Letters 29.1–29.14

The immoderate love which, as we charge, speaks of our burden in your letters you have tempered with a fitting and moderate kindness in gifts, to our benefit. For you have sent cloaks woven of camel’s hair, which are necessary for sinners in need both of the prayer of lamentation and of its dress, to admonish us with useful goads as we lie prostrate in the sight of the Most High, so that, as we are pricked by the roughness of the bristles, we may also be pricked by horror at our sins and inwardly crushed in spirit, while the garment chafes us outwardly. Besides, many gains for shaping faith are gathered in their use from the remembrance of the saints of old. There come to mind Elijah, taken up, and John, sent ahead: the one was girded with a belt bristling with hair, the other was clothed, as it is written, with a shaggy covering of camel’s hair. We remember also David and all his meekness, by which, sacrificing to God a contrite and humbled heart, he put on sackcloth and covered his soul with fasting, so as to clothe it with spiritual fullness. From this we learn that the garment of the soul is that fasting by which we abstain from all that the divine law forbids. We know this also from the stripping of the first parents, who were laid bare once they had stopped fasting from the forbidden food. And the prophet himself teaches us with what kind of fasting he protected his soul from the nakedness of shame, when he says to the Lord, ‘I have kept my foot from every evil way, that I may keep your word.’

From this same woolwork of your gift that camel of the gospel also presents itself to us, which passes through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man into the kingdom of heaven. Thinking from this of our riches, which now remain only in sins, since we cannot aspire to virtues like those of the divine men, we long that at least the grace of that tax collector may come to us, who, accusing himself before God in a crushed heart, beating his afflicted breast with repeated blows, and not daring to raise to heaven his eyes cast down in the shame of conscience, with that iniquity of vices like a camel’s hump, so drew himself into due humility and straightened himself by the leveling of a repentant soul that he entered the eye of the needle, that is, the way of the Word or of the cross, which leads by a narrow path to life, and penetrated the divine ears. For ‘the prayer of one who humbles himself,’ it says, ‘pierces the clouds.’ On the other hand, that Pharisee, rich in the spirit of his boasting, who, by reckoning works that were owed (for by the law he was a debtor to do them) as though he had done them freely beyond what was owed, proclaimed himself and accused another, and who confronted God rather than asked him, could not enter, because narrow places do not take in the overloaded. Broad boasting could not be received where narrow humility drew itself together and, narrower than the narrow, slipped in by the thinness of a contrite heart.

May your prayers intervene, so that the needle of the Lord’s cross, threaded with the saving Word, may mend my soul, torn by much corruption and rashly stitched together with the thorns of my senses. For I consider this needle to be faith and the word of the cross of Christ, by which the garment of our life is renewed, our mind is pricked, and we ourselves are sewn to God through the intervention of the Mediator himself. In it too is that eye, because through him and in him is that way to life, desirable to many, passable to few, through which humbled iniquity enters more easily than proud righteousness. All the more thanks do we owe you as spiritual physicians, who confer even fleshly gifts on us for spiritual benefit, sending us these cloaks as a goad to prayer and a garment of humility, like the basket of dung for that barren fig tree. In this, it seems to me, is shown the eternal usefulness of devout humility, which makes the barren soul fruitful, so that it may not, pleasing itself like that Pharisee through the empty show of arrogance, run riot like an unhappy tree in foliage useless for fruit. How good and useful such dung is for the cultivation of salvation we are taught in blessed Job, who, after he sat on the dunghill, ceased to be tempted. For he had used up the tempter’s envy by perfect humility, which can more easily rise than be thrown down. For one who sits on the dung has nowhere to fall from; he has a place from which to rise through him who raises the needy from the earth and lifts the poor from the dunghill, and brings the proud down to the dung, because, as it is written, everyone who is proud is unclean before God. And so the one who accused his own iniquity is more righteous before God than the one who proclaimed his righteousness: the latter accused himself by praising himself, the former defended himself by accusing himself.

