Letters 23.38–24.10

Let us, then, fix chaste kisses on the feet of Christ, so that we may be worthy to rise from the feet to the head, and, growing into the higher members of the body, dare at last, from nearby, to ask for kisses of his face and mouth. And when, tasting the word of God with a pure heart, we have tasted how sweet the Lord is, then let our soul, set on fire in all its inmost being with love of wisdom, be refreshed by a sweet burning, and, pierced by the fiery arrows of the Lord’s love, by which every other delight of hostile pleasures is killed, let it say in a contrite heart: “For I am wounded with love.” Blessed indeed is he who can anoint Christ’s feet even with a kiss. Who would burn my mouth, wretched as I am, and purify my tongue with that heavenly coal, so that I might be worthy to touch even the heel of Christ with the very tip of my lips, and, with head bowed, wipe his holy soles, so that rather my head might be wiped by Christ’s feet, and, while I lick the divine feet, I might expiate my unclean lips on his chaste footprints!

Let us therefore exhort one another and say in rivalry: “Come, let us worship and weep before the Lord who made us.” Weeping for him we shall sow our joys; anointing his footsteps we shall heal our wounds. For whatever we spend on Christ, we rather confer on ourselves. Indeed, she by pouring over Christ washed herself, by wiping his feet cleansed her sins; loving him she loved herself. And therefore she deserved to hear: “Daughter, your faith has saved you,” which he who was of the sons of the kingdom did not deserve to hear; and she was justified more by her service than he by his banquet. For the Pharisee had not believed; she believed. Indeed he said: “If this man were a prophet, he would surely know what sort of woman this is who touches him”; and therefore he was not justified by the banquet to which he had invited Christ as merely a man, perhaps reckoning it a favor to him, because for our sake he was poor, that a rich man had thought so much of him as to take a poor man to his feast. But she would not have hoped for the remission of sins by so great an effort of service and expense and tears unless she had believed that Christ was God; and therefore, though only at the last footstep of the Savior, she found the head of her salvation.

Where will you boast, wretched Jew? In your own house our sinful woman has gone before you, entering into your labors. You feasted in order to be proud; she fasted in order to serve. And the water you refused to pour from your jugs, she supplied from her eyes. You did not wipe Christ’s feet even with a towel; she wiped them with her hair. Those whom you, unworthy, would not even touch with your hands, she did not cease to caress with kisses. Yet surely you rather owed this service in your own house to the guest you had received, if you had kept the law of hospitality at least after the example of the fathers; but it is enough for you, for your pride, to boast of father Abraham. And therefore she has gone before you, who by faithful affection proved herself rather the daughter of your father, from whom this inhumanity too shows you degenerate, in that you disdained to wash the Lord’s feet, when both Abraham washed those of angels and the Lord himself those of his servants; although then too the father of faith washed the feet of Christ also, whom, seeing him as one of the three, he worshiped with prophetic eyes; and therefore he himself rebukes you thus with his present mouth: “If you were children of Abraham, you would do the works of Abraham,” and he added: “He saw my day and was glad.” And he blessed also those who did not see but believed along with those who saw. From this it is clear that faith has been acquired for us, while for you there remains the nature of faithlessness.

Let them keep for themselves their arrogance, their riches, their nobility and their righteousness, who glory in Abraham as father by body rather than by spirit, uncircumcised in heart and Jews in the flesh only. For us Christ, and him crucified, is enough for salvation and for glory, who has raised us from stones to be sons of Abraham, while they, on the contrary, sons of Abraham, are hardening into the stones of our origin. For us Ephraim, the left, blessed at the right hand, prospers; them the mystery of the cross marked in Manasseh, who, by the presumption of the elder, had stood at his grandfather’s right, when the left hand was transferred to his head; because the cross, a stumbling block to the Jews and the future glory of Christians, would make him left from right and me right from left; since, the Jews slipping into our deserts and we invading their sown fields, they are by blindness what we were, and we are by grace what they were. But we will not so rejoice in our salvation as to delight in your destruction. For we have been taught, by a brother of your body but a teacher of our spirit, not to boast over the broken branches, since we have grown into the tree of your stock not from works but from the gifts of God’s mercies. And the common Lord, but Father of the Christians, that is, God of the faithful, is able to graft you again into the native folds of your own bark and to replant you in your own soil, he who has filled our marrow with the sap of your richness through the gift of adoption, so that one root may sustain both, bearing fruit in one for the Lord.

