Letters 26.1–28.6

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who has chosen and taken you up as a vessel of his election, and set you apart from the womb of your old mother, and given you the wings of a dove, so that, flying far from the din of this world, you might say, ‘See, I have fled far away, and remained in the wilderness.’ Yet your solitude is not solitary; it is not deserted but secluded, so that, abandoned by the darkness of this world, it is frequented by the light of God, fled by mourning demons, and tended by rejoicing angels. The Lord our God himself has granted us, though separated by a long distance, to draw near to you in love through the good fragrance of report about you, which we received through Victor, our brother most dear in the Lord. He told us both the work of your way of life and the seclusion of your tent: that, a strenuous emulator of the saints of old, you had set up a peaceful dwelling and a spiritual camp by a stream, as once the sons of the prophets did by the Jordan under the leadership of Elisha, and that your blessed brother, a deacon, served you with the attentiveness of the widow of Zarephath or the Shunammite woman. Blessed is he whom the Lord commanded, as he commanded one of the birds of heaven, to feed you, sitting in seclusion by the stream like Elijah, with the bread of devotion, and with constant steps in this ministry to fly back to your little cell like the dove to Noah’s ark, bringing the fruitful branch of a godly shoot.

Blessed are you by the Lord, who makes those of one way of life dwell in a house, and who has doubled the bond of brotherhood in you. He made you brothers in the womb of the church as well, and under one faith distinguished you by different offices, so that by different services you might feed each other: you, fasting and praying, would help him with spiritual arms, and he would sow heavenly goods for himself while supplying you with bodily food, though you do not need the expense of perishing food, because your hunger hungers for righteousness and the kingdom of God. And yet, because the same Lord who made what is within made also what is without, and ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,’ therefore your soul, though it lives in the word of God, who is Christ God, the living and true bread, is repaid by such a service that he serves your body, that is, the earthly frailty in you, with modest food, and is himself fattened by the abundance of your fasts. For this is why he said, ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God’: because, as he had regard for our weaker substance, so the Creator himself shows that bread is necessary for the flesh as well.

But so that we might not put the care of the body before the soul, which is fed by the word of God, he showed that the life of man does not consist in bread alone; and so, in saying, ‘not by bread alone,’ he taught that man’s sustenance does also consist in bread, which, though the care of the soul does not seek it, the nature of the body demands. Therefore blessed is he for whom the necessity of your condition profits the wealth of his soul, because you are still a man and must be fed with this visible bread, even if inwardly you are filled with that eternal bread. For spiritual virtue would not advance unless fleshly weakness lay beneath it; nor would the ministry of the faithful have power, unless a brother’s need usually supplied the material for ministering. Hence the apostle too speaks of a future exchange toward the saints, when he exhorts the church of God to the comfort of this blessing and says: ‘Let your abundance supply their want, so that their abundance too may supply your want.’

I dare to say further that in the two of you the figure of John and of the Lord stands divided: of John crying in the wilderness, and of the Lord teaching in the temple. One of you has been called to the service of ministry, the other to the freedom of a monk. But both have been called together into the one kingdom and glory of God, and both are free, because both are under grace, and both are servants, because both are under the law of faith. Both are free from sin and both servants of righteousness; both in your fasts mind the day for the Lord, and both in the feasts of sincerity give thanks to the Lord, who gives food to all flesh and gives living food to those who hunger for the true life. One of you has heard so as to say, ‘I will go in to the altar of God, to God who gladdens my youth’; and the other has learned from the same prophet to say, ‘I am alone until I pass over.’

Since, then, you are so chosen and loved by the Lord that you bear one another’s burdens, and with the perfect love by which you feed one another you support, instruct, and enrich, fulfilling the law of Christ, pray for us; join strong hands of prayer, so that you may overcome the multitude of our sins. For this is why the merciful and compassionate Lord himself procures and grants to his sinners the acquaintance and love of the saints: so that a most powerful advocacy may free even inexcusable defendants from what they deserve, condemnation. May you abide in the kingdom of the Lord, which he has made to be within you through the pledge of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you, in whom you cry, ‘Abba, Father,’ blessed sons of the Lord, sons of devotion and peace and light.

