Letters 121 to 130: Origen, the Sack of Rome, and Virginity

Why does John send his disciples to the Lord, to ask him: Art thou he that is to come, or do we look for another? When he himself had earlier said of the same one: Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sins of the world. Concerning this question we have spoken more fully in the Commentaries on Matthew. Whence it appears that you who ask this do not have those volumes themselves. Nevertheless it must be briefly summarized, lest we seem to have been wholly silent. John was sending his disciples while he himself was set in chains, so that by seeking for himself, they might learn; and he, about to be beheaded, was teaching that he ought to be followed whom by his own question he confessed to be the master of all.

For he could not be ignorant of him whom he had before shown to those who did not know him, and of whom he had said: He that hath the bride is the bridegroom; And, Whose shoes I am not worthy to bear; And, He must increase, but I must decrease. And he had heard God the Father thundering: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. But as to what he says: Art thou he that is to come, or do we look for another? This can also have this meaning: I know that thou art he who hast come to take away the sins of the world; but because I am about to descend to the lower world, I ask this also, whether thou thyself wilt descend there too, or whether it would be impious to believe this of the Son of God, and thou wilt send another?

But this I desire to know: that I who announced thee to men on earth, may announce thee also to those below, if perhaps thou art to come there. For thou art he who came to release captivity, and to loose those who were held in chains. The Lord, understanding his inquiry, answers more by works than by word, and bids it be reported to John that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise, and (which is twice as great) the poor have the gospel preached to them. Now the poor, whether in humility or in riches: so that there is no difference between the poor man and the rich man as regards salvation; but all are called equally. And what he adds: Blessed is he who shall not be scandalized in me, strikes not John, but his disciples, who had earlier come to him, saying: Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but thy disciples do not fast?

And to John: Master, to whom thou gavest testimony near the Jordan, behold his disciples baptize, and more come to him. By which saying they show envy at the greatness of the signs, out of the bitterness of jealousy. Coming: why, having been baptized by John, does he himself dare to baptize; and a much larger crowd runs to him than had earlier come to John. And lest perhaps the people, not understanding, should think that John was being disparaged by this saying, he goes on at length in his praises: and began to say to the crowds standing about concerning John: What went ye out into the desert to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out into the wilderness to see? A man clothed in soft garments? And so on. Of which saying this is the sense: Did you go out into the wilderness for this, that you might see a man like a reed bent in various directions by the blowing of the winds?

So that he whom he had before praised, he now doubts about; and concerning whom he had before said: Behold the Lamb of God, he now asks whether he himself or another is the one who has come, or is to come? And because all false preaching pursues gain, and seeks human glory, so that gain may be born through glory: he asserts that he who was clothed in camel's hair could not yield to any flattery; and he who feeds on locusts and wild honey seeks neither wealth nor other earthly delights, and that his rigid and austere life avoids the halls of the palace, which are sought by those who are clothed in purple and fine linen and silk and soft garments.

And he says that he is not only a Prophet, who is wont to foretell things to come, but more than a Prophet: because he whom the others had said was to come, this one has shown to have already come, saying: Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world; especially since to the height of the prophetic office was added the Baptist's privilege; so that he who had said, I ought to be baptized by thee, himself baptized him: not by presumption of one greater, but by the obedience of a disciple, and the fear of a servant. And though he asserts that among those born of women none has arisen greater than John, he mentions that he who was begotten of a Virgin is greater; or else that every angel in heaven, even the least, surpasses all men on earth. For we advance toward the angels, and the angels do not advance toward us: as certain people, sleeping in the heaviest slumber, dream.

Nor is this enough in the praises of John, unless he himself, preaching the baptism of repentance, is recorded as having first said: Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Whence from the days of his preaching, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence; so that he who was born a man might desire to be an angel, and an earthly creature might seek a heavenly dwelling. For the Law and the Prophets prophesied until John: not that John is the end of the Prophets and the Law, but that he is the one preached by John's testimony.

But John, according to the mystery which is written in Malachi, He himself is Elias, who is to come: not that the same soul (as the heretics suspect) was both in Elias and in John: but that he had the same grace of the Holy Spirit, girded with a belt as Elias was, living in the wilderness as Elias did: having suffered persecution from Herodias, as that one endured from Jezebel: so that as Elias was the forerunner of the second coming, so John saluted the Lord Savior who was to come in the flesh, not only in the wilderness, but even in his mother's womb, and announced him by the exultation of his body.

What is signified by that which is written in Matthew: He shall not break the bruised reed, and he shall not quench the smoking flax. For the exposition of this passage, the whole testimony which Matthew took from the Prophet Isaiah must be set down, and the very words of Isaiah, according to the Septuagint translators, and the Hebrew itself, with which Theodotion, Aquila, and Symmachus agree. Thus, then, of the four Evangelists, Matthew alone set it down: But Jesus knowing it, withdrew from thence: and many followed him, and he healed them all: and charged them that they should not make him known; that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the Prophet, saying: Behold my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved, in whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall show judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not contend, nor cry out, neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets.

