Letters 32.6–32.25

Having given these verses to the handmade works of your oneness of heart, I could not keep silent about that grace of God not made by hands in your house church, by which he has granted you Clarus as a perpetual guest in it. So I have dared to compose verses to his holy memory and to send them to your oneness of heart, not because I could say anything worthy of his divine merits, but to express the zeal of my very great love for his soul. Reciting them before the Lord to his holy soul, which always dwells as a fellow guest with you in the Lord, you will excuse my boldness and commend my service. ‘Clarus the presbyter, bright in mind as in the title of his name, is covered here; but his perishing limbs are in the tomb; his mind, free from the prison of the body, rejoices among the stars, pure, having been allotted the seat of the approved and godly. His holy bones rest under eternal altars, so that, while the chaste gifts of Christ are offered by the devout, the fragrances of his soul may be joined to the divine rites.’ Likewise on the same subject, so that you may choose which you prefer; but I know that in this you ought rather to hesitate, not so as to choose some of them for the inscription, but lest you should be bound to do an injury to God’s saint by any of them. ‘Here lies the presbyter, bright in merits and in name, Clarus, Martin’s companion in pursuits and now partner in merit. Altars are a worthy home for the devout man, under which his body is laid, lifeless; for his spirit rejoices in the heavens and joins the disciple to his equal master above the stars. Clarus, bright in faith, brighter in deed, brightest in fruit, who match the title of your name by your merits, chaste altars worthily veil your body, so that the altar of God may cover a temple of Christ. But since you are not held in this seat, where your body is, but as a spirit fly about among the heavenly ones by your merits, whether you recline in the bosoms of the fathers, or are laid under the altar of the Lord, or are fed in the sacred grove, in whatever region of heaven or paradise you are placed, Clarus, you live blessed in eternal peace. Receive kindly these prayers of sinners who ask you to be mindful of Paulinus and Therasia. Love those commended to you by the intercession of Severus, whom you did not know in the body, sinners as we are. Let the common love of one heart be for both a kindling of a perpetual covenant in the highest Lord. You cannot tear apart those intertwined; if you draw one, the one will draw with him those who cling to him as he is carried off. So embrace together the inseparable brothers, and, as we are, so love us, sharing us. So God summoned us, so Martin loved us; so do you, Clarus, protect equals, equal not in merit but in love. You, holy one, will be able to obtain by prayer that we become equals also in merit, if you labor with Martin in shared devotion, so that your prayers may overcome our sins, and that we may be led together in the lot of your Severus, and that your wing may always protect us in its bosom.’

But if the Lord fulfills the desire of your soul according to your faith, adding to the adornment and sanctification of your works, so that you obtain sacred ashes from the blessed relics of the glorious apostles or martyrs (for we have learned that in the confident expectation of this wish you have prepared another basilica at our Primuliacum, larger than the former), we think it worthy of the work of your faith, and fitting for the dedication of a work faithfully labored, which will no doubt be very famous, and for the relics of the saints too, that you should venerate this piece of the cross that we have sent laid up and consecrated together with them. If you so decide, these lines, if you think fit, will announce your decision: ‘The revered altars cover a divine covenant, the martyrs laid together with the holy cross. All the witnesses of the saving Christ come together: the cross, the body, the blood of the martyr, God himself. For God always keeps his gifts for you; and where Christ is, there are the Spirit and the Father. So where the cross is, the martyr is there too, because the cross is the martyr’s, which was the devout cause of martyrdom for the saints. It brought forth for mortals the food of life; it brought forth the crowns that make servants sharers with their Lord. On the cross was fixed the flesh by which I am fed; from the cross flows that blood by which I drink life and wash my heart. Christ, let these gifts of yours come together for your Severus; let him be the bearer and witness of your cross. Let him live by your flesh; let your blood give him drink; let him live and act in your word. And where he saw your Martin ascend with his companion Clarus, let him too go, carried by your gift.’

