Letter

I believe you remember, most holy Cyprian, what chatter we shared at the orator's, one mind, one thought, undivided reading. Why are we not strengthened in spirit in this way in the divine reading too? Or was it not always our thought, as you promised, that we should believe together …

I have received your letter, beloved, which is not delightful and is written against the rule of faith. In it I recognized things that sicken, and I did not praise the poisons of words sown over by you, with horrible tares, against the catholic church spread throughout the whole world. I ask that you quickly withdraw and condemn them beforehand; which indeed you ought to have done before the deadly poison sprinkled in the world infected the minds of the simple and innocent. It is not right, then, to rebaptize. So root out and disentangle, as we have said, by flowery and worthy words in a later letter, your earlier writings, which the brood of vipers resolved to sow against the catholic faith. For it does not befit the bishop of so great a city and a most excellent teacher that, while you think the baptism of heresy must be condemned beforehand, you should dare to stain true baptism with words, which you grieve, of course, to fight against the apostle when he says: “One God, one faith, one baptism.”

We give thanks to God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who has united you and restored you to your assemblies. For this reason we have recalled the writing of the most blessed martyrs and confessors and have wished to keep it for our council. The majesty from above and the Holy Spirit command it, whose grace is a saving witness in us. For when he was treating of the traitors, he commands, as much in the gospel as in the apostle, as much in the psalms as in the prophets and the other Scriptures: “Search.” When we had searched this, we found that those who handed over the holy Scriptures do not deserve to join our council, that is, the saving council. For there is no one who joins this council … who does not look to heavenly things. And therefore we have recalled that those who have dealt with the Scriptures in this way … to the standing of the people and the judgment offered by them, nor that any action be brought forward by them, nor even that they be near the standing of the sacrifice or of the people; by whom indeed, the people having long since been abandoned, the altars were stripped and the sacrifices put off. Rightly, recalling these things with sorrow and grief of mind, with the Lord as witness … we have decreed what we ought: that those who had dared all disputes and dissensions and heresies and scandals should no longer call people to themselves, whether they are weak in faith or light in the Scriptures, and readers. This we have decreed, and we do not wish our decree to be departed from: that if anyone who handed over has been set over this people, they deserve a bishop who ministers at the altar with a body unstained. We have given orders concerning those by whom we also command the sacrifice to be offered. Rightly these commands must be obeyed, and nothing else will happen than what the sincere voice of the gospel immediately says according to John: “I do not want sacrifices from your hands, because you have not come to me with a pure offering.” Whoever does not offer a pure offering, the offering does not ascend from his hands. For again we read: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.” Those who by a word have feigned a pretense of giving up useless things in their keeping, whether the true holy Scriptures or feigned ones, … whoever feigns to hand over will complete the handing over. We wish those who denied to have pardon for the meantime, as confessing fathers. For whoever says that he does not have the Scriptures was certainly prepared even to be tortured, and we have examples of such. Three times they denied, and they did not hand over the sacrament. But those who offered them without even being asked will for the meantime communicate as laymen until the session of the council. Nevertheless, we wish the decision of the council which holy Scripture has put forward to be completed according to the sentence fixed for the saints and friends of God, since our predecessors, witnesses and near ones, had already long since decreed something. For this reason it is necessary for us to agree with the witnesses, to embrace and complete it. I wish you always to be well in the Lord. Amen. Thanks be to God.

