Letters

“How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb to my mouth!” I have plainly felt, as though my heart had been anointed with the honey of your speech, the truth of holy Scripture where it says, “Good words fatten the bones”: not, of course, these bones whose framework holds us together in the fitness of the body, but those in which the strength of the inner man is contained, namely hope and faith and love, which are also the bowels of mercy, the bones of patience, and the limbs of every virtue. These bones and limbs and bowels you have enriched with holy words of hope and faith and love. By them you have taught me that the hope of your faith is intent on the Lord, that the faith of your hope stands firm in the Lord, and that the fullness of love abides in Christ, like God’s own love toward us. For when I was anxious and longing, and believed nothing else of you, or rather of God, who works and perfects his power even in the weak, you told me of the increase of your inheritance in heaven, which you have wholesomely gained by boiling away the burdens of the present, buying heaven and Christ at the price of a frail estate: truly “considering the needy and the poor,” in whom, as he himself taught, you believed that Christ is, and in whom Christ is clothed, fed, and lent to.

Let this be “an odor of death unto death to those who perish,” to whom the flesh and cross of the living God is foolishness or a stumbling block, because flesh and blood, which they serve, does not reveal to them that Christ Jesus is the Son of God; but to us let faith in the divine flesh and death become “an odor of life unto life.” And let not our feet be moved, dearest brother, from the ways of the Lord and the path of the narrow road, if at times the profane or foolish words of some worldly men bark around us; for through the sacred letters we have been taught enough both about them and about ourselves. Of them the blessed apostle tells us that “for this we labor and are reviled, because we hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of the faithful.” And he whose account you wish to render to these men has, even with his own mouth in the Gospels, foretold both the poison in their talk and what they deserve in punishment: “Woe to those who cause one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble! It is better for that man that a donkey’s millstone be hung about his neck and that he be thrown into the depth of the sea.” But to us he says: “Blessed are you when men revile you and say every evil against you and reproach my name as evil; rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” Keeping these words of the Lord, my brother, let us both be strengthened in our faith and disregard the reproaches or hatred of unbelievers; for they walk in darkness, because the sun of righteousness has not risen for them. “The poison of asps is under their lips,” which infects the mind and kills the soul, if, once received by the ears, it penetrates to the heart. “Their heart,” says divine Scripture, “is vain, and their throat is an open grave.” Let us beware of their leaven, lest it corrupt the whole lump. For it is written, “The wicked shall not dwell beside you,” and again, “With the holy you will be holy, and with the perverse you will be overthrown,” and, “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.” Stop up, brother, and hedge your ears with thorns against their words, which are the thorns and arrows of the devil, who, lurking in their hearts, lies in ambush in secret to seize Christ’s poor man and hunt the soul of a Christian. But, as it is written, their iniquity will turn back upon their own head, and they will fall into the pit that they are making.

But you, man of God, flee from these men, and do not labor to render an account to them as though they were wiser, since you know that the beginning of wisdom is with you, who fear the Lord. If they think what we do is foolish, rejoice in your conscience that you are doing the work of God and the command of Christ, and remember that “God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise,” and that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.” To wish to be cleared before such men is the same as to be able to deny Christ himself, who will in turn be ashamed to acknowledge before the Father those who are ashamed of his name before this world.

You, then, who labor, as you write, to render an account of my deed and yours: what will you do if you fail to persuade men who argue with you about the work of God, not for their own edification but for your destruction? At once you will blush and grow pale, as the defender of the worse cause; shaken from your footing, you will stagger on the way of the Lord and slide back from heaven to earth, if you destroy what you have built. It matters a great deal who these people are to whom an account is to be given. If someone comes from a desire to learn and confesses his ignorance, sow in him the seed of faith and open to him the divine command. If he receives the word, you have gained a brother for the church and a sheep for Christ. But if he is not the pure growth of good seed, but harmful grass sown by the enemy of the heavenly householder by night when he scattered tares among the wheat, an unhappy crop to be separated from the good fruit at harvest time, owed not to the barns but to the furnaces, fuel destined to burn as food for the eternal fire, growing meanwhile for its own burning: then flee from him and drive him from your conversation and your sight, so that, if he cannot be healed by your faith, he may not wound you with his unbelief.

Though he be a brother and friend joined to you more closely than your right hand and dearer than your eyesight, if he is a stranger and an enemy in Christ, let him be to you as an outsider and as a tax collector. Let him be cut off from your body like a useless right hand, since he does not cohere with you in the body of Christ; and let him be plucked out like a harmful eye that darkens your whole body with its stain or blindness. For it is better that one member perish for the health of the whole body than that, from love of one diseased member, the whole body go, as the Lord says, into Gehenna. Nor should we fear offending such people; indeed we should even wish for it, since from their reproaches and curses is born that reward which God has promised in abundance in heaven. “The disciple,” he says, “is not above the master, nor the servant above his lord,” and “if they have called the householder Beelzebub, how much more those of his household?” If they loved the Lord and God whom we follow, they will love us too; if they persecuted him, they will persecute us also. What do we want with the favor of the world, which is hatred of Christ? “If you were of the world,” he says, “the world would love what was its own.”

You, then, who seek to render an account to men, and to unbelieving men at that, consider what you are wishing for: without doubt the favor of men, that is, of the world, which you cannot please unless you choose to displease Christ. “For if I were pleasing men,” he says, “I would not be the servant of Christ.” Let us therefore displease them, and rejoice that we displease the very people whom God also displeases. For, as you know, it is not our work but the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, of almighty God, in us that they assail. Him they scorn in their own acts and hate in our works, and too late they will say: “Lord, when did we see you naked and did not clothe you? hungry, and did not feed you? sick, and did not visit you?” And then they will hear: “Go into the eternal fire, which God has prepared for your father and his angels,” because what they do not do for the needy they deny to Christ, who, “though he was rich, became poor, that he might make us rich by his poverty.”

Meanwhile let them enjoy their pleasures, honors, and riches, if indeed they are theirs, which they prefer to have here, where we cease to be, rather than there, where we continue to be. Let them keep their wisdom and their happiness for themselves, and leave us our poverty, as they think it, and our folly. From the very words of him whom they confess by name but deny in deed, “having the form of godliness but denying its power”: from the words, I say, of our God himself let them, if they please, claim prudence for themselves and reproach us with folly. For the Lord said, “The children of this world are wiser than the children of light,” but he added, “in their generation.” Let them be more prudent, provided they are not children of light; let them be wise for one generation, provided they are found senseless in that regeneration of ours. Let them now be blessed, or rather fortunate, drifting through every prosperity as the world flatters them; let them be clothed in soft garments and be in kings’ houses, provided they are not in the labors of men and are not scourged with men. Let them be rich for the world, since they are poor toward God, of whom it is written, “The rich have wanted and hungered,” just as of us it is added at once, “but those who seek the Lord shall not lack any good thing.”

Would that we, my brother, might be counted worthy to be cursed and branded and crushed and even killed in the name of Jesus Christ, provided Christ himself is not killed in us! Then at last we would walk upon the asp and the basilisk and trample the head of the ancient dragon. But as yet, what is worse, we are relaxed by a friendly world and take our pleasure in Christ, loving only to be praised in his name and refusing to be grieved and afflicted, which is more profitable. Remember that the grain of mustard seed, of which seed we are, when crushed is the more kindled and only then roused to its full strength. We ought therefore, as it were, to answer to our nature in this: crushed by hostile words, let us blaze up toward faith, and let us burn those very men who try to break us as the least of men, that is, like the grain of mustard, which is the least of seeds. But if those who are outside demand of you an account of your holy work and dart venomous tongues from a viper’s heart into your heart, “do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not cast your pearls before swine.” “For what part has the believer with the unbeliever? What fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial?”

But you, soldier of Christ, armed by the apostle with the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the sword of truth, and the power of the Holy Spirit: stand firm in heavenly armor and quench the fiery darts of the enemy with the fountain of wisdom and the river of living water within you. Guard the deposit, keep the faith, pursue righteousness, hold fast the love of Christ, strive after patience, train yourself for godliness, which is profitable for all things; be sober, labor in all things, fight the good fight, finish the course, that you may lay hold of that for which you have been laid hold of. For the rest there will be laid up for you the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award on that day to those who love his appearing. But those who do not endure sound doctrine, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, always advancing into worse, deceiving and deceived, men corrupt in mind and estranged from the truth and for that very reason given over to the desires of their heart, into a snare and many desires that sink those shipwrecked from the faith into ruin and perdition, because they have preferred the creature to the Creator, that is, holding the idols of the nations, gold and silver, dearer than God, saving their souls in this world and losing them in Christ: withdraw from such men and avoid profane novelties of words, lest you begin to grow sick over old wives’ questions and vain or impious disputes about words, and be endangered by false brothers or by lost and reprobate wise men, and all who see it, while the devil mocks, say: “This man began to build and was not able to finish.” Far be this from us, who, relying not on our own works or strength but on divine power and mercy, have dared the work of perfection. He who is almighty is able to perfect in us the work of his own perfection, and what he has deigned to found and raise up with the first scaffolding, to build to his own measures and complete to the roof. For when even his apostles were dismayed at the mass of this work, he deigned to tell them that this was impossible with men but not with God, for those who believe in whom nothing is impossible.

But so that we may comfort one another with the words of the Lord and advance in works: go out from your land and from your kindred, that, imitating faithful Abraham in his departure, you may be worthy of the blessed bosom of Abraham. Hasten to come to us, to receive and to give, for our common gain, what is lacking in faith. For this is acceptable before God, since “a brother helping a brother will be exalted.” We are at present, as I wrote before, staying in the city of Barcelona. After the letter you answered, on the Lord’s day on which he deigned to be born in the flesh, I was seized by a sudden violence of the crowd, as he himself is witness, but, I believe, by his own ordering, and was initiated into the presbyterate, against my will, I confess. This was not from disdain for the place (for I call him to witness that I had wished to begin holy service even with the name and office of sacristan), but because, destined for one thing and settled and fixed in mind elsewhere, as you know, I was terrified at this new and unhoped-for decision of the divine will. Having given my neck, then, to the yoke of Christ, I see myself handling works greater than my merits and understanding, and, received and admitted now into the secrets and inner sanctuaries of the most high God, I share in heavenly things and, brought nearer to God, move in the very Spirit and body and splendor of Christ. I can hardly yet grasp the meaning of this sacred burden with my narrow mind, and, aware of my weakness, I shudder at the load of my office. But he who gave wisdom to little ones and “out of the mouth of infants and sucklings perfects praise for himself” is able to perfect his work in me also and to adorn the office, so that he may make worthy the one whom he called from unworthiness. Know, however, that by the gift of the same Lord the plan of our common vow is safe; for I was brought to be consecrated in the church of Barcelona on this condition, that I should not be bound to that church, but dedicated only to the priesthood of the Lord, not also to a place in the church.

Come, then, if you please, before Easter, which is what we most wish, so that you may celebrate the holy festival with me as priest; but if you would rather, God willing, meet us at the start of our journey, set out after Easter in the name of Christ. Yet we trust in our Lord that he will breathe into you a more burning desire for us, so that you will not bear to put off your coming to us beyond the time of Easter. How long the journey is the servant of your oneness of heart will also report; he reached us from Elusa, as he declared, on the eighth day. For the road is so short and easy that it is not steep even in the Pyrenees, which lie between Narbonensis and the Spains as a frightening rampart, a mountain more in name than in fact. But why should I talk of distance? If you long for us, the road is short; long, if you do not care.

After some time we received the letter of your love; but the longer it was awaited, the more eagerly we took it up. For “cold water is sweeter to the thirsty, and good news from a far country” is more welcome; so too the sweetness of your words has fattened our bones and filled our hungry soul with good things. What worthy return can we make for such eloquence, we who are thin in talent, gross in heart, fasting in speech, and, as it is written, “slow bellies”? Yet though we are inferior in all things, love alone makes us your equals. For we strive with equal mind to match the love you have for us, a love planted in our inmost being, fixed in our hearts, and mingled with our very soul by the Spirit of the Lord, who “makes those of one way of life dwell in one house,” who binds countless thousands of believers into one heart, because the One is fulfilled as all in all.

Now it has pleased this Lord to place his treasure in an earthen vessel. He has called me by his grace, “raising the needy from the earth and lifting the poor from the dunghill, to set him with the princes of his people,” and to clothe him with salvation among the priests, so that, while I run after the fragrance of his ointments, I might become a drop of that ointment which ran down upon the beard of Aaron. When, aware of my merits, I refused, or rather did not dare, to accept becoming a member of his household and blessing the Lord from the fountains of Israel, I, “a worm and no man,” was seized against my will, I confess, by sudden violence and compelled by a choking crowd. Though I wished that this cup might pass from me, I had to say to the Lord, “Yet not my will but yours be done,” especially since I read that the Lord said of himself, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” Forestalled, then, by the Lord and laid hold of by him whom we have not yet laid hold of, we serve the altar of God and minister at the tables of salvation, now elders in name and office, but still little children in understanding and sucklings in speech.

That I may serve this ministry well, “gain a good standing for myself,” and “know how I ought to behave in the house of God” and handle “the mystery of godliness,” you, venerable lord, brother and lord to us in Christ, pray the Lord who is rich in every good, that we may abound “in faith and speech and knowledge and all earnestness,” and moreover in your love for us, that you also may abound in this grace. Instruct us often, too, by your letters with the help we need; for, nourished on the words of faith and of good doctrine, which you have followed from childhood in the sacred letters, shape us to the rule of right direction; feed us with spiritual food, that is, with the word of God, who is the true and living bread, by which one lives more than by bread, since he is the food of the righteous who live by faith. Do not be less careful about my instruction because we are separated in our place in the church, though not in body; for there is one God and one mediator between God and men, who is the head of the church, in which, since we are all one, we live as in one house. Nor can we say that we are without you, since we are of one Spirit and dwell in the One, who is one. So, “keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” as one body and one spirit, let us labor together for each other as fellow members, that we may grow into the building up of that body whose head is Christ.

Therefore, since from enemies we have been made citizens, from those far off neighbors, from sheep shepherds, and have been set on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, instruct and strengthen my hands in the skill of building, that I may learn to join both walls to the stone that has become the head of the corner, and to build bodies and hearts cleansed by faith into a holy temple and a dwelling place of God; to take captive, by the apostle’s weapons, mighty before God, every height that lifts itself up against the knowledge of God and bring every thought into obedience to Christ; to lay the axe of the Gospel to the roots of the trees; with the sword of the Spirit, that is, the word of God, to slay the sinners of the earth; with the shield of the catholic faith to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one; and, having fought the fight, finished the course, kept the faith, and fulfilled the ministry, to await what the Lord, the righteous judge, will give on that day to all who love his appearing. So, seeing and holding me spiritually as your own and as dwelling with you, instruct, help, exhort, strengthen me. For since I was born to God in Christ from you and through you, I ought to be above all your care, because I shall be your shame, if unworthy, or your joy, if I am known by good fruit to be a branch of your tree.

This is true love, this is perfect charity, which you have shown you have toward our lowliness, truly holy lord, deservedly most blessed and longed for. For we have received, through our man Julian returning from Carthage, a letter bringing us so great a light of your holiness that we seemed not to come to know your love but to recognize it again. For plainly this love flowed from him who predestined us for himself from the origin of the world, in whom we were made before we were born, because “he made us and not we ourselves,” he who made the things that are to be. Formed by his foreknowledge and work into likeness of wills and unity of faith, or faith in unity, we were joined by a love that went before acquaintance, so that we knew each other by the revelation of the Spirit before we saw each other in the body. We therefore rejoice and glory in the Lord, who, one and the same in every land, works his love in his own by the Holy Spirit, whom he has poured out on all flesh, gladdening his city with the rush of the river. Among its citizens he has deservedly placed you in the first rank, “with the princes of his people,” in an apostolic see, and has willed that we too, whom he raised up when we were crushed and lifted needy from the earth, be counted in your lot. But we rejoice still more in that gift of the Lord by which he has set us to dwell in your heart and has deigned to insinuate us so into your inmost being that we may claim a special confidence in your love, provoked by these services and gifts, so that we may not love you diffidently or lightly.

For we have received a special token of your love and care: the work of our brother Augustine, a holy man perfect in the Lord Christ, completed in five books, which we so admire and look up to that we believe its words were dictated by God. So, confident in your oneness of heart, which we must revere, we have dared to write to him too, presuming that through you we will be both excused to him for our lack of skill and commended to his love. So too with all the saints by whose good offices, though absent, you have deigned to greet us: you will doubtless take care, with equal affection, that through your holiness they in turn are greeted with our respects, both the companions of your holiness in the clergy and the imitators of your faith and virtue in the monasteries. For though you act among peoples and over a people, guiding the sheep of the Lord’s pasture as a shepherd watchful in anxious vigils, yet by renouncing the world and rejecting flesh and blood you have made a desert for yourself, set apart from the many, called among the few.

As a kind of return gift, though unequal to you in everything, I have, as you instructed, provided that History of all the ages by Eusebius, the venerable bishop of Constantinople. The delay in obeying lay in this: since I did not have the codex myself, on your instruction I found it at Rome with our truly most holy father Domnio, who without doubt obeyed me the more readily in this kindness because I told him it was to be passed on to you. However, since you deigned also to tell me where you would be, as you yourself advised, we have written to the venerable companion of your crown, our father Aurelius, asking that, if you are now staying at Hippo Regius, he would deign to send you there our letter and the parchment copied at Carthage. We have also asked those holy men whom we came to know from your words, which showed their love, Comes and Evodius, to take care to write themselves, so that our father Domnio may not be without his codex any longer, and the copy sent to you may remain with you with no need to return it.

But I ask this of you especially, since you have embraced me, undeserving and unexpecting, with great love: that in return for this history of the ages you tell me the whole history of your holiness. Tell me your family, from what house you were called by so great a Lord, by what beginnings, set apart from your mother’s womb, you renounced the stock of flesh and blood and passed over to the mother who rejoices in her offspring of the sons of God, and were transferred into a royal and priestly race. As for what you have told me, that you learned the name of our lowliness at Milan when you were being initiated there, I confess I wish to learn more closely, so as to know you in every respect and to rejoice the more if it was by our father Ambrose, whom I revere, that you were either invited to the faith or consecrated to the priesthood, so that we both may seem to have the same author. For I, though baptized by Delphinus at Bordeaux and consecrated by Lampius at Barcelona in Spain through the violence of a suddenly inflamed people, have yet always been nourished in the faith by the love of Ambrose, and am now cherished by him in my ordination to the priesthood. Indeed he wished to claim me for his own clergy, so that, though I live in different places, I may be reckoned his presbyter.

But that you may not be ignorant of anything about me: know that I am a sinner of very long standing, not long ago led out of darkness and the shadow of death to breathe the breath of life, and not long ago I put my hand to the plow and took up the cross of the Lord; that we may be able to carry it to the end, let us be helped by your prayers. This reward will be added to your merits, if by your intercession you lighten our burdens. For “a holy man helping one who labors” (since we do not dare to say “a brother”) “will be exalted like a great city.” And you indeed are a city built on a mountain, or a lamp lit upon a lampstand, shining with sevenfold brightness; we lie hidden under the bushel of our sins. Visit us with your letters, bring us out into the light in which you yourself move, conspicuous upon the golden lampstands. Your words will be a light to our paths, our head will be anointed with the oil of your lamp, and our faith will be kindled when we take from the breath of your mouth food for the mind and light for the soul. [6] The peace and grace of God be with you, and may the crown of righteousness await you on that day, lord father, deservedly most beloved, venerable and most longed for. We ask you to greet with much affection and respect the blessed companions of your holiness and its imitators in the Lord, our brothers, if they deign to be so, both in the churches and in the monasteries at Carthage, Thagaste, Hippo Regius and in all your parishes, and in all the places known to you throughout Africa, who serve the Lord in the catholic way. If you receive the parchment of holy Domnio, please send it back to us copied. And I ask you to write to me which of my hymns you have recognized. We have sent your holiness one loaf as a sign of unity, in which the solidity of the Trinity is also contained. You will make this loaf a blessing by deigning to receive it.

The love of Christ, which urges us on and, though we are absent, binds us through the unity of faith, has itself driven away my shyness and given me confidence to write to you, and has made you dear to my inmost being through your writings. These, overflowing with the resources of the schools and sweet from heavenly honeycombs, I hold meanwhile in five books, as physicians and nurses of my soul. We received them by the gift of our blessed and venerable bishop Alypius, not only for our own instruction but also for the benefit of the church in many cities. These books I now have for reading; in them I delight; from them I take food, not the food that perishes, but that which works the substance of eternal life through our faith, by which we are incorporated into Christ Jesus our Lord, since our faith, which disregards the visible and gapes after the invisible, is strengthened through love by the writings and examples of the faithful, who believe all things according to the truth of almighty God. O truly salt of the earth, by which our hearts are seasoned, so that they cannot become tasteless through the error of the world! O lamp worthily set upon the lampstand of the church, which, pouring far and wide over the catholic cities a light fed from the sevenfold lamp with the oil of gladness, scatters the thick darkness of the heretics, however dense, and clears the light of truth from the confusion of shadows by the brilliance of your illuminating speech.

You see, admirable brother, one in heart with me in Christ the Lord and to be revered, how familiarly I have come to know you, with what amazement I admire you, with how great a love I embrace you, I who daily enjoy conversation with your writings and feed on the breath of your mouth. For I may rightly call your mouth a pipe of living water and a vein of the eternal fountain, since Christ has become in you a fountain of water springing up to eternal life. For desire of him my soul has thirsted in you, and my land has longed to be drunk with the abundance of your river. Therefore, since you have armed me well with this Pentateuch of yours against the Manichees, if you have prepared any defenses also against other enemies of the catholic faith (for our enemy, who has a thousand arts of harming, must be fought with weapons as varied as the snares with which he attacks), I beg you not to refuse to bring out for me from your armory and bestow on me the weapons of righteousness. For I am still a sinner laboring under a great burden, a veteran among sinners, but a new recruit to the eternal King in incorporeal warfare. Wretch that I am, until now I admired the wisdom of the world, and through useless letters and reprobate prudence I was foolish and dumb before God. After I had grown old among my enemies and become vain in my thoughts, I lifted up my eyes to the mountains, looking up to the precepts of the law and the gifts of grace, whence my help came from the Lord, who, not repaying according to my iniquities, gave light to the blind, freed the shackled, humbled one wrongly lifted up in order to lift up one humbled in godliness.

I follow, therefore, with steps still unequal, the great footprints of the righteous, if by your prayers I may lay hold of that for which I have been laid hold of by the mercies of God. Guide, then, a little one crawling uncertainly, and teach him to walk with your steps. For I do not want you to consider me by the age of my bodily birth rather than of my spiritual rising. My age according to the flesh is now that of the man who was healed by the apostles at the Beautiful Gate through the power of the word; but in the birthdays of the soul I am still at the age of those infants who were sacrificed by the wounds aimed at Christ, ran ahead of the victim of the Lamb with their worthy blood, and inaugurated the Lord’s passion. So, as an infant still and a suckling in the word of God and in spiritual age, bring me up with your words, as I gape after the breasts of faith, wisdom, and love. If you consider our common office, you are my brother; if the maturity of your mind and judgment, you are my father, even if perhaps younger in years, because a gray-haired prudence has advanced you, though young, to maturity of merit, the honor of elders. Cherish and strengthen me, then, in the sacred letters and in spiritual studies, recent as I am, as I said, in time, and for that reason, after long perils and many shipwrecks, still unskilled in practice, barely emerging from the waves of the world. You, who already stand on solid shore, receive me into a safe harbor, so that, if you think me worthy, we may sail together in the port of salvation. Meanwhile, as I strive to escape from the perils of this life and the depths of sins, hold me up with your prayers as with a plank, that I may escape naked from this world as from a shipwreck.

For this reason I have taken care to lighten myself of baggage and to strip off the clothes that weigh me down, so that, at Christ’s command and with his help, freed from every covering of flesh and from care for the next day, I may swim across this stormy sea of the present life, which separates us from God with sins barking between. Nor do I boast that I have accomplished this; even if I could boast, I would boast in the Lord, to whom it belongs to accomplish what lies at hand for us to will. But my soul still longs to desire the judgments of the Lord. Consider when one who still desires to desire may attain the fulfillment of God’s wishes. Yet so far as in me lies, I have loved the beauty of the holy house, and, so far as I could, I had chosen to be an abject in the house of the Lord. But he who was pleased to set me apart from my mother’s womb and to draw me from the friendship of flesh and blood to his grace was also pleased to raise me, needy of every good merit, from the earth, and to lead me out of the pit of misery and the mire of dregs, to set me with the princes of his people and put my portion in your lot, so that, joined in office, I might be made equal to you, though you surpass me in merits.

Not by my own presumption, then, but by the Lord’s will and ordering I claim for myself the bond of your brotherhood, unworthy as I am of so great an honor, and deem myself worthy of it; because I know for certain that, being holy (for you savor of truth), you do not mind high things but condescend to the lowly. I therefore hope you will receive readily and heartily the love of our lowliness, which indeed I trust you have already received through the most blessed bishop Alypius, our father, since he deigns to be so. For he without doubt has given you in himself an example of loving us before acquaintance and beyond our merit: we were unknown to him and separated by a long gap of land and sea, yet by the spirit of true love, which penetrates and is poured out everywhere, he was able to see us by loving and to reach us by addressing us. He gave us the first proofs of his affection and the pledges of your love in the gift of the books mentioned above. And as much as he took pains that we should not love your holiness moderately, once we knew it not only by his words but more fully through your own eloquence and faith, so much, we believe, he has taken care that you in turn, by imitating him, should love us very greatly. We pray that the grace of God may abide with you forever, as it does, brother one in heart with us in Christ the Lord, venerable and most longed for. We greet your whole household and every companion and imitator of your holiness in the Lord with the deepest affection of one-hearted brotherhood. We beg you to bless, by accepting it, the one loaf we have sent to your love as a sign of oneness of heart.

And did you think you had to excuse yourself, dearest brother, for not coming to us in person as you had promised and we expected? But you came to us with the better part of yourself rather than with the part by which you stayed: remaining at home in body alone, you came to us in will, in spirit, and in word. And yet you were not wholly absent even in body, since in your servants, joined to you in holy service in the Lord, the members of your body came to us. Therefore, truly holy brother, deservedly most beloved and one in heart with us in Christ, the crown of godliness is already laid up for you in heaven, which the righteous judge will give on that day to you and to all who, like you, with perfect love love their neighbor in Christ, or Christ in their neighbor. For, looking at spiritual things through bodily ones, we readily infer from the plain love you show to the brother you see that heavenly, faithful, and perfect love with which you love God whom you do not see. We prove it by the obedience of faith, if, that is, by loving one another we prove, as you prove, that we are disciples of that Master who loved his own to the end and laid down his life for his friends with the same power by which he also took it up again.

Therefore, truly most holy brother, deservedly blessed, you will have a place and a reward in the land of the living above the Queen of the South. For she, a sinner, being still a companion of the nations not yet visited, though already a forerunner of those who would be, did not have the law of the letter but had the faith of the law engraved on the fleshly tablets of the heart by the spirit of counsel and godliness. For her own benefit and from zeal for great and saving gain, she was roused from so far away at the end of the earth and longed to hear divine wisdom, so as to receive what she did not have and drink in the light of knowledge that she lacked. Even then, as a queen who was to come from the nations, she longed for her Bridegroom; she ran in the fragrance of Christ, which his prophet breathed out far and wide, “clothed in a robe of gold, surrounded with variety,” forgetting her people and her father’s house; barbarian by race, not in mind, a foreigner openly but a Jew in secret, she desired to become a fellow citizen of the saints. Hence by the mouth of the Judge himself she is judged worthy not only of the heavenly prize of the blessed resurrection but also of the apostles’ power to judge the adulterous Jews, because, admiring Christ in Solomon, she had fulfilled the true love of the heavenly queen, the church, foreseen in a mystical image. If, then, a divine reward awaits her in the future, although she too received a large part of her reward here at that time by obtaining the hearing of heavenly wisdom she desired, what rewards will be paid at last to you, who desired me with equal grace and greater effort, since with less hope of present benefit to yourself? For what, I ask, did you have to desire in me? What did you hope to take from me that you did not have? What good could you get from conversing with an unskilled man? What profit would there be in the sight of a sinner? What could the wise get from the foolish, the upright from the crooked, the blessed from the wretched, the strong from the weak, one rich in the Lord from the poor?

Truly you seek not your own things but the things of Christ, because you had no merit or gain of your own from me in mind, but only that love which is the fullness of the Gospel, both when you thought of your journey and when you troubled your servants. You are blessed, because I have nothing with which to repay you; but you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous by him who testifies that he is loved and received even in his least ones. Hence he also said this, making himself by his words a debtor for any servant of his name, even a false or useless one: “He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” For me, of course, my burden will not be lessened by this, even though, a sinner, I receive from a righteous man the honor due to the righteous; but to you the very righteousness of your opinion will be credited for a reward of good, because by a holy mistake but with a true affection of godliness you have honored the good Lord even in a bad servant.

What then shall we wretches do, who will owe an account and a penalty even for this, that we receive honors we do not deserve and, being only hearers of the law, are proclaimed as doers? So much the more is the sluggishness of a damnable idleness held against us, the hunger of barren souls, and hands withered for good works, when, hearing through your words what is true praise for worthy servants of Christ such as you, and therefore false praise for us, we recognize how great a debt binds us, since, comparing your judgment with our actions, we do not find in ourselves what we hear said of us. For what similar thing can we boast of? Though one must boast in the Lord, since we have nothing that we have not received by his gift, yet in my case a more advanced age and a personality honored from my early years could ripen me into greater seriousness; besides, a weaker body and a wasted flesh could wear down the pursuit of pleasures; moreover, this mortal life itself, often exercised in labors and hardships, could produce hatred of disturbing things and, out of the necessity of hope and the fear of uncertainties, increase devotion to religion. Then, when I seemed at last to have found rest from false charges and travels, neither occupied with public affairs and far from the noise of the forum, I celebrated the leisure of the countryside and the worship of the church in a pleasing tranquility in domestic retirement; and so, my mind having been gradually withdrawn from worldly crowds and fitted to the heavenly precepts, I fought my way more easily to contempt for the world and to the company of Christ, as if by a road bordering on this way of life.

You, dearest brother, turned to the Lord by a greater miracle, since you were in the bloom of youth, richer in praise, lighter in the burdens of inheritance, not poorer in the substance of means, and still moving in the very theater of the world, that is, the throng of the forum, holding the palm of an eloquent name, when with a sudden rush you shook off the slavish yoke of sin and broke the deadly chains of flesh and blood. Neither the riches heaped up from your marriage into a consular family, nor, after your marriage ended, the freedom to sin and an unmarried youth, could call you back from the narrow entrance of salvation and the steep road of virtue to that soft and spacious road of the many. Blessed are you, who fled from the counsel of the ungodly and refused to stand in the way of sinners and disdained to sit in the seat of pestilence, so that by a lofty humility you might lie at the feet of the Crucified.

You, then, a true doer of the law and the Gospel and no deaf hearer, nailing body and world to the cross, turned away from the delights of youth and the evil joys of the present life as from poisons and griefs, spurning the burdens of inheritances as dung. Deservedly you obtained a holy mother-in-law, more generous than any parent, as an eternal mother, because you had put the heavenly Father before your earthly parent: following the example of the apostles, you left your father in the tossing boat, that is, in the uncertainty of this life, with the nets of his affairs and the entanglement of the inheritance, and followed Christ. And, no less rich in the household wealth of talent, not receiving praise from men and loftily disregarding vain glory, you preferred the preaching of fishermen to all of Cicero’s writings and to your own. You fled to the silence of godliness to escape the uproar of iniquity. You chose to fall silent to mortals, so that with a pure mouth you might speak of divine things, and expiate a tongue polluted by doglike eloquence with the praises of Christ and the very remembrance of the holy name.

O true Israelite, who have seen the God of Jacob with so faithful a mind and, as though strengthened by wrestling with the Lord himself, have prevailed against the prince of this world and conquered the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places with the shield of faith and the weapons of righteousness, choosing to please Christ rather than men, and to be foolish to men rather than to God! You have preferred the scandal of the cross to all the eloquence and all the wisdom of this world, so that what is foolishness to those who perish you, admitted to the portion of salvation, might know to be the power and wisdom of God, as it is made plain to all who are to be saved. Blessed are you, brother, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but the Father who is in heaven, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who turned their wisdom and made it foolish and chose the weak and foolish things of the world, so as to confound this world by the very things for which it disdains to know God. Remember us, then, all the more, since you rely on richer merits for power in prayer. For though our lamp is already lit in the light of Christ, we still lie hidden under the bushel of our sins, and we long to be brought out by the hand of you who, conspicuous by the light of faith and grace as much as of works, shine through the seven lampstands of the Lord, and to have our head anointed with your oil, so that we may not burn dimly like a smoking wick (which nevertheless the merciful Lord does not quench), but may shine with a pure light of faithful example, worthy to be preferred even to others; although, by the grace of the Lord shining in the darkness, we live not obscurely, through the brightness of his name, even if, as you have heard, we live in retirement. For in our upper room we keep silent in seclusion, because “it is good for a man,” as the prophet says, “to sit alone and keep silence.” Hence the Lord himself taught us to be silent even in causes that cry out, he who “like a lamb before the shearer did not open his mouth,” and who nevertheless said, “I have kept silence; shall I always keep silence?” So we silently await his will and judgment, who is able both to be silent now in us and, when he wills, to intercede for us.

Meanwhile, however, we have felt that our sins have harmed us in this, that we have not deserved to see you; and we think this has been added to our ills, that we have also been the cause of trials for you, since, as you told us, you suffered illness twice over, struck down as often as you tried to come to us. But since, as it is written, the Lord our God himself often tests us to prove our love, with which we love one another in his peace, we hope from your faith rather than from ours that, if the trial that came first has worked approval in you, it may no longer be able to frustrate the wishes of a love thus proved. For we know the spirit in you is so willing that we do not fear that the ever-weak flesh will prevail to hinder our common desire; strengthening it by faith, you will subdue it to the mind, so that it is forced to be able in Christ to do what of itself it cannot, if you say to it: “Do not fight against the spirit; agree with your adversary on the way, and there will be peace for your bones,” and, “When my heart has exulted in the living God, then my flesh too will rest in hope.”

Hold fast, then, brother, what you hold, lest another take your crown. It is like this: do not cease to will what you have willed, and keep your resolve to come to us unchanged. He in whose power and favor it lies that we may prosperously do what we piously will will bring your devout efforts to the fruit of your vow. For we know that for one who desires the good all things work together for good. And we too, which was indeed a most welcome sign of our agreement in all things, received your letter telling of your illnesses while we were ill ourselves, and we proved in ourselves the apostle’s saying, that the members of one body suffer with one another in feeling. For we felt ourselves restored by the very fact that you had written that you had recovered, so that, though placed in different lands, we experienced the unity of the Spirit working in us, as we shared equally both troubles and remedies by a silent connection between separated bodies.

So you too, brother one in heart with me and the better portion of ourselves in Christ, put away any sadness that you may have felt in your devout mind at the news of our chastisement, for “the Lord has chastened us sorely, but he has not given us over to death.” Visited by the healing hand of the Almighty, we were being nursed from our present illness toward the hope of health, softening our scourgings by mutual consolations. For the very fellowship of suffering gave us great and sweet comfort, since the very likeness of our blows seemed to have met in us not without the will of the Lord, without whose command not even a sparrow falls to the ground. So also recovery had begun to come to both of us together, whether because each breathed more easily with the other’s relief, or because the Lord, the author of unity, binding all his own with an undivided Spirit, would not allow even our bodily substance to disagree.

Yet this was not the only reason that delayed our servants. For our Vigilantius too, both before he reached us and after he arrived in Campania, suffered from violent fevers, and, being himself a fellow member, he suffered with our illness by a shared labor. In short, that catechumen, who was not yet a member of our body, did not feel our wounds and remained healthy and free of our sickness, because flesh still foreign could not feel the pain of a frame not its own. So when our Vigilantius began to be able to travel, only then did I decide that a reply should be sent. For we admit that both wanted to hurry long before; but since, before regaining his strength, the one who could not would have hurried rashly, and the one who could would have done so undutifully, we held back both against their will, since they were willing but we could not consent, by keeping silent.

Therefore, as we wrote above, after an illness borne in common labor, restored by the prayers of saints and dear ones, and in great part, we believe, by yours, as the Lord looked on us more mercifully, yet still weak in our exhausted bodies (in which indeed the apostle teaches us to boast, whom weakness, as he proclaims, made strong, because, of course, the flesh, which wars against the spirit, when it is broken by ill health, its strength likewise broken, cannot overcome spiritual power): weak, then, in the flesh, to the advantage of the spirit, which exults at the loss of the flesh, rejoices as it were in the tribulation of a hostile matter, and grows strong through the weakening of the tamed body, but sound and strong in the love we have for you through the Lord Jesus, we have sent this letter for your comfort, just as we meanwhile keep yours, until we see you yourself, as you have promised and as we never cease to hope from the Lord.

There are many things that ought to invite you to us and call you away from your homeland for a little while, above all love of peace and flight from jealousy, which is kindled most of all by the sight or neighborhood of a rival way of life. Indeed, in our case the distance of the City quenches the fires of the jealous clergy at Rome, and there “all iniquity stops its mouth,” because through our absence the flame of hatred, as though its fuel were withdrawn, grows sluggish and cold and does not dare to break out into speech, though envy gnashes its teeth, while, conscious of its own iniquity, it blushes at itself and has nowhere ready to kindle the torches of a spiteful mind. Yet the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, abounds in the hearts of very many, and all Campania venerates the work of God our Savior in us. At Rome too only a few, even among the clergy itself, by whom alone we seem to be scandalized, are stirred by the bite of envy. But thanks be to the Lord, who has granted even to me, his most wretched sinner, to say, “For they have hated me without cause.” As far as I am concerned, however, with those also who hate my peace I am peaceable in mind. For if anyone wishes to be contentious, our custom does not admit it. Of these very men who are said to hate us and to separate us from the fellowship of their holiness, hardly a faint rumor slips through to us, and it is shut out from our ears, fenced with a hedge of thorns, like a cold breeze or the troublesome hum of an empty gnat.

But our fellow servants, your servants, will be able to tell you more fully how little harm the haughty aloofness of the pope of the City does to the Lord’s grace toward us. In the few days they were with us they saw how assiduous, how constant were the services of anxious brothers, monks, bishops, clerics, and often even laymen, throughout the whole time of our illness. I may boast of this to your oneness of heart, yet only of the Lord’s grace, whose work and gift this also is: there was hardly a bishop in all Campania who thought it right not to visit us, and those whom weakness or some necessity held back were present through clerics and letters sent in their place. African bishops, too, sent men to visit us at the beginning of summer. This being so, you see how much you ought to hasten to our lowliness, both to take away a little of the occasion from those who seek an occasion, and to go abroad from your homeland for the increase of grace or love, while as a guest in the body you are still abroad from Christ; for the Truth himself testifies that no prophet is accepted in his own country.

I confess, though nothing could be given me more welcome than your presence, that my desire for your presence has been kindled more fiercely because you have promised that many spiritual brothers will come with you to us. Will that time come, I ask, and will that day ever dawn on which I shall welcome your brotherhood, coming with a band of God’s elect as companions, in the lap of my lord Felix, now our common patron, and on which we may rejoice together in the Lord, in his very presence, over what I now ask to be obtained by his prayers, when, embracing you all together and in turn, I shall rightly say as we sing together: “This is plainly the day that the Lord has made; let us exult and rejoice in it,” for “it is good and pleasant for brothers to dwell together in unity”? Then I will settle you not only as a lodger in the monastery of the neighboring martyr, but also as a tenant in his garden, but rent-free, since you have already received your denarius from the householder, besides those which the same Lord has already generously given the innkeeper for your wounds, so that, healed with the oil of mercy and the wine of grace, you might be hired more usefully for the Lord’s vineyard with your body made whole.

I already seem to see my little garden better cultivated as the Lord’s hired laborers arrive with you and work with us. Nor is it hard to judge how easily they will finish the labor of light cultivation whom Christ chose for his vineyard and would not allow to stand idle to God in the empty marketplace of this world. Already in mind and thought I picture the joys of home after the holy kiss, when, under the inebriating spirit of love, we shall mingle a sober gladness in chaste cups, and celebrate holy feasts not in the leaven of wickedness but in the unleavened bread of sincerity, singing to the Lord in hymns and spiritual songs, singing to God with tongues and hearts, doing whatever we do in word or deed in the name of Jesus Christ, giving thanks to the Father through him. He who makes those of one way of life dwell in one house will, I hope, make us dwell among ourselves in himself. He who made both one and, when lifted up, drew all things to himself, who, humbled, had made peace for all things, reconciling the world to God, when he has filled our mouth with joy by the presence of your oneness of heart, we shall say: “The Lord has done great things for us,” and in the abundance of our gladness we shall bless you from the house of the Lord, because you are blessed by the Lord, you who have come in the name of the Lord. May you receive the cup of salvation and eat the bread of the blessed in the kingdom of God; for you are our fullness and joy before the Lord Jesus.

Dare, then, to break out, relying not on your own means and strength but leaning and resting on Christ, because his rod and his staff comfort, sustain, and guide us. He who bears our sorrows and took up our infirmities, who gives strength to the weary and strengthens feeble knees, will himself make your way spotless and without stumbling; he will gird you with strength and make your feet like a deer’s, so that you may exult like a giant to run your course, and the weakness of fearful flesh cannot hinder you, who walk not by the flesh but by the Spirit. For in serving Christ we use the body’s service, but rather the mind’s command. And so the flesh, commanded, accompanies our will, directed by Christ’s authority; the body draws firmness from the strength of the mind and, as a servant, shapes its obedience to its master’s bearing. And thus strength is made perfect in weakness, when the soul, serving God with the consent of a tamed flesh, fulfills the duties of virtue through the ministry of weakness.

Set out, then, and proceed prosperously, and the right hand of God will lead you wonderfully. His mercy and grace will go before your face, and even if you leave home weak, you will gain strength by going. For those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles. If, then, you have a heart burning on the way, your youth will be renewed like the eagle’s; you will run and not be weary, you will walk and not faint. No staff, no wallet, no purse will weigh you down, nor shoes nor two tunics hinder you; but, stripped of fleshly bonds as one allowed to stand barefoot on holy ground, with loins girt with a belt weighed down by no money, you will run your way in haste, as the Lord’s Passover and the work of Christ must be done in the time that is short: “the God of our salvation will make your journey prosperous”; every valley will be filled for you and every hill brought low, so that the rough places of iniquity become level ways, lest you strike your foot anywhere on the journey, “for he has given his angels charge over you to keep you in all your ways.” And the Lord himself, your protection, will surround you with the shield of his peace, shining before you in the light of his countenance and spreading over you the shadow of his wings, so that “the sun shall not burn you by day nor the moon by night.” In every place he will keep and bless your going in and coming out, so that everywhere you may find a son of peace and your peace may come upon every host.

But if perhaps, as you set out, you weep at the thought of being torn from dear people or familiar places, your temporary sadness will be turned into eternal joy. “Going they went and wept,” it says, “casting their seeds; but coming they will come with exultation, carrying their sheaves.” So you, even if you weep in coming, will rejoice in returning and reap in joy what you have sown in tears. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with your whole house, not made with hands, for you are the living temple of God, built on the foundations of the apostles in Christ God, my brother one in heart, venerable, most beloved and most longed for. I ask you to greet our holy parent, your mother in Christ and fellow heir, with the veneration she deserves. My partner in the Lord greets your brotherhood with the affection with which she venerates you. And greet from us with much respect all the holy brotherhood that we are sure lives with you. All who are with us in the Lord greet you, such as Proforus, from among the Hebrews, and Restitutus, who loves the Lord and loves you, whom he has come to know in Christ, and greatly longs for you.

In the heading of the letter I was afraid to imitate your brotherhood, which surpasses me in all things, because I believed it safer to write truthfully. So take care hereafter, servant of Christ called to freedom, not to write yourself the servant of a man, a brother, and a lesser fellow servant; for it is the sin of flattery rather than the justification of humility to give to any man, not to say a most wretched sinner, the honor due to the one Lord, the one Master on earth, the one God. Love from a pure heart and unfeigned faith is enough; whatever is more than this comes from evil. I beseech you, brother, by the Lord, to look upon my presumption toward you with the spirit of revelation; otherwise I may fear offending you by so talkative a letter. But with love, which bears all things, grace ought to be increased by the very thing that usually produces disgust where no love tempers weariness. For while dictating, as I think of you and am wholly in you, I speak as though to one present after a long separation and forget to bring my words to an end.

We have sent you a Campanian loaf from our cell as a blessing, relying so much on your merits in the Lord that we believed it would reach you full of its grace. Though you are already filled with richer crumbs from the Lord’s table, deign to turn into a blessing in the Lord’s name the bread received from sinners. And lest a loaf of fine wheat seem to you to exceed the measure of our lowliness, we have sent a boxwood dish as a witness to our riches; you will receive it as a parting gift of a spiritual vow, to keep as a model if you do not yet use similar silver. But if you have blackened silver, send it to us in the little vessels that we have entrusted to the servants, our sons. For we love vessels of clay, because they are akin to us according to Adam, and we have the Lord’s treasure entrusted to us in such vessels.

Further, since I trust that I have the fullest right over your heart, I ask that, if it becomes necessary for your care to be spent for us, because freedmen, servants, and brothers have failed me, you deign to arrange how the old wine, which we believe we still have at Narbonne, may be brought to us. Do not fear loss, holy brother, if you make us your debtors even for money. For all our people have turned away from us; together they have become unprofitable, and a man’s enemies are those of his own household.

Long since, my brother of one heart in Christ the Lord, as soon as I came to know you in your holy and devout labors without your knowing it, and saw you though you were absent, and embraced you with my whole mind, I hastened to approach you also with a familiar and brotherly address by letter. And I believe that my message was delivered to you by the hand and grace of the Lord; but since the servant whom we had sent before winter to greet you and others equally beloved of God is still delayed, we could no longer either put off our duty or restrain our most eager longing for word from you. So we have written now a second time, if our earlier letter was found worthy to reach you, or for the first time, if it did not have the good fortune to come into your hands.

But you, brother, who as a spiritual man judge all things, should not weigh our love for you by the duty or the timing of letters alone. For the Lord is witness, who, one and the same, works his love in his own everywhere, that from the time when, through the kindness of the venerable bishops Aurelius and Alypius, we came to know you by your works against the Manichees, love for you was so implanted in us that we seemed not to take up some new friendship but as it were to resume an old affection. So now, though we write as beginners in speech, we do not write as beginners in affection, and we in turn as it were recognize you in the spirit through the inner man. Nor is it surprising if, though absent, we are present to each other and, though unknown, we know each other, since we are members of one body, have one head, are steeped in one grace, live on one bread, walk one way, and dwell in the same house. In short, in all that we are, with the whole hope and faith by which we stand in the present, we strive toward the future; let us be one as much in the spirit as in the body of the Lord, lest we be nothing if we fall away from the one.

How small, then, is what bodily absence begrudges us of each other, except indeed that fruit by which the eyes of those who wait on temporal things are fed? And yet not even bodily grace should be called temporal among spiritual people, to whom the resurrection will grant even the eternity of their bodies, as we dare to presume, unworthy though we are, in the power of Christ and of the goodness of God the Father. Therefore would that the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ would grant us this gift too, that we might see your face also in the flesh. Not only would great joy be brought to our longings, but light would grow in our minds, and our poverty would be enriched from your abundance. This indeed you can bestow even when absent, especially on this occasion, when our sons Romanus and Agilis, of one heart with us and very dear to us in the Lord, whom we commend to you as other selves, will return in the name of the Lord with their work of love completed; we ask that on this errand they may enjoy especially the affection of your love. For you know what lofty things the Most High promises to a brother who helps a brother. Through them, if you wish to repay me with any gift of the grace given to you, you may do so safely; for, please believe me, they are one heart and one soul with us in the Lord. May the grace of God remain with you forever, as it does, my venerable brother of one heart in Christ the Lord, most beloved and most longed for. Greet from us all the saints in Christ, such as no doubt cleave to you. Commend us to all the saints, that they may deign to pray for us with you.

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.

In the Lord God Jesus Christ I feel, and in you above all I gladly experience by the gift and word of God, that “nothing can be compared with a faithful friend,” and that “a gracious tongue abounds in a good man.” For the consolation of your love is to us like a medicine of life, your words like a honeycomb; “as cold water to the thirsty, so is good news to us” about you “from a far country.” And while this news fattens our bones with the evidence of your well-being and with the eloquence of your love, it brings a great heap of gladness and delight in that it is brought and delivered by your servants, our sons in the Lord, so that we enjoy not only your letter but some part of your very side. What shall we render to our Lord, besides all that he has rendered to us, for this grace too, by which he has joined you to us by a spiritual brotherhood: you who were most dear to us before in worldly friendship, and now also, in his own affairs, which we hold to be of incomparable price, an inseparable companion and partner?

“Who is my mother,” he says, “or who are my brothers?” Clearly not those born of the will of the flesh and the union of sleep, but those born of God through Christ, the wisdom of God, who, remaining in himself, makes all things new and gives power to become sons of God, coheirs of his kingdom; for this very reason he was conformed to the body of our lowliness, that he might conform us to the body of his glory, and, tearing us not only from our land but also from our kindred, transfer us into his own lot and generation. By this gift he has deigned to create us for himself and to bind us together in the bond of his love; from a carnal intimacy, in which even then, as we understand, he had been preparing us for this covenant, he has changed us by a stronger affection into an eternal kinship, since this is the love of Christ, which never fails, because it flows down from God and abides in God, and makes every man in whom it abides everlasting by its own everlastingness. This love knows not how to be puffed up, is free of guile, untouched by envy, jealous for God, not with pride of spirit but with a spirit of gentleness and a jealousy of devotion. For our Lord, as he himself has testified and as we experience, is sweet and gentle and lowly of heart.

Born a brother to me from him, not only for present help but for an everlasting partnership, you surpass every affection of bodily kinship toward me by as much as you are my brother by a stronger parent than those whom flesh and blood alone ally to me. For where now is my brotherhood of blood? Where is my old friendship? Where are my former companions? I have vanished before them all, “a stranger,” as it is said, “to my brothers and a foreigner to the sons of my mother.” “My friends and those once near to me now have stood afar off”; and “like a stream rushing down and like a wave passing over,” so they pass me by, and perhaps are confounded in me and, as it is written, are ashamed to come to me; those who were near have become far from me, and those who were far, near. “Instead of your fathers,” it says, “sons have been born to you.” So instead of parents and brothers and friends you have been made ours by the Lord: you, anxious with a parent’s care, solicitous with a brother’s love, assiduous with the whole faithfulness of unfeigned friendship, and pouring out all the bowels of devotion upon us, visit us with constant letters and soothe us with the gentlest comforts.

Nor are you content to visit us at every opportunity unless you also send your servants; and you choose letter-carriers not only from among your household slaves but also from among your holy sons, in whose blessed offspring in the Lord you rejoice, so that you may see us through their eyes and touch us through their mouths. Beautiful to us are their feet, as of those who bring good news. For they announce and bring us the things that make for peace concerning you, when they relate the works of the Lord which you either do in the word of God or write in the spirit of the Word. What riches could give us such precious gifts, what kinships such sweet comforts? Even if we defer the reckoning of what divine generosity promises for eternity, it is easy to see how much better than the things we have put second are the things that are repaid even in this world. For what loss of devotion, I ask, is caused me by an unkind parent, a neglectful brother, or a forgetful friend, when all the loves of these names, pledges, or bonds are repaid to me abundantly even from you alone? To say nothing of the not a few, both in our world and in one unknown to us, who are like you toward God and toward us, whose very great affection the grace of the Rewarder grants us in place of homeland, parents, and patrimony: if we count the good things we have received in you alone, we shall reckon that all that was ours has been repaid to us in you more abundantly and more preciously. “A brother does not redeem,” it says; “shall a man redeem?” Likewise we may say: the world does not love us, but Christ loves us. Man neglects, but God cherishes. “A man’s enemies are those of his own household,” but again, a man’s friends are those of God’s household. We had good and great brothers, friends, and neighbors; but the Lord was not pleased in them toward us, he who chose to give you to us as an inseparable brother and a most beloved neighbor, whom we rightly love as ourselves, because we have one heart and one soul with you in Christ.

So what we said briefly above about the love of many others who are equally spiritual we did not say fittingly or worthily; for in no one’s person can there be for us the same grace that we have in you. For though they may deign to love equally the grace of the Lord in our lowliness, yet this is a special gift to us in you: that the friendship of our former life too marked us out as predestined for each other in the closest union of Christ’s love, while we were still lovers of the things from which we are now turned away through Christ. And yet, through the habit of that intimacy, we grew into this bond in which we are now joined by God’s intervention, so that by loving each other faithfully even on an unbelieving road we learned to love spiritually as well; for each of us always loved the other so scrupulously that no affection could be added to our love for each other except the love of Christ, which alone surpasses every sense and affection. All the more warmly do we owe thanks to the good Lord, that he deigned to look upon our lowliness, and, having found us alike in the field, drew us out alike, as twins from the womb of the flesh, and took us up alike. For truly, as you wrote, we were two in the field; but by the goodness and almighty power of God, I would dare to say, one of us was taken up in such a way that neither was left. For each of us singly was also two, when the rebellious flesh in us was at odds with the spirit and our man had no peace, since the outer fought against the inner. But now, by the favor of him who made both one, we are both two and one, because there is one spirit in two, and there is no distinction between those whose body is one. But this, as I said, we share with all our brothers in Christ; one thing is peculiarly welcome to us and to be welcomed in you, in whose friendship we have received this most blessed gift of God: that we were not separated from each other by a change of road, a loss we have experienced with regard to many who were once, as you recall, most dear to us.

