Letters 37.1–38.11

‘As cold water to a thirsty soul, and good news from a far country,’ so was the word of your holiness a refreshment and restoration to us. We received it in a letter brief in words but long in love, from the hand of its dearest bearer, our son Candidianus, at whose grace we rejoiced, because ‘for the words of holy lips’ he pressed the unflagging beast of his weak flesh with a ready spirit into ‘hard ways,’ relying not on strength but on faith. And no doubt, strengthened through your prayers, he received as it were the wings of a dove or the feet of a deer to fulfill the ministry of love; and so, become like a giant in a small body, he rejoiced to run his course, and filled our soul with the blessing of sweetness, bringing us letters ‘more desirable than gold and very precious stone, and sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.’ By them the holy and sweet breath of your blessedness changed our mind, bitter with sins, into the sweetness of joy by spiritual delight, as Moses changed that bitter water in his hand by the wood of the mystery. For we had drawn bitterness from this, that you had not come from the City to us, as we hoped, by a short journey, you who had come to the City across such great distances of land. I confess that I was not only saddened but also put to shame by the loss of this good; for never had my sins been more plainly shown to me, not to say to others, than in that they had grudged me the light of your face from so near. For could not God’s hand, which had brought you so far, have brought you a short distance? But our sins, set like a great wall against our desires, have separated us from you. Woe is me, a wretched sinner with unclean lips, who dare to say that you were near us or we near you, when, even if you had come right to us, we would still have been equally far from your holiness; for so great a distance of virtues and remoteness of merits could not have been equalized or joined by places.

Yet the work of this devotion would have been added to the fruits of your holiness, and your reward in heaven would have grown from so devout a labor, if you had also fulfilled toward our weakness, visiting it close at hand with your face and your hand, that saying of the saving Lord, ‘The healthy have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.’ For I do not want you, man blessed by the Lord, to be so secure about us as to think that all the sicknesses of our soul, in which we have sinned and do sin against the Lord, are already healed, however much the supreme perfumer himself, who for the remedies of our salvation prepares various sweet savors of saving ointments and virtues, has made the medicine of our life not only from the outpouring of his Spirit but also from his assumption of our body. He was made, as it is written, sin for us, through the likeness of the flesh of sin, in the reality of our flesh, so that from sin he might condemn sin, that is, that he, free of sin, might condemn the root of our sin from matter previously sinful, blotting out by the blood of his passion that handwriting of the deadly decree which was against us; and he slew in himself the enmity by which we were separated from God, our sins coming between, and triumphed over the hostile powers by his flesh, giving us an example of living and conquering within ourselves our spiritual and invisible enemies in a spiritual and invisible battle, which is waged between the law of the mind and the law of the flesh striving to take us captive into the law of sin.

But pray to the Lord and entreat him that he may take hold of arms and shield and rise up to help us and say to our soul, ‘I am your salvation,’ lest our way become darkness and a slippery place, and the shadow of death cover us, and the enemy say, ‘I have prevailed against them.’ With you stretching the bow of prayer for us, we shall not be turned into a crooked bow. Let God arise in us, that our enemies may be scattered, because for the misery of the needy and the groaning of the poor, of whom we are partners, the Lord has arisen to turn our evils back upon our enemies and to save sinners, of whom we are the chief, as the least of Christ’s servants, who cannot do even what we owe, when we ought to add, beyond what is owed by the law, some voluntary gift by our own affection, as the teacher himself did, whose imitator you are, who, having the right to live by the gospel, nevertheless would not use his right, and, renouncing what was lawful, found this occasion of heaping up reward with Christ, that he made the gospel free of charge.