The bruised reed he shall not break, and the smoking flax he shall not quench, till he bring forth judgment unto victory: and in his name shall the Gentiles hope. For which, in Isaiah according to the Septuagint translators, it is thus written: Jacob is my servant, I will uphold him. Israel is my elect, my soul hath upheld him. I have given my spirit upon him, he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor let go, neither shall his voice be heard without. The bruised reed he shall not crush, and the smoking flax he shall not quench: but he shall bring forth judgment in truth. He shall shine, and shall not be bruised, until he set judgment upon the earth: and in his name shall the Gentiles hope. But we, from the Hebrew, have translated thus: Behold my servant, I will uphold him; my elect, my soul is well pleased in him. He shall not cry, nor accept a person, neither shall his voice be heard without.

The bruised reed he shall not crush, and the smoking flax he shall not quench. He shall bring forth judgment in truth. He shall not be sad nor turbulent, until he set judgment in the earth: and the islands shall wait for his law. From which it appears that the Evangelist Matthew, not bound by the authority of the old translation, departed from the Hebrew Truth: but as one Hebrew of the Hebrews, and most learned in the Law of the Lord, brought forth to the Gentiles those things which he had read in the Hebrew. For if it is to be taken as the Septuagint translators have rendered it: Jacob is my servant, I will uphold him: Israel is my elect, my soul hath upheld him, how do we understand that to be fulfilled in Jesus which was written of Jacob and of Israel?

Which we read blessed Matthew to have done not only in this testimony, but also in another place: Out of Egypt have I called my son: for which the Septuagint translated: Out of Egypt have I called his children. Which certainly, unless we follow the Hebrew Truth, is manifest not to pertain to the Lord Saviour. For it follows: But they sacrificed to Baalim. But that which is lacking in the Gospel from the testimony taken up: he shall shine, and shall not be bruised, until he set judgment upon the earth, seems to me to have happened by the error of the first scribe, who, reading the previous sentence to be ended in the wordjudgment,thought the last word of the following sentence to bejudgment: and passed over the few words which lay in between, that is, betweenjudgmentandjudgment. And again, what is read among the Hebrews: And the islands shall hope in his law, Matthew, interpreting the sense rather than the words, putnationsin place oflawandislands.

And this must be diligently observed not only in the present passage, but wherever the Evangelists and Apostles have brought forth testimonies from the Old Instrument: that they followed not the words, but the sense: and where the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew, they expressed the Hebrew sense in their own words. The servant, therefore, of Almighty God, according to the dispensation of the flesh assumed, by which he is sent to us, is called the Saviour. To whom also in another place the Father says: It is a great thing for thee to be called my servant, that thou mayest gather the tribes of Jacob. This is the vine Sorec, which is interpreted,chosen.This is the most beloved Son, in whom the soul of God is well pleased: not that God has a soul; but that in the soul all the affection of God is shown.

And it is no wonder if a soul is named in God, since all the members of the human body, according to the laws of tropology and various understandings, are said to be attributed to him. He also put his spirit upon him: the spirit of Wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and fortitude, the spirit of knowledge and piety, and of the fear of the Lord: which descended upon him in the form of a dove: concerning whom also John the Baptist relates that he heard from God the Father: Upon whom thou shalt see the Holy Spirit descending, and remaining upon him, he it is. And he shall declare judgment to the Gentiles; concerning whom also in the Psalms: Give to the king thy judgment, O God, and thy justice to the king's son. Who also himself speaks in the Gospel: For the Father judgeth no man, but hath given all judgment to the Son. He shall not contend: as a lamb was led to the victim: he shall not contend in the overthrow of hearers.

Neither shall he cry out, according to that which the Apostle Paul writes: Let all clamour, and anger, and bitterness be put away from you. He shall not cry out: because Israel did not do judgment, but clamour. Neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets, or abroad. For all the glory of the king's daughter is from within: And, Narrow and strait is the way that leadeth to life. Whence in the streets his voice is not heard, in which wisdom acts confidently, not entering the broad and spacious way, but rebuking and condemning. Whence also to those who were without, he spoke not with his own voice, but through parables: The bruised reed, he says, he shall not break; or (as the Septuagint translated) the broken reed he shall not crush.

The broken reed, which before was vocal, and used to sing together in the praises of the Lord, is to be called Israel, who, because he stumbled at the corner stone, and fell upon it, and was broken in it; therefore it is said of him: Rebuke, O Lord, the beasts of the reed: and in the volume of Jesus (Isaiah) the torrent is calledof canes,that is, of reeds; which has turbid waters, which Israel chose, despising the purest streams of the Jordan: and turning back in mind to Egypt, and desiring the muddy and marshy region, and melons, and onions, and garlic, and cucumbers, and the pots of Egyptian meats, is most rightly called by Isaiah the broken reed: on which whoever wishes to lean, his hand shall be pierced through. For whoever, after the coming of the Lord Saviour, forsaking the spirit of Evangelical interpretation, rests in the death of the Judaic letter, all his works are wounded by this reed.