Truly, then, you are to us parent and brother and neighbor; you do in our regard the will of God and the fullness of the law, you love us as yourself, a friend to us in the love of Christ and a brother in God’s regeneration. Since you see and recognize this, why do you speak burdensomely of us and falsely of yourself, saying, “We were two in the field, and one was taken”? Let us not be ungrateful to God, who took up not one of us, but one in us. We were two, but at the time when we were paired with those brothers from whom a division has been made by this resolve of ours; for the same Scripture shows clearly enough that “one” is said not of a single body but also of the oneness of heart of many, since it presents these persons not in two men but in peoples, as the faith of the Gentiles and the remaining-behind of the Jews shows. For those two women grinding, too, of whom likewise one is taken, bear, I think, the figure of the synagogue and the church; for there is no other person treated in the whole scheme of the sacred writings except either the distinction, in the universal human race, between believing and unbelieving peoples, or, in the nature of every man, the creation of a twofold substance. And therefore, my brother, since we always cleaved to each other in one heart, as we now cleave together in Christ, we have been either taken up together or left together. But taken up, not by our merit but by the grace of God, whose gifts and callings are without repentance; nor from any prior claim of works, but by the faith of a good will, by which, inspired together with love for him, as appeared from the single tenor of our resolve and the single time of our conversion, we ought to glory and exult together in him who justifies the ungodly through faith and gives food to all flesh: not this food which perishes, but that which is prepared for eternal sustenance, such as either a soul busy in the things of God or the catholic church cooks. For it is the body of the true bread that came down from heaven and gives life-giving food to those who hunger for righteousness. For it does not stuff the flesh but strengthens the heart of man. This bread is also a fountain: the more it is eaten, the more it is hungered for, and the more it is drunk, the more it is thirsted for. That we may eat this bread forever, let us grind in the mill of this world the good wheat, which is the working of faithful obedience and love from a pure heart and unfeigned faith.

Since you are full of this grace and virtue, you grind good grain for God and present yourself to be feasted on by God in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth; for whoever, by carrying out his will, is turned into a member of his body is food for him, as he himself says that whoever joins himself to God becomes one spirit. This we attain if we bear the image of the heavenly with the same care and diligence with which we have borne the image of the earthly. For by imitating the imitator of Christ we shall come to the imitation of God, to whom we are a good odor in Christ, if we present a living sacrifice in reasonable service, so that we offer him pure fine flour sifted by the mill of a clean heart from the inner chambers of our being, and, setting up a chaste altar in our breast, slay in our vices the animals commanded by the law for sacrifices: sacrificing a he-goat when we destroy sin, in which is the odor of death; striking down a bull if we lay aside pride; offering a sheep if, not lukewarm in love and fervent in spirit, we cast out softness and sloth; offering in ourselves also a lamb if we live unblemished, and a calf if we become children in malice, so that we reproduce the purity of the one by chastity and the foolishness of the other by simplicity. Such a sacrifice I see you presenting to God in the temple of your body, in the sanctuary of your heart, in the immolation of your flesh, in the oblation of your soul. You sacrifice a bull when, brought low by devout humility, you have struck your lofty neck with the fear of God. You sacrifice a kid when, as a follower of righteousness, you kill all the works of the left side. You cut the throat of a sheep when, as a diligent worker and zealous meditator on the divine will and law, you lay low in yourself inertia and sloth like a soft beast, and with the shears of the heavenly word cut away from yourself the hindrances of this life, like fleeces, useful to the one who shears but burdensome to the one who bears them. With these shears Christ holds us gripped by the two Testaments, and either strips us of worldly burdens as of wool, or again, cutting them away like fleeces from bodily vices as from the sickly and soft bodies of sheep, he draws them into the spinning of the church for the clothing of his body, which he covers with the works of believers (since, when we in turn put on Christ, we are clothed by Christ), and weaves them into the fringes of his garment.

This shepherd has already shorn you, I think, and set you on his threshing floor and soaked your fleece with heavenly dew. For the grace that has been poured on your lips, and flows abundantly through your mouth like a stream from the fountains of Israel or … , as it is written, from paradise, teaches us that the Lord has come down on you like rain on a fleece and has given you water from Jacob’s well, because you too had become one of the sons of Israel drawn near to the Lord. If, then, you have been shorn, you feel that you have received a double benefit: in the heat of the world you crop the light pastures of the word sprinkled with the dew of morning gladness, and you are not scorched by the heat of the noonday demon, because you rest under the shadow of the Lord’s wings. Meanwhile a tunic is being prepared for you from your own wool, with which you may be clothed on that day of winter, so that you may be able to stand before the face of his cold, if, stripped of the body, you are not found naked of works. Then in turn Christ will offer himself to you as a sheep, that Lamb who was led to the slaughter for us and before his shearer did not open his mouth, allowing his fleece, that is, the covering of his flesh, to be stripped from him. For he laid down both his soul and his flesh for us and took them up again, he who is priest and victim, lamb and shepherd; who was slain as shepherd for his sheep and as lamb for his shepherds. For the Lord himself is the victim of all priests, who, offering himself to the Father for the reconciliation of all, was the victim of his own priesthood and the priest of his own victim; and now to him, as the one Lord of all, every new creature is a sacrifice, and the victims themselves are priests. If we now present ourselves to him to be shorn in the silence of humility and patience with which he presented himself for us, he will take on himself the burdens of our fleece and will not disdain to carry the wool of his sheep, he who deigns to carry back on his shoulders to the fold the very sheep that he has called back from straying.

And since he himself has no need of our goods, while we need all of his, being good to us only for our own good, he takes what is ours, which is his; and yet he does not want it as his by right, but credits it to us as if it were ours, though we have nothing that we have not received, and we cannot even exist without his assent. So to us, who brought nothing into this world, he adds the substance of temporal things like a fleece to be shorn: not that the burden may hinder those whom he bids to be born unencumbered, but that he may set before us material for virtue in which to bring forth merits, and that we may have the means to give proof of our faith and devotion toward God, that is, our true Father and Lord, if we have things that are dear or sweet which, preferring God, we disregard for a great reward. And through his immense goodness these things, though they were neither brought with us into this world nor are to be carried out from it with us, are nevertheless, if we obey his commands, so ordered that they are changed for the better and from temporal become eternal. For the things which, as we did not bring them in, so we cannot take away by our nature and by the passing form of this world, these, turning them by the work of almighty God through a blessed kind of trade, we not only carry out with us but even send on ahead of us, sown in the bosom of the Lord.

Hence, I think, it is prescribed that the lazy worker shall not eat bread: not, of course, this bread of perishing food, but that by which one lives into true life; because each one, as it is written, will eat of his own fruits and live by his own works. And so each man’s work is his bread, and the true and living bread is Christ, whom the lazy worker cannot eat, because he is also our Passover, which we are commanded to eat in all haste, unencumbered and girded and firmly shod, without putting our staffs out of our hands, that is, never slackening the works on which we lean; for the time is short, and it is expedient for us to be free from care, as the apostle urges, because of the present necessity, so that we may be found ready and not fear to open to the Lord when he knocks, dreading what we deserve from a conscience of sleep or negligence. That fear will indeed profit us nothing, when we must nonetheless be dragged out, and to death after death, to pay the just penalties of negligence and impiety, if we are caught serving another’s master rather than our own, busy with the affairs of the world rather than of Christ, and do not open to the Lord when he knocks, and are led unwilling to the Father. Therefore we are told beforehand to labor and pray for this, that is, for the soul, at the opportune time, that is, the present, into whose span we are brought for this purpose, that through this short and passing life we may seek the true life. The plain and field of this life is this world, or man himself, who is sent into this world, from whom one is taken up when, as we said above, with the flesh subjected to the spirit, he has made the two one; for in each of us, according to the apostle, there are two minds and two laws, and as they grind within us, flour acceptable or rejectable to God is produced.

But your words, as eloquent as they are chaste, testify that you, having conquered the law of the members and with the outer man brought to ruin, are preparing a pure dough and making unleavened bread for Christ. For it would not have been granted you to tell the story of Martin unless you had made your mouth worthy of sacred praises by a clean heart. Blessed, then, are you by the Lord, you who have recounted the history of so great a bishop and so manifest a confessor in words as worthy as your affection is just. Blessed too is he for his merits, who deserved a historian worthy of his faith and life, and who is consecrated both to divine glory by his own merits and to human memory by your writing. These words of yours are also fleeces, and they cover the Lord Jesus with a most welcome covering; they surround … with beautiful furnishing and adorn it with the flowers of your talent. That Lamb will clothe you in return from his own fleece on the day of recompense, putting his immortality over your mortality.

Only remember us and look back to us, not looking back as one who turns away, but as one mindful of a friend. For it is certain that, as a more skillful farmer, you have larger fruits, and, as a swifter runner, you fly ahead of our slowness to the prize of the upward calling. For, weaker in mind than in body, I follow you at a long interval, yet separated from you only by distance, not by road; and I turn the same mill with a sick and unequal hand, your partner at the mill but worse in grain, because I grind tares mixed with the wheat. That these may be wholly turned into good grain I need your prayers, by which I hope to escape both my riches and my poverty, since both are evil for me, being poor in righteousness and rich in sin. For I would truly believe myself rich in good if I were already as poor as you think. In this matter, however, I will shake you a little out of your words, in which you disagree with yourself. Even if you did not proclaim virtues of my own in me, yet since you thought others’ virtues might be granted me by your words, how is it fitting that you, the same man, should admit that you shudder at the poverty which you profess to admire? If you believe that this virtue has been given me which you confess you wish for but cannot attain, namely that having food and clothing I am content with it and take no thought beyond the day, why do you think either that I shall be overcome by the necessity of want, so that I stop inviting you, whom I cannot help longing for, or why do you show yourself so weak and distrustful of Christ that you fear to come to such a friend as you describe, if in truth you follow him who said: “Take up your cross and come, follow me”? How else do you think Christ is to be followed except by the law he taught and the pattern he displayed? Though he came to his own, yet among his own possessions he had no place to lay his head.

Imitate the imitator of Christ, that you may live by dying, crucifying yourself to the world and the world to yourself, dying daily through faith in the word and living in the word of faith. For man does not live by bread alone, especially a Christian, of whom it is properly written that he lives by faith. Did he say “by bread”? Why then do you fear hunger from me, if you have faith? Your bread is with you. If you are fed by the word of God, you will not long for the food of the belly; for God will destroy both the one and the other while he builds himself up in us, if we stand founded in his love and do not set our house on the sand of wavering distrust. Did we not both believe him and swear allegiance to him who said: “Do not take thought for tomorrow; for sufficient for the day is its own evil; seek first the kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be added to you”? If you believe him, why do you fear hunger from the want of this brother of his, whom you know to have preferred poverty to riches in the security of this word? Or do you believe that the one who trusts the earth abounds more than the one who trusts God? And the one fed by his own care more than the one fed by God’s? What can that wretched man have who does not have himself? For he does not have himself who hopes more from himself than from God; and he is truly dead who fears not to live if he entrusts his whole self to God and commits himself to God. I hope, therefore, that it was rather a jest of your good humor than a confession of weakness when you wrote that you believe I shall soon be so poor that I would not dare invite you any more. I confess that I prefer nothing to the good of such freedom, since so inward a circumcision is full perfection. But if you have true faith in Christ, true admiration of heavenly virtues in man, and emulation of a man living in God, how would you not seek me all the more the more perfect you heard I was, unless you were openly confessing that you do not believe in your heart what you profess with your mouth? But you, a frequent visitor of the most blessed Martin, are shown to be fleeing in me the sinner, not the poor man; for you would surely never have longed for Martin if you had feared to go hungry for bodily food.

I certainly, since in the progress of spiritual work love, which is the fullness of the law, must above all make progress, shall not cease to invite you as I do not cease to long for you. Come to us, and if you can, fly to us. We have nothing but Christ; and see whether we have nothing, we who have him who has all things. For we did not leave Ebromagus for the sake of a little garden, as you write, but preferred the garden of paradise to both patrimony and homeland, because the true home is rather there, where it is eternal, and the homeland is more truly there, where is our original land and first dwelling. For if you believe, by the favor of Christ, for whose sake, if we have nothing, we possess all things in him, then now in this ground of thorns and toil the mud of the earth does not hold us even in the little clod of a garden; would only that no dust of sin clung to us in the same way! If you believe this good to be such as you proclaim, and believe that I am in it, as you write that you believe, and yet long for me more sluggishly, then you offend no longer against me, a sinner always and always unworthy of your sight, but against the Lord himself, if you think that the sustenance of mortal life will fail us precisely when God has begun to be our possession.

I confess that I marvel at the holy kindness and patience of your love, that from the letters I usually write to you, very talkative and fuller of annoyance than of grace, you nevertheless conceive a longing for my speech rather than weariness of it; since you provoke me to frequent and longer letters and stir me by the grace of your own writings, in which love from a pure heart and unfeigned faith speaks a sincere affection in the unleavened bread of truth, and in turn draws out mine from my inmost mind. What, then, shall I do? Shall I obey you with an abundance of letters? But you have no need of my goods, and it is more fitting that I be enriched by you, because the rich man ought to give to the poor, that there may be equality. Or shall I rather consult my own advantage and set a guard on my mouth, to escape the danger of sin that comes from much talking? But again I fear that I may be found guilty of disobedience and perhaps offend more gravely if I sin against you by not obeying than if I fear for myself by not writing.

May the Lord, then, at the Lord’s bidding, give me the opening of my mouth to you, and hold out the lamp of his word before my feet, so that the night of my foolishness may be lit up like the day. May he loosen my tongue to a good word, he who loosed even the mouth of an ass to human speech. For I too am one of those stones or beasts of burden in whose prefiguring the ass then spoke, signifying that the dumb nature of pagan hardness and stupidity would speak when its tongues were loosed for God. And, if you like, let us extend the fabric of this letter on this very grace of God, since all our discourse ought to be occupied with the commands and praises of the Most High, and everything we say, everything we live, should be paid back with perpetual thanksgiving to him by whose work and gift we speak and live. For he made us, and not we ourselves. He, I say, the Lord, made us, and he also remakes us, having from the very beginning, through all that he has done and spoken in his saints, been working out the sacraments of our salvation, that is, of the restoration of mankind. For the righteous Abel was at once restored by a holy offspring in Seth, who, with a like face, reproduced his father, formed in the image of God. From there, flowing down through the others from the first spring, the vein of righteousness ran on; and although the flood intervened, the seedbed of the destroyed universe stood firm in one man, but a righteous one, the mystery of the only Redeemer already then at work, so that reconciliation might come through one, since the offense had come through many. But again, as the human race went on and righteousness slipped back, and nations and crimes grew together, lest the iniquity of men should again deserve the destruction of the race, again one was chosen to be called the father of faith, from whom should spring both the promise of the kingdom and the seed of the eternal King. That seed, multiplied by the faith of the Gentiles, Christ fulfilled: he who appeared to the patriarchs, was foreshadowed by the law, foretold by the prophets, and came himself, to fulfill the law and the prophets and to give by grace the healing that the law could not confer by works.

For by now sin had so pervaded the whole body, that is, the entire human race, that neither poultice nor bandage was of use to the weak and wounded; for, the strength of the vices being confirmed, the disease, stronger than the remedies, had shut out every cure of human help. And therefore he came who is also to come, conformed to the body of our lowliness, that he might conform us to the body of his glory; because no one but the craftsman is master of his own work, and only the potter has rights over his clay. So the Lord of all, who had made all, deigned to come down to our condition and to take us up in his body, that he might remake us by the same art or power by which he had made us. And he came, not in the loftiness of a lord, which he was, but in the form of a servant, which he was not. He who is the power of God and the Lord of hosts, the helper and protector of all, became like a man without help. He who was free among the dead died to set free. He who justifies the ungodly through faith was reckoned among the wicked. That Lamb who takes away the sins of the world was led like a sheep to the slaughter. He suffered death who gives eternity.

But to perceive the reason for so great a design and gift is his own light, who enlightens us from the everlasting mountains, to which, lifting up our eyes, we may see that we have been found again by the same paths by which we had perished: again from a tree, again from a virgin, but not again to be cast down by pride; on the contrary, to return by humility. For this reason the King of glory and Lord of majesty emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and covered his invisible greatness with a visible abasement, so that us, who were through that old disease of wrongly conceived arrogance lofty outside but crushed within, he might raise to the form of his own loftiness through the pattern of our humility in himself. For to this end the good Lord has worked and works daily, that we may attain the glory of being conformed to God if we follow the example of our own conformation in Christ, recognizing in the government of the Most High the measure set for our nature, so that we may be carried above ourselves by his grace if we walk within ourselves, mindful of ourselves. To this measure we are fitted by that prophetic saying in Numbers, which says: “We will turn neither to the right nor to the left, but we will go by the king’s highway.” This for us is Christ, the mediator of God and men, holding us in balance between the divine and the human and leading us to his kingdom by the king’s highway, so that, humble in heart and lofty in work, we may be lifted from the left, that is, from sins, which drag down to death, and, called back by the law of humility from the excessive right, that is, from proud presumption, may keep a wholesome middle course; lest either, bending our eyes to the earth, we be compared to beasts that have no understanding, or, searching things too high for us, we become vain in our thoughts. Therefore, not minding high things but consenting to the lowly, let us measure ourselves by the measure with which the Lord has measured to us, so that we may be narrowed in ourselves and enlarged in the Lord; not like those wise men of this world, whose wisdom the Lord has rejected and destroyed and shut out by the foolishness of preaching. For “they argued,” it says, “to hide snares”; since the whole art of the philosophers labors at this, to obscure the light of truth by the assertion of fictions, to entangle in the snares of empty disputes minds drawn away from the truth, to deceive by the fraud of talent and to mislead by the cosmetic of speech.

But after the light arose in the darkness, the Lord merciful and compassionate and righteous, those men set their mouth against heaven in vain, who, ignorant even of earthly things and of their own nature, search the regions of the sky and seek God without God. Therefore those who searched failed in their searching, and the arrows of little ones became their wounds; because the Lord, catching the wise in their own craftiness, confounded them through the mouths of infants and sucklings, and established his kingdom not in word but in power. Hence I too, least of all the Lord’s least, slightest of the little ones and most infantile of infants, dare to burst out into the voice of his praise, giving thanks to the Lord Most High that he has brought forth to his little ones the mystery of lofty godliness, which he kept stored in the treasures of his wisdom, and hidden it from the wise of the world, lest this world should glory in the vanity of its wise men, through which, with darkness poured over it, it had not known the wisdom of God. But our peace is Jesus, who came to make both one and to set all things in equality; he destroyed the strong and chose the weak, despised the wise and took up the foolish, so that there might be equality, with no one claiming anything as his own, since every man, sharing in salvation and wisdom only by the divine gift, must glory in the Lord. Let us therefore rejoice with trembling in the Lord our God, who is humble of heart and lofty in majesty, having the same mind in ourselves as in Christ, who, as I said above, conferred on us the grace of salvation through the pattern of humility, so that we, who had deserved to fall by a spirit of exaltation, might learn to rise again by a heart of humility.

That the good Lord was crucified and rose again was done not only to destroy our death and restore eternity, but also to shape the present life, in which we acquire the merit by which the possession of that eternally blessed life is prepared. With what mystery of godliness and design, then, was the Lord fixed to the cross? The apostle teaches: that he might break down, he says, the dividing wall, kill the enmities, strip all the ambition of this world, and, taking captive from the whole power of the enemy, triumph over captivity itself, taking up in his flesh, he says, the likeness of sinful flesh: not, of course, the likeness of flesh, since God is truth in all things and therefore the Word was truly and bodily made flesh, but the likeness of the sin of the flesh; so that he who did no sin by his inviolable and impassible nature nevertheless, for our sake, as it is written, was made sin, that is, bore the sinner he had taken up in the form of a servant. For he was made a curse for us, to free us from the curse of the law; by sin he condemned sin, that is, the material of sin, which still lived in that flesh of Adam, he made void in that very flesh of Adam which he deigned to take up. And so, destroying the dividing wall, that is, the sin that separated us from God, he made both one, not only so that the faith of Jews and Gentiles might come together in Christ, but so that in each of us who believe our nature might agree with itself, and the discord which before was at work in us, when the carnal soul fought against spiritual affection, might be dissolved by the peace of faith. For now that ancient war, in which the law of sin fought against the law of God, is abolished in Christ, when the spirit, serving God, governs by faith the soul subdued to it, and the flesh, as servant, accompanies in all obedience the soul serving God in its turn.

Therefore by the Lord’s passion and resurrection we are instructed not only in the hope and faith of the resurrection, so that we may know how to die not only by the dissolution of the flesh but also by a voluntary withdrawal from this world, and by dying through faith to this world be made alive to God. For the life that is friendly to this world is the death of the soul. For this reason the apostle tells us: “Put to death your members which are on the earth.” He testifies that he himself dies daily, bruising his body, forgetting what lies behind and stretching forward to what lies ahead. In this he teaches humility and loftiness together, because the body cannot be crushed without a spirit of humility, nor can the soul rise to heavenly things except by the mortification of the members. And yet the measure of humility itself must be kept by us, so that we humble ourselves only in divine fear to the one Lord: for “you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve,” whom to serve is freedom. For he who has subjected himself to God alone is subject to no one; but on the contrary, he who wants to be free from righteousness serves all the lowest things, whether spirits or other creatures or his own vices and desires. There is, moreover, a holy pride and a wicked humility. For that pride is justified which is proud toward this world, despises this age, and uses all its great, sweet, and beautiful things as of no account, intent on heavenly things and subject to the divine commands. On the other hand, that humility is condemned which is brought before men not from faith but from slackness of mind and cares more for human favor than for its own salvation: the handmaid of falsehood, the enemy of truth, without freedom, bound to iniquity, mixing wine with water, that is, weakening the pure wine of truth with the wateriness of flattery. Against this kind of humility especially, it seems to me, is aimed that voice which declares: “Woe to those who call evil good and bitter sweet,” and to those who proclaim righteousness to the unrighteous, whom truth also curses through Solomon, as you know.

The blessed psalmist, in a short psalm but with full teaching, shapes us well to the balance of our self-government when he puts forward the merit of humility in his prayers, saying: “Lord, my heart is not exalted, nor are my eyes lifted up. Nor have I walked in great things, nor in wonders above me.” And then he who had asked to be regarded for his humility of heart says: “If I was not humbly minded, but exalted my soul; as a child weaned upon its mother, so you will reward my soul.” He asks for reward precisely because he was not humbly minded but exalted his soul. Will not the prophet’s statement seem to disagree with itself, unless we distinguish these things in understanding, as they were distinguished in his spirit and heart so as to agree with each other? For it was said fittingly and humbly in divine fear by one who offered to God as a sacrifice, as he himself testifies, a troubled spirit and a humbled heart. Yet, keeping humility of heart, the same man exalted his soul, not being humbly minded, because, not minding earthly things, he had his mind fixed on God, holding it the one good to cleave to God and put his hope in God. So too the apostle, who teaches us humility, saying that we should strive above all to be imitators of Christ in it — “Let this mind be in you,” he says, “which was also in Christ, who did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” — yet the same apostle calls us to exalt the soul to things above and divine, when he says: “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is at the right hand and in the glory of God the Father.”

Holding, therefore, this rule of both humility and exaltation, let us keep each of these, which in the perversion I spoke of above is sin but in the right direction in which we are taught obtains grace, in its own order and measure, devoutly both humbling the heart to God and exalting the soul to our Lord. Let us fear nothing but him, love nothing above him. Let us bow our necks only to his yoke, which is easy, and to his burden, which is light, so that, free above every yoke of the hostile power, we may be carried up into heavenly things. For this too is why our Lord’s yoke is easy and his burden light: because it lifts us from earthly and infernal things and raises us to the heights of the heavenly kingdom. For all lightness seeks the heights and is carried upward by the force of its fineness.

But the weights of sin, contrary to this grace, press down and lead into the depths; how heavy a burden they are the prophet testifies when he cries out groaning: “My iniquities have gone over my head, and like a heavy burden they weigh upon me.” But thanks be to the Lord Jesus our God, who is able to deliver us from the body of this death through the multitude of his compassions and the riches of his goodness, by which he superabounds over the abundance of our sins and saves those who hope in him. With him, we believe, the vigils of your prayers for us are also kept. For we know that, serving as his soldier from boyhood and nourished on the sacred writings, polluted by no stain of earthly and fleshly living, you have found grace in the sight of the Most High, even for us, who were caught late from the forest of this world for the Lord’s flock or chariot; since our iniquities have multiplied above the hairs of our head, and we are unworthy that our names should be brought to the divine ears, lest perhaps your lips too become unclean when you name us, and your mouth have to be touched with a fiery coal. Yet you can say, with the humility or the confidence of the ancient prophet: “Lord, forgive them, or blot me out of your book.” This he, a sharer in converse with God, dared to say, not careless of his own salvation nor insolent toward the Lord, but by the art of a profound design: when the just Lord threatened the destruction owed to a sinful people, he set against it the offering of his own blotting-out, being sure, of course, of the divine goodness and justice, that the Lord’s mercy would spare even the unjust while justice could not blot out the just.

Bind the Lord Most High for us too by this condition, so that, since he cannot remove you from his book, he may receive the unjust for the sake of his just one. For since he who is in us is greater than he who is in this world, righteousness is therefore stronger in defending sinners than iniquity against the patronage of the saints. I would like, as far as I am able, to prolong my discourse further, if the running out of paper and the fear of tiring you did not force me to put a limit on my words and end the letter. Indulge my rashness in everything, and answer me, that I may be comforted and instructed by your letter.

Now we commend specially to your oneness of heart Sanemarius, the bearer of this letter, that he may be provided for by you as we have asked our holy bishop and father. For we have made him our fellow servant by giving him freedom in the Lord; but let him serve us in the house of the Lord, in duties assigned to the memorial of our parents, so that through this religious servitude he may deserve to obtain a firm freedom under your protection. Act also with our holy brother the presbyter Exsuperius, that he may receive a small plot of land on the church’s estate from which to provide his living. Further, I ask you to have my letter to our son Daducius, even if he is in Gaul, sent on without any delay by the bishop through a faithful and energetic fellow servant. If perhaps he does not wish a cleric to be taken up with it, deign to send one of the men of Alingo with your letters, by which ours may be supported; for you will learn from the letter I have written to him that the cause is worthy of your intervention. Above all, speed of action is needed, so that the most holy presbyter, venerable in life and age, who is suffering such violence as I have described, may be freed as soon as possible from his exile out of his own house.

As till now I kept the time for silence with fitting humility, so now with due love I have recognized the time for speaking, my venerable and most beloved brother in Christ the Lord. For from the letter of the holy man our brother Olympius, our common friend of one heart, I lately received word of your grief, as unexpected as it was unwelcome to me. In it the love of Christ, our Lord and God, did not permit that the fellowship of my sadness and the service of my voice should then be lacking to you, even if the feelings of private affection might be silent, because in him and through him we are joined together as members of one body. For our Lord God himself, the teacher alike of our life and of our devotion, taught us through that heavenly vessel of his election to rejoice with those who rejoice, to weep with those who weep, to suffer with one another, and to bear one another’s burdens, so that by mutual consolations we might strengthen our common faith and cherish weary hearts. To this service God has granted so much that he promised the one who performs it would be magnified like a great city, declaring through the prophet that “a brother helping a brother will be exalted like a great city”: namely, because brotherly compassion brings a defense to a soul in combat and stands like a wall against the various blows of an afflicted mind.

But if perhaps the very fact that I perform this duty of love rather late is judged a fault rather than a kindness, please believe that I wrote at once, as soon as I learned of it. Nor let me seem to have heard late because I neglected you, since both the remoteness of the place and the character of my way of life excuse me: living withdrawn and silent in it, I can see only the few who pass by, and I do not wish to ask about the holy brothers except those dear to me. Yet always, even in my silence, mindful of you, now that love seemed to demand it, I have opened the affection hidden in my breast and brought it out through this letter to you, by which I have set out, by the way I could, to your holiness, of one heart with me; for I could not keep my body and my mind within the same bounds, since my flesh, weak as always, refused to be moved far in winter, while the spirit, which is always readier, flew to you with fervent longings, so that I might embrace in mind the one I could not hold in body. I have run to you, then, in the thirst of my longings, my brother in Christ, of one heart and venerable; and if you in turn look at me with your mind, you will see and feel that I am wholly with you. For if it is true that we see and hear rather by the mind, I am certainly present to you, and by the better part of myself, since I have come to you in mind; for unless we are present by it, even where we are present in body we do not show real presence, the image of us being empty when the mind is absent. Therefore I have bestowed the sealed gift of friendship and made it fit for our faith, to visit you by a spiritual approach. In turn I ask that I may deserve this kindness from you, that you too, seeing me with inner eyes as though standing near and speaking face to face, sighing with your anxiety over our common necessity, or rejoicing with your patience over the hope of faith, may receive and behold me in this discourse. For a man’s speech is the mirror of his mind. The very word of God confirms this, since out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and the treasure of the breast is made public by speech. For this reason, in the truth in which we stand in Christ, receive my mind expressed to you in this letter, and I do not want you to measure our friendship by time. For it is not like worldly friendship, which is more often begotten by hope than by faith, but that spiritual friendship which is begotten with God as its author and grows together by the hidden kinship of spirits. So it does not grow into love by long familiarity or hang on waiting for proof, but, as befits a daughter of truth, is born at once firm and great, because it begins from fullness, having arisen through Christ.

Embracing you, then, with this love, I revere you as a member of Christ and love you as a member shared with me. For how can those not have one mind who have one faith? How can those not have one spirit who have one God? And so how can those have different hearts in the feeling of endurance who are one body in the framework of belief? I speak the truth, I do not lie: when I think of the movements of your mind, I feel my own heart too drawn by your sighs, and, as truly allied members, pierced by the pain of your wound; although the thought of your prudence and faith refreshes me no less than concern for your grief affects me. In short, I confess that I hesitated whether to offer you words of sorrow for my affection or rather of congratulation for your faith. For I heard both of the calling to God of my holy sister and likewise of the devotion of your piety in Christ, since this householder, through whom I write, also told of the prudence and holiness of your true love for your wife. You attended her, not empty of tears, like most mortals, nor, as those without our hope usually do, with the vain honor of empty pomp, but escorted her with saving remedies and living works, that is, with almsgiving; first paying in due order to her dear funeral its rites, steeped in devout tears and in an abundant dew of love, you honored her obsequies more religiously.

So I will first praise this work of devotion in you; for divine Scripture shows that this too is pleasing to God when it says: “Son, shed tears over the dead, and as one who has suffered grievously begin to lament, and do not neglect his burial.” Indeed our patriarchs too are examples of this observance. For the father of faith wept for his Sarah, the mother of our calling, not, of course, out of distrust of receiving her back, but out of longing for her who had gone ahead. For how could the father of faith and the first hearer of the blessed promise distrust the resurrection? Yet, mindful of humanity, he did not disregard care for the body because of the soul’s security, but, buying a field for a tomb, laid his dead to rest in a precious resting-place; teaching at the same time what men ought to provide for themselves here, since he, who at God’s word had gone out from the land of his fatherland and kindred and had acquired nothing else in all the regions of different nations through which he wandered, a stranger in all the earth, bought only a field for a tomb, that is, not a temporal but an eternal possession, not a land of avarice but of rest. Jacob too honored his beloved and long-awaited Rachel with a famous tomb and a pillar, both to discharge a religious duty in his present grief and to bear witness to it for posterity. Yet he marked that place with the monument of his wife’s death with a prophetic mind, foreseeing that the law was to be laid to rest by the gospel’s birth. By this mystery the patriarch’s wife, who in many places lived as an image of the church, yet died, as I think, as a type of the synagogue, and, bringing forth a son of sorrow, died there, where the end of the law was to be brought forth by a virgin’s childbirth; for Christ is the end of the law. And Tobit teaches the holy and sanctified hope of caring for burial, justified by the Lord especially for the merit of this service and praised by the voice of the archangel, because he had put the burial of a poor man before his own dinner. For, neglecting his belly because he cared for his soul, he preferred to hunger in body rather than in spirit, so that he might be an example to us also, to choose to fast from the food of the flesh in order to bring fullness to the soul. Good, therefore, is the observance of burial. Good are the tears of love, which father Abraham shed for the mother of the promise. Good are the tears of devotion which righteous Joseph spent on his father. Good also the tears of prayer with which David watered his couch every night. But why should I proclaim the weeping of mortal saints? Jesus too wept for a friend, deigning to take even this feeling from our unhappiness, to shed tears for one dead and to mourn with human weakness the one he was about to raise by divine power; although in that one man the merciful and compassionate Lord lamented the whole condition of the human race together, and with those tears with which he wept for our sins he also washed them away.

For this reason your tears too, brother, are holy and devout, because they flowed from a like affection and wept for the worthy companion of a chaste bed, not out of distrust of the resurrection but out of the longing of love. For “a gracious wife raises up glory for her husband” while she is held, and so she also raises up longing when she is sent on ahead. But she, as she always was, so she will be forever a crown to her husband, and her lamp will not be put out; for, as it is written, she stretched out her arms to useful works, she opened her mouth wisely, she did her husband good. She has crowned you with glory and honor, that she might rejoice with you in the last days; and for this reason she is more worthy of weeping than of mourning, and is rather to be longed for persistently than lamented. For the very thought of her merits, as it commands bitter grief in the survivor, since “the righteous man who has died will leave regret,” so also offers rich consolation to the believer, because there is immortality in the memory of the righteous. Nor, holy brother, let a sharper goad of grief be thrust upon you from this, that she died in her first youth, since the divine word offers comfort for this very case: “The righteous man,” it says, “if he is overtaken by death, will be in refreshment.”

But lest she seem to you to have come to her death untimely, the same Wisdom proves to you in the following words that she was also an old woman: “Old age,” it says, “is venerable, not long-lasting nor reckoned by the number of years. For understanding,” it says, “is gray hair for men, and a spotless life is old age.” Let us therefore rejoice in her just summons and ripe end, for though she was still green in the flower of her years, she had grown gray in holiness of character and adorned the age of a girl with the service of old age. Hence the very causes that make your soul’s wound bitter can bring you greater comfort: that you had so holy a woman, even if you have her no longer. For to have lost a mortal you share with all; but to have deserved the best is yours with few. So I marvel the less that she did not linger in this world and was summoned sooner to Christ; for her soul was pleasing to God, and therefore, as it is written, he hastened to bring her out from the midst of iniquity, lest wickedness should change her understanding; because, as it is written, this whole world lies in the evil one, and evil conversations generally corrupt good manners, and he who touches pitch will be defiled by it. In this fear a certain saint, afraid of delay and anxious about a slow old age, prays God to make known to him his end and the number of his days; and since by the revelation of the Spirit through which he prophesied he learned that his time had been prolonged, he groans, saying: “Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged!” He testifies that the cause of his groaning and fear is this, that he dwelt with the tents of Kedar, that is, in the darkness of this world. For Kedar in Hebrew means the same as what is called obscurity in the Roman tongue.

Indeed David himself, losing two sons of different merit, set out the mystery of this truth: he did not weep when he had lost the most beloved son for whom he had wept while he was sick, sure that the infant had been carried over to the blessedness of eternal peace; but the same man lamented Absalom, whom he had had as an enemy, when he was dead, because, as a prophet aware of divine justice, he despaired of rest for the ungodly and knew that the good of the resurrection was not owed to a parricide. And yet the same man, as I said, had spent tears on that little son of his while he was sick, and, changing his royal attire for black clothing, propped up by sackcloth, ashes, and fasting, had sent prayers to God. But after the end of life released his son from his illness, he made for himself, as though the matter for his cares had failed, the same end of mourning as the little one had received of living. So as the son was released in body, the father was released from grief; and, laying aside at once his sad heart and his clothes, he both took food and resumed his attire and anointed his head, squalid with dust; and when his servants asked him, astonished at so unusual an order of a father’s devotion, that he who had mourned before his bereavement rejoiced when bereaved, he answered: “I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.”

The prophet-king has taught well enough, I think, what concern we ought to put on after our dear ones are gone: namely, that we who follow should labor rather over our own journey than over theirs who have gone ahead and already arrived. It is devout to be saddened by separation from those dear to us, but holy to be gladdened by hope and faith in God’s promises and to say to the laboring soul: “Why are you sad, and why do you disquiet me?” “Shall not he who sleeps rise again?” A grateful gladness is more acceptable to God than a long, as it were querulous, sadness. For by that example of David we are taught not to pour out empty tears, which are certainly given in vain to the dead, bringing nothing to the one taken up and burdening the one left behind. Therefore David wept while his son lived and rejoiced when he had died, because while the child still breathed he could obtain a reprieve by prayers and tears; but once he had been summoned by God, he ought then to rejoice, as he did, because there is no doubt that what pleases God is better than our wishes.

Let us therefore pay the duties of devotion without harm to faith, and put first the joys of faith without harm to devotion. Granted that devotion weeps for a time; faith must rejoice continually. Let us long for them as sent on ahead, but let us not despair of receiving them back. For our God is the God of the living, not of the dead, and the apostle says that the dead in Christ sleep, so that you may understand from sleep that death is temporary. For it follows for one who sleeps that he is awakened and rises. Since this is so, let us bear in love the longing for the familiar company of our dear ones, but let us have consolation from our faith in the confidence of the resurrection.

By these authorities, then, most beloved brother, both of heavenly words and of heavenly examples, as you have used them for the devotion of tears, so use them also for their measure. For it is written: “To everything there is a season.” The time for weeping has run its course; now it is time for rejoicing, because the Lord is near. And divine Scripture, which permits us to shed tears as though to let grief evaporate, also prescribes limits for them by a fixed time, when it says that the bitterness of mourning is to be borne for one day. O the riches of the goodness of God! With what tender concern for us he guards against this very thing! Not grudging a devotion that inclines that way, but aware of our weakness and moderating everything immoderate, he bids tears be shed over the dead, but he confines the bitterness of mourning to a single day, allowing that to be extended by which grief is relieved and the soul breathes again, but cutting short that which wears out our mind with immoderate and irrational torment and which our frailty cannot long endure. But the goodness of God explains this more fully in its own word; for it adds: “And comfort yourself soon because of sadness. For from sadness death hastens, and it will cover strength”; because only that sadness is saving which is according to God; but that which is according to man, that is, sadness from carnal weakness, as the apostle says, works death. Though by different authors, yet by the one Spirit of God and the one word through both of the saints, Scripture sings in harmony; for true death is the covering over of strength. For if Christ is the power of God and our life, you see that it is truly said that death hastens by this grief, by which strength is covered and the whole man, as the apostle says, is swallowed up as by some chasm of hell, by too heavy a sadness. But thanks be to God that knowledge of your strength and prudence spares me this labor and fear for you; its light is too abundant in you to be covered by the darkness of sadness; rather, your strength covers sadness and swallows up death itself and the force of harmful grief. I do not grant you this by my words, nor do I speak from conjecture about your strength; your works bear witness to it and compel me to speak of what I have ascertained.

I now come to the praise of your works and shall pass from the holiness of your tears to your devout deeds. For you paid each part its due, pouring tears on the body and pouring alms into the soul. Truly aware of the truth and a son of light, where you knew there was death you wept; where you believe there is life you worked, paying empty things to the empty and living things to the living. So you gathered into the court of the apostle the poor, the patrons of our souls, the multitude who beg for alms throughout Rome. I feed indeed on the beautiful spectacle of so great a work of yours. For I seem to see all those devout swarms of the pitiable common people, those nurslings of divine goodness, streaming in such columns into the vast basilica of glorious Peter, through that venerable royal entrance smiling from afar with its sky-blue front, that all the spaces, both inside the basilica and before the doors of the atrium and before the steps of the open ground, are crowded. I see them gathered and so distinctly arranged in their places at table, and all filled with flowing food, that there comes before my eyes the abundance of the gospel blessing and the image of those peoples whom Christ, himself the true bread and the fish of the living water, filled with five loaves and two fishes: not making food grow for men in the usual way, but by a new gift producing food already prepared for men, when a hidden hand, at the divine prompting, served visible feasts and flowed forth into bodily nourishment with spiritual fruitfulness; from ineffable springs of bread and fish, in the hope of the Gentiles still fasting, he fed carnally and watered spiritually the peoples hungering for faith, filling up what was eaten with increase that could not be detected, supplying what was to be eaten, and bringing out fresh fragments to the bites of those eating, so that, as the food grew between their hands or in the mouths of those who took it, they felt rather than saw the plenty of their food, what was consumed returning to their bites and what was to be taken coming up under their teeth.

Carrying out in your work the example of the Lord himself, you ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground; for so Jesus too commanded, as we read, that they recline on the ground. For the Lord himself was in you, as he is, since no one does the works of Christ without Christ; by his gift and blessing, having received abundant loaves in his name, as the disciples had received loaves blessed by him to distribute, you measured them out among the countless mouths of the poor; and they ate and were filled, and all took up what was left over of the loaves, each his basket full. But you gathered up all the overflow of the spiritual fragments: from the twelve baskets the apostolic faith, from the seven hampers the spiritual grace; Christ working no less wonderfully in your loaves, who at this banquet of yours changed your bodily bread into heavenly food and prepared it for your eternal fullness. For you will rightly recline with the fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet of Christ, provided with the wedding garment, because Christ reclines with you here in his poor, and in you the Son of Man has somewhere to lay his head.

It is a pleasure to linger even now over the spectacle and praise of so great a work. For we are praising not the works of a man but the divine works done through a man. What a joyful spectacle, as the saying goes, you presented, a sacred giver of shows, to God and his holy angels from this full house of yours! With what joy you lifted up the apostle himself, when you had packed his whole basilica with dense throngs of the needy: where, under the high roof of its ridge, the wide nave stretches long in the middle under its coffered ceilings, and, gleaming from afar with the apostle’s throne, dazzles the eyes and gladdens the hearts of those who enter; or where, under the same mass of roofing, it spreads its sides in twin aisles on either side; or where the shining atrium lies spread out before it as a vestibule, where a dome topped with solid bronze adorns and shades the fountain that pours out streams to serve our hands and mouths, surrounding the leaping waters with four columns, not without a mystical meaning. For such adornment befits the entrance of a church, so that what is done within by the saving mystery may be signified before the doors by a visible work. For the one faith of the gospel supports the temple of our body too on a fourfold foundation; and since from it flows the grace by which we are reborn, and in it Christ, by whom we live, is revealed, surely there springs up for us, in the four columns of life, a fountain of water leaping up to eternal life, which waters us from within and boils in us, if indeed we can say, or are worthy to feel, that we have a heart burning on the way, set aflame as Christ walks with us.

What a joyful spectacle, then, you offered to God and the angels of peace and all the spirits of the saints! First in veneration of the apostle, whose faith and memory you celebrated with so manifold a devotion of your wealth: first bringing to God holy offerings, pure libations, with a most acceptable commemoration of her; then, by the munificence that followed, offering yourself to Christ as a most acceptable sacrifice in a clean heart and a humbled spirit, in whose tabernacles you offered the sacrifices of true jubilation, refreshing and feeding those who would offer to God a sacrifice of praise with abundant blessing. With what a good uproar our city then resounded, when you, pouring out the bowels of mercy in refreshing and clothing the poor, restored the pale bodies of the hungry, watered the dry throats of the thirsty, clothed the trembling limbs of the cold, and opened the mouths of all in harmony to bless God! But in cherishing needy bodies, as your works returned to the better part of you by divine recompense, you rather fattened your own spirit, and you refreshed the soul of your blessed wife, the hand of Christ pouring into her what was being given of yours to the poor, when bodily food passed over, changed in the twinkling of an eye, into heavenly nourishment. And as much money as you, a cheerful giver and untiring distributor, had poured with heavy right hand into the doubled palms of those receiving it, so much at once, as angels flew between, was carried into the bosom of the rejoicing Lord and laid up to be counted to you as thirtyfold fruits and returns. And not riches only, but also the graces of blessings were added to your rewards. For to you was reckoned as righteousness that shout and joint prayer of the poor by which God was blessed through your gifts. For the voices of the needy are directed by an easy road to the ear of God, since, as it is written, the prayer of the poor man pierces the clouds.

You could, Rome, not fear those threats leveled in the Apocalypse, if your senators always gave such shows. Then truly would that nobility of yours be noble, which the holy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would receive into their fatherly bosoms, which the prophets, apostles, and martyrs, that is, the senate of heaven, would acknowledge, which Christ, after a toga defiled by no gore of unclean blood, would clothe with the royal robe of the promised light and enroll in the white book, that is, the book of everlasting life. Truly would those riches be rich by which not the bloody savagery of the ancient dragon but the immense goodness of God the Savior was fed, if what is wickedly squandered on buying and feeding beasts or gladiators were given for our own salvation, and living were dearer to us than perishing. But we are both stingy and perversely generous: needy toward God, who acts for us, and prodigal toward the devil against us. We count loss as gain and gain as loss; we do not care to redeem our life even sparingly, we who buy death instead of life at great expense. Blessed would our condition be if we were equally afraid of displeasing God as men, or equally careful to please him; if we feared the commands of Christ as much as the hisses of the people; and if the praise that comes from God were bought at as high a price as this applause of the crowd.

Blessed are you, who have not walked in such counsel nor sat in the chair of pestilence, but in the seat of the apostle and in the assembly of the church, that is, in Christ’s theater, are praised by tiers of spectators who bless rather than riot, with God himself as onlooker: a giver of shows for the church, a seeker not of the arena nor of empty glory but of eternal praise. You do not buy gladiators or wild beasts, but you provide the means by which you may slay the true gladiators, that is, the princes of this darkness, and overcome the true beasts, that is, all the power of the devil, and with foot pressed down unharmed trample on the lion and the dragon. Blessed are you, in whom the name of the Lord will be blessed, and who have seed in Zion and household members in Jerusalem, who in turn may receive you into eternal tabernacles. For you will not fear the place of that rich man who, in Tartarus, that is, in the lower hell and the outer darkness, deservedly surrounded by fire, begged to be sprinkled even with the fingertip of the poor man despised in this life, to whom father Abraham rightly answered: “Remember, son, that you received good things in your life, and Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are tormented.”

For this reason, I think, those rich men should shudder at this reversal of punishments and delights who here, abounding only for themselves and their vices, either brood over hidden wealth and have set aside no share for the poor, or, being wickedly prodigal, are deservedly in want and will be punished with eternal want; men who held themselves so cheap through love of luxury that a single day’s table is shown to have been more precious to them than the life of their whole time. These, then, will never share in the heavenly goods of the poor, whose poor here they did not know with earthly goods. And their tongue will be scorched more grievously who now either shudder at or mock the infirmities of the poor, fatally fastidious and witty, who pass by and leave the ulcers of their neighbors for the dogs to lick, since by nature every man is neighbor to man. Are not these, I ask you, more truly to be called dogs, who have not imitated even the dogs in caring for and soothing men, and who order their brothers, that is, those born of the same mother nature, longing to be filled at least with the crumbs that fall from their table, not only to be shut out with barred doors but even to be driven off with savage blows? Hence I believe that the rich man of Tartarus in the gospel, though, as he cries, wholly in misery and tormented in that flame of the fiery whirlpool, yet asked for relief for his tongue alone, because it was doubtless burned more fiercely, since with proud and greedy mouth he had often sinned against Lazarus lying before his gate and left to the dogs. For this reason too we are warned elsewhere to set a guard on our mouth, wisdom teaching through Solomon that “life and death are in the power of the tongue,” and elsewhere: “By your words,” he says, “you will be justified, or by your words you will be condemned.”

For you, then, my brother of one heart in Christ, who are under no fear of this punishment and share in that other seat, whose mouth is full of blessing, whose riches are the breasts of the poor, whose house is Christ’s, who do not allow a beggar to lie before your gate while you feast, but on the contrary gladly bring him under your roof, either to feast with you or even to be filled while you fast: for you there is a happy poverty of sins and blessed wealth in virtues. You will rightly be numbered both among those poor whose is the kingdom of heaven and among those rich whose possession is a strong city, because you are rich in God’s spirit and poor in your own. For such rich men, together with their poor, God loves, and he celebrates them in the sacred writings and ennobles them by the authority of everlasting pages.

For I want you to consider this very point, that the names of those rich men whose crimes or punishments are recorded in the Scriptures are not given, because without doubt they were unworthy to be named by the divine word, men whom the impiety of their life blotted out or their avarice erased. Therefore the Lord had foretold of them in the prophet: “Nor will I remember their names by my lips,” that is, by the two Testaments of immortal words, which are well called the lips of the divine mouth, because they cleave to each other and are opened by the one Word of God, and through them God kisses us with the kisses of his mouth. Divine justice, then, would not have these lips defiled by the names of the ungodly; and so the name of that rich man does not appear whose vanity and avarice is recorded, to whom, when his life was already spent and he was thinking of the furnishing of his barns, it was said: “Fool, this night your soul is required of you; whose will be the things you have prepared?” Nor is the name of this rich man from Tartarus given, which we understand was not omitted by chance, since the poor man’s name is given. Of that rich man too who boasted of having fulfilled the law, and out of love for his riches turned away from the condition for attaining perfection, we read of the blindness but do not have the name. For “he had,” it says, “many possessions”; and therefore that sentence followed which had almost closed the kingdom of heaven to every rich man, had not God, as the only good one, excepted from it this gift of his omnipotence, that he should enrich the rich by the will of the poor. These rich men, then, are hateful to God and blotted from memory, who have put perishable things before eternal ones and preferred to trust the earth rather than God, heaping up food for moths and plunder for thieves, and, as it is written, they treasure up, not knowing for whom, because they will not understand to whom they owe their treasures; they deserve not to know to what successor they leave them, since they do not know by what giver they possess them. For what have you, O man, that you did not receive? And since you have received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it, and grow proud toward God of his own gifts? The names of such rich men, my brother, are not written in the gospel, because they are not held in the book of life either.

Finally, that you may know that it is not riches but men who, for the use they make of them, are blameworthy or acceptable to God, read of the holy fathers Abraham and Job, who were made friends of God by means of their wealth. For in the gospel, in which that rich man of Tartarus who despised Lazarus is passed over, we see that the rich Joseph of Arimathea is named. For he is blessed who in a special way considered the needy and the poor, honoring the body of Christ with devout service, not afraid to petition the judge against the wrong done to the Lord’s body, and rich, at the Lord’s burial, in the devout expense of a costly shroud and a new tomb. Among these names the holy page will enroll you, and you will be numbered in the lot of such rich men, whose wealth you equal in spirit as well. For having, they did not have for themselves, but no one called anything his own, and they thought nothing human foreign to themselves, like that multitude that once led the faith, which had one heart and one soul and all things in common. And consider the reasoning; you will easily judge that it is by a crime like parricide that the poor are despised by our choice, whom we see distinguished from us by no work of God. For how do we shut out of our modest dwellings those whom God has enclosed with us in the one house of this world? How do we disdain to make partners in the use of earthly possession those whom, even unwillingly, we have as sharers in the unity of divine origin? Holding to this, Abraham was made a friend of God; observing this, Lot escaped from Sodom; following this, Job triumphed over the devil.

Let us too open our dwellings to our brothers, either fearing the danger shown by the example of the fathers mentioned above, lest perhaps in shutting out a man we also drive away an angel, or hoping to deserve angels as guests while we receive with ready kindness the passing of every stranger. For father Abraham, while receiving strangers, received also the Lord Christ with the angels, and in his hospitable tent saw that day of which the Savior in the gospel speaks of himself. The wrong done to guests condemned the people of Sodom, and Lot deserved to be delivered above all by this disposition, that he put his guests before his daughters. He was not impious, but perfectly devout; for he did not hold his daughters cheap, he who earned his reward from this, that he put the justice of love, that is, the fear of God, before domestic devotion; by God’s command and spirit he was serving in receiving guests, and so already then that mind fulfilled the perfection of faith by which it is said to us: “Everyone who has left brothers and sisters or mother or sons or daughters for my name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and will possess eternal life.” The perfection of this mind, or the mind of this perfection, already from the beginning of the world delivered righteous Lot from that fire of the five cities, and he deserved, in return for his hospitable house, to receive by God’s gift a whole city as his house; because he who in an incestuous and impious city alone was both devout and chaste, surpassing devotion itself by holiness, did not hesitate, as far as it lay with him, to redeem the chastity of his guests with the virtue of his daughters. And Job, that silver tried by the Lord’s fire, testifies that he was always the eye of the blind and the foot of the lame, and in the very contest of his temptation he claims back and receives the reward of these works. He is stripped of the wealth of his patrimony, not of his mind; but, unwounded in heart, he does not sin with his lips either; stripped of the trappings of property but armed with the strength of patience; bereaved of offspring but not of the light of his heart, he embraces the children of his mind, that is, the works of righteousness, crying: “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb; naked I must return to the earth. We brought nothing into this world, nor can we take anything out.” But because he had not lost his spiritual riches, he also received back temporal wealth for the triumph of his patience and was enriched threefold, because he had been tried and purified sevenfold. For, as it is written, he had eaten the labors of his fruits by laboring in devout works, and therefore he ate the fruit of his labors by receiving the rewards of his works even in this world.