Your holiness, however, holds the rich glory of Christian poverty not only from renouncing what is lawful and abstaining from visible comforts, but also, as I have learned, from the multitude of your adversaries and from enduring trials, since ‘unjust witnesses have risen up against you, and iniquity has lied to itself.’ But no knot in a bulrush, no spot in the light, could be found; for your lamp did not lie hidden under a bushel, but stands out and shines brightly on the holy lampstand, to give light to all who are in the house, and to be the kindling for many lights to be lit for the Lord. And so your lampstand remained unshaken and stable, because it was pushed by human hands to make it fall. But you did not deserve that it should be moved to ruin by the hand of him who holds the seven stars and walks among the seven golden lampstands, having in his mouth the two-edged sword, with which he has armed the right hand of your mind, so that by the torch of both Testaments you may victoriously quench the burning darts of the enemy, and that a thousand may fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand, but not come near you, whom the truth of God will cover with an impregnable shield, so that the bows of those who are said to have sharpened the swords of their tongues against you may be weakened. But their blows have become weak as the arrows of little children, and they could find no place for a wound in a body hedged by the mighty arms of God; for the Lord is your protection, and the Lord the light of your heart, who has instructed you in the spirit of truth, so that in Paul’s teaching you are a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth, proclaiming the mystery of Christ not with the puffing up of knowledge nor in loftiness of speech, but declaring that you know nothing among men but Christ Jesus and him crucified.

Since, then, your faith and confession, as we believe and trust, testify that the co-eternal Trinity is of one divinity, substance, work, and kingdom, and hold God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, who is and was and is to come, who sent you, like Moses and the apostles, to preach the good things of the Lord to the Gentiles, you teach, as you have yourself been taught by God, joining the unity of the Trinity without confusion and distinguishing the Trinity of that unity without separation, so that no person is identical with another, and in every person of the three the one God shines out; and the Son is as great as the Father, as great as the Holy Spirit, but each, always distinguished by the property of his own name, keeps undivided concord in equality of power and glory.

We are certain, too, that you so preach the Son of God as not to be ashamed to confess the same as Son of man, as truly man in our nature as truly God in his own: but the Son of God before the ages, because he is the Word of God, God, who was in the beginning with God, equally God, co-almighty and co-worker with the Father. ‘For all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.’ And this Word, by a mystery of boundless godliness, ‘was made flesh and dwelt among us,’ not only the flesh of our body, but the whole man, by the assumption of both our body and our soul, and a rational soul, which by God’s natural workmanship has a mind implanted in it. Otherwise we shall wander in the darkness of Apollinaris, if we say that the man assumed by God had a soul empty of human mind, such as that of cattle and beasts of burden, and that the man whom the Son of God took up was not taken up whole, though he must have taken him up whole with that truth by which he is the Truth and by which he created man, so as to renew his work with full salvation. But there is no salvation for us unless it is full, because the Son of God took up not a man but some animal or other of irrational creation, if the soul of the man assumed did not have its own mind, and if, against the nature of the human race, that man above all, the firstborn of all creation, assumed into the form of human perfection, so lacked his own mind that he is said to have had a mind not from a human but from the divine spirit. This is said by the mouths of those in whose heart this poison is conceived, so that even the Truth would have lied. But near you and in you is the word of truth and the truth of God. Nor do you lack the Holy Spirit, you who confess, believe, and preach that the Lord Jesus, the Son of God, God, abides in the glory of God the Father and at the right hand of power as King of kings, and will come from the resurrection of the dead as judge of the living and the dead.

Remember us, and glory, as the apostle says, because this brief trial has worked for you an eternal weight of glory and has laid up for you the crown of righteousness, which you will receive from the hand of the Lord; and war was allowed to be stirred up against you as material for victory, so that you too, following blessed Paul your teacher, may glory in your sufferings and, with your mouth enlarged over your enemies, say how you labored in long-suffering, in the Holy Spirit, in love unfeigned, in the word of truth, in the power of God, by the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, through glory and dishonor, through ill report and good report, as a deceiver and yet true, as unknown and yet, behold, known, as chastened and not killed, as sorrowful yet always rejoicing, as poor yet making many rich. For this very trial of your holiness has turned out for many to the progress of the gospel, because no one was put to shame in you, as the grace of Christ and the truth of your faith shone out not only in the uprightness of your teaching but also in the power of your way of life, which is in heaven. ‘For the kingdom of God,’ he says, ‘is not in word but in power.’ What then is sought, when what surpasses words stands out in you? For who would doubt that the faith of truth dwells in the spirit of one in whose life he sees the power of faith standing out?