The smoking flax also he shall not quench: the people gathered from the Gentiles, who, with the fire of the natural law extinguished, were wrapped in the errors of a most bitter smoke, injurious to the eyes, and of dark gloom. Which he not only did not quench and reduce to ashes, but on the contrary from a small and almost dying spark, roused the greatest fires; so that the whole world burned with the fire of the Lord Saviour, which he came to cast upon the earth, and desires it to burn in all. According to tropology, what seemed to us concerning this passage, we have briefly noted in the Little Commentaries on Matthew.

But this one who did not break the bruised reed, and did not quench the smoking flax, also brought judgment to victory, whose judgments are true, justified in themselves, that he may be justified in his words, and overcome when he is judged, and so long as the light of his preaching shine in the world, and be crushed and overcome by no one's snares, until he set judgment in the earth, and that be fulfilled which is written: Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. And, In his name shall the Gentiles hope; or, in his law shall the islands hope. For as islands, though struck indeed by whirlwind and blast of winds and frequent storms, are yet not overturned, in the type of the Evangelical house, which is founded upon a rock with a solid mass, so also the Churches which hope in the law, and in the name of the Lord Saviour, speak through Isaiah: I am a firm city, a city that is not assailed.

What sense is to be had of that which is written in the Evangelist Matthew: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself. What is the denial of oneself? Or how does he who follows the Saviour deny himself? Concerning which, in the third book of the Commentaries on the same Matthew, I have thus briefly spoken: He who lays aside the old man with his works denies himself, saying: And I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me: and takes up his cross and is crucified to the world. To whom the world is crucified, follows the crucified Lord. To which now we may add: after he showed to the disciples that it was necessary for him to go to Jerusalem, and to suffer many things from the priests and scribes, and the chief priests, and to be killed, Peter, taking him aside, began to rebuke him, saying: Be it far from thee, Lord, this shall not be unto thee.

Who turning, said to Peter: Go behind me, Satan, thou art a scandal unto me: because thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things that are of men. For, terrified by human fear, he dreaded the passion of the Lord. And just as, hearing that he would suffer many things and be killed, he feared, so hearing that he would also rise again on the third day, he ought to have rejoiced, and to have soothed the sadness of the passion with the glory of the resurrection. Whence, when he was rebuked for his fear, he spoke to all the disciples, or, called the crowd together with his disciples, as Mark has set it, or, according to Luke, said to all: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself; and take up his cross, and follow me. Of which exhortation this is the sense: Confession toward God is not delicate and secure. He who believes in me ought to shed his own blood.

For he who shall lose his soul in the present shall gain it in the future. Daily, believing in Christ, one takes up his cross, and denies himself. He who was unchaste, turned to chastity, denies lust by temperance. He who is fearful and timid, having assumed the strength of fortitude, no longer knows his former self. The unjust man, if he follows justice, denies iniquity. The foolish man, if he confesses Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God, denies foolishness. Knowing which, not only in time of persecution and the necessity of martyrdom, but in all conduct, work, thought, speech, let us deny ourselves what we formerly were; and let us confess those whom we have been reborn in Christ. For to this end the Lord was crucified, that we also, who believe in him, and are dead to sin, might be crucified with him, and say what the Apostle Paul taught: I am crucified with Christ.

And: But God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ: through whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world. He who is crucified with Christ, let him despoil principalities and powers, and triumph over them in the wood. Whence also in the Gospel according to Matthew, in a type of those who were to believe in the Lord, and to be crucified with him, Simon of Cyrene bears his cross; which, according to the other Evangelists, he himself first bore.

What does it mean to signify, what is written in the same Matthew: Woe to those who are with child, and to them that give suck in those days. And: Pray that your flight be not in winter or on the sabbath. This is manifestly dependent on what precedes. For when the Gospel of Christ shall have been preached to all nations, and the consummation shall have come, and they shall have seen the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holy place: then it is commanded that those who are in Judea flee to the mountains; and he that is on the housetop, let him not come down to take anything out of his house; and he that is in the field, let him not return to take his coat. Of which things we have spoken more fully in the Commentaries on the same Matthew. And immediately it is joined: Woe to those who are with child and to them that give suck in those days. In what days?

When the abomination of desolation shall have stood in the holy place. That this indeed is to be understood literally of the coming of Antichrist, no one doubts: when the magnitude of the persecution will compel flight, and heavy wombs and little sucklings will retard the flight. Although some would have this signify the siege and war of Titus and Vespasian against the Jews, and especially Jerusalem. Winter also and the sabbath they interpret thus, that they should not be compelled to flee at that time, when the harshness of the cold in the fields and in desert places does not allow fugitives to hide; and the observance of the sabbath either makes them transgressors, if they flee, or subjects them to the swords of enemies, if they keep the rest and precepts of the sabbath.