But if you would rather have this blessing from the cross ready to hand for daily protection and healing, lest, once enclosed in the altar, it should not always be at hand, as use requires, then the grace of the apostles and martyrs is enough for the consecration of the basilica, if we leave it to them; and if their venerable ashes are placed beneath the altars without the companionship of the cross, this inscription will point out what is hidden: ‘The glory of the divine table veils pledges of the saints, sprung from apostolic bodies; and the Spirit of the Lord, at hand with healing powers, proves by living evidence that the ashes are holy. So a twofold grace breathes upon devout prayers, worked by the martyrs below and by the sacred rites above. The precious death of the saints, in a little dust, helps the prayers of the priest and the welfare of the living.’

You have verses unworthy indeed of your holy and magnificent works, but suited to the opinion you hold of me, which you believe more than I do. If you are not ashamed to inscribe them on the walls of your house church for people to look at, I shall be avenged. For I believe that then at least you will blush at my follies and repent of your desire and your demand, when you look, confounded, at the buildings, which now shine with the spotless grace of your work, darkened by the dirges of my folly and, to use a word worthy of my verses, smeared with soot, while many laugh or feel sick. Nor will you labor to deceive, so that the reader thinks you the author; and since the folly cannot instruct the reader, being known to no one in you, take care that he does not lay my poem, that is, my crime, on you, though you are to blame either as the betrayer or as the writer. But lest anyone judge me unjust by that rule which prescribes, ‘What you would not have done to you, do not do to another,’ you will prove to him by the evidence here present that I first subjected my own basilicas to the same thing, so that you may show this too of our oneness of heart, that, comparing myself to you either as a favor or as an injury, I have sinned against your buildings with the same rashness as against my own. But let our Victor be held by you as the author or the culprit of this, whether favor, as your most patient mind toward me will take it, or injury, as my most unworthy gift deserves: he, the most holy interpreter of our love, presumed that he would return from us the more welcome to you, the more weighed down he came back under the unjust load of our follies to you. For he wished this too to be added to his bundles, that he should bring you the verses and the pictures of our basilicas together. And rightly he will do so, if he comes in to you fainting and bent with this complaint, crying, ‘Behold, because of the words of your lips I have walked hard ways,’ and crying, ‘On my back sinners have built, who have prolonged their iniquity into so many letters.’

So I have taken on this too, to add to the heap of my sins: to give our brother, most eager for such a load, by which his soul might be lightened as his body was weighed down, the injury he desired. For this request of his seemed truly fitting to our oneness of heart, as he argued that our buildings in the Lord ought to become known to you just as you had wished to show yours to us in inscriptions and pictures. Persuaded by this reasoning, I have taken care to join our basilicas to yours in writing, as they are joined in the time of their building and the kind of their vow, so that in this too our union might be figured, which is joined in souls and separated by places. So these buildings too, which we have built with labor in the name of the Lord in the same Spirit, though divided by different regions, will be seen sealed together, as it were, in the sequence of one letter. The basilica, then, which has now been dedicated in the name of the Lord Christ God to our lord and common patron, and is celebrated as added to his four basilicas, is venerable not only for the honor of blessed Felix, but for relics of apostles and martyrs consecrated under the altar within the triple-apsed apse. The apse, faced with marble on floor and walls, is brightened by a vault adorned with mosaic, whose picture has these verses: ‘The Trinity shines in its full mystery: Christ stands as a lamb, the Father’s voice thunders from heaven, and through the dove the Holy Spirit flows. A crown encircles the cross with a shining ring, and the crown of this crown is the apostles, whose figure is in the choir of doves. The holy unity of the Trinity meets in Christ, who also has his own threefold emblems: the Father’s voice and the Spirit reveal him as God; the cross and the lamb proclaim him the holy victim; the purple and the palm show his kingship and triumph. He himself, the rock of the church, stands upon a rock, from which flow four sounding springs, the evangelists, the living rivers of Christ.’

On the lower band, where a ledge of plaster set between them joins or divides the boundary of wall and vault, this inscription points out the holy things of the saints laid beneath the altar: ‘Here is devotion, here kindly faith, here the glory of Christ; here the cross is joined to its martyrs. For from the wood of the cross a short splinter is a great pledge, and the whole power of the cross is in the tiny fragment. Brought to Nola as the gift of holy Melania, this highest good came from the city of Jerusalem. The holy altars veil a twofold honor for God, joining apostolic ashes with the cross. How well the bones of the devout are joined to the wood of the cross, so that those killed for the cross may have rest in the cross!’