Meanwhile I prefer the riches of our sinful and poor woman in tears and affection to yours in impiety and the letter, her fasting to your banquet. I prefer to be entangled in her hair at the feet of Christ than to recline with you among your dishes beside Christ without Christ. If I do not now have ointment for Christ’s feet, I shall not have oil for my torches at his coming. And woe is me if my ointment is cheap; for precious ointment is needed, that I may be worthy to be buried with him in his burial, for unless I die with him in his death, I shall not live in his resurrection. Let us, then, love him whom it is a duty to love. Let us kiss him whom to kiss is chastity. Let us be joined to him to whom to be married is virginity. Let us be subject to him under whom to lie is to stand above the world. Let us be cast down for him for whom to fall is resurrection. Let us die with him in whom is life.

And how worthily shall we be able to repay this Lord, in whom even when dead we live, who deigns in turn to be to us whatever we, his little servants, have been to him! For he so mingles himself with us and joins us to himself that he makes what he received profit us, and credits as received by himself what is given to us, that is, to his least ones. So too, involving his own in his honor, he has shared almost everything with us, even his names. As he is called the power of God, so he deigns to be power to us too: “For God is our refuge and power.” As we are an inheritance to him, so is he to us. For as you have in Moses, “The Lord’s portion became his people Jacob,” so you have in the psalms, “My portion is the Lord.” And as he says of himself, “I am the light of this world,” so he said to his own, “You are the light of this world.” “I am,” he says, “the living bread”; and “we are all one bread.” “I am the true vine”; and to you he says, “I planted you a fruitful vine, wholly true.” Christ is the mountain of God, in which it has pleased God to dwell, and his saints are the mountains of God, the fertile mountains, from which the Wonderful enlightens us from the everlasting mountains. The rock is Christ: “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” Even to his disciple he did not deny the grace of this name, saying to him: “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

But why do we wonder that he has granted his names to his servants, with whom he shares both his Father and his kingdom? For he gave to those who received him power to become sons of God, and, as far as lies with him, he said to all men: “You are gods, and all sons of the Most High.” But we, by the crime of our wills, die like men and fall like one of the princes. For one of the princes of the angels he was, before, falling by casting down, he became the devil, to whom it is said: “How has Lucifer fallen, who rose in the morning?” But we are not condemned to eternal destruction as he is, because he was the author of sin and will be punished at once for himself and for man, he who perished by the same crime by which he destroyed. But man did not deserve to be shut out of paradise forever and to be earth, because divine justice judged it more lenient to have sinned by another’s design than by one’s own. It is more criminal to deceive than to be deceived, and to devise sin than to commit it. And therefore he who consented to the fraud was punished temporally and for amendment, while the inventor of death is destined to eternal punishment, for whom the penalty of sin will never fail, because he never ceases. So, “not an angel, not an envoy,” as it is written, “but the Lord himself” came to raise up the crushed, to free the fettered, and to save what was lost. But to confound our deceiver by a mutual deception, as it were, the only-begotten Son of God, through the mystery of his goodness, deigned to take the very nature of our frailty, so that the devil might be conquered by that very nature which he had deceived, and he who was always under God’s power and laws might be subjected, as he is, to man.

What, then, shall we render to him for all that he has rendered to us? For he has rendered, but as a good Lord, good for evil, to him on whom we had heaped evil for good. He blessed, and we cursed. He healed, and we blasphemed; he justified the ungodly, and was reckoned among the wicked. What, then, shall I pay back to him for my evils which he bore, what for his good things which he conferred? What for the flesh he took? What for the slaps? What for the reproaches? What for the scourges? What shall I repay for the cross, the death, the burial? Suppose we render cross for cross, death for death: shall we be able to render what we have, since from him and through him and in him we have all things, and we ourselves who have them are his? For he made us, and not we ourselves, and our soul is always in his hands. Let us render, then, love for the debt, charity for the gift, gratitude for the money. For woe to us, unless we love.

