Tractates 1.2.1–1.3.7

The foundations of the Christian summit rest on three things, that is, on hope, on faith, and on love; and these seem so joined to one another that each is necessary to the others. For unless hope goes before, for what does faith labour? If there is no faith, how will hope itself be born? If you deny them love, both will cease: because neither faith without love nor hope without faith can work. So the Christian, if he wants to be perfect, must be built on three things; for if any of these is lacking to him, he will not have the perfection of his work. Hence first of all the hope of things to come must be set before us, without which we see that not even present things can stand. Take away hope, and all humanity grows numb. Take away hope, and all arts and virtues will cease. Take away hope, and everything is destroyed. What does the boy do at the schoolmaster's if he does not hope for the fruit of letters? Why does the sailor commit his ship to the deep flood, if gain never meets him, if the longed-for harbour never does? Why does the soldier despise, I will not say the injuries of bristling winter or scorching summer, but himself, if he does not carry hope of future glory? Why does the farmer scatter seed, if he does not gather the harvest as the reward of his sweat? Why does the Christian believe in Christ, if he does not believe that the time of everlasting happiness promised him by Christ will come?

But hope comes from faith; although it is placed in the future, it is nevertheless subject by right to faith; for where there is no faith, there is no hope; for faith is the substance of hope, and hope the glory of faith; since faith earns the reward that hope holds; faith indeed fights for hope, but wins for itself. It must therefore be embraced tenaciously by us, brothers, and guarded with every kind of virtue; we must lean on it strongly; for it is the immovable foundation of our life, an unconquered bulwark and weapon alike against the assaults of the devil, the impenetrable breastplate of our soul, the brief and true knowledge of the law, the terror of demons, the strength of martyrs, the beauty or the wall of the church, the servant of God, the friend of Christ, the guest of the Holy Spirit. To it both present and future things are subject: the present because it despises them, the future because it presumes they are its own. Nor does hope fear that they will not come, because it always carries them with it in its virtues. This is why Abraham against hope believed God in hope, that he might become the father of many nations. 'Against hope' is what is impossible and is not seen; but it becomes possible by this hope, when God's word is believed without doubting and firmly; for the Lord says: 'All things are possible to him who believes.' Hence Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness; he was righteous because he was faithful, for the righteous man lives by faith; faithful because he believed God; for unless he had believed, he could have been neither righteous nor the father of nations. Therefore it is plain that hope and faith have one inseparable nature, because if either of them fails in a man, both die.

Faith, then, is above all our own possession, as the Lord himself says: 'Your faith has saved you.' So if it is ours, let us keep it as ours, so that we may rightly hope for what is another's; for no one entrusts his estate to a spendthrift, nor will he honour a deserter with triumphal rewards, especially since it is written: 'To him who has, it will be given, and he will abound; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.' Through faith, brothers, Enoch merited to be carried away by God with his body, against the law of nature. Through it Noah escaped and found no one with whom to compare the flood he had come through. Through it Abraham came to the friendship of God. Through it Isaac shone out beyond the rest. Through it Jacob prevailed in wrestling with God. Through it Joseph brought Egypt under his rule. It made a glassy ground for Moses in the Red Sea. It put reins on the sun and moon, so that the measure of their usual course was disregarded to obey the desire of Joshua son of Nun. It brought triumph to the unarmed David over armed Goliath. In Job it did not despair amid frequent and enormous evils. In the blindness of Tobit it was the physician. In Daniel it bound the mouths of lions. In Jonah it turned the whale into a boat. In the army of the Maccabean brothers it alone conquered. In the three young men it made the fires pleasant. In Peter it dared to believe that the sea could be walked on. Through it the apostles stripped many of the contagious, scabby crust of deforming leprosy and its swelling ulcers, restoring clean skin. Through it, I say, they commanded the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak, the lame to run, the paralysed to be restored, demons to flee from the possessed, and the dead themselves often to return from the tombs with their own funeral trains, so that all marvelled that tears of joy came which had just been tears of bereavement.