Your lot is with these rich men, you who have remembered that the same God is the source of your riches, free from avarice because a servant of righteousness. You use the mammon of iniquity justly, and you are not a captive but truly the master of your money, because you are possessed by Christ, to whom captivity itself is captive. Glory, then, in the Lord, because not flesh and blood but he himself who is the true light and the wisdom of God, Christ, has revealed to you the prudence of this foresight, by which you understand that in every needy and poor person Christ is fed, given drink, clothed, and visited, as with those whom, for this merit mentioned above, the Lord will deliver in the evil day.

May the Lord himself preserve you and give you life and make you blessed, and bring you help now upon your bed of sorrow; may he turn your devout lament into holy joy. May he tear the sackcloth of your sadness and give you back the joy of his salvation; with his guiding Spirit strengthening you, may he make your arms firm in prayers and almsgiving like a bow of bronze; may he make your feet like those of a deer, so that you may be swift both to flee the devil and to pursue Christ, and, with your steps fixed by the double hoof of both Testaments, may stand firm in the way of the Lord, your feet snatched by the Lord’s hand from slipping and your eyes from weeping, so that with your blessed wife you may please the Lord forever in the land of the living. For it will be done to you according to your faith, because the Lord, faithful in his words, will remember this sacrifice of yours forever, and your burnt offering will be made rich; and he will receive you yourself as a living victim for himself, for an odor of sweetness, the rewarder of your loan on that day when the debtor, richer than his creditors, will return to each his deposit with interest multiplied. Nor is the day of repayment far off, since the regions are already white with the harvest near.

Meanwhile, promising yourself with festive meditation the wealth you are to receive, you will console your mind much more richly by faith in what is to come than by my words or anyone’s. For it is no small delight to the souls of believers to anticipate in sweet thought the goods promised to the faithful and already to walk in paradise in their souls. If it pleases the farmer to admire the hope of the harvest in the growing crop while he waits for the fruit of his labor from the harvest, and the greed of his wishes bears the delay of the seasons more easily if it feeds his eyes while he hopes for the outcome, how much greater delight can we take, sinners though we are, yet faithful little servants, the account of whose scattered seed has been entrusted not to the doubtful faith of the earth but to the unchangeable truth of God, since we hope for what truth itself has promised.

For we do not gather what follows man’s death from human opinions, nor from the fabulous dreams of the poets or the phantoms of the philosophers, but we draw the faith of things from the very fountain of truth. And who could know divine things better than God himself, who is aware of his own works and decrees? We shall not falsely say that souls pass into other bodies, so as to become monsters after being men, nor that they will remain wholly without a body, nor that they perish in the body. Let those flatter themselves with the lies of the poets who do not have the prophets of truth. Let those be blinded by the wandering opinions of the philosophers who are not enlightened by the testimonies of the apostles; and let those console themselves with despair who have no hope, saying: “Our time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our end, for it is sealed, and no one returns”; those who, blinded by the darkness of their wickedness and unbelief, cannot say: “I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.” But we have no need of such poor remedies, we to whom truth itself, the Word of God, God, both promised by his teaching and proved by his rising the resurrection of the flesh to eternal life. For the Son of God himself, through whom are all things and without whom nothing, himself testified: “I am the resurrection; he who believes in me, though he die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” That he might not assert this by word only, he confirmed it by example, and showed to the disciples his own man, in whom is the whole taking up of humanity, raised from the dead, sealing in himself the faith of the flesh when he says to Thomas: “Put your finger here and see my hands; and put out your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believing, because a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.”

Having these testimonies, then, these proofs, this light of faith, on what pretext shall we be able to doubt the resurrection, which we have both heard from the word of God and seen with the eyes of the apostles and touched with their hands? We who through Christ are so bound and grafted into God that we hold in our land the pledge of God, the Holy Spirit whom he has given us, and have in God the pledge of ourselves, the flesh of Christ; because that immense interval by which mortal things are set apart from divine he bridges by his mediation, standing between and common to both, as by a kind of bridge, if I may say so, so that by its path earthly things are joined to heavenly, when supernal incorruption has suffused this corruptible of ours, and, as it is written, immortality has swallowed up our mortality, and life, victorious in Christ and from Christ, has swallowed up for us conquered death. To attain this, we can doubt not the truth of so great a good but only our capacity to deserve it. But let us do what Christ commanded, that we may obtain what Christ promised. His truth is with us; let our faith in him not be lacking. He is life to all, the way to all, the door to all. He closes his kingdom to no one, and even allows it to be taken by force.

Press on where you are running, that you may lay hold of that for which you have been laid hold of; strive through the narrow way, that you may come into the wide possession of the eternal inheritance. You already have in Christ a great pledge of yourself and an eager advocate, your wife, who prepares for you in heaven as much grace as you supply her with wealth from earth, honoring her, as I said, not with vain mourning but heaping her with living gifts, in which she now rejoices; and already she enjoys the fruit of this work of yours, whose gift is still for you in seed.

Already she is honored by your merits, already she is fed with your loaves and abounds in your wealth, “in gilded clothing, wrapped about with variety,” with precious light; she has no need to be cooled by the finger of another’s hand, being herself steeped in the dew of her own fingers, that is, in the works of your right hand. You did not enrich her as a bride with so ample a dowry as you now enrich her in her rest. For how great a share of your gifts did she take then, when she enjoyed only what she could wear? Now, however much you give, she will possess it all at once in her soul, rich with the delight of all the senses. Blessed is she who has so many advocates with Christ, and whose head is encircled by so manifold a crown of illustrious jewels, not woven of others’ flowers but flashing with lights of her own house. Truly precious to the Lord is that soul which takes its value from three pearls. For she is wife of faith, sister of virginity, daughter of perfection: Paula her mother, Eustochium her sister, you her husband.

We rejoiced in what was written and brought to us by Cardamas. For the message announcing your safety, like the oil of gladness, fattened our bones, so that, filled with joy, we said: “The Lord has done great things with us,” he who visited us on the bed of your pain, so that, rising up in your health, we might sing a hymn to our Lord, since he had snatched our eyes from tears, putting off your crown but keeping you for our help; so that, while you lighten our burdens by your earnest prayers and go before us on our journeys, we may run more lightly after the odor of the Lord’s ointments, which, fragrant to us in your holiness, we do not reach by merit but follow by affection, hoping that through the inseparable bond of your love we may be led to arrive under your leadership where you have arrived by your own effort. For your infirmities are not unto death but for the glory of God, that they may bring perfection to your strength and strength to our weakness. For many examples of the Lord’s saints, from the patriarchs onward, already reassure us not to be disturbed about you.

Just as the fathers of faith themselves, besides the other labors of their life, even in that prophetic old age in which, inwardly enlightened, they foresaw the eternity of the world and the course of all ages, were yet heavy in their bodily eyes and brought their spiritual strength to perfection in fleshly weakness: so too blessed Job was tempted that he might be proved, fought that he might conquer, was humbled that he might be exalted, wept that he might rejoice. What of the Holy of holies himself? Did he not conquer when he was judged, and by falling through death rise again into glory? The sufferings of infirmity are for the strong what incitements to virtue are for the weak. For the strong man is made weak so that the weak may be strengthened and, by imitating the robust, learn to overcome in the contest. And therefore the righteous man too is chastised, that the unrighteous may be corrected.

So the bodily weakness of the saints works a twofold benefit: their own spiritual strength is exercised, and he who prospers in his way and, insulting with the strength of unbroken health, says, “I have sinned, and what has happened to me?” may not dare to flatter himself on his bodily happiness, and perhaps, held fast by fear of the divine power, may be corrected to righteousness, as he rightly dreads, for his impious acts, the avenging hand of the heavenly Lord, which he sees is severe even to the righteous. For if you scarcely escape without the blows of chastisement, where shall we, the unrighteous and sinners, appear? And we believe that you have suffered in these recent times weapons of bodily tribulation heavier than usual, troubled first by the heat of fevers and now by a flux in the head, so that in that rest of the Lord you may happily say: “We passed through fire and water, and you brought us into refreshment.” Gladdened, then, by this mercy of God, by which he had looked with favor on our lowliness, so that we profited from the pain of a most grievous anxiety, since you told us at the same time both our anxiety about you and our relief, we received in the same letter another gift of divine grace: namely, that the business that concerned us, about the house of the holy presbyter Basilius, had been settled through your efforts just as we wished.

May all that blessing come upon your head and flower, woven over it, to heap up your crown: the blessing with which they blessed the Lord in you, not only those to whom the benefit belonged, but almost the whole of Capua, and the most famous church of that city, exulting together in the presbyter’s joy, gave praise to God, who had helped the poor man out of beggary and humbled the lofty hearts of the rich; so that they too may have hope of an eternal house in the city of habitation, they who were found worthy, through the intervention of your words, to be enlightened to good understanding, by which, through the just restoration of a small dwelling, they have prepared for themselves eternal hospitality in the heavenly tabernacle of the poor saint of God, by whom they will be received in turn.

We received Cardamas in the joy of love and with the blessing of sweetness, bringing us all good things: your letter, which showed your good health, gladdened our hearts and was sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, and its sweetness penetrated our inward parts like oil; the bones that had been humbled exulted, and with a voice of exultation we said to the Lord: “We have received, O God, your mercy, by which you have delivered the poor from the mighty and the lowly from the hand of the one stronger than he.” Causes for thanksgiving ran together into our mind from every side: that we were receiving your letter, that we found you mindful of us, that we heard you were safe, as we had prayed, that we learned that my lord, our father, had been healed of a grave and long illness. We were gladdened about both of you alike, because, as the same tribulation that had worn him out in body had worn you out in heart, so the same visitation that brought him divine help upon his bed of pain brought you too the refreshment of relief on the couch of compassion. But nonetheless, as we thought of his illnesses and of your mind, our affection pricked us, that at that time of your tribulation we had perhaps been healthy and even cheerful. But thanks to the Lord, who forgives the fault of ignorance and has not dealt with us as we deserved, forestalling our sadness with gladness, since he deigned so to provide that we learned of the flight of your sickness from the same messenger who announced at the same time the return of health.

What shall I say of that work of your holiness, by which you have brought us as great a heap of present grace as you have brought yourselves an abundance of eternal reward? I mean the business of the holy presbyter Basilius, whose lament you have turned into joy and whose old age you have settled in rich mercy. A voice of gladness and salvation has sounded in his tent, and he does not cease, rejoicing with his whole house amid the harmonious thanksgivings of the church, to bless the Lord, who has looked upon his lowliness, bound up his bruises, covered with confusion those who rejoiced at his misfortunes, and, tearing his sackcloth of sadness, girded him with the vigor of gladness.

Therefore, on behalf of those brothers of ours whom we had earlier asked you to petition, we now ask your oneness of heart to love them beyond your usual affection, and if perhaps they come to Bordeaux, as they usually do, to give them thanks in person also for the feelings of our heart and inmost being. Or if the opportunity of meeting them is slow to come, at the first occasion deign to send them due thanks and a deserved blessing for their work, so that they may know and understand how acceptable a sacrifice to God they have offered by this obedience of their faith, with which, yielding to entreaty, they received our petition through your intervention, giving us indeed present joy by their devotion, but providing an eternal benefit for their own salvation. For even if they did what was owed in recognizing justice, by ordering what belonged to another to be returned, yet they deserve abundant thanks for that very disposition of good will by which they could have transgressed and did not transgress, and preferred to do what was expedient rather than what was lawful; and because they deigned to obey us with so free and pure a heart that their kindness could not be disputed, since they ordered the house to be restored to the holy presbyter without difficulty even if he could not prove it his own, so that, if he could not possess it by his own right, he might yet possess it by their gift. Nor have they lost the grace of so holy a generosity; for that most holy man himself, for whom the Lord provided you as intercessors according to his merit, gives thanks and proclaims it as if he had received an undeserved gift. But we have put off answering these brothers of ours for now, because, through their own men who often travel from Campania, there will be no lack of more suitable opportunities, which will carry our letter straight to them wherever they are.

As for Cardamas himself, we confess that we owe your oneness of heart no small thanks, for we have received him not only advanced in ministry but progressing in spirit. For when he arrived during the days of Lent and we had received him with brotherly affection as a cleric, he did not shrink from the daily fasts, did not shudder at our poor little table as an evening guest, and, what is more wonderful, was content with our cups; so that we understood that he, reformed as he is in your holiness’s company, is being taught by the apostle, and is no longer drunk on a measure but on a little wine, by which the belly is not swollen but the heart is gladdened, drunk unto sobriety, belching out to God, from a spiritual surfeit, a hymn which he sings not only with his voice but with his silent heart, since he receives the Lord’s will with faithful hearing, tells it with devout speech, and fulfills it with vigorous action. Blessed be the Lord who does wonders, who turns the rock into waters: he has made Cardamas both a cleric, as we saw, and sober, as we believed. For when the Easter festival brought back the days of midday meals, he began to grumble to us around noon, saying: “My throat is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws. My soul and my belly have failed, and from hunger and thirst my bones cleave to my flesh.” He was answered indeed: “Son, endure in humility, and let not the desires of the belly take hold of you, for man does not live by bread alone but by every word of God.” But he, like a deaf man, did not hear, and like deaf adders stopped his ears against us, but in vain. He longed to fill his belly at a midday meal, and no one gave him even a pod, until the day declined to evening, and, the hymn having been said, however sad from hunger for the midday meal, he was pacified with us by the refreshment of supper. But lest by joking longer we seem to wrong his gravity, which now delights more in drops from the cups than in the drunkenness of rivers, I will speak seriously of his needs: he says his wife is sickly and therefore of no use to him. If this is so, I ask that some little slave be provided for her.

When our sons Posthumianus and Theridius were seeking their homeland from Campania, to which they had come for our sake, I thought it contrary to duty and affection not to write to your oneness of heart: not only taking care lest I seem to pass over, by a negligence toward you unusual in me, the zeal of our common regard, but much more lest I be thought to judge otherwise of your mind toward God, if, while I carefully take every occasion of writing to you through men of religion, I passed you over without a greeting, as though you shrank from holy men; since you are certainly shown to be devoted to the Christian name and an approver of our way of life also by your love for us. Receive gladly, then, not them on the strength of my letter, but my letter on the strength of them, who with the utmost holiness took care to make it a matter of conscience either not to revisit their homeland without coming to you or not to come to you without a letter from me. And such letter-carriers seemed to me fitting for this purpose also, that I might answer something of that former letter which you sent in reply to the letter in which I had proclaimed the manifest kindness of divine power in the elements and of its care for us. For surely you remember that I had learned from your letter what I then answered with thanksgiving; and so I urged you not to ascribe God’s gift to chance, nor to think that it was by luck rather than by divine power that the silver of that holy transaction was preserved amid winter storms and greedy sailors, after its guardian was lost, the ship being cast up on that very shore where a town familiar to us and an estate of yours received our property in the safest of bays.

But you, again more querulous to me about the injury of the storm than grateful for God’s clemency, have subjected all the motions of the elements, amid which the divine hand alone can protect human safety, and our actions, which the power of the supreme Lord rules and turns or directs according to our merits, to the empty names of the fates and fortune, as though they were powers rivaling God. In this do not think that you have deferred to God, since you have rather insultingly refused to let God’s kindness be what it was, saying that these things should be separated from divine power because evils befit chance rather than God, and that without doubt that is evil by which men often incur danger or loss. Among these evils, as I see, you place storms, by which either devastation of fields is suffered on land or the distress of shipwreck in a ship. But I see that this opinion arose from those teachers who, proud in their own wisdom and disdaining to seek the wisdom of God, live as exiles from the bounds of truth, champions of their own opinions, who, sending their minds through the great void, have become vain, as is written and proved, in their thoughts, and have fashioned the works and counsels of God after their own fancies. To them sea or sky may seem ruled and moved by chance, who argue either that this world, empty and without a ruler, or neglected by an idle God, is whirled about by fortuitous falls, or that, put together by no author, it is without end as without beginning, which bodily nature, to which this world, of which each of us is a portion, belongs, cannot have, because every structure can be dissolved; or, what is more foolish, they would have it created from itself, as though anything could be the cause of its own birth, so that the same thing would be creator and creature alike, that is, craftsman and work, which, as they differ in name, plainly differ also in kind and state. For who does not see that this bodily world is governed by an incorporeal force, and that its whole mass is moved to life, tempered for use, held together in being, and ordered for duration by the mind of the divine Spirit, poured into and mingled with the great body of the universe, by which it was made?

Since, then, it is clear that what is seen or perceived needs another’s help in order to stand and remain, it cannot be doubted that it also needed another in order to be created. That being so, we must confess that all things have arisen from God, since only the profane can doubt that the world was made with God as its author; and accordingly that the winds and all things within the world, which are parts of the same mass and as it were the inward parts of its body, are not to be referred to the rule of another, because the forces of the divine works, that is, the substances of all natures, in such discord among themselves, would not allow themselves to be ruled and held together except by that nature and power alone, that is, by God, the one creator of all, by whom alone they could be made and ordered, and without keeping whose laws they would not maintain their state. It is much more foolish to blame any nature and call it evil, since, if all things are from God and God is good, then surely all things that God made are good. And if in the secrets of his decrees there are some things too high for our senses and thoughts, even if we cannot follow and gather their reason, it is safer for us to believe that the reasons are hidden than that there are none, because it must not be doubted that all God’s works, even if not clear to us, are planned with counsel.

So if God, who made the whole world, also governs it, in what place or over what creature will chance and fate or fortune rule? If they depend, as some would have it, on the motions or orders of the stars, they draw this power, which you make a rival to God, from little fires smaller not only than God but than the world itself, indeed adorning a third part of the world with the service of a handmaid light. For certainly it belongs to the divine power to stir up the elements, and either to rouse the violence of the winds when it is lulled or to rein it in when roused, and either to hand over mortals to the fury of storms or to snatch them from it. Since every creature, subject to the one creator of all, obeys this power, how is divine force and power given to these which lack not only the name of creator but even the form of creature: empty names, neither of spirits nor of bodies, fitted to carrying on or signifying things, since “chance” (fors) is a word of one who doubts, “fate” (fatum) an expression of one speaking out, and “accident” (casus) a term for things falling or befalling? Yet from the habit of an ancient error, through ignorance of God, those without reason fashion empty names in their foolish thoughts into bodily form, as though they were therefore gods as well, and, more foolishly than they fashioned them, give them divine honor. Hence Hope and Nemesis and Love and even Madness are worshiped in images, and Opportunity is consecrated with a bald back of the head, and that Fortune of yours is portrayed resting badly on a slippery globe. And with no less falsehood the Fates are depicted spinning men’s lives from wool baskets or weighing them in scales. Lest we impute this raving to the common people or admire the philosophers too much, it is told even by Plato in his raving, who sets out the spinning of Necessity in an old woman’s lap and gives her three daughters singing together, turning the spindle and playing among the threads, supposing, no doubt, that by this woolwork they accomplish the affairs of men and weave the times assigned to each. So far did the arrogance of empty eloquence abuse human ears that he did not blush to insert the ridiculous chant of an old wives’ tale into his writings, in which he dared to discuss even the divine nature as though he knew it. But in him we should look only at the charm of his Attic style, not at the neatness of an empty fable; what was produced only to soothe the ears ought not to tear up the foundations of our understanding.

Rather, as reason and truth teach, let us refer to him all the works of God, in which we exist and of which we are part, and all his gifts, by which we are ruled and preserved amid the uncertainties of this fragile and perishable life; and let us remove nothing from his power by our error, because, whether we will or not, he is the creator and God of us as of all things. And since, as he is goodness and wisdom and the source of reason, he has established nothing except by reason and has created for the material of his goodness, let us spend on him all that we are, and strive to learn and take care to do what pleases him. Then, looking more purely with a cleansed mind, we shall see that this is the truth: that all things that are are from God; and that this follows: that all God’s works are most beautiful, and that nothing is evil that has a good author, who prepared all things throughout the world for our uses and acts for our benefit, and so founded the work of this universe that he created some things to serve, others to exercise, others to rule. So we men rule by reason over bodily and animal natures. But lest we be undone by the very license of our power, we are usefully exercised by adversities, whether spirits of demons, or difficulties of affairs, or often the motions of the elements themselves, namely so that, stirred up by cares, we may be sharpened to prudence and to fear of the deity. From this, security, which ought rather to make us more grateful to the eternal Lord, makes us negligent. Hence the apostle and teacher of the Gentiles says that, by a hidden counsel of divine goodness and to the great profit of human salvation, certain obstacles are set against our courses and prosperity is changed into adversity, such as sicknesses, losses, and dangers; because tribulation works the strength of patience, and patience produces the proof of faith and confers the reward of glory. This virtue certainly cannot obtain unless victorious, and it will not have the means of victory unless it has first contended with some difficulty.

Since this could have been made known to your prudence, which you have both by birth and by education, even through those very letters (would that you now put them below the sacred writings in study as you do in judgment), in which it is recorded that the virtues of men famous as generals or philosophers shone out to noble fame only through labors and dangers, I greatly wonder why you have chosen to be so darkened in the plain truth of the divine gift that you have given over to chance events that wonderful safety of the storm-tossed ship and the protection of our property, granted by God on land and sea with evident signs, and have poured away so great an occasion for proclaiming God. Lift your mind to the height of wisdom and seek Christ, the very kindling of the true light, who enlightens faithful souls and glides into chaste hearts. You have shown that you think so too, though you put forward as an excuse that you are still unequal to it and therefore not capable of God, because, beset by earthly affairs and cares, you are kept, as by clouds set between, from looking up higher to heavenly things. But would that you could plead this as truly as you can plead it eloquently! For the very richness of your eloquence and learning proves that what you lack for the sacred writings is will rather than leisure or ability. For you did not, I think, gather such riches of mouth and mind while asleep or doing something else. You breathe the flowers of all the poets, you overflow with the rivers of all the orators, you are watered also by the springs of philosophy, and, rich too in foreign letters, you fill a Roman mouth with Attic sounds. Where, I ask you, are those taxes then, when you read through Cicero and Demosthenes? Or when, wearied by surfeit of more common reading, you turn over again Xenophon, Plato, Cato, and Varro, read through already, and many others besides, of whom we perhaps do not even hold the names while you hold the volumes? To be occupied with these you are exempt and free; to learn Christ, that is, the wisdom of God, you are tax-burdened and busy. You have leisure to be a philosopher; you have no leisure to be a Christian. Turn rather your judgment, turn your eloquence. You need not lay aside the philosophy of your mind, provided you season it with faith and religion; use what you have joined together more wisely, so that you may be God’s philosopher and God’s poet, wise not by seeking God but by imitating him, so that, learned not in tongue but in life, you may both discuss and do great things.

Be a Peripatetic for God, a Pythagorean to the world. As a preacher of the true wisdom in Christ and silent at last to vanity, shun this pernicious sweetness of empty letters, as those Lotus-eaters who blotted out the homeland with the sweetness of their berries, and as the songs of the Sirens with their harmful blandishments. And since it is permitted to take some things often from empty fables, as from common proverbs, for the use of true and serious speech, I will say that not only letters but all the forms of temporal things are Lotus-eaters or Sirens to us. For the pestilent sweetness of pleasures makes us forget our homeland when it blots out from man God, who is the common homeland of all; and the allurements of desires imitate that fable of the Sirens with the reality of disaster. For what the Sirens are imagined to have been, that the allurements of desires and the blandishments of vices truly are; for they have seduction in their appearance and poison in their taste; their use is counted in crime, their price in death. We must flee them, more cautious than Ulysses’ cunning, with not only our ears but our eyes shut, and with our mind flying past them like a ship, lest, enticed by deadly delight, we be swept onto the rocks of crime and, fastened on the reef of death, suffer the shipwreck of our salvation.

And would that we might be allowed to escape from the salt sea of this world even naked, if in this time, in which we float in bodily frailty and the slipperiness of possessions as in the untrustworthy framework of a ship coming apart, we remember to strip ourselves, in order to swim out, of choking hindrances as of soaked clothes, and to seize as a plank of refuge the saving faith by which we lean, in the power of Christ, on the standard of the cross; so that from flowing things we may acquire a solid hope, and from the harmful material of desires snatch something for innocence and salvation: namely, that, serving God and ruling our desires, we may limit our wants to the measure of necessity, and, having the clothing we need, not seek superfluous display, since we are reminded that we brought nothing into this world and cannot take anything out. This truth is so strong that even some of the pagan philosophers, who with loftier minds touched at least the outermost lines of the truth, felt that one cannot have leisure even to seek wisdom, let alone to follow it, unless one throws away the burdens of money like dung, some even into the sea.

But make a division with God, and, as for a mutual kindness, render thanks to the supreme Father, who, of all that he has given you by birth or added from outside, asks back from you only yourself. You may keep for yourself and your family all that you possess, taking care only to confess that God is the giver of these things also. For we have nothing that we have not received, we who, as I said, came naked into this world. But dedicate to God the abilities of your talent and all the riches of your mind and tongue, offering him, as it is written, the sacrifice of praise with an eloquent mouth and a devoted heart. As soon as you direct the gaze of your mind to the inner sanctuaries above, truth will open her face to you and will disclose you to yourself. For in the knowledge of divine truth we attain this too, that we know ourselves. For whence do you think so great a perversity of pride or of sloth has grown into wretched mortals that, not worshiping God, they serve demons or the elements subject to them, venerating waters, fire, stars, trees, and images, with the most impious insult to the divine majesty? In whose name, whether they worship demons or creatures, they honor servants, for which they deserve to be blinded by this darkness, so that, because they will not understand the true God, they are also struck with ignorance of themselves. From this a man enlightened by faith is set free, so that, understanding the order and measure of his kind, he knows that he is subject to God alone, whose unity is reckoned in an ineffable Trinity, but is equal to all other creatures if they are rational, and superior to them if they are bodily.

Kept in balance by this middle measure, a man neither slips from the lot of salvation nor from the dignity of his nature, and becomes aware of the truth, possessed of wisdom, a servant of righteousness, free of error, and master of the vices to which the soul that does not serve God is condemned to serve; a soul which then, as an exile from its proper state, is scattered through all the byways of its own thoughts or of others’ opinions, wandering through the philosophers and curious through the soothsayers, religious toward superstition and profane toward religion, always hanging between hope and fear with wavering feelings. Hence, carried about by every wind of any doctrine, because it is empty of the fear of God, it does not have the head of wisdom, as though its senses were maimed, from which to draw the understanding of things, and, ignorant, has nowhere to fix its judgment; when it has distracted itself in vain, wandering in thought through every region of heaven and earth, it places the whole force by which the world is moved in visible creatures and in the empty names of chances and fates, as tenacious of what is false and wrong as it is ignorant of the truth.

But let your mind, which, kindled from heavenly seed, already breathes a divine ardor, be directed by faith going before it to Christ, the very citadel of wisdom. You will have a better supply of the philosophers’ eloquence to possess even in our studies, provided you cease to love the wisdom that is opposed to the truth. For it is better that you hold divine things by seeking them than seek them by disputing. Let go of those men always wallowing in the darkness of ignorance, consumed in the contentions of learned talkativeness, enslaved with their phantoms to mad altercation, always seeking wisdom and never finding it, because they do not deserve to understand the God in whom they will not believe. Let it be enough for you to have taken from them abundance of language and adornment of speech, as spoils from enemy arms, so that, stripped of their errors and clothed in their eloquence, you may apply that coloring of eloquence, by which vain wisdom deceives, to things of substance; so that, adorning not an empty body of fictions but the marrow-filled body of truth, you may compose what will not only please the ears but also profit the minds of men.

We are worn out both with inviting you and with waiting for you, and neither prayers nor words are left us now to add to those so often poured out in vain in entreaties and letters. Since you have left us only this one thing of our common friendship, with the hope of our seeing each other cut off, we pay back words with words and wish to be revived at least by these comforts, which bear no fruit; although you have begun to be sparing in these too, now seeking us only when an occasion offers, and you have tormented us for almost two whole years held in suspense by the daily expectation of seeing you. For that summer which followed our servants’ return to you we closed in such a way, until winter shut it off, that we thought every day was dawning for your arrival; but since not even messengers of your delay had come, we consoled ourselves with the reflection, assuring ourselves that you had sent no one because you were going to come yourself, even if late. Meanwhile, as this summer too was slipping by, still soothing ourselves with that hope or opinion, we set out for Rome for the venerable day of the apostles’ festival, promising ourselves that you would meet us there, in an expectation that was due but festive; and when the grace of the hope we had presumed had been boiled away, since you were not there yourself, we were nevertheless not wholly without some share in it, receiving your letter through the servant of a man very dear to us, our brother Sabinus. At first we wondered at him, in his hardly monastic boots and clothing, since he was also no less red in face than in his military cloak, with cheeks not very spiritual; then at last we knew he was not one of ours, when we learned through him, as the master of the letter-carrier was asking us for a reply, that you are joined to him by close kinship. Hence we embrace him, a friend before, now with a love heaped up.

But there was no opportunity to write back from the city, which we saw for scarcely ten days without seeing it, spending even the hours before noon in the devotions for which we had come, at the holy memorials of the apostles and martyrs. Then, when we had returned to our lodging, occupied with countless visits from people drawn partly by friendship, partly by religion, so that evening barely dissolved the gathering and set us free, we necessarily put off the duty for lack of leisure. Then, when we had returned home, a sickness of the flesh that befell us caused another delay and tested us, not lightly, for not a few days. But he who is our life and resurrection visited our lowliness for good, and though he chastised us sorely, he did not hand us over to death. “For many are the scourges of the sinner, but mercy will surround those who hope in the Lord.” And so we were beaten as sinners, freed as those who hope in the mercy of him who heals the broken of heart and binds up their wounds.

So, now recovering in the power and mercy of the Lord, we have written this by our dearest brother in the Lord Amachius, subdeacon of my lord and our father Delphinus, because the opportunity he offered was at hand; and at the same time, since he said he was very well known to you, we thought him the most suitable person to entrust with our letter to you. We greet you as much as we love you in the Lord and still long for you; for we cannot yet tear from our minds the hope by which we presume that, by the Lord’s gift, we shall see and embrace you in the dwelling and bosom of my lord Felix, our common patron, before whom I have so often attested your vows and recited your promises, as often as you remember giving me pledges. If we have deceived the martyr of truth, I do not think that I alone should be held guilty of this fault, I who pledged what I believed; please see to it, my brother of one heart and most beloved, while there is time, that you do not seem to have gone back on your word to so great a confessor, a saint of such powerful grace with Christ.

I do not know how you can plead weakness rather than laziness or a preference of persons, since within a year you could reach us and return with the same effort with which you have for so many years made pilgrimages around Gaul, and often, in repeated excursions within one summer, visit Tours and places still more remote. I do not begrudge it; rather I proclaim your devotion in the Lord, whom you admire and honor in his servants. I confess that Martin is rightly and deservedly visited; but I say that it is unjust and dangerous for Felix to be mocked with empty promises by the same man who honors Martin, or to be slighted by the careless pretense that the promise is already cancelled. With the same faith with which you hope for Christ’s grace in honoring Martin, fear Christ’s displeasure in offending Felix. Perhaps a stronger mind and a sturdier soul, or the powerful consciousness of perfect love in Christ, gives you such confidence that you think this offense, by which you have, God forbid, wronged my lord Felix, is to be washed away by the compensation of the great merits of your faith and works. Indeed you promise yourself pardon even from his own goodness, which he has in fullest measure from God, Christ himself, whose spirit he has, and you do so in faith. But I confess that I am either so timid through the fault of my weakness or so excessive in my love for you that I fear for you even what is safe, and while I desire the grace of Christ to abound for you in every saint, I would not want you to strike a stone of stumbling precisely in the one in whom the love of God is outstanding and eminent. I know indeed that, according to the riches of God’s goodness, the bowels of compassion abound in my lord Felix too; but I beg you to love and fear him the more for being better and more indulgent. Such fear will bring you a great reward, making you more anxious precisely where you could be more secure, that is, fearing to offend God’s dearest one the more, the more readily he deigns to forgive; because he who does not know how to take offense is wronged with greater impiety, and he who does not seek to be avenged is more severely avenged by the Lord. Weigh this case, I ask you, with the affection of our mutual faith, and see whether you ought, being strong, to make excuses, or, being weak, to lose confidence. For our Lord is near to us everywhere, he who says: “In every place, while you are still speaking, behold, I am here,” and says: “All things are possible to him who believes.”

What did not happen for a long time while we wished for it has suddenly come about, by the Lord’s gift, when we did not hope for it: an opportunity has been given us to write to your venerable holiness by one of the household of faith, and above all by a brother who is in the Lord both yours and ours. For it happened that at Rome, on the most celebrated birthday of the apostles, our blessed brother the deacon Paschasius met us. Besides the grace of brotherly fellowship in the sacred ministry, we received him the more reverently and lovingly because we learned that he belonged to your holiness’s clergy both in body and in spirit. But we confess the violence we used: though he wished to return from the city to your holiness, and though we approved the devout haste of his most just longing, we nevertheless embraced him in your love and brought him to Nola, so that some breath of your spirit might bless the lodging of our lowliness there through his coming, and so that we might enjoy longer, as it were, a portion of your grace, seeing and holding him whom the modesty of his character, the humility of his heart, the gentleness of his spirit, the faith of truth, and his speech in all things seasoned with salt proved to be both a disciple of your teaching and a companion of your way. So pardon our brother in us, or us in him; for whether his slowness is blamed or our presumption censured, the love of the Lord will excuse both faults to you, by which either he was compelled to obey us or we did not fear to seize him and keep him by our right; not out of stubborn arrogance, but with a pure heart and unfeigned faith, believing that what is yours is ours and not doubting that you would reckon it so in turn, so that you would consider him not to have been absent from you during the time you knew he was with us. For even if we are separated in body by distances of regions, we are nevertheless joined by the Spirit of the Lord, in whom we live and abide, poured out everywhere, as members of one body having one heart and one soul in the one God.

Therefore, contemplating your mind toward us in a spiritual mirror, and joined to you in turn by the affection of our heart, we have claimed for ourselves your oneness of heart by keeping your brother, the grace of the Lord, which has been given you abundantly, working this very thing, that you are loved even in the members of your body and in the fringes of your garment; although we lost many days of his stay while, the Lord correcting us in his mercy, we were beaten with a bodily sickness for our spiritual amendment. But he who comforts the lowly and heals the broken of heart comforted us with the presence of our blessed brother Paschasius, by which, while we were refreshed in spirit, we were also restored in body; for a good friend is a medicine of the heart, and where two are gathered together in one, Christ stands in their midst.

And he not only shared our tribulation and suffered with us in our weakness, but was long worn down by the very grave sickness of our dearest son Ursus, whom he had had as the inseparable companion of his journey. In this we saw clearly his faith and his full love in the Lord. For as much as the one labored in body, so much was the other wasted in spirit. And therefore the Lord looked upon the one in the humility of the other, heaping up this benefit too: that one weakened even to death should nevertheless, by the faith and labor of Paschasius, in whom the Lord willed to show the power that his holy and most beloved confessor Felix, our patron, has with him, find salvation out of danger. For, begotten through this man’s hands, he was baptized on his sickbed and has recovered. The same Lord who has given him back, at the prayers of the saint, to our brother Paschasius and to our anxiety along with his, and above all to your church, regarding you, without doubt, always in your own wherever they are, will grant it: may he bring him into your presence safe and sound, free from sin and a servant of righteousness. We do not doubt that he too, if he is found worthy to reach you, will make great increases in faith, equal to Paschasius, with you as the teacher of both.

For your Tychicus, a dearest brother and faithful minister in the Lord, has made known to us, proclaiming not you so much as God in you, what great lights the Lord has kindled through you in regions formerly dark, he who, bringing up clouds from the end of the earth, has brought you too out of the farthest part of the world into the light of his people and made the bright lightning into abundant rain. As once the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, the way of the sea beyond the Jordan, of Galilee, those who sat in the region of the shadow of death saw a great light: so now too the land of the Morini, at the farthest edge of the world, which the ocean pounds roaring with barbarian waves, a people of remote nations who sat in hiding places on the sandy way of the sea outside the Jordan, before the borders of the desert grew fat in it, rejoicing in the light that has risen for them from the Lord through your holiness, have laid aside their rough hearts as Christ entered. Where once foreign barbarians or native robbers frequented the deserts of the forests and the equally unsafe shores, now venerable and angelic choirs of saints fill cities, towns, islands, and forests with churches and monasteries, numerous in people and harmonious in peace. And though Christ works this in the peoples of all Gaul as everywhere among the nations, he who goes round the whole world seeking those worthy of him, passes through the nations into holy souls, shows himself cheerfully in the ways of right direction, and with all providence meets those who love him: yet in the most remote stretch of the Nervian shore, which the faith of truth had before breathed upon with but a faint breath, and which he chose above all as a vessel of election, he shone in you first more brightly, grew warmer more ardently, and appeared nearer; and he took you up in whom he might sanctify his name there, and through whose name his sound might go out into all the earth, even from the setting of the sun.

Indeed we now hear that Rouen, formerly known only by a slight name in the neighboring regions, is named with veneration even in distant provinces and numbered with divine praise among the cities famous for holy places. Not undeservedly, since the merit of your holiness has brought there, even by the presence of the apostles, the whole appearance of Jerusalem as it is recalled in the East; for the apostles, by the affection of their holy spirits and the effect of their divine works, make the city, a stranger to their memorials, equal to their own seats, and have found in you yourself a lodging most fitting for them. It pleases the friends of God and the princes of the people of the true Israel, that is, of the people drawing near to him, to stay in that city and to work with you, a city in which, with the holy angels, they are soothed day and night by the continual preaching of Christ the Lord; in which many friendly virtues prepare for them, through the most devoted hearts of faithful servants, a welcome rest and a familiar lodging; where, in the daily harmony of those who sing psalms wisely through many churches and secluded monasteries, they delight in both the most chaste hearts and the voices of your sheep. And now untouched virginity holds them in the temple of a holy body, so that it makes them guests of Christ resting in chaste inward parts. With no less pleasure the unconquered purity of widows serving day and night in holy works and devout ministry feeds them, as does the hidden brotherhood of married couples subjected to God, which by constant prayers invites Christ, glad in their works, to visit no longer a marriage bed but a brotherly couch, when, mingled in turn with him and his saints in a union of chastity, it is joined by spotless love with the spirits of those who visit. And now they are refreshed through the bowels of mercy and rest in the sons of devotion and righteousness, loving you in all the sons of your teaching and in you loving Christ, and therefore working the miracles of God, that is, their own power in Christ, above all in your city, to show that you are their partner.

Grace and glory to him who, not neglecting the works of his hands, wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, and who, running through the whole world on the feet of the gospel, has deigned to make you too a beautiful foot of his word, in which he might rejoice like a giant to run his course, and to shoe you with the preparation of the gospel of his peace, so that through you too he might walk upon the asp and the basilisk and trample the lion and the dragon. And lest so bright a lamp should lie hidden, darkened under the bushel of silence, he has so set you, by raising you to the apostolic see, as on a lofty lampstand, that you might shine with the illumination of many throughout the whole house.

But by what paths did he lead you to the way of his truth? Training you through fleshly duties for the spiritual works of his power, he made you at first a soldier whom he afterward chose as a bishop, and he allowed you to serve Caesar as a soldier so that you might learn to serve God as a soldier; so that while you trained the strength of the body in the labor of the camp, you might strengthen yourself for spiritual battles, firming your spirit for confession and hardening your body for suffering. That this had been the counsel of divine providence concerning you, your departure from the army and your entry into the faith later showed in a great way. When first, kindled by the love of Christ, at the Lord’s own ordering, you went out to the parade ground in a certain display of his work on a day famous for a military assembly, girded with all that adornment of warlike defenses which you had already rejected in your mind, and while all admired the most careful dress and terrible equipment upon you, suddenly, before the astonished army, you turned and, changing your military oath, threw down your arms of blood at the feet of the sacrilegious tribune, so as to put on the arms of peace, scorning to be armed with steel, you who were armed with Christ. And at once, the tribune being driven to fury by the envy of the ancient serpent, you were stretched out for beating and broken with huge cudgels, yet not conquered, because you leaned on the wood of the cross. And soon, the punishment of your body being doubled, you were laid on sharp fragments of potsherds, your limbs torn by cruel wounds, Christ then supporting you more softly, whose bosom was your bed and whose right hand your pillow. From there, with your wounds not yet closed, restored, kindled rather by their pain than broken in strength, you sprang forth stronger to a greater enemy, and, brought before the count, triumphed more gloriously over the more powerful foe. When the devil’s attendants dared not inflict further tortures, since these had been overcome, and were planning a capital sentence, so that at least by the end of your bodily life they might cease to be defeated, our Lord, strong and mighty and unconquered in battle, confounded their hearts, however hardened, by conspicuous miracles. For the executioner who, on the road by which you, a holy victim, were following your executioner, had insolently and threateningly dared to touch your neck, feeling with his hand as though anticipating the place of his sword’s blow, at once had his eyes struck out and was struck with blindness. O ineffable goodness of Christ, how great an affection it shows toward its own! He who asked that his crucifiers be forgiven did not let the wrong done to his confessor go unpunished; he who would not have his own passion avenged at once avenged the insult to his martyr. But that very anger is of mercy. For one was blinded so that many might be enlightened, and perhaps he himself, who had lost the eyes of the flesh, might receive the light of the mind. Then at once, as a greater proof, those who carried out the grim service of the deadly custody saw the chains, which they had tied very tightly and pressed down to the bone and had refused to loosen even a little when you asked for that small kindness, flow of their own accord from your loosened hands, your prayer being turned to God, Christ, before their eyes; and not daring to retie what God had loosed, they ran in fear to the count, confessing God’s truth on behalf of the confessors. When this had been heard with reverence and believed, the count reported it to his emperor with the testimony of the soldiers; and, so that his sudden turning from fury to clemency might also be counted among the wonders of God, he became in your case a preacher of Christ, in whose case he had vowed to be a persecutor. I think the Lord had filled him too with the Holy Spirit, like Saul once, because he loved you as he loved his David; so that, as that king was once affected while he was setting out to persecute the prophets, so that count too, sprinkled with the grace of the Lord which overflowed from the abundance of your faith, who had come to punish a confessor, might himself depart having confessed. For he believed, and those whom in his rage he had condemned in advance as guilty he dismissed with praise as saints, and he bore witness to the truth who had wished to punish the witnesses of the faith.

Why, then, should we wonder that you are so powerful in merits, so rich in graces, when what was for you the first lesson of virtues in Christ is for few the completion of long labors? Shall we doubt even now whether you are perfect, you who began from perfection? Or whether you must be lawfully crowned when the contest is run, since you began to run from the crown? Who would give us wings like a dove? Then we would fly to you and rest in the sight of your holiness, admiring and venerating Christ the Lord in your face; we would wipe his feet with our hair in your feet and water them with tears, and in those scars of yours we would kiss, as it were, the imprinted marks of the Lord’s passion. For the wounds of a friend are sweeter than the kisses of an enemy. Woe is me, wretched sinner with unclean lips, to whom this fruit did not fall when it was within reach!

For I believe you deign to remember that I once saw your holiness at Vienne in the company of our blessed father Martin, to whom the Lord made you equal, though unequal in age. From that time, then, though I touched you in a brief acquaintance, I embraced you with great love and venerated your holiness as fully as was then possible, and I commended forever to you myself and my own, who, though absent, saw you through me, since we are one by Christ’s joining; and I rejoice now that at least this boast is allowed me, that I have seen your face in the flesh. But I mourn the negligence of my unhappiness, that I unknowingly lost the opportunity of so great a good, and, darkened at that time not only by sins, by which I am pressed even now, but also by the cares of this world, from which by God’s favor I am now free, I saw in you only the bishop, which was in plain view, and did not know how to see what was more remarkable within, a living martyr.

Remember us, I beg you, on that day when the hands of angels coming to meet you will bring you, escorted by the countless troop of your merits, adorned with happy ornaments, crowned alike with fillets and with the garlands of victory, the snow-white bands of consecrated bishops and the bright purple of confessors; and when the supreme refiner of his gold and silver will himself receive you, as silver tried by fire and gold proved in the furnace of this world, and the eternal King will set you like a precious pearl in his diadem; and when the just Judge will acknowledge that he owes you rewards not only for your own virtues, seeing the countless flocks of saints of both sexes around you whom you beget for him daily by your teaching, as a pattern of perfect virtue and faith for all: as brother Paschasius too shows, in whose grace and kindness we have gathered, as a mirror gives them back, certain outlines, so to speak, of your virtues and graces. Truly you are blessed, the parent of so many blessed, the sower of so great a harvest, bringing forth for God from the fruitfulness of your soil fruit a hundredfold, sixtyfold, and thirtyfold, and destined to receive an equal measure from the various fruits of your offspring. The Most High has named you among the greatest of his kingdom, granting you to make your word equal to your deed, so that your life is your teaching and your teaching your life. Hence no disciple dares excuse himself on the plea of the hardness of the command, since he is first bound by the example of virtue.

We were waiting, like a thirsty threshing floor, for the refreshment of your letter, and our soul, like earth without water, panted with hearts thirsting for your words; for almost two years were now running out since you had bedewed us through our fellow servant Cardamas with small but most sweet drops from your mouth, and we no longer hoped meanwhile to be sprinkled with even a little drop of your speech, since, held in suspense the whole summer by vain expectation of Uranius, who did not come, we thought much more that the winter season would have to be passed in your silence. And behold, the merciful and compassionate Lord, who gives food to the hungry and comforts the lowly and is able to give us what we desire beyond what we hope, brought our Cardamas to us again by a sudden arrival, unhoped for but longed for; and as the voice of your greeting sounded in our ears through him, our heart leapt with joy, and all our bones said: “Lord, who is like you? What is our lowliness, that you are mindful of it and visit it? You have blessed, O Lord, our land and given us drink from the torrent of your delight. Our lips will pour out a hymn evening, morning, and noon. We will sing and make music to the Lord who has given good things to us.” For he has sent good news from a far country, by which we have learned the safety and received the words of our sweetest and dearest father. Hence our heart has been turned from the sadness of anxiety to the joy of relief, and, the turn of our anxious feeling changed for the better, we were delighted on that day, made festive by your letter, in return for the days in which the long duration of your silence had humbled us.

Let us therefore confess to the Lord his mercies and offer him a sacrifice of praise, because he has satisfied the empty soul: not, by his favor we say it, empty of his grace, but fasting from the fruit of our longing, since it had long hungered for the comforts of your letters, which, as I said, had been denied us for almost two years. May the Lord not lay their transgression to the charge of those whose iniquity has lied to itself and wasted our soul with a long famine of the bread of your mouth. Let them stay where they wish, since they do not wish to be where they ought to have preferred. Let them do what is lawful for them, since they do not do what is expedient. As the addition of such men could have brought us no good, so it can take nothing away. Would that our sins did us as little harm, if they too, with such neighbors, were removed far from us through the multitude of the compassions of him who does not repay us according to our sins, but as a father has compassion on his son, so he has compassion on those who fear his name and hope in his mercy; of whom we are partakers, because we both love his coming, wretched as we are, in hope of his mercy, and shudder at it, sinners as we are, in fear of his justice. But, appeased by your prayers for your sons, may he not enter into judgment with his evil servants, of whom we are the first, as we are the last of the good. We even turn into a heap of condemnation this very glory, that in Christ and from Christ we received you as the father of our regeneration, because, useless servants and degenerate sons, we show to the Lord Most High nothing worthy of you as father; we who even now keep the unhappy hardness of the natural wild olive in a thorny heart, though long ago, by the goodness of the Lord, we were torn from the root of our kindred and seem to have been grafted into your tree, from which we should draw the sap of your richness into the marrow of our soul, and, rooted in the spirit of gentleness in the way of peace, be recognized by generous fruits as shoots of the good olive.

But now, poor in paternal goods through the abundance of our vices, how shall we order our words on the day of recognition, not having attained your virtues and showing no likeness from your stock in us by which we may be recognized as yours? Who will snatch us from the wrath to come? Who will rescue us from ourselves, so that, cleansed of our own senses, we may be emptied of the material of heavenly wrath by the cleansing of faith? For we feel within us the causes of eternal punishments, the roots of thorns and thistles living in our heart. For the former offshoot of our old self, like the vine of Sodom, bore a grape of gall in the bitter fruits of the fleshly life, and the mind, drunk with the poisons of malice, vomited the wrath of asps; but he who is mighty has done great things for us; he sent from heaven and delivered us; he sent his mercy through you and renewed the face of our land and made us your planting for himself in his vineyard. Therefore, blessed and most venerable father, you must say to the Lord with constant care and assiduous prayer that he look down from heaven and visit these vines which your right hand has planted, so that, fixed in the true vine, we may live as branches to be pruned for fruit, not cut off for the fire. May he himself, who is the vine and the life, direct us in every rule of his discipline of truth, watering us from his upper rooms through your chaste and devout words, as fiery as they are sweet. For your words are drops of that voluntary rain which God has set apart for his inheritance, which came down upon the fleece, poured, that is, with silent gliding into the Virgin. He is the one in whose drops we rejoice, when he rises in us and distills on the newborn soul the first dew of his knowledge, to heal all our diseases. For the dew that is from him is health to us, because he is the fountain of life, who sent his word and healed us. This is the Word of God of whom the rain is voluntary, because not by the necessity of a subject but by the assent of one equal to God and by the duty of devotion, the Son, obedient to the Father, humbled himself to the death of the cross, as he had said through the prophet: “I will sacrifice to you voluntarily”; because the same Lord, priest and victim, offered himself for us and by his own power both laid down his life and took it up again. And so this rain is voluntary, which poured itself out freely on the parched lands, to turn the desert into rivers. And how it was made weak, he teaches who says: “For he was crucified out of weakness”; and how it was strengthened and established, you have in the same place, “since,” he says, “he lives by the power of God.”

Pray to this Lord until you prevail, that he may not allow our fleeces, which he washed by your hands in the water of refreshment, to be soiled again, stained by our sins, and once more turned to scarlet, dyed by the coloring of vices; but may he guard in us, by the watches of your prayers, the gift of his grace, and not abandon the work of your hands in us, until he ripens and perfects from us fruit and a crown for you; so that on that day, coming with exultation and carrying your sheaves in a full bosom, you may say even of us, numbered among your offspring and your harvest: “Here am I, Lord, and the children whom you have given me.” But now the fear of tiring you warns us, and not only that but also the fear of sin, which is not escaped in much talking, to put a bridle on our mouth and to close the door of speech, though with a late end to the letter. Let the close be a commendation of Cardamas, whom we congratulate on being so renewed by the blessing of your hand that in him, where before the frivolity of a mime’s name gave ridicule, now the gravity assumed with the name of exorcist has given reverence. Yet we were the more astonished and rejoiced at this, that he has changed even the disposition of his former condition along with his religious office. For, as a constant sharer of our little table, he so narrowed himself to the measure of our throat that he avoided neither our little vegetables nor our cups, as he will be able to testify by the thinness of his body and the paleness of his face, unless perhaps, on his way back, he restores himself along the laborious road by renewing his old familiarity with his cups.

Keeping the teaching of wisdom, we ought indeed to have put a yoke on our tongue and a balance on our words, to escape the doubled sin of our much talking and your weariness. But from the abundance of your love our mouth is opened wide to you, and we cannot, by bolting the door of our mouth, hold back within the barriers of a silent breast the affection overflowing from our heart. So we speak to your reverence in another letter too; for though the one in which we replied is so long as to suffice to fill you with weariness, yet for us, who, as you recognize, receive your conversation and return our own only at the longest intervals of time, one letter to you is too little. For by this we give our soul some comfort, slight as it is: while we write a letter to your affection, fixed with our whole heart on your face, we suddenly forget that you are absent, and, lingering as if in conversation with you present, we draw out our words further; and so, though we do not quench the burning thirst of our longings, for that would not be good for us, we soften it by setting before our inner eyes the image of your face and conversation. For though our sojourning seems prolonged far from the places of your dwelling, yet the spirit is not separated from the embrace of your love. “For who,” he says, “will separate us from the love of Christ?” If neither death nor life nor any other creature, how much less bodily absence, which cannot dissolve spiritual presence? Because the stronger the spirit is than the flesh, the more powerful is the union of souls than that of bodies, and the presence of inner men is better than that of outer men separated, who are often joined in place to no purpose if they are separated in mind. “For not he,” he says, “is a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, who is circumcised in spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is not from men but from God.” So by this same law, by which the circumcision in the heart is truer than the cutting in the flesh, and the presence that is joined and coheres in spirit is firmer than that in body, we are always with you and you with us. For though we are separated in face for a time, yet we remain always joined in heart, in you, and you in turn dwelling in our inmost being, to die together and to live together. Indeed, since it belongs to the care and comfort of the same love that we be made aware of each other’s doings, so that we may be less anxious about each other when absent if we are not uncertain, we tell your affection, which we know is most anxious about everything we do, that by Christ’s favor, as you pray, we are well, in a bodily frailty that is not robust but healthy, poor in spirit, not our own but God’s, whose goodness we need, while we abound in our own malice.