And so, flattering ourselves in nothing about our works, let us always commend our spirit into his hands, since with him is the fountain of life. Let us ask of him understanding of our way, since a man’s steps are directed by the Lord. And even if we are able to do his commandments by his help, we must still confess our unprofitableness, because we cannot claim credit for service that is owed, if we only do what is commanded. For that servant is unprofitable and wicked who adds nothing by a willing affection to what the duty owed requires; he will have no ground to hope for a reward if he pays only the services of his condition. Therefore, even when we fulfill the commandments, as I often write to you, let us always fear, saying to the Lord, ‘Do not enter into judgment with your servant, for no one living will be justified in your sight.’ The humility of confession may at least claim us before the Lord as modest men, whom the usefulness of strenuous service cannot commend, since we are sluggish. For the Ninevites too prove how great a remedy it is for a sinner before the divine mercy not to spare himself, since, reconciled to God by the support of repentance, they deserved to escape the destruction announced, because by tormenting themselves with voluntary mourning they forestalled God’s sentence with their own.

We, though we can repay nothing worthy in words or in things, yet with the one resource of love in which alone we are your equals, have sent a tunic, which please accept from my use as a rag gathered from the cheapness of the dung heap. For this at least suits your innocence: woven from the tender fleece of lambs, it is gentle to the touch. I add further to its value and charm that, to prove it the more worthy of your use, it is a keepsake to me from the blessing of Melania, a holy woman and illustrious among the saints of God. Hence it seemed more worthy of you, whose faith is closer to her than our blood. Yet I confess that I dared, although I had destined it for you as soon as I received it, to wear it first by breaking it in with my own use, knowing that I would do you more service by this wrong than if I had honored you with its untouched newness, and at the same time so that I might take a blessing in advance as from what was already your garment, so that I may boast that I am a sharer of your clothing, having put on, by God’s favor, the tunic that was to be for your use as if it had already been so.

The Lord added this grace to your gifts and letters, that brother Victor arrived among us precisely in the days when we welcomed that holy woman herself returning from Jerusalem after twenty-five years. And what a woman, if one may call her a woman, so manfully Christian! What shall I do here? The fear of intolerable tedium forbids me to add further to my volumes; but the dignity of the person, or rather the grace of God, seems to require that I not hastily pass over the remembrance of so great a soul, and that I turn the course of my discourse aside for a little to tell you of her, as sailors, when they see some remarkable spot on the shore, do not sail past it, but shorten sail a little or rest on their oars and feast their eyes in a pause of gazing. In this way I may seem to make some return to your book, illustrious in subject and eloquence, if I portray a woman, the lesser sex, serving as Christ’s soldier with the virtues of Martin, who, noble from consular grandfathers, made herself nobler by despising bodily nobility.

I think this too belongs to the abundance of divine grace, that I begin to proclaim holiness worthy of praise from praise of her lineage. But that this order is taken no more from rhetorical rules than from gospel examples, the most learned Luke is my witness, who wove the merit of the blessed Baptist from the brilliance of his origin. And lest you think he mentioned the noble parent of the Lord’s forerunner only for the sake of history, he joins the venerable insignia of ancient nobility, each with its own pedigree, saying that the priest Zechariah was of the course of Abijah, I believe in order to show by that very fact the dignity of his merit, adding a name from the priestly fillets, which was no doubt distinguished among the Hebrews, by whose course he exercised the priesthood honorably allotted to him. Then he adds, ‘and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron.’ You see that the evangelist built a discourse on the merits of saints from mention of their birth, so that he set ancestral names before those he was about to praise for their own merits: ‘and his wife,’ he says, ‘was of the daughters of Aaron.’ He increased the priest’s merit by mentioning the nobility of his marriage, and, about to praise their life, he first praised their lineage, so that he might appear more venerable who answered to holy parents with inborn holiness, as by a kind of inheritance of righteousness, and who bore that chief name among priests, Aaron, succeeding to it in office as to honor and in his wife as to descent. And she who in harmony on the road drew the yoke of truth with her husband, being chosen to bear the one of whom it is written, ‘Behold, I will send my angel before your face,’ appeared the worthier both of a priest husband and of a son to be preferred to the prophets, because not only a life of righteousness but also the privilege of family had made her fit for divine endowments. Indeed, of the Lord’s own birth too, besides that which flows from the divine fountain, two evangelists begin this one also, by which he deigned to be son of man, by listing his ancestors from the beginning, each writer recording a different vein of bodily blood with equal faith and dignity, because it was fitting that the only-begotten of God and firstborn of all creation and head of the whole body should hold the first place even in the dignity of bodily descent, so that the one Son of God in heaven, born before the ages by an ineffable origin, might claim for himself on earth too the summits of illustrious titles, the famous offspring, as two authors testify, of kings and priests alike. Therefore we shall not seem to use another’s rule rather than our own if we proclaim earthly nobility too in the aforesaid handmaid of God, since it is clear that the Lord brought this too to the glory of his work, so that this world, which glories in such titles, might be the more confounded, and that what human vanity uses for contempt of God she might use rather for contempt of the world. At the same time, a greater authority of saving example would be shown for humbling the eyes of the proud: a woman of higher rank cast down sublimely to the practice of humility for love of Christ, so that, strong in the weaker sex, she might rebuke sluggish men, and, rich made poor and noble humbled, she might confound arrogant persons of both sexes.