‘I will bless the Lord at all times,’ and I will not forget his benefits, because he has not repaid us according to our sins, he who satisfies our longing with frequent and abundant comforts from your oneness of heart. For within a few days the return to us of our holy brothers and common friends of one heart, Postumianus and Theridius, was followed by the arrival of other brothers, Virinus and Sorianus. So at almost one time a great harvest of joys came to us, since all these, whom I have mentioned as arriving together, had made the grace of their presence sweeter to us by letters from your oneness of heart. So our spirit rejoiced in the Lord, and our mouth was enlarged over our enemy, who was not allowed to say, ‘I have prevailed against them,’ since rather the prayers of our longings had prevailed, so that we received the longed-for judgments and words from you, that is, from the greatest care of our soul.

So, that we may owe one another nothing, as it is commanded, but mutual love, I will answer all your letters, and first the one I received first, in which you complain to me about the very men through whom you wrote, asking why I either left you alone or took them away from you. But you will recognize that I cannot be blamed on either count, because I have never set any limit to longing for you, nor have I had any contest with you over claiming them. Otherwise I would freely have yielded to you your right, if the possession had been yours first. For they would not be strangers to me while staying with you, who are wholly mine in Christ the Lord, through whom I am in turn yours; nor would I have gained as much grace in receiving them as I would have lost if I had snatched from you companions, however desirable, on the road of salvation. For by my own judgment too I would consider myself most deserving to be emptied of your love, if I preferred any good for myself rather than for you. But when I found that they, who came to me by an unexpected gift of the Lord, were such as they soon afterward proved themselves to you too, I even begrudged myself that I had been happier than you in this respect, in that I rather had obtained, or had first come to know, men more worthy of your sight and fellowship. In short, so that I might as soon as possible rejoice with you as a sharer in this grace by which I thought myself blessed, I scolded them in person, because they admitted that they had no acquaintance or familiarity with you, and I charged them with nothing more earnestly as they set out than that they should hasten to see and embrace you, and put knowing you before all their affairs and cares at home, so as to make up, even if late, for a long loss. And, thanks be to the Lord, we receive them coming back with rejoicing, bringing back a great joy of conscience in this, that they had believed us when we commended you above others as one to be sought out, like a blessed sheaf from a full field, higher than the other fruits of their life. What thanks they gave, first to God, who had not only satisfied but surpassed their longing, so that they found more good in you than they had presumed; what thanks to us, who had been the authors of so great a gain for them; what thanks to themselves, because they had obeyed us to their own profit!

I cannot express with what delight they flooded me when they told of your deeds and words, and of your heart made perfect by the knowledge of divine love, by which you are lowly and lofty, poor and rich, servant and free: a fellow servant to your servants, a servant to your brothers, rich toward the poor in the bowels of mercy, poor toward the rich in the spirit of meekness, lowly in the virtue of devotion, high in the sublimity of virtue, a servant to God, free of mammon. They proclaimed that the whole of Martin breathes in you, that Clarus blooms in you, that the gospel ripens in you. They wholly anointed our head with the oil of gladness; for this reason all our inward parts blessed the Lord, with a twofold cause for thanks: that we understood we had done you a very great service by your coming to know these most beloved brothers, as you showed, and that we saw them congratulate themselves on knowing and loving you as on a divine gift. Besides, among the works and gifts of God in you, how much they admired your boys, who flourish around you like young olive shoots, for whom our God has made you what he himself is to all, so that they both revere you as a master and love you as a father! In this report of theirs, however, we confess that we groaned at our own unhappiness, whom graver sins have made barren of such sons; but we became as those comforted, because we judge the good of your happiness to be near to us.

But so that our iniquity may not separate us from you by a longer interval, gird up that whole chosen band of holy youth with which you soothe God day and night, so that they may draw up a battle line of prayers for us against our sins, and entreat that the Lord may confirm what he has wrought in us, that is, that we may be refreshed and rejoice on that day in your love, in which we now rest and glory.