But we, hearing the Lord and Saviour, that those who are in Judea should flee to the mountains, let us also lift up our eyes to the mountains, of which it is written: I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, whence help shall come to me. And in another place: Its foundations are in the holy mountains. And, Mountains are round about it, and the Lord is round about his people. And, A city set on a mountain cannot be hid; and let us put off, not the skin of the letter, but with bare feet, ascending the mountain with Moses, let us say: Passing over, I will see this great vision; that we may be able to understand pregnant souls, which from the seed of doctrines and the word of God have conceived the beginnings of faith, and say with Isaiah: From fear of thee, O Lord, we have conceived, and been in labour, and have brought forth the spirit of thy salvation, which thou hast made upon the earth.

For just as seeds are gradually formed in the wombs, and a man is not reckoned as such until the confused elements take on their own images and members: so a meaning conceived by reason, unless it breaks forth into action, is still retained in the womb; and quickly perishes by miscarriage, when it sees the abomination of desolation standing in the Church, and Satan transfigured into an Angel of light. Of offspring of this sort Paul speaks, saying: My little children, of whom I am in labour again, until Christ be formed in you. These, then, I think, according to mystical understandings, are the women of whom the same Apostle writes: The woman being seduced was in the transgression. Yet she shall be saved through childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.

And if she has at some time brought forth from the divine word, it is necessary that what has been brought forth grow; and first receive the milk of infancy, until they come to solid food, and to the mature age of the fulness of Christ. For everyone who is fed with milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. These souls therefore, which have not yet brought forth, or which have not yet been able to nourish what has been brought forth; when they see the heretical word standing in the Church, are quickly scandalized and perish: and in tempest and persecutions they cannot endure, especially if they have had leisure from good works, and have not walked in the way, which is Christ.

Of this abomination of heretical and perverse doctrine the Apostle spoke, that the man of iniquity and the adversary exalts himself against all that is called God and religion, so that he dares to stand in the Temple of God, and to show himself as if he were God: whose coming is according to the working of Satan; and he causes those things which have been conceived to perish by miscarriage; and those which have been born, to be unable to reach childhood and to perfect age. Wherefore the Lord is to be entreated, that in the beginning of faith and of growing age winter should not arise, of which it is written: The winter is past, the rain is over and gone; lest we grow torpid in idleness: but with shipwreck imminent, let us rouse the sleeping Lord, and say: Master, save us, we perish.

What is meant by what is written in the Gospel according to Luke: And they did not receive him: because his face was going to Jerusalem. The Lord, hastening to go to Jerusalem, that the days of his assumption might be fulfilled, and that he might celebrate the Passover, of which he had said: With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, and to drink the cup, of which he says: The cup which my Father has given me, shall I not drink it? And that he might confirm all his doctrine by the gibbet, according to that which is written: When I shall be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself; he set his face firmly to go to Jerusalem. For firmness and fortitude were needed for one hastening voluntarily to his passion.

Whence also to Ezekiel, to whom God had said: Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of scorpions, and fear them not: I have made, he says, thy face strong, and I have made thy face brazen, and thy forehead iron; so that if perchance the hammer of the whole earth should rise up against him, he might resist like a very hard anvil, and might wear out the hammer, of which it is written: How is the hammer of the whole earth broken and crushed? And he sent messengers, that is, Angels, before his face. For it was fitting that Angels should minister to the Son of God. Or he calls the Apostles Angels: since John also, the forerunner of the Lord, was called an Angel. And when they had entered a village of Samaria, to prepare for him, they did not receive him: because his face was going to Jerusalem.

The Samaritans and the Jews are at hostile enmity with one another, and while all nations are hated by them, they rage against each other with their own particular fury, since both contend over the possession of the Law, and persecute one another to such a degree, that after the Jews returned from Babylon, the Samaritans always hindered the building of the Temple. And when they too wished to build the Temple with them, the Jews answered: It is not lawful for us and you to build the house of the Lord. Finally, as the greatest insult, the Pharisees reproached the Lord: Sayest not thou well that thou hast a devil, and art a Samaritan? And in the parable of the man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, a Samaritan is set forth as a sign and miracle, that an evil man had done good: and at the well of the Samaritan woman it is written: For the Samaritans do not have dealings with the Jews.

The Samaritans, therefore, seeing the Lord going to Jerusalem, that is, to their enemies, which they had heard from his disciples, who had come to prepare lodging, recognized that he was a Jew: and as a Jew and a stranger, and one going to enemies, they refused to receive him. Although another understanding may also be suggested to us, that it was the Lord's will not to be received by the Samaritans, because he was hastening to go to Jerusalem, and there to suffer and shed his blood, lest, being detained by the reception of the Samaritans, and by the teaching of that nation, he should delay the day of the passion which he had come to endure. Whence he says also in another place: I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And he charged the Apostles: Into the city of the Samaritans enter ye not, wishing to remove every occasion of Jewish persecution: lest afterward they should say, we crucified him, because he had joined himself to our enemies and foes.