As for what our Cardamas reminded us of, saying that you had ordered us to report from here too what concerns us in the Lord, let your reverence know that your holy brother Anastasius, the pope of the city, is most loving toward our lowliness. For as soon as he began to have the power to offer us his love, he hastened with most devout affection not only to accept it from us but to press it upon us. Shortly after his ordination he sent letters in our name, full of religion, devotion, and peace, to the bishops of Campania, by which he both declared his own affection and gave others an example of his kindness. Then, when we had come to Rome by our annual custom for the birthday of the blessed apostles, he received us as warmly as honorably. Later too, after some time had passed, he deigned to invite us even to his own anniversary, which he usually grants only to his fellow bishops; nor was he offended at our excuse, but, accepting the service of our letter, which we had sent in place of our presence, he received us in our absence too with a fatherly mind. Finally, if the Lord grants us leave to go back to him at the usual festal time, I hope to obtain from him a letter to your holiness, by which he may begin to commend us to you as well.

The new bishop of Milan too, Venerius, till now your son, now your brother, had already written to us after his ordination; but since Cardamas reported that you had ordered this too, we have written to him through Cardamas, so that he might know that an opportunity was ready, if he wished to acknowledge the duty of due devotion, to write to your blessedness and commend his beginnings to your heart. As for us, we rejoice and glory in the Lord, because both visibly and invisibly you work salvation for our house, truly a good father and a saving patron: invisibly you build us up in your prayers, asking that the kingdom of God come to be within us; visibly you work for us in the building of churches, to give us a share with him whose house was found worthy to be visited by Christ, because he had received the testimony of the devout people for building the synagogue, which is now the church. We confess to your venerable devotion that as we read that part of your letter in which you indicated that the new daughter of the church of Alingo, begotten by your initiative, had already grown in the name of the Lord to the day of its dedication, our spirit so exulted in God our Savior that, as though we were present among the companies of those dedicating it, we sang those words of prophetic joy from the psalms: “Rejoice in God our helper; take up a psalm and bring the timbrel. Bring offerings and enter into the courts of the Lord; worship the Lord in his holy court”; or that word of the same prophet: “Arise, O Lord, into your rest, you and the ark of your holiness. Let your priests be clothed with salvation, and let your saints rejoice. Let them appoint their day.”

As for your deigning to tell us that some of the party of him through whose envy death entered the world gnash their teeth and waste away, we do not wonder, since in Jerusalem too, when the temple of God was being rebuilt, the Assyrians were envious and tried to hinder the rising building by frequent hostile attacks. But since he who is in us is mightier than he who is in this world, their desire will perish, while ours will be confirmed, because we hope in the mercy of him who never confounds those who hope in him. Only let your holiness take care, as you do, that a house may be built in us too by Christ and in Christ, because unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it have labored in vain; and unless this house is founded upon the rock, which is Christ, it will not be able to resist the winds of spiritual wickedness and the torrents of worldly temptations.

Pray that the Lord Jesus may come into our heart as into his temple, shake out the scourge of his love, with which he beats every son whom he receives, and drive out from the senses of our mind, as from the traders of the temple, all the commerce and contagion of iniquity. May he drive out from us the oxen and the sellers of doves and the tables of the money-changers, so that, cleansed of all uncleanness and greed, we may keep the chaste simplicity of faith and love; because the figure of Christ is kept where Caesar’s coin is driven out, and where there are no oxen the mangers are clean, and faith is kept uncorrupted where the dove is not sold. For unless we hand ourselves over to God, we sell ourselves to the devil. Hence also the old man, who bound himself over to the counsel of the ill-advising serpent, is said to be sold under sin. And, as one sold, he needed a redeemer, who bought us at a great price, so that we might no longer belong either to the devil or to ourselves, and, changed from a brood of vipers into a royal and priestly race, might become his own blood, who made precious, by the commerce of his blood, souls fallen from the noble state of our first origin and made cheap by persisting sin, and in his ungrudging love granted them to become coheirs with him and sons of God. Let us exult and glory in him who has become the refuge of the poor, to humble the eyes of the proud. Let us present to him both a temple and a sacrifice in ourselves, cleansing ourselves, if we can, of the old leaven, so that we may become unleavened and Christ, who was sacrificed for us, may himself feast in us.

Let us remember that, set apart from the womb of our land and kindred, we have been made sons of Delphinus, that we might become those fish that pass through the paths of the sea. Let us remember that you have become to us not only a father but also a Peter, because you cast the hook to draw me out of the deep and bitter waves of this world, that I might become a catch of salvation and die to the nature for which I lived, so as to live to the Lord, to whom I was dead. But if I am your fish, I ought to bear in my mouth the precious coin on which shines not the figure and inscription of Caesar but the living and life-giving image of the eternal King: namely, the faith of truth, which has stamped the coinage of your teaching and the seal of your ring on the coin of my heart and the wax of my mind. For your teaching is silver tried by fire, proved in the earth, purified seven times.

May the Lord grant to your prayers that I may be a coin of your coinage, a fish of your hook, a branch of your vine, a son of the womb of your chastity. For the sons of Delphinus will be reckoned among the sons of Aaron, but not with those who offered strange fire to the Lord and were burned by divine fire because of the fire they had quenched in their hearts. Let your sons have a heart burning, not with the wicked fires of desires and worldly allurements, but with that fire which the Lord came to kindle in us, of which he says: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and what do I will, if it is already kindled?” Let not avarice, then, not the lust of the eyes and harmful love of temporal things burn in us with a pestilent fire, which is a fire strange to God; but let our God himself, who is a consuming fire, recognize his own fire in us, so that we may say: “The Lord is our light and our salvation; whom shall we fear?” This fire enlightens hearts and consumes sins, extinguishes the darkness by which we are put to death and kindles the light by which we are given life. If our lamps are always burning with this fire, we shall say with confidence: “Even though I walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Enlightened by this fire, and kindled by its ardor to a thirst for living water, in longing for the Lord we shall truly say: “As the deer longs for the springs of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we shall see light.”

In the sacred history of the Kingdoms we admire Asahel, brother of Joab, winged of foot and light in running, so that he could compete with deer or wild goats in rival swiftness. And we are no less astonished when we read of that giant among the Philistines who had grown beyond the measure of the human body and the size of limbs, whom hands armed with six fingers and feet jointed with as many toes made stronger and swifter than the rest; except that against David, fighting by the hand of God and ever unconquered in the image of Christ, no hand or strength of enemies, however great, prevailed; by which the proud exaltation of the devil was cast down in the great ones of the aliens, and in the little ones of ours the saving form of God, all-powerful in humility, conquered.

But let us run back to the head of the letter, which we began from the feet, that we may praise the Lord’s runner Cardamas with the examples of the swift men of old recorded in the divine law. There comes to mind also from the gospel that blessed swiftness of the young apostle, by which he outran Peter, his equal in eagerness to run but slower under the weight of greater age, to the tomb of the Lord, so that he who alone reclined on the breast might be the first to look into the resurrection of the body. From there he had drawn into the channel of his heart the twin springs which he later, as herald of the Revelation and the gospel, poured out into the world; and that bodily quickness of feet he afterward fulfilled with spiritual swiftness, running through the whole world among the peoples on the beautiful feet of the word.

The same John, his life prolonged beyond the times of all the apostles, is recorded to have been the last writer of the gospel, so that, as the vessel of election says of him, he might, like a pillar, add support to the foundations of the church, confirming the earlier writers of the gospel with harmonious authority: the last author in the time of his book but the first at the head of the mystery, since he alone of the four rivers, running down from the very highest spring of the divine head, thunders from the lofty cloud: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He surpasses Moses, who extended the bounds of knowledge with the keenness of his mind to the head of the world and the beginnings of visible creatures. While the other evangelists began the gospel of the resurrection either from the Savior’s human birth, or from the typical sacrifice of the law, or from the prophetic proclamation of the forerunner, the Baptist, he flew higher and pierced even the heavens; nor did he stop at the angels, but, passing beyond the archangels too and all the creatures above, the virtues, principalities, dominions, thrones, he directed himself with lofty mind to the Creator himself, and, starting from that ineffable generation, proclaimed the Son coeternal, consubstantial, co-omnipotent, and co-creator with the Father, discerning God with God in the Holy Spirit, because in him the Trinity of the Godhead is fulfilled and the one Godhead of the Trinity is discerned. For the Spirit of God, like the Word of God, is God, both remaining in the one head and flowing from the one spring of the Father, but the Son by being born, the Spirit by proceeding, each distinguished rather than divided, with the property of their persons kept.

So the blessed John, who lay on the Lord’s breast, who had drunk from the very heart of the Wisdom that created all things an understanding higher than all creatures, drunk with the Holy Spirit, who searches even the depths of God, began his gospel from the very innermost and infinite beginning of all beginnings; by this one word all the mouths of the devil that bark in the heretics are shut. The tongue of Arius is cut off first, but the blasphemy of Sabellius is also made void, since by the same sentence of our fisherman both the unity of the Godhead in Father and Son and the distinction of persons are expressed. By the same chapter Photinus, the mad teacher of a merely human beginning in Christ, is hissed off the stage; Marcion, who separates the God of the law from the God of the gospel, is extinguished; and Manichaeus, the denier of the true Creator and inventor of a false one, is crushed, confounded at once by the voice of the same supercelestial gospel that follows (I have called this gospel supercelestial because its opening begins from that origin which is above all heavens and before all ages), since he hears of this Word of God, God: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.” And the Gnostic, who glories in the name of a false knowledge and turns all the understanding of his perverse mind into certain airy phantoms, as by a spiritual imagining of bodily things, the same author compels to faith in the flesh in Christ, when he says of the same Word, which was God with God: “And the Word was made flesh.” Not, however, made flesh in such a way, as certain others of the serpents are said to hiss, that he passed from his own nature into ours, but so that, remaining what he was in himself, he began for our sake to be what he was not.

I am carried too far, abusing the indulgence of your oneness of heart so as to fear neither to tire you with much talking nor to err before you through folly. For I know that, wise as you are, you gladly bear with your fool through that love which endures all things and never fails. Yet I will now say to myself that I should guard my ways, so as not to sin with my tongue, and I will come down briefly to Cardamas, that is, our Asahel, whose feet you have made like a deer’s, renewing his youth like the eagle’s by the abundance of your love, by which, out of regard for our lowliness, you took him up and set him in the courts of the house of the Lord, so that he might be more fully free from man since he had begun to be Christ’s freedman. By this kindness you have made him flourish again not only in spirit but also in body, so that he too, filled from your inmost being with the affection with which you love us, brings your longings to us and in turn soothes ours, and, traveling almost regularly across such great distances between us, keeps hard ways for the sake of the words of your lips. We believe indeed that from the very letters of your holiness that he carries he takes on wings like a dove, and besides receives from your prayers the strength of feet by which he is carried to us; yet we congratulate him on this very grace, by which he has been placed in the service of so great a love, so that he serves in freedom, runs about in old age, and prefers to spend the rest of a well-earned retirement in the labor of travel rather than at home; because he declines to tread the ways of the lazy, strewn with thorns, lest he be turned into misery while the thorn of wretched anxiety pierces him from the fruitless idleness of sloth. So he exults, unwearied, to run his course, lest the want that follows the lazy should meet him like a good runner while he wastes away in sluggish leisure. And when he comes to us, with what joy he floods and fills our soul with good news of your health! He fattens our bones, and a voice of gladness sounds in our tents, when, our minds refreshed with the longed-for comfort, we say: “The Lord has been mindful of us and has blessed us.”

Let us exult and rejoice in him who grants the wish of one who desires and has given us the desire of our soul, since he has gone before us with the blessing of sweetness. For what blessing is now sweeter to us, or what sweetness more delightful, than the fruit and comfort of love, which is given us most of all by your letters? In them we embrace pledges, as it were, of your mouth and heart, because your words are the offspring of your soul; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Therefore we love Cardamas both when he comes, in your words, and we commend him in ours when he goes; for he deserves that his old age, which labors for the longings and duties of love, should rest in rich mercy. Besides, what we admired in him more than his very swiftness in his gray hairs, he has so advanced to frugality since receiving the title of exorcist that he did not shun being our almost daily table companion, and when he was sprinkled with rare and tiny cups, with which he barely wetted the tips of his lips, he made no complaint of the injury of an empty belly or a dry throat. Altogether, in every respect Cardamas appeared so fine to us that we saw in him a cleric acceptable to men and an exorcist terrible to demons. For the rest, brother, we commend to you both him and all our people and ourselves, that through you we may be commended to the Lord by earnest prayers, so that the freedom of all our people may serve the eternal Lord, and our service in Christ may obtain the reward of eternal freedom.

The letter you had sent by that unspiritual monk of ours was intercepted and delivered by a truly spiritual letter-carrier, our son Sorianus; in him we saw that the Lord had conferred a twofold grace: that he, who had longed for us with affection drawn from your inmost being, should not come to us empty of your words, and that Marracinus should not again bring us your letter. He, by a shame at seeing us, or by a laziness about extending his journey beyond the city, inspired in him, I believe, by God, gave your letter at Rome to the brother I mentioned, glad of the chance of the shortcut he had wished for, by which he thought he had provided for himself against your instructions, so as not to be forced either to pretend to be a monk in his own person, as you had ordered, or to see one in mine, as he would have had to. So let him keep his military cloak and his boots and his cheeks, of which he was afraid to change the one or to bring down the other.

Let those come and visit us who are our fellow servants and fellow pale ones: not proud in embroidered clothes but humble in rough hair-shirts, not cloaked in a short military mantle but in little cloaks, not girded with a belt but with a rope, not with long hair on a shamelessly trimmed forehead but with hair cut to the skin in chaste unsightliness, unevenly half-shorn and shaved in front, leaving the forehead bare. Let them be unadorned with the adornment of modesty, becomingly unkempt and honorably despicable, since, scorning even the natural beauty of the body for the sake of inner adornment, they deliberately disfigure themselves, so as to become modestly unsightly in face while they are made, to their salvation, comely in mind. The face, the dress, and the smell of such men make those people sick for whom the odor of death is in place of the odor of life, to whom what is bitter is sweet, what is chaste is shameful, and what is holy is hostile. Therefore it is just that we repay them in kind, so that their odor is to us as an odor of death, lest we cease to be the odor of Christ. For why should they be justly angry with us, if in turn the odor of the life of those to whom our odor is unto death stinks to us? He shudders at my fasting; I cannot bear his drunkenness. He avoids the breath of a monk speaking; I flee the breath of a belching Thraso. If the dryness of our throat displeases them, so does the indigestion of their gullet displease us. If the aridity of frugality offends them, the gluttony of their bellies offends us too. Let them see us, then, not drunk in the morning but fasting in the evening, not swollen with yesterday’s wine but abstaining from today’s, not madly unsteady from the surfeit of lust but wholly wounded by the vigils of honor and soberly drunk, made to totter by thrift, not by gluttony.

We are glad to have received such a bearer of your letter, and I ask you to receive him as though he had come to me sent by you. For he ought to be numbered among those who have come to me on your brotherhood’s behalf, since the Lord, so that he might be so numbered by you, handed him your letter even without your knowledge. And I think that you too will credit this gift of divine grace to him, through whom it was granted to you as well that your letter should not be brought to us by a carrier not of your own body. But I want Sorianus to be praised without offense to the other, lest you accuse me to him again. For I think that I have rather praised than blamed him by mentioning the things in which one who blushes to be, or to seem, a monk must glory. You remember that in Virgil a Fury is praised for the very things that are usually made reproaches. But see that you do not slander me for borrowing something from a poet who is no longer our study, as though I were violating my resolve; I declare that I did this on the authority of your example. For I have your letter which ends: “Live happily, you whose fortune is completed,” and also the one in which, mindful of Plautus’s prologue, you called your home “the household god.”

Why do you try to force us to love you more? The sum does not admit of growth. If the sea can overflow its barriers, and whatever things keep their natural fullness can feel a temporal increase, then our love for you can also be heaped up, which we have filled to its limit, since we love you as ourselves. So, as we cannot add a cubit to our stature, we cannot add to the heap of our love for you; yet we set no limit to our longings. For you who think you satisfy us by this constancy of your honor and devotion, by which you try to make up for your presence by such frequent letters, rather provoke the appetite of love, and you satisfy it the less by the favor of your letters the greater the cause you give, by the very diligence and kindness of your words, for longing for you yourself, brother of so singular a oneness of heart with us in Christ. For what can be done more diligently toward God and neighbor than what you show to Christ in us? In this both commandments of God are fulfilled, since the same Christ is to us both God by the majesty of his nature and made our neighbor by the assumption of ours. In him, then, as it advances in you, your love is brought to completion, a love that is infinite in one perfect, because it is bounded in Christ, of whose greatness there is no end; but let our end be in him, that through him we may live without end, we for whom Christ is both the general beginning, since through him are all things, and the special summit, since he is head of the body of which we are members. Sweet and upright is the Lord; sweet to me in you, and how great the multitude of his sweetness you are to me; for as great as you are, in mind and in tongue, you are wholly a longing, and you taste to me of the sweetness of Christ, like a garden to me, like the smell of a full field, which you have gathered by running after the odor of his ointments. For you are a field to him, who in turn is a field to us. For in him we sow and from him we reap. And you are a field, not one bristling with thorns, or dry with sand, or rough and bare with stones, in which the seed given is choked or fails or is scorched, but that field which God has blessed with the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth. Hence your tongue drips with the word of God, and your heart, fertile for God, multiplies the seed received with spiritual fruit, so that the reaper may fill his hand with your fruits, and he who gathers the sheaves his bosom: that is, God himself, who is both sower and reaper of his word in us. He is also the hand, as the right hand of God, which we fill with good works; and he is also that bosom of Abraham in which we rest in the reward of our works.

So this God, abounding to us in your love, blesses, visits, feeds, and enlightens us not only by your letters but also by your letter-carriers, opening to us by both the good treasure of your heart; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and “every animal,” it says, “gathers to its like.” Therefore God has blessed you, because the innocent and upright have clung to you, and you have not sat with the wicked; you have hated iniquity, you love your soul, which you have cast away in Christ, so that, lost to this life, it may be kept for eternal life, gaining itself by its own loss, if through the love of Christ it becomes worthless to itself. Smelling the sweetness of your soul, worthless to you and precious to God, in the words of your mouth breathing Christ, we bless the Lord, the Word of God, God, who, as in that very man whom he bore, so in our minds goes through certain stages of bodily age: he is born, grows, grows strong, grows old. But we must pray that he not remain long or always little and weak and poor in us. In you indeed, as we glory, since your good is our glory, we recognize by experience his progress: great in goodness, little in malice, old in wisdom, strong in faith, poor in the spirit of devout humility, rich in love. For in earlier services toward our lowliness you had gone before others, more zealous than all our friends, more religious than our neighbors, more diligent than our brothers, as we have often testified. But now, by this turn of visiting us, you have surpassed even yourself in overflowing kindness. For it was enough for us to earn your letters by yearly couriers and to see those sent by you, in whom we might hold not only a substitute for your presence but also an image of your faith. But it was not enough for you to celebrate the established observance with the customary performance. Your great love made the delay of winter long for you to be silent toward us. Your heart grew hot within you, and in the meditation of devotion a holy fire of good impatience blazed up in you. Nor was it enough to hasten the sending of a letter to us, unless you also heaped up the favor of your words by choosing a bearer from among your holy companions.

Blessed is the one you chose and took up for this service, by which you lend to God; because, though we are sinners by the true confession of our conscience, yet, thinking us saints by the false opinion of your simplicity, as you say, you love us no longer with a man’s love but with Christ’s, and therefore you will receive a prophet’s reward, because for the name of Christ you receive with the honor of prophets even those who are not prophets. To us, however, no like gratitude is due for this service, in which we received with inmost affection and great rejoicing brother Victor, who came to us in the name of God and in your person. For we did only what we, useless servants, ought to have done, since the plain truth compelled us to receive and revere a pure sheep in him whom not only a sheep’s skin but the spirit of gentleness and the modesty of Christ expressed in his speech and silence revealed. Truly we recognized in him the pattern of the saints, the blessed Martin and Clarus, whom we came to know, through you, as the close follower of his illustrious master. Victor, a son of peace, declared himself the offspring of the one in regeneration and to have been the companion of the other on the way. A man truly, as you wrote, of God, humble in heart, not humble in grace, a vessel of mercy and a dwelling of the Most High, whom he receives and delights in the peaceful lodging of a trembling soul: he added to us, besides the blessings he brought from you, twofold in letters and cloaks, many more from the riches of his own mind, most welcome to us not only in spiritual companionship but also diligent in bodily service. For I dare to confess a matter that weighs on me, while I keep silent to you about none of his good qualities, which I know for certain are your joy, since the good of your familiar friend is your portion.

So he served me; he served me, I say, and, woe is me, wretched man, I allowed it; he served even a sinner, he who was not a servant of sin; and I, unworthy, was ministered to by a servant of righteousness. But I hope for some relief from so great a burden in this, that I did not claim the service of a holy brother out of pride, but admitted it from fear of saddening his love and in faith of receiving a blessing. For holy service in the name of God and loving service in the spirit of freedom was a blessing to me. For this reason I accepted his voluntary good also for his own benefit, presuming that he would be the more powerful in praying for me the more merit he had gained from works of religion. He will surely see to it by his prayers that what was added to his fruits from me does not add to my burdens. For I confess that I loved the blessing in his service, fearing that if refused it would go far from me, since I held what is written: “He would not have blessing, and it shall be far from him.” So I gave myself wholly to his hands and his heart, because through the bowels of love he applied serving hands to my limbs as anointer and to my feet as washer, full of the feelings of a free man but snatching away the tasks of a slave, so that he scarcely let me pour water on his hands. For from your book I came to love the grace of this servitude, so that I might taste at least the smallest drop of the holy acts of Martin. He himself daily desired not only to wash my feet but also, if I had allowed it, to wipe my shoes, greedy for inner mastery and therefore untiring in bodily servitude.

But as to washing my feet, I confess that only once did I yield, by the example of the apostles, who I had read offered their feet to be washed by the Lord serving them. For they would not have received a share in the inheritance except by the obedience of one who serves, since the good Lord and Master of saving things conferred, by the ministry of serving, the merit of ruling, and gave an example of human humility to those for whom he was preparing a share in divine loftiness. Hence, having perceived the mystery of so great a gift and understood the greatness of the good, those who at first had trembled to offer their feet at the appearance of the one ministering asked to be washed no longer only on their feet but wholly, even to the head. And I, venerating the Lord Jesus in brother Victor, since every faithful soul is from God and a heart humble is the heart of Christ, confess that I wished, as a remedy for my weakness, that my better fellow servant should touch me with oil or water. Nor was I disappointed in the help I had presumed; for the oil, as if medicated by his devout hands, glided more gently into my marrow from the very gentleness of the ointment, and the humbled bones exulted. My soul blessed the Lord, and all that is within me his holy name. For this exercise of devotion rather than of the body helped to invigorate my senses; by it the good brother, setting my frail limbs in order with his molding hand, raised up also the vigor of my mind with my bones restored, faith without doubt working with his hands, so that while the hand of one who loved handled the weak flesh, the grace of a believer washed the soul that suffered with it, and what was outwardly the oil of health became within me the oil of gladness.

Hear now another of his services toward our senses, by which, taking care not only of our refreshment but also of our frugality, he taught us to take an easy diet of simple food, porridges cooked with a drop of oil and plenty of water; but he seasoned them with so much salt of grace, with so much sweetness of love, that we did not miss cooks and seasonings, because simplicity joined to love mixed into the pure water the oil of sweetness, which no troublesome flies spoiled. But the spiritual cook, more skilled at feeding the inner man, to destroy the food of the gullet made our porridges not of fine wheat but of coarse flour or millet. And lest he seem to deal too delicately with us even in this, he who was preparing to train us in the appetite of monks crumbled beans into the panic-grass, so that we might the sooner lay aside a senator’s fastidiousness. But in the blessing of sweetness we had delights for the soul, rejoicing that the brother, spiritual even in bodily ministries, fed us with prophetic food. For in the mixed crushing he imitated those loaves of tribulation which the prophet Ezekiel was commanded to make for himself from various kinds of grain and meal, and, to express the confusion of the Jews, who forgot God and changed their glory into the likeness of a calf eating hay, to bake in cow dung and, when baked under the foul ash, to eat by measure with the tears of captivity; namely, so that they might foresee the punishment coming upon their faithlessness, signified bodily in the prophet, and so at least return to the Lord, if the wrath of an offended God, not only announced in words but also expressed in the bodies of the prophets, might call them back to repentance.

So brother Victor wished us to learn to humble our soul not only by fasting but also by food, and, in remembrance of old sins and understanding of present ones, to eat sorrowfully the bread of grief; although he partly spared us, mixing only beans with the millet and panic-grass, which, however, was perhaps a matter of forgetfulness rather than restraint. For the holy man, with faithful caution, would have feared to withhold anything of holy Scripture from us, and, to fulfill the whole preparation of the prophetic bread according to the word of God, would have mixed in lentils too and barley and vetch, so that, as the heats of grains unlike one another boiled over its lips as though the cooking were fighting itself, the pot would split and crackle with cracks. Nevertheless, filling a capacious earthenware vessel with fewer grains, he brought us dishes steaming with much savor and filled with a smelly haze not only the whole round of our little table but the whole space of our little cell; and, to multiply the blessing for us, he brought to our little supper the meal of another prophet too, setting before us the pot of Elisha, into which he threw meal; and he cooked in it not a poisonous herb but a seasoning of salvation, doing everything he did in the name of the Lord. Safe and secure in this, we did not cry out to him: “Man of God, there is death in the pot,” because there is now life in our pot, since the Lord Jesus, the Word of God, was made flesh and dwelt in us; and he took up into himself the earthen vessels of our body, which had slipped from his hands through the slipperiness of our willful depravity and had been crushed by long sins, so that the potter himself might renew them for a better use, having himself been made from the clay of our body, as he says, like a lost vessel, that is, in the likeness of sinful flesh, that he might condemn sin by sin. And therefore he says, “Moab is the pot of my hope,” because he took a body not only from Judah but from Moab, that is, not only from the line of the saints but also from that of sinners. He, having cooked away, as through the pot of our flesh, its rawness, sanctified his flesh as food for us forever. For his flesh, as he himself says, is truly the food of life. He is also that pot, according to Jeremiah, burning sins and consuming them with that fire of which he says: “I came to cast fire on the earth”; let us pray that this fire be kindled in us too, so that we may be cooked in the pot of the Lord’s body, that is, the church, and, our vices burned out and purged, may become silver tried by fire, proved in the earth, purified seven times; so that we may remain, no longer branches to be burned but fruitful shoots, in the same Lord, that is, the true vine; and that the same Lord may become for us as food that sweet cluster which, hung on the pole of the cross from the land of promise, both showed us the fruit and gave us its taste; so that we may no longer pursue the cheap grasses of the untilled country, among which we risk picking even the poisonous clusters of wild vines. This certainly happens to us when, with our soul, whose cultivation is the word of God, overgrown with the thorns of worldly cares, longing for this life, short in time and barren of good, we gather harmful sins among superfluous actions, like poisonous growths among the wild herbs, and so put death into the pot of our body or heart. But thanks be to God, who has delivered us from the body of this death through Christ Jesus our Lord, by whom, mixing the power of his Spirit with our weakness, both the bitterness of our malice and the barrenness of our uselessness, the word of God being poured into our hearts as by the sprinkling of saving or living salt, have been changed into sweetness and fruitfulness.

Let us run back to brother Victor, who, by the use he took upon himself in the name of God, made the jar of our little supply of flour abundant with blessing, so as to give us something too of blessed Elijah’s jar, by which the heavenly prophet, filled in the sacred word to unfailing sufficiency, fed the blessed widow of Zarephath with her sons through the three years’ famine. In that widow, I think, Christ was already then, through the prophet, feeding his church with the bread not of grain but of the word; of whom he says: “Blessing I will bless her widow,” that widow, namely, whom the apostle says is free, when her husband is dead, to marry whom she will; because, as the law ceased, whose end is Christ, the church, passing over to the freedom of grace, married Christ as the widow of the law. Now the oil of grace and the flour of blessing in this jar have not failed during the famine of all the nations outside, whose wretched hunger for the food of life and the faith of the Trinity that famine of three years once fittingly prefigured. But, to conclude this topic, our flour felt the grace of the Lord in brother Victor’s hand so much that what before was scarcely enough for loaves now abounds even for porridges, and fills our monastic brotherhood, eager for food in the evening after fasts, with a double service, of leavened loaves or of boiled meal.

But though my Victor tried to accustom our stomach to stronger foods, yet the brother, so needful to us, also took account of our weakness in this: he made up what our faith lacked in taking those porridges and completed the work of his hands with one helper on our behalf at this dish: a man taken in from among the country folk whom we are nursing at home, old in bodily age but an infant in mind, since, already failing in old age, he has been reborn to grace and has blossomed from the oldness of the flesh into newness of life. Brother Victor’s kitchen fattened him, with food he was used to, as one from the country, and suitable, as toothless. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him. He snatched him from darkness and the shadow of death; and now, sprinkled with hyssop and cleansed, he feasts with a voice of exultation and praise and cries: “I have gone astray like a sheep that was lost. I will bless the Lord at all times, who has given me understanding and snatched me from the mire of the dregs and put a new song in my mouth. I have been young, and now am old; but my days have not failed in vanity, because he who is mighty has done great things for me. He has given me to drink from the torrent of his delight, and my flesh has flourished again. He has sent me grain in abundance and satisfied the empty soul, and now my old age is in the mercy of fatness, until I sleep in peace and rest for length of days.”

I come now to a greater service of brother Victor toward me, by which he deigned to cut my hair with his own hands; yet he wished me to owe this very kindness to you, saying that he was revealing his art to me at your command. So I asked him that what he did with skilled hand you both might do with earnest prayers: namely, that the Lord, prevailed upon by your prayers, may have our sins, multiplied above the hairs of our head, by which we have an uncombed soul, not trimmed by cutting off the middle but removed down to the quick as by a shaving razor. For we have a razor sometimes of saving, sometimes of deadly cutting. The razor of remedy and beauty for us is Christ, God, who circumcises our heart, shaves off our vices, smooths the head of the soul, and tends the face of the mind; and, like that captive woman in the law, he cleanses us and frees us from the rough hair of miserable slavery, so that, to be joined to the Lord, as she was to pass into marriage with an Israelite man, we may be stripped of the crimes of our flesh as of barbarian locks; then, with our senses renewed, we may shine as with fresh hair, and, nourishing our life like the hair of a Nazirite, may consecrate it to God in chastity and frugality.

But we must beware lest that hostile razor from the other side, which shaved the head of the human race in our first parents, deceived by harmful fraud, should climb up to our head, that is, to faith, by which Christ is made our head, and strip us of spiritual grace as of that Nazirite hair. How good that hair remains for those who keep it, and how ruinous its cropping is for the unwary, is shown by that hero consecrated by oracles in the book of Judges: unconquered while his hair was kept, a captive when it was cut off, and strong again when it grew back. Would that he had been as prudent in guarding against a woman as he was strong in strangling a lion! But he who had conquered by spiritual grace was conquered by fleshly allurement, and, having prevailed over the strong, was overcome by weakness. This must be suffered by those who do not subject their woman, that is, the flesh, to their husband, that is, the spirit, in the laws of God, and who, like soft husbands with melting minds, give in to an ill-counseling wife; degenerate from that master who, as soon as he knew Christ, already a victor in a great contest in the very first lessons of his soldiering, did not give in to flesh and blood.

Let us see, then, all that Samson endured, corrupted by a faithless wife, since we sinners shall bear spiritually the same things which he bore bodily, set forth for our instruction. For if the grace of Christ is violated in us, as his hair was cut in him, the enemy will mock us; he will take away our eyes, put us in prison, and assign us to turn mills like asses. Hence the Lord warns us through the prophet, lest we make our neck, not submitted to the yoke of Christ, worthy of the ass’s millstone: “Do not become like the horse and the mule, which have no understanding.” For man, as the same prophet says elsewhere, not understanding his honor, that is, the dignity of his nature, which rules the other living things on earth by reason, having been made rational so that he might know how to understand and worship his author, abusing so great a gift of the Creator for the license of his error, is compared to the beasts and made like them. This we see plainly fulfilled in the king of Babylon, who, stripped of human sense, suffered in a beast’s heart the penalty for his impious stupidity and senseless pride. For man, set in error and fallen from righteousness, justly deserted, like Samson, by the power of wisdom and grace alike, is punished with blindness and the mill, because he deserves the work of a beast of burden who has bereaved himself of the light of reason and cast himself down, a slave of the body, into the likeness of beasts.

Consider the life of such mortals, and the whole picture of a beast grinding at the mill will meet you. As that beast has the eyes of its body sewn shut with rags, so this man, the eyes of his mind sewn shut by the filth of his life, wretchedly turns in laborious station through the wanderings of his senses as round the circuits of the mill, empty for his own use and busy for another’s; he stands in the way of sinners, shackled with the chains of his desires, and he is his own prison, beset by the darkness of his error and caked with the squalor of his conscience; within himself he suffers the workhouse of the mill, and turns like a millstone the rock of his heart, hardened by the obstinacy of iniquity, making flour for his enemies from the corrupted grain of his soul. For as, it is written, the sinner runs from his own soul, so he who works sin grinds grain for the enemy from the mill of his life, to feed the devil, to whom that soul becomes bread which is a famine to itself. But if he becomes a spirit not always going but sometimes returning, he will be made whole as grace flowers again, like hair growing back.

But, to weave the whole letter out of hair, it is a pleasure to indulge my discourse and follow that strong man of the Lord to his end. For both in his blindness and in his death we shall marvel at the sacraments of the divine mystery foreshadowed; and as for what is written, that dying he laid low more enemies than he had struck down in the whole of his life before, I think it should be interpreted in the first place of the power of the Lord’s passion, by which the house of the devil fell and the kingdom of death was dissolved. For although Christ always lived, as he lives, and before his coming in the flesh was, in the majesty of his nature, God the Word with the Lord the Father, yet, the ages having been arranged in their order, from Adam to Moses the power of death had reigned with raving license and had grown through sin understood from the law and not avoided; this kingdom the King of kings and dispenser of times, the Son of God, divided and destroyed by his passion: God made under the law, to free those subjected to the law; made through a woman, but a woman in sex, a virgin in childbearing, so that the Creator of both sexes might sanctify both, by taking up the Word and by being born through a woman. So by dying he destroyed death itself, abolishing, as it is written, the enmities in his flesh, and making both one, that is, man and God, which the God and man Christ Jesus joined in himself, in whom the substance of both natures laid aside discord and acknowledged an eternal covenant of unifying grace. Stripped by the devil’s robbery and wounded on the road, we had been passed by our brother in the Levite and our brother in the priest, since the law redeemed us neither by sacrifices nor by prophets. But that Samaritan did not pass by, who for our sake bore even the insult of this name; he did not pass by, because he was not a hireling but the true and good shepherd, who had come to lay down his life for the sheep. He, taking pity on his man, passed over and not cared for by those who went before, came near and took him up on his beast, that is, on the incarnation of the Word, and, having entrusted him with the oil of grace and the wine of his passion to the innkeeper, that perfect teacher of the Gentiles, healed him with the payment of a denarius in the two Testaments; he will repay that innkeeper, from the countless fruits of this good, rich thanks and innumerable crowns for blessed virginity as well, because he paid out more from his own, adding this counsel to the commandment.

So he was not a brother (for he differed from servants by his condition as Lord and from mortals by his nature as God), and yet he was also a man, of whom it is written: “And he is a man, and who shall know him?” Nor is he therefore our brother, though divine goodness, for the humility of his heart, has allowed his servants this name too, saying, “I will declare your name to my brothers”; yet our arrogance must not dare to call him brother, nor because he deigned to become man, since even in his human birth he has nothing in common with us, for he was made flesh of the Holy Spirit apart from the way of our generation, both conceived and born of the untouched virginity of his holy mother. And therefore, made our body without any contagion of our body, he did not give God his own appeasement, since he himself was the propitiation, nor the price of the redemption of his own soul, but of ours, since the Savior did not need salvation. For we, sold under sin, needed the price of redemption; and therefore for us he became man, for us the form of a servant, for us the son of a handmaid. He who is blessed and the sanctifier of the saints was nevertheless made for us both sin and a curse, which he was not, so that he might free us, who were sin by transgression and a curse by condemnation, from both, nailing both to the cross in his flesh. Therefore I think it was said: “A brother does not redeem; a man will redeem,” because those whom a brother had not redeemed, that is, a prophet or lawgiver who was only man, this man redeemed, who was also God. For “God,” it says, “was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” Only such a man could prevail against the sentence of death and the sting of sin, to blot out the bond of death and humble the slanderer; yet meeting him not in the majesty of his own nature but in the guise of ours, and wresting nothing from him by violent domination, but overcoming him by the law of justice: so that, since, the woman having been deceived and the man cast down through the woman, the devil claimed all the offspring of the first man as sinful under the laws of death, with a malicious desire indeed to harm but yet as by a most equitable right of victory, his power should last until he killed the just man, in whom he could show nothing worthy of death; not only because he was killed without fault, but also because he was born without lust, to which the devil had subjected those he had captured, so that whatever was born from it he might keep, as the fruit of his own tree, with a wicked desire to have indeed, but yet by no unjust right of possession. Most justly, therefore, he is compelled to release those who believe in him whom he most unjustly killed, so that they both pay the debt in dying temporally and, in living forever, live in him who paid for them what he did not owe.

For this reason I think that he is also for us that lion in whose dead mouth we find the food of honey. For what is sweeter than the word of God? And what is stronger than the right hand of God? Or in whose dead mouth are the honeycomb and the bees, if not in his in whose word is the good of our salvation and the gathering of the nations? Many have rather placed the figure of the nations in this lion, because the people of the nations who believed was before a body of fierceness, and is now Christ’s, in whom the apostles, like bees, have stored the honey of wisdom from the dew of heaven and the flowers of divine graces; and food came out of the mouth of the eater because the nations, formerly wild toward God, taking the word of God received with faithful heart, have brought forth a belching of salvation. But those who see Christ rather in this lion make Samson a figure of the Jews, namely that the Jew killed that lion as being Christ; and they assign this too to the mystical preparation, that it was at the very time when he was seeking a marriage that he carried out the desired slaughter of the powerful beast, because, of course, the marriage which has been covenanted in Christ and the church could not be confirmed unless the lion from the tribe of Judah were slain. For the same Lord is that lion who conquered, and also the lion’s whelp, laid to sleep of his own will and raised by himself, of whom it is written: “Who shall rouse him?” For, offering for us voluntarily to the Father the sacrifice of his body, he, the supreme and eternal priest, took up his life again, as he himself testifies, by the same power by which he laid it down. He is the lion’s whelp because Son of God, and the same is the lion because equal to the Father. Therefore, as it seems to me, this fits this lion better: “Out of the eater came forth food, and out of the strong came forth sweetness,” namely from our Savior, whose word is life: he both chewed this food for us by teaching and brought it out by imparting it. And, if you prefer another sense, food comes out of the eater in this way: this lion of the tribe of Judah, victorious for us, snatching us from the mouth of the opposing lion, hunts in order to save, captures in order to free, breaks in order to make solid, chews in order to make whole, eating in us that by which we are corrupted. Therefore let us pray to become the prey of this lion, lest we be the prey of the enemy lion. Let us become food for God, lest we be food for the serpent. Let Christ eat us, lest the devil devour us. For when Christ eats, as I said, that in us is consumed by which we are consumed. For Christ is life, and we cannot lay aside this mortality unless we are swallowed up, because Christ devours our death. But we cannot be Christ’s food unless we do his will, so that he in turn may become food for us, in whom we live forever if we live by his commandments. So, then, out of the strong comes sweetness when, the bitterness of our malice changed through him into the sweetness of goodness, we come forth from his word as sweet food, he who restored to life those whom, eating them, he consumed for sin. He alone is strong, sweetly strong, who has delivered the poor from the greedy mighty one, who, destroying the fierceness of my body through the mystery of his goodness in the death of his own body, gives the food of life there where the famine of wretched death was parching; who has changed for me offense into grace, sin into righteousness, weakness into strength, death into life, confusion into glory, exile into a kingdom. We who used to hear, “You are earth, and to earth you shall go,” now hear: “Your citizenship is in heaven.”

So I think that the picture woven again in Samson, whether when his hair grew back or when he died, fits every servant of Christ. For a man who has been overtaken in some sin, when by wholesome repentance he returns to the restoration of grace as with hair growing again, setting his arms like a bow of bronze, that is, faith in true hope and hope in unfeigned faith, and training his hands for battle in works of devotion, whose training is profitable for all things: then, strong as with certain arms of good conscience and firm faith, he will dare to attack and will be able to overturn the pillars of the enemies. These are the pillars of the enemy house on which it rests, in which the enemy, as our conqueror, feasts and mocks his captives, if he uses our members as the weapons of his iniquity. We cast this enemy down from his house by the death of the subjugated flesh; with the flesh as his helper, the enemy, shut up within us, shakes our soul with civil war, having become master of us by the fault of our own will; he has our own vices as attendants against us and attacks our inner man by the service of the outer.

But let us remember the covenant by which, buried with Christ through the grace of baptism, we swore an oath to the sacraments of the cross, that we should no longer act as living in this world, and that now not we but Christ should live in us. When he is restored to us in the honor of the head, the devil’s house will fall, and the whole troop of enemies will die with the death of our sin. Therefore from Samson’s death I learn not only to die together with my enemies, that is, by mortifying my flesh to kill sin at the same time, so that with the spirit surviving I may triumph as a victor of salvation and say to my soul, “Return to your rest, for the Lord has dealt well with me”; but also by Samson’s blindness, by which, captured only in his bodily eyes, he did not lose his spiritual ones, I am enlightened to good understanding, to know by his example which eyes I ought rather to have. For that man would not have called on the Lord to help his strength unless he had had the eyes of his mind unharmed, for which the light is Christ, in whose light we shall see light. If this light always burns in the lamp of our body, then the works of darkness will perish, and the prince of this world is cast out: not, of course, out of this world, with which, as it is written, he will be brought to nothing in condemnation with those judged at an end shared with them, but out of our hearts, from which, if we receive Christ, he is expelled.

Therefore, since those who are of his party imitate the devil, let us imitate the Lord Jesus, who has called us into the lot of his inheritance and bidden us take up his easy yoke, to shake off from us that heavy yoke of the law and of death. And hair, too, is like a yoke of lightness; for, as divine Scripture teaches us, the hair of the saints is light, that of the wicked heavy. The one is of strength, as in Samson, or of sanctification, as in Samuel; the other of weight, as in Absalom, or of squalor, as in Nebuchadnezzar. By this difference of men and of hair we are taught to judge works by hair, since in the Assyrian king, condemned to the wilderness and savagery, the mournful matting of his unshorn head bristled into a lion’s mane, so that even in bodily appearance he passed into a beast, he who was exiled not only from his kingdom but from human senses, recalling a lion by his grim hair, a vulture by his hooked nails, an ox by his mind and fodder, so that he who had been like many beasts in his morals should not bear the likeness of only one beast in his punishments.

Yet when at last he understood God and was restored to his senses and his kingdom, he too became for us an example of faith, so that we may fear to lose the kingdom that is within us by sinning and remember to seek it again by repenting. Nor could Absalom, though proud of a handsome body and head, say what Samson said: “If I am shaved, my strength will leave me,” because he did not have in his hair, however beautiful, that strength which belonged not to bodily hair but to spiritual grace, which the wicked man could not have. For Christ is the power and wisdom of God, who did not enter a parricidal soul, because he did not dwell in a body subject to sins. Indeed, the necessity of shaving that is recorded testifies that his hair was cut because of the mass of his iniquities. For so you have it: “He shaved his head, because it weighed on him; and when he had been shaved, he weighed the hair of his head, and it was a hundred shekels by the king’s weight.” How could it be more plainly expressed that hairs are counted for works, since Scripture has marked in the wicked man’s head not any strength but only the burden of his hair? “He weighed,” it says, “the hair of his head.” For his iniquity is glory to the wicked man. And not only the wicked deed delights him, but also, as someone says, the reputation for wickedness. Hence you have that in the psalms: “Why do you glory in malice, you who are mighty in iniquity?” For the light of the wicked is darkness, their honor a shadow, their height a passing, their head the devil; and therefore their hair is a weight, for which reason Scripture says that the hair of that parricide was heavy by the king’s weight, that is, by the devil’s weight; for every wicked man is the devil’s kingdom. So too “those who are clothed in soft garments,” it says, “are in the houses of kings,” that is, of the princes of this air and the leaders of spiritual wickedness; in whose houses and kingdoms they live, either hard in impiety or soft in wantonness, whose riches are sin, their paths slippery, their end destruction, their glory in hell, their house in the tomb. The hairs of such men are crimes, and therefore they cannot be those hairs by which the holy warrior loosed the ropes of his enemies and the new cords like soft threads, but rather those of which it is written: “The cords of sinners have wound around me.” For the soul is both entangled and pressed down by its sins. The prophet fully proves this when he says: “My iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy burden they weigh upon me.”

You see how heavy is the hair of the sinner. But he whose hair is Christ exults, light and winged, saying: “God, who girds me with strength and has made my way spotless, who has made my feet like a deer’s and set me upon the heights.” For, as I said, the yoke and the hair of Christ are light, because, serving Christ, we do good works, by which, given wings, we are carried up on high. Hence the apostle says even to Christians still in the flesh: “But you are no longer in the flesh but in the spirit.” For the flesh, made subject to a soul subject to God, passes over into spirit, not by a change of substance but of life. So I want Samson’s death and blindness too for myself, that I may live and see for God. For perhaps the reason he did not desire to receive back his eyes together with his strength, when his strength was restored in his hair for the sake of the mystery to come, as he had lost them together, was that that strength of heavenly grace, sound in its inner lights, did not need bodily sight.

By this example, then, let us too, with our senses stretched toward the Lord, blind the eyes of the flesh by turning away from worldly things, the eyes of which the prophet desired to be deprived when he said: “Turn away my eyes, lest they see vanity.” And the Lord himself, preferring blindness to the eyes of the Jews, says: “If you were blind, you would have no sin.” Let us remember with what ruin the eyes of those in paradise were opened, who had them enlightened for God as long as they kept them closed to sin. For only then did they drink in the shame of their age of puberty, when by the crime of transgression they lost the chastity of good conscience, with whose light they were clothed. And therefore it is a loss of the true light to use the eyes for the service of darkness and to blind eyes fixed on earthly things to heavenly ones. But the soul is enlightened by such a blindness as despises the world in order to behold God. Because, it says, “all that is in the world is the lust of the eyes,” the apostle, teaching that our sight should be clouded to this world and cleared for Christ, namely for him who enlightens every man coming into this world, that is, the mind of every man that comes, calls us from looking at present things to looking up at eternal ones, and says: “Do not seek the things that are in this world; for the form of this world passes away”; and again the same: “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is at the right hand of the Father.” For all things, as Ecclesiastes says, are vanity under the sun. Accordingly, above the sun is truth. So those who stand in the truth, even if they live within the world by bodily dwelling, are yet above the world by heavenly citizenship, and with the spirit flying out they climb and pass beyond the choirs of the stars or the poles of the heavens, and live higher than the elements, not subject to the things and uses of the elements, but, their life fixed in Christ, they become superior to the world, abiding in him who is over all, God blessed forever.

You see how the imitator of Christ transfers us from mortal things to God by teaching and example of virtue alike, taking away the veil from our heart, so that with unveiled face we may behold the glory of God, which is hidden from unbelievers by the veil of the law and disclosed to believers by the revelation of the gospel. So now we no longer need that fleshly hair. For “the old things,” it says, “have passed away, and behold, now all things are new,” since light has risen in the darkness for the upright of heart, the Lord merciful and compassionate and righteous. “Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” And therefore long hair may have been an honor then, when that spiritual veil of the law still had to be displayed even in bodily appearance; now it is a burden, since the sun of eternal freedom has shone and Christ has become our head, to lift from us, as the yoke, so also the burden of bowed-down heads. Therefore we now dare to cry out as free men, with a voice of exultation and praise: “Let us burst their bonds and cast their yoke from us.” For now is the acceptable time, now the day of salvation, since the truth is present no longer in the shadow of a cloud but in the light of its own body. And fittingly, for the time of grace and the appearance of freedom, the barber is at hand, to lighten us of the longer covering of the head too, so that even the bodily form may bear witness to the gift of spiritual grace, and the serenity of a bared forehead may display the joy of inner freedom.

Apostolic authority has left long hair to women only, because, even if the one faith they share with us removes the veil from their heart, yet the grace of modesty requires a covering of the head and a shade for the forehead; and therefore the perfect teacher of faith and discipline teaches that long hair is unbecoming to a man, because the head of the man, Christ, cannot be hidden, who is also that city built upon a mountain, in the church, which is the body of Christ. So what is unbecoming to a man is an ornament to a woman, who is head to no one, but adorns the man with the attire of decency and, placed as it were in the foundation, supports the order of the body, which is woven from the head of Christ, God, and of the man, Christ, and of the woman, the man. But Christ makes her too, through the partnership of the body and the weaving together of the members, a sharer in the supreme head, in whom we are neither male nor female. Let them indeed have hair, with which, like that sinful woman of the gospel, they may wipe the footsteps of Christ and be entangled in the feet of wisdom, so as to know nothing but to love wisdom, to embrace virtue, to kiss chastity; and that, sprinkled at least with the last dew of the heavenly word, they may say: “For the dew that is from you is health to us.” Let our women have, for hair, the deeds of spiritual virtues: fasts, works of mercy, prayers; for such hair becomes a man too. Let the grace of Christ adorn them, not hair; the jewel of chastity, not of stone; and let the ointment of works, not of perfumes, be fragrant in them. Let them remember that they are daughters of that daughter of the king whose glory is all within. Let them understand why the apostle ordered them to be covered with a longer veil for the head: “because of the angels,” he says, those, that is, ready for seduction, whom the saints will judge. For these assail the weaker vessels more insolently, as the serpent attacked not Adam but Eve. Hence also they are forbidden to teach in the church, lest with exalted spirit they dare to look into the decrees of wisdom and, puffed up by knowledge, burst apart. For surely it avails to the confusion of the wicked if they see a woman covering her understanding by silence under an appearance of ignorance and confessing the discipline of her mind by a modest dress, so that the serpent may not dare to approach her again to tempt her, despairing of capturing her.

Not without reason does the apostle teach that this ought to be done especially at the time when a woman either prays or prophesies. For then she comes into the conception of the Spirit, and therefore then she more stirs up the envy of the tempter, when, breathing toward the perfect man, she goes beyond the bounds of her weakness. And that the apostle thinks the same of prayer as of prophecy is not surprising, since in another place too he says that one prays by the Spirit; “for when we pray,” he says, “we do not know how we ought to ask, but the Spirit himself teaches us.” Therefore, since in prayer too there takes place a spiritual conception, so that, as it is written, the enemy’s guile and snare may not meet a woman acting beyond the bounds of her vessel, the apostle wishes it to be shown in her dress that she has authority over her head, by which she is both ruled and defended; this very humility of heart gives her strength, by which she presses down the pride of knowledge with the rudder of discipline and prefers to fear rather than to be high-minded, safer silent through the fear of faith than skilled with her tongue; in vain will she press down her forehead with hair, unless she also veils it with modesty.

So in common, every soul of us, let us strive to be adorned with those hairs which God holds numbered, as he himself says: “But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” And whose hairs would he deign to number rather than those of the one of whose crown he himself is the head? Of him it is said: “His head is like gold, cephas,” by which name I think some purer and more refined gold is signified, like that of the land of Havilah. For this gold is the form of the saints, who shine like lights in the head of the body and are gold refined in fire for God. For he found them, as it is written, worthy of himself, smelted through the trials of sufferings in the furnace of this world, and in them he struck the sacred coin of his image, impressing on their hearts and tongues the word of his truth and setting them up as money-changers, so that they might strike coins acceptable to the Lord according to his form and, the figure of Caesar being removed from us, might stamp the living coin of the eternal King; so that, inscribed with the spirit of redemption, our neck now free of the yoke and our forehead fortified with the title of salvation, we might sing: “The light of your countenance is signed upon us, O Lord.”

With all our strength, then, let us strive so to prepare ourselves that we may be worthy to be the hair and the gold of the divine head, which for us, by the grace of God, is Christ. For from that very head sprouts that hair of which it is written: “His locks are like flocks of goats.” And well are the flocks of Christ designated by the name of those animals whose chief use is in their milk, because everyone who believes in Christ as God embraces with the faith of devotion the whole fullness of the Trinity in him whom the Father anointed with the Holy Spirit. And therefore the very mother of all the living, the church, the body of Christ, overflows with the juice of devotion, and “her breasts are better than wine.” In this I think it is signified that the freedom of grace in the milk of mercy is sweeter than the severity of the law in the wine of justice. For “the letter,” it says, “kills”: you see the pure wine of strictness; “but the Spirit gives life”: you see the gift of the breasts and the effect of milk. But let this be granted to the seed, as you prefer it to be understood, by which the first milk of the newborn grows. Good, then, are the breasts which the good shepherd, who laid down his life for his sheep, milked for those infants from whose mouth he perfected praise for himself, to destroy the enemy of good and the defender of evil.