So, with Marcellinus the consul as her grandfather, she was married while still of tender years, through the ambition of her family and the luxury of wealth, and soon became a mother; but she did not long enjoy that happiness of mortals, lest she should long love earthly things. For besides other bereavements, which she mourned with her husband still sharing them, in the vain labor of miscarriages, she grew so in afflictions that she lost two sons and her husband within the space of a year, with only one little boy left to her, as a reminder rather than a compensation for her affections. But from the seeds of our evils, by the Lord’s providence, come the causes of heavenly goods for us: through the losses of human affection she conceived divine devotion. She was made wretched so that she might become blessed. She was struck so that she might be healed, since ‘I will strike and I will heal,’ says the Lord. So great is the goodness of the supreme Father that even his anger comes from mercy, and therefore he chastises in order to spare. Indeed, the blessed apostle was blinded so that he might be enlightened; the persecutor fell so that the apostle might rise; on the road he found the way, and on the way of impiety he recognized the way of peace. So in the same way the good Lord, at every time, with the same outlays of his goodness toward us too, the least, ‘working until now,’ as he himself testified, ‘the works of the Father,’ rebuked this holy woman too with fatherly love, not because he found her unfaithful but to make her perfect; in mercy he scourged her with trials, so as to crown her for patience: ‘for he scourges every son whom he receives.’ So, escorted by the mournful procession of three funerals, widowed and bereaved at once, she came to Rome with her only son, who kindled her tears rather than consoled them, whether the infant, feeling evils before he could know himself, already knew enough to mourn another’s death while he did not yet know his own life, or whether, ignorant and sadly secure in infancy, he laughed at pitiful play amid his mother’s laments.

Taught by these lessons not to be bounded by a fragile world, and to place her hope only in God, whom alone we cannot lose against our will, she put on a knowledge saving for herself and her son: to love her little one by neglecting him and to keep him by letting him go, being sure to hold him more firmly absent, once she had commended him to the Lord, than she would embrace him present, if she had trusted him to herself. She imitated, in the way her condition allowed, the faithful vow of barren Hannah. For a ruinous fruitfulness had made this woman too nearly barren; and, fearing to become after her fruitfulness was emptied what Hannah had been before she earned fruitfulness, she dedicated to God a different gift with like affection. This one was anxious over a pledge already born, that one over one to be conceived; that one to begin to be a mother, this one not to cease to be one. But if it is judged unlike because her son, who uses the wealth and honors of the world, was not placed in the temple to serve the Lord as Hannah’s was, see on the other side how the recompense of devotion and faith is made equal, because she paid to the Lord in her own person the same thing that glorious Hannah paid in her son. For to Hannah the vowed Samuel was afterward repaid with several births; for Melania her only son was the sum of her births and the end of her griefs. When her firstborn had been committed to service in the temple, Hannah was consoled by other children at home and by a separation from her son, however consecrated, that was not distant, and by her solemn visits to the temple. Melania, once she had cut her only son from her breast and cast him into the bosom of Christ, so that the Lord himself might nurture him, gave him no more of her anxious care, judging it a sin of distrust if she should herself take care of one whom she had entrusted to Christ. With how great faith she did this can be seen from the fact that, though she had at Rome a great number of most powerful and dear relatives, she did not deign to commend her little one to any of them even by a word, as the saying goes, to be fed, taught, or protected. So sure was she that he had been taken up by Christ. And therefore she deserved to keep him, because she was unwilling to enjoy him; and now she has deserved to see him again through the devotion of that faith by which, having once left him in God, she had not longed for him in this world. So he who is mighty to give believers more than they presume has done great things for her. Thus he added for her that she should see her son even in this place, as for Solomon, because he had chosen to ask for wisdom, he also bestowed the other riches which he had not asked for, precisely because he had not desired them. Rewarding the good understanding by which he had preferred the highest things to the lowest, he poured out the lesser things over the greater. So he who had chosen to ask for the highest things deserved to become possessor of all riches. By this example we are all admonished to be wise, as we are taught to choose. For if we put lesser things before greater and the lowest goods, that is, earthly, before heavenly, as the penalty of foolish desire we shall lack every good, the highest and the lowest alike: we shall justly not receive the former, which we did not desire, and deservedly be cheated of the latter, out of harmful love of which we neglect better things. So too father Abraham received back the only son he had offered to God, because he promptly offered him when asked. A sacrifice of devotion completed in the heart was enough for the Lord; and therefore, interposing an angel’s hand and catching the right hand of the father already brandished to strike, he substituted for the victim a ram suddenly provided, so that neither should God lack a victim nor the father his son. At the same time, the mystery to be fulfilled in Christ, rehearsed in Isaac as far as an image allowed, was shaped in the ram, since that lamb too, to be sacrificed afterward in Egypt in the figure of the Savior, was already foreshadowed in an animal of its own kind, that is, in the ram that came forward as victim in place of Isaac, so as to run ahead in figure in place of Christ. So the ram was found for the one to whom the whole of the mystery was not due; but he was slain for the one for whom the fulfillment of the sacrament was reserved.