The whole space of the basilica outside the apse is widened under a high coffered roof by twin porticoes on either side, along which a double row of columns runs, arch by arch. Within the porticoes four rooms on each side, set into the long sides of the basilica, provide places for those who pray in private or meditate on the law of the Lord, and also places suited to the memorials of the religious and their families for the rest of eternal peace. Every room is marked by two verses over the front of its threshold, which I did not wish to insert in this letter; but I have written out those at the entrances of the basilica itself, because you could use them, if you wish, and they could suit the doors of your basilicas, such as this: ‘Peace be to you, whoever you are who enter the inner sanctuary of God in Christ, pure, with a peaceful heart.’ Or this, on the sign of the Lord painted above the entrance in the form the verse indicates: ‘See the crowned cross of the Lord stand above the courts of Christ, promising lofty rewards for hard labor; take up the cross, you who wish to carry off the crown.’ At the other basilica, where an entrance opens, as if private, from the little garden or orchard, these lines open this more secluded door: ‘Enter the heavenly ways through the pleasant green, worshipers of Christ; it is fitting that the way in should be from glad gardens, from which a holy exit into paradise is given to the deserving.’ This same door is marked on its inner face by other verses: ‘You who leave the house of the Lord when the prayers have been completed in order, go back in body, remain in heart.’

The front of the basilica does not face east, as is the more usual custom, but toward the basilica of my lord the blessed Felix, looking toward his tomb. Still, since the apse curves out and widens within its spacious circuit with two little side apses, right and left, one of them is open to the bishop as he offers the sacrifices of jubilation, and the other receives in its ample bay those who pray behind the priest. With a most joyful prospect this whole basilica opens at once into the basilica of the aforesaid confessor through a lattice screen gleaming with three equal arches, by which the roofs and spaces of both basilicas are joined to each other. For since a wall, blocked by the apse of a certain tomb set between them, shut off the new from the old, it was opened on the confessor’s side by as many doors as the new one was opened by doorways at its front entrance, and so it presents, as it were, a perforated view to those looking from each into the other, as is shown by inscriptions placed between the two sets of doors. So at the very entrances of the new basilica there are these lines: ‘The kindly house lies open to those who enter by a triple arch, and the threefold door bears witness to the devout faith.’

Likewise, to right and left, over crosses painted in red, are these epigrams: ‘The lofty cross is encircled by the ring of a flowery crown and is red, dyed with the Lord’s shed blood. And the doves that sit upon the heavenly sign show that the kingdom of God lies open to the simple.’ ‘By this cross kill us to the world and the world to us, giving life to our souls by the death of guilt. You will make us too doves pleasing to you, Christ, if your peace flourishes in pure hearts.’

Within the screen itself, by which that short interval that rather separated the neighboring basilicas is bridged, facing the new basilica, above the middle arch, are these verses: ‘As Jesus, our peace, broke down the middle wall and, destroying the division by the cross, made the two into one, so we see the new roofs, the dividing wall of the old building destroyed, joined by a covenant of doors. A gleaming basin runs through the holy courts with water for servants and washes the hands of those entering with its ministering stream. A twin people adores Christ in the hall of Felix, which Paul the bishop governs with apostolic voice.’ These epigrams, marked by two lines each, are above the other arches, to right and left: ‘A new light opens to astonished eyes, and standing on one threshold one sees two halls at once.’ On another: ‘The two halls have opened by thrice twin arches, and they admire each other’s adornments through the shared thresholds.’ Likewise on the same arches, on the face that opens toward the basilica of lord Felix, on the middle one, are these: ‘You whom devout faith urges, in dense crowds, to celebrate blessed Felix from different directions, pour in your throngs freely through the triple entrances; the courts will stand spacious however countless you are, which, joined to each other close at hand by open arches, Paul the bishop dedicates to eternal use.’ On the others are these two: ‘You who have left the ancient hall of holy Felix, cross into the new building of Felix.’ ‘One faith, which worships the One under a threefold name, receives those of one heart by a threefold entrance.’

In the two sacristies, which I said above are beside the apse, these verses indicate the purpose of each. On the right of the apse: ‘Here is the place where the venerable store is kept, and from which the kindly procession of the sacred ministry is brought forth.’ On the left of it: ‘If a holy will to meditate on the law holds anyone, here he can sit and give attention to the sacred books.’