I rejoiced in what you wrote to me, and in your faith, which you have conceived in your heart and testified with your mouth. If the grace of the Lord makes me a sharer in so great a spirit, I hope that ‘we shall go into the house of the Lord,’ and, beholding together in the face of truth what we have received in common hope and faith, we shall sing a hymn with harmonious exultation, about to say to the Lord our God: ‘We believed that we were ashes and earth,’ if in this time our feet are so established in the courts of Jerusalem that we cease to be earth and ashes in act and deed, so that in the spirit of humility we remember that we are earth and confess it to the Lord, so that through him we may deserve, by the reconciliation of grace, not to be what we are by the condemnation of sin. You are blessed, brother, and it will be well with you, because not flesh and blood but the Spirit of the heavenly Father revealing it has taught you what you have affirmed, at the most holy close of your letter to me, that you hold with unshaken faith and confess with free voice: that Christ Jesus crucified is the Son of God, God, to whom every knee bends of things on earth, in heaven, and under the earth, and whom every tongue confesses to be at the right hand of power and in the glory of God the Father. This our Lord and God (for no other will be reckoned beside him), embracing the whole mystery of hidden godliness, you believe, as he is, to be Lord and God, the Son of God before the ages, made of the seed of David in this age, and now, from the resurrection of the dead, living for ever as the hope of human eternity; and as you believe, you preach. And will you call yourself untaught and a babe before God? Truly, in part I believe you have been made a little child, but in malice; but from the profession of your faith I learn that you are mature in understanding, because the knowledge of truth, which you have grasped in a shortened word, is the fullness of wisdom. And therefore the teacher of the Gentiles himself, the vessel of election and vessel of God, who professes that Christ speaks in him and that he has the Spirit of God, does not glory in loftiness of speech or in knowledge of the law, but protests that he has thrown away all the glory with which the wisdom either of the Jews or of the philosophers is puffed up, and has counted it as dung, so that he may gain Christ, and by the loss of that knowledge obtain the gain of this lack of skill, so that he says, ‘But I know nothing except Christ Jesus and him crucified’; since in him the whole fullness and perfection of wisdom and knowledge is contained, so that, mocking this world and despising its letters and all its wisdom as vanity with a loftier spirit, he says: ‘Where is the scribe? Where is the wise man? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?’ And he shows the cause of this error, by which the wisdom of this age deserved to be so stricken as to be foolishness to God: because to them, through the arrogance of wisdom as if their own, when no one has anything unless he has received it, the wisdom of God seemed foolishness. Rightly, then, according to the justice of God, with foolishness and wisdom reversed, they are condemned to be fools for this reason, that they seem wise to themselves not by God’s gift but as by a good of their own.

All the more do I congratulate your oneness of heart that you have spurned that wisdom rejected by God and have preferred to have fellowship with Christ’s little ones rather than with the wise of the world. From this you already deserve from the Lord this grace too: that, as you have deigned to tell me with devout glorying, all men hate you, which would not happen unless you had begun to be a true imitator of Christ. For this world would not hate anything except what it saw to be already alien to itself and opposed to it. Rejoice and exult; already in your first lessons the power of perfection is at work. It is clear how strongly you have believed in Christ, since it has already been given you to suffer for Christ. See what the Lord himself says, and understand how blessed you are: ‘Do not marvel,’ he says, ‘if the world hates you, because it hated me first. For if you were of the world, the world would love what was its own.’ And again: ‘The servant is not greater than his lord. If they called the householder Beelzebub, how much more those of his household?’ See now whether it is right for us servants to refuse to suffer for the Lord what the Lord first endured for us, his servants. O blessed injury, to displease along with Christ! We must rather fear the love of such people as are pleased without Christ. ‘Did I not hate,’ he says, ‘those who hated you?’ And he added, ‘I hated them with a perfect hatred.’ What dealings should we have in fellowship with those from whom we are separated in lot?