His face therefore was that of one going to Jerusalem. And therefore, according to another understanding, the Samaritans did not receive him: because he was hastening to enter Jerusalem. But that they did not receive him was of the Lord's will. Finally the Apostles, versed in the Law, in which they had known only such justice as an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, strive to avenge the injury, and to imitate Elijah, at whose voice fire had consumed two captains of fifty soldiers: and they say to the Lord: Wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them? Beautifully they say, Wilt thou that we command: for Elijah too had said: If I be a man of God, let fire come down from heaven upon you. Therefore, that the word of the Apostles might have effect, it depends on the will of the Lord.

For unless he had commanded, in vain would the Apostles say that fire should come down upon them, and in a certain way they speak this in other words. If for the injury of Elijah's servant fire came down from heaven, and the conflagration consumed not the Samaritans but the Jews, how much more ought the flame to rage against the impious Samaritans for the contempt of the Son of God? On the other hand the Lord, who came not to judge but to save, not in power but in humility, not in the glory of the Father but in the lowliness of man, rebukes them, because they did not remember his teaching and the goodness of the Gospel, in which he had said: Whosoever shall strike thee on the cheek, offer him also the other. And, Love your enemies.

Wishing to know the reason for this, and from what source it proceeded, I unrolled the volume of the Gospel, and among other things I found that, as the publicans and sinners were drawing near to the Saviour to hear him, the Pharisees and Scribes murmured, saying: Why does this man receive sinners, and eat with them? He spoke to them the parable of the hundred sheep, and of the one that was lost, which, when found, was carried back on the shoulders of the shepherd. And as to why it was proposed, he immediately added: I say to you, so shall there be joy in heaven over one sinner doing penance, more than over ninety-nine just who need no penance. He also proposed another parable, of the ten drachmas, one of which was lost and found, and he ended it with a similar conclusion. So I say to you, there shall be joy before the Angels of God over one sinner doing penance.

He proposed also a third parable, of a man having two sons, and dividing his substance between them. And when the younger, having squandered his means, had begun to be in want, and to eat husks, the food of swine, he returned to his father, and was received by him. The elder brother also, being envious, was rebuked by his father's voice, because he ought to rejoice and be glad, since his brother had been dead, and had come to life again: he had been lost, and was found. These three parables he spoke against the Pharisees and Scribes, who were unwilling to accept the penitence of sinners and the salvation of publicans. But he said, it says, also to his disciples—no doubt a parable, as before to the Scribes and Pharisees—by which parable he might exhort the disciples to clemency, and might say in other words: Forgive, and it shall be forgiven you; that in the Lord's Prayer you might ask with unashamed brow, Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.

What then is the parable exhorting the disciples to clemency? There was a certain rich man, who had a steward or dispenser, for this is what οἰκονόμος means. Now a villicus is properly the governor of a country estate, and hence took his name from villa. But an οἰκονόμος is the dispenser as much of money as of produce, and of all things which the master possesses. Whence also the οἰκονομικός is a most beautiful book of Xenophon's, which signifies not the governance of a country estate, but the management of an entire household (as Tullius translates it). This dispenser, then, was accused before his master of squandering his substance. Being called, the master said to him: What is this that I hear of you? Render the account of your stewardship, for you shall no longer be able to manage my affairs. What did he say within himself: What shall I do, since my master takes away from me the stewardship? I am not able to dig, I am ashamed to beg.

I know what I shall do, so that when the stewardship is taken from me, they may receive me into their houses. So he called each of his master's debtors, and said to the first: How much do you owe my lord? He said to him: A hundred baths of oil. He said to him: Take your bond, and sit down quickly and write fifty. Then he spoke to another: But how much do you owe? And he answered: A hundred cors of wheat. And he said to him: Take your bond, and write eighty. And the lord praised the steward, or dispenser, of iniquity, because he had acted prudently: for the children of this world are more prudent in their generation than the children of light. And I say to you, make to yourselves friends of the mammon of iniquity, that when you shall have failed, they may receive you into eternal dwellings. He who is faithful in a little thing, is faithful also in much.

He who is unjust in the least, will be unjust also in much. If therefore you have not been faithful in the unjust mammon, which is true, who will trust you? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own? No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or he will hearken to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. Now the Pharisees, who were covetous, heard all these things, and they derided him. I have set down the whole text of this parable, so that we might not seek understanding from elsewhere, nor strive to find definite persons in the parable; but let us interpret it as a parable, that is, a similitude, which is so called from the fact that it is παραβάλλεται to something else, that is, likened to it, and is as it were a shadow that goes before the truth.

