Letters 7.1–10.3

On the day before we dispatched this letter, our brothers returned from Africa, for whom you saw us waiting anxiously, and, as we had most longed, we received from there letters from holy and dearest men, namely Aurelius, Alypius, Augustine, Profuturus, and Severus, all of them now bishops alike. So, rejoicing in the very recent words of so many such saints, we hastened to bring our gladness to you, so that on your anxious journey abroad we might bring you too the joy you have been waiting for, with the most festive tidings. If you have perhaps learned the same about these venerable and most loving men through the arrival of other ships, take it again from us too, and exult once more with gladness as it were renewed. But if this news comes to you first from us, rejoice that so great a love has been won for us in your homeland, by Christ’s gift, that whatever divine providence does there, which is always, as it is written, wonderful in its saints, we know either first or among the first.

We write this to share our joy, not only that Augustine has received the episcopate, but that the churches of Africa have been found worthy of this care of God, to receive heavenly words from the mouth of Augustine, who, to the greater grace of the Lord’s gift, has been raised in a new manner: he was consecrated not to succeed a bishop in his chair but to be added beside him. For while Valerius is still living, Augustine is co-bishop of the church of Hippo. And that blessed old man, whose most pure mind no stain of jealous envy ever discolored, now receives from the Most High fruits worthy of his heart’s peace, in that he is found worthy to have as colleague the one whom he simply wished to have as successor in his priesthood. Could this have been believed before it happened? But of this work of the Almighty too that word of the gospel may be spoken: “For men these things are hard, but with God all things are possible.” Let us therefore exult and rejoice in him who alone does wonders, and who makes those of one mind dwell in a house, since he has looked on our lowliness and visited his people for good, who raised up a horn in the house of his servant David and has now exalted the horn of his church in his elect, that he may break the horns of sinners, as he promises through the prophet, that is, of the Donatists and the Manichees.

Would that this trumpet of the Lord, which now thunders through Augustine, might strike the hearing of our son Licentius, but so that he hears it with that ear by which Christ enters, from which the enemy does not snatch God’s seed! Then truly Augustine will seem to himself a high priest of Christ, for then he will feel himself heard from on high, if the one whom he begot for you, worthy of you in letters, he also worthily bears for himself as a son in Christ. For even now, please believe me, he has written to us with the most burning anxiety about him. We trust in the almighty Christ that Augustine’s spiritual prayers will prevail over the carnal wishes of our young man. He will be conquered, even against his will, believe me, he will be conquered by the faith of his most devout parent, lest an evil victory conquer, if he prefers to win to his own ruin rather than be overcome for his salvation. That the duty of brotherly kindness might not seem empty, we have sent five loaves, to you and to our son Licentius alike, from the hard bread of the Christian campaign, in whose array we serve daily for a ration of frugality; for we could not separate from the blessing the one whom we desire to bind most closely to ourselves by the same grace. Yet let us speak a few words to him too, so that he may not deny that what was written to you about him was written to himself; for “what Micio hears is said to Aeschinus.” But why should I speak in others’ words, when we can say everything from our own, and speaking others’ words is not usually the mark of a sound head, the head through which, by God’s grace, we are sound and safe, we whose head is Christ? May we have you safe in Christ for as long an age as possible and always blessed with your whole house, as we desire, my lord brother, deservedly most honored and most longed for.

Hear, then, my son, the law of your father, that is, the faith of Augustine, and do not reject the counsels of your mother; for Augustine’s devotion rightly claims that name too in your regard. He carried you in his bosom when you were very small, and having fed you first from childhood on the milk of worldly wisdom, he now longs also to suckle and nourish you for the Lord at spiritual breasts, since he sees you, grown in bodily age, still wailing in a spiritual cradle, still an infant in the word of God, scarcely crawling in Christ with first steps and tottering footprint, if only Augustine’s teaching, like a mother’s hand and a nurse’s arm, may guide the unsteady little one. If you hear and follow him, to entice you again with the words of Solomon, my son, you will receive a crown of graces upon your head. And then you will truly be, not a consul and pontiff dreamed in a phantom but one formed by the truth itself, when Christ fills the empty images of a false work with the solid effects of his own working. For Licentius will truly be a pontiff and truly a consul if you cleave to Augustine’s footsteps, to the prophetic and apostolic disciplines, as blessed Elisha did to the consecrated Elijah, as the young Timothy did to the illustrious apostle, in undivided companionship along the divine paths, so that you may learn both to deserve the priesthood with a perfect heart and to take counsel for the peoples’ salvation with a teacher’s mouth.