You rightly glory, most venerable brother, and say with exultation that from this you believe yourself to be a Christian: that those who loved you have begun to hate you, and those who feared you to despise you; and you yourself are aware that, if you were only yourself, they would love and revere you as they used to. Rejoice, then, and exult, for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For it is not you they hate but him who has begun to be in you, whose work in you is both the humility they scorn and the chastity they detest. In this good recognize with joy that you share with the prophets and apostles: with the prophet, when he says, ‘They slandered me because I followed righteousness,’ and with the apostle, who says, ‘We have become the offscouring of all,’ and again, as the same testifies, that ‘we have been made a spectacle in this world to all angels and men.’ From the beginning of the ages Christ suffers in all his own. For he is the beginning and the end, veiled in the law, revealed in the gospel, always the wonderful Lord, suffering and triumphing in his saints: in Abel slain by his brother, in Noah mocked by his son, in Abraham a wanderer, in Isaac offered, in Jacob a servant, in Joseph sold, in Moses exposed and put to flight, in the prophets stoned and sawn asunder, in the apostles tossed on land and sea, and often slain by the many and varied crosses of the blessed martyrs. So the same one even now bears our weaknesses and sickness, because he is the man always placed under the stroke for us, and knowing how to bear the weakness which without him we neither can bear nor know how to bear. He himself, I say, now too enduring the world for us and in us, so as to destroy it by enduring and to perfect strength in weakness, himself suffers reproaches in you also, and it is he whom this world hates in you. But thanks to him, because he conquers when he is judged, and, as you hold written, the Lord triumphs in us through the appearance of servitude, gaining for his servants the grace of freedom, and doing this by that mystery of his love by which he put on the form of a servant and deigned to humble himself for us even to the death of the cross, so that by visible humility he might work inwardly for us that invisible exaltation in the heavenly places. For see from the beginning whence we fell, and you will understand that by the counsel of divine wisdom and love we are being re-formed to life. In Adam we fell through pride, and therefore we are humbled in Christ, so that we may wash away the sin of the ancient crime by the service of the opposite virtue, and we who offended by pride may please by serving.

Let us exult, then, and glory in him who has made us his battle and his victory, saying, ‘Be steadfast, for I have overcome the world.’ And in the book of the Kingdoms I likewise hear the prophet saying to king Jehoshaphat, when he was terrified by a huge mass of war and a great multitude of enemies: ‘Thus says the Lord: Do not fear or be dismayed at the face of this multitude, for this battle is not yours but the Lord’s.’ Moses too had said the same before: ‘You shall be silent, and the Lord will fight for you.’ So let those who trust in their strength or wisdom and glory in the abundance of their riches sharpen against us, as they will, the weapons of their teeth and the arrows of their words, and vomit the poisons of an evil treasure from viper tongues; they have the Lord answering them for us: ‘I have kept silent; shall I always keep silent?’ Let us hedge our ears with thorns, as it is written, that is, with the word of God and faith in the word, which defend the crop of our life with the very firm hedge of innocence and patience, resist like thorns the devil seeking by his tricks an entrance into our hearts, as against thieves, and pierce the hearts of the King’s enemies, that is, the lovers of Christ’s foes, these slanderers of Christians, by the contemplation of our life and constancy. So let us keep silent to them, speaking to the Lord with the silence of humility and the voice of patience, and then he who is unconquered will fight for us and conquer in us. Then the prince of this darkness will be cast out, who is certainly cast out not from this world but from a man, when he is shut out from us as faith enters, and gives place to Christ, whose indwelling casts out sin and is the exile of the expelled serpent.