If, then, the dispenser of the unjust mammon is praised by the voice of the Lord, because out of an unjust matter he prepared for himself righteousness, and the Lord, having suffered loss, praises the prudence of the dispenser—because, although he acted fraudulently against his master, yet he acted prudently for himself—how much more will Christ, who can sustain no loss, and who is inclined to clemency, praise his disciples, if they have been merciful toward those who are to believe in him? Accordingly, after the parable he added: And I say to you, make to yourselves friends of the mammon of iniquity. Nowmammon,not in the Hebrew but in the Syriac tongue, is called riches, because they are gathered out of iniquity. If, then, iniquity, well dispensed, is turned into righteousness, how much more will the word of God, in which there is no iniquity, which has also been entrusted to the Apostles, if it shall have been well dispensed, raise its dispensers up to heaven?

Wherefore it follows: He who is faithful in the least, that is, in carnal things, will be faithful also in much, that is, in spiritual things.

But he who is unjust in a little thing, so as not to give to the brethren for their use what was created by God for all, this man will be unjust also in the dispensing of spiritual wealth, so that he will dispense the Lord's teaching not according to need but according to persons. But if, he says, you have not well dispensed carnal riches, which pass away, who will entrust to you the true and eternal riches of the teaching of God? And if you have been unfaithful in those things which belong to another (and everything of this world is foreign to us), who will be able to entrust to you the things which are your own, and properly assigned to man? Whence he rebukes covetousness, and says that he who loves money cannot love God. Therefore even the Apostles, if they wish to love God, must despise money.

Whence the Scribes and Pharisees, who were covetous, understanding that the parable was spoken against them, derided him, preferring carnal things, as certain and present, to spiritual and future things, which seemed to them uncertain. Theophilus, the seventh bishop of the church of Antioch after the Apostle Peter, who, weaving together the sayings of the four Evangelists into one work, left us the monuments of his genius, has spoken thus concerning this parable in his Commentaries.The rich man who had a steward, or dispenser, is God omnipotent, than whom nothing is richer. His dispenser is Paul, who learned the sacred Scriptures at the feet of Gamaliel, and had received the Law of God to be dispensed. When he began to persecute those who believed in Christ, to bind them, to kill them, and to squander all the substance of his Lord, he was rebuked by the Lord: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad. And he said in his heart: What shall I do?

For I who was a master and a steward am now compelled to be a disciple and a laborer. I am not able to dig. For I perceive that all the commandments of the Law, which lay upon the earth, are destroyed, and that the Law and the Prophets were ended up to John the Baptist. I am ashamed to beg, I who had been a teacher of the Jews, that I should be compelled to beg the teaching of salvation and faith from the Gentiles and from the disciple Ananias. I will do, therefore, what I perceive to be useful to me: that after I have been cast out of my stewardship, the Christians may receive me into their houses.

And he began to teach those who had formerly lived under the Law, and who had believed in Christ in such a way as to suppose they would be justified by the Law, that the Law was abolished, that the prophecies were past, and that the things which before had been reckoned as gain were now to be counted as refuse. So he called two of the many debtors. The first, who owed a hundred baths of oil, namely those who had been gathered together from among the Gentiles, and who greatly needed the mercy of God; and out of the number of a hundred (which is full and perfect) he made them write fifty, which properly belongs to those doing penance, according to the jubilee, and that parable in the Gospel in which to one five hundred, to another fifty denarii are forgiven.

The second he called the people of the Jews, who had been nourished on the wheat of God's commandments, and who owed him the number a hundred, and he compelled them to make eighty out of the hundred, that is, to believe in the resurrection of the Lord, which is comprised in the number of the eighth day, and is completed out of eight decades: that they might pass from the sabbath of the Law to the first day after the sabbath. For this reason he is praised by the Lord, because he acted well, and for his own salvation was changed from the austerity of the Law to the clemency of the Gospel. But if you should ask why he is called the steward of iniquity in the Law, which is God's own—the steward was unjust, because, although he offered well, he did not divide well; believing in the Father, but persecuting the Son; having the omnipotent God, but denying the Holy Spirit.

Therefore the Apostle Paul was more prudent in transgressing the Law than were the sometime children of light, who, occupied in the observance of the Law, lost Christ, who is the true light of God the Father.What Ambrose, bishop of Milan, has thought on this passage you may read in his Commentaries. I have not been able to find any exposition of Origen and Didymus on this parable, and whether it has been lost through the antiquity of time, or whether they themselves did not write one, I am uncertain. It seems to me, following the earlier interpretation, that we ought to make friends for ourselves out of the unjust mammon, not just any poor, but those who can receive us into their houses, and into eternal dwellings: so that when we have given them small things, we may receive great things from them, and giving what is another's, we may receive what is our own, and sow in blessing, that we may reap blessing: for he who sows sparingly shall also reap sparingly.

—In what sense is to be understood that which we read in the Epistle to the Romans: For scarcely for a just man doth one die. For perhaps for a good man some one dares to die. Two heresies, taking occasion from this testimony which they do not understand, blaspheme with different error indeed, but with equal impiety. For Marcion, who makes the Just God to be the Creator also of the Law and the Prophets, but the Good God to be that of the Gospels and the Apostles, whose Son he wills Christ to be, introduces two gods: the one just, the other good. And he asserts that for the just, either none, or few, have met death; but for the good—that is, for Christ—innumerable Martyrs have arisen.