Enough of warning and exhortation. For I think, my Licentius, that with a few words and little labor you can be stirred toward Christ, you who from boyhood have been set on fire by the spirit and mouth of the venerable Augustine for the pursuit of truth and wisdom, both of which Christ truly is, the highest good of every good. If he has availed too little with you for your own sake, what shall I achieve, coming after him at so great a distance and poor in all his riches? But since, trusting both in the power of his ability and in the kindness of your own nature, I hope that fuller and greater things have already been worked out in you than remain to be worked out, I have dared to open my mouth for a twofold favor: that I might be compared with that man in due love, in my concern for you, and that I might be numbered, at least by declared affection, among those who love your salvation. For in the effecting of your perfection I know that the palm is destined above all for Augustine.

I fear, my son, that I have offended your ears with the harshness of rash speech and through your ears have inflicted on your mind too a wound of weariness with me. But your letter came to mind, from which I understood that you are at home in musical measures. I too once, at your age, did not shun that study. So, remembering your letter, I found a remedy for soothing your mind, if I had made it sore in anything: to call you, with the melody of a poem, to the Lord, the craftsman of harmony in every form. I ask you to hear with your ear and not to spurn in my words the cause of your salvation, but to accept willingly a devout care and a fatherly mind even in words that deserve contempt; the name of Christ, which is above every name, set within them, makes them owed this reverence, that a believer cannot despise them.