Let us now leave this basilica at Nola and pass over to the one at Fundi. Fundi is the name of a town which was equally familiar to me while I still held the estate there that I used most. So it was my desire to give a basilica in that very town, whether as a pledge of a sort of civic love or as a memorial of my former inheritance, since it needed one, having a small and ruinous one. So I thought I should add these lines too, which we are preparing for the basilica to be dedicated in that town. It is still under construction, but, by God’s favor, near its dedication. What most persuaded me was that my Victor loved the picture designed for its apse and wanted to bring it to you, in case you should choose one of the two to paint in your more recent basilica, in which he told me an apse had likewise been made. But whether I should rather say absida or absis, you must decide; I confess that I do not know, because I do not remember having read this kind of word. This little basilica too the sacred ashes from the blessed relics of the apostles and martyrs will consecrate, in the name of Christ, the Holy of holies, the Martyr of martyrs, and the Lord of lords. For he himself has testified that he will in turn be the confessor of his confessors. So over it, besides the picture, the inscription is doubled in grace. On the picture: ‘The labor and the reward of the saints rightly belong together: the hard cross and the lofty prize of the cross, the crown. God himself, the leader for us of cross and crown, among the heavenly grove of flowering paradise, Christ stands as a snow-white lamb beneath the blood-red cross, the lamb given as an innocent victim to an unjust death, on whom, as he gapes, the Holy Spirit pours down in the form of a gentle bird, and whom the Father crowns from a ruddy cloud. And because he stands above on a lofty rock as judge, around his throne stand the two kinds of animals, the goats at odds with the lambs; the Shepherd turns away the goats on his left and embraces the lambs that have served their time on his right.’ ‘See, beneath the lighted altars a royal slab of purple marble covers the bones of the devout. Here grace presents apostolic powers too, in great pledges in a little dust. Here are father Andrew, and Luke of great name, and Nazarius, a martyr illustrious for his blood, and those whom God revealed to his Ambrose after long ages, Protasius with his peer Gervasius. Here one little casket embraces the holy company together and holds such great names in its small bosom.’

These, meanwhile, my brother, and other visible works of this kind I had built with labor from earthly things on earth. But blessed be the Lord day by day, who alone does wonders; as he turned the rock into a pool of water, so he changes earthly things into heavenly, and deigns to make this exchange with us, though from things that are his both here and there, so that what I had built bodily on earth may be built hiddenly in heaven by him, to be revealed to us then, when we shall see with direct sight what we now foresee by faith. So here we sow and there we reap; here we scatter and there we gather; here we live and there we have our citizenship; here we are girded and there we serve as soldiers; here we fight and there we conquer, or, if we conquer here, there we are crowned. So what we build here by hand we found there by faith. And the building of these structures, though earthly, if it is raised with spiritual desire and zeal, is for us the blessed preparation of heavenly dwellings. For, building these in the Lord out of the attainment of faith, we ourselves are built up by the Lord through the progress of the same faith. For that centurion of the gospel is an example to us of the sure hope of receiving an eternal reward specially for this kind of work: he succeeded in earning his son’s healing, and in having the Lord Jesus himself as the herald of his faith, chiefly by this merit, that the Lord’s people, which then was still only among the Jews, supported him with the testimony that he had built the synagogue.

Why then, wretched men, do we now rest yawning, and stand empty-handed in the noisy marketplace of this world like hired men not yet engaged? Or, if we consider that, being hired, we owe the householder for his denarius some work in his vineyard, why do we perform this very work as though not owed but as a favor, and even plan to charge it to the Lord, as though we were doing what would profit him rather than ourselves? O wretched men! We think we are giving something; we are trading, and we are thought generous when we are proved most avaricious, indeed as much more avaricious than the greediest moneylenders of the earth as it is greater to buy heavenly things with earthly and blessed things with wretched and needy ones than to trade earthly for earthly and perishable for perishable, and to lend to the Lord rather than to man. In the law he is condemned who has given his money at interest and taken gifts against the innocent. See, the grace of the gospel shows us how these same crimes are changed into innocence and holiness, and how not punishment but reward follows as recompense, if only they are turned to the divine commandments by the saving greed of faith. Give your money at interest, but to Christ, and the interest is saving.