Arius, again, refers the just to Christ, of whom it was said: O God, give thy judgment to the king, and thy justice to the king’s son; and he himself says of himself in the Gospel: For the Father judgeth no man, but hath given all judgment to the Son; and, As I hear, so I judge. But he refers the good to God the Father, of whom the Son himself confesses: Why callest thou me good? None is good but the one God, the Father. And when up to this point he has been able to find the devious paths of his blasphemy, in what follows he stumbles and falls. For how does one dare to die for the Father, and scarcely die for the Son, when for the name of Christ so much blood of Martyrs has been shed?

Whoever, then, expounds this passage simply, may say this: that in the Old Law, in which there is justice, scarcely a few have been found who shed their blood; but under the New Covenant, in which there is goodness and clemency, innumerable Martyrs have arisen. But from the fact that he added,perhaps some one even dares to die,and tempered his statement with a hesitant step, showing that some might be found who dare to die for the Gospel, he shows that it is not to be so understood; but that the sense of this passage ought to be treated from what precedes and what follows.

For Paul, saying that he glories in tribulations—because tribulation worketh patience, and patience proof, and proof hope, and hope confoundeth not, which has a sure promise from this, that the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who is given to us, according to that which God had said through the Prophet: I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh—marvels at the goodness of Christ, that he willed to die for the impious, and the weak, and sinners, and to die at a fitting time, of which he himself says: At an acceptable time I have heard thee, and in the day of salvation I have helped thee. And again: Behold, now is the acceptable time, behold, now is the day of salvation. When all had sinned, they became alike unprofitable; there was none that did good, no, not one.

Incredible, therefore, is the goodness, and unheard of the clemency, to die for the impious; for scarcely does anyone shed his blood for a just man, and for a good man, terror of death frightening all things away. For it may sometimes be found that someone dares to die for a just and good cause. But the love of God which He had toward us is thereby most fully proved, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, and his life was taken away from the earth: and he was led to death for the iniquities of the people; and he bore our sins, and his soul was delivered unto death, and he was reckoned among the wicked; that he might make us, the impious, and the weak, and sinners, pious, and strong, and just. Some interpret it thus: If He died for us, the impious and sinners, how much more ought we, without doubt, to die for Christ, the just and the good?

But let us not think thatjustandgoodare diverse, nor that they properly signify any person; but absolutely a just and a good thing, for which, with difficulty, but sometimes, someone can be found who will shed his blood.

—What is meant by that which the Apostle writes to the Romans: Sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. Let us set forth the whole testimony, and discussing each point with Christ's help, indicate simply what seems to us, not prejudging your own understanding as to what you wish to gather from it, but briefly explaining our own opinion. What then shall we say? Is the law sin? God forbid. But I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived. And I died: and the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death. For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it slew me.

Wherefore the law indeed is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, worked death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful. For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I understand not: for what I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that I do. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Just as medicine is not the cause of death when it displays deadly poisons—although evil men may abuse these poisons unto death, either killing themselves or plotting against enemies—so the law was given that it might point out the poisons of sins; and that it might restrain, by the bridle of the law, a man abusing his own liberty for evil, who before was carried along heedlessly and slipped down precipices, and teach him to walk with ordered steps; so that we might serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter—that is, that we might live under precept, we who before, after the manner of brute animals, used to say: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

But if, when the law has come in (which teaches what we ought to do, and forbids what we ought not to do), we are carried by our own vice and incontinence against the legal statutes, the law seems to be the cause of sin: for while it forbids concupiscence, it is seen in a certain way to inflame it. There is a secular saying among the Greeks: Whatever is permitted is desired less. Therefore, on the contrary, whatever is not permitted receives fuel for desire. Whence Tully also denies that Solon wrote among the Athenians concerning the punishments of parricides, lest he should seem rather to suggest the crime than to forbid it. Therefore, among despisers and those who trample upon the precepts of the laws, the law seems to be an occasion of offenses: while, by forbidding what it does not wish to be done, it binds them with the bonds of the commandments—those who, before, sinning without law, were not held bound by crimes.

These things we have said, understanding the Law which was given through Moses. But because it is written in what follows: the law of God, and the law of the flesh and of the members, which fights against the law of our mind, and leads us captive in the law of sin, and since I recognize that four laws fighting against one another are written in one place, I think it not amiss to inquire how many kinds of law are recorded to exist in the Holy Scriptures. That law is called Law which was given through Moses, according to that which is written to the Galatians: For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse. For it is written: Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.

And again in the same epistle: The law was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made, ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator. And again: Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster. For ye are all the children of God by faith which is in Christ Jesus. Historical narrative also, which contains no precepts but relates what was done, is called Law by the Apostle. Tell me, he says, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondmaid was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.