From the flocks of these goats was that man of the flock who suckled the little ones of Christ, not yet fit for solid food, with tender nourishment, saying to them: “I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able, and even now you are not able.” But when we have grown by the nourishment of this milk, our steps first made firm by the conception of faith, we shall grow up into the strength of youth, and, with patience confirmed through faith and love, we shall lift up our hands to more vigorous action and live on the works of virtues as on stronger food, so that we may become also those locks of which it is written: “His locks are black firs, like a corax,” that is, a raven; but this is a good raven, not the one that forgot to return to the ark, but the one that remembered to feed the prophet, to which are well compared the locks that rival those firs, of which it says: “good and black firs, bringing the ships of Tarshish.” Hence this corax is now a raven not of night but of light, the saints, whose hair is beautiful with its color, a royal and priestly race, with which he empurples the divine head as with the purple of his glory; because the grace of youth too clothes the flowering age above all in hair of this color.

It must not be concealed, however, that this bird is found in the Scriptures sometimes as a figure of sin, sometimes as an image of grace. For it seems deadly when it is brought forth for the punishment of the wicked, since God sends evils, as it is written, through evil angels, or when it is said in vengeance of a curse: “The eye that mocks father and mother, let the ravens of the valleys dig it out.” But the same bird is praiseworthy, both when it feeds the prophet with bread in the morning and meat in the evening and when the young of the ravens call on the name of the Lord. Its color too is applied sometimes to the saints, sometimes to the wicked. For the bride of Christ says that she is dark and comely, and the Lord made darkness his hiding place. And again, on the contrary, we are warned by the apostle lest darkness overtake us. But those black and good firs bringing the ships of Tarshish are after the form of her who is both dark and comely. For the saints are her members, who, as they are flourishing palms and multiplying cedars, so are also black and good firs, because in the church, that is, the mountain of God, they stand out with the summits of their merits like firs on their mountains. And as firs are fit for building ships, so those princes of the people, cut from the mountain of the law as from Lebanon, built the ark of the Lord, or the ship, that is, the church, which was to sail through the floods of this world, from nations hewn by the word of God, and taught it, joined in the framework of love bound by faith, to cut through the waves of this world without decay.

But now too souls trained in the apostolic faith are black and good firs: black, I think, no longer from sin, but rather still blackened either by dwelling in the body or by the warlike dust, as it were, or dusty sweat, of inner training; yet good because of their spiritual way of life even in the nights of their bodies. So too the ships which float on the waves of the world are armed, as with oars, with the faith of the true and the work of the just on the right and, as it is written, on the left; they are steered by the word of God as by a rudder, they spread the folds of their senses to the breeze of the Holy Spirit, and bind the sail of their heart with the cords of love as with ropes to the yard of the cross. Their mast is the rod from the root of Jesse, which rules the whole quadrireme of our body; and if, following that poetic fable in prophetic truth, we are bound to it with voluntary bonds, our ears stopped not with wax but with faith, not the ears of the body but of the heart, we sail safe and unharmed past the reefs of pleasures, like the rocks of the Sirens, against the allurements of this world, varied for capturing, equal for harming. Let us be bound to this mast with the strongest rope, tied in hope, faith, and love, believing with our hearts and confessing with our mouths the undivided Trinity, which is the threefold cord that is not broken. With this cord let our works too be woven, so that with the cable of our faith the yard of love may be raised on the mast and the sails of our life may billow, so that we may be both those firs which were brought from Tarshish on great rafts to be built into the temple, and also the ships that rival the one which once brought chosen gold and the riches of Tyre to Solomon. Our trading must be carried on the more zealously and profitably the more our eternal King Jesus surpasses that temporal Solomon. “For behold,” he says, “something greater than Solomon is here,” who will not crush us with a violent wind among the ships of Tarshish if by the good conduct of our life we bring him profit, which is the most precious merchandise for God, so that he may receive from us his own price, since he himself is the pearl, and the whole conduct of this spiritual trade strives to buy it. If our means suffice to buy it, we shall carry a load that does not weigh us down but lifts us up through this great and wide sea; and the Lord asleep in us because of our sloth, if we are worthy to carry him even asleep, we shall dare to wake, so that, rebuking the winds of hostile spirits or even of our own senses, he may save us from faintness of spirit and from the storm, calm the seas for us as we make for his calm, lead us like ships laden with his riches into the harbor of salvation, and gladly set green crowns on the sterns that have conquered the waves.

Let us also be the right hand of him who is all right hand, having no left hand in our actions, so that we may be worthy to stand at the right hand of the Judge, or rather to be the right hand of the Judge himself, and that on the day of recompense the Lord, our rewarder, may count our works like the hairs of his head, as he has already said in the gospel, to be pronounced at the judgment, when with divine blessing and royal bestowal he will reward the merits of spiritual virtues, that is, the most beautiful locks of his head. With such locks that woman too, in the figure of the church, wiped the footsteps of Christ, watering them with ointment and tears, she who pleased not so much by the price of her gifts as by the affection of her service. For the Lord loved in her not the ointment but the love by which, modestly shameless and devoutly importunate, without fear of reproach or rebuff, uninvited, she boldly broke into the Pharisee’s house, a stranger to her, with that force by which the kingdom of heaven is seized; and hungering only for the heavenly word, she ran not to his riches but to the feet of Christ, and in them washed and fed herself, and made those very feet her sanctuary, so to speak, and altar. On them she poured out her weeping as a libation, offered ointment as sacrifice, sacrificed her affection. For “a sacrifice to God is a broken spirit,” and she, offering it to God, deserved not only the remission of her sins but also the glory of having her deed proclaimed with the gospel.

And because she bore the image of the church to be called from the Gentiles, she carried in herself all the signs of the saving mystery: she was anointed with the chrism of her own gift, she had tears of repentance for her washing, the bowels of love for her sacrifice, and she took beforehand, with hands and mouth, the living and life-giving bread itself, and with sucking kisses tasted beforehand the blood of the cup, before the cup of the blood came to be. Blessed is she who tasted Christ in the flesh and received the body of Christ in his very body, rightly preferred to the Pharisee, though he was feeding Christ; while the Jew feasted, she fasted and served, eager, as I said, not for food but for salvation. Blessed is she who was found worthy to be figured in this way too, as a type of the church, that in the house and at the banquet of the Pharisee not the Pharisee himself but the sinful woman was justified to pardon. Her importunity accomplished more. For the order of the mystery arranged from the ages required, according to that prophetic blessing of father Noah, that the dwelling of Japheth should pass into the tents of Shem, that is, that the church, younger in age but greater by the law of grace, should rather be justified in the house of the law and the prophets; hence, in the person of John, the law itself declares of the church: “He who comes after me has been made before me, because he was before me.”

And so that the church might agree with its head even in figure, she had rightly taken the form of a sinner, because Christ too took the form of a sinner. But the Jew, who was to have neither head nor foundation in Christ, had anointed neither the head nor the feet of Christ, both of which the woman of the gospel had watered with precious ointments. Therefore the synagogue has neither the oil of grace nor the water of refreshment from Christ; its figure was borne by that Pharisee, in whom, though he was beside the very fountain of the oil and water of salvation, both the water and the oil of love dried up. Of this fountain he had foretold through the prophet: “Let not the oil of the sinner fatten my head,” as he could say to his church: “You have fattened my head with oil”; for she had brought ointment precious not only in its making but also in its vessel, fragrant with the grace and power of many herbs or flowers mixed into one. Who but the church could have made such? She, fragrant from the various flowers and juices of heavenly graces, breathes manifold sweetnesses to God from different nations, and exhales the prayers of the saints like spices burned in bowls aflame with the Spirit of truth; so that the Bridegroom himself thanks her, flowing with the scents of such flowers or the dews of such liquids, with that voice with which he caresses her in the Song of Songs: “My dove,” he says, “my perfect one, for my head is filled with dew”: the head of Christ is God, and his locks are the elect saints, in whom the Father rejoices in Christ; “and my locks with the drops of the night.” Dew, as we know, is not the moisture of rain but of refreshment, by which the grasses parched by the day’s heat are restored. The earth is sprinkled with the shining drops of this dew only on a clear night. Hence it is given us to understand that those drops of the night, with which Wisdom rejoices that her head and locks are wet, are the figure of the saints, whom the apostle too shows shining as stars, which likewise glitter on clear nights when the dews fall. And what is to be understood by the night in a spiritual sense, if not the passion of the Lord, which also lit up the day? Of it, I think, it is written: “And night is my illumination in my delights.” But you may also take this age as the night, which, by the conversion of the nations, through whose faithlessness it formerly bristled with darkness, has been cleared as of clouds; and now, by the light of the church as by the mirror of a full and perfect moon, and by holy men as by pure stars in a clear sky, the works of the faithful, by which each one, giving life to his soul, refreshes it from the thirst of its past dryness, drip down like dews in this night of the age, as we said.

And therefore Christ rejoices that his head is filled with such dew, and, though he is the illuminator of our nights, he rejoices that his locks are drenched with the drops of our night, because his refreshment and restoration is that working of the faithful by which brothers are helped or the needy cherished. For this reason he spurned the voice of Judas, who, having received into his heart the spirit of the devil, begrudged the woman’s ointment to Christ’s feet. For Christ is anointed, lent to, and fed by works of devotion and mercy. But the traitor, before he betrayed the Lord, betrayed his own faithlessness; he was moved not by care for the poor but for his thefts, and by the envy of an unbelieving mind, so that, judging that ointment, however precious, yet most cheap in comparison with the Lord’s blood, more precious than the saving body, he was indignant at the devoutly prodigal woman, whom the Lord himself testifies had done a good work on him; teaching not that care for the needy is to be put second, but only to himself, in order to show in this that Judas, with perverse heart, had preferred mercy to faith, since faith is the kindling of works and the commander himself comes before his commands. Except that in this too the son of perdition showed how cheap he held Christ, saying that the ointment poured over Christ was wasted. And therefore he has no part in the price of Christ’s blood, because he cannot have as redeemer the one he preferred to have for sale; and the contractor of death is justly excluded from the commerce of life, to be condemned by his own judgment, by which he sold for thirty pieces the one whom the woman, as he himself had assessed, anointed with three hundred; but perverse in this, that, valuing the Lord himself cheaply, he valued dear the ointment that was being sent ahead for his saving burial for us. Truly, like the devil, ignorant of the grace of God, in which he had no share, he valued highly, not from love but from envy, the price of the death by which he who bought us at a great price saves us freely, not sells us. For he wants to make us precious by the cheapness of his gift. He is more precious to us for this goodness, that he wishes to be valued cheaply, so that he may be bought by all. “For he himself,” it says, “made the poor and the rich, and he cares equally for all.” Hence he says: “Freely you have received grace, freely give.” Rich in the free wealth of this grace, Peter, having no money, enriched with health the poor cripple who desired only a beggar’s coin.

So let us be poor in the greed for gold, that we may abound in grace, and, becoming cheap to this world through voluntary poverty, become precious ointment to the Lord. For we shall breathe the good odor of Christ to God if, carrying about in our body the death of Christ and showing forth his life in the spirit, we are fragrant with the odor of both the Lord’s passion and his resurrection. And we pour ointment on the body of Christ if we devote our substance and our life to faith in his truth and obedience to his command. Then, in his body, we shall be fragrant ointments filling the whole house, if with perfect love we can ever say: “But to me the world is crucified,” to me who do not love riches, nor the honors of the world, nor what is my own, but what is Christ’s, nor the things that are seen, but those that are not seen. These will be for us hair for strength and holy service, with which we may wipe Christ’s feet, and be able to break the cords of sins, and, rejoicing in the spirit of freedom, say: “You have broken my bonds; I will offer you a sacrifice of praise.”

But while there is space to run, while there is time to serve, let us grow such hair and imitate not only the love of that sinful woman of the gospel, so as to wash away great debts with great love, but also her importunity, so as to snatch salvation from the wrath that threatens. In season and out of season, seeking the bread of life, let us knock at the householder’s door even at night. “For in the nights,” it says, “lift up your hands to the holy place.” Wearing out, as we are commanded, the thresholds of everyone wise in Christ, let us catch the food of life everywhere, let us hunt the word of God wherever it is; let us hang on the mouth of all the faithful, because the Spirit of God breathes into every believer; and it must be that even from the least servant of God a drop at least of heavenly wisdom will fall, to bedew the dryness of my heart and overflow for me, above the rivers of the wise of this world, into a drink of benefit; because I prefer to speak five words in the law rather than many thousands in a tongue, as I prefer to live one day in the courts of the Lord rather than thousands in the tents of sinners, since the Spirit breathes where he wills, and I hear his voice and do not know where he comes from. So wherever I catch his breeze, from wherever I gather even a slight breath, whether of the unworthy, or if I hear that the righteous one has come even into the house of a Pharisee, I will strive to snatch the grace of the guest, to snatch, if I can, the kingdom of heaven. Wherever the name of Christ sounds for me, I will run; into whatever man’s inner house I learn that Jesus has entered, I too will hasten. When I have found wisdom, when I have found righteousness reclining in someone’s inner rooms, I will run to the feet of Christ, to be marked at least with the last footprint of wisdom; nor will I disdain his feet; rather I will pray that Christ may touch my head even with his feet. She touched the fringe and was healed; others even the passing of the apostle’s body healed by overshadowing them.

Let us spread out our hair before him, that is, lay down before him all the dignities of our distinctions, and let us cast ourselves down from ourselves, that we may be exalted by him who dwells on high and regards the lowly. Let us confess our sins with tears, so that that heavenly Righteousness may say of us too: “She has watered my feet with tears and wiped them with her hair.” Perhaps the reason he did not have his own feet washed, when he washed the disciples’, was that we might wash them with our tears. No small merit has the soul of whom Wisdom can say: “From the time she came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet.” What is this kiss but the eternal pledge of that love which covers a multitude of sins? These kisses the church was already then preparing for her Bridegroom when she sang: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” This privilege catholic love alone rightly claims for herself, which, one and perfect, asks for one husband the kisses of truth from the mouth of the Word himself, lest she be polluted by the poison of heretical fraud as by the kisses of a strange, unchaste mouth.

Let us, then, fix chaste kisses on the feet of Christ, so that we may be worthy to rise from the feet to the head, and, growing into the higher members of the body, dare at last, from nearby, to ask for kisses of his face and mouth. And when, tasting the word of God with a pure heart, we have tasted how sweet the Lord is, then let our soul, set on fire in all its inmost being with love of wisdom, be refreshed by a sweet burning, and, pierced by the fiery arrows of the Lord’s love, by which every other delight of hostile pleasures is killed, let it say in a contrite heart: “For I am wounded with love.” Blessed indeed is he who can anoint Christ’s feet even with a kiss. Who would burn my mouth, wretched as I am, and purify my tongue with that heavenly coal, so that I might be worthy to touch even the heel of Christ with the very tip of my lips, and, with head bowed, wipe his holy soles, so that rather my head might be wiped by Christ’s feet, and, while I lick the divine feet, I might expiate my unclean lips on his chaste footprints!

Let us therefore exhort one another and say in rivalry: “Come, let us worship and weep before the Lord who made us.” Weeping for him we shall sow our joys; anointing his footsteps we shall heal our wounds. For whatever we spend on Christ, we rather confer on ourselves. Indeed, she by pouring over Christ washed herself, by wiping his feet cleansed her sins; loving him she loved herself. And therefore she deserved to hear: “Daughter, your faith has saved you,” which he who was of the sons of the kingdom did not deserve to hear; and she was justified more by her service than he by his banquet. For the Pharisee had not believed; she believed. Indeed he said: “If this man were a prophet, he would surely know what sort of woman this is who touches him”; and therefore he was not justified by the banquet to which he had invited Christ as merely a man, perhaps reckoning it a favor to him, because for our sake he was poor, that a rich man had thought so much of him as to take a poor man to his feast. But she would not have hoped for the remission of sins by so great an effort of service and expense and tears unless she had believed that Christ was God; and therefore, though only at the last footstep of the Savior, she found the head of her salvation.

Where will you boast, wretched Jew? In your own house our sinful woman has gone before you, entering into your labors. You feasted in order to be proud; she fasted in order to serve. And the water you refused to pour from your jugs, she supplied from her eyes. You did not wipe Christ’s feet even with a towel; she wiped them with her hair. Those whom you, unworthy, would not even touch with your hands, she did not cease to caress with kisses. Yet surely you rather owed this service in your own house to the guest you had received, if you had kept the law of hospitality at least after the example of the fathers; but it is enough for you, for your pride, to boast of father Abraham. And therefore she has gone before you, who by faithful affection proved herself rather the daughter of your father, from whom this inhumanity too shows you degenerate, in that you disdained to wash the Lord’s feet, when both Abraham washed those of angels and the Lord himself those of his servants; although then too the father of faith washed the feet of Christ also, whom, seeing him as one of the three, he worshiped with prophetic eyes; and therefore he himself rebukes you thus with his present mouth: “If you were children of Abraham, you would do the works of Abraham,” and he added: “He saw my day and was glad.” And he blessed also those who did not see but believed along with those who saw. From this it is clear that faith has been acquired for us, while for you there remains the nature of faithlessness.

Let them keep for themselves their arrogance, their riches, their nobility and their righteousness, who glory in Abraham as father by body rather than by spirit, uncircumcised in heart and Jews in the flesh only. For us Christ, and him crucified, is enough for salvation and for glory, who has raised us from stones to be sons of Abraham, while they, on the contrary, sons of Abraham, are hardening into the stones of our origin. For us Ephraim, the left, blessed at the right hand, prospers; them the mystery of the cross marked in Manasseh, who, by the presumption of the elder, had stood at his grandfather’s right, when the left hand was transferred to his head; because the cross, a stumbling block to the Jews and the future glory of Christians, would make him left from right and me right from left; since, the Jews slipping into our deserts and we invading their sown fields, they are by blindness what we were, and we are by grace what they were. But we will not so rejoice in our salvation as to delight in your destruction. For we have been taught, by a brother of your body but a teacher of our spirit, not to boast over the broken branches, since we have grown into the tree of your stock not from works but from the gifts of God’s mercies. And the common Lord, but Father of the Christians, that is, God of the faithful, is able to graft you again into the native folds of your own bark and to replant you in your own soil, he who has filled our marrow with the sap of your richness through the gift of adoption, so that one root may sustain both, bearing fruit in one for the Lord.

Meanwhile I prefer the riches of our sinful and poor woman in tears and affection to yours in impiety and the letter, her fasting to your banquet. I prefer to be entangled in her hair at the feet of Christ than to recline with you among your dishes beside Christ without Christ. If I do not now have ointment for Christ’s feet, I shall not have oil for my torches at his coming. And woe is me if my ointment is cheap; for precious ointment is needed, that I may be worthy to be buried with him in his burial, for unless I die with him in his death, I shall not live in his resurrection. Let us, then, love him whom it is a duty to love. Let us kiss him whom to kiss is chastity. Let us be joined to him to whom to be married is virginity. Let us be subject to him under whom to lie is to stand above the world. Let us be cast down for him for whom to fall is resurrection. Let us die with him in whom is life.

And how worthily shall we be able to repay this Lord, in whom even when dead we live, who deigns in turn to be to us whatever we, his little servants, have been to him! For he so mingles himself with us and joins us to himself that he makes what he received profit us, and credits as received by himself what is given to us, that is, to his least ones. So too, involving his own in his honor, he has shared almost everything with us, even his names. As he is called the power of God, so he deigns to be power to us too: “For God is our refuge and power.” As we are an inheritance to him, so is he to us. For as you have in Moses, “The Lord’s portion became his people Jacob,” so you have in the psalms, “My portion is the Lord.” And as he says of himself, “I am the light of this world,” so he said to his own, “You are the light of this world.” “I am,” he says, “the living bread”; and “we are all one bread.” “I am the true vine”; and to you he says, “I planted you a fruitful vine, wholly true.” Christ is the mountain of God, in which it has pleased God to dwell, and his saints are the mountains of God, the fertile mountains, from which the Wonderful enlightens us from the everlasting mountains. The rock is Christ: “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” Even to his disciple he did not deny the grace of this name, saying to him: “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

But why do we wonder that he has granted his names to his servants, with whom he shares both his Father and his kingdom? For he gave to those who received him power to become sons of God, and, as far as lies with him, he said to all men: “You are gods, and all sons of the Most High.” But we, by the crime of our wills, die like men and fall like one of the princes. For one of the princes of the angels he was, before, falling by casting down, he became the devil, to whom it is said: “How has Lucifer fallen, who rose in the morning?” But we are not condemned to eternal destruction as he is, because he was the author of sin and will be punished at once for himself and for man, he who perished by the same crime by which he destroyed. But man did not deserve to be shut out of paradise forever and to be earth, because divine justice judged it more lenient to have sinned by another’s design than by one’s own. It is more criminal to deceive than to be deceived, and to devise sin than to commit it. And therefore he who consented to the fraud was punished temporally and for amendment, while the inventor of death is destined to eternal punishment, for whom the penalty of sin will never fail, because he never ceases. So, “not an angel, not an envoy,” as it is written, “but the Lord himself” came to raise up the crushed, to free the fettered, and to save what was lost. But to confound our deceiver by a mutual deception, as it were, the only-begotten Son of God, through the mystery of his goodness, deigned to take the very nature of our frailty, so that the devil might be conquered by that very nature which he had deceived, and he who was always under God’s power and laws might be subjected, as he is, to man.

What, then, shall we render to him for all that he has rendered to us? For he has rendered, but as a good Lord, good for evil, to him on whom we had heaped evil for good. He blessed, and we cursed. He healed, and we blasphemed; he justified the ungodly, and was reckoned among the wicked. What, then, shall I pay back to him for my evils which he bore, what for his good things which he conferred? What for the flesh he took? What for the slaps? What for the reproaches? What for the scourges? What shall I repay for the cross, the death, the burial? Suppose we render cross for cross, death for death: shall we be able to render what we have, since from him and through him and in him we have all things, and we ourselves who have them are his? For he made us, and not we ourselves, and our soul is always in his hands. Let us render, then, love for the debt, charity for the gift, gratitude for the money. For woe to us, unless we love.

But when could I, wretched and needy, hope to repay this Lord, whom not even the apostles profess to have repaid? Hear, indeed, one of them confessing that he has not repaid, who says: “Who has first given to him, that it should be repaid to him?” But thanks to him, who remits to us the interest on so great a loan and grants us a settlement of an immense obligation, asking back from us only love for himself; and by placing it in the first place among his commandments he showed how we, though poor, might pay him an unpayable debt. Let no one, then, excuse himself on the ground of the difficulty of paying, because no one can say that he has no heart. Not sacrifices, not costly gifts, not hard labors are required of us; we have within us the means to pay. For our affection is a thing in our power; let us spend it on the Lord, and we pay. Indeed, David, delivered from the hand of all his enemies, paying for the full security of his salvation not with the riches of his kingdom but of his heart, says: “I will love you, O Lord, my strength.”

I add, moreover, that he who is the creditor will be the debtor if we pay him the price of his goodness, which he gives us undeserved, with the free payment of a loving heart. And he is loved in ourselves too, since he himself said that this would be the sign of his disciples, if they loved one another with the love with which he loved us, that is, that we should have one heart and one soul in Christ, and each should do to his neighbor what he wishes done to himself. All the more do we glory in the Lord in your love, which alone makes us able in some measure to pay to God even one of our great and innumerable debts. For in all other good things we confess that we are scarcely initiated, and only in a few; in love for you alone we profess to be perfect.

I still have something to say to you, although you receive my letters in unlocked storerooms and, as far as it lies with you, are eager, as you yourself declare, to proclaim them upon the housetops. But if you bring out the complaint against you that I am now about to lodge with you, among the other follies of my talkativeness, you will at the same time publish your own rashness, about which I have written this letter in complaint, reminded by the end of my previous one, that is, by its word on love and perfection, to make that the beginning of this one. My ground for remonstrating with you over the excessive affection of your oneness of heart is this: that great love draws you as far as the sin of falsehood. For whether I consider what you say of yourself or what you say of me, heaping up my burdens with unjust praises and lessening your own with false reproaches, I would charge you with sinning against love out of love. For ‘love,’ it says, ‘is kind; love does no evil to a neighbor.’ That you show it to us as kind we experience, and indeed we glory in it. But see that you do not appear to do evil to your neighbors against its rule, piling on them the weight of undeserved praise on top of the load of their sins, and, as it were, not wishing for us what you wish for yourself, since you think it right to speak of us in a way that you judge unprofitable to yourself if spoken of you. You will rightly hear: ‘If you love rightly but do not divide rightly, you have sinned.’ Unless perhaps you do this too by a higher counsel of devotion: that while you lavish on us in words goods that belong to others, you may prompt in us the goad of shame, so that, reading what we ought to be, we may learn to be good and strive to show ourselves according to your words, and perhaps we may be made what we are not, while we blush not to be what we are called. Meanwhile, however, since conscience does not recognize the truth of your words, modesty spurns the flattery. Let modesty, as I said, call you to account before yourself: why do you dare to assign to us, as to victors whose contest is fought out, the palm of perfection, because we seem to have laid down every burden of earthly possession, while on the other hand you lament yourself as still unhappy and stuck in the mire of the lower dregs, because, as you wrote, you seem not to have sold even one little estate? Yet you have alienated it too from your present right just as if it had been sold, so as to stand twice devoted to God with greater fruits of faith. By different kinds of trade, but for the one gain of life, within the bounds of the same command, you are both the seller and the giver of your lands, and therefore a possessor without captivity of mind, because the church, with you as its servant, possesses what you have kept back.

So weigh your account and mine alike by the words of the Lord himself, so that you neither despair of yourself as still hampered nor congratulate us as already free: there are ‘divisions of graces’ and ‘measures of gifts,’ which one and the same God, the dispenser, works as in the members of his own body, distinguishing different members in his body by the gifts he pleases, yet building one body for himself out of the diversity of members, so that from this too the grace of the sacred body may increase, when manifold virtue is counted within one frame, that ‘the queen may stand at his right hand, clothed in golden fringes, arrayed in variety.’ See now how much God has given you in her, he who has granted you a portion in the lot of those who lived perfect under the law, possessing in such a way that they were not possessed by their possessions, and did not put any love of things or of kinsfolk before the love and discipline of the Lord, as is shown in Job and Abraham and Lot. But you are also a sharer with those whom the fullness of the gospel perfects, you who have sold estates of greater wealth and allure.

Hence I trust that there is for you an equal rest in the midst of the divine lots, so that you may sleep, as it is written, ‘among the middle portions,’ that is, the lots of the Lord, which are taken to be in the two Testaments, from which the inheritance of the Lord and the fullness of the saints is made complete. So I am ready to turn the Lord’s saying against you in the opposite sense and say to you: you see the speck of grace in your brother’s eye, and do not perceive the mass of the same good in your own, since, as I said, you have taken both portions of the saints: you are not a possessor in the estates you have kept, and you are perfect in those you have sold. So even in that in which you seem a possessor, you are perfect with a mind freed from the bonds of possessions, you who, mindful that ‘the time is short,’ fulfill that saying of the apostle, that having you should not have, because you have not for yourself but for those who do not have. You are a guest in your own house, that you may be a house of hospitality; you are a stranger in your own homeland and in this world, that you may be a dweller in paradise and a citizen of the ancient homeland. You do not fill your house with dining rooms, nor cram it with heaps of furniture or money; instead, you yourself, the measurer of a single corner, fill it with strangers and the needy, and, a fellow servant of your own household slaves, you do not usurp the temporary dwelling of your house as master of the household, but remain in it as a hireling or a tenant, paying rent to the Lord as for a dwelling held on sufferance by the joint service of your body and soul.

But if the reward is to be extended or shortened according to the measure of the work, and some reckoning of what has been done and not done must be made, the perfection of your mind will be fairly reckoned with the work of those who sold everything, since you have kept back nothing for yourself either in law or, what is more, in your heart, you who ‘use the world as though not using it.’ And I am not sure whether this constancy and firmness of your heart is not to be judged a mark of stronger faith, by which among fires you are not burned, among snares you are not caught, you touch pitch and are not defiled, than that of those whom you think strong, but whom I consider weaker, because, not trusting their own weakness, they hastened to alienate everything to which they feared to cling. You, then, are ‘free among the dead,’ you who in an earthly possession are no longer earth but stand above the earth; you are neither polluted by contact with corpses nor do you dwell in the tombs of those who lie cast out, because you have buried your life in heaven, having ‘hidden it in Christ.’ But let us not suffer envy for a perfection; rather let us receive pardon for weakness, since you cannot deny that it is braver to do without things that remain to you than without things alienated, and to despise what you have than not to have what you despise.

Indeed, consider the very words of the Lord on which you credit us with perfection, and you will see that you have put the beginning for the end. ‘If you wish,’ he says, ‘to be perfect, go and sell all you have and give to the poor.’ If he had ended the sentence there, I would rebuke you for speaking falsely and would freely ask you, as a soul close to me in the likeness of the same pursuit, to rejoice with me, because we would now be holding in our hands the palm of a finished contest, like that tenth drachma, I say, lost in the first parent of the flesh, yet found at last inside the house when the light of the saving word was lit. But since you see how weighty a word remains, when the Lord of majesty himself adds, ‘and come, follow me,’ consider rather that difficulty and measure it with an enlarged heart; then you will understand that you have greater cause for anxiety on our behalf than for congratulation. For it was easy for us, letting go of our cloak, to drop goods, or rather burdens, laid upon us; and the things we had not brought into this world with us, and could not carry out with us, we gave back as if borrowed. We did not tear them away like skin from flesh, but put them off like clothing from the body.

Now we must pay to God what is truly ours, that is, the heart and soul, ‘presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice,’ as it is written, to the Lord, and building ourselves up as a holy temple for him on the very cornerstone, who gave us in himself the pattern of our sanctification and said, ‘Be holy, for I am holy.’ What thanks are due to us, then, if we are faithful only in what belongs to another, unless we serve him from what is our own, that is, from the free choice of the will, loving God ‘with our whole heart and,’ as it is written, ‘from the whole’ inward parts ‘of our soul’? To this disposition the prophet stirs us when he says, ‘I will sacrifice to you willingly.’ For this is acceptable and pleasing before God, that our good be voluntary, so that we may recover what is ours, namely the home of paradise and eternal life, in which we were created. If we recover it, cleansed from the possession of this earth into which we came by condemnation, then truly, as men restored from exile to their homeland or returned from a long journey abroad to the house of their birth, we shall be able to say, ‘The Lord is our portion in the land of the living.’

Therefore the giving up or selling of the temporal goods held in this world is not the running of the course but the entrance to it, not the finishing post but the gate. For the athlete does not win at the moment he is stripped; he is stripped in order to begin the fight, and he will be crowned if he has competed lawfully. The swimmer too undresses when he is about to cross the river before him; yet he will not swim across through this great preparation of having stripped himself, unless by the effort of his whole body and the skillful movement of all his limbs, the thrust of his feet, the oars of his arms, and the slant of his side, he cleaves the force of the current and completes the labor of swimming.

Yet I see that the order of this campaign was also prefigured for us in the blessed patriarch Jacob, when I read that after he had crossed the stream and sent on ahead the burdens of his cares, that is, the hindrances of bodily goods and of kinsfolk, and had remained alone at the place of his tent, he wrestled with God, prevailed in wresting a blessing, and received that name Israel, hallowed in heaven and on earth. Although in this a prefiguration of the saving mystery seems primarily to be present, namely that in the figure of the Jews, that is, of the offspring of his body, Jacob prevailed over the Lord, as that people prevailed in wresting his passion from Pilate, as it is written, when they said, ‘Crucify, crucify,’ and ‘their voices,’ it says, ‘prevailed,’ nevertheless, for the purpose of my present discourse, the story should be used insofar as it has produced an image of the gospel command: that by that example we may understand that we cannot be fit to grapple with God, with whom we certainly grapple when we strive to fulfill his word and try to prevail toward divine virtues by imitating him. So we cannot be fit to seize the way of life, to lay hold of the word of God, and to prevail toward the kingdom of heaven, which ‘from the days of John suffers violence’ as from those who plunder it, unless we send ahead, before the evening of our death, all the things that hinder and slow us through love or care if they cling to us on the road of this world, and then through the whole night of this world wrestle with anxious striving in spiritual works and pursuits to lay hold of Christ and hold him, and are not torn from the love of Christ, as Jacob was not torn from his embrace until we wrest the blessing. And would that, as the badge of a saving wrestle, he might strike the sinew of our thigh with the fear of his majesty, so that when it is numbed the strength of the flesh may be weakened and spiritual grace grow strong. In Jacob, however, the sinew of the stricken thigh withered as a figure of Jewish barrenness and corruption, pointing to that part of his sons which, degenerating from the faith of the fathers, ceased to be fruitful to God. From this you have it that it was weakened in its fruitfulness in sons, and, straying from the commandments of its author, limped in the paths of its error.

Nevertheless we too must beware lest we appear barren in the sight of the Lord, or limp with a lame foot on his road; rather, unfruitful in bodily offspring, let us draw that numbing of the father’s thigh by the stroke of the divine hand toward the rigor of continence, so that, strengthless toward the desires by which the strength of faith is hamstrung, we may strengthen the soul with chastity, which the apostle teaches and which even fleshly athletes carefully guard. With how much greater zeal must we keep it, who wrestle for that ‘unfading crown,’ when it is cultivated even by those who contend for a temporal and fragile crown! Therefore, being about to fight before the Lord under the gaze of men and angels in the theater of this world, let us strip off hostile works, so that we may be clothed with healing works. For he wishes us to be prepared for this very thing who says, ‘Follow me,’ so that ‘we may lay hold of him in whom we have been laid hold of’ by him. He who calls us to the place where he sits at the right hand of God in the glory of the Father says to all, ‘Come to me, you who are burdened and laboring, and you will find rest for your souls.’ For he who made all ‘wishes every man,’ as far as lies in him, ‘to be saved.’ For this reason he came down to us, that we might go up to him; for this he was conformed to the body of our flesh, which served sin, that he might conform us to the body of his flesh, which did no sin, so that we may truly be re-formed to our original glory if we take on the divine likeness by imitating Christ. For that only the image remained to us in Adam the book of Genesis itself shows, which narrates the workmanship of the divine hand: in it the likeness, together with the image of God, is named while the making of man is still being planned; but in the following chapter, where man, now made, is written to be only ‘in the image of God,’ it indicates that the likeness was withdrawn, as from one who would sin, surely by foreknowledge of the future, so that it might be kept for men in Christ, who by the obedience of his devotion reconciled to the Father the world which the disobedience of the first parent had estranged. And so the likeness of God, which the servant lost when he was puffed up with desire for equality with his Lord, the Lord himself regained, ‘emptied into the form of a servant’; and man, who in his pride had fallen through the devil’s fraud, rose again in the Lord’s lowliness through faith in him, when the devil was laid low by the humiliation of the Lord most high. He, then, grieving for us and ‘for our sake made obedient unto the death of the cross,’ set before us the way of life and the perfection of virtue not only in selling estates and paying out their price, but in following him. And because he had said, ‘When I am lifted up, I will draw all things to myself,’ therefore he says, ‘Come, follow me.’ Blessed is he who follows at so close an interval that he can say, ‘My soul has clung behind you.’ Only that love can say this which is ‘the end of the commandment’ and ‘the fullness of the law,’ that is, which ‘from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned’ so engrafts and fastens itself to God that, loving nothing outside God, it says, ‘And I am always with you.’ Therefore our whole labor and full work lies in keeping watch over our heart and stripping it bare. We cannot see its darkness, or the hiding places of the enemy concealed in it, unless the mind is cleared of the dregs of cares for outward things and turned inward to itself; for not in vain was it said, ‘Keep your heart with all watchfulness.’

I think you have already found by experience how toilsome, constant, even daily our struggle with this enemy is, and how many snares are at work in it, what strength the vices have there and how great the weakness of the virtues, how ready its relapse into depravity, how sluggish its effort toward God. Now that conflict of a different law, once shut up within me, is laid open to me; now I feel the force of the opposing law, which, as if laying hands on me, strives to drag me captive into the law of sin; and I recognize that the blessed man is burned rather by my unhappiness, and grieving for me out of my own state cries out, ‘Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ But the same teacher revives and restores me, showing me the saving way out, if only the will is present with me, so that I may deserve to find perfection by the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. He must be entreated to prevail over our enemies and to overflow our darkness, to destroy in us what is alien, or rather our own, and to build what is his. This we know the friends of God obtained by prayer, who certainly suffered with their heart when they said, ‘Create a clean heart in me, O God, and renew a right spirit in my inward parts.’ When he had been entreated, the psalmist now says with confidence, ‘Test me, O Lord, and know my heart, and see if there is a way of iniquity in me.’ But lest he seem to have earned this confidence by his own strength rather than by the grace of God, he also says, ‘For you, O Lord, have possessed my reins.’ For, as the Lord himself said, ‘without him we can do nothing,’ because he is ‘the true vine and we are his branches.’ If we remain in his love, we do not wither, living by the sap of the eternal root, nor shall we be cut off for the fire by wrath; rather, we shall be pruned for fruit, as discipline cleanses us with the edge of the gospel pruning hook, so that, with the luxuriance of our shoot checked, we may sprout more fruitfully.

So, about to begin his husbandry in us, he says, ‘I have come to cast fire on the earth,’ that is, to cleanse our heart, overgrown with sins like a field bristling with thorns, burning us in our vices and enlightening us in our senses. The devoted farmer pursues the roots of our old deeds with a saving pruning hook, so that the fiery word may set alight the remaining stubble of the old harvest and prepare our soul like a field for new sowing, which, once the thorns are rooted out by the pressed-in plowshare of the divine word, may freely pour forth a glad crop of virtues and, with the root of harmful weeds destroyed, may multiply fruits worthy of the heavenly granaries. But because we are not only God’s husbandry but also his building, cultivated and built by his grace and Spirit and word, he prepares to build us for that road on which he calls us after him by this work: he first urges us to be released by selling our goods. Because care or love for them dims the very sight of the mind and lures the soul, drawn away from its inner self, to outward things, he also says to us through the prophet, ‘Be still and see that I am the Lord.’ Does he not seem here too to say, ‘You cannot serve two masters’? For by this word he who warns us to pray instantly and to watch, lest we enter into temptation, does not urge idleness upon us, but to be free of the world in order to be occupied for him, to be free from those affairs in whose entanglement we are idle toward God.

So, as we build newness of life in us, we must destroy the old; and because there can be no fellowship between darkness and light, or between mammon and Christ, we must exchange the old for the new. With the kind of our occupation and of our freedom reversed, let us be bound up in the things from which we were free, so that in turn we may be free of the things in which we were bound up; let us die to the things for which we lived, and live in turn for those works and pursuits to which we were dead, when we were dead to the things of the living and, doing deadly things, lived among the dead. Hence the holy teacher asks something human and fair: that ‘as we presented our members to serve iniquity, so now we present the same as servants of righteousness’; having changed masters, let us change our pursuits too. For we do not lay aside slavery or freedom by changing masters; we only gain happiness, with both slavery and freedom changed for the better, when we break the bond of iniquity, submit to the yoke of righteousness, and are bridled by divine fear, beginning, with our road turned straight, to be free from sin, which we served when in a wretched freedom we rebelled against righteousness.

So now, in our turn servants of God and rebels against this world, we enter the contest, and, trusting in the Lord, we challenge the very enemy whom we used to serve. You surely recognize, my brother (for I speak as to a fellow soldier of what we have experienced together), how great a conflict there is for us, and how great an enemy within us, not of flesh and blood but, as the apostle says, of invisible powers and of spiritual wickedness, with which the services of the fleshly vices conspire. Hence they are also called rulers of darkness, because according to the apostle sinners are called darkness, and demons rule over them as over those like themselves. Indeed, the whole form of this world, which passes away and entices hearts through the eyes, spread out with the devil’s nets, is in any of its appearances a snare and a sword to the mind. Let us believe the prophet that we walk in the midst of traps, and that life is passed among swords concealed by deadly guile. This world receives us, blooming with various pleasures and poisoned with deceiving allurements. The serpent receives us with countless snares, he who has ‘a thousand names, a thousand arts of harm’; and often he attacks violently in open combat and aims at us with burning darts, if he does not catch us with hidden snares. For ‘the arrows of the mighty are sharp, with desolating coals,’ which burn our soul through with the harmful fires of desires and make it desolate of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. When this happens, various guests come in upon us, and ‘a man’s enemies become those of his own household’: now they puff us up with the wind of ambition, now they bring up the torches of lusts, now they bind us with the chains of avarice, which, armed with every crime, even if it alone captures us, suffices both for the devil’s malice and for man’s death.

What then are you doing, wretched man, sent among so many enemies? How will you, weak, resist the strong, unarmed, the armed? Blessed Job cries out, wounded by many of the devil’s darts without a wound to his heart: ‘Naked I came out of my mother’s womb.’ Who then will arm me against so many columns of the enemy of the air, so that I may not return to the earth naked as I came? See, I breathe again, I am strengthened, I rise up: ‘The Lord is my light, the Lord is the defender of my life; though camps stand against me, my heart will not fear.’ Nor, if I lack the arms of my own strength, shall I despair. I have the armory of Christ, from which I may take the arms of light, with which to storm the rulers of darkness and the columns of the night that oppose me in the heavenly places, that is, in my spiritual way of life, which they strive to overthrow with earthly allurements. But against them he will be my armor bearer and my standard bearer who is God’s chosen vessel. He will bind my loins with the belt of chastity, fit the helmet of salvation to my head, and enclose my breast with the breastplate of righteousness. He will protect the whole of me with the shield of faith, and he will arm my right hand, or rather the whole of me, made into the right hand of Christ, with the sword of the Spirit and the word of truth, so that ‘a thousand may fall at my side and ten thousand at my right hand.’ He will shoe my feet with the preparation of the gospel, so that I may tread unharmed upon the thorns and thistles of this earth and walk safely with protected foot through the rough places of the narrow road; and, not fearing its bite, I shall crush the head of the enemy serpent, put under me, with the very heel that he treacherously watches. I do not claim to say this from the boldness of my own weakness, but promise it to every believer from the power of Christ, who, as he ‘calls the things that are not as though they were,’ so is able, as he always has done and does, to destroy the strong and lofty things of this world by means of his weak and lowly ones. For this reason he has given us a teacher whom he had as his own imitator, through whom we may attain to the imitation of the Lord himself.

For that teacher himself teaches me to stand in the battle line, to run in the stadium, to wrestle in the contest, bruising his own body, forgetting what lies behind and stretching out to what lies ahead, and so founded on the rock that he glories even in weaknesses, and when he is weak, then he is strong, able for all things, as he himself declares, in Christ, who strengthens his own, if he fights for us and conquers in us. This was the apostle’s reason for saying, ‘So run that you may all lay hold of it.’ In an earthly contest it is the opposite: there a wrestling bout can end only with unequal lots for the wrestlers, so that one man’s glory is another’s disgrace. But in Christ, because we, being many, are one, we all run as one, and the course of all is shared toward one good. Therefore we are told, ‘So run that you may all lay hold of it,’ because, as the same apostle says, there can be no division in the body whose head is Christ, whom, as their common crown, the one frame of his members accompanies. Since these cannot be at odds with themselves, let us run together, so that we may all lay hold of it without envious rivalry, with equality of victory, so that, as in the strain of the race we are Christ’s labor, so at the goal of arrival we may be Christ’s triumph, and he may bless us ‘in the crown of the year of his kindness.’

But I see that in this contest it is no more expedient for us to conquer than to be conquered, because both an enemy and a friend dwell within us. Who is more my friend than the spirit, which opposes the flesh, so that it may not drag me into the law of sin? Or who is more our enemy than the flesh, which lusts against the spirit for our destruction? So ‘better to me are the wounds of a friend,’ which Christ received in order to heal me, ‘than the willing kisses of an enemy,’ with which the flesh, that evil counselor, flatters me through the allurements of its delights, in order to betray me, as with that parricidal kiss of Judas, to enemies made ready for my captivity. Yet the Lord did not receive that kiss in order to accept the peace of the traitor, but to take back his own peace from the one who had estranged himself. Although it is also wholesome to hold to it as an example to contemplate of perfect goodness: with the same affection by which he commands that even enemies be loved, he gave a friendly kiss of peace to an enemy, returning love for hatred, he who received hatred in return for his love.

So it is easy to discern … the devil contend with the flesh; for it is better to be conquered by good than to conquer by evil. So in this world the man whose tunic another has taken seems to be conquered; but in Christ he triumphs who lets the one who takes his tunic have his cloak as well. To pay back injury in turn is human revenge; but to love even an enemy is heavenly vengeance. To sell one’s inheritance and give to the poor is foolishness to this world but wisdom to God; on the other hand, to brood over riches, to increase money by usury and possessions by auctions, to extend one’s boundaries by violence, is industry and profit in this world, but with God it is crime and punishment. So if you conquer by evil, you are a conquered conqueror, because when you conquer by wickedness you are overcome by greed. But conquered, you will conquer, if you yield to the just man and the divine will prevails over your will. Let us then be emptied of our own strength, so that we may be filled with divine strength. Let us be conquered in body, but conquer in salvation. Let us remember that we are members of him who conquered when he was judged, who overcame by yielding, and by falling into death rose into glory, establishing out of the setting of his passion the rising of our resurrection.

Let us follow this Lord who calls us, that he may teach us to conquer by yielding and to come alive by dying, killing in us that by which we are put to death and quickening that by which we may live. ‘This is our God; no other shall be reckoned beside him,’ he who ‘was seen on earth and lived among men.’ Because flesh and blood cannot reveal this to us, he says, ‘Be still and see that I am God.’ At this point I am roused to the boldness of asking, and I say: who then are you, God, who made heaven and earth and appeared in the bush, who did great things in Egypt, wonders in the land of Ham, terrible things at the Red Sea? Up to now, Lord, there is no one who does not believe in you; not only the Jews, though loving you with their lips and far from you in heart, as a people formed in the law, but even the Gentiles, living without the law, confess by natural sense one Lord of supreme power. What difficulty is there, then, in seeing that you are God, when ‘the heavens tell your glory’ and ‘your invisible things are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made’? What hinders a man from possessing property? What harm is there in caring for other things too, when even busy men can readily discern the conspicuous truth of God and see the manifest light of the supreme providence? ‘Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night shows knowledge’; and yet I am bidden to be still, so that I may see that you are the Lord, when even the nights, that is, the rulers or workers of darkness, know this light.

But it is not for nothing that the truth, which has often shown itself in many marks of divinity, testifies that it cannot be perceived except when stillness has been secured. For it is easy to see only that God is God. This, as I said, every soul sees; to this no mind is blind; this even the faith of unbelievers receives. But that God is in Christ, or Christ in God, the busy man, surrounded by a cloud of earthly cares, does not see. For the Word made flesh is foolishness to the wisdom of this world; and so it pleased God, to the confounding of that wisdom through whose pride this world did not know the wisdom of God, ‘through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.’

And this is the treasure of the field, to obtain which even the field must be bought, because the price of our salvation lies in this, that we confess that God the Son of God came in the flesh to save the flesh; and this is the pearl to be bought with inheritances squandered. But it is not bought at once when its price is made ready, because very many difficulties come in the way of the trade itself: either the sea lies between, or a robber intercepts, or a greedier buyer gets there first, or a wealthier one is preferred. So do not think that we have already bought the jewel because you see that we have made ready its price, nor that we have already built the house for whose building we have made room, when we carried out visible riches, furniture, money, and estates like filthy heaps and troublesome rubble, so that in a cleansed heart, as in living ground, we might lay more firmly the foundations of a more stable building. But as when rubble has been cleared and the soil laid bare beneath the filthy heaps, many knots of tree trunks, or remains of ruins, or many creatures of a harmful kind, and especially the young or the dens of vipers, are found, so when the possession and care of temporal things have been removed from our breast, and we are now free to examine our heart, free from the things that drew us outside, we find in our senses the knots of long-standing sins and the hiding places of spiritual enemies. Now the inner house begins to appear to us, ‘and there creeping things without number.’ Now the whole darkness of our unhappiness lies open. Now at last we see how far from God we are, and how dead in comparison with the living.

Understand this and sigh with an anxious heart in care for us, foreseeing that the praise of the same Lord is sung at the end, so that we may be perfected by the grace of the Spirit in which we began, and may obey the command to the end, as we seem to have obeyed it at the head of the counsel. For he gives counsel, not command, who does not say, ‘Be perfect,’ but, ‘If you wish to be perfect,’ because freedom of the will, which, when it is good, is above the law, is not forced but persuaded, and is a law to itself. How great a thing it is to follow Christ you can gather from the apostle’s saying: ‘He who says he follows Christ ought himself to walk just as he walked.’ How Christ walked another teacher shows: ‘He did no sin,’ he says, ‘nor was guile found in his mouth; when he was reviled, he did not revile in return, but gave himself up to death to the one who judged unjustly.’ But we can also know from his own action and commands how he walked. For he came for this, to set his own life before us as a pattern and a mirror of life. ‘I came not to destroy the law,’ he says, ‘but to fulfill it,’ and he himself teaches what that fulfilling is, saying, ‘Unless your righteousness abounds more than the righteousness of the Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.’ For to fulfill is to add what is lacking. The law says, ‘You shall not kill’; but he says, ‘Nor shall you be angry with your brother without cause.’ The law forbids adultery; but the Truth itself condemns a curious look at women. From this you see how much greater than the law is faith, ‘whose praise is not from men but from God,’ because the circumcision of the law is in the open, that of faith in secret. The law breaks off the branches of sin; faith digs out the roots, making us spotless not in deeds only but in our inner senses, so that we may truly be re-formed to our original dignity, that is, the likeness of God, cleansed not only in body but in heart. Hence the apostle also testifies that, having laid aside the appearance of the earthly man, we put on the heavenly, and elsewhere the same apostle declares that the man, as already clothed with Christ, is the glory of God.

See then how much we must do so that we may travel the length of the road, not as perfect, as you say, but as beginners, as we show: we who are commanded to exceed the righteousness of the law so that we may become the righteousness of God, and whose action is not to come from the law, but for whom the law is in the will: to follow Christ and imitate God. And he who wishes us to be more righteous than the very law of his righteousness, and perfect after the likeness of his Father, asks us not only to flee human faults but also to fulfill divine virtues. Because you see that this is as difficult for those still engaged in the contest as it is glorious for victors whose fight is finished, do not, while we are still in the arena, while there are fightings without and fears within, think or speak high things of us; rather fear, and labor together with us in spirit as we labor, and help us with your prayers, so that through us too he may destroy the enemy and the avenger, he who chose the weak things of the world to confound the strong.

Ask humbly that he give us understanding in this way on which he calls us, so that we may see that he is God who ‘was crucified out of our weakness, but lives by the power of God’; that he weaken in us the power of sin, so as to strengthen the spirit of his power; that he reverse both our poverty and our abundance, so that we may abound in the righteousness we lack and lack the iniquity in which we abound; that we may be stripped of sins and clothed with virtues; that he bring us help against our own wills and not hand us over to the desires of our heart, and that against flesh and blood, the devil and death, he give us victory, as he gave it to Abraham against the four kings. The father of faith overcame them by this mystery, by which our faith, if it is strengthened by the princely spirit, will subject to the word of God the same number of elements of our body. And as he was victor over kings on behalf of a kinsman, so faith, victorious on behalf of the soul, which flourishes with as many senses, will triumph over the outer man, in whom, composed of as many elements, the figure of the four kings is contained. But as he defeated the hostile princes not by the number or strength of legions, but already then in the mystery of the cross, whose figure is expressed by the Greek letter T in the number three hundred (by the power of that mystery the ark, built three hundred cubits long, overcame the flood, as now the church sails over this world), so let us too, trusting not in our own resources or strength but in the sole knowledge of the Crucified, lift up our eyes to him, that he may make wonderful his mercies upon us, he who saves those who hope in him, because he is ‘the Lord who crushes wars, mighty in battle.’ He has given us both the confidence to fight and the way to conquer, when, bearing in himself our human nature already triumphant, he said, ‘Be steadfast, for I have overcome the world.’

Although I am unknown to you by face, I have already come to know you in heart, because my son, most dear in the Lord, Victor, by telling me of your devout life, has made me know you though absent, and has made me begin to love you as one who will be a partner in Christ. For he told me how he was your comrade and follower in your tent-fellowship even in the worldly military service in which you are still held. So I have all the more presumed to write to you through him. For I hope that from that same road you will come to the true road, since you have sent him on ahead to us from among your comrades, and the church holds him as your pledge, so that after him it may take you. For there is nothing, blessed son, that can or should be preferred to him who is the true Lord and true Father and eternal Emperor. Or to whom should we more rightly spend our life than to him from whom we received it, and for whom we ought to keep it to the end, since we live by his kindness? If we serve as his soldiers in this world, then we shall deserve to pass over to him. But if we love this world more and prefer to serve as soldiers of Caesar rather than of Christ, afterward we shall be carried over not to Christ but to Gehenna, where the case of the rulers of this world is decided.

So we must not prefer affection, or homeland, or honors, or riches to God, because it is written thus: ‘The form of this world passes away.’ And those who love this world will perish with it. Therefore the Lord himself solemnly declares in the gospel: ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he who does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.’ Of the riches of this world, which some embrace and love as the highest and necessary good, he says this: ‘Treasures will not profit the wicked, but righteousness rescues from death.’ And again he says through the prophet: ‘All who had been exalted by gold and silver have been destroyed.’ In the gospel too he cries out and condemns the rich of this world, saying: ‘Woe to you rich, who have your consolation! Woe to you who are full, for you will hunger! Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep!’