Victor goes back from me to you, so that he may come back from you to me: Victor, our common pledge, our faithful tent-companion and regular comfort; Victor, mine in you and yours in me; Victor, the courier of our letters, a post-runner on foot or a two-legged post-horse; victor over the longest roads; rightly called both victor and vanquished, because he is vanquished by love, by which he vanquishes hard roads and great labors, he who eats his bread in the sweat of his face so as to refresh us with yearly journeys between the two of us, tirelessly carrying and bringing back the exchange of letters by which we pay to each other’s souls and hearts our mutual visiting as a tax of due service. May the boy Victor be blessed by the Lord, and may his ground not bring forth thorns and thistles for him, because he is not slothful; for ‘the ways of the slothful are strewn with thorns.’ Our Victor does not say, ‘There is a lion in the ways,’ because he is so simple that he walks confidently, faithful and chaste, so that he does not fear ‘the terror of the night and the arrow that flies by day.’ Therefore the Lord guards him in all his ways and commands the angelic watches that he never strike his foot against a stone, nor the snake that lies in wait on the road bite his heel; with his feet shod for the course of the gospel he will tread on it unharmed and crush it. I will therefore praise and bless in the Lord the feet of our Victor, and of these feet too I will dare to say, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring me good news of peace’ from you, when they announce your safety and peace in you, when they announce your faith, through which Christ abides in you, our peace, who makes both one from us or in us, whether in that we are two in one heart, or in that we make one of the two substances of soul and body, as Christ fuses us together by the fire of his Spirit, of which he says, ‘I have come to cast fire on the earth.’ And what does the good Lord wish but that it be kindled in us, and enlighten our darkness, and consume our sins, because ‘the Lord our God is a consuming fire’? May the Lord grant me that he be in me a consuming fire for my good. May my heart burn with this fire into eternal light for me, lest my soul burn with the same fire into everlasting punishment. For in this fire the day of the Lord will be revealed, and the fire will test what sort of work each one of us has done.

Let us pray to this Lord that he may teach us to do his will, and that his good Spirit may lead us into the right way, so that our labor may not be found wood, hay, stubble, but rather silver, gold, precious stones, and that we may be found living stones in the walls of that heavenly and free Jerusalem, ‘which is built as a city, whose sharing is in unity.’ For the dweller in this city is shown to be one in three; hence it is called ‘the city of the great King, the city of our God, the city of the Lord of hosts,’ which the Lord himself, as it is written, ‘has founded for ever.’ Of this city Christ has been made not only the foundation, but also the tower and the gate. ‘For no one,’ it says, ‘can lay another foundation’ than him who is for us ‘a tower of strength before the face of the enemy,’ who says, ‘I am the door of the sheep; no one can come to the Father except through me.’ If, then, our house and mind are founded on him, and a work worthy of so great a foundation is built upon it, he himself will be for us the gate of entry into his city, ‘who will rule us for ever,’ and ‘in a place of pasture he will set us,’ whom he has already begotten for himself through ‘the water of refreshment,’ and feeds with saving food at that table which he ‘has prepared for us against those who trouble us.’ Of it he says, ‘Blessed is he who will eat bread in the kingdom of God,’ because Christ is both the kingdom and the bread, by which we are fattened and the serpent wastes away; his hunger and punishment is the food of our life, Christ Jesus, who was made food for us, so that, living by that bread and walking according to him, we may say with the apostle, ‘But our citizenship is in heaven.’ For when we mind and seek the things that are above, we cease to be earthly, so that we are no longer food for the serpent, who in turn was given as food to the peoples of the Ethiopians, to be eaten by those whom he eats. For us, on the contrary, it is saving: we eat Christ and are swallowed up by Christ, who, because he is life, swallows up what is mortal in us, so as to clothe us with immortality and make us conformed to his image. He has given us power to tread unharmed upon all the power of the enemy, by the same grace by which he gave power to become sons of God to those who believe in his name, which is above every name. Let us dwell in him, because he is also the city that cannot be hidden, because it is set on a mountain, and whose foundations are in the holy mountains. ‘The Most High himself has founded’ this city, as it is written, because ‘Wisdom has built herself a house.’ This is that ‘house not made with hands,’ in which, if we dwell with those works by which we may deserve to become fellow citizens of the saints, our work will not burn; and that wise fire, as we pass through its testing, will not surround us with severe burning to punish us, but, receiving us as commended, will lick us with a gentle touch, so that we can say, ‘We passed through fire and water, and you brought us out into refreshment.’