But when could I, wretched and needy, hope to repay this Lord, whom not even the apostles profess to have repaid? Hear, indeed, one of them confessing that he has not repaid, who says: “Who has first given to him, that it should be repaid to him?” But thanks to him, who remits to us the interest on so great a loan and grants us a settlement of an immense obligation, asking back from us only love for himself; and by placing it in the first place among his commandments he showed how we, though poor, might pay him an unpayable debt. Let no one, then, excuse himself on the ground of the difficulty of paying, because no one can say that he has no heart. Not sacrifices, not costly gifts, not hard labors are required of us; we have within us the means to pay. For our affection is a thing in our power; let us spend it on the Lord, and we pay. Indeed, David, delivered from the hand of all his enemies, paying for the full security of his salvation not with the riches of his kingdom but of his heart, says: “I will love you, O Lord, my strength.”

I add, moreover, that he who is the creditor will be the debtor if we pay him the price of his goodness, which he gives us undeserved, with the free payment of a loving heart. And he is loved in ourselves too, since he himself said that this would be the sign of his disciples, if they loved one another with the love with which he loved us, that is, that we should have one heart and one soul in Christ, and each should do to his neighbor what he wishes done to himself. All the more do we glory in the Lord in your love, which alone makes us able in some measure to pay to God even one of our great and innumerable debts. For in all other good things we confess that we are scarcely initiated, and only in a few; in love for you alone we profess to be perfect.

I still have something to say to you, although you receive my letters in unlocked storerooms and, as far as it lies with you, are eager, as you yourself declare, to proclaim them upon the housetops. But if you bring out the complaint against you that I am now about to lodge with you, among the other follies of my talkativeness, you will at the same time publish your own rashness, about which I have written this letter in complaint, reminded by the end of my previous one, that is, by its word on love and perfection, to make that the beginning of this one. My ground for remonstrating with you over the excessive affection of your oneness of heart is this: that great love draws you as far as the sin of falsehood. For whether I consider what you say of yourself or what you say of me, heaping up my burdens with unjust praises and lessening your own with false reproaches, I would charge you with sinning against love out of love. For ‘love,’ it says, ‘is kind; love does no evil to a neighbor.’ That you show it to us as kind we experience, and indeed we glory in it. But see that you do not appear to do evil to your neighbors against its rule, piling on them the weight of undeserved praise on top of the load of their sins, and, as it were, not wishing for us what you wish for yourself, since you think it right to speak of us in a way that you judge unprofitable to yourself if spoken of you. You will rightly hear: ‘If you love rightly but do not divide rightly, you have sinned.’ Unless perhaps you do this too by a higher counsel of devotion: that while you lavish on us in words goods that belong to others, you may prompt in us the goad of shame, so that, reading what we ought to be, we may learn to be good and strive to show ourselves according to your words, and perhaps we may be made what we are not, while we blush not to be what we are called. Meanwhile, however, since conscience does not recognize the truth of your words, modesty spurns the flattery. Let modesty, as I said, call you to account before yourself: why do you dare to assign to us, as to victors whose contest is fought out, the palm of perfection, because we seem to have laid down every burden of earthly possession, while on the other hand you lament yourself as still unhappy and stuck in the mire of the lower dregs, because, as you wrote, you seem not to have sold even one little estate? Yet you have alienated it too from your present right just as if it had been sold, so as to stand twice devoted to God with greater fruits of faith. By different kinds of trade, but for the one gain of life, within the bounds of the same command, you are both the seller and the giver of your lands, and therefore a possessor without captivity of mind, because the church, with you as its servant, possesses what you have kept back.