But it would take long, brothers, to go through each one, especially since love brings forward stronger things; it is so endowed over all things that it is by right the queen of all. Let faith triumph with whatever virtues it will, and let hope set forth many great things; yet without love neither will stand: faith first of all, if it does not love itself; hope, if it is not loved. Add that faith profits only itself; love profits all. Add that faith does not fight for nothing; but love is accustomed to bestow even on the ungrateful. Add that faith does not pass into another; love, it is too little to say, passes into another, for it passes into a whole people. Add that faith belongs to few; love to all. Add that hope and faith have their time; but love has no end; it grows at every moment, and the more it is trusted by those who love one another, the more is owed to one another. It loves no one for his person, because it does not know how to flatter; not for honour, because it is not ambitious; not for sex, because to it both are one; not for time, because it is not changeable; it is not jealous, because it does not know what envy is; it is not puffed up, because it cultivates humility; it thinks no evil, because it is simple; it is not angry, because it gladly embraces even injuries; it does not deceive, because it keeps faith itself; it lacks nothing, because nothing beyond what it is is necessary to it. It keeps countryside, cities and peoples ordered and at peace. It makes the swords at the sides of kings secure. It suppresses wars, removes lawsuits, empties the laws, restrains the courts, uproots hatreds, extinguishes anger. It crosses the sea, goes round the world, supplies the nations with what they need by trade. Let me quickly tell, brothers, its power. Whatever nature has denied to places, love restores. This, as conjugal affection, draws two persons by a venerable sacrament into one flesh. It gives humanity its being, in that a person is born. It is its gift that a wife is dear, that children are noble, that fathers are true. It is its gift that others are as near to us as we are to ourselves, or nearer, as neighbours or friends. It is its gift that we love slaves as sons, and they gladly serve us as masters. It is its gift that we love, I will not say acquaintances or friends, but often even those we have never seen. It is its gift that we come to know either the virtues of the ancients from books, or books from their virtues.

But why should I linger longer on human things, as if they alone were endowed with this affection? Do we not see every kind of living creature bear witness to love by gathering together and by concord, and all their movements so turned as if by one sense under the teaching of affection that anyone may understand this could not happen without the discipline of a natural friendship? What they do for one another in need is shown by the everyday and almost delightful examples of the fight put up by pigs, known to all: when one of them, perhaps caught from the herd by the rage of a bold wolf, begins to be dragged by tyrannical attacks into immediate danger, they all suddenly rush together; they help the one in trouble; they keep throwing themselves almost onto the enemy's very weapons; they throw him into confusion with a great din; and with their filthy tusks thrust out they resist as if in a kind of tortoise formation; and by love they more easily conquer what one by one they could hardly overcome by bare strength. The elements themselves too, brothers, so different and so opposed, an attentive observer would long ago have found at war, had not kindly love bound them together, endowed one with another by mutual and equal gifts of balance, in the faithful lineage of a perpetual marriage. There is absolutely nothing that without love can be pleasing, peaceful, faithful, secure, glorious, joined to God, or perfect. Indeed, when the Lord was asked what was the greatest commandment of the sacred law, he answered thus: 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.' From this it is plain that love is the substance and natural teacher of all the divine virtues, because it is learned from the law but is born in minds: for the law hangs on love, not love on the law, as holy Scripture says: 'The law is not laid down for the just but for the sinner.' The sinner is the one who does not have the love of God, and therefore he who works wrath is rightly subject to the law. Yet perhaps someone may say: the law is to be despised, because it is not necessary for the just and is troublesome to the sinner. Far from it, brothers; rather it is to be revered, because it is the mirror of truth, because it is a certain stern form of love: for whatever the just man has learned from it, it compels the unjust also to do; glorious in two ways, by glorifying the one and correcting the other.