Come, then, break off delay and the clinging chains of the world, and do not fear the gentle yoke of the kindly Lord. Fair indeed is the presence of things, but marvelous only to wandering minds; a wise soul is not dazzled by it. Now mighty Rome, ill-counseling, solicits you with its varied shapes; alas, it can overturn even the strong. But I pray, my son, that father Augustine may always meet you at all the city’s allurements. Looking to him amid such great perils of fragile life, and holding him in your heart, you will be safe. Yet this I will warn, repeating it again and again: flee the slippery paths of hard service in office. Honor is a flattering name, an evil slavery, a sickly ending; what pleases you to wish now, you will soon regret having wished. It pleases to climb the heights; to come down from the heights is trembling. If you stagger, you will fall the worse from the highest citadel. Now false goods please you, now ambition carries you off on every breeze, and hollow fame bears you in its glassy bosom. But when the costly belt, bought at a great price, has girded you, and fruitless toil has then broken you, too late and in vain you will accuse your empty hopes and will wish to break the chains you are now tying. Then you will remember, grieving, that you scorned the truthful warnings of father Augustine. Therefore, if you are wise and devout, boy, listen, and take the words of fathers and the counsel of old men. “Why do you draw your wild neck back from the yoke? My burden is light, my yoke is easy”: this is the loving voice of Christ. Believe God, and put your head to the yoke, give your mouth to the soft halter, and bow your lowered shoulders to the light load. Now you can do this, while you are free, while no chains hold you back, no care of a marriage bed, no high office. This is good freedom: to serve Christ, and in him to be above all things. He who has given himself to Christ the Lord alone serves no human masters, no vices, no proud kings. Nor should that nobility seem free to you which you now see carried aloft in the astonished city, which you see appearing to itself so free that it disdains to bend its neck to God. That wretched man serves many mortals, even slaves, and buys maidservants that they may lord it over him. Those who have endured eunuchs and great palaces know, and whoever, wretched, willingly endures Rome knows, at what price of sweat and loss of dignity the cloak of office costs there and the honor of a post here. Nor does the powerful man himself, who has bought the right to be higher than all, achieve serving no one. When he has boasted himself master throughout the city, he serves demons if he worships images. For shame! Is it for these that you linger in the city, Licentius, and spurn the kingdom of Christ to please them? Do you call them lords and greet them with bent neck, whom you see to be slaves of wood and stone? Under a divine name they worship silver and gold; their religion is what the disease of avarice loves. I pray that whoever does not love Augustine may love these, and that whoever is pleased to worship them may not worship Christ. Hence God himself says that two masters cannot be served, because one mind pleases God. One faith, one God, and Christ the only one from the Father: there is no double service to one Lord. For as great as the distance between heaven and earth, so great is the distance between the affairs and empires of Caesar and of Christ. Raise yourself from the ground; and now, while the spirit rules these limbs, pierce the sky with your mind; the delay of the flesh is no obstacle. Die even now to the acts of the body, and meditate beforehand with a clear mind on the goods of the heavenly life. You are spirit, though you are held by a body, if now, with devout mind, as victor you destroy the work of the flesh. These things, dear boy, I have written to you, driven by faithful love; if you accept them, you will be accepted by God. Believe that Augustine is now doubled for you in me; take two fathers with one devotion. If we are spurned, you will be torn away to the greater grief of two; if we are heard, you will be a sweet pledge to two. The glad care of two fathers has toiled over you, and it will be a great honor for you to have gladdened two. But when I join myself with Augustine, I do not boast myself his equal in merits; I compare myself with him only in love for you. For what could I pour on you, sprinkling from my poor stream? Apart from me, you are washed by a twin river: brother Alypius and master Augustine, the one a sharer of your blood, the other the sower of your mind. You are strong in so great a brother and teacher, Licentius, and do you hesitate to follow the stars on such wings? Whatever you do (for the world may not hope to have you as its friend), you will not be given over to the earth, a soul owed to Christ. Though you now think of marriage chambers and lofty honors, one day you will be given back to your Lord. I believe that two just men will overcome one sinner, and brotherly prayers will drive off your stains. So come back: both priests, one a parent by his voice, the other a brother by blood, bid you return. They draw you back to what is yours, for now you seek what belongs to others; these rather are yours, the realms that hold what is yours. Seek these again, long for these; do not wear away your time on outward things. If you refuse what is yours, will anyone give you what belongs to others? You will not be your own, and sent far through foreign lands, alas, you will live an exile from the feelings of your own heart. Enough that an anxious parent has sung this to his son, while I wish or fear for you what I wish or fear for myself. If you accept it, this page will one day bring you life; if you refuse, this same page will be a witness. May Christ grant me that you be safe, dearest son, and give you to himself as his servant forever. Live, I pray, but live to God; for to live to the world is the work of death; to live to God is living life.

As far as I understand, what I speak in your ear you preach on the housetop, since, while you love me too much and are too pleased with your inept brother, you do not hesitate to insinuate even into the ears of our holy and venerable common father the rashness of my foolishness, by which I dare to slight you rather than him in my words. For how would he think me fit, he from whom he desires something in writing worthy of his spirit, unless you had persuaded him, judging so more from affection than from judgment, that my mouth too had been opened by the Lord among the mouths of the mute and of infants, from whom the Almighty perfects praise? So he bids me produce for him a discourse seasoned with spiritual salt, that is, with his own; for he remembers that he sprinkled me with the salt of his word. Nor does he cease to do so; for all his letters are spiritual seasonings to me. For he himself is also the salt of the earth, giving back the living savor of apostolic teaching. But I fear that I have not drawn his salt into an unsalted heart, and that my mind does not feel that in which it is seasoned so as to savor the sweetness of the Lord, if in it the savor of Delphinus could fade and its vigor be dulled.