So weigh your account and mine alike by the words of the Lord himself, so that you neither despair of yourself as still hampered nor congratulate us as already free: there are ‘divisions of graces’ and ‘measures of gifts,’ which one and the same God, the dispenser, works as in the members of his own body, distinguishing different members in his body by the gifts he pleases, yet building one body for himself out of the diversity of members, so that from this too the grace of the sacred body may increase, when manifold virtue is counted within one frame, that ‘the queen may stand at his right hand, clothed in golden fringes, arrayed in variety.’ See now how much God has given you in her, he who has granted you a portion in the lot of those who lived perfect under the law, possessing in such a way that they were not possessed by their possessions, and did not put any love of things or of kinsfolk before the love and discipline of the Lord, as is shown in Job and Abraham and Lot. But you are also a sharer with those whom the fullness of the gospel perfects, you who have sold estates of greater wealth and allure.

Hence I trust that there is for you an equal rest in the midst of the divine lots, so that you may sleep, as it is written, ‘among the middle portions,’ that is, the lots of the Lord, which are taken to be in the two Testaments, from which the inheritance of the Lord and the fullness of the saints is made complete. So I am ready to turn the Lord’s saying against you in the opposite sense and say to you: you see the speck of grace in your brother’s eye, and do not perceive the mass of the same good in your own, since, as I said, you have taken both portions of the saints: you are not a possessor in the estates you have kept, and you are perfect in those you have sold. So even in that in which you seem a possessor, you are perfect with a mind freed from the bonds of possessions, you who, mindful that ‘the time is short,’ fulfill that saying of the apostle, that having you should not have, because you have not for yourself but for those who do not have. You are a guest in your own house, that you may be a house of hospitality; you are a stranger in your own homeland and in this world, that you may be a dweller in paradise and a citizen of the ancient homeland. You do not fill your house with dining rooms, nor cram it with heaps of furniture or money; instead, you yourself, the measurer of a single corner, fill it with strangers and the needy, and, a fellow servant of your own household slaves, you do not usurp the temporary dwelling of your house as master of the household, but remain in it as a hireling or a tenant, paying rent to the Lord as for a dwelling held on sufferance by the joint service of your body and soul.

But if the reward is to be extended or shortened according to the measure of the work, and some reckoning of what has been done and not done must be made, the perfection of your mind will be fairly reckoned with the work of those who sold everything, since you have kept back nothing for yourself either in law or, what is more, in your heart, you who ‘use the world as though not using it.’ And I am not sure whether this constancy and firmness of your heart is not to be judged a mark of stronger faith, by which among fires you are not burned, among snares you are not caught, you touch pitch and are not defiled, than that of those whom you think strong, but whom I consider weaker, because, not trusting their own weakness, they hastened to alienate everything to which they feared to cling. You, then, are ‘free among the dead,’ you who in an earthly possession are no longer earth but stand above the earth; you are neither polluted by contact with corpses nor do you dwell in the tombs of those who lie cast out, because you have buried your life in heaven, having ‘hidden it in Christ.’ But let us not suffer envy for a perfection; rather let us receive pardon for weakness, since you cannot deny that it is braver to do without things that remain to you than without things alienated, and to despise what you have than not to have what you despise.

Indeed, consider the very words of the Lord on which you credit us with perfection, and you will see that you have put the beginning for the end. ‘If you wish,’ he says, ‘to be perfect, go and sell all you have and give to the poor.’ If he had ended the sentence there, I would rebuke you for speaking falsely and would freely ask you, as a soul close to me in the likeness of the same pursuit, to rejoice with me, because we would now be holding in our hands the palm of a finished contest, like that tenth drachma, I say, lost in the first parent of the flesh, yet found at last inside the house when the light of the saving word was lit. But since you see how weighty a word remains, when the Lord of majesty himself adds, ‘and come, follow me,’ consider rather that difficulty and measure it with an enlarged heart; then you will understand that you have greater cause for anxiety on our behalf than for congratulation. For it was easy for us, letting go of our cloak, to drop goods, or rather burdens, laid upon us; and the things we had not brought into this world with us, and could not carry out with us, we gave back as if borrowed. We did not tear them away like skin from flesh, but put them off like clothing from the body.