What we ought to do in suffering of this kind the prophet teaches us, saying, ‘But I, when they troubled me, put on sackcloth and humbled my soul with fasting,’ namely, so that we may destroy our detractors by that very appearance of humility by which they are disturbed, and they, still persisting in the crime of the ancient pride, may be the more confounded before the Lord, the more we ourselves glory in that by which they are confounded in us. For God loves a workman not put to shame, as he loves a cheerful giver. So, firm in the faith of truth and the working of righteousness, we refute the hatreds or insults of such people better by living than by speaking, because he who hates discipline will cast your words behind him, and he who rebukes a fool, as you hold written, brings insult on himself.

Let the orators keep their letters, the philosophers their wisdom, the rich their riches, kings their kingdoms; for us Christ is glory, possession, and kingdom; for us wisdom is in the foolishness of preaching, strength in the weakness of the flesh, glory in the scandal of the cross, by which the world is slain to me and I to the world, so that I may live to God, yet no longer I, but Christ in me, with whom we have been buried, in whom we are now hidden from the eyes of this world, so that we may be revealed with him to its confusion, when, remembering what it now casts at us, it will say: ‘These are the ones whose life we counted madness; how have they been reckoned among the sons of God?’ Let them meanwhile, dearest brother, enjoy their glory and their life, let them possess their fruits, since like herbs of the field they will quickly fall, and their days pass like a shadow, whose hope is shut within the limits of this age, because they have neither faith in the truth nor the will to believe, who, intent only on present things, give themselves to avarice and lust, so as not to believe God, because the fear of the Lord puts an end to both desires, and it is strengthened by faith in Christ, through whom we learn to recognize the truth, whether in contempt of temporal goods or in longing for eternal ones. Strangers to him, since Christ is also the Truth, they must remain in this blindness of unhappy errors, thinking there is solidity in the fragile and emptiness in the solid, laughing at true things as vain and admiring vain things as true. If they were willing to understand so as to do good, they would lift their eyes, which they have set to bend down to the earth, to the salvation of righteousness and raise themselves even a little from the ground; they would easily be enlightened by these very conversions of men which they disparage as empty and foolish. For ‘the Lord,’ as it is written, ‘looses the fettered, and the Lord enlightens the blind,’ and again: ‘The law of the Lord is blameless, converting souls; the testimony of the Lord is faithful, giving wisdom to little ones.’ For it is God’s work to change a man, because he alone can restore whom he made. This Christ, the wisdom of God, has long been working throughout the whole world, carrying himself everywhere as the word flies among the nations and sending himself into chosen souls, so that, as he said through the prophet, he may have the first place in every nation.

And because the day of reckoning draws nearer every day, and every hour brings us closer to judgment, the good Lord is busy and hastens to snatch us from the wrath to come and to lead us away from the embrace, as it is written, of this harmful and viperous generation. Hence everywhere more miracles and signs than usual increase daily, so that he may save every man, as far as lies in him. He shows in rare cases what would profit all, if they were willing. For the pattern of a few suffices for the instruction of all, set forth for both purposes: as an example to believers, as a testimony against the hardened. So if those who deny in their minds the humanity they display in their form have any human understanding, let them marvel at you and praise God, and not think this most blessed change of your mind and life an error of folly, but understand it to be the power of the wisdom of God. For the more prudent and learned than others they remember you to have been, the more evident to them ought to be the working of God’s power, because nothing can turn a prudent man from the course or stand of his opinion except the supreme Wisdom itself, which is God in Christ, the power of powers and mind of minds, the Lord of majesty, the arm on high, by which the proud are scattered, as it is written, in the thought of their heart, the mighty put down from their seat and the humble exalted. By this arm, that is, by Christ, the hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty. This we see done in you too. For look at yourself, and you will find in yourself both of these things that God casts down or lifts up.