Likewise, in the world judges corrupted by the gifts of defendants are condemned; but whoever you are, man, caught in some sin and distrusting your innocence, bring the price of your salvation to our Judge, and do not fear that you are doing God’s justice the wrong of corruption. Christ gladly accepts from you the price of your salvation, because he desires mercy more than sacrifice. But perhaps you ask where you may find him, and by what way you may corrupt one whom you do not see. ‘Rise,’ it says, ‘you who sleep, and arise from the dead,’ and you will touch Christ; that is, shake off the sleep of fleshly sloth, and raise from dead cares, that is, from fleshly living, your mind weighed down by earthly thought, lifting and directing your soul to the Lord, and you will touch Christ. By working at his commandments you will see him in every poor man, touch him in every needy man, receive him in every stranger, since he himself testifies that what is done to his least ones in his name is done to him. See, you now know how you may see the invisible and grasp the ungraspable. So let us be poor here now, so that we may be rich there then. Let us weep now, so that we may rejoice then. Let us hunger now, so that we may be filled then. ‘You have the poor,’ he says, ‘always with you.’ You see that we never have any reason to put off doing good, since, if our will is not lacking, the poor man is at hand.

Let us then lend confidently now to the needy man, and to Christ in his poor, so that we may share in his glory, which will abound in them. For this is why the Lord himself warns us, saying, ‘Make friends for yourselves of the unrighteous mammon.’ You see how the Almighty makes light out of night and righteousness out of unrighteousness, ‘so that when you fail,’ he says, ‘they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.’ For the human race is balanced by a kind of exchange of plenty and want, as the gospel word revealed in the rich man in hell and the poor man in the kingdom above, so that we may understand the counsel of the common Creator, by which he prepared the rich man for the poor and the poor for the rich: that the wealth of the one who abounds may be sustenance to the needy, and the poor may be material for righteousness to the wealthy, so that there may be, as the apostle said, equality; and in that age, when their present need is repaid with eternal riches, their abundance may overflow to our want, if our abundance here has been lent to their need. Let us sow fleshly things there, then, so that we may reap spiritual things from them. Let the hand labor now with earthly things, so that the soul may then be refreshed with heavenly ones. Let present hope build the future reality. Let us make roofs here that may cover us there. Let the poor man be fed here, where he needs me who am rich, so that he may feed me there, where he will be filled while I am in need. See the spiritual commerce, and, if you can, deny that we are greedy, who sell earth and tribute in order to buy the immunity of the kingdom together with eternity.

We lay down fragile sand in order to found an eternal house, and with cheap rubble we reach the stars. From it we are not contriving, in vain labor, that tower of confusion and pride which was to be destroyed; rather we are founded on the very cornerstone, so that through him we may rise into the fullness of him who is ‘a tower of strength before the face of the enemy.’ This tower he himself commands us to build, having first counted the cost, lest, our building broken off and ourselves defeated, we bear the brand of improvident rashness and the deserved mockery of a sloth that was boldly undertaken in vain. Our cost is firm faith. So, believing according to the truth of God, whoever has the Lord Jesus as his hope, his wealth, and his strength, his whole building, fitted together, grows and rises, and it is an ascent into the fullness of God. So ‘unless the Lord builds the house,’ we shall sweat in vain labor as builders. But lest, even when the building is complete with the Lord’s cooperation, we lie back and let our hands drop in security, divine Scripture adds that, even when the house is built, unless the same God guards it, the care of the watchmen will keep watch in vain.

Let us pray to the Lord, then, that while we build for him outwardly dwellings that are seen, he may build within us those that are not seen, namely that house, as the teacher says, ‘not made with hands,’ which we shall understand when we have entered it at the last, seeing then face to face what we now see in a riddle and know in part. But now, while we are still set in the tent of this body, living as it were under the skins and curtains of that ancient tabernacle in the desert, with the Word of God going before us through the dry land of this world, either in the pillar of cloud, to overshadow our head in the day of battle, or in the pillar of fire, so that we may know his heavenly way on earth, let us pray that through these tabernacles of the church we may now enter ‘even to the house of God,’ where, as the Lord himself, the highest, stands the stone ‘made for us by the Lord,’ cut from the mountain and grown into a mountain, which ‘is marvelous in our eyes.’ May he now offer himself both as foundation and as summit for our building, because he is the beginning and the end. On that same rock (for ‘the rock was Christ’), apart from which no one can found a stable house, let our hands not heap up stubble or hay and chaff, as those who served in Egypt with the basket, lest, as they say, we wash a brick with muddy buildings of sordid works, and, bent under the burdens of slavish labors, turn our back away from the Lord, because, as he refreshes with light those who turn to him, so he afflicts with blindness those who turn away.