Now we must pay to God what is truly ours, that is, the heart and soul, ‘presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice,’ as it is written, to the Lord, and building ourselves up as a holy temple for him on the very cornerstone, who gave us in himself the pattern of our sanctification and said, ‘Be holy, for I am holy.’ What thanks are due to us, then, if we are faithful only in what belongs to another, unless we serve him from what is our own, that is, from the free choice of the will, loving God ‘with our whole heart and,’ as it is written, ‘from the whole’ inward parts ‘of our soul’? To this disposition the prophet stirs us when he says, ‘I will sacrifice to you willingly.’ For this is acceptable and pleasing before God, that our good be voluntary, so that we may recover what is ours, namely the home of paradise and eternal life, in which we were created. If we recover it, cleansed from the possession of this earth into which we came by condemnation, then truly, as men restored from exile to their homeland or returned from a long journey abroad to the house of their birth, we shall be able to say, ‘The Lord is our portion in the land of the living.’

Therefore the giving up or selling of the temporal goods held in this world is not the running of the course but the entrance to it, not the finishing post but the gate. For the athlete does not win at the moment he is stripped; he is stripped in order to begin the fight, and he will be crowned if he has competed lawfully. The swimmer too undresses when he is about to cross the river before him; yet he will not swim across through this great preparation of having stripped himself, unless by the effort of his whole body and the skillful movement of all his limbs, the thrust of his feet, the oars of his arms, and the slant of his side, he cleaves the force of the current and completes the labor of swimming.

Yet I see that the order of this campaign was also prefigured for us in the blessed patriarch Jacob, when I read that after he had crossed the stream and sent on ahead the burdens of his cares, that is, the hindrances of bodily goods and of kinsfolk, and had remained alone at the place of his tent, he wrestled with God, prevailed in wresting a blessing, and received that name Israel, hallowed in heaven and on earth. Although in this a prefiguration of the saving mystery seems primarily to be present, namely that in the figure of the Jews, that is, of the offspring of his body, Jacob prevailed over the Lord, as that people prevailed in wresting his passion from Pilate, as it is written, when they said, ‘Crucify, crucify,’ and ‘their voices,’ it says, ‘prevailed,’ nevertheless, for the purpose of my present discourse, the story should be used insofar as it has produced an image of the gospel command: that by that example we may understand that we cannot be fit to grapple with God, with whom we certainly grapple when we strive to fulfill his word and try to prevail toward divine virtues by imitating him. So we cannot be fit to seize the way of life, to lay hold of the word of God, and to prevail toward the kingdom of heaven, which ‘from the days of John suffers violence’ as from those who plunder it, unless we send ahead, before the evening of our death, all the things that hinder and slow us through love or care if they cling to us on the road of this world, and then through the whole night of this world wrestle with anxious striving in spiritual works and pursuits to lay hold of Christ and hold him, and are not torn from the love of Christ, as Jacob was not torn from his embrace until we wrest the blessing. And would that, as the badge of a saving wrestle, he might strike the sinew of our thigh with the fear of his majesty, so that when it is numbed the strength of the flesh may be weakened and spiritual grace grow strong. In Jacob, however, the sinew of the stricken thigh withered as a figure of Jewish barrenness and corruption, pointing to that part of his sons which, degenerating from the faith of the fathers, ceased to be fruitful to God. From this you have it that it was weakened in its fruitfulness in sons, and, straying from the commandments of its author, limped in the paths of its error.