So the whole of Christianity is placed more in love than in hope or faith, as a clear example testifies. Judas Iscariot, the Lord's betrayer, lost both hope and faith, because love did not remain in him: for heresies and schisms too are sown in this way, when faith and hope, puffed up, are torn away from the foundation of love. And what not only these but other virtues too are without love, learn from a little pointer: 'And if I have all faith so as to move mountains, and do not have love, I am nothing. And if I distribute all I have for the food of the poor, and if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing.' For love, brothers, loves all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. Not without reason, then, does the Lord God commend love of neighbour, since he presumes that it alone can keep what he commands.

So the first duty of love is to pay back to God that we were born, to owe to him alone that we live, and to keep nothing at all in the depths of our heart that we would hold under another's right. But when, invited by this devotion, we have begun to be inhabited by him, or to dwell in him, as John says, 'God is love; he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him,' then at last, brothers, we shall worthily return love to him through himself, because, an exchange having been made, what is his becomes ours in our part. Next, we should love our neighbours too with the same affection with which we love ourselves, especially since the very laws of kinship demand this: for the prophet cries, 'One God created you. Is there not one father of you all?' Whoever, then, keeps the consciousness of his nobility loves his brother, and does not wait to hear anything from the law, lest by admonition something be taken from devotion; and he loves himself in his brother so much that he hates himself without him. Add to the heap that God made man in his image and likeness for this reason, that by contemplating the image we might feel reverence for the truth; and the matter was left on this condition, that if we do any evil or good to anyone, we are seen to have done it to God. For this reason John, the special confidant of the Lord's secrets, firmly declares, not without cause: 'If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he sees cannot love God whom he does not see.' Let us then contend among ourselves, brothers, in a glorious rivalry of mutual love; and by most worthily revering the image of God, let us declare what we owe to the truth itself, knowing that if anyone harms the image, he provokes the truth to the destruction of his own soul. Nor is the proof far from the saying. If anyone in any way has defaced the likeness of some famous king (yet only a man), does he not at once pay the capital penalty as if for a sacrilege committed? How much more must one guard against it in the cause of God, whom alone all that kings themselves fear in the powers of nature reveres?

But each must necessarily know the property of sincere love, lest under the sound of the name the rule of truth be betrayed; for there is also another love, plainly contrary to our salvation, to which the form of a man is rightly given, because it is known to be temporal and fragile. It is painted with a boy's features because its wanton slipperiness is not tempered even by old age. It is naked because its will is shamefulness. It is winged because it rushes swiftly into whatever it has conceived. It is equipped with arrows and torches because a sword is always joined to unlawful burnings. And it is blind because when it has caught fire it considers neither age, nor beauty, nor sex, nor rank, nor even that sacred affection of sound devotion. This love set Eve's breast on fire with its torches. This love killed Adam with its arrows. This love tried either to subject Susanna to the monstrous fires of two elders or to cut her throat with a murderous sword. This love demands that a woman do violence to Joseph, whom, even while she stripped him, she did not find unchaste. This love overcame the synagogue by giving up its weapons to it. It is turbulent everywhere, carried along madly everywhere. It promises, deceives, gives, takes away; now sad, now merry, now humble, now proud, now drunk, now fasting, now accuser, now accused. It jests, plays, grows pale, wastes away, sighs, hides, complies; it either tempts or deceives, and is worse when it flatters than when it rages. It passes over no opportunity at all to do harm. Do you want to know how evil it is? In its very fruit it hates even itself. With its poisons the whole world seethes daily, and all things are so corrupted by pestilent pleasures that whatever is done in the world, since we are commanded by sacred words not to love it, rightly seems detestable to the wise, as John says: 'Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him: for all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the ambition of the age, which is not from the Father but from the lust of the world.' For through this love the devil, when he captures and deceives the minds of men in various ways, began to be called Cupid by his luxurious followers, his worshippers.