But so that the letter may end with the same name with which it began, I will return to our Victor, for whom I owe an apology. That he is returning to you later than agreed, do not charge to his feet, which stayed longer with us not through the fault of sloth but out of eagerness to obey. Yet reckon the time, not when you said he was dismissed, but when you sent him, and you will see that the account of our agreed turns in keeping Victor stands in my favor. For he did not come to us to spend the winter, as you had written; but, as he declared, having been sent back to you from Narbonensis, where he had met brother Postumianus, he then set out from you again, when he could have reached me if he had been sent straight to me. So, as winter was already departing, I received him and had to keep him for the spring months; and because the time seemed short, until the Easter festival would soon close it, and since I had also been very ill at that time, so that I was not strong enough for the business of writing back, I added a stay of his into the summer days, to square accounts with you, if I used as much of your time in him as you had taken up of the winter days. So I will grant that, if he reaches your oneness of heart in autumn, he may again spend the winter with you; for you see that it has been so arranged by the Lord’s good pleasure that the seasons of our common friend of one heart, which we had yielded to each other, were changed, without breach of our agreement, to his greater benefit. For now it has been fittingly reversed, so that what you had written, indulging me beyond my merit and detracting from yourself, has become truer: you, truly fervent in spirit, will more wholesomely warm him in the cold season with the fiery heat of your faith, while I, being cold, will be better suited to be his summer station.

But would that I were cold rather than lukewarm, and did not make my Lord vomit, and could relieve my neighbor’s heat! As it is, I rather cause disgust from a surfeit of me to those who spend the time of my sojourn with me, being necessary neither to the chilled nor to the overheated, fit to be spewed out for the lukewarmness of my little faith by those who try to taste the flavor of my company in hope of spiritual sweetness. All the more do I wonder at your eagerness in longing for, or your patience in enduring, the annoyances of my follies. But would that as little sin accrued to me from much talking as great reward is heaped up for you from so tireless a love! For as though not wearied but rather refreshed by such a number and quantity of volumes sent before through our Victor, you have again asked through the same book-bearer that I should be more of a nuisance to you with further writings, if I can.

Besides, flattering your poor friend far too lavishly, you have bidden me teach you, as if I were more skilled, whatever escaped you in the annals not of one nation but of the human race. But let him blame his hunger on himself who knocks at a poor friend’s door and searches an empty storeroom. For I have never had a sustained zeal for investigating and collecting these matters; even in the old days, when I seemed to read what was not worth reading, I was a stranger to the historical writers. Nevertheless, now, caring for your work, in which you have told me you are occupied in examining and comparing the reckonings of past times for the benefit of our faith, what I did not have of my own I have sought from the richer treasury of a brother of one heart. I have sent the very note you had sent as a memorandum, enclosed in my letter, to Rufinus the presbyter, the companion of holy Melania on her spiritual way, a man truly holy and devoutly learned, and for this reason joined to me in the closest affection. If he does not set out the causes of these gaps in history, which rightly trouble you, concerning the disagreeing reckoning of years or reigns, he who is rich in both secular and saving letters, in Greek as well as Latin, I fear we would seek in vain from anyone else in these regions. But if he satisfies my confidence in him, at the first opportunity, if the Lord favors, I will send to your oneness of heart whatever he writes back to me on this question.

Meanwhile, to carry out something of your commands, I have sent some of the things which I fear may be evidence of my sloth or imprudence rather than signs of heavenly ministry, or even proofs of human wisdom. Still I have sent you, that is, entrusted to my own heart, my trifles, not so that my darkness may pollute your mind, but so that it may be washed away by your mind. I have called them my trifles with respect to my words and thoughts; for the rest, the subject is holy and more worthy of your talent and eloquence, and even if it is clothed by my words as in a dark garment, it keeps nevertheless the beauty of divine light and of inward comeliness, though in the cheapness of poor furnishing. You have, then, two little books from me. One is in verse, a birthday poem, from my yearly song to my patron, to whom I pay daily with body and spirit, and yearly with my tongue, the sweetest tribute of a voluntary servitude, offering to Christ on the festal day of his consecration a sacrifice of praise and paying my vows to the Most High. The other little book is one of those which I may be held to have written for a blessed man, that is, a Christian, my friend Endelechius, though I shall not be convicted of having published it. For he was the instigator of this little work in the Lord, as his letter, prefixed to my book as its theme, shows. I confess that I gladly took on this labor from my friend so that I might praise in Theodosius not so much an emperor as a servant of Christ, powerful not in the pride of ruling but in the humility of serving, and a prince not by kingship but by faith.