Who has roused me, as I say, “There is a lion in the ways, and murderers in the streets”? We are not stirred to foresight for life and to useful work by the zeal of the mystic bee or the example of the industrious ant; but we sleep a little, we slumber a little, we fold our hands on our breast a little, and meanwhile want comes upon us like a good runner. And that rich one who became poor that by his poverty he might enrich us who are truly needy, seeing us persist in our want, rightly cried out: “What profit is there in my blood, while I go down to corruption?” But would that even while we say this we might be roused by the very judgment of our conscience and the complaint of our own words, so that even late we might be able to say: “Now I have begun; this is the change of the right hand of the Most High.” But we are lazy bellies, and therefore our soul cleaves to the pavement, although you have long since said to it: “Rise from the dead, that you may reach Christ.” Him indeed, the Lord, you placed by the intervention of your faith, through the sacrament of grace, in the little boat of our heart. But since he has fallen asleep in us through the sleep of our sloth, you must wake him, that he may rise to the awakening of our soul, command silence to the turbulent winds of earthly thoughts, and calm the waves of our senses by the peace of his word, so that a chaste calm may come in our heart, and with the Spirit of truth as helmsman and the Word of God as oarsman we may be steered to the haven of our desire.

For what is our expectation, if not the Lord Jesus, who is able to save us from faintness of spirit and from the storm, and to grant your prayers, that our flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath, that is, in idleness from spiritual business and in barrenness of good works? For the sabbath is idle, and winter is bare of growing things. So if we keep the sabbath, not by carnal observance but by spiritual, abstaining from all servile work, which is the life of sin (one given to it is truly a slave and does not remain in the house); and if we keep not that sabbath which the soul of the Lord cannot bear, but that in which is the rest of God, who rests in the humble heart of his trembling servants: then the wintry storm will not overwhelm our flight nor hold back our feet, sluggish as with cold, from the freedom of escape, if, rejoicing in hope and fervent in spirit, with hands not contracted by the frost of avarice but opened in the refreshment of mercy, that stealthy coming of the last hour finds us covered and clothed in the saving garments of faithful works, so that we may stand before the face of his cold, who wishes us now to be made ready in fear of his command so that on the day of wrath he may find us fit to be acquitted.

Favor us now, then, and pray that we may lay hold of that for which we have been laid hold of, and, stretching ourselves out to the prize of the upward calling, may forget what lies behind; and that, with the hand of my mind set on the plow of the cross, I may not look back at what has been furrowed but look ahead to what is still to be furrowed, until we reach the mountains to which we have lifted our eyes, that thence help may come to us from the Lord, who is wonderful in his saints, who are the mountains of God, to which we shall be carried up by the good working of a faithful soul. For if we walk worthily in the way of truth, which is undefiled, then the Lord himself, who is the way and the truth, will make our feet like those of the deer and set us upon the heights. For “the high mountains,” it says, “are for the deer, and the rock a refuge for the hedgehogs.” For if, with the swiftness of deer, we flee over iniquity from Nimrod the hunter, who, as Scripture shows, was a hunter against the Lord, and with Christ working with us climb by devout actions the heights of the virtues through the teachings of the prophets and apostles, who are the mountains of God, those fertile mountains: then, looking down as from a lofty crag on the empty shapes of the passing world, we shall sing with a voice of exultation: “I will exalt you, O Lord, because you have lifted me up above those who rose against me, and my eye has looked down upon my enemies.” And, formed from this height of the mountains to humility of heart, and with our limbs fortified on every side by wholesome disciplines as by spines, we shall become like hedgehogs, which, their small bodies armed with a rough covering, are protected by their natural darts against the hostile bites of dogs or the hands of men. And for those humbled by the fear of God and armed with the grace of humility itself, the rock is a refuge, that is, Christ, whose words are to us both fences and darts against the devil. For with them we both fence our ears against the wicked tongue and pierce the opposing vices in our heart. Thus, by spiritual observance and right faith, we shall be hedgehogs and deer alike, if, like these smaller creatures, straitened and humble, we hide ourselves in Christ as in the rock of refuge, and, fortified by the Word and the Spirit of truth, resist roughly both the devil and the allurements of this world.