Now then let us see where true love comes from, where it rests, and to whom above all it is owed. Surely to him who made man; who gave him his likeness as a gift of everlasting love; who gave him the world; who subjected all the elements of the world with their living creatures to his power; who commanded years, seasons, months, nights, days, and the two most brilliant chariots of the royal orbs to serve him with the ever gift-bearing delight of alternation; who, when man had been killed by the evilly sweet poisons of that love mentioned above and sunk into the seat of hell, gave him life by the sacrament of his majesty, and enriched him besides with a share in the heavenly kingdom. O love, how loving and how rich! O how powerful! He has nothing who does not have you. You were able to change God into man. You made him shortened, for a little while, to travel abroad from the immensity of his majesty. You bound him in a virgin's prison for nine months. You restored Eve in Mary. You renewed Adam in Christ. You provided the holy cross for the salvation of a world already lost. You emptied death by teaching God to die. Yours is it that when God, the Son of almighty God, is killed by men, neither of the two is angry. You hold the soul of the heavenly people, when you adorn peace, guard faith, embrace innocence, cultivate truth, love patience, make hope present. You make men different in conduct, age and rank, from one nature, one spirit, one body. You do not allow glorious martyrs to be separated from confessing the Christian name by any torments, any novelty of death, any rewards, any friendships, any affections, which are worse than any torturer for the bite they give to devotion. To clothe the naked, you are content to be naked yourself. Hunger is your feasting. If the hungry poor man eats your bread, it is your wealth to have all you have in mercy. You alone do not know how to be begged. You rescue without delay the oppressed, set in any distress, even at your own cost. You are the eye of the blind, the foot of the lame, the most faithful shield of widows, a better parent to orphans than both their parents. Either mercy or joy never allows your eye to be dry. You so love your enemies that no one can tell what difference there is between them and those dear to you. You, I say, join heavenly secrets to human ones, human to heavenly. You guard divine things. You command in the Father; you obey yourself in the Son; you exult in the Holy Spirit. Though you are one in three, you are in no way divided; you are moved by no slander of human curiosity. From the Father's fountain you are poured wholly into the Son; and yet, wholly where you are poured, you do not withdraw. Rightly are you called God, because you alone turn round the power of the Trinity.

Perhaps one of the learned standing round may burst out laughing that I, a most unskilled and tongue-tied man, dare to argue anything about justice, about whose nature men excellent in talent and learning have set down nothing certain in huge books. But I would not care how anyone jests about me: for in the church of God it is not painted speech that is sought, but pure truth; from which all those have, not undeservedly, strayed far who thought that the justice of God lies in the powers of eloquence. In short, since they could not grasp it (for they could not without the teaching of divine wisdom, of which they had no knowledge), they asserted two justices, one civil, the other natural; of which the Apostle made mention most plainly when speaking to the Romans, saying: 'For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God and wishing to establish their own, they did not submit to the righteousness of God.' But since they suppose nothing about the future and look only to the advantages of the present life, and defend the false against the true as if it were the true, they have lost both out of their very hands, with their eyes open: God's justice, because they think it foolish that it should labour, at the cost not only of its means but even, if need be, of its safety, to benefit another rather than itself; their own, because, although it is clothed with the false name of wisdom, yet by looking after its own advantages, which cannot at all be secured without the disadvantage of others, it cannot be denied to be unjust even by the most truly foolish.