Do not, then, love this world any longer, nor its military service, because according to the authority of Scripture ‘whoever is a friend of the world is an enemy of God.’ And he who serves as a soldier with the sword is a servant of death; whether he sheds his own blood or another’s, he receives from it the fruit of his pay. For he will be held guilty either by the outcome of death or by crime, because the soldier in war, in which he fights not so much for himself as for another, must necessarily either meet his own death as a coward or, as victor, become the cause of death, since he cannot be victor unless he has first been a shedder of blood. Therefore the Lord says, ‘You cannot serve two masters,’ that is, the one God and mammon, namely Christ and Caesar, although Caesar himself now strives to be Christ’s servant, so that he may deserve to be king over some nations. For no earthly king is king of the whole world; Christ God is, because ‘all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made’; and he is ‘King of kings and Lord of lords’; he does whatever he wills on earth, in the sea, and in the depths.

Let us follow him, then, let us serve as soldiers for him, whose soldier, once girded, is never ungirded, who bestows on those who serve him the glory of eternal life, the honor of the heavenly kingdom, the riches of his inheritance, and a lasting share in the knowledge of God. It is written: ‘He who loves money will not be justified’; and he who covets earthly possessions will, as it is written, be entangled in them. Hence in Ecclesiasticus the divine Wisdom speaks through Solomon: ‘Many have been brought to ruin for the sake of gold, and their destruction came before its face. Gold,’ it says, ‘is a tree of stumbling, and it throws down those who pursue it. But none will perish in it except the foolish.’ Therefore flee from it, son, as from the face of a serpent, believing Christ, who testifies to all men in the gospel ‘that a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.’

But perhaps confidence in your age, and the wages of rank, and the growth of riches tempt you to say: ‘I am still young and have time to finish my service, to marry a wife and have sons, and afterward to serve God.’ To this not I but the Lord answers you, who speaks in his prophets and apostles. The prophet says, ‘Do not delay to turn to the Lord, and do not put it off from day to day, lest his wrath come suddenly.’ And in the gospel he shows with what ardor one must hasten to conversion, when he says, ‘From the days of John until today the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent seize it.’ Such violence is pleasing to God; it strikes no one, and is committed to no one’s loss. Turn your hands to this robbery, which carries no crime and confers salvation. And why should you concern yourself with the business of military pay, with the odium of violence, when perhaps, for your honor’s sake, you are even a moderate collector of debts? You can be violent without anyone’s ill will and with God’s favor, so as to seize the kingdom of heaven, which suffers violence; and Christ rejoices to be invaded, because in the abundance of his love and power he is able both to give what he holds and to keep what he has given. For when he grants his saints to reign in his kingdom, he himself will reign in those whom he has taken up as partners of the heavenly kingdom. For it is written both that the kingdom of God will be with the saints and that the saints themselves are the kingdom of God, which, by God’s favor, when you have been converted, you will come to know by reading and understand by believing.

As for the bloom of youth and early manhood, who would dare to boast of it? For divine Scripture warns us, saying, ‘All flesh is grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass has withered and the flower has fallen; but the word of the Lord abides for ever.’ Hence the prophet too, longing rather for those things in which the eternal glory of the body brought back to life can abide after the resurrection, cries out, ‘How lovely are your dwellings, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs and faints for the courts of the Lord.’

And about the bonds of marriage and the other cares of temporal things, as thorny as they are empty, the apostle, in whom Christ speaks, warns us not to send vain hopes into the long time of this world, and bids us know that ‘the time is short,’ and says: ‘It remains that those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who weep as though they wept not, and those who rejoice as though they rejoiced not, and those who buy as though they possessed not, and those who use this world as though they used it not.’ When he says this, he shows that those who are free ought not to entangle themselves, since he urges those who are entangled to be set free. If, then, you are perhaps already bound to a wife, do not seek a release; but if you are still free, do not seek to be entangled. For the apostle does not compare the sacredness of this covenant to the great mystery of Christ and the church in order to condemn marriage; but, because of the present necessity, he asserts that it is good for a man to be as he himself was. ‘I want you,’ he says, ‘to be without anxiety,’ that is, to think of nothing but God and our salvation. For wife and children, though they too are pledges given us by God, are nevertheless burdens of the heaviest cares. Hence the same apostle says that ‘such will have trouble of the flesh,’ because our fleshly ties torment and weary us the more, the dearer they are to us. For once a wife has been taken, children are first longed for, and if none are born, barrenness is mourned; if they are born, their loss is feared. And so the mind never rests in fleshly affections so as to be free from torment, as long as it either loves its kin when they are good, with fear of losing them, or hates them when they are bad, with a wish to lose them, in either case always liable to suffer miseries. For he is wretched who loses a good wife, more wretched who has a bad one; between these two chances he is far happier who knows neither. Likewise with children: very often the most wretched parents are either those who are bereaved of good ones or those who have such as force them to envy the childless.

Hear then, my son, and incline your ear to me, and break all your bonds, whatever they are that hold you entangled in this world. Exchange the soldiering of the world for something better, so that you may begin to serve the eternal King. And now, as I hear, you who are a helper and guardian of citizens, become a companion of Christ. Then too, in this service you are accustomed to hope for promotion to the post of protector. But if you prove yourself to God, you will begin to have God himself as your protector. See to what service I invite you as a colleague: that what you wish to be to a man, God may be to you. If you begin to follow him, you begin to serve in his retinue, and the end of your service will be a kingdom not of earth and time but of eternity and heaven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It was said to the blessed apostle, ‘Much learning has driven you mad.’ In this the true madness of those appears to whom the wisdom of God, which Paul spoke, was foolishness, because, empty of faith, they did not deserve to understand the wisdom of God, Christ. But I, although by Christ’s favor I am far from the character of those to whose unbelief that teacher of soundness seemed mad, will nevertheless, with the freedom of oneness of heart, which is closer between you and me through oneness of faith, borrow the likeness of the words, not of the mind, and say: Severus, my Severus, much love makes you almost delirious, and toward me, your little one not in age but in understanding, you become foolish through too much affection, like a grandfather toward a late grandson, if I may say so with all respect to your wisdom.

For what should I answer to that request in which you bade that our portraits be painted and sent to you? I beseech you by the bowels of love, what comforts of true love do you seek from empty shapes? What kind of image do you want us to send you, that of the earthly man or of the heavenly? I know that you long for that incorruptible beauty which the heavenly King has loved in you. For no other form of ours can be necessary to you than that to which you yourself were formed, by which you love your neighbor as yourself and wish to excel us in nothing, so that nothing unequal may appear between us. But I am poor and in pain, because I am still crusted with the squalor of the earthly image, and I reproduce more of the first Adam than of the second in fleshly senses and earthly deeds. How shall I dare to paint myself for you, when I am proved by earthly corruption to deny the image of the heavenly? Shame hems me in on both sides: I blush to paint what I am; I dare not paint what I am not. I hate what I am, and I am not what I love. But what will it profit me, wretched man, to hate iniquity and love virtue, when I rather do what I hate, and, slothful, do not labor rather to do what I love? At odds with myself, I am torn by civil war, while the spirit fights against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit, and the law of the body attacks the law of the mind with the law of sin. Unhappy me, who have not digested even by the wood of the cross the poisoned taste of the hostile tree! For in me that ancestral venom from Adam endures, with which the transgressing father infected the whole of his race, so that I, who by natural goodness had the eyes of my mind open to innocence and closed to iniquity, drank in from the unlucky food of the forbidden grove, by a bad choice of good and evil, a deadly wisdom, blinded and badly enlightened at once.

And would that I had at least washed away the crime of forbidden desire by this remedy: that, having received through the harmful taste the knowledge of good and evil, I had chosen the good! Especially since I had heard the saving counsel of God persuading me that, with water and fire, life and death set before me, I should rather put my hand to the water and choose the gift of life. But from the crime of folly the guilt of audacity grew in me, because, though I had received the choice of the good too, I preferred to seek what harmed me. What pardon for sin, then, is available to wretched me, for whom no excuse of ignorance remains? I knew the good, and did evil, when I was equally free to do good, had I not despised the benefit of my soul by a fault of the will, by which I committed what was not expedient while not restraining myself in what was lawful. Therefore I justly lost those eyes of innocence with which I did not see evil, and received in exchange these eyes of iniquity, with which sin is known to the punishment of conscience.

For Scripture declares that the first parents of the human race both saw and did not see. For ‘the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and pleasing to the eyes to look at.’ ‘She saw,’ it says; so she had eyes. And what does it add next? ‘When they had eaten,’ it says, ‘their eyes were opened.’ So they had been blind. From this we observe that, since blindness and sight of the eyes cannot exist together in the same body, there is surely something blind in us even when we see, and conversely something seeing even in the blind. For this reason I think the Lord said, ‘For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.’ For he came into this world to seek what had perished and to give light again to what had been blinded. Indeed, man, in need of this physician, cries out in the prophet, ‘Lighten my darkness, O Lord.’ For the merciful and compassionate Lord, who has risen as light in the darkness of human blindness to raise up those who are crushed, to loose those in fetters, to give light to the blind, how had he come to blind those who see? Yet in the gospel we are taught that he restored sight to many blind people and took it from no one. But as it is written in the law, ‘I will kill and I will make alive,’ and also in the gospel, that he was set for the fall and the rising of many, so too is this saying: ‘For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see and those who see may become blind.’ So the Lord came that the old things might pass away and new things arise. And what he had said was fulfilled, ‘I will kill and I will make alive,’ because by taking on our old man he put him to death, nailing him to the cross; stripping himself of the flesh, he openly made a show of the principalities and powers, triumphing over them in himself; and he made alive the new man from the resurrection of the dead, ascending on high and setting him in the heavenly places.

So he came that the blind might be enlightened and the seeing blinded: that our eyes which had been opened to transgression might be blinded, and in turn those which had been blinded might be opened. For I am well blind if I do not see sin, and well sighted if I discern righteousness. Pray, then, my brother, that the Lord may work both in me: that he may blind what sees in me, so that I may not see vanity, and enlighten what does not see, so that I may see what is right; that he may kill in me the old man with his deeds, so that my flesh may flourish again in Christ and my youth be renewed like the eagle’s. For this is the change of the right hand of the Most High, when we shall be changed from ourselves into that man who is created according to God, whose image is heavenly, putting off the one who is corrupted according to the desires of error. Let God, I pray, crush the image of this man in me and bring to nothing our image, that is, the earthly, in the city of encompassing, and restore and perfect in us his own image, in which we are not ashamed to be painted, so that, bearing it, we may truly say, ‘My heart and my flesh have failed, God of my heart, and God my portion for ever.’ For when, by the good change which is the right hand of the Most High for man, my heart and my flesh have failed, that is, the acts of my will and the fruits of my flesh, then at last, as one free of bodily bonds and cleansed of my own heart, I may dare to say, ‘God of my heart, and God my portion for ever.’ Would that the word of Simeon in the gospel might be fulfilled in me, that Christ may become for me a fall and a rising: a fall to my outer man and a rising to my inner, so that sin may fall in me, which stands when the soul falls, and that immortal man may rise, who fell when sin rose. For the standing of the outer man is the fall of the inner; and therefore, when the outer man is weakened, the man within is renewed day by day. So the perfect teacher says, ‘When I am weak, then I am strong.’

But thanks be to the Lord, who with a more lasting and living painting has painted our images, not on perishable panels or melting wax, but on the fleshly tablets of your heart, where, keeping us imprinted and conformed to your soul by the unity of faith and grace, you will behold us not only here but also in the eternal age, in an undivided and ever present contemplation. Here too, if your love is so great as to grasp at visible comforts as well, you will be able, through the guiding lines of your mind, to dictate us even to unskilled painters who do not know us, setting before them your memory, in which you hold us painted, as a face to be copied, like the visible faces of sitters. But if perhaps the hand, too ignorant of the art, goes astray in understanding your words, it will paint us unlike to others; yet to you, who always regard and embrace us in your mind, whatever faces its unskill may have painted under our name, we shall still be ourselves in your consciousness.

Brother Victor, among other accounts of your works and desires, told us that for the basilica which you have just built at our Primuliacum, larger than the earlier one, you want a blessing from the sacred relics of the saints, with which your house church may be adorned, as is worthy of your faith and grace. The Lord is witness that, if we had had even a scruple of sacred ash beyond what will be necessary for us to dedicate the basilica that will shortly be completed in the name of the Lord, we would have sent it to your oneness of heart. But since we had no supply of this gift, and he said that you had a rich hope of this same grace from holy Silvia, who had promised you relics of many martyrs from the East, we have found something to send you worthily, both for the sanctification of the basilica and to crown the blessing of the sacred ashes: a part of a particle of the wood of the divine cross. This good thing the blessed Melania brought us from Jerusalem, as a gift of the holy John, bishop there; and she, our common fellow servant, sent it specially to our venerable sister Bassula. But what is given to one of you belongs to both of you, because in both of you one purpose abides, and faith, by which you both run together into the perfect man, cancels sex. Receive, then, from brothers of one heart who long for your fellowship in every good, receive a great gift in a small one, and in a segment of a short splinter almost an atom take a defense for present salvation and a pledge of eternal salvation. Let not your faith be narrowed by fleshly eyes that see small things, but let it see with its inner sight the whole power of the cross in this smallest piece. While you think that you are seeing that wood on which our salvation, on which the Lord of majesty, hung nailed while the world trembled, rejoice with trembling. Let us remember the rocks split at the sight of this cross, and, in emulation at least of the stones, let us split our hearts with the fear of God. Let us consider also the veil of the temple torn by the same mystery of the cross, and understand that the tearing of that veil was put before us so that, hearing the voice of the Lord and the mystery of boundless godliness, we may not harden our hearts but be divided from fleshly things and tear the veil of unbelief, so that, with the face of the heart unveiled, we may see the mysteries of God’s saving gifts.

We do not write this so that you should imitate the setting in which we have enclosed so blessed a thing in a little golden tube. Rather, by such a setting we have imitated your faith, so as to send you your own likeness in the appearance of gold, because we know that you hold within you, like gold tried in fire, the kingdom of God, that is, the faith of the cross, by which the kingdom of heaven is taken by storm. ‘For if,’ he says, ‘we suffer with him, we shall also reign with him.’ And so we have sent you the gift of the saving wood in the Lord, not to strengthen your faith, for you have outrun sight by faith, but because of the merit of that faith, which you received by hearing and prove by deed, so that you might possess in the body also what you hold in the spirit and carry by the strength of your purpose.

But since faith itself seems to require it, I think it not out of place, for it is worth knowing, to tell the particular history, after the time of the passion, of how the cross was uncovered and found. If this is not known, it is easy to see how hard it would be to prove that this wood is from the Lord’s cross, which certainly, if it had come into the hands of the Jews, who took every precaution against faith in Christ, would have been broken up and burned. For those who sealed the tomb would not have been careless in disposing of the cross, nor could they have borne that the passion of him should be honored in a surviving cross, whose resurrection, proved by the tomb emptied after their seals were broken, they cannot bear to see honored. Why then do we now ask where it was hidden? For unless it had lain hidden, especially in those times of persecution which followed the Jewish ill will and almost surpassed its cruelty, it is plain that it would have been destroyed. We can easily guess by conjecture with what violence those who persecuted even the place of the cross would have cut down the cross itself, if they had seen it standing. For the emperor Hadrian, thinking he would destroy the Christian faith by an outrage to the place, consecrated an image of Jupiter on the place of the passion, and Bethlehem was profaned by a shrine of Adonis, so that the root and foundation of the church might, as it were, be removed if idols were worshiped in the places where Christ was born in order to suffer, suffered in order to rise, rose in order to reign as judge, or to judge as king. Wretched me! Even these things the almighty Lord did not refuse to endure for us: that where he had hung crucified for the salvation of the human race, there he should be scorned by the sacrilege of men; and over the cross, at which nature had tottered, when the world shook, the sun fled, and the tombs burst open as the dead were raised, stood the image of a demon, the altar of the image smoked with the burning of cattle, and the name of God was given to statues of the dead, while the God of the living himself, who is also the resurrection of the dead, was blasphemed with the reproach not only of a dead man but of a crucified one. In Bethlehem too, where the ox had known its owner and the donkey its master’s manger, there the princes of men, denying the Savior God, worshiped the shameful loves and deaths of men. Where the Chaldeans, led by a new star of the eternal King, had in supplication adored his cradle with their treasures, there the Romans consecrated barbarous lusts. Where the shepherds, on the night that was lit up, had greeted the newborn Savior with heavenly joy, singing with an army of angels, there harlots mixed with half-men bewailed the lover of Venus. Oh, the grief of it! What human devotion can make up for this impiety? Where the sacred infancy of the newborn Savior had wailed, there the infamous rite of those feigning the laments of Venus howled with lewd mourning, and where the Virgin had given birth, adulterers were worshiped.

This crime of the former age lasted until times close to ours, those of Constantine, who deserved to be the first of Christian princes no more by his own faith than by that of his mother Helena. She, inspired by divine counsel, as the outcome showed, when she came to know Jerusalem, sharing the reign with the title of Augusta, asked him to give her the means of cleansing all the places there impressed with the Lord’s footsteps and marked by memorials of the divine works toward us from every contagion of profane impiety, by destroying the temples and idols, and of restoring them to his religion, so that the church might at last be celebrated in the land of its origin. So, with the ready assent of her son the emperor, the mother Augusta, the treasuries being opened for holy works, drew freely on the whole treasury, and with as much expense and splendor as a queen could command and religion urged, she covered and adorned with basilicas all the places in which the Lord Redeemer had fulfilled for us the saving mysteries of his love by the sacraments of his incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension. Among these things it is wonderful that in the basilica of the Ascension, the one spot from which he went up, taken up in a cloud, leading in his flesh our captivity captive, is said to be so hallowed by the divine footsteps that it has never allowed itself to be covered with marble or paved, the soil always spitting out and throwing off whatever hands have tried to lay on it in zeal for adornment. So in the whole space of the basilica it alone remains green with its own turf and preserves the impressed veneration of the divine feet, the sand of the dust trodden by God being both visible and touchable to those who venerate it, so that it can truly be said: ‘We have worshiped where his feet stood.’

But in the history of the cross receive a great and truly divine miracle. That venerable queen, when she came to Jerusalem, carefully and devoutly curious about all the places there and round about that bore divine marks, and eager to drink in with her eyes the faith she had received with devout ears and from Scripture, set about searching most zealously for the cross of the Lord. But what way or means of finding it was there, when no reliable informant could be found, since both the antiquity of the age and the long duration of impious superstition had wiped out the memory and care of religious conscience or observance? Yet, with the Lord himself as witness, who knows all things hidden in the earth and in minds, the faithful woman deserved the Holy Spirit through her devout affection; and under his inspiration, after she had diligently but vainly searched for a thing divinely removed from human knowledge, she strove to be informed at least about the place of the passion. So she sought out not only men of the Christians full of learning and holiness, but also the most expert of the Jews, as informers about their own impiety, in which, poor men, they even glory, and summoned and assembled them in Jerusalem. Then the place was confirmed by the single testimony of all. At once, no doubt urged by the impulse of the revelation she had conceived, she ordered the work of digging to be set going on that very spot; and soon a force of citizens and soldiers alike was assembled and quickly finished the labor of this undertaking, and, against everyone’s hope but in accordance with the queen’s faith alone, when the bosom of the earth had been opened by deep excavation, the secret of the hidden cross lay open. But since three crosses were found together, as they had once stood fixed for the Lord and the robbers, the joy at their discovery began to be confused by anxious doubt, from the just fear of the devout that they might perhaps choose the gibbet of a robber for the cross of the Lord, or desecrate the saving wood by throwing it away as a robber’s stake. The Lord looked on the devout cares of those faithfully anxious, and poured the light of this counsel into her above all, who was the leader of so devout a concern: that she should order someone recently dead to be sought and brought in. No delay: the word was spoken, the corpse was brought in; it is laid down; one of the crosses is brought to it as it lies, and another; but death spurned the wood of the guilty. At last resurrection revealed the Lord’s cross, and at the touch of the saving wood death fled, the dead man was roused and the body raised; and while the living trembled, the dead man stood, and, freed like Lazarus of old from the bands of burial, at once walked about, alive again, among those watching him.

So did not the cross of the Lord, covered for so many ages, hidden from the Jews at the time of the passion, and not revealed to the Gentiles when they built the shrine, though they no doubt dug out earth for the building itself, lie hidden by the divine hand, so that it might be found now, when it was religiously sought? Thus, as befitted the cross of Christ, the cross of Christ was found and proved by the test of resurrection, and soon it was consecrated with fitting splendor. A basilica was built on the place of the passion, gleaming with gilded paneled ceilings and rich with golden altars, which keeps the cross laid up in a secret shrine; and the bishop of that city brings it out every year, when the Lord’s Pasch is kept, for the people to venerate, himself the first of those who venerate it. Nor apart from this day, on which the mystery of the cross itself is celebrated, is it brought out, the very cause of the sacraments, as a kind of emblem of the sacred festival, except sometimes when very devout people ask, who have come on pilgrimage there for this sole purpose, that its showing may be granted them as a reward for their long pilgrimage. This, they say, is obtained only by the favor of the bishop, and only by his gift are these tiny pieces of the sacred wood from that cross given to be had, for a great grace of faith and blessing. And this cross, holding a living power in insensible matter, has so lent its wood from that time to the almost daily prayers of countless people that it feels no loss and remains as if untouched, divided daily for those who take from it and always whole for those who venerate it. But surely it drank this incorruptible power and undiminished solidity from the blood of that flesh which suffered death and did not see corruption. We hope that for you too it will be not only a memorial of blessing but also a seedbed of incorruption, so that the sight of it may kindle your faith with the memory too of that blessed robber, who, with his robbery well turned about, anticipating the long roads of the saints in great labors by the faith of a moment and the moment of a confession, not undeservedly was the first, before the apostles and martyrs themselves, to storm the kingdom prepared for them, as he says, from the beginning, and as a devout robber of heaven carried it off. For seeing Christ crucified, in the likeness of his own punishment, in that state at which even the faith of the disciples was shaken and wavered, he nevertheless confessed him to be the Lord of majesty, as he was, and, asking to be remembered in the kingdom of God, he believed in the glory of the resurrection before the resurrection itself, which the apostles believed after it had happened, not only by seeing but by touching. Yet even they did not doubt the resurrection of the flesh so much as the kind of resurrection, because, of course, those who were to be sent into the whole world to instruct all nations had to receive the faith to be preached not only by their ears but also by their eyes, so that what they had learned more firmly they might teach more steadfastly.

The page left open after these lines of verse enticed my tongue and hand to fill the empty space, and it came to my mind that I had something to write. For I am exceedingly glad that we have shown a likeness of our heart and body, of our works too and our desires, in adding basilicas to the Lord’s sheepfolds at the same time. You, however, at the same time built a baptistery set between two basilicas, so that you surpassed us in the building also of these works that are raised visibly. But thanks to the Lord, who has given us a matter in which we may count it victory even to be beaten. For we win in desire where we are beaten in grace by him whom we set above ourselves in judgment and equal to ourselves in love. You are the one we speak of; you, I say, the greater and better part of us; you our rest, you our joy; in you is the resting place of our head and the dwelling of our mind, which will remain ours not only in the present time but, as we hope and trust in the Lord, for ever, by his gift and in his body and Spirit. So if by the grace of the Lord you do something more, you certainly do it with us, and surely for us.

But in this I fear that, out of that affection of yours for us of which I always complain, you may mix a stumbling block into your works, by which you straighten the crooked places of worldly roads and level the steep ones: that you darken the splendid inscriptions of your devotion in Christ with our names, and insert this unfairness into just labors, so that you pollute a holy place even with the faces of the unrighteous. For Martin is rightly painted in a place of human renewal, he who bore the image of the heavenly man by perfect imitation of Christ, so that those who lay aside in the washing the oldness of the earthly image may meet the likeness of a heavenly soul to imitate. But what place do we have there, who match neither infants in innocence nor men in wisdom, and are set apart from the spotless by malice and from the perfect by weakness? What fellowship, then, has light with darkness? Wolves with lambs? Serpents with doves, that is, we with Martin? Have you not mixed a cup of milk and gall? But it is well that, unlike liquids mixed in one cup, so with men placed together in one place, if they differ in merits, the sweetness of the good is not poisoned by the bitterness of the bad; rather, the opposite happens: the sinner set beside the righteous looks dirtier, and the righteous, compared with the sinner, shines out more. So I am less disturbed by the error of your love, because you have done that blessed man no wrong, but rather contributed to his glory, so that a venerable face was painted opposite a contemptible one, and his splendor, by comparison with darkness, might shine out more clearly, he who outshines with conspicuous brightness even among the splendors of the saints. And indeed, if I did not know that you had made this painting from the lavish zeal of too much love for us, I would accuse you of being malicious and cunning, for having set beside that holy head the persons of our lowliness, dark with the night of our souls, painted on the opposite wall, so as to paint him only, but rather to disfigure us, exposing us, rightly to be spat upon once Martin’s face is seen, to the disgrace of a ridiculous comparison.

But so that, for our sake, this design of yours, which slipped from love while you are deceived by great love for us into a false picture, might not be laughed at, as it truly can and should be, I have obeyed you only so far as to send you verses about this painting of yours, so that the reason of your plan might be shown: that, wholesomely concerned with the instruction of new men, you set before them two images far unlike each other, so that those emerging from the sacred font might see both what to avoid and what to follow. So here it is; if you like, use it: ‘You who wash souls and limbs in the font, behold the roads set before you toward good deeds. Martin stands by, the rule of a perfect life; Paulinus teaches how you may earn pardon. Let sinners look at this one, the blessed at that; let that one be the pattern for saints, this one for the guilty.’ Likewise on the same subject: ‘Severus, rich in wealth for Christ, poor to himself, set up a lovely building for the sacred font. And because he was founding a hall for heavenly deeds, in which men might be renewed by the font and by God, he had painted, under a twin image worthy of the sacraments, so that the man reborn might learn the gifts of life. The revered image of a man bears witness to Martin; the other figure shows the lowly Paulinus. The one arms faith with examples and strong words, so that it may carry off unstained the palms of merit; the other teaches, redeeming his sins with money poured out, that wealth should be cheaper to everyone than his salvation.’

Surely you are now proved not a matter for laughter but rather for approval, if you appear to have painted side by side men so very unlike for this reason alone: that in Martin the form of righteousness and the sum of virtues might be seen, and in us the crushing and confession of a conscience of iniquity; that an example might lie open both to the blessed and to the wretched; that in him courage might have a mirror, and in us sloth a comfort; that those able to fulfill the command by virtues might look at him, and those wishing to bring a remedy to their sins might take comfort in us, because for those bereft of confidence in innocence and bound by the chain of iniquity only redemption, as for captives, can bring help. I beg you, however, not to make my obedience a crime by removing, as you threatened, those verses of yours of light and honeycombs. I beg that you threatened this more out of modesty than in earnest, and that, if you think these should be added, those may remain, so that they may be like little gems among these, giving value to cheap things and setting off the dark with the bright. Indeed, having received permission, I told my tongue, not as the prophet says, to stay in its rest and guard my ways, but rather to break the reins of the guard set over it, while it served you. I love you so much that I would fear sin more from not obeying you than from much talking.

For this reason I have also designed verses for your basilicas, as votive inscriptions for the sacred font. If I seem to have said anything fittingly in them, this too is thanks to brother Victor. Through his eyes and words I have seen everything you have done and are doing in Christ the Lord; and so you will consider him the author of the verses I have also put in about the basilicas, since he dictated the material by his account of your deeds. These, then, will be about the baptistery itself, of whose painting only the earlier ones speak: ‘Here the font that begets souls to be restored drives a living river with divine light. The Holy Spirit descends from heaven into this stream and weds the sacred waters with a heavenly spring; the water conceives God, and from its kindly streams brings forth a holy offspring from eternal seed. Wonderful is the love of God: the sinner is plunged into the waves, and soon emerges from the same water justified. So man, having passed through a happy setting and rising, dies to earthly things and rises to everlasting ones. Guilt perishes, but life returns; the old Adam dies, and a new one is born for eternal dominion. Severus, an indweller of Christ, most chaste in body, mind, and faith, joyfully built this house for God. He himself, too, flourishes wholly as a temple of God with Christ as guest, and bears the Lord, who rejoices in a lowly heart. See, as he worships one Mind under a threefold name, so he has hallowed a threefold work in a holy pile. He gave the people spacious roofs in twin buildings, so that the number might agree with the sacred laws. For as one faith joins the two Testaments, compacted through one lawgiver, God in Christ, so he has placed the font, under a towered roof, between two halls of different height, so that mother church may joyfully receive in twin bosoms the new offspring that the water has brought forth. The double hall, with its roofs, is like the church with its Testaments, but one grace of the font is present to both. The old law confirms the new, the new fulfills the old; in the old is hope, in the new is faith. But the grace of Christ joins old and new; therefore the font is set in the space between. From there the priest, as parent, leads from the sacred font infants white in body, heart, and dress, and, bringing the raw lambs around the festal altars, fills their untried mouths with saving food. From here the older throng rejoices with its comrade band; the fold bleats Alleluia with new choirs.’

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.

Thanks be to God, who has made manifest to me the fragrance of his grace in you through the eloquence of your letter. For through my brother Victor, most dear in God, who serves as a soldier of God in this office, to serve brotherly love and provide us, separated by long distances of land, with a tireless courier in yearly journeys, and to spend bodily labor with spiritual affection in the most devout duties of those who visit one another; through this brother, then, and fellow servant in the Lord and common friend of one heart (for he boasts that he is most welcome to you also with the same grace with which he is bound to us), through him, I say, my holy and venerable brother, I have received a gift as sweet as it was unexpected, your letter, in which the good treasure of your heart appeared to us. So I rightly rejoiced in receiving the blessing of your courtesy, since, beholding the face of your inner self in your most chaste eloquence, I recognized how great a help is granted me by the Lord in you.

But in what you thought should be enjoined on me, rich as you are in your estimate of my poverty, you showed indeed the holy confidence of the purest love; yet, as far as I understand, you were led on by the report of the Lord’s work to think that, after the work of the Lord, who has deigned to inspire in us care for our redemption, we also have resources of talent and speech. But hope, deceived by empty opinions, has cheated a good desire of great faith. For where would I get as much water as you thirst for, or a cup that you could worthily drink? Where would I get as many loaves as you ask for? But you will be the author of your own wrong in going hungry longer, you who, longing for the gospel food of light and life in the deep night of this world, knock at the needy pantry of a sleepy and poor friend; who, thirsting for rivers of living water, scrape at a parched little vein and try to squeeze moisture out of pumice. For within me there is either no spring, from the dryness of uninspiredness, or a bitter one, from the gall of malice; and would that your prayers and letters, often spent on me, might make it overflow and grow sweet by the wood of your faith and the sweetness of your eloquence, so that, by the word of God too, which as a good minister you have drawn out with a devout mouth, as by the prophet’s rod, when the … of my heart is struck

Not in vain, my dearest friends, is a manger set out for beasts, nor does it lie there only for show; it is a kind of table, though for irrational animals, yet constructed by human reason, so that four-footed creatures may take their food from it. But if those who have taken care to build mangers neglect to bring in fodder, the beasts, wasting in a poor stall, will sink down and fail, and hunger will feed upon the animals that are not fed. And those men will suffer a loss on the whole, worthy of their neglect or avarice, who took the labor only of making the manger and lacked the care of filling it; for along with the dead animals they will also lose the use of the manger, justly bearing two grave losses because they spared to supply the one necessary cost of a useful outlay. By this example, then, my dearest friends, we must beware lest we incur loss of soul and damage to salvation by neglecting the table set by the Lord in the church for the needy, which we look on with contemptuous eyes or pass by with dry hands. Far from your minds, I beg, be such a contagion. For the cancer of avarice easily creeps into hearts that are protected by no bowels of mercy, and it binds the captured soul with viper’s chains, if the enemy serpent finds it naked of good works and abounding in the material of captivity, that is, in unfruitful wealth. Let us not, then, allow the Lord’s table to be left empty for us and bare for the needy, to stand only for show and not for use, lest the groans wrung by our neglect from the hungry be turned back upon us. For he who despises the poor, as it is written, provokes him who made him, that is, the common Creator of all, who, as he rejoices in the refreshment of the needy, so is saddened by their failing.

Let us rouse ourselves, then, from the sleep of sloth, and, to shake off the torpor of neglect or to break the chains of avarice, let us look carefully into all the words, commands, promises, works, and counsels of our Savior God, and consider with ourselves why this table has been set out in the courts of the house of the Lord, in the sight of all his people, and by whose authority; and, what is most to be considered, for whose good, by what grace, and for what fruit it is placed there, shining and open. Consult the very oracles of truth, and the prophet will answer you: ‘He who has pity on the poor lends to the Lord.’ This table, then, belongs to the heavenly banker, who builds up the treasure of life and carries on God’s lending in order to trade for the pearl. For he who lends to the Lord’s poor awaits from the Lord the repayment of an eternal reward. And the blessed apostle Paul too, teaching amid his care for all the churches, testifies that his care for the poor was not the least; for he says, ‘Only that we should remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.’ The same apostle cries elsewhere: ‘We brought nothing into this world, nor can we carry anything out,’ and again: ‘What do you have that you have not received?’ And so, my dearest friends, it is not that we should be tight with what is our own, but that we should lend out of what has been entrusted to us. ‘For a stewardship,’ he says, ‘has been entrusted to us,’ and the use of temporal money is common, not the eternal possession of a private thing. If you recognize that it is yours for a time on earth, you will be able to make it yours for ever in heaven. If you remember in the gospel those who received the Lord’s talents, and what the householder on his return repaid to each, you will know how much more useful it is to place money on the Lord’s table to be multiplied than to keep it idle with barren faith, and you will know that a thing kept with no return to the lender, at great loss to the unprofitable servant, was kept only to increase his punishment.

Hasten, then, rather to deserve to hear that word, ‘Well done, good servant, enter into the joy of your lord,’ than this: ‘Wicked and slothful servant, out of your own mouth I judge you,’ and the rest that is well known, when the useless one was cast into the outer darkness and his talent given to the one who abounded with multiplied deposits: ‘For to everyone who has,’ he says, ‘it will be given, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.’ Let us remember also that widow who, careless of herself out of care for the poor, mindful only of the future, emptied her whole substance for living, as the Judge himself bears witness. ‘For others,’ he says, ‘gave out of their surplus abundance’; but she, poorer perhaps than many of the poor, for whom two mites were her whole wealth, but richer in mind than all the rich, looking only to the riches of an eternal reward, greedy for heavenly treasure, renounced at once for herself the whole of that substance which is taken from the earth and returns to the earth. She cast in what she had, so as to possess what she had not seen. She cast in corruptible things, so as to buy immortal ones. That poor little woman did not despise the reckoning arranged and ordered by God for receiving what is to come; and therefore the arranger himself was not unmindful of her, and the judge of the world has already anticipated his sentence and praised in the gospel the one whom he will crown at the judgment.

Let us lend to the Lord, then, from the Lord’s gifts; for we possess nothing without his gift, and without his nod we ourselves do not even exist. And what should we especially think our own, we who by a greater and special debt are not our own, not only because we were made by God, but also because we were bought? Let us rejoice, though, that we were bought at a great price, indeed with the blood of the Lord himself, a price by which we cease to be cheap and for sale, because freedom is cheaper than slavery, to be free from righteousness; for such a free man is the slave of sin and the captive of death. Let us give back his gifts to the Lord, then; let us give to him who receives in every poor man; let us give, I say, joyfully, so that, as he says, we may receive from him exulting. For such a wrong pleases him, that we do violence to his kingdom, breaking open the bars of heaven by good works. For our Lord, who alone is good as the one God, desires to receive not out of zeal for avarice but out of an affection of generosity. For what does he lack who has given all things? Or what does he not possess who possesses the possessors themselves, since all men of riches are in his hands? But his boundless justice and goodness alike wish that, from his own gifts, gifts be made to him in return, so that, because he is good, it may produce for him matter for kindness toward you, and, because he is just, it may make for you a merit, so that you may worthily receive.

His treasuries of good things lie open, then, and the riches of his goodness are at hand, so that each one need not wait to receive, but may freely seize for himself as much as he will. For the good Lord and holy Father made us for this, that we should be good for our own good. For what outward good would he need, who is himself wholly, in all his greatness, goodness and blessedness? For this reason, as far as lies in him, dearest friends, he wishes every man to be saved, because in every man he loves his own work; and he is lavishly generous to you from his own wealth, if you are not envious and avaricious toward yourself with the things God has made yours, not to be a cause of death to you, but a return to life. O abundance of God’s goodness! He wishes to borrow from what he himself has bestowed; he desires to become the debtor of his own gifts, so as to repay you your interest with much reckoning.

Hasten, then, brother, to bind to yourself so rich a debtor, so that he may call you friend instead of servant, and, having found you faithful in your earthly coins, may make you rich from his heavenly treasures. Do not tremble, do not delay, do not spare. Be violent toward God; seize the kingdoms of heaven. He who forbids the touching of what belongs to others rejoices that what is his own is invaded; and he who condemns the rapacity of avarice praises the plunder of faith. Your guests have long been standing before your doors, waiting for the time and the king of the table. You keep your guests waiting; run anxiously, lest they remain fasting longer, and lest by the wrong done them he be roused who made them, and who made them poor for your good. For the almighty Lord, dearest friends, could have made everyone equally rich, so that no one should need another; but by the counsel of his infinite goodness the merciful and compassionate Lord has so arranged it as to test your mind in them. He made the wretched man so that he might recognize the merciful one. He made the needy man so as to exercise the wealthy one. Your brother’s poverty is the material of your riches, if you consider the needy and the poor, and do not keep for yourself alone what you have received; for God gave you in this world his share too, so that he might owe you whatever of his gifts you have offered to the needy by your voluntary affection, and might in turn enrich you on the eternal day from his share. For through them Christ now receives, and then he will repay for them. That rich man of the gospel, in hell, teaches us, and Lazarus, no longer a beggar but in Abraham’s bosom, who in that penal want of the burning rich man abounded in the refreshment of life; that example, I say, teaches that an exchange is distributed to the human race here and there, and that what seems denied to the poor here is to be repaid there; and, on the other hand, that the rich, who were poor toward the poor here, will take nothing of the happiness of the poor, and that perpetual beggary, with an abundance of punishments, is to be repaid them as a just vengeance for the wrong done to the poor.

Therefore walk, as it is written, as children of light in the light, while you have the light; and act so, Christian, while the day for repenting and providing is still at hand, that you may deserve to hear from the Lord, ‘Well done, good servant, because you were faithful over a few things, I will set you over many.’ See, then, and attend to this word, brother, and do not neglect the grace that has been offered to you. Do not go down empty into the house of Christ, which is the church of the living God. If you give even a little from your much, you have prepared for yourself a great addition to what remains to you. Very many wait for you and hang on your coming, looking around for when they may see you. For you are spent the prayers of all the needy and the vows of the weak. See that they are not forced to change such devout affections and turn their prayers into complaint, and that the groans, uttered against you, which the need of those in distress has wrung from the exhausted when you showed no pity, do not strike and summon God, the father of orphans, the avenger of widows, and the fellow sufferer of the poor.

Beware of loving only yourself, if you love yourself, because that love is of iniquity, and he who loves iniquity, as it is written, hates his own soul; the fullness of the law is love of neighbor, because every man is brother to every man by kinship of nature. So take equal care of yourself and of the poor man, so as to imitate the imitator of Christ by caring for what is useful not to yourself but to others, so that God may take the more lavish care of you. For see with how great a crime pride or avarice separates you from him to whom God has joined you by his work. Refresh the hungry soul, and you will not fear in the evil day the wrath that is to come. For ‘blessed,’ he says, ‘is he who considers the needy and the poor; in the evil day the Lord will deliver him.’ Work, then, brother, and cultivate this region of your land, so that it may bring forth for you fruitful produce, full of the fat of wheat, bearing you, with great interest, a hundredfold fruit of multiplied seed. In the desire and pursuit of this possession or business, avarice is holy and saving; for such desire, which earns the heavenly kingdom and longs for everlasting good, is the root of good things. Long for such riches, then, as was said above, and possess such an inheritance as the debtor pays you in hundredfold fruit, so that you may increase your heirs too, along with yourselves, in everlasting goods. For this possession is truly great and precious, which does not burden its owner with a worldly heap but enriches him with eternal return, which flows with milk and honey, and offers to its farmers a nectar of sweet liquors not pressed from hives or flocks, but poured out through glad rivers.

But, my dearest friends, provide by present care and diligent working of righteousness, not only so that you may seek eternal goods, but so that you may deserve to avoid countless evils. For you need great help and protection, and we need the support of many and unfailing prayers. For our adversary does not rest, and the enemy, ever watchful for our destruction, besieges all our ways and carefully searches out the exits and entrances of all; he fastens himself, an inseparable companion, to the footsteps of each one, throws hedges across our goings out and puts them among our feet, so that, ill-wary, you may strike a hidden pitfall even on level ground. Hence it is written: ‘There are ways that seem level to men, but their end leads to hell.’ And if you fall, secure on the level and not careful on the slippery, he rushes on at once and presses the fallen man, and he will not let go until he breaks and devours him. So beware in everything; while you set down your foot, look around at everything. For the devil threatens from every side, like a lion ready for the prey. Do not trust even your own ground; you must tread it with a cautious, or rather a protected, step, for it, knowing the sin of the first father in all human flesh, carries out the Creator’s sentence, fertile in thorns and thistles, serpents and beasts. Besides, many crosses beset us in this world, countless dangers; plagues of diseases, fires of fevers, and darts of pains rage against souls; torches of desires are kindled; everywhere snares lie hidden, spread before us; on every side drawn swords bristle; life is passed among ambushes and battles, and we walk through fires laid under treacherous ash.

So, before you fall, by chance or by desert, into some plague of such great sicknesses, hasten to be received and held dear by the physician, so that in the time of need you may have the remedy of salvation ready. It is one thing when you pray alone for yourself, and another when a multitude trembles before God for you. You are silent, and while you are silent they cry out for you. They see you and smile at you; they meet you and greet you, and, forgetting their want and weakness, their bodies are invigorated by your health, their souls revive at the sight of you. For you are a fertile field to them, you a fruitful estate; and they in turn are a rich and precious possession to you. They prefer you to their own children, and each is anxious for you before himself, and prays for your welfare with his own, or before his own. They do not neglect themselves, but, their love transferred to you, each loves himself in you and prays for your life as for his own, because your life is his harvest, and your riches are his wealth; they are the riches of poverty. In all the churches they pray for you; in all the streets they congratulate you; and in every place, at the mention of your name, they raise themselves up, blessing the Lord, and kiss you in your absence in their own hands. They always see you and never fail to see you, because they embrace you with the mind, by which we see those who are absent. For you are inscribed and imprinted on their hearts through your great kindness to them. They do not fear hunger, secure in your food, nor dread winter, because you forestall and shut out the winter by providing clothing. Blessed is the man whom the Lord, when he comes, will find so doing!

We have received with our whole longing heart the short letter of your holy affection, abundant to us in great affection. But because there is a time for everything, now, as in a time of sorrow, it has seemed also a time for shortening our words. We confess that we are greatly saddened, not so much by the bodily death of our brother as by his spiritual neglect, by which, mindful rather of the cares to be left here than of the remedies to be provided there, he put first what should have come after and put after what should have come first. He ought both to have cared for those better things for himself and not to have neglected these temporal things for his children. So we ask that you, suffering with our grief in fatherly affection, deign to remember that he too was once begotten as a spiritual son to you by the grace of God, and that this cause is therefore especially your care, lest we put to shame your devotion, which gloried in us as sons, by squandering the substance of our inherited portion; but rather that it may be granted to you by your prayers that a drop of refreshment, distilling even from the least finger of your holiness, may sprinkle his soul; and that for us, while there is time, running back to you and crying, ‘Father, we have sinned against heaven and before you; we are no longer worthy to be called your sons,’ the divine mercy may come to our aid, through your intercession, for the confession of sin, lest, having used up the substance of the eternal Father, which our sins squander daily, we be overwhelmed with shame to return, and, lingering in the far country, be led, which God forbid, to the unworthy keeping and food of swine.

We have sipped the sweetest taste of your mouth in the brief letter of your holiness. For as a drop of honey tastes the same as the whole comb, so, though in a single word, the dripping of your tongue conveys the whole flavor of your holy soul, because whatever is brought out of a good treasure is good and precious. Nor is a pearl cheap because it is small; it is all the more precious because even in a small size it has a great price, so that, as the authority of the gospel too testifies, it is sought even at the cost of squandered inheritances. And the grain of mustard, which seems least among seeds, stands out greatest among herbs. Because the word of this seed has been sown in you and flourishes in your heart, so that you have a burning heart on the way of the Lord, therefore even your brief letter holds the sweetness and strength of the heavenly word and ministers it to us, so that we too may be seasoned with the salt of your wisdom.

So we too will imitate the economy of your speech in this letter, even if we cannot imitate the fullness of your meaning, answering only this: that what chiefly concerned us when we wrote was the fresh grief of being torn from our brother. Even if we know that he has been taken from this world for a time, to be soon followed by us into that one, yet we mourn him as having died more truly for this reason: from what he did or arranged at his end, we have seen that he acted in keeping with our sins rather than our prayers, so that he preferred to pass to the Lord a debtor rather than free. For this reason we earnestly ask that, as a brother, which you deign to be to us in the Lord, helping brothers of one heart, you heap up this further reward for the merits of your faith: that you suffer with our weakness on his behalf and join in the labor of prayer, so that God, merciful and compassionate, who does all things in heaven and on earth, in the sea and in the depths, may refresh his soul with the droppings of his mercy through your prayers. Because, as the fire kindled by him will burn down to the lowest hell, so without doubt the dew of his pardon too will penetrate the lower regions, so that we, burning in the blazing darkness, may be refreshed by the dewy light of his goodness.

Pray also for us, that we may not die in our sins; may the Lord make known to us our end, so that we may know what we lack and hasten to fulfill what remains, that we may not be called back in the midst of empty days, weaving the spider’s web with empty works, but that full days may be found for us, so that we may be boys dying at a hundred years, that is, little ones in malice and mature in understanding. So may it be that, dead, we may leave to the survivors, by a good example, a wholesome repentance, and that our mourning may not exceed seven days, if we agree in the way of this life with our adversary, that is, with the Spirit and word of God, which opposes us when we sin. For the Spirit convicts the world of sin, and the word of God, as the Lord testifies in the gospel, if we do not obey it, will be our accuser and will hand us over to the Judge, the Word, who will demand the account of his talent to the last farthing, and, unless he receives the doubled interest of his money by the exercise of godliness, which is profitable for all things, will set the portion of an idle faith with the unbelievers, because he is next to an unbeliever who carries, under the empty name of Christian, a faith dead without works. And this is the fool, whose mourning lasts for all time, because, not having the fear of the Lord, he has not held the head of wisdom. And he has become the tail, because he who loves iniquity and hates his own soul does not dwell in the midst of the house; and, handed over to the officer of the prison of hell, he is sent into the outer darkness, because he lived according to the outer man. Therefore he is to be mourned here without end, because, condemned to eternal fire, he will die without end.

Let us then have peace with the Lord, not the peace of this world, which, friendly to sins, is at odds with God, but the peace of Christ, which unites us with God and conforms us to Christ, if our soul clings to the word of God, so that we may become one with God through the intervention of the Mediator, who is our peace, because he has made both one, joining in himself the discordant natures of God and man, and in us making two into one, that is, the flesh agreeing with the spiritual soul. And then Jesus will remain in our midst, whether the agreement of these two in us, or of three with the Spirit, invites him to make in our heart a dwelling pleasing to himself with the Father and the Spirit, and in turn to lead us where he is, saying, ‘Enter into the joy of your Lord.’

‘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.

Let others be paid revenues from their inheritances by solemn reckoning; we, whose possession is your love in Christ, take our revenue from the services of your affection, and it is counted in the kindness of your letters. Thanks to the Lord our God, who, paying back living goods for dead and perishing ones, has also given you to us as a most fertile estate. For as in earthly things that estate is dearer which either answers the greedy wishes of its farmer with flowing fertility or charms the eyes of a fastidious owner with its pleasantness, so now in our spiritual estates, that is, the holy brothers whom the love of Christ has bound to us and given us as an eternal possession, that man is valued by us as a richer field who has been more loving toward us and more fruitful to us in ministering saving benefits. Since this is so, see how great a mass of such possession we have, when, besides the affection which you pour out to us in return, you bestow other gifts, which we cannot match, from the wealth of your tongue and the riches of your mind. For the courtesies and eloquence of your letters, which you pay us generously by yearly courier, show how ample a possession you are to us and how fertile a land to God, already producing thirtyfold fruit from your continence with each other, drawing near to sixtyfold by the daily increase of your common faith, and promising a hundredfold from your virgin offspring.

As for your writing that the care of property and children, which causes that necessity of tending earthly things while you long for heavenly ones, is a hindrance to your purpose, we judge rather that these things have been set before you by divine counsel as manifold material for exercising faith and perfecting virtue. For since this whole possession of the world seems to have been established for man and subjected to man, who would doubt that in every place of the world, in every part of nature, benefits have been prepared for the human race, from which we may gain not only bodily advantages but much more read spiritual ones? Therefore Wisdom herself, the maker of things, who orders all things sweetly, says through Solomon that husbandry was created by the Most High, so that you may cultivate it not only with bodily but also with spiritual zeal. In short, she teaches how much can be drawn from the countryside for the instruction of the soul when she sends her followers to the ant and the bee, both creatures of the countryside, the one provident of the fruits of life, the other the worker of honey from flowers. And the Lord in the gospel taught by how many rustic examples, showing the signs of the last times from the fig tree and from the regions already yellowing with harvest near, and warning us to learn in the field what we must beware of in the spirit, lest the enemy sow among us a fraud rivaling our faith, as tares among wheat. So he called us his field and showed himself the sower of our life in us, and expressed the differences of souls by the various natures of soils, so that we may beware lest we be barren, and may cultivate ourselves too, by steady study in the law of the Lord, for the fruitfulness owed to God and useful to ourselves.

So when you are in the field and looking at your land, think that you too are Christ’s field, and look at yourself as at your own field. Whatever appearance you require your steward to give your field, give such cultivation to God, the Lord of your heart, and understand that whatever displeases or pleases you in your field, the same pleases or displeases Christ in your soul. If it is foul and waste with sins as with briars, and is not rained upon by the clouds of the prophets and apostles, it will be condemned, grace deserting it, to a dry wilderness. But if, careful of itself, it cultivates itself with frequent prayers, is fattened by the sacred Scriptures, presses the plow of the cross deep into the heart, roots out its thorns with the rake of divine fear, and is burned in its faults and enlightened in its senses by the fiery word of God, then the householder must needs delight to walk in your heart and to go through all the regions of your soul, and rejoicing over you in his own field, he will say to you, if you appear a careful cultivator of yourself: ‘Well done, good servant, enter into the joy of your lord; because you were faithful in a few things, I will set you over many.’

But as for us, who in reversed order, weak ourselves, give counsel to the strong, what shall we answer for ourselves, who are in fact as poor as you think us, but in spiritual rather than earthly things, humble not by strength of mind but by want of strength? That narrow little garden, which you describe with an eloquent and generous mouth, barely bearing and holding a single cabbage, is ourselves, and we are, as the prophet said, more tasteless than half-cooked beet; let us take care that that cabbage is not the only thing without salt in our house. Yet it is more excusable for it to have no salt, which it did not receive because of the necessity of our want or the fault of stinginess; we rather are the boiled ones, we more culpably saltless, in whom, as folly abounds from voluntary sins, the apostolic salt has lost its savor, and from the face of our sins the spiritual seasonings have fled. But unless we are refreshed by your prayers, even that single cabbage will not flourish in us, and, utterly deserted, we shall lack even the saltless vegetable.

Pray, then, that the harmful caterpillar may not lay waste the shoots of our soul, that the greedy locust may not consume the crop of our mind, that the sluggish canker-worm may not settle on our heart, and that blight, the last companion of these little creatures, may not eat away the inmost fibers of our vitals. For evil beasts press upon our inner man, and troublesome birds often attack, to snatch away from us, if they can, the seed of the word. But thanks to God that we did not fall from the sower’s hand beside the way, but rather were sown in the way itself, that is, placed in the bosom of our Catholic mother; and that we may not be cast out from it like untimely births we need his mercy, that he may give us understanding in this way which he has bidden and enabled us to enter, and fix his eyes upon us, lest we become like the horse and the mule, which have no understanding.

But let us return to the language of our husbandry; for our God and Father is himself the farmer, God our Savior is the true vine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who waters souls. So may it come about for us through your prayers that the supreme householder, the heavenly farmer and diligent gardener, may visit, frequent, and mark the garden of our soul like that one in which he taught, prayed, and rose again. May he strengthen in us the bond of his love, so that we may live as branches abiding in him. May he command his clouds to rain upon us, and remove from our heart the wicked passions of fleshly thoughts, like those animals hostile to good crops, lest that word of the prophet be fulfilled in us: ‘What the caterpillar left the locust ate, and what the locust left the canker-worm ate, and what the canker-worm left the blight ate.’ For in our body there are as many principal incitements to vice: hope, fear, joy, and grief, by which the human race is most troubled, two concerning the present and two the future: concerning the present, distress of mind or joy; concerning the future, fear or hope. So we must beware lest, while we flee one of these vices, we run into its opposite.