You have been destroyed as a proud man and taken up as a humble one, put down from the seat of unjust power so as to be placed on the throne of peace and righteousness; you have been emptied as a rich man so as to be enriched as a poor one, and emptied of that fullness of superfluous bloating so as to be filled, hungering for righteousness, with the true goods of devout poverty. Where now are you, that once terrible man, whether as advocate before the tribunals or as judge on the tribunals? Where is that neck of yours, which then was more truly, as you now falsely say of yourself, the neck of a fat bull? How has it become docile and slender under the yoke of Christ, since you were converted and groaned, and it has pleased God in you more than a young bullock? With the bull’s neck laid down, you have been made into the meekness of that ox which knew its owner. Blessed are the eyes of those who behold these wonders of God in you, and wretched indeed those who, seeing, do not see.

Who would give me wings like a dove, and I would fly to you and rest in your presence and conversation, and feast in the voice of exultation and praise, seeing you, and seeing a calf from a lion, seeing Christ in a boar, now, with fierceness and strength reversed, a boar to the world and a lamb to God! For you are no longer a boar from the forest but from the cornfield, because you are fattened on the good fruits of discipline, and your pasture is in the crop of virtues; you are armed with the tusks of the two Testaments to break the nets of Nimrod the hunter, and all those arms which you proudly bore for the world you now, humble, turn against the world. Now truly wise, truly eloquent, and truly powerful, you who are foolish and dumb to this world, so that, eloquent and wise from his own gifts, you may serve God, the author of your tongue and mind.

Now, better instructed in divine law, you plead for yourself as an advocate, and as a juster judge you judge yourself and pass sentence in yourself or on yourself, so that you may the more deserve to be acquitted and make yourself worthy not only of pardon but also of glory, since you stand by yourself through accusing yourself and sanctify yourself by condemning yourself, understanding that it is holy and innocent to please not men but God. And so, as you write, you rarely frequent the cities and have come to love the familiar seclusion of the quiet country, not preferring leisure to business nor withdrawing yourself from the service of the church, but avoiding the tumults of the churches, almost rivals of the crowds of the forum, and their restless councils. I think, however, that this very thing is being prepared for the greater benefit of the church: that by wholesome counsel you give yourself to holy instruction and, intent on spiritual studies, to which solitude is a friend, you form and strengthen Christ in yourself daily, so that, a more useful servant and a more learned teacher, you may make yourself more worthy of that seat in which you have been placed by God’s will, powerful alike in work and word, so that, at one with yourself in tongue and mind, you may offer yourself as a true pattern of apostolic discipline, an authority and teacher of the Lord’s command. So at last it will be clear that you are a priest not by human vote but by divine judgment.

Believing that this is already being proved both by your faith and by your life, I ask and earnestly beg that you always include us in your prayers and take care, whenever there is an opportunity, to visit us by letter. I demand this gift of you not so much from desire to receive a courtesy as from eagerness to refresh my mind, so that I may receive at once the comfort and the joy of love, when I read and see you mindful of me in holy matters and careful of yourself, by the progress of spiritual knowledge and the understanding of a heart burning toward God, weighing yourself no longer by the word of power, that is, the preaching of Christ, but by the power of the word itself, that is, so that you may confirm by speaking and living alike that you believe Christ Jesus crucified to be Lord and God; because we ought to bear the image of the heavenly man with the same affection with which we bore that of the earthly before. Otherwise, who will give us what is our own, if we have not been as faithful in what is our own as we were in what is another’s? For we were made for this, to be good and to serve our Maker; living against his commands by our own fault alone, we shall act not only against our life but also against our nature, and so men are compared to beasts that have no understanding. Yet the goodness of God so bargains with us that, forgiving us our past impiety, it is content that we should be for him, on our own behalf, such servants as we were for the devil against ourselves, as the apostle says, that, as we presented our members to serve iniquity, so we should present the same to serve righteousness, namely, that we should delight in the Lord with the same affection with which we delighted in sin. So let us canvass for the kingdom of God as we canvassed for worldly rank, and in short care for heavenly goods as diligently as we cared for earthly ones.