But if they had been able to know true justice, whose reward is immortality, covered with the veil of a seeming folly so that a great thing might be sought with great virtues and great labours, they would without hesitation prefer to be judged foolish and just rather than wise and unjust; especially since their fraud is already all out in the open: for they could not change the thing, only the names, slandering justice with the name of folly and injustice with that of wisdom. If you correct these to their proper terms and restore them to their own seats, you will find that folly fits injustice better, and wisdom justice; which I shall not cease to prove by the testimonies of the sacred law too, whose words are these: 'For since the world did not know the wisdom of God through wisdom, God thought it best to save believers through the foolishness of preaching.' And again, more plainly: 'If anyone among you seems to be wise in this age, let him become a fool, that he may be wise: for the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.' For this reason the same God protests through the prophet: 'Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, nor the strong man glory in his strength, nor the rich man in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, to understand and know that I am the Lord who do mercy and judgment and justice on the earth.' O in how very few words he has summed up the whole business carried on so strenuously in this world! For by these three things, which are the foundations of all vices, as if by violent storms, the whole human race is shipwrecked at every moment and driven to destruction. For wisdom, seething with dense arguments, adorned with the persuasive and delightful lie of brilliant speech, armed with the trumpet of the voice and the sword of the tongue, draws all affairs to itself, gathers crowds, harangues; settles lawsuits so as to sow them; collects depraved and slippery habits; fights its own laws with its own laws; pulls law apart with law. Who does not see that it never does or has done anything right in what it has done? Do you want to know how just it is? It thinks itself wretched unless it has overturned the truth. Then strength, which men share with beasts, has all right in force; what it has prevailed to do, it thinks right; and so without any reverence for divine and human religion it suddenly wipes out with fire and sword inhabitants, cities and countryside with all their substance, fearing nothing at all in its trust in a friendly death; in short, what wisdom gathers by industry through laws, strength sometimes scatters in one rush with its eyes shut. Third, the rich man is avarice, and both of the others strive with wonderful speed to heap up its wealth; the whole world serves in its army, every age serves it. Oh, the wickedness! What darkness is this? It is in everyone, and is reproved by everyone as if it did not exist. It is accused and yet worshipped; it kills, and is loved. Truly invincible is the kind of calamity which virtue will serve, once wisdom has been subjugated.

Do you not now see plainly that the wisdom of this world is not justice? Nor indeed true wisdom: because it cannot be that a truly wise man is not also just, nor likewise that a just man is not also truly wise: because no one can be just and foolish, nor wise and unjust, as reason itself teaches: for he who is foolish does not know what is good and evil, nor can he know what to reject and what to hold; and so he always sins, which is contrary to justice; but the just man abstains from all sin, which he does because he has knowledge of the evil and the good, which is surely the mark of a wise man. Hence it comes about that the one who is foolish can never be just, nor the one who is unjust wise. And if either the just or the wise man lacks one of the two, as those men thought, he will surely be neither wise nor just.

Enough, I think, has been laid bare of the world's trickeries; since all men deal in them more skilfully than can be told, it is superfluous to linger. So now let us come to true justice, the fountain and mother of all virtues, which beyond the others gathers and spreads itself wholly for the benefit of others, knowing what is owed to God first of all, gaining nothing for itself, leaving nothing as its own except that it faithfully carries out his will without any boasting. It stands forth and is spread wholly in public, yet so that it would rather be felt than seen; plainly cautious, too, about which side it turns to, lest it should blame itself in anything, lest it should ever fail in a work begun. It breaks the yokes of captives by ransoms; it knows the prison better than the imprisoned, by gentle and watchful care in healing them; it shares sickness with the sick; it does not allow cast-out corpses to lie uncovered and unburied; among the poor and wretched, neglected in their need, it scatters the seeds of devotion generously and secretly; it does not let itself be asked, nor be repaid with the reward of praise in return: this it thinks a heavy loss, this a crime: for by leaving nothing for itself it outruns avarice with a blessed greed: for avarice possesses men, justice God. Hear further with what love and with what devotion it hastens to its own seat and the palm set before it. If anyone takes it to court to take away its tunic, it willingly gives him its cloak too; it is cursed and blesses; it is beaten and gives thanks; it is killed and does not resist; and besides it entreats God for those who strike it. Its one chief care and greatest caution is that it should owe nothing to the world, that it should suffer none of these things deservedly. Those who have either not read the divine Scriptures, or have thought them void when read, because of their lowly and unpolished language, though they say, 'Unless you believe, you will not understand,' think this justice foolish and mock it as vain, because, when it could enjoy the goods of the world, it neglects them and makes itself unhappy of its own accord; not believing that, by keeping God's commandments and offering up the pleasures of the world through such duties, when it has conquered and is free from the bonds of the flesh, it will enjoy the inestimable blessedness of promised immortality.