I have received your letter, beloved, from which I learned that your mind is shaken with grief over the falling asleep of your daughter. I wondered at nothing so much as that the strength of a Christian heart in you has been so tossed about that you have bent your mind to grief. I am astonished that the wall of faith has been pierced by the wounds of bereavement, which the hope of the resurrection and of the heavenly kingdom ought to have fenced about. Hope never agrees with grief, nor does faith ever feel any loss. We believe that our dead rise again, and we lament! What would we do if God commanded only death without resurrection? His will alone is enough for comfort, and we know that no affection is to be put before it. He who had created her had taken back what he had given. Who else strives to lament what he had received for a time? He had lent her, for you to have for as long as he wished, and to take back again when he would. He took nothing of yours who deigned to take back his own. It was fitting for the creditor to take back what he had lent, and nothing else befits the borrower than to give thanks to his creditor. So we read the most devoted words of Job, which we should follow: “The Lord gave,” he says, “the Lord has taken away. As it pleased the Lord, so it has been done. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” This one consolation against mourning was therefore not too little: that no one ought to mourn when he has returned what belonged to another, since it was not right for what was needed by its owner to be kept by someone else. Another provision of consolation is added to meet the darts of bereavement. We ought to rejoice over those who depart from the world, if we felt the world's hostility against us; and yet we lament the kindnesses of the Lord, who knows what he grants to our weakness. Whoever grieves for someone who sleeps wished him still to be in danger, and desired to see the poor soul toiling among the waves of this present life. Why do you think a faithful Christian soul should have lingered in the prison of the world, for which the whole world is a shipwreck? She has escaped such great and such storms of life, so many attacks of the devil, so many wars of the body, so many disasters of the world; and you shed tears, as if you did not know what you yourself suffer every day. For this reason the Lord admonishes his apostles, saying: “If you had loved me, you would rejoice, because I am going to the Father.” He did indeed weep over the dead Lazarus, but not with your tears. As the promiser of the resurrection, he could not teach grief, lest he make into unbelief the faith which he was teaching. He grieved over Lazarus not as sleeping but rather as rising again, and he wept for the one whom he was compelled, for the sake of saving others, to call back to the world. The Lord groaned as he gave back this life, which you grieve has been taken away. Your tears fight against his tears, and your love against his love. His weeping has no equal. He did not wish to give back to labors the one he had loved; and you believe that you love her for whom you wished the torments of labors still to remain. Besides, if you think he grieved for Lazarus as dead, he who could have repelled death would not have let him depart in the first place, or at least he would not have wept who had the power to raise the dead man afterward. Hence it appears that he was moved only because he was pressed to call back his dearest friend again to a hostile life for the sake of some who would believe or of unbelievers to be confounded. Finally he went on to say: “Therefore, Father, that they may believe that you have sent me.” Rejoice, then, over what he was compelled to weep for, lest you seem to envy the happiness of those who sleep. She has passed from a foreign world to her own, she has passed to the Lord; she has moved from a hostile land to her Father's homeland, she has moved to heaven, as the apostle says: “We know,” he says, “that if our earthly house of this body is dissolved, we have a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” She has lost, then, a house which she ought not even to have known. She has lost wicked fellow citizens, whose hatred she endured, so as no longer to be a stranger in a hostile land, as the apostle recalls, saying: “As long as we are in the world we are away from the Lord.” So mourning ought not to weigh on us for anyone who has earned the right to return from a sojourn abroad to his own country, especially since he is known to return not empty and void, having traded for the gain of Christianity, for which he came to the commerce of the world. He has completed his business, has returned, and has paid God his debt. He has made the purchase for which he had come down, and has hastened to go back to the Lord, to offer him his merchandise, so as to receive both security and honor for the merchandise he bought. “And I,” you will say, “am not troubled by any doubt about the heavenly promises; I am tossed only by the separation of one who has died, burning with grief and bereft of the comfort of a dear child.” This excuse, blessed friend, is no doubt one of human frailty, but it cannot plead the cause of distrust. For if people could not bear desolation, they would never send their dear children away from themselves. They complain that they are forsaken by the dying, and yet they entrust their living children to foreign regions for letters, or honors, or business, and are glad to spend their whole lives without their affections, provided they gain what they desire to obtain from their children. They travel abroad to reach the palace; they sail to pursue the gaining of rank; or, to settle some matters of their estate, they urge them all to set out through labors and dangers, and they do not allow those they love to be free for them. Yet, so that their children may reach with security the palace of heaven, the studies of Christ, the honor of eternal life, the estate of an everlasting possession, no one gladly congratulates his children on departing from him. Everyone compels a son or brother or parent to travel abroad for uncertain things through uncertain ways, and no one permits any of his own to set out for certain things through certain ways. To acquire sins, parents and children are glad to be separated from one another at the devil's prompting; to receive pardon, they do not wish to be parted at God's call. So it appears that we do not grieve for whomever we seem to lose on reasonable grounds, but rather show a sign of distrust, we who do not endure the departures of our own to the Lord, while we rejoice at their journeys in the