So in the caterpillar, the locust, the canker-worm, and the blight we must understand the passions of our affections, some of which cling briefly to the heart, while others grow little by little and, if not cast out, reach the marrow and drink up all the sap of the soul. For see how these monsters of vices in our hearts correspond to the ravages of the monsters that befall crops. For example, if I desire something forbidden and soon cast away the thought, that is a caterpillar sitting on a leaf and shaken off; if I cast it away, but the thought comes back again, and begins to be cast away and to return more and more often, that is a locust flying off and returning. But if it begins to linger and takes more time eating than flying away, it is called a canker-worm. And if that canker-worm, which does not fly away enough but rather sits, is not cast out, it turns into blight, which, now clinging deep within, is never, or only with difficulty, driven out of the soul, as from the stalk.

I fear that, while I weary you with too much talk, I have myself settled on you more troublesomely than a locust or canker-worm. So shake off this little sheet like a caterpillar and throw it far away, lest from longer contact with our speech you gather the blight of our folly, by which the brightness of your heart might be dulled and the vigor of your mind blunted. Yet forgive us this sin by which we weary you so heavily, for this reason only: that we abuse your patience by the license of love, and we trust that your heart is so filled with love for us that it takes no offense at us, even if we do you an injury by which we might deserve to offend, if you could ever be offended by us, even when we deserve it.

There is a time for all, and a time for every thing under heaven; for above heaven there is no time, because eternity has no time, eternity which the Creator has given even to creatures in heaven, he who alone has eternity of his own and dwells in light inaccessible. For true eternity is nowhere but in him, who alone is what he is, as he himself says, ‘I am who I am.’ Other things exist only in him. So there is a time under heaven for every thing: a time for leisure, a time for business; a time for silence and a time for speaking; a time for hungering and a time for feasting; as until now we have had a time of fasting from your words, and now a time has dawned to be fed with them. For you have fed us with your letter, sweet with the word of God and anointed with the oil of gladness, with which we gladly anoint our head, because there is no lying work of the olive in you, in whom dwells love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned. But since no one who is very hungry can be satisfied with one loaf, we confess that we are not yet filled, but rather stirred to desire for your letters by this one letter of yours, which we count as one, because we have received such a letter from you, by which our soul is filled as with marrow and fatness, only once so far.

Yet even if there have been alternations of times among our courtesies, as a time to be silent and a time to speak, there has not likewise been a time to love and a time to neglect. For long ago, as you no doubt recall, Sanctus, my brother, I began to love you, and I have loved you continuously, though not with that love which is Christ’s, but with that friendship of human familiarity which has flattery on its lips and no root in the heart, because what is not built in Christ is not founded upon the rock. Hence it is shaken and dissolved by any breeze of fickleness, and, holding a brief flower by temporal favor, it withers quickly like grass and soon falls like the flower of the field. But the love of the Lord abides for ever, by which we are bound to each other both to live and to die together, because the love of Christ is strong as death. For as the law of death is unbroken, so too the chain of love testifies that the power of love and of death are equal. For as the prophet says, ‘What man is there who will live and not see death?’ so the apostle too cries, ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ?’ Therefore, blessed one, a richer fruit will come to you from it, because, wounded first by the darts of this love, you have anticipated us with the blessing of sweetness through the chaste and faithful words of your letter, in which your tongue has distilled honey and milk from the word of the Lord.

I had written to your oneness of heart before as well, and when I had received from you your short letter in return for the one I had sent, I had poured myself back into long silence as if the debt of courtesy were paid. But with Christ keeping keener watch in your mind, you were the first to flourish again in your care to rouse in us the observance of love, lest it should fall asleep in the death of forgetfulness; and because my lack of kindness had abounded toward you, your kindness has superabounded toward me. For you have multiplied your enrichment of me with the affection and courtesy of your love, in that you took as your partner in visiting us the Lord’s blessed servant, brother Amandus, and have set him before us as a strong patron. For we trust that, as he has become your partner in writing to us, so he may be your colleague in praying for us. Indeed, spiritual brotherhood requires that, as you have one spirit in the faith and confession of Christ, so you should have one love and one labor in championing your neighbors. Hence you will reap a common reward richly from the supreme rewarder, exalted in his towers, because ‘a brother helping a brother will be exalted’; provided only that you remember always to pray and sigh for us, and for the rest take care not to burden us with words of praise, lest perhaps you prepare a stumbling block for yourselves too, if you call sweet what is bitter. For you have read that praise befits the upright, the truly holy, not sinners set in the gall of bitterness and still bound by no slender bond of iniquity, so that destruction and unhappiness cannot but be in our ways.

Yet even so there ought to be contrition in our minds, because God does not despise a contrite and humbled heart. And who will give us a heart of flesh, so that, with the hardness of our feeling softened, we may feel the arrows of the Lord piercing our flesh with holy fear, and, the pain of our wounds aroused, weep before the Lord who made us? May Jeremiah lend us that fountain of tears with which he lamented his day and his people; may David too pour over us the rivers of his eyes, with which he watered his bed, and bathed with overflowing tears not only the cheeks of his face but the whole bed of his body. For our iniquities have gone over our head, and they are multiplied above the hairs of our head, because more works of iniquity than of righteousness are counted in us; and therefore our scars have festered and grown worse because of our folly, and our bones have grown old, because we kept silent to God; and adding iniquity to iniquity, when we had set our eyes to bend down to the earth, we have slowly and with difficulty raised them to the mountains of God, from where our help comes from the Lord, who alone is able to heal all our sicknesses and rescue us from the body of this death, because, bound through Adam, we are loosed through Christ, provided that we bear the image of the heavenly man as we bore that of the earthly, that is, if we serve righteousness and truth for our salvation as faithfully as we diligently served unrighteousness and unkindness for our death. For the apostle asks of us something human: as we presented our members to serve iniquity unto destruction and shame, so let us present the same to serve righteousness unto life and glory. For we have with us the fruit of those works of which we are now ashamed.

But thanks to the wisdom of God, Christ God, who, abiding in himself, renews all things and orders all things sweetly, so that there is a time for all things: a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to build and a time to destroy. May the time of killing, destroying, and laughing now have passed for us, I pray, and the time at last have come of healing, building, and weeping. ‘For behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.’ ‘The night is far spent, and the day is at hand. Let us cast off the works of darkness and take up the arms of light.’ Let us walk in the light as children of the day, since behold, our enemies have prepared arrows in the quiver to shoot in the dark. For they will not be able to shoot those placed in the light, who can foresee before they strike and, being on guard, easily avoid them. But the reckoning of both times can be joined in the same work, so that those times distinguished above work together in us. For in that by which we are made alive we are killed, or in that by which we are killed we are made alive, through him who said, ‘I will kill and I will make alive.’ For unless Christ kills us, we shall not live; of him it is written, ‘The Lord puts to death and makes alive,’ because unless he destroys our sins, he will not make our souls alive. Therefore the prophet says to him, ‘I have risen, and I am still with you. If you would kill, O God, the sinner.’ We shall rise, emerging from the mire of the dregs and the shadow of death, and we shall remain with him, if he kills the sinner in us and creates the righteous man, because the cup of our frailty is in the hand of the Lord, in which he humbles this one and exalts that. For unless the outer man is humbled, the inner is not exalted. And so the times of killing and healing, or of destroying and building, come together into one work, when the life of sin is destroyed in us so that the life of righteousness may be built. For newness cannot be built unless oldness is destroyed, nor can we love Christ unless we begin to hate mammon. Nor shall we be able to rejoice in that age unless we mourn in this one, because those who sow in tears will reap in joy.

So that prayer in the psalms of the poor man, anxious and mourning, suits us now, since our days have almost failed like smoke, and our malice has not yet failed. For see, age has made our days old, drawn out in the course of life; old age does not merely sprinkle our head with grey but floods it; and we still pass the infancy of our spiritual life, crawling with its first efforts, with childish senses, barely now beginning to speak in the word of God, loosing, as the soul wails its first cries, a tongue mute and unskilled in the sacred letters; and we who were once talkative in the literature of human fables now stammer in the words of truth, wise in folly and fools in wisdom, robust in vices and still tender in virtues, recruits with a will barely born to righteousness and veterans with an age spent in sins. For a long time, as you, Sanctus, blessed brother, know, we have grown old wallowing in this world among our enemies; and would that we had grown old to our enemies, so that that life of the broad road might have failed us, now idle to it, and our youth be renewed in Christ like the eagle’s, so that we may put off the old age of the old man, putting on that new man who is created according to God. But we, who cannot yet be like the pelican of the wilderness, when shall we become like the night-raven in the house? When shall we be roused to that vigor of a lofty mind, so that, winged with spiritual alacrity and perfected in the heights of virtues with an arduous end, we may say, ‘I have watched, and I have become like a sparrow alone on the housetop’? Let us see here, if you please, for what reason the prophetic word arranges these kinds of birds, and in this order, in the person of the poor man in anguish, that is, the penitent, reduced to poverty of hope through some fall. You will bear, I think, the talkativeness of my folly, which you have provoked to your own scorn. For I have learned from a certain holy and very learned man, very dear to me, who has come to know much not only by reading but also by travel, that the pelican is a bird common in Egypt or the regions near it, that it roams the deserts near the river Nile and feeds on serpents, which it strikes down by fighting. So it fights in order to conquer, and, if conquered, dies; but as victor it both escapes death and gains food. As for what is written ‘night-raven’ (nycticorax), he asserted that it is more truly nycticora; and he seemed to show this with a probable argument, saying that the bird placed here is the one we call the owl, because it practices its songs and flights secretly by night, and is given light by the obscurity of darkness, in which almost all animals are blind; hence it is more aptly called nycticora than nycticorax, because nycticorax means ‘night raven,’ but nycticora ‘seeing by night,’ since the pupil of the eye is called korē by the Greeks. And it is plain that the owl has nothing like a raven. Further, it is clear that it, as I said, like certain other birds of the night, sees better in darkness and is blind in light, suffering night by day and using light by night.

Now, then, my blessed ones, see how this bird fits the sorrowful poor man, that is, the penitent: made poor in the riches of grace, mourning the loss of his glory with a mind conscious of wretched falls, laboring in pitiful affliction in his groaning, striving to recover the life of the soul from the death of his own flesh, and seeking, through the outlay of prayers and the support of groans, the eager remedies of tears for his wounded salvation. How aptly is such a poor sinner called an Egyptian or a nocturnal bird! For in that, to weep over and confess his sins, he shuts himself up, sorrowful, apart from the common gathering of the church, within the prison of his little cell, and withdraws far from this world, fleeing so that he may remain in the solitude of lamentation, and there fights against the desires of his flesh and battles in spiritual combat to crush his sins, surely he becomes like the pelican of the wilderness both in dwelling and in battle, and, fighting to overcome the devil himself and the rulers of darkness in the sins and thoughts of the flesh, he imitates that bird hostile to serpents. And if he overcomes in that contest, he will live, surviving his enemies; he seeks food for himself from his victory, because, as victor over sin and the devil, he gains the merit of life. We experience daily, in the dangers of our inner man, how that devil, with the whole army of spiritual wickedness, creeps by various arts to our destruction. But thanks to God, who has given us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord, so that we may walk upon the asp and the basilisk and trample the lion and the dragon, against such arts, that is, against the rulers of darkness, men mighty in sins, whom the apostle calls darkness, with whom we have a rival contention for salvation. Pray that, while we live in the desert of this world, we may destroy these serpents after the example of that solitary bird. When they are crushed and devoured through victory, our inner man will be enlightened, as though a cloud of darkness had been scattered, and then he will become like the night-owl in the house, that is, in the house of the Lord, so that amid the darkness of this world he may direct the keen sight of a mind that had failed, and, enlightened with such eyes, may say with the prophet, ‘For darkness will not be dark to me, and the night will be lit up like the day.’ This surely happens when both substances in man agree together, so that the flesh too, denying its earthly nature, passes over with spiritual affection into harmony with the soul; and then the night will be lit up like the day, when the flesh too becomes spiritual like the soul.

But if, through your prayers, it is granted us both to imitate the pelican of the wilderness in crushing the viperous enemy and to see with the eyes of the night-owl amid the dark places of this world, then at the end, with our feet set on the heights of perfect virtue, by watching in prayers and meditating on the law of the Lord, we shall become like the lone sparrow on the housetop, and, with body and spirit in harmony in the will of God, we shall rightly say, ‘I am alone until I pass over.’ And who is this sparrow, in whom is the form of the perfect, but that sparrow which has found itself a house, and, with the turtledove, has made its nest your altars, O Lord of hosts? This perhaps is that sparrow of the two, one of which does not fall to the ground without the will of the Father. For this supreme sparrow fell in the body, but he also rose again. He fell by the consent of his will, made obedient to the Father unto the death of the cross. This sparrow is that Wisdom which gladly shows herself in the ways to those who seek her, now meets them in the gates, now runs to meet them in the streets, now, high on the walls or towers, calls her lovers to herself and invites them to the heights of her dwellings, so as to fulfill his word, that, when lifted up, he draws all things to himself. Who will give us the silvered wings of a dove, so that, winged by the chaste words of the Lord, like silver tried by fire, we may fly through to the prize of the upward call, following this lone sparrow, who is the only Son of God, flying above, because he dwells on high and looks upon lowly things, and he who descended into the lower parts of the earth is the same who ascended above all the heavens, leading captivity captive, that he might fill all things? If we can follow this sparrow in direct imitation, walking in the same footsteps in which the beautiful feet of those who preach the gospel have gone, then, set on high, we shall be able to say, ‘I have watched and become like a lone sparrow on the housetop.’

Yet, even when raised on high, let us remember that word of the Lord, that he who is on the housetop should not go back into his house to take his goods, that is, that we should not run back into ourselves and seek again fleshly works, like goods left below. ‘For no one,’ he says, ‘who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ But even if we are on the housetop, that is, have flown above earthly nature, not consenting to the flesh, let us fear, after the example of birds, to fly down to low places. For it is written that not without cause are nets spread for birds. And we know that fowlers, lying in wait for the simplicity of birds, set snares on the ground; and very often scattered bait or blind decoys bring birds down by fraud and entangle the credulous ones in nooses hidden under treacherous turf. But let us, armed with faith and enlightened by truth, say to the fowlers of spiritual wickedness, who tempt us by a like art through the spread-out allurements of this world: ‘In the Lord I trust; how do you say to my soul, Flee to the mountain like a sparrow? Depart from me, all you who work iniquity.’ Therefore let us pray to the Lord, who enlightens every man coming into this world. I think ‘every man’ is said because no one is a man unless he acknowledges God and rather deserves to be acknowledged by God. Those who do not acknowledge him have been compared to beasts and made like them. Let us, then, justified from ungodliness by his great mercy, through faith and not by works, run to the fragrance of his ointments, so as to draw from his name the fragrance of life and become a good fragrance of Christ to God, given to drink, as it is written, of the wine of ointments from the cup of salvation, in which he himself, like a perfumer, as is written in Ecclesiasticus, mixes ointments of sweetness, dividing his gifts to each as he wills, so that all may be filled in all, and he may show the fragrance of his knowledge in us, because his name is ointment poured out. That this name may always be invoked over us and named in us, let our citizenship be in heaven. For so we shall become like the lone sparrow on the housetop, if we do not mind or seek the things that are on earth, but those that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of the Father, with countless eyes the watcher of our deeds and spectator of this contest, in which, walking in the flesh, we do not fight according to the flesh.

For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against invisible enemies and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places: not that wicked spirits act in heavenly places, but that they oppose those who live a heavenly way of life. Let us therefore put on the arms of light; in our God let us leap over that wall which separates us from God, and let us not, because of fleshly weakness, fear an adversary violent by his spiritual nature, because strength is made perfect in weakness, and a man is not strong in his own strength, but the Lord makes his adversary weak. The Lord of hosts himself, the King of glory, confounds him for us by such a kind of encounter that on the cross of Christ not divine strength but human weakness overcame him. Let us therefore follow Jesus in his triumph, and let his truth surround us with the shield of faith, so that we may not fear the terror of the night and the arrow that flies by day. A thousand will fall at our side and ten thousand at our right hand, not by our strength but by Christ’s, whose battle it is in which we fight, and whose crown by which we conquer, because we are members of his body, provided that we put to death our members on earth, so that they may become arms of righteousness. Girded with them, let us offer to Christ, to his angels, and to ourselves a joyful spectacle from our contest, and, flying out of the hunters’ snare, let us sing with chattering thanksgiving: ‘Our soul has been rescued like a sparrow from the snare of the hunters; the snare is broken, and we are set free,’ because our help is in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. ‘For there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.’ Triumphing in this name, let us confess to the Lord his mercies and glory in his praise, not in our own. For, as the prophet says, if there is any good in us, it is from him, and if anything best, it is his: ‘for he made us, and not we ourselves.’ And therefore he says, ‘What do you have, O man, that you have not received? But if you received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it?’ In this he warns that he who glories should glory in the Lord. Hence the distress of seeming to be praised becomes light for us: for we are conscious of no good of our own, so that the praiser might press upon us the shame of those who recognize it; because we know that it is not we ourselves who are proclaimed but the gifts and works of the divine goodness. For if any good is seen or believed to be in us, it belongs to him who alone is good, of whose fullness we have all received, and with which we are sprinkled according to the capacity of our merit or faith. For the dew that is from him is health to us, and we rejoice in his droppings. So this error too, by which you praise us, will be harmless to you. Moreover, so devout a faith heaps up a rich reward for you, because, in thinking that we, wicked in our own mind and crooked from the perverse generation of this world, have been made good, you believe the Lord almighty, who is able to justify the ungodly, to make the dead alive, to lighten darkness, and to make scarlet white.

Therefore pray earnestly that we may receive a heart worthy of so great a work or gift of God, and that we who have received contempt for our inheritance may receive also contempt for ourselves. For we walk a narrow way, and we go uncertainly as on a stretched rope; and unless we fix our steps with a sure balance of mind, so as not to turn aside to right or left, the enemy will easily push us into a fall on this side or that. Therefore Wisdom sings to us in Solomon: ‘Do not turn aside from the Lord, lest you fall.’ For the Lord Jesus himself is the way, the truth, and the life, who says, ‘Keep your heart with all watchfulness,’ because through the very ways of the virtues we can slip into vices, and unless, as I said, we balance the movements of the mind, guiding them in a sure stance, we shall take pride from humility itself, and the appearance of godliness will vanish if puffing up creeps in through the praise of poverty. And what will it profit us to have been without riches if we remain rich in vices? So we beg you not to flatter us on the strength of that word of the Lord, as if we had done it: ‘Sell what you possess,’ because what remains is greater: ‘and come, follow me.’ It is easy to see how great a thing it is to follow Christ, that man should imitate God. But you know this too: ‘God spoke once; I heard these two things.’ For this saying too, like almost all of divine Scripture, opens in two directions: ‘Go and sell all that you have.’ For we possess not only money and estates, outward resources, but also the inward wealth of our mind, which is truly our substance. To sell this, that is, to alienate it from ourselves, is a victory as much greater as it is harder to separate what is inborn than what is added, and to tear away what is fixed within than to throw off what is fastened on outwardly. For he changes and overcomes himself who renounces his own ways and disowns himself, so as to fulfill that strongest word of God: ‘He who loses his soul for my sake will find it.’ Remembering these words of the Lord, let us pour out our soul to him, and he will nourish us and cherish our life hidden in him, and will reveal himself with glory, provided we pray for this same soul in the fitting time, that is, now in this age. ‘For in hell who will confess to him?’ Here we die to sins, so that we may not live there in punishments. For the death which is called the second is nothing other than a life of punishments.

Let us beware, then, of the lower hell, where Gehenna will torture body and soul eternally, while the sinner’s soul dies, its feeling remaining and the matter of corruption enduring. For the dead too, as it is written, will rise incorrupt, not in the immortality of glory but of punishment. ‘Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle, who has broken the iron bars and humbled the oppressor, so as to lift me up from the gates of death, that I may tell his wonders in the gates of the daughter of Zion. May the Lord bless you from Zion, and may you see the good things of Jerusalem and pray for us all the days of your life, so that our portion may be in common in the land of the living.

On the back of your letter we read the list of letters which you said were mine. Truly I had so nearly forgotten almost all of them that I would not have recognized them as mine had I not trusted your letter. So I received a greater proof of your love, for I saw that I am better known to you than to myself. I rejoice that I have received the hymns I longed for; by this gift, holy brother, you have warned me to prepare my little torch carefully while there is time, lest I be shut out with the foolish, if I should fail to go out to meet him with the wise. Pray that our souls may be both virgin and fruitful: virgin without barrenness, fruitful without corruption. For by this mystery both in the law ‘cursed is he who has not given seed in Israel,’ and in the gospel there is the wise virgin who, with oil procured with watchful care, awaits the bridegroom’s coming with her torch anointed, and, as he now comes, lights a flame not to be quenched with rich fuel.

So let our mind be fertile to God and bring forth the fruits of life in good works. Let our spirit be a virgin, so that it may be corrupted by no allurement of the world and remain whole from every stain of vices. For those foolish virgins seem to me to be souls that are barren in virtues, and the wise ones souls that are uncorrupted by vices. Indeed, five are set in each kind of virgins, so that it may be understood that they refer to the wholeness or corruption of man’s senses; for we are all endowed with five senses, through which we receive either life or death. Of these the prophet says in grief: ‘Death has entered through your windows.’ Let us block them with the fear of God, so as to be deaf and blind to all the forms and voices of this world; let us hedge our ears with thorns against the wicked tongue and alluring melodies; let us turn away our eyes, lest they see vanity; let us block our nostrils too, lest we draw the smell of death from the corruption of this world; let not the disease of the gullet creep in through the enticing taste and enervate the strength of continence with the foods of lusts; and let us not flatter the body with soft clothing, lest limbs wrongly caressed by delicate coverings shake us with fleshly touches and unlawful embraces. So it will come about that, in each of us, with all the senses chaste and imbued with the oil of faithful teaching, all five virgins remain wise and, with oil stored in their vessels, rest in secure expectation, ready to meet him with torches soon prepared, when they are awakened by the first stir of the bridegroom’s coming. For among such great peoples of the church, in which are seen not only virgins, whose number is countless, but also married women and widows of different ways and fruits, I do not think that only five foolish virgins and as many wise are set out for any other reason than this: that each kind of person is found diversely in the whole people, but the number, for the reason given above, is contained individually in all, so that each one has in himself either foolish or prudent virgins according to the quality of his senses, in which virginity is wise when they are provident, foolish when they are slack. For this is why the foolish, like the wise, are alike called virgins, despite their great unlikeness: because the virgins according to the flesh have an unfruitful barrenness, and those according to the spirit a fruitful chastity. Therefore neither have the wise a barren virginity, because they are wise, nor the foolish a fruitful one, because they are foolish. Their type seems to me to be the wisdom of this world, which is foolishness with God, and the wisdom of the flesh, which is truly a foolish virgin, because it is not joined and subject to the law, and to the law and wisdom of God; and its lamp is easily put out, because it has not the oil of truth, being empty of the Holy Spirit, by which the inner eye is enlightened and the head of the soul, which is our faith, is anointed, whose oil is the infusion of heavenly teaching.

So let not the oil of the sinner anoint our head, nor dying flies destroy the oil of sweetness, so that Christ may always be our head, and oil may never fail on our head, because his name is ointment poured out. And then, perfect in all our senses, we shall be wise virgins, if the wisdom of God remains in us, through whom virginity was made fruitful even in the body. I weary you too much and presume much on the patience of love. But I must listen to Solomon, speaking in the wisdom of God, so as to set my foot of words more sparingly, even with those who love me most, lest when they have had their fill they hate me. Yet I know that, as no one can hate his own bowels, so you cannot hate our lowliness, which you have mingled with your bowels. May the peace and love and grace and humility of Christ, the Lord most high, abound in you, blessed brothers, deservedly venerable and most beloved.

We rejoice in the Lord that we have been visited and challenged by a letter of your holiness, so that we, who had not before enjoyed the favor of knowing you, now by God’s sudden gift should take up full confidence in you as in an old friendship. ‘Wine,’ it says, ‘and a friend will grow old, and you will drink it with pleasure.’ See, your holiness has surpassed this saying of the prophet, for it has begun to love us with such perfect affection that in the first newness of this covenant it has given us the sweetness of an aged love, so that we need not wish for the increase of a love whose finished maturity we experience in its abundant beginnings, so that we can compare the richness of your soul to great springs, which, bursting from their source with a wide-poured mouth, are rivers at once at their rising. Blessed, then, is the Lord, who has superabounded over our sins with such grace that he has enriched us, unworthy even to know you, with your love too; and to us, who lacked until now a lesser good, since we had no bodily acquaintance with you, he has granted a gift from you as much greater as the spirit is a more important substance in man than the flesh. Therefore our heart exults, and with our mouth filled with joy we say: ‘The Lord has done great things for us,’ since you have anticipated us with the blessing of sweetness through holy words tried like refined silver, visiting us, as I said, and rousing us from the mold of our sloth to the observance of your love, in which we were not asleep through ignorance, but silent through ignorance. So blessed be the name of the Lord, and may he rejoice in this work too of his goodness, by which he has shown to us, who do not know your face in the flesh, rather this appearance of your mind, in which you are more beautifully formed in Christ. ‘For a man’s speech,’ it says, ‘shows what he is, and out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.’

Your speech, seasoned with apostolic salt, expressed for us the flavor of the grace that has been given you, and from the droppings of your lips we have tasted how sweet the Lord is in you, who have been made and set as head of the people, chosen from the sheep to be the ram of the flock, to rule the sheep of the pasture of him who laid down his life for his sheep. He, the same Lamb and Shepherd, will rule us for ever, who made us sheep out of wolves, and is now the shepherd of those sheep, to guard them, for whom he was the lamb, as victim. This, then, is our Lord and God, who was seen on earth and lived among men for us, who is sheep and shepherd in us, because he rules us inwardly with an invisible staff and a saving rod, so that even if we walk in the shadow of death we fear no evil, because God is with us, that Emmanuel, the Lord of majesty and the son of a handmaid, of whom the one he was born, the other he was made. The same is the Creator of man and his Redeemer, God from God, man for man, Son of God before the ages, Son of man for the world, in the form of a servant for the freedom of servants; he was made poor, so as to enrich the poor by his poverty, because he is rich toward all in every good, who is filled all in all, the fullness of the divinity, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of those far off on the sea, God our Savior, the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who is in the glory of God the Father, God over all, blessed for ever.

He, then, who has deigned to take you up into the lot of his apostles, so that by their craft you might be a fisher of men and draw out with the hook of the saving word, from the bitter and deep waves of this world, a catch to be given life rather than killed for God, which you surely do daily; this God, who has made you a helper in his building and husbandry, who has deigned to plant love for our lowliness in the lofty soul of yours through humility of heart, because no doubt by the meekness of a sheep and the innocence of a lamb you deserved to be a shepherd; this God, I say, who deigns to make you love us, not doing according to our evil merit but according to the riches of his goodness, so that help may be heaped up for us from the support of your prayers, and reward for you from your great love even for lesser neighbors, may make you mindful of us perpetually, and mingle care for our salvation with all your prayers and offerings, lest this great outlay of your love, in which we glory in the Lord, become a stumbling block to us, if we cover the ravening beasts of untamed senses with sheep’s clothing. So pray, until you obtain it, that our heart may be made spotless in the sight of the Lord, so that we may not be confounded or dragged off together with those who speak peace with their neighbor, but evil is in their hearts; but that, at one in tongue and mind, we may believe with the heart to righteousness and confess with the mouth to life. So at last the devotion with which you love us will be returned fruitful to you, if your prayer for us is so effective that we are changed from our earthly appearance and transferred into your likeness, so as to bear the image of the heavenly man with equal truth.

Then we shall truly be happy in your love, if you obtain that we are not unlike your love. In this, however, we do not stretch to so proud a wish as to hope to reach the summit of your merit, but that, enclosed within the bounds of salvation, we may go over the footsteps of truth on the straight road, after the pattern of your faith, and that our end may be he who is the beginning, the head and foundation of his body, the Rock, Christ: that rock which follows us, thirsting for righteousness in the deserts of this world, with an accompanying spring and refreshes us with a sweet drink, lest we be scorched by the heats of fleshly desires; that rock on which the house, established, did not fall; and that rock which, its side pierced by the lance, flowed with water and blood, so as to pour out for us together saving springs, the water of grace and the blood of the sacrament, by which the same is both the fountain and the price of our salvation.

But woe is me, a sinner! Where have I now advanced, or rather slipped? While I plead with you in many words so that I may earn, when you direct your prayers, help for my sins, or rather against my sins, I heap up from my talkativeness the same burden which I ask you to lessen by your prayers, as if forgetful of what is written: ‘In much talking you will not escape sin.’ And what shall I do? With what mouth shall I ask to be cleansed? Or by what reasoning shall I be defended by you, when, knowingly and wittingly, I have committed the opposite of the prophetic word, so as to harm myself by the sin of much talking and to weary your holiness? I shall stick fast in this crime, and not even your prayer will be able to cover me, unless you yourself first forgive me this fault of wronging you, and offer for me to God a sacrifice of appeasement, as blessed Job was commanded to do for his talkative friends. For I claim so much of your mind as to presume that this talkativeness will go unpunished by your indulgence, not doubting that you have as much patience as you have love.

Long ago we had given brother Victor a short letter for you, and I wanted that too to be brought to your holiness, so that it might bear witness for its bearer himself that his delay with us was not of his own choosing. For the reason for its brevity was that Victor, hurrying back from us to you shortly after his arrival, was so obstinately set on retracing his journey that he barely gave us the opportunity of a short letter to you. Meanwhile sudden obstacles drew him back as he was setting out, since winter closed off sailing and fear closed the roads; hindered and recalled by these, he who had refused love’s request for a postponement granted necessity a long delay. During these delays he was also sick, and indeed suffered so severely that, brought back from the gates of death, he spent more time recovering his health than he had spent enduring his illness. Afterward, with the birthday of the apostles near, we thought it unkind to send him off. So to the longer delays which he had made because of the necessities mentioned we added this short delay by our own wish, so that, having celebrated the apostolic feast as a companion of our yearly vow and journey, he might return to you as messenger of this business of ours too.

The letters he carries to the blessed man of God, our brother Severus, we wrote at different times, as the pressure of haste allowed, as the varied reading of them will show; for Victor, hurrying and hanging at the very doors of departure, demanded the shorter ones, while we wrote the longer ones, as with a mind relaxed and loosened into leisure, once we had begun to feel secure about his long stay. Our brother Severus had written to us to send him back, and he had so prescribed the time that, sent back, he should arrive by the days of the vintage. Since we could not obey him in this, we have tried at least to show obedience in this form: that he may receive him arriving, if not in the same year he had hoped, at least at the same season he had ordered. And if he does not wish to charge his slowness to the necessities which I have set out, let him reckon it to my fault that he stayed; yet let him owe even his late return to his own prayers, because when he was sick and quite given up, I hoped for his health from the faith of Severus, while I despaired of it from my own merits, by which I saw Victor’s innocence being scourged, so that my iniquity was punished in him, in whom the divine justice was avenging what erred in love of a sinner. For love roused punishment for me too, so that I endured, suffering with him in torment of heart and mind, the tribulation which a man of one heart with me was suffering in his body.

As for the matter about which you had written to me through him, seeking sweet and abundant water in a bitter and dry little stream, I pour it back to your grace to explain; for I confess that I have not dared to touch even with a finger the weight of such great names and mysteries. For I have read that ‘wisdom will not enter a malicious soul,’ and so, conscious of my malice, I could not have confidence in divine revelation, since with a dark heart I could not receive the light of prudence. But you, blessed one, a vessel clean and fit for God, if you have received understanding of that blessing with which the patriarch, enlightened by the prophetic Spirit in the blindness of his body, addresses his sons, explain to me in your reply the mysteries of the kingdom and the sacraments hidden from the ages and revealed for the ages in Christ Jesus, in whom the various figures of all the saints meet, who is prefigured in the patriarchs, speaks in the prophets, works in the apostles, and is filled all in all, because in him all fullness was pleased to dwell, who is the beginning and end of all. But if you have not yet received it, because perhaps, believing it given to me, your neighbor, as if already stored in your own pantry, you have put off asking the Lord for it yourself, ask and you will receive according to your faith and your soul, which, the chaster it is in its members, the livelier in its senses, and the purer in heart, the more capable it is of Christ, who is possessed by the humble and seen by the pure in heart.

But so that you may bear less hardly being deceived in your opinion by my poverty, think of it as though you had suffered from me what the Lord himself suffered from that fig tree to which he came hungry and, finding it without fruit, struck with the word of his mouth, so that the tree which had been barren became withered by the Lord’s curse. But I beseech your brotherhood, even if you have found me like that unhappy tree, not to strike me with a like word, lest I wither completely and, empty of due fruit, be stripped even of the covering of leaves, that is, of the foliage of grace. But thinking again that the merciful and compassionate Lord wishes no one to die the death, and that in that tree he condemned by his curse not his creature but the fault of the tree, hostile to his planting, I rather ask you to curse my barrenness, so that no fruit may ever be born of it, so that fruit may be born for God from myself. For the death of my barrenness is good for me, so that the fruitfulness of the Lord’s planting may revive in me, and, as the fault by which I am made fruitless dies, I may grow green again for my farmer with the return of good will, so that the Lord himself, hungering for my life, may find me offering on fertile branches the fruits due to him.

But in this same tree Mark added the matter of no small question. For, agreeing with the other evangelists about the fig tree cursed and withered, he said something deeper: after saying that the Lord found no fruit on that tree, he added something that seems to excuse the tree, saying, ‘for it was not the season for it to have fruit.’ If that is so, the tree seems to have received the curse without cause, being free of the guilt of barrenness, if at an unsuitable time of year it did not yet have fruit ready, being not barren through fault but unripe through the season. But what the apostle says about cattle we can also apply to the tree, and say: ‘Is God concerned about a tree?’ Surely it was written for our sake, in whom God always wishes to find his food. For he has both a field and a vineyard in us. He winnows us on his threshing floor; in us he cleanses the wheat, scatters the chaff, burns the tares. So in that tree he was hungry for man’s salvation and was asking from man the fruit due to him. But when he came to his own, his own did not receive him, and the barren synagogue of the unbelieving Jews did not render the due crop of faith which he had sown in them through the law and the prophets. He came to their tree, seeking from the children of his planting the sweet food of the awaited shoot; but it, withholding the fruits of devotion, gave him gall for food, offered him thorns when he asked for grapes, and gave the planter of the good vineyard himself, the true Vine himself and the cluster of sweetness, burning vinegar to drink. Hence their table has been turned into a snare for them, and their grape has become one of bitterness, and their wine the incurable wrath of dragons.

But you, my brother, pray the Lord that our vine may not come from the vineyard of such men, because their stock has degenerated from the vineyard of the Lord of hosts into the vineyard of Sodom. And unless the Lord had left us, in the branches of the apostles from the roots of the patriarchs, a seedbed of life, from which the salvation of the Gentiles might sprout and in which the vein of the blessed seed might endure, we would have been like Sodom and Gomorrah in the whole fullness of malice. But since it is the last hour, and the axe is already laid to the roots of the trees, threatening a just felling to dry and unhappy wood, I ask you to pray for indulgence for me and a respite of time, so that, death being postponed, I may perhaps receive the sap of fruitfulness from the diligence of your love and the cultivation of my own care: that the fear of God may dig around my heart, and necessary repentance may fatten my stock with the dung of humility; that then, roused to the vigilance of care, I may stand ready at every hour and be fearful when the Lord is absent, so as to be secure when he comes; that at every time, every day, Christ may find me fruitful for him, that is, that I may never appear unripe for any work of his will, but that, if perhaps in a time of anger he should desire his peace from me, my mind may not be unripe for concord through the bitterness of anger; and that I may not wait for the sun to go down on my anger, lest my life go down, if evening closes the day before peace has quenched my rage.

What I have put about anger, consider said of every kind of vice. For this, I think, is what is meant by the Lord’s seeking fruit from that tree before its season. For he who knows the secrets of the heart and saw through the thoughts of men did not fail to see what was set before men’s eyes, nor was he less than human understanding, so as not to know the season of the year, which lies within the knowledge even of little children, and to demand autumn fruit in spring. But the craftsman of our salvation, the Creator, whose whole life and action on earth was a pattern of conduct and morals for us, arranged his invisible counsels visibly and expressed in irrational creatures, for the rational soul, the likeness of its own shaping, so as to instruct us in all things saving for us by the written signs of his works and words. And this is what he wished to be understood through the evangelist, by showing us that he sought fruit from the tree out of its season: that man may know that he owes fruit to God at every season, because the good Lord, who prepares mortal man for immortality, wishes him already in this world to put on the likeness of perpetuity, so that he may not take his fruit from the season, but be ripe at every season for him with whom, or in whom, he is to abide without time.

Who would give me the fountain of your letters, so that I could answer your letter, woven with the varied flower of spiritual graces, eloquent now no longer with the schoolman’s speech but with divine speech, and flowing, as from the land of the divine promise, with the milk of devotion and the honey of wisdom, whose honey and oil you have sucked from the firm rock, that is, from Christ the Lord, who is the foundation of the eternal house? On it you have begun to build the edifice of salvation with living works, and you are striving to build upon it not wood or hay and stubble, but gold, silver, and precious stones, because, laying aside with the old man the hardness, dryness, and lightness of your former heart, you have become a well-watered tree, which, green beside the streams of water, will give its fruit in its season and will never be deprived of the honor of its leaves. Your understanding is gold tried in the fire, and your speech is silver refined sevenfold, which, shining with spiritual grace, brings out the chaste words of the Lord from a pure heart and a tongue that shows the heart. You keep a good and firm treasure in an earthen vessel with no fragile faith, because the vessel of the grace entrusted to you is your mind, which, strengthened within bodily frailty by the princely Spirit, offers a solid guard for the divine gift. Poor and in pain, how shall I obey Wisdom, who has bidden me put my hand to the table of the mighty on this condition, that I know I become a debtor of a like banquet? For see, you have become for me the table of the mighty; you have set before me rich food, which easily carried me off, hungry as I was, into all your words, as into delicacies varied in taste and sight of choice dishes, so that, mindful of my gullet rather than of my poverty, I dared to take what I cannot match. What then shall I do? From whom shall I ask to be given or lent either furniture, with which I might rival the rich man’s dining room with fitting display, or means, by which, poor as I am, I might feast the rich man in turn? Who will help me in the obligation of this debt but you, Lord Jesus, who always bind yourself to every poor man of yours as one who lends, and pledge that you will be the repayer for those who now have no means of repaying? Help me now, and, for my poverty, pay my debt to your Aper out of your riches; water his furrows abundantly and multiply your generations in him, so that he may be in your house like a fruitful olive, flourish like the palm, and grow like the cedar of Lebanon.

But I will return to your letter, in which I rejoice like one who has found great spoil; and although I can bring back nothing like it from my own words, yet, as hungry men do when, having digested the dishes of a rich banquet, they begin to hunger again from their want, comforting their hunger with the memory of past fullness and feeding their empty soul by present thought of the absent feast, so I will weave this letter by going back over your words and will relate my own delight, bestowing nothing on you, and will speak not so much my wish for you as my experience of you. For your letter expressed to me the face of your heart: that letter of good hope, letter of faith unfeigned, letter of pure love. What most holy love it breathes! How sweet and how great a fragrance of Christ is fragrant in it! What wealth of a sincere heart boils up in it! How it pants to us your thirst, and the longing and fainting of your soul for the courts of the Lord! What thanks it gives to God, what it obtains from God, what spectacles it offers me as I read of the graces of God flowering in you and the virtues already at work!

There the little ones, or rather the grown children, of Babylon are dashed against the rock, that is, the vices of confusion and worldly pride, which faith will more readily overcome in combat if, forestalling their weakness as they grow, it takes care to dash them against Christ at their beginnings. There too the cedars of Lebanon, brought down to the ground and raised up into the building of the ark by the joining of love, cut the waves of this world with incorruptible strength. There likewise Christ, roused so as to lead the course of your steering to his own stability, is seen calming winds and seas for you, he who now has passage in the ship of your body and a pillow in your heart, because the sparrow has found a house there, and has in you where to lay his head. There too your wife, not leading her husband to softness or avarice, but brought back to continence and fortitude into the bones of her husband, is wonderful in imitating that great marriage of God with the church; your unity, brought back and restored to you by spiritual bonds as much stronger as they are chaster, the love of Christ couples, into whose body you have both passed from your own.

Blessed are you by the Lord, who has made both one, creating the two in himself, who alone does wonders, who converts not only souls but also affections, temporal into eternal. See, you remain the same spouses as you were, but not spouses as you were; you are yourselves and not yourselves; and as you no longer know Christ according to the flesh, so you no longer know yourselves. This is the change of the right hand of the Most High, which, abiding in itself, renews all things and turns the sea into dry land, drying the streams of vices into the dryness of continence. Blessed is she among women, and faithful and most acceptable to the Lord by this devotion too, by which she has set herself against the necessities of the world for you, like a tower founded on an immovable rock against storms. Truly, founded with the solid footing of a strenuous mind on that rock on which a house built will not fall, she has become for you a tower of protection before the face of the enemy, breaking the waves and whirlwinds of the world by the barrier of her devout service, so that you, shut off from the open sea, may ply the safe boat of an unshaken mind in the harbor of the church, in continual meditation of heavenly studies and works, as with the oars of salvation. ‘For bodily exercise,’ it says, ‘is of little profit; but godliness is profitable for all things,’ which has made you subject to Christ, preferring to lie in the house of the Lord rather than to stand high in the tents of sinners, and has pledged your fellow servant to bodily labors out of spiritual affection for your soul, so that she made her servitude the price of your freedom, serving not the world in worldly affairs but Christ, for whose sake she suffers the world so that you may not. Truly, according to the divine work and word, made as a help for you and having her turning toward you, she hangs on your nod and stands in your stance, walks in your footsteps, lives in your soul, fails for your life so as to be restored in your life. She cares for the cares of the world so that you need not; she cares that you may care for heaven. She seems to possess, so that you may not be possessed by the world and may be possessed by Christ. No discordant will separates her from your purpose; rather, what is more wonderful, a harmonious faith divides by work her who is joined by will. For administering, without captivity of mind, the material of captivity in freedom of spirit, she has strengthened her hands for works of virtue; she has stretched out her arms to useful things, having girded her loins with strength, and, not eating the bread of idleness, she has become for you like a ship that trades from afar, by a necessary division rendering through herself to Caesar what is Caesar’s, so that through you she may minister to God what is God’s. For when she has paid tribute, as it is written, to whom tribute is due, then too, opening her hands to the poor and holding out the fruit of her labor to the needy, she pays a spiritual tax and supplies the revenue of the property for the pay of your warfare, more greedy for saving loss than for deadly gain. ‘When she is such, the heart of her husband trusts in her.’ ‘For she does,’ as it is written, ‘good to her husband all her life, and not evil,’ and therefore you do not anxiously manage what is done in your earthly house; what is done in the heavenly house you strenuously pursue as a free man. Nor are you put to shame when you speak with your enemies in the gate, because a wise woman, such as has been given you, more precious than precious stones, makes you circumspect at the doors of the church. ‘And she has made double cloaks for her husband.’ Does it not seem to you that she is weaving these double cloaks for you and purple or fine linen garments for herself, since her faith doubles your grace, because ‘a good woman is a crown to her husband,’ and in turn your honor is purple to her, because, by the grace of the Lord tempering it, clothed simply in the unity of faith, you clothe each other over with the working of spiritual virtues? You are her head in Christ, and she your foundation, by whose work your foot stands in the way of the Lord, and whom the joining of faith, as fellow members in the Lord’s body, will make a sharer of her head; because even in a difference of tasks, yet with the consent of a harmonious mind kept, she is joined to the resolve of your purpose. While you, faithful and skillful, exercise the stewardship entrusted to you as a multiplier of the master’s talents, she does not treasure up on earth what she works out of earthly fruits, but lends it at interest rather to your works than to the ruinous gains of avarice. And therefore she will be given the fruit of her hands, and her husband will be praised in the Lord in the gates of the daughter of Zion, who for you both prepares, by a different labor of the same work but equal zeal, a crop sown for a common harvest, so that on that day you may come together in exultation bringing your sheaves, she the servant of the seed and you the sower of the ministry. For she will not be cheated of a share in your reward by the merit of this exchange, in which, obeying not her own will but your salvation, she proves by the evidence of this very work the judgment of her faith, showing clearly how much better she too judges contempt of the world than its use, since she has preferred spiritual things for you, not putting this world before Christ but putting you before herself.

May the Lord add to you and to your children. For the mercy of the Lord, earned by the parents, will raise up their children, as it is written, and they will be enriched with the good things of the Lord. And I hope that, as your wife is like an abundant vine on the sides of your house, overflowing for you with the fruits of godliness, so that a thousand fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand, so your children too will deserve to stand around the table of the Lord with you like young olive shoots. I think they are now being fed, like eaglets, on the food of divine wisdom and your good way of life, so that they may learn already now to eat the flesh laid waste by their parents’ prey, that is, the fleshly enmities which oppose the spirit, and to consume them with spiritual appetite, and to fly up into the heights of virtues with strengthened oars of wings. Let them be brought up like the sons of the prophets, who, avoiding the tumultuous dwelling of the city in order to compose their soul in the peace of silence, measured out secluded dwellings for themselves beside the bed of the Jordan. Let them be consecrated like the sons of Aaron, not, however, those who, kindling strange fire to the Lord, were burned up by the divine fire, which they lacked themselves, but like Eleazar and Ithamar, deservedly perpetual successors of their father’s dignity, as heirs not degenerate from his holiness.

And it seems to me that anyone kindles strange fire who, kindling in the sanctuary of his heart the fire of some bodily or worldly desire, dares to approach the altars of the Lord, which receive the kindling of no fire but that of which he says, ‘I have come to cast fire on the earth, and what do I wish, if it is already kindled?’ With this fire, Lord Jesus, kindle us always, so that we may be enlightened in our senses and burn up in our vices; for this fire alone, which is from you, will resist the eternal fire. Having a heart burning on the way of the Lord, we kindle to the Lord not a strange fire but his own, and, protected by this fire amid the fires of the world, like those boys in the furnace, we shall be bedewed with flames as the blast whistles among us, and we shall sing a hymn to the Lord amid the refreshing fires, with the Son of God singing with us. For he himself said that he would always be present in the agreement of two or three. Hence we trust that he dwells also in the midst of your house, where in you and your children one company of numerous souls is gathered. In it we pray that you, absent from us only in body, sharing in spiritual presence, may water the thirsty little garden of our soul not only with words but with prayer, which we can cultivate neither with our own hands, being weak, nor with hired ones, being poor; and we do not find by what way we may seek our living, because we are not strong enough to dig and are ashamed to beg. So we need all the more the help of your prayers, because who will hire useless workmen or give to those who do not ask? Yet sometimes those who have poor and uncultivated fields, despairing of fruits from their own help or hand, turn all their hopes to divine aid; and often, when the outcome is granted according to their faith, as religion makes up for diligence, devout prayers have helped those whom skillful cultivation has failed.

Pray, then, that the Lord almighty, who has set rivers in the desert, may turn our dry land into springs of water, strike and break the hardness of our heart, so as to turn this rock too into a pool of water. And would that he would sprinkle us with that dew with which he soaked that mystic fleece on the threshing floor. ‘For the dew that is from him is health to us.’ Pray, I say, that, deigning to enter our little garden, he may bid the north wind arise and the south wind come, so that, as they breathe life-giving breezes, our shoots may come alive. And if, entering his vineyard, he finds our tree without fruit, may he spare to cut it down, and, with mercy delaying, trust the farmer who intercedes and promises to wring fruit by his diligence from the barren fig tree. For the Lord himself, who intercedes for our sins and who calls the things that are not as though they were, is able to make even of us, needy and dry, a fruitful tree, and to fatten an empty soul with the fat of his word as with a basket of dung, because it is written: ‘From his grace the borders of the desert will grow fat.’ This basket of dung, which makes a fertile tree of a barren one, seems to me to be especially spiritual humility, by which, crushing our heart with repentance for past vanity, we empty out what is vain and receive the sap of virtue, by which we who were barren in works of righteousness are made fruitful. It is good for us, then, to enter into our recesses and to humble our soul in fasting, by which one fasts from the works of darkness, so that from the dung of this humility, which is cheap to the world but dear to God, it may be lifted up by him who raises the needy from the earth and lifts the poor from the dunghill. The grace of God be with you.

‘Your word is always a lamp to my feet and a light to my paths.’ So whenever I receive a letter from your most blessed holiness, I feel the darkness of my folly scattered, and, as though the eye-salve of your explanation were poured on the eyes of my mind, I see more clearly, with the night of ignorance driven off and the mist of doubt wiped away. I have often felt this given me at other times through the gift of your letters, but especially by this little book of your recent letter, whose bearer, as welcome as he was worthy, was a man blessed by the Lord, our brother Quintus the deacon. He delivered to us the blessing of your mouth a long time after he had come to Rome, when I came there, according to my yearly custom, after the Lord’s Pasch, to venerate the apostles and martyrs. Nevertheless, wiping out the time he had spent in Rome without my knowing, he seemed to me to come most freshly from your presence, so that I believed he had come to me from you at that very moment when I first saw him and when he offered me the full fragrance of your sweetness in your words, fragrant with the chastity of heavenly ointment. I confess, however, to your venerable oneness of heart that I could not read the volume itself at Rome as soon as I had received it. For the crowds there were so great that I could not examine your gift carefully and enjoy it as I wished, namely by reading it straight through, once I had begun to read. So, as is usually done, in the secure expectation of a feast prepared, I restrained the hunger of my mind, eager though it was, and, in sure hope of being filled, since I held in my hand the loaves of my desire in the volume to be devoured, which afterward, as I devoured it, was very sweet both in my mouth and in my belly, I easily held back my gullet, gaping for the honeycombs of your letter, until I left the city and could devote wholly to this task the day to be spent at a halt on the journey, which we had in the town of Formiae, so that I might feast on the spiritual delights of your letter, free from all the dregs of cares and the stifling of crowds.

What then shall I, lowly and earthly, answer to this wisdom which has been given you from above, which this world does not grasp and which no one understands unless he is wise with the wisdom of God and eloquent with the word of God? So, because I have proof of Christ speaking in you, ‘in God I will praise your words,’ and I will not fear ‘the terror of the night,’ because you have taught me in the spirit of truth the wholesome temper of a mind moderating itself over perishing mortals, by which you saw that the blessed mother and grandmother Melania wept for the bodily death of her only son with a silent grief indeed, yet not with a sorrow dry of a mother’s tears. As a spirit nearer and more equal to her soul, you understood her restrained and grave tears more deeply, and, while keeping the manly fortitude of a woman perfect in Christ, you contemplated her mother’s heart better, from the likeness of your own heart, as from an equal standing. So you perceived that she wept, first moved by natural affection, then pricked by a weightier cause, not so much for that human loss, that she had lost in the present world her only son, who had paid the debt of mortal condition, as because he had been taken almost overtaken in worldly vanity, since the ambition of senatorial rank had not yet left him; and so she could not think of him as taken up according to the holy greed of her prayers, as having passed from the glory of a holy way of life to the glory of the resurrection, to receive a rest and crown in common with his mother, if in the life of this world he had, by his mother’s example, preferred sackcloth to the toga and the monastery to the senate.

Nevertheless, as I think I have told your holiness before, that same man departed enriched with such works that, if he did not wear his mother’s humble nobility in his dress, he displayed it in his mind; for, according to the Lord’s word, he was so meek in his ways and humble in heart that he is not undeservedly believed to have entered into the Lord’s rest, since there is a remnant for the peaceable man, and the meek shall possess the land, pleasing God in the land of the living. For surely he fulfilled that saying of the apostle too, not only with the silent affection of a meek man but also with conspicuous religious duties: though he was a colleague in the rank and honor of the high ones of this world, yet he did not, like the glorious of the earth, mind high things, but, as a perfect imitator of Christ, agreed with the lowly, and persisted all day long in showing mercy and lending. Hence his seed too has become mighty on the earth among those strong ones of God who have been greatly exalted on the earth, so that the holy merit of the man is revealed even by the most blessed visitation of his family and house. ‘The generation of the upright,’ it says, ‘will be blessed’; a glory that does not fall and riches that do not slip away are in his house, a house built in the heavens not by the labor of hands but by the holiness of works. But I cease to recount more of the memory of a man as dear to me as he was devoted to Christ, since I recall that I told not a little about him in an earlier letter, and I can proclaim nothing better or holier of the blessed mother of this son, Melania, a root like that of holy branches, than your holiness has deigned to speak and discuss about her. For since I, a sinner with unclean lips, could say nothing worthy, being far from the merits of her faith and the virtues of her soul, you, that man of Christ, the teacher of Israel in the church of truth, were made ready by the grace of God, providing for the better, as a worthier herald of so manly a soul in Christ, you who, as I said, beheld with a nearer spirit her mind strengthened by divine power and praised with worthier eloquence her devotion mingled with strength.

You have deigned to ask me what the activity of the blessed will be in that age after the resurrection of the flesh. But I consult you, as teacher and spiritual physician, about the present state of my life, that you may teach me to do the will of God, to walk after Christ in your footsteps, and first to die that gospel death by which we anticipate bodily dissolution by a voluntary departure, withdrawing from the life of this world not by dying but by decision, a life which is wholly full of temptations, or, as you once said to me, is wholly temptation. Would, then, that my ways might be so directed after your footsteps that, loosing by your example the old shoe from my feet, I may break my bonds and, free, exult to run the course, so that I may attain that death by which you have died to this world so as to live to God, with Christ living in you, whose death and life are known in your body and heart and mouth, because your heart does not mind earthly things nor does your mouth speak the works of men, but the word of Christ abounds in your breast, and the Spirit of truth is poured out on your tongue, gladdening the city of God with the rush of the heavenly river.

