of the life of those to whom our odor is unto death stinks to us? He shudders at my fasting; I cannot bear his drunkenness. He avoids the breath of a monk speaking; I flee the breath of a belching Thraso. If the dryness of our throat displeases them, so does the indigestion of their gullet displease us. If the aridity of frugality offends them, the gluttony of their bellies offends us too. Let them see us, then, not drunk in the morning but fasting in the evening, not swollen with yesterday’s wine but abstaining from today’s, not madly unsteady from the surfeit of lust but wholly wounded by the vigils of honor and soberly drunk, made to totter by thrift, not by gluttony.

We are glad to have received such a bearer of your letter, and I ask you to receive him as though he had come to me sent by you. For he ought to be numbered among those who have come to me on your brotherhood’s behalf, since the Lord, so that he might be so numbered by you, handed him your letter even without your knowledge. And I think that you too will credit this gift of divine grace to him, through whom it was granted to you as well that your letter should not be brought to us by a carrier not of your own body. But I want Sorianus to be praised without offense to the other, lest you accuse me to him again. For I think that I have rather praised than blamed him by mentioning the things in which one who blushes to be, or to seem, a monk must glory. You remember that in Virgil a Fury is praised for the very things that are usually made reproaches. But see that you do not slander me for borrowing something from a poet who is no longer our study, as though I were violating my resolve; I declare that I did this on the authority of your example. For I have your letter which ends: “Live happily, you whose fortune is completed,” and also the one in which, mindful of Plautus’s prologue, you called your home “the household god.”

Why do you try to force us to love you more? The sum does not admit of growth. If the sea can overflow its barriers, and whatever things keep their natural fullness can feel a temporal increase, then our love for you can also be heaped up, which we have filled to its limit, since we love you as ourselves. So, as we cannot add a cubit to our stature, we cannot add to the heap of our love for you; yet we set no limit to our longings. For you who think you satisfy us by this constancy of your honor and devotion, by which you try to make up for your presence by such frequent letters, rather provoke the appetite of love, and you satisfy it the less by the favor of your letters the greater the cause you give, by the very diligence and kindness of your words, for longing for you yourself, brother of so singular a oneness of heart with us in Christ. For what can be done more diligently toward God and neighbor than what you show to Christ in us? In this both commandments of God are fulfilled, since the same Christ is to us both God by the majesty of his nature and made our neighbor by the assumption of ours. In him, then, as it advances in you, your love is brought to completion, a love that is infinite in one perfect, because it is bounded in Christ, of whose greatness there is no end; but let our end be in him, that through him we may live without end, we for whom Christ is both the general beginning, since through him are all things, and the special summit, since he is head of the body of which we are members. Sweet and upright is the Lord; sweet to me in you, and how great the multitude of his sweetness you are to me; for as great as you are, in mind and in tongue, you are wholly a longing, and you taste to me of the sweetness of Christ, like a garden to me, like the smell of a full field, which you have gathered by running after the odor of his ointments. For you are a field to him, who in turn is a field to us. For in him we sow and from him we reap. And you are a field, not one bristling with thorns, or dry with sand, or rough and bare with stones, in which the seed given is choked or fails or is scorched, but that field which God has blessed with the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth. Hence your tongue drips with the word of God, and your heart, fertile for God, multiplies the seed received with spiritual fruit, so that the reaper may fill his hand with your fruits, and he who gathers the sheaves his bosom: that is, God himself, who is both sower and reaper of his word in us. He is also the hand, as the right hand of God, which we fill with good works; and he is also that bosom of Abraham in which we rest in the reward of our works.

So this God, abounding to us in your love, blesses, visits, feeds, and enlightens us not only by your letters but also by your letter-carriers, opening to us by both the good treasure of your heart; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and “every animal,” it says, “gathers to its like.” Therefore God has blessed you, because the innocent and upright have clung to you, and you have not sat with the wicked; you have hated iniquity, you love your soul, which you have cast away in Christ, so that, lost to this life, it may be kept for eternal life, gaining itself by its own loss, if through the love of Christ it becomes worthless to itself. Smelling the sweetness of your soul, worthless to you and precious to God, in the words of your mouth breathing Christ, we bless the Lord, the Word of God, God, who, as in that very man whom he bore, so in our minds goes through certain stages of bodily age: he is born, grows, grows strong, grows old. But we must pray that he not remain long or always little and weak and poor in us. In you indeed, as we glory, since your good is our glory, we recognize by experience his progress: great in goodness, little in malice, old in wisdom, strong in faith, poor in the spirit of devout humility, rich in love. For in earlier services toward our lowliness you had gone before others, more zealous than all our friends, more religious than our neighbors, more diligent than our brothers, as we have often testified. But now, by this turn of visiting us, you have surpassed even yourself in overflowing kindness. For it was enough for us to earn your letters by yearly couriers and to see those sent by you, in whom we might hold not only a substitute for your presence but also an image of your faith. But it was not enough for you to celebrate the established observance with the customary performance. Your great love made the delay of winter long for you to be silent toward us. Your heart grew hot within you, and in the meditation of devotion a holy fire of good impatience blazed up in you. Nor was it enough to hasten the sending of a letter to us, unless you also heaped up the favor of your words by choosing a bearer from among your holy companions.

Blessed is the one you chose and took up for this service, by which you lend to God; because, though we are sinners by the true confession of our conscience, yet, thinking us saints by the false opinion of your simplicity, as you say, you love us no longer with a man’s love but with Christ’s, and therefore you will receive a prophet’s reward, because for the name of Christ you receive with the honor of prophets even those who are not prophets. To us, however, no like gratitude is due for this service, in which we received with inmost affection and great rejoicing brother Victor, who came to us in the name of God and in your person. For we did only what we, useless servants, ought to have done, since the plain truth compelled us to receive and revere a pure sheep in him whom not only a sheep’s skin but the spirit of gentleness and the modesty of Christ expressed in his speech and silence revealed. Truly we recognized in him the pattern of the saints, the blessed Martin and Clarus, whom we came to know, through you, as the close follower of his illustrious master. Victor, a son of peace, declared himself the offspring of the one in regeneration and to have been the companion of the other on the way. A man truly, as you wrote, of God, humble in heart, not humble in grace, a vessel of mercy and a dwelling of the Most High, whom he receives and delights in the peaceful lodging of a trembling soul: he added to us, besides the blessings he brought from you, twofold in letters and cloaks, many more from the riches of his own mind, most welcome to us not only in spiritual companionship but also diligent in bodily service. For I dare to confess a matter that weighs on me, while I keep silent to you about none of his good qualities, which I know for certain are your joy, since the good of your familiar friend is your portion.