Those larger beasts, swift of foot and lofty of horn, we shall imitate in this way: if we have firm feet to stand in the way of the Lord, and our footsteps are not moved from his path, and if we use those same feet to flee sins and the deadly contagions of this world, bearing the head of our salvation, which is the catholic faith, adorned and armed alike with good works as with horns, so that we may either fight back against the enemy hunters or, crowned with deeds pleasing to God, be above all your joy and crown; for we are your planting in Christ and your daily labor with Christ. For we do not doubt that you pray daily that there may be accomplished in us that blessed change of the right hand of the Most High, so that we may truly say: “My heart and my flesh have failed, God of my heart, and God is my portion forever”; because God will deign to be the God of our heart when our heart, which is carnal, has failed, torn down by spiritual building. Then we shall dare to call you too our portion in the land of the living, when we also, renewed to the Lord in the sense of our mind according to Christ, after the heavenly image, can say: “God of our heart and our portion is God forever.”

We have received the letter of your holy affection, in which you bid us, in the letters we write to you, to add some discourse from the Scriptures beyond mere courtesy, which might reveal to you the treasure of our heart. But it is rather parents who should lay up treasure for their children, as both the order of devotion requires and the apostle, our teacher, teaches. And yet you, who have been made our father by the Lord and in the Lord, have always laid up good things for us, and do not cease to lay them up, besides that talent of saving grace which we received when you sealed us: a talent not to be hidden in the earth or wrapped in a napkin, but to be placed with the money-changers, by whom it might be multiplied with rich interest, or to be distributed in due season to those who sell oil to the wise, to be bought for preparing torches for the bridegroom’s coming. But you lay up treasure for us in another way too, always, when you ask that something from the Lord’s treasures be added to the grace that was given to us through you. And would that we could receive as much as you can obtain for us to receive! For it is surely from this awareness of and confidence in your petitions for us that you ask of us, or rather demand back, that we say something spiritual to you which may be worthy of your seed in us; because, believing according to your faith that you have obtained by prayer what you have prayed and still pray to be given us, you desire to gather the fruit of your care and supplication from the offspring of our heart and mouth, by the evidence of words, since out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and the savor of the mind is tasted in speech.

Rightly, then, your holiness demands back what is owed on its deposit and looks for the sprouting of its seed. But what shall I do, a barren field? With what crop shall I answer you, I who have brought forth thistles instead of wheat, or thorns instead of grapes? And therefore, aware of a bad harvest or of an unfruitful tree, I put forward in my letters only the words of courtesy, to satisfy at least the duty of devotion, and, confounded by the shame of my sloth, I hide a mind degenerate from your heart; for, aware of your excessive love toward me, I fear that I may sadden your soul, which rejoices in the confident good hope it has of us, by disappointing its expectation, and you may be compelled to say or write to me: “I planted you as a fruitful vine, but you have turned into the bitterness of a strange vine. I waited for you to produce grapes, and you produced thorns.” And would that they were at least useful thorns, which provide pious ears with a fence against the wicked tongue and guard faith in a wary heart like a crop in an enclosed field! But, as I feel, you have brought forth like a rough bramble those useless and harmful thorns which choke the word and turn it into distress, while they pierce hearts still given to carnal thoughts.

You ask, then, most devout father, what more you can do for us that you have not done, since you have planted us in the house of the Lord, and around what you planted have built the wall of the saving seal, by which we might be protected from the inroads of the wild boar and the grazing of the fierce wild ass, and have dug a winepress, in which through a devout way of life we might pour out for you, as it were, a sweet vintage from your vine? You still have something to do, in imitation of him who begged from the lord of the vineyard a reprieve for the barren fig tree and put off, by his pledge, the cutting down that threatened the useless tree. So let the care of your devotion intervene for us too, and ask that the axe laid at the roots of the fasting trees be held back at least for the year of the indulgent Lord’s waiting. Pledge to the householder the diligence of your concern for us, and promise your constant prayers like that apostolic basket of gospel manure, by which the soil of our heart may grow rich, and the crop you sowed be nourished, or the tree you planted receive the sap of your fruitfulness; so that on the day of recognition, when sower and reaper will rejoice together, you may bring us too in your fatherly bosom among your sheaves and claim from him the fruit of your cultivation, when you offer to him who nourishes the sowings of those who water and makes fruitful the labors of those who till, something in us which he may deign not to order cut down for the fire, but to reap for the barn.