Nevertheless we too must beware lest we appear barren in the sight of the Lord, or limp with a lame foot on his road; rather, unfruitful in bodily offspring, let us draw that numbing of the father’s thigh by the stroke of the divine hand toward the rigor of continence, so that, strengthless toward the desires by which the strength of faith is hamstrung, we may strengthen the soul with chastity, which the apostle teaches and which even fleshly athletes carefully guard. With how much greater zeal must we keep it, who wrestle for that ‘unfading crown,’ when it is cultivated even by those who contend for a temporal and fragile crown! Therefore, being about to fight before the Lord under the gaze of men and angels in the theater of this world, let us strip off hostile works, so that we may be clothed with healing works. For he wishes us to be prepared for this very thing who says, ‘Follow me,’ so that ‘we may lay hold of him in whom we have been laid hold of’ by him. He who calls us to the place where he sits at the right hand of God in the glory of the Father says to all, ‘Come to me, you who are burdened and laboring, and you will find rest for your souls.’ For he who made all ‘wishes every man,’ as far as lies in him, ‘to be saved.’ For this reason he came down to us, that we might go up to him; for this he was conformed to the body of our flesh, which served sin, that he might conform us to the body of his flesh, which did no sin, so that we may truly be re-formed to our original glory if we take on the divine likeness by imitating Christ. For that only the image remained to us in Adam the book of Genesis itself shows, which narrates the workmanship of the divine hand: in it the likeness, together with the image of God, is named while the making of man is still being planned; but in the following chapter, where man, now made, is written to be only ‘in the image of God,’ it indicates that the likeness was withdrawn, as from one who would sin, surely by foreknowledge of the future, so that it might be kept for men in Christ, who by the obedience of his devotion reconciled to the Father the world which the disobedience of the first parent had estranged. And so the likeness of God, which the servant lost when he was puffed up with desire for equality with his Lord, the Lord himself regained, ‘emptied into the form of a servant’; and man, who in his pride had fallen through the devil’s fraud, rose again in the Lord’s lowliness through faith in him, when the devil was laid low by the humiliation of the Lord most high. He, then, grieving for us and ‘for our sake made obedient unto the death of the cross,’ set before us the way of life and the perfection of virtue not only in selling estates and paying out their price, but in following him. And because he had said, ‘When I am lifted up, I will draw all things to myself,’ therefore he says, ‘Come, follow me.’ Blessed is he who follows at so close an interval that he can say, ‘My soul has clung behind you.’ Only that love can say this which is ‘the end of the commandment’ and ‘the fullness of the law,’ that is, which ‘from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned’ so engrafts and fastens itself to God that, loving nothing outside God, it says, ‘And I am always with you.’ Therefore our whole labor and full work lies in keeping watch over our heart and stripping it bare. We cannot see its darkness, or the hiding places of the enemy concealed in it, unless the mind is cleared of the dregs of cares for outward things and turned inward to itself; for not in vain was it said, ‘Keep your heart with all watchfulness.’

I think you have already found by experience how toilsome, constant, even daily our struggle with this enemy is, and how many snares are at work in it, what strength the vices have there and how great the weakness of the virtues, how ready its relapse into depravity, how sluggish its effort toward God. Now that conflict of a different law, once shut up within me, is laid open to me; now I feel the force of the opposing law, which, as if laying hands on me, strives to drag me captive into the law of sin; and I recognize that the blessed man is burned rather by my unhappiness, and grieving for me out of my own state cries out, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ But the same teacher revives and restores me, showing me the saving way out, if only the will is present with me, so that I may deserve to find perfection by the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. He must be entreated to prevail over our enemies and to overflow our darkness, to destroy in us what is alien, or rather our own, and to build what is his. This we know the friends of God obtained by prayer, who certainly suffered with their heart when they said, ‘Create a clean heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit in my inward parts.’ When he had been entreated, the psalmist now says with confidence, ‘Test me, O Lord, and know my heart, and see if there is a way of iniquity in me.’ But lest he seem to have earned this confidence by his own strength rather than by the grace of God, he also says, ‘For you, O Lord, have possessed my reins.’ For, as the Lord himself said, ‘without him we can do nothing,’ because he is ‘the true vine and we are his branches.’ If we remain in his love, we do not wither, living by the sap of the eternal root, nor shall we be cut off for the fire by wrath; rather, we shall be pruned for fruit, as discipline cleanses us with the edge of the gospel pruning hook, so that, with the luxuriance of our shoot checked, we may sprout more fruitfully.