In the very first exercises of this warfare she had many battles against the envious dragon; for the envy of the jealous enemy did not allow her to depart by an easy and peaceful leave-taking. He tried, with the whole power of her noble relatives armed to hold her back, to hinder her purpose and block her going. But she, already strengthened beyond the force of temptations, gladly loosed both the bonds of bodily affection and her ship, while all wept, and, steadfastly engaging the waves of the sea so as not only to overcome the waves of the world, she sailed; and, exchanging at once the world and the City, she chose by a spiritual gift the city of Jerusalem, in which she might be a sojourner away from the body, becoming an exile from her fellow citizens and a citizen with the saints. Wisely and holily she wished to serve in that city which is in slavery, so that she might reign in that one which is free.

Of the many virtues of God in her, I will proclaim at least one, from which all her works may be judged. In the time of Valens, when the fury of the Arians, with the emperor himself as the henchman of impiety, was persecuting the church of the living God, she was the leader, or a sharer, of all who stood firm for the faith. She received those put to flight, or accompanied those arrested. But when she had received into hiding men who, because of their outstanding faith, were attacked by the greater hatred of the heretics and were sheltered at the risk of odium to those who hid them, then, in a grave uproar kindled by the devil’s torches, she was ordered, as if obstinate against the public law, to be dragged forth and to suffer what awaited them, unless she preferred to betray them. She came forward fearlessly, eager for suffering and exulting in the injury of public exposure, though she had not waited to be dragged, flying ahead of those who were to drag her to the judge, who, confounded with reverence at her presence, did not carry out the wrath of unbelief, while he marveled at the boldness of faith. In the same storm she fed with her own bread five thousand monks in hiding for three days, so that through her hand the Lord Jesus again fed the former number in the desert, and with so much more lavish kindness now, as those in hiding were cherished with less freedom than those who once had come to the Lord of their own accord in freedom and peace. But she, neither fearing to be caught nor heedless of what was forbidden, gave her service; and though she did not wish to be recognized for the glory of the work, she was betrayed by the greatness of the deed, glorious before men by as many witnesses as she had fed, known to God alone in her conscience. Let us reckon what merit she has. Since in the history of the Kingdoms that man is celebrated who fed a hundred men of God hidden from the wrath of a king equally impious, should we doubt that she, who in a like work often surpassed this number a thousandfold, has borne fruit a hundredfold?