What power works this death in us but love, which is strong as death? For it so blots out and destroys this world for us as to fulfill the effect of death through the affection for Christ, turned to whom we are turned away from this world, and living to whom we die to the elements of this world. Nor do we decide matters in their sight and use as though still living, because our portion is the death of Christ, whose resurrection from the dead we do not lay hold of in glory unless we imitate his death on the cross by mortifying the members and senses of the flesh, so that we may live no longer by our own will but by his, whose will is our sanctification, and who died and rose for us for this reason, that we may live no longer to ourselves but to him who died and rose for us, and who gave us the pledge of his promise by his Spirit, as he placed the pledge of our life in heaven in his own body, which is of our body. Hence ‘now our expectation is the Lord, and our substance,’ which was made by him, is with him and in him and through him, who was conformed to the body of our lowliness, so as to conform us to the body of his glory and to set us with him in the heavenly places. Therefore, for those who will one day be counted worthy of eternal life in the glory of his kingdom, so as to be with him, as the apostle says, and to remain with him, as the Lord himself said to the Father, ‘I will that where I am they also may be with me,’ there is without doubt what you have in the psalms: ‘Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they will praise you for ever and ever.’

I think, however, that this praise is to be uttered with the voices of those singing together, even though the bodies of the risen saints will be changed, so as to be like the Lord’s body as it appeared after the resurrection, in which the living image of human resurrection shone forth, so that the Lord himself, in the very body in which he had suffered and risen, was as it were a mirror of contemplation for all. For when he had risen in the same flesh in which he had died and been buried, he often showed, when brought into the company of men, all the functions of all his members expressed to their eyes and ears. But if even the angels, whose created nature is simply spiritual, are said to have tongues, with which they sing praises to the Lord their Creator and never cease giving thanks, how much more will men, even with bodies now spiritual after the resurrection, yet with all the members of the glorified flesh remaining, and their shapes and proportions throughout all the members, have tongues in their mouths and give voice with speaking tongues, by which to utter the divine praises or the affections of their feelings and joys in words? Perhaps the Lord will even add this to the grace and glory of his saints in the ages of his kingdom, that they may sing with tongues and voices as much better as they have advanced by a blessed change to a more blessed nature of bodies, so that, set now in spiritual bodies, they may perhaps speak no longer in human words but in those angelic and heavenly words such as the apostle heard in paradise. And perhaps for this reason he testified that those words were unspeakable for man: because new tongues are already being prepared for the saints among the other kinds of rewards. Men of this age are therefore not yet permitted to use them, so that the immortals may speak with these now befitting their glory, of whom it is said, ‘For they will shout and sing a hymn,’ without doubt in heaven, where they will be with the Lord and delight in the abundance of peace, rejoicing in the sight of the throne, casting bowls and crowns before the feet of the Lamb, and singing to him a new song, gathered to the choirs of angels, powers, dominions, and thrones, so that they too, singing with unending voice with the Cherubim and Seraphim and those four living creatures, may say, ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts,’ and the rest that you know.

This, then, is what I, needy and poor, that foolish one, your little one, whom as a truly wise man you are accustomed to bear with, ask: that you teach me your knowledge or opinion on this, because I know that you have been enlightened by the spirit of revelation from the very Leader and Fount of the wise, so that, as you have known the past and see the present, you may also judge about the future: what you think about these everlasting voices of heavenly creatures, or of those dwelling even above the heavens in the sight of the Most High, and by what organs, in the end, they are expressed. For although the apostle, by saying, ‘If I speak with the tongues of angels,’ showed that they have a speech proper to their nature, or, so to speak, their race, as much higher than human senses and words as the very creation and station of the angels excels mortal inhabitants and earthly dwellings, yet perhaps he spoke of ‘tongues of angels’ for kinds of voices and speech, just as, discussing the variety of charisms, he counts among the gifts of graces ‘kinds of tongues,’ meaning surely that it is for a sign that individuals were given to speak in the speech of many nations. But the voice of God, often sent forth to the saints from a cloud, also shows that there can be speech without a tongue, since the tongue is a little member of the body and a great one. But perhaps, because God placed the function of the voice in this member, he called the words and voices even of the incorporeal creation of angels a tongue, as Scripture is accustomed to assign the names of members to God too according to the kinds of his operations. Pray for us and teach us.

Our dearest and sweetest brother Quintus hastens to return from us to you as quickly as he came slowly back to us; and this letter, fuller of erasures than of lines, speaks of his urgency in demanding a reply; the page shows the excessive haste of the said exactor. For he came to us on the day before the Ides of May to ask for the reply, and obtained leave to be dismissed on the Ides before the sixth hour. Judge, then, whether I have commended or accused him with such testimony. Perhaps, or rather without doubt, he will be judged more praiseworthy than blameworthy, who most justly hastened back from darkness, which we are in comparison with your light, to his own light.

Even a short letter from your oneness of heart is a great refreshment to us, as a thirsty field is revived by dew in a dearth of rain. So we confess that we were refreshed by your letter, short as it was, yet yours, brought by the boy of our common sons; but we were also afflicted again, because you told us that you are still suffering at Rome in the heat of anxiety and in uncertainty about your stay. May the Lord grant us to be gladdened by the Lord as soon as possible about your affairs, so that, as we suffer with you in your anxiety, we may rejoice with you when you are cheered, and may begin to hope for the fruit of your presence, if you begin to be certain of your decision or of the Lord’s good pleasure concerning you.

Indeed, your advice, given with that affection by which you love us as yourself, that I should take up the study of Greek letters more attentively, I gladly accept; but I cannot carry it out, unless perhaps the Lord grants my wishes so that I may enjoy your company longer. For how shall I be able to make progress in an unknown language if there is no one from whom to learn what I do not know? For I believe that in my translation of holy Clement, besides the other failings of my talent, you noticed above all this want of skill: that some things, where I could not understand or express the words, I translated by grasping, or rather, to speak more truly, guessing the sense. All the more do I need the mercy of God, that he may grant me a fuller supply of you, because for a poor man it will be riches to gather with the eager mouth of a hungry heart even the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table.

At the very time when this was being written, there fell under my eyes, in the reading set out, that chapter of Genesis in which Judah is blessed by Jacob. And because the Lord had given this most fitting occasion, it pleased me after a time to knock at the doors of your heart. So, if you love me, or rather because you love me much, I ask you to write to me how you understand the blessings of the patriarchs themselves, and, if you know anything in them difficult in meaning and worth knowing, to let me know it; but especially about that chapter in which he says, ‘Binding his foal to the vine and his ass’s colt to the haircloth’: what is his foal, what the ass, or what the ass’s colt? And why is his own foal bound to the vine, but the ass’s colt to haircloth?

Although our son Cerealis left me uncertain whether he would go on to you at the time when he returns to holy Peter, yet we judged that not to write to you through one who is as much yours as ours would be as blameworthy for us as it would be sad for you. So, preferring to risk the loss of a little sheet, if perhaps he did not see you, than the loss of a courtesy, as we believe, if he did see you, we have entrusted this letter not to chance but to faith. For we believe that in the Lord the way of our letter and of our son will be directed to you, because for those who desire good all things will turn out for good; and he desires you as much as you ought to be desired by one who understands his own benefit from your company. And so I presume that, according to his faith and devotion, his desire will be satisfied with good things, and he will reach you and remain with you, and a saving protection before the Lord will be doubled for us in you both, when so good a son, companion, disciple, and helper is added to you, and you, given to him by the Lord as father and teacher of every good, add the strength of spiritual grace to the effective power of prayers. As for us, although, thanks to your love, we presume that, about to return to the East, you will not bear to go away without visiting us, yet because of our sins we fear lest even the daughter of Babylon, so near to us, turn you away. So we commit our desires and prayers to the Lord, that he may act not according to our merit but according to our desire, and direct your way to us in the way of his peace, because those who do not walk in it have been condemned to a reprobate mind, lest they deserve to desire you.

Indeed, with that importunity with which I have been accustomed to knock at your door even at midnight, never forced to modesty and moderation in asking by fear of a refusal, I now hand over to you this business of mine: that you deign to explain the blessings of the twelve patriarchs, distributed among the rest of his sons, of which you have already published for me the beginning, the prophecy concerning the person of Judah expounded in written pages, as was asked, with a threefold interpretation. So may I through you become acquainted with the truth and have as author of great grace and praise, if to those who, thinking of me beyond what I am because of the grace of a necessary work, have thought I should be consulted, I give answers that are divine and of your spirit rather than foolish and of my own understanding. May the grace of God remain with you, as it does, for ever, brother of one heart in Christ.

… For if you see today priests worthy of the Lord, such as Exuperius at Toulouse, or Simplicius at Vienne, or Amandus at Bordeaux, or Diogenianus at Albi, or Dynamius at Angoulême, or Venerandus at Clermont, or Alethius at Cahors, or now Pegasius at Périgueux, however the evils of the world stand, you will see the most worthy guardians of the whole faith and religion, in their excellence …

It is honorable to proclaim the works of the Lord, and this has been the cause of this letter, because the affair of this householder, Secundinianus, whom I am commending to your oneness of heart, cannot, as you will see, be told without the glory and praise of the Lord. For as he said in the gospel, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working,’ so he does now too, and the good Lord does not cease to rouse and truly challenge our faith by evident proofs of his truth. So, appearing to us, as it is written, by various proofs, God our Savior works for us on land and sea, and what he does in individuals he provides for the faith and salvation of many. For see how wonderful and worth proclaiming is the work which the Lord Jesus has done in one old man with his holy angels. This is the case of our aforesaid friend and brother, a man faithful in Christ. Last winter he was compelled in Sardinia, along with other shipowners, to take on board, by the service of his own ship, grain to be carried to the state granaries; and, without waiting for the time of the usual sailing, under pressure of public authority, he sent off the loaded vessel before the mildness of summer. At once, as he told me, a storm arose in the nearest strait, drove back from their intended courses a fleet of many ships rashly set loose from the harbor, and wrecked them on the shore. His ship, at a certain place on that island which they call Ad Pulvinos, they tried to anchor fast, so that it might not be dashed likewise; but, as the violence of that same storm prevailed and the cables broke, the terrified sailors let down the skiff, either to help hold the ship more strongly by renewing the anchors and fixing them deeper, or to rescue themselves, if they could, from the danger to the ship. But the storm, it is said, at once snatched them with the frail refuge of their little boat onto the rocks and overwhelmed them with the breaking waves. One of the whole number of the crew, an old man assigned to bailing, they left behind, either forgetful of him in their fear or despising him as a cheap life. Meanwhile the ship, abandoned by sailors and anchors, was carried out to sea.

The old man, who had not known he was left behind, when he felt himself tossed and rolled, came up from the depths of the ship and saw everything empty, sea on every side and on every side sky. Since solitude heaped up both fear and danger for the wretched man, he spent six days and nights fasting. For his tears were his bread day and night. Then, when he was now more eager for death than for life and longed for an end of his sufferings by the departure of his soul, the merciful and compassionate Lord deigned to approach him close at hand and revive him with the food of his word. He himself relates, still weeping, the happiness of his danger, and he cannot be heard without tears of the heart and joy of the spirit, how he was addressed by Christ as he came near, how he was strengthened by his exhortation, how he was bidden to cut down the mast, the cutting of which at that time was the remedy for the ship; and what many very strong men can hardly do without danger to themselves and the ship, he, alone and weak, not daring to undertake, dared at the word of God. Struck only twice and lightly with the axe, touched rather than hewn by an old man’s hand, the mast sprang so from the wound that it was thrown far outside the ship into the waves and fell harmlessly. Then, in the various tasks that the tossing of the sea and the rigging of a ship require, when either the foresail had to be set or the bilge had to be emptied, he was called by the Lord by the name of Victor and bidden only to stretch out his hand, by way of acting, to any work. For among the many and various graces of divine wonders concerning this old man, this gift of God too seems not to be passed over: that he also received the name by which he is now enrolled at his rebirth and is written by men and angels. For by his family name he was called Valgius, who is now called Victor by the Lord; and he is a victor in the Lord, who gave him a name fitting his own works in him, because, namely, both at sea, over storms and shipwreck, by the help of Christ, and lately on land, by the grace of the same, over sins and the devil, he has triumphed, so that, to be wholly renewed in Christ, he should remain old neither in name nor in man.

Wonderful faithfulness and unspeakable kindness of the saving Lord! If perhaps the old man, sluggish with sleep, rose too slowly for his tasks, he first felt for him gently with a soft hand, so that he might not wake up in fright, and roused him by pulling his ear lightly; and when the old man made a light effort, he saw at his very first attempt the things done by angelic hands. He had hardly touched a rope as if to haul it, and already the topsail stood unfurled on its spars, or the ship was making sail. Water taken in through the seams had tried to sink the ship, and after one or two scoops of a small bailer, the ship was drained and dried of moisture, and he had nothing to do, amazed that the labor was taken from him without labor and his task forestalled by a hidden hand, if one can rightly call hidden a hand that gave such clear help. But the workers themselves were not withheld from the simple eyes of the most innocent old man; for he often saw armed men, that is, soldiers of the army of heaven, keeping watch over the vessel and managing every task of seamanship. And indeed no sailors befitted that ship but angels, since the governor of the world was its helm. For the Lord himself, now shining with his own face, as he is described in the Apocalypse, and radiant in his hair, now venerable with the face of his confessor and friend, my lord, our common patron Felix, sat on the stern, as it is called in nautical usage, at the steering oars, or rather in place of the steering oars, which the ship had lost on that shipwreck shore along with its anchors and sailors, unhappy, but happily, so that for all its lost men and gear it gained either the Lord’s martyr or the martyr’s Lord. The old man relates, weeping for joy, that he used to lie at the feet of him who steered, now the Lord, now the martyr, and even, as he drew him more familiarly, had a blessed pillow for his reclining head on the sacred knees and bosom and in divine breaths of fragrance.

Should we now doubt that the bosoms of the patriarchs lie open to faithful servants in Christ, when his boundless goodness has cherished in his own lap, or in his saint’s, even this man, then a catechumen? For he himself was present in his saint, he who said, as you know, to the Father, ‘I have given them the glory which you gave me, that they may be one, as we are one: I in them, and you in me’; and again to the apostles, in whom he spoke to his whole body: ‘Behold, I am with you all the days of my life until the end of the world.’ This his power proves daily to us by conspicuous miracles, working in the hand of his apostles and martyrs, so that we may believe that the Son of God and our Lord Jesus, reigning in heaven at the right hand of the Father from the resurrection of the dead, is the Lord of the living, not of the dead. So when he cherished the old sailor in the likeness of his holy confessor too, he himself was present in his saint, and soothed the weary and spent man with gentle words, and refreshed him no more with food than with word, because he himself is the true bread which came down from heaven to give food to all flesh. For in every man he loves his own work and wishes every man, as far as lies in him, to be saved, because, being the giver of life and wholly life, he did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living, he who prefers mercy to sacrifice, nor does he accept persons, he who made all, but judges according to merits, because God is judge.

In short, the sailor was not cheaper to him because of the calamity of shipwreck or because of age and want; rather, all those things for which his comrades had despised him moved Christ and shook his heart. ‘For his eyes always look upon the poor.’ Surely this poor man too cried, and the Lord heard him. Perhaps the Lord, and the very cause of his danger, even dictated to him the prophetic words for praying, so that he cried: ‘Save me, O God, for the waters have come in even to my soul. I have come into the depth of the sea; let not the storm of water drown me, nor the deep swallow me up. Let your mercy quickly anticipate me, before I am fixed in the mire of the deep and the pit shuts its mouth upon me. Look upon me, for I am alone and poor,’ and ‘I have become like a pelican of the wilderness, like a night-raven in its dwelling,’ and so, in my ship, ‘like a lone sparrow on the housetop.’ The Lord heard and had mercy on him, and sent his angels round about him, and became his salvation. He commanded the storm, and it stood still into a breeze; he rebuked the sea, and its waves were silent, and he led him on many waters, seeing the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. He fed him with the fat of wheat, and, with Christ speaking to him, he was filled as with honey from the rock. He who has blessed the poor in spirit looked upon the lowly; he who promised comfort to those who mourn spoke to him as he wept; and he who gives fullness to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, himself the bread, the righteousness, and the fountain of life, watered from himself and fed this fainting man, and he had mercy on him with no other kindness than that with which, devoted to the Father even to the death of the cross, he has had mercy on every man tossing in the sea of this world, because, namely, one man is a portion of the whole, and the whole is the form and cause of one man.

In short, governing not only the ship but also the man for whose sake he was guarding the ship, and dispensing in him the distinct tasks of flesh and spirit, he bade him rest secure by night and watch carefully by day, promising that he would keep watch for him while he slept and would work with him while he watched. You will surely recognize in these words of the Lord that affection by which he always so cherishes our hope as not to relax our care, and so provides for the weak flesh that the spirit does not cease to be willing. And therefore he allowed the weary old man to sleep in such a way that he did not release even an old and exhausted man from the task of watching, so that, namely, he might not slacken into sluggish sleep and begin to sleep not only in body but also in mind. Fearing this, a certain holy man says, ‘Enlighten my eyes, O Lord, lest I ever sleep in death.’ For torpor of minds is a disease near to death. And then the enemy will say, ‘I have prevailed against him,’ if sleep has overcome the eyes of the mind too. We recognize, then, that he was present to the old man who said to his drowsy disciples, ‘Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation,’ and again said to them when they were watching, now secure in the vigor of those he had roused, ‘Sleep now and take your rest.’ That this was said no more of bodily sleep than of firmness of faith he teaches elsewhere, saying, ‘Be steadfast, for I have overcome the world.’ For this is man’s true rest, if, constant in faith and secure from every enemy by Christ’s victory, he enjoys peace of one heart: for he is our rest who is our peace, and who watches for us so that he may rest in us, and who now bids us watch for the sake of perpetual rest.

The Lord himself deigned to do in this one old man those same gifts of his kindness which he wishes done in the whole world: severe with gentleness, and indulgent but not without the bridle of fear, he pulled his ear to shake off the sleep of torpor, and offered his bosom to give him perpetual rest. For twenty-three days a man shut off not only from land but also from men, the plaything of all the winds, an exile from every land, a guest of different seas and without a share in the human race, worn out by fasting, age, and fear amid the waves and the monsters of the sea in the wandering lodging of a drifting ship: did he, I ask you, endure by his own nature? To whom, then, could it be obscure that God was in him? What God do I mean? Is it not he who alone does wonders, who calls the things that are not as though they were? By his help the ship swam across the whole lonely sea and moved itself on with an invisible helmsman, as if empty and yet with heavy bulk, with the man shut in its cabins along with the grain, as that ark, pregnant with the seeds of the world, floated on the flood, and, tossed on more than one sea, did not change its course with the storms.

First, driven toward the City, the ship saw the lighthouse of Rome’s harbor; then it coasted Campania in long stretches, and, the whirlwinds changing, flew over to the shores of Africa; and, carried off again from them, it ran past Sicily. Around Sicily, they say, the straits are agitated and full of whirlpools from the many islands, and the courses dangerous even for ships with a helmsman, amid the windings and obstacles of the islands; yet the idle old man passed through them by so direct and unimpeded a voyage that, like a divine ship, wise with a breath sent from God, it of its own accord avoided what was to be shunned, sought what was to be followed, and was turned usefully and skillfully through necessary detours, until at last, on the twenty-third day, God now taking pity, it was to put an end to its wanderings and dangers on the shores of Lucania. As it drew near them, the eternal Lord, so that his tireless goodness might work its wonders to the very end of the voyage he had taken on himself, sent out to meet it, by a silent prompting of his inspiration, fishermen driven from the shore in two little boats. Seeing this ship from afar, they fled terrified at first sight; for, as they themselves afterward reported, it seemed to them full of armed men and like a warship. Then, called back at last by the loud and often repeated cries of our old man, they reasoned with themselves, and, the Lord so working, they understood that they had nothing to fear from the ship to which they were called. They came up to the vessel, and only with difficulty, though the old man assured them of it, and when at last they had boarded it, did they believe their own eyes that what they had seen from afar crowded was empty of soldiers. There the old man received them with a meal which he had prepared the day before at the Lord’s bidding, and filled them abundantly with the plentiful bread of the lost sailors, and rewarded them with a great payment. Glad at these wages, with their little boats serving it and leading the way with a towline, they brought the ship to their harbor, as if it had served its time and been crowned after a heavy war and contest, being the survivor of shipwreck and the victor over winds and waves. What would the vanity of those men have made of this ship, who, by the error by which they worship whatever they fashion, have consecrated in fabulous literature the ship of the unhappy Argonauts and even now believe they see it in the sky and count it among the choirs of stars? With no less madness they venerate the ship that carried the Epidaurian dragon, while the serpent himself, whose embodied phantom they carried, mocks them.

But let us flee from fictions and foreign things, and not mix the lies and poisons of those who are perishing with the light of our truth. We have our own ships, so that we may more worthily use true and domestic examples. We have the ark of Noah. We have both the ship of Tarshish and the ship of the man of Tarsus. But that one from which the whale, avenger and guardian, received the fugitive prophet of God can be compared with this ship only so far as it was in danger before the lot was cast; but the third ship fits my example in this, that it carried the apostle and martyr, and for his sake and in him received Christ, or when he gave back to him the whole multitude of the ship that was about to perish.

Let us then set before ourselves and behold in mind the most beautiful spectacle of divine work: seeing one ship snatched from the wreck of many ships and all its sailors, with one old man traveling over different seas, alone on the sea and he alone in it. Now that ark of the flood, the image of the church, will turn before our eyes, floating firmly over the whole world, over the submerged globe, under the single face of a sea spread everywhere, between the poured-out waters of heaven and the deep; and this ship bore its image in many ways on a smaller scale. For as that ark was full of seeds of every kind, so this ship was full of various grains, carrying, besides the public cargo, much from the wages and private goods of the sailors. That ark carried one family for the restoration of the human race, and this ship one man for the faith of many. To that the dove brought the branch of peace; to this the Lamb showed peace. A bird entered that one in the image of the Holy Spirit, and Christ approached this one through the image of his confessor. Let us look also at Jonah’s ship: we shall see this one saved by a larger gift of the same power and by a greater miracle. For that one was saved with all safe except one; this one was saved with all lost but one. And this ship also seems to have imitated that whale, the harmless devourer of the living prophet, since it likewise carried a man shut in its belly through the depths of the sea and set him unharmed on the shore, as that beast, fasting from its prey, at the command of hiccups threw out the undigested man from the prison of its spacious belly and poured him back to God, at whose command it had received him, and, the mystery of the saving passion fulfilled, vomited him out on the third day in hope of the resurrection.

But the company of that ship which was granted to the apostle was happier, not indeed by their own merits; for they too had deserved shipwreck, having sailed in contempt of the apostle’s advice. But we can glory no less among the divine works in this vessel too, whose men, though they lacked a like advocate, yet in its single sailor the apostle’s God himself was present as helmsman; and it deserved to be freed for the safety of one innocent man, which that ship did not deserve which first received the chosen vessel in chains, condemned for contempt of the apostle and for the crime of his prison captivity. That ship’s band seems to me to have been freed also for the mystery of grace, so that they escaped naked from the wreck of the doomed ship, namely so that, freed from the former ship, that is, from the sin of Adam’s flesh, and cleansed by the very waves through which they had escaped, lightened of all that they had thrown into the sea, that is, of worldly burdens, and stripped of the heavy and wet garment of the old man, as of the waves as of sins, they might be received by a whole and sound ship, which, presenting the full form of the church of faith, carried them safe into port and to Rome. In these things likewise mystical arguments are formed. For the changed ship is life renewed in Christ, and the port of salvation is the church, whose name, as Greek bears witness, is ‘Rome’ for strength. Let us bless God, then, and exult in our God, who dwells on high and looks upon lowly things, whose good pleasure is not in the strength of the horse nor in the tents of a man, but in the humble and those who fear him, and who, as he has shown in this old man too, heals all the broken in heart and binds up their wounds.

I chatter too much, brother. I feel it, but I beg you to bear with me a few words more. For I would like to ask: would you rather be honored with any dignity of this world than with this favor of God which this old man has enjoyed? Do those seem more blessed to you who shine in purple, who sip from jewels, are stuffed into togas and painted with embroidered robes, and who, ruling over fellow mortals and many better men, are slaves of their desires and of their possessions, insolent to God with God’s gifts, needy of Christ, rich in sin, barren in life, fruitful in death? What, I ask, did the person of a bilge-man, the cheapest among sailors, his poor dress and the sheepskin of the Sardinians, harm this old man? For he was clothed in skins sewn together, when the Lord of hosts, the King of glory, blessed him with his conversation, enlightened him with his sight, and lulled him to sleep in his lap, surely loving in him this very thing too, that he imitated Elijah’s sheepskin and the dress of John the forerunner in a bristly garment. To see the king of the world close at hand and to be sprinkled with his even disdainful speech a great part of the world thinks so blessed that, if it cannot obtain it otherwise, it would even buy it with losses, and, having obtained it, becomes forgetful not only of men but also of itself. How much happier in dignity than how many is this man, whom the King of kings has honored? How much nobler in nobility than how many, whom Christ has acknowledged? How much richer in wealth than how many, on whom such great goods of so many saints have been bestowed together, that he saw Christ like Israel, spoke with the King of heaven face to face like Moses, rested in Christ’s bosom with almost the same familiarity with which John reclined on his breast, and finally received a new name like the friends of God, whom you know well in the patriarchs and apostles? I asked you a little earlier whether you would prefer to be granted this man’s grace rather than all the glory of this world; for my part I think that the very rulers of this darkness, if they deserved to see it, would prefer the most blessed calamity of our poor old man to their wretched felicities and joys, which are to be mourned for ever.

You may perhaps ask by what merits this old sailor, who had always lingered in the darkness of ignorance and was a stranger alike to the works of righteousness and the knowledge of truth, seems to have obtained what is not easily granted to very few workers, although they have borne the weight and heat of the whole day from the morning watch until night. The apostle will surely answer you that the graces and gifts of God are without repentance, and that no flesh will be justified by works. It is the time of grace, and faith is counted for righteousness, because sons of Abraham are raised daily from stones. For now is the acceptable time, now the day of salvation, in which we offer sacrifices of peace and praise; and the sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit, and the temple of God is in man, and saving things are in the heart of the believer, and the holy of holies is in purified breasts. So he who does not despise the contrite and humbled received our old man as a sacrifice pleasing to him for his natural goods, as an odor of sweetness. For he is said always to have been so pure in mind by inborn simplicity that he did not know how to sin. Now, in the old age of his last years, a boy in body and a little one in malice, he bears the infancy not only of grace but also of mind. For lately, as I said above, he has been reborn in Christ and dedicated to the Lord, through whom he escaped the waves of life and the waters of death.

Receive him, then, gladly in the Lord, as a good odor of Christ, as a lamb of the month of the new fruits, whom I, the shepherd of a small flock but the giver of a great pledge, have sent to your oneness of heart as a spiritual guest-gift, from the new offspring of mother church, spotless, with shining fleece. For I thought no one else more worthy of such a gift than you, who, according to God’s grace and working, would know how to look upon him and receive him. For I seem to see with what rejoicing, with what wonder, with what faith you will hear of him and see him, when you consider that angels sailed with him, that a martyr steered for him, that he slept in Christ’s bosom, that Christ pulled his ear and gave him a name. I confess to you that my affection, while I too much admire and love such remarkable deeds of God in a man of our own time, was almost cruel to the old man himself. For I pulled his ear so constantly that I almost wore it away. I would also have liked to cut off part of one ear, if what would have been a pledge to me had not been a wound to him. For no other affection carries men off to Jerusalem than to see and touch the places in which Christ was bodily present, and to be able to say from their own experience, ‘We have entered his tabernacles and worshiped where his feet stood.’ Although a higher meaning is to be held here too, yet the simple sense according to the letter must not be misused when the matter requires it. If, then, it is a religious desire to see the places where Christ entered, suffered, rose, and from which he ascended, and it is a blessing to take and have either a little dust from those places or something, even like a splinter, from the very wood of the cross, consider how much greater and fuller a grace it is to behold a living old man as a witness of divine truth? If the memory of a former divine presence is celebrated by the manger of the one born, the river of the one baptized, the garden of the Master praying, the courtyard of the one judged, the pillar of the one scourged, the thorns of the one crowned, the wood of the one hanged, the rock of the one buried, the place of the one raised and taken up, and lifeless things prove the ancient truth to present faith as living documents, how reverently is this man to be looked upon, whom the word of God deigned to address, from whom the divine face did not hide itself, to whom Christ showed now his martyr, now himself, in whose living earth we see the footprints of the Lord’s body impressed, if with faithful eyes and spiritual sight we read in him what the bosom of Christ and what his hand touched, stroking often with our hand the grey hair that often lay on the Lord’s knee and was often warmed in the Lord’s bosom, and often feeling the little ear which heavenly fingers pulled as the Lord played?

You have, my brother, my guest-gift: eat it in the spirit of love, and if you have felt sick at the bitterness of my talkativeness, you will temper your disgust with the grace of the Lord and the sweetness of the heavenly story. But I know for certain that you will seek and desire something by which to show toward this man the love with which you love Christ. There is material at hand: apply the zeal of devout devotion, and stand by Secundinianus, this man’s patron, with the whole affection of your faith, to whom almighty Christ, when he already despaired, gave back the ship preserved for this man’s salvation. For you will be defending a gift of Christ. Do not allow, through the envy of the devil, by means of a wicked man, what God gave back to Secundinianus from shipwreck to be snatched from him, or, already snatched, to be denied him. There is said to be a steward of a Christian man, our brother Postumianus, who, when that ship drifted onto the coast of Bruttium, where the senator’s estate is washed by the sea, being greedier than the sea and acting as a pirate on land without a pirate boat, seized it and, having taken it, emptied it; for even now it remains empty on that very shore, to testify to the loss of a cargo saved in vain at sea and lost on land. Complaints about this robbery have often been lodged with the provincial judge, but our Pharaoh has hardened his heart, perhaps so that wonders may be done in him; and when summoned by the officials, he first resisted by force, and afterward fled to Rome. This necessity has forced my Secundinianus to travel to the City by land with his one sailor. I do not doubt that our brother Postumianus will be moved both by your intervention and by his own faith and justice. Therefore we must intervene with this moderation, which you will surely do even if I do not remind you: that with equal labor you may defend and excuse his guilty man to that excellent senator, that is, Christian man, so that the robber himself may be content with the gain of impunity, and we content to receive back from him the gifts of God.

Of the few things that have come to my mind now, as the bearer of my letter is already running to the ship and I am hurrying in his haste, I will set out some, so that you may not write back to me without a bonus. If perhaps they are clear and seem obscure to me, let none of the prudent sons of ours who may perhaps stand around you at the hour of reading this little piece laugh at my foolishness; rather let them favor me with the goodwill of brotherly love by instructing me, so that I may become a sharer with those who see and, with minds enlightened by your teaching, consider wonderful things from the law of the Lord.

Tell me, then, blessed teacher of Israel, what is meant by what he says in the fifteenth psalm: ‘To the saints who are in his land he has made wonderful all his wishes among them. For their infirmities have been multiplied; afterward they made haste.’ Whom does he call saints, who are saints on earth? Are they those Jews who, children of Abraham’s flesh and not children of the promise, are excluded from the seed that was called in Isaac? Are they called saints on earth because they are holy by fleshly descent, but earthly in life and understanding, minding earthly things and growing old in fleshly observance in the oldness of the letter, not being reborn into a new creation, because they did not receive him through whom the old things have passed away and become new? For perhaps he calls them saints in this psalm in the same way as he calls them righteous in the gospel, where he says, ‘I came not to call the righteous but sinners,’ that is, those righteous ones who glory in the holiness of their descent and the letter of the law, to whom it is said, ‘Do not boast of Abraham as your father, for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.’ Their type is set forth in that Pharisee who, recounting his righteous deeds as though the Lord did not know them, proclaimed them in the temple, not praying to be heard but demanding, as a debt of merit, for works good indeed but unwelcome to God, because what righteousness had built pride destroyed; and he did not do this in silence but cried it aloud, so that it appeared that he was not speaking to the divine ears, since he wished to be heard by men too. And so he did not please God, because he pleased himself, since the Lord has scattered the bones of men who please themselves. ‘They were confounded,’ it says, ‘because he despised them,’ he who does not despise a humble and contrite heart.

Indeed, in the very parable of the gospel in which the figures of the Pharisee and the tax collector are compared, the Lord himself shows plainly what he accepts in a man and what he rejects, as it is written, ‘God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ Therefore he declares that the tax collector went away from the temple justified rather than the Pharisee, the one for confessing his sins, the other for reckoning up his righteous deeds. Rightly that self-praiser went away rejected from the face of God, who, though he displayed knowledge of the law by his very name, had forgotten the Lord saying in the prophet, ‘On whom shall I dwell but on the humble and quiet and him who trembles at my words?’ But the other, accusing himself in a contrite heart, is accepted and obtains pardon for his confessed sins because of the grace of humility, while that holy Pharisee, holy in the way the Jews are holy, carries back a burden of sins for boasting of holiness. Surely those Jews are a figure of him of whom the apostle says that, ‘seeking to establish their own righteousness,’ which is from the law, ‘they have not submitted to the righteousness of God,’ which is from faith, which was reckoned to Abraham our father as righteousness, not from works, because he believed God according to God’s omnipotence. Before God he is truly righteous who lives by faith, and he is a saint not on earth but in heaven, because he walks not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, whose citizenship is in heaven, glorying not in circumcision of the flesh but in circumcision of the heart, which is done not in the letter but in the Spirit, invisibly, whence his praise is not from men but from God.

Then, as to what he adds in the same verse, ‘He has made his wishes wonderful among them,’ I believe he says it because he first lit for them the lamp of the law and gave them the precepts of living. For ‘he made known,’ it says, ‘his ways to Moses, his wishes to the children of Israel.’ Then he worked among them the very mystery of his love, being born in the flesh of a virgin, God in their nation, and made man from their flesh of the seed of David; then the mighty works of healing which he performed in them and before them, by which he was not only not believed but even blasphemed by them, when they said, ‘If this man were from God, he would not heal on the sabbath,’ and, ‘He casts out demons only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons.’ Because of this mind, blinded by hardened impiety, their infirmities and their darkness were multiplied.

But what is it that he says, ‘Afterward they made haste’? Was it to repentance, like those in the Acts of the Apostles who, pricked by the preaching of blessed Peter, believed in him whom they had crucified and, hastening to be cleansed from so great a sin, ran to the gift of grace? Or rather, since the powers of the soul are strengthened by faith in and love of God, were the infirmities of the soul multiplied for those wicked men, empty of both, occupied by the deadly sicknesses of impious crimes? For Christ is the light and life of believers, and healing is under his wings. So it is no wonder if both the darkness and the infirmities of those who did not receive the life and the light, and would not remain under his wings, were multiplied to their destruction. As he himself, weeping, declares in his gospel, he often wished to gather them under his wings, as a hen gathers her chicks, and they would not. With their infirmities multiplied, then, to what did they make haste? Perhaps to crying out for the Lord’s cross and wresting it from an unwilling Pilate with wicked voices, so as to fill up the measure of their fathers, that they might kill the Lord of the prophets, whose fathers killed the prophets themselves, by whom it was announced that he would come as the Savior of the world: ‘afterward they made haste.’ ‘For their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and unhappiness are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known,’ that is, Christ, who says, ‘I am the way.’

In the following psalm I would like this explained to me, what it means: ‘From your hidden things their belly has been filled. They were filled with pork,’ or, as I hear is written in some psalters, ‘they were filled with sons, and they left what remained to their little ones.’

Again, in another psalm I am accustomed to wonder, understanding the Son to be speaking to the Father, in the fifty-eighth psalm, where, about the hostile Jews, of whom he had said above, ‘Behold, they will speak with their mouth, and a sword is on their lips,’ he says a little further on: ‘Do not kill them, lest they ever forget your law. Scatter them by your power and destroy them, O Lord.’ This we see fulfilled in them to this day. For they have been destroyed from their old glory, living without temple, without sacrifices, and without prophets, in dispersion among all nations. But why do we wonder that he was already praying through the prophet that they should not be killed, for whom he prayed also at the very time of the passion, as they were leading him to the cross, saying, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do’? But what he added, ‘lest they ever forget your law,’ as if their life were necessary for this, even without faith in the gospel, I confess is obscure to me. For what does it profit them for salvation, which is sought by faith alone, to be occupied in the memory and meditation of the law? Unless perhaps for the honor of the law itself or of Abraham’s race, so that even in the earthly part of his fleshly seed, which seems to be counted like the sand of the sea, the letter of the ancient law may endure; unless perhaps some, by reading the law, may be enlightened to faith in Christ, who is the end of both the law and the prophets and shines out, prefigured and prophesied, in all their books; or because from those wicked men there is to come a generation of the elect, who, chosen from each tribe, will be sealed by twelve thousands, to whom the very Revelation of blessed John bears this witness, from the voice of the angel announcing it, that they will cling more familiarly to the retinue of the eternal King, wholly spotless and without experience of human union, of whom he specially says, ‘They follow the Lamb wherever he goes, because they have not defiled themselves with women; for they are virgins.’

In the sixty-seventh, besides other things, this is most obscure to me, where it says, ‘But God will shatter the heads of his enemies, the crown of the hair of those who walk about in their sins’: what it means to walk about the crown of the hair in sins. For he did not say ‘the crown of the head,’ but ‘the crown of the hair,’ which has no feeling. Does he want to show a man filled with sins? It is written, ‘Every heart in pain, from the feet to the head.’ And a little further on, what he says: ‘the tongue of your dogs from the enemies by himself’: by whom himself? And can the Gentiles be called God’s dogs, whom he himself in the gospel calls dogs? Or perhaps he calls those God’s dogs who can be reckoned such, if any who bear the Christian name live like Gentiles, whose portion is set with the unbelievers, because they deny in deeds the God whom they worship in words?

So much for the psalms for now; now I will set out something from the apostle too. He says to the Ephesians what he had said in another letter about the grades or orders of God’s arrangements, the Holy Spirit working the divisions of graces: ‘And he gave some apostles, some prophets, others evangelists, others pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints,’ and the rest. I would like you to distinguish for me in this diversity of names what is the property of offices or graces for each name: what is proper to apostles, what to prophets, what to evangelists, what to pastors, and what to teachers; for in all these different names I see that a similar and almost one office of teaching was carried on. These prophets, whom he placed after the apostles, I do not think are those who in the order of time were before the apostles, but those to whom, already under the apostles, there was given by grace either the interpretation of the Scriptures and insight into minds, or the foretelling of the time to come, as Agabus discerned, who both foretold the coming famine and announced in word, and showed by the sign of his belt, what blessed Paul was to suffer in Jerusalem. I wish to know what difference there is especially between pastors and teachers, since both names are usually given to those set over the church.

Likewise, what he says to Timothy: ‘I exhort, therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men’: I ask you to explain to me what distinction there is in this diversity of words, since all the things he said should be done seem to me to belong to the office of prayer.

Likewise I ask and beg you to expound to me what he says to the Romans. For I confess that I am quite blind about this saying of the apostle concerning the Jews, where he says, ‘As regards the gospel they are enemies for your sake; but as regards election they are most beloved for the sake of the fathers.’ How are they enemies for the sake of us who have believed from the Gentiles, as though the Gentiles could not have believed unless the Jews had not believed? Or was the one God, Creator of all, who wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, not capable of acquiring both, unless he possessed the one in place of the other? Then, most beloved for the sake of the fathers: how or why most beloved, if they do not believe and persist in being enemies to God? ‘Did I not,’ it says, ‘hate those who hated you, O God, and waste away over your enemies? I hated them with a perfect hatred.’ Surely, I think, the Father’s voice says this to the Son through the prophet in the same psalm, where he had said above about the part that believes, ‘But to me your friends, O God, are exceedingly honored; their rule is exceedingly strengthened.’ And what does it profit them for salvation, which is obtained only through faith and the grace of Christ, if they are most beloved by God for the sake of the fathers? For what good are they loved who must be condemned for this reason, that, through their unbelief differing from the faith of their parents, the prophets and patriarchs, they are enemies of the gospel of Christ? If, then, they are most beloved by God, how will they perish? And if they do not believe, how will they not perish? If they are loved for the sake of the fathers without merit of their own, how will they not be saved for the sake of the fathers too? But ‘even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in their midst, they would not save their wicked sons; they alone would be saved.’

Dig up for me from the deep yet another more obscure thing and bring it out into the shallows. In the letter to the Colossians I cannot at all make out what he says: ‘Let no one lead you astray, wishing in humility and the religion of angels, walking in what he has not seen, vainly puffed up by the sense of his flesh, and not holding the head.’ Of what angels does he speak? If of hostile and evil ones, what is their religion or what their humility, and who is the teacher of this seduction, who, under the pretext of some angelic religion or other, teaches as if seen and discovered what he has not seen? Without doubt they are heretics, who both follow and bring forth doctrines of demons, inventions conceived from their spirit, feigning as seen phantasms that they have not seen and sowing them by pestilent arguments in ill-believing hearts. These are the ones who do not hold the head, that is, Christ, the fountain of truth, whatever opposes whose teaching is madness. And these are the blind leaders of the blind, of whom I think it is said, ‘They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug for themselves broken cisterns that cannot hold water.’

Then in the following chapter he added: ‘Do not touch, nor taste, nor handle, things that all perish by their very use, according to the precepts and doctrines of men, having indeed a show of wisdom in superstition and humility, for not sparing the body, not in any honor, to the satisfying of the flesh.’ What are these things, in which the teacher of truth testifies that there is a show of wisdom, and yet denies that the truth of religion is in them? Is he perhaps speaking of such men as he speaks of to Timothy: ‘having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power’? So I ask you especially to unravel for me, word by word, these two chapters from the letter to the Colossians, because he has mixed things to be abhorred with things to be praised. For what is so praiseworthy as a show of wisdom? And what so abhorrent as the superstition of error? Humility too, both pleasing to God and most praiseworthy in true religion, is attributed, along with the show of wisdom, to those very men about whose doctrines and acts we are told: ‘Do not touch nor taste things that perish,’ because they are not from God, and ‘everything that is not from faith is sin.’ And God has scattered the counsels of the wise, who are foolish to God through the prudence of the flesh, which cannot be subject to the law of God. For he knows the thoughts of men, that they are vain. I ask what kind of humility and what kind of show of wisdom he says is in a superstition that comes from the doctrines of men. And what he says, ‘for not sparing the body, not in any honor, to the satisfying of the flesh,’ I understand very little, because in the same sentence there seems to me to be a great difference. For I think he says ‘for not sparing the body’ of some feigned or useless abstinence, such as is commonly affected by heretics; and that he added ‘not in any honor’ because those who practice the appearance of a holy work not in the faith of truth do it for no honor of glory or fruit, which they bring about to the great reproof of their perverse error, transforming themselves into ministers of righteousness. But what he added, ‘to the satisfying of the flesh,’ seems to me contrary to what he says, ‘for not sparing the body.’ For he seems to me not to spare the body who subdues the flesh by fasting, as the apostle says, ‘I bruise my body and bring it into subjection,’ from which work satisfying the flesh is foreign. Unless perhaps he called even that very care for satisfying the flesh, which is especially shameful in those who make a show of religious observance, a not sparing of the body, according to that precept of decency which he gives elsewhere, that each should know how to possess his own vessel in honor, so as to present his body as a living sacrifice pleasing to God, not to the satisfying of the flesh, because the bloating of the body kills the sobriety of the soul and is an enemy to chastity.

It remains for me to put something to your blessedness about passages of the Gospels too; not, indeed, as many as usually come to mind when one reads at leisure (for I had no leisure now to search for things scattered through the books or to stir up my memory in recalling them), but I will ask about at least the few things that come to mind at the hour of this dictation. As for the letter on the form of the resurrection, not long but full of instruction in the faith, with which you replied to my second inquiry while I was spending the winter at Carthage, if you have it copied on sheets, I ask you to send it, or at least to compose it again for me, which is easy for you. For even if the writing does not survive, because perhaps a short letter, as an improvised one, was disdained to be kept among your books, renew it for me with the same sense, brought out of the treasury of your heart, and send it to me among the other replies which you will give me, as I hope, Christ granting a supply of days to me and to you, so that I may receive them, by which your labor may bear fruit in me, according to these chapters of the Scriptures about which I have asked you, who see as through God, so that I may hear what God speaks to me in you or from you.

But I ask you to make this clear to me: how, or for what reason, the Lord after the resurrection was both not recognized and recognized, by the women who first came to the tomb, then afterward by those two on the road, and then by his disciples. For he rose in the same body in which he had suffered. And how was the form of the same body not the same as it had been? Or, if it was the same, how was it not recognized by those who had known it? I believe it belongs to a mystery that he who had not been recognized by those walking on the road was revealed in the breaking of bread. Yet I want to hold this very point by your understanding, not by mine.

And what he says to Mary, ‘Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father’: if she was not allowed to touch him standing close by, how would she touch him when he had ascended to the Father, unless perhaps by the progress of faith and the ascent of the mind, by which God becomes far from or near to a man? And she had doubted about Christ, whom she thought to be the gardener. Perhaps that is why she deserved to hear, ‘Do not touch me.’ For she was judged unworthy to touch Christ with her hand, whom she had not yet grasped by faith nor understood to be God, since she had thought him the gardener, of whom a little before she had heard from the angels, ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?’ So: ‘Do not touch me, because for you I have not yet ascended to the Father, you to whom I still seem only a man; afterward you will touch me, when you have ascended by believing to know me.’

Explain to me too what you think about those words of most blessed Simeon, so that I may follow your understanding, which he spoke when, having come into the temple by the Spirit’s leading to see Christ according to God’s oracle, and having taken the infant Lord in his arms and blessed him, he said to Mary: ‘Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that will be spoken against; and a sword will pierce through your own soul too, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.’ Is he to be believed to have prophesied this of a passion of Mary, which is nowhere written? Or rather of her maternal affection, by which afterward, at the time of the passion, standing by the cross on which was fixed what she herself had borne, she was pierced with the pain of a mother’s heart, and the sword of the cross, which pierced her son according to the flesh while she looked on, pierced her soul too? For I see that in the psalms too it is said thus of Joseph, ‘They humbled his feet in fetters; iron passed through his soul,’ just as Simeon said in the gospel, ‘and a sword will pierce through your own soul.’ He does not say ‘flesh’ but ‘soul,’ in which the affection of love is contained and the sting of pain works like a sword, when either some injury is done to one’s flesh, as with Joseph, who suffered the passions not of death but of injuries, sold as a slave, bound as a criminal, and put in prison; or when one is tormented by the sorrow or pain of inward affection, as in Mary, whom her mother’s mind had brought to the Lord’s cross, in whom she then thought only of the son of her own body, so that, when she saw him dead, she mourned with human weakness and gathered him for burial, presuming nothing for herself about his resurrection, since the penalty of the passion set before her eyes blinded the faith of the wonder that was to follow. And yet the Lord consoled her as she stood by his cross, not trembling with the weakness of a dying man, but, having in his power the very death by which he was willingly passing away, he admonishes her from the cross with the full power of one living and the constancy of one about to rise, saying of the blessed apostle John, ‘Woman, behold your son,’ and likewise to him standing there, ‘Behold your mother.’ Now, passing over through the death of the cross from human frailty, by which he was born of a woman, into the eternity of God, so as to be in the glory of God the Father, he delegates the rights of human affection to a man, and from his disciples he, the younger, chooses the younger, so as fittingly to assign the virgin mother to the virgin apostle. He teaches two things at once in the same saying: leaving us a pattern of devotion, when he is concerned for his mother, so that he whom he was leaving in body might not leave her in care (yet he was not to leave her in body either, because the one she saw dying she was soon to see alive again); and also signifying under this saying, by the hidden reason of divine counsel, the saving mystery of his devotion, which pertains to the faith of all: that he both delegated his mother to another to be held as a mother and comforted in his place, and in turn handed over to her a new son in place of his own body, or rather, so to speak, begot one for her, by which he showed that apart from himself, who was born of that virgin, she neither had nor has a son, because the Savior would not have been so concerned about her desolation if he had not been her only son.

But let us return to the words of Simeon, at whose close I confess that my understanding grows dim. ‘And a sword,’ he says, ‘or blade will pierce through your soul, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.’ According to the letter this is wholly obscure to me, because we nowhere read that most blessed Mary was killed, so that that holy man should seem to have prophesied a future passion for her by a bodily sword. But as to what he added, ‘that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed’ (for ‘God,’ it says, ‘searches hearts and reins’), and the apostle says of the future judgment that ‘then God will make manifest the hidden things of hearts and the secrets of darkness’; and likewise the apostle, expressing spiritually the heavenly arms with which we should be armed in our inner man, calls the word of God the sword of the Spirit, of which he says to the Hebrews, ‘The word of God is living and effective, and sharper than any two-edged sword, reaching,’ he says, ‘even to the dividing of soul and spirit,’ and the rest you know: what wonder, then, if the fiery force of this word and the sharper edge of the two-edged sword passed through the soul of holy Joseph of old and afterward of blessed Mary? For we do not know that iron passed through the body of either the one or the other. And to make it clearer that the prophet there put ‘iron’ for the sword of the word, he says in the very next verse: ‘The word of the Lord set him on fire.’ For the word of God is both fire and sword, as the Word, God himself, says both of himself: ‘For I have come,’ he says, ‘to cast fire on the earth, and what do I wish but that it be kindled?’ And likewise elsewhere he says, ‘I have not come to bring peace but a sword.’ You see that he designated the one power of his teaching by the different names of fire and sword. Or how would a passion or tribulation inflicted by a sword benefit Mary? So I want to know what it had to do with Mary that the thoughts of many hearts should be revealed, or where it appeared that, from the fact that either a fleshly sword of iron or a spiritual sword in the word of God passed through her soul, the thoughts of many hearts were thereafter revealed. Explain to me, then, especially this close of Simeon’s words, because I do not doubt that it is clear to your holy soul, which by the purity of the inner eye has deserved the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, through whom it can search and see even the deep things of God. May God have mercy on me through your prayers and make his face shine upon me through the lamp of your word, holy lord, most blessed brother of one heart in the Lord Christ, my teacher in the faith of truth and my protector in the bowels of the love of Christ.

Blessed be the Lord our God, who grants a wish to him who longs for it, and always surpasses our wishes and answers our prayers, who has deigned to offer me, when I did not hope for it, an occasion as timely as it is longed for, through the devout young men, my sons and our common fellow servants in the Lord, Gelasius, Augendus, and Tigridius, whom a man praiseworthy and illustrious in Christ, our brother and my fellow presbyter Honoratus, sent from the holy and most chaste number of his community, at the Lord’s inspiration, to cheer my lowliness after the example of your love. For when I anxiously asked them, out of the love due to your merits, about your doings and your welfare (for about your devout and heavenly doings I could not be in doubt), they answered what refreshed my soul: that they had left you, by God’s favor, in good health, attending to the works of your venerable way of life, practicing its pursuits, and seeking heaven with that one heart with which you left earthly things.

For I remembered that my sons, whom you had sent a year ago to visit my lowliness for my sake, had made known to us the place of your dwelling, and also that of the venerable lord Honoratus, saying that you lived in the neighboring islands, separated by a short stretch of sea and rocks, with the related names of Lero and Lerinum. So, when these sons of ours said they had come from the one called Lerinum, I recognized it and easily remembered the island of the related name, in which I already knew that your holiness lived, fleeing from the din of this world. Therefore, knowing that the courtesy of my letter would be welcome to your love, since it is owed by me to you in perpetual gratitude, I gladly embraced this opportunity of spiritual sons to be the bearers of my letter to your oneness of heart, blessed in Christ the Lord; and they, as sons or ministers of obedience, as they have been taught by God or according to God, most readily accepted. Receive, then, in these small words of my littleness the marks of no small love, and keep these writings of mine as pledges, so to speak, of your soul and testimonies of my mind and love toward you.

I hope, by the mercy of Christ the Lord, that you will receive these words of mine in good health, and that, if he grants an opportunity hereafter through such letter-carriers too, you will be prompt to write back. Your affection would doubtless have done this through these sons of mine as well, if you had known of their journey directed to me. For when I asked them about this, since I knew you were neighbors, they said they had sailed from their monastery without your knowledge. Nevertheless, since, as the kingdom of God is not in word but in power, so love too, in whose perfection and fullness the kingdom of God is contained or gained, consists in the treasure of the heart and the power of faith, I desire letters as a familiar grace of your oneness of heart. For the rest, trusting in the most devout affection of your minds, I do not doubt that I cling to your minds even when you are silent. For we have come to know each other and been joined not by human friendship but by divine grace, through the bowels of the love of Christ. And therefore a perpetual concord must remain between our hearts, which has been joined with Christ as its author. For what force or forgetfulness could separate what God has joined?

May the Lord bless you out of Zion with that blessing with which the man who fears the Lord is blessed, perpetual spouses and parents, together with the offspring dedicated with you to God, of your most noble holiness. May you see the good things of Jerusalem and together deserve to dwell in the house of the Lord for length of days, holy children, deservedly venerable, loved by me with inmost love and always to be longed for.