As builders, let us see what we can build, out of our fragile and earthly substance, worthy of the divine foundation, so that, made alive by the chief stone himself, we may be fitted as living stones into the structure of the heavenly temple. Let us melt down in Christ the gold of our understanding and the silver of our speech, so that, purified in the furnace of this world, he, the examiner of the souls pleasing to him, may make us gold tried in fire and coin worthy of his image; and let us bring ourselves to him as precious stones from the works of light. Let us not be hard in heart with the stiffness of wood, nor dry in works with the dryness of hay, nor shifting and weak in faith or love with the frailty of light chaff; but, so that the work of our will may be made ready not to burn and may rise unshaken by peaceful working, let us pray the Most High for that peace for our building by which that wall was once made into the wall of the temple, so that hammer and axe and no iron tool was heard in it; and that no hostile incursion, as afterward in the rebuilding of the same temple through the hostile envy of the Persians, may hinder and break off the rising structure. For so we shall be completed into a house of prayer and peace, if no care of fleshly thoughts cuts us down and no tumult of the world drowns out our quiet. For our hammer is the care for food and the care for clothing; our axe and iron are the desire for temporal things, the nightly fear of death, hostile envy, and the affairs of this world, by whose care, if it is bad, or love, if it is good, the soul is eaten up and the mind fettered; and the peace of good will, which is strengthened when the senses are composed in religious silence, and the intention of prayer, which is directed unhindered from a free and pure heart, is torn away by the barking of fleshly cares, as by a hammer’s din or an axe’s stroke. But because he who is in us is greater than he who is in this world, the Lord is able to crush Satan under our feet, so that the prophecy may be fulfilled for us too: ‘The hammer of the whole earth is crushed.’

It is good for us, moreover, that the Lord Jesus should often revisit the temple of our heart even after it is built, coming with the scourge of his fear, to cast out of us the tables of the money changers and the sellers of oxen or doves, so that our mind may not carry on any trade of avarice, nor sluggishness stable oxen in our senses, because ‘where there are no oxen, the mangers are clean’; and that we may not be sellers of our innocence or of divine grace, lest we make the house of prayer a den of robbers. For when our senses have been purged of all the leaven of malice, our Lord Jesus Christ will gladly walk in them, and Wisdom, the power of God, which heals all our sicknesses, will stroll as in those five porticoes. For in our soul too, as in that portico by the pool that once healed, many lie sick and weak. If it hears the word of God, its healing command will drive out the leprosy of avarice, the rust of envy, the blindness of intemperance, the frenzy of anger, and the paralysis of lust; and, when we have been restored not only to the health of innocence but also to the firmness of patience, he will bid us at once not only to rise from the bed of weakness but also to take up the bed itself, so that we may carry, strong, that on which we were carried, weak. This is surely fulfilled also in the spiritual kind of our sickness or health, when our flesh, to which we lay given over as to a bed, in the chains of vices and the weakness of virtues, we afterward, made healthy, take up like that pallet when the inner man has been renewed by the word of God, through the grace of Jesus Christ, to a good and incorrupt mind, and carry it with the spirit prevailing, bearing it as it follows where we will, the flesh in which we were weak, waiting for another’s help and always forestalled by the speed of those who got into the pool first, because there was no one to stretch out a hand or to save, until he, greater than messengers and angels, as Lord of prophets and angels, came, and in mercy took up all our weakness, cleansed it by assuming it, filled the hungry soul with good things, and bade us go to our house, that one, as I said above, not made with hands, in which there will be the voice of joy and salvation, and Christ himself will be for all his own their dwelling, their kingdom, and their king, as the apostle testifies, ‘we shall always be with the Lord,’ to whom be honor and glory and power for ever.