Now I will pass over the rest of her doings and times, and, to imitate her course, I will cross over this very voyage by which she sailed back, so as the sooner to conclude my discourse with an account of her coming to us, in which I was a spectator of God’s great grace. She was brought to the city of Naples, a short distance from the town of Nola where we live; there she was met and welcomed by her children and grandchildren, and soon hastened to Nola, to the hospitality of our lowliness, where she came to us surrounded by a showy retinue of her very wealthy kin. We saw the glory of the Lord in that journey of the mother and her children, who were indeed on it but in far different style: she sat on a lean nag cheaper than a donkey, while senators surrounding her escorted her with all the pomp of this world that honored and wealthy men could display, with swaying carriages, caparisoned horses, gilded coaches, and many wagons, so that the Appian Way groaned and glittered. But the grace of Christian humility outshone the splendors of vanity. The rich wondered at the poor saint; but our poverty laughed at them. We saw a confusion of this world worthy of God: purple, silken, and gilded trappings serving old black rags. We blessed the Lord, who makes the humble wise and the exalted, and fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty. Yet in those rich men we were amazed that very day at a spirit poor from their mother’s goods, who gloried more in their mother’s holy want than in their own visible abundance. The very glory of the Lord seemed to be at work in this, that we beheld the riches of our poor little woman in her children, so that she might already reap from here the fruit of her faith, as she looked down on her own victory over the vanity of this world, seeing close at hand all that she had left for Christ’s sake and had persevered in despising. Those children of hers, clothed in silk and accustomed to shine, each according to sex, in toga or stola, rejoiced to touch with their hands that coarse tunic, as if of rush fiber, and the cheap little cloak, and were eager to spread their garments, precious with golden fleece and art, beneath her feet and to be rubbed by her rags, judging that they were cleansed from the contagion of their riches if they deserved to pick up some dirt from her cheapest garment or footprint.

Our little hut, which, raised above the ground with an upper room, stretches out in a single portico with guest cells set between, was as it were enlarged by the Lord’s grace and offered room enough not only for the saints who came with her, who were very many, but even for the crowds of those rich men; and in it the neighboring roofs of our patron Felix resounded with the voices of boys and choirs of virgins. Nor did the guests, though of a different way of life, make a din from the other side of the same dwelling; even in them a religious modesty imitated the silence of our discipline, so that, even if they pretended not to sing along with those keeping vigil, being drowsy with sluggish bellies, they did not dare to make discord with the holy voices, composed by a faithful fear, by which, as the tumult of the worldly crowds was hushed by the calm voices of the psalm singers, even in silence they sang along. But to return to the Lord’s perfect dove: know now that so great is the power of God in this one of the weaker sex that her refreshment is in fasting, her rest in prayer, her bread in the word, her clothing in rags; her bed, on a rug and patchwork, hard on the ground, becomes soft in Scripture, by which the pleasure of reading softens the hardship of the rigid couch, and to watch in the Lord is for a holy soul to rest. The daughter of Zion has had her until now and longs for her; now the daughter of Babylon has her and admires her, because that very city is now in more respects a daughter of Zion than a daughter of Babylon. And so it wonders at her living in the obscurity of humility and the light of truth, giving incentives of faith to the rich and comforts in hardship to the poor; although she, chafing now amid the crowds of Rome for her quiet and seclusion at Jerusalem, may cry, ‘Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged! Was I put off for this, that I should now dwell with the dwellers in Kedar?’ For by this name among the Hebrews, as I have learned, darkness is meant. Therefore I think she must be congratulated on the virtues mentioned in such a way that one may fear for her present abode: that so remarkable a soul may give more to Rome than she takes from Rome, and so sit by the rivers of Babylon as to remember Zion, and, with the harp of her body hung up out of reach of all the snares and allurements of hostile Babylon, set in the steady course of her purpose as on willows ever living with native moisture, may not cease to be green, and, with the constancy of faith and the grace of virtue abiding, her leaf may not fall, so that, as her life is watched on the road, so her praise may be sung at the end.

I could not bear, brother, that she should not know about you. So that she might know God’s grace in you more fully, I revealed you to her by your own words rather than mine: for I myself read our Martin aloud to her, who is most eager for such histories. In the same way I have made you known, boasting in truth no more of you than of myself, to the venerable and most learned bishop Nicetas, who had come from Dacia and is deservedly admired by the Romans, and to very many saints of God. For it is my glory that you are loved and cherished, whom a life in tune with your tongue proves a servant of the truth. May the Lord grant us mercy from the Lord on that day through this grace, of which he is himself the author, so that, as we are now refreshed in the bowels of your love, so we may be refreshed from the fires we deserve by the finger of your lot. For I hope that, by the Lord’s indulgence, we shall have, as those dearest to you, the support of your righteousness, even if, unworthy as we are, we dare not hope to share your crown.