But what does it matter to us what they say? As our distinguished man says: 'God knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are foolish.' Let them leave our folly to us; let them keep their wisdom to themselves; whose followers indeed I see almost all Christians to be, who think that perfect justice is to protect one's own and not to seek another's, neglecting the command of true wisdom, which is contained in these words: 'If you wish to be perfect, go and sell all you have and give to the poor, and take up your cross and come, follow me.' On this I do not know what anyone can put forward; but one thing I know, that there is none of us who does not labour at every moment to have more than he had; and when he strives for this he certainly plays the part of avarice, which is the enemy of justice. So it is that the barns of a few are full of grain, and the bellies of the many empty. Hence prices are worse for the peoples than the measures, worse than scarcity. Hence fraud, perjury, robberies, lawsuits and wars; daily gain is sought from the groans of others, and confiscation is called industry; and the craving for another's property is pressed with the most cunning arguments under the pretext of defence and diligence, so that a man left undefended, or innocent, loses what he has through the laws; which is worse than any violence: because what is seized by force can sometimes be reclaimed; what is taken by the circumventions of the laws cannot. Let whoever wishes glory in such justice; yet let him know that he who grows rich on the miseries of others is more wretched than the wretched. Can anyone think him just who puts the advantage of his household property before devotion? Who, while men suffer from hunger and nakedness, feeds moths, weevils and worms? Who, by unhappy tenacity, withholds what he has not only from others but even from himself?

'But,' you will say, 'it is just that I keep what is mine and do not seek what is another's.' The Gentiles too are accustomed to say this. But how unjust it is before God we shall soon see. Now first of all, best of Christians, I wish to know what things are yours, since all things are common to those who fear God, as it is written: 'The multitude of those who had believed acted with one soul and mind; nor was there any distinction among them, nor did they think any of the goods they had their own; but all things were common to them,' like the day, the sun, night, rain, the condition of being born and dying, which divine justice has granted equally to the human race without exception of persons. Since this is so, beyond doubt he is not unlike a tyrant who alone has what could serve the advantage of many. What? While the poor man is dying daily from oppression, hunger, cold, injury, you cultivate gold as your friend, you guard silver, you hold costly clothing and proud and superfluous ornaments as something sacred, like an idol; you adorn yourself from moment to moment, rich in public, richer in secret; and you do not understand that he who, when he could help a man dying of want with such wealth, does not help him, is himself seen to kill him? O how many souls' deaths hang on the trappings of adorned matrons! If you sold just one of their ornaments for its price and distributed it to the needs of individuals, you would learn from their recovered breath how many people's misfortune that adornment costs.

'I have children,' he says, 'whom I must not strip.' This is the excuse of unbelief, which the Holy Spirit beats back through the prophet, saying: 'I have been young and now am old, and I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed seeking bread.' And again: 'The rich have been in need and gone hungry, but those who seek the Lord shall not lack any good thing.' This is very easy to prove by example. We remember it is recorded in the books of Kingdoms that in a time of famine, when the whole people was dying everywhere, the memorable widow gave to Elijah, who asked for food, the last substance of her own and her children's living, not divided but whole, and preferred to die with her children rather than pass by justice: in return for so illustrious a deed she received from God undying food, which consumption could not diminish, for it grew by its own diminishing. In the end the state of their vessels always remained whole and full, and as much as the need of daily outlay had taken from them, so much a reviving fruitfulness put back. Therefore if you wish to be a good father, a provident one, a useful one, you must, like Abraham, love God more than your children, so that you may deserve to have them whole, unharmed and blessed. It is foolish to want to provide the substance of life for those to whom you did not give birth, into whom you did not breathe souls, and to whom you cannot give salvation. So, even late, suppress that sacrilegious voice, remembering human frailty, you who do not know what may happen in the very moment we are speaking; and lay aside the deceit of a vain excuse. You store up avarice by sin for the ungrateful. It is the power of God alone to provide for the advantage of the future.