world. Because we believe in the world's gains, we bear the members of our body divided; if we believe God's promises, after the departure of our own the joys of our hearts ought to resound with nothing but thanks. Believe me, it is always unbelief that mourns in everything; and as faith cannot know what to grieve over, so distrust alone is held as the handmaid of griefs. For if we call them sleeping, we must surely believe them sleeping and not dead, but resting for a time, according to the voice of the Lord, who speaks faithfully: “Everyone,” he says, “who believes in me, though he die, shall live.” If some physician promised you this, you could surely not refuse his promise every joy; now, because Christ the maker and raiser promises it, you are not afraid to lament, so that you seem in his promises to judge a physician more faithful and more powerful than Christ. “But,” you say, “I grieve for my forsaken old age, I who ought rather to have gone before my children, so as not to be left in labors.” When anything is discussed about spiritual goods, nothing at all about carnal goods is to be set before our eyes. I declare to you that it has turned out better, since I consider not carnal but spiritual happiness in your regard. You say you are worn out in old age by the death of one of your dear children; I prove on the contrary that you are relieved. The Lord has rather cut away from your old age the anxiety that tormented you over your living daughter, lest she perish. Surely you now believe it better that she, dead to the world, is alive with God, than that, alive to the world, you should perhaps grieve that she was dead with the Lord. Rejoice for yourself that you will be found worthy to follow a Christian daughter, and, having followed her, to rejoice in embracing her again in heaven. She has not forsaken you but gone before you; and, lest she should grieve as her father departed, she hastened to receive him. You have not lost what you nurtured. If you shudder at mourning, then as an old man you will be able to count it that you have offered your child to the Lord, according to the vow, after Abraham, if you cannot be first; so that what he did not tremble to offer, you at least may be seen to rejoice over when it is taken away. From him the Lord asked; from you he took. He obeyed a command; you consent to a will. He proved him devoted to himself through a law of nature that was not lawful; let him at least mark you as religious through the lawful condition of mortality. For if you are compelled neither by will nor by necessity to show the Lord anything of devotion, in what respect can you prove yourself a Christian? Let our unbelief blush, and not … with the pagans, if it wishes to be subject to God. The end of death is common to us and to them, and we surpass their griefs with our griefs. What would we do if something peculiar were demanded of us? What of the fact that it is to our shame? The pagans often despise griefs, though they are snatched away not to heavenly promises but to the punishments of Tartarus; and we lament those who go to heaven. Let such a Christian consider what he deserves henceforth, who neither strives to imitate the examples of the saints nor has the contempt of the pagans. They despise mourning by despairing, and we do not try to despise it by hoping. Indeed they often do not hesitate to sell their children, so that, what is worse, they spurn them alive; and the deaths of the departed do not relieve us: we want those taken from captivity and given freedom … . They fearlessly hand over their children to mortals to be slaves, and we hesitate with a sacrilegious mind to let our children, who are at once God's children, go to God to be set free, as if it were judged safer for any of our children to be condemned among human beings than to be with God. What a shameful reproach of Christians among the pagans, by whom they are judged without doubt worse, when it would have been criminal to have them only equal, not to say better! Christians do not wish even with congratulation to escort their own to good things; pagans do not hesitate to hand theirs over to evil things. Finally, let us be compelled to bend our minds at least by the very happiness of our dying, lest our desires begin to fight against their desires. Those who depart rejoice as they come to their rest. Let us also rejoice with them, at least reckoning the blessedness of our departed. Be devout at least by the wish of her who has escaped, if you cannot be by your own, and exult because you know that one who shares your blood has pleased Christ; above all because, on this occasion at least, you ought to bear the will of the Lord, which you cannot contradict. And since this lot is common to all, grief is vain, which is seen to be neither the first nor the only one. “But,” you say, “no anguish of mind over my desolation is wounding me, but human feeling is stirring me on account of the sins of a little child who has died.” Neither may this move a Christian mind, lest it struggle against the commands of Christ. What does it matter when or what kind of children we have left behind, whom we are commanded by the Lord to hate for the sake of devotion? It is better that she has now, in dying, left her soul safe in peace, than that she should be unable, in persecution, to give it up with her own ruin. He himself helps in the world those whose mother dwells in heaven, and he who comes to the help of the mother surely aids the children also. Finally, see whether anything ought to be conceded to grief, when the mind can be wearied without any remedy. Whoever grieves ought to grieve wisely, lest he lose without cause what he grieves for. But now arms must be taken up against mourning, so that our hope may have the victory. First of all, let us rejoice that the Lord willed to receive her. Then, because this is common to all in the world, there is added our private and peculiar portion, that we are called away to rest. There follows the consummation of all joys, that in the resurrection we shall be restored to one another, the Lord re-forming us, as the apostle promises: “We do not want you, then, to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who sleep, so that you may not grieve as the others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so too the Lord will bring with him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus.” These things, blessed friend, I have sent you out of our common love. For the rest, I know that you console others. Bereavement will find itself unable to pierce you, if you do not cease to arm others against it. I wish you, dearest brother, always to be well and to remember us.