But the Psalms too are called Law: That the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause. Isaiah's prophecy too the Apostle calls Law: In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord. Which I found written thus in Isaiah according to the Hebrew and Aquila. Law is also called the mystical understanding of the Scriptures: We know that the law is spiritual. And beyond all these, the same Apostle also teaches of a natural law written in our hearts. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law: these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves; which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness. This law which is written in the heart embraces all nations; and there is no man who does not know this law.

Whence the whole world is under sin, and all men are transgressors of the law: and therefore it is the just judgment of God, writing in the heart of humankind: What thou wouldst not have done to thyself, do not to another. For who does not know that murder, adultery, theft, and all concupiscence are evil, from the very fact that he would not wish these things done to himself? For if he did not know they were evil, he would by no means grieve that they had been inflicted upon him. By this natural law even Cain recognized his sin, saying: My guilt is greater than that I should be forgiven. And Adam and Eve recognized their sin, and therefore hid themselves beneath the tree of life. Pharaoh too, before the Law was given through Moses, goaded by the law of nature, confesses his own crimes, and says: The Lord is righteous, but I and my people are wicked.

This law childhood does not know, infancy is ignorant of it, and one sinning without a command is not held by the law of sin. He curses father and mother, and strikes his parents; and because he has not yet received the law of wisdom, sin is dead in him. But when the commandment comes—that is, the time of understanding that seeks good things and avoids evil ones—then sin begins to revive, and he to die, and to be guilty of sin. And so it comes about that the time of understanding, by which we come to know God's commandments so as to attain to life, works death in us—if we act more carelessly, and the occasion of wisdom seduces and supplants us, and leads us to death. Not that understanding itself is sin (for the law of understanding is holy and just and good), but through the understanding of sins and of virtues, sin is born in me, which before I understood it I did not know to be sin.

And thus it comes about that what was given to me for good is, through my own fault, turned into evil; and, to speak by hyperbole, and to use a new word to explain my meaning: sin, which before I had understanding was without sin, through the transgression of the commandment begins to become for me a more sinning sin. Let us first inquire what this concupiscence is, of which the law says: Thou shalt not covet. Some suppose it to be that commandment which is written in the Decalogue: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods. But we think that by concupiscence all the disturbances of the soul are signified, by which we grieve and rejoice, fear and desire. And this the Apostle, the vessel of election, whose body was the temple of the Holy Spirit, and who said: Do ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me?

And in another place: Christ has redeemed us: And again: I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me—he speaks not of himself, but of one who wishes, after sins, to do penance: and under his own person he describes the frailty of the human condition, which endures the warfare of two men, the inner and the outer, fighting between themselves. The inner man consents both to the written and to the natural law, that it is good, and holy, and just, and spiritual. The outer man, he says, I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I do I know not, and not what I would, that I do, but what I hate.

But if the outer man does what he does not will, and does what he hates, he shows that the commandment is good, and that it is not he who does the evil, but sin dwelling in his flesh: that is, the vices of the body, and the desires of pleasure, which for the sake of posterity and offspring have been implanted in human bodies, and which, if it exceeds its bounds, turns into sin. Let each one consider himself, and, as his own accuser, examine the incentives of vice: how often in speech, and in thought, and in the heat of the body he speaks, and thinks, and suffers what he does not will—I will not say does, lest I seem to accuse holy men, of whom it is written: That man was true and blameless, a just worshipper of God, departing from every evil work. And of Zacharias and Elizabeth: They were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.

And it was commanded to the Apostles: Be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Now he would never command this to the Apostles unless he knew that man could be perfect. Unless perhaps we should say this: thatdeparting from every evilsignifies an amendment, a passing from the errors of childhood and the vices of a wanton age to correction and to virtues; and that the righteousness proclaimed of Zacharias and Elizabeth is outward, while the concupiscence which is now said to dwell in our members is inward. But moreover this is enjoined not upon boys but upon the Apostles, now of mature age, that they should take up perfection—which perfection we too confess to belong to a mature age. Nor in saying this do we flatter vices; but we follow the authority of the Scriptures, that no man is without sin, but God hath concluded all under sin, that he might have mercy upon all: except him alone who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.

Whence it is also said through Solomon that the tracks of the serpent are not found upon the rock. And the Lord himself says of himself: Behold, the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me—that is, none of his own work, nor any trace of his own. For this reason we are commanded not to reproach a man returning from his sins, and not to abominate the Egyptian: because we too were once in Egypt, and built cities of clay and bricks for Pharaoh; and because we were led captive into Babylon by the law of sin, which lodged in our members.

And when it seemed the utmost despair, or rather an open confession, that every man was entangled in the snares of the devil, the Apostle, turning to himself—or rather the man under whose person the Apostle speaks—gives thanks to the Savior, that he has been redeemed by his blood, and has laid aside his filth in baptism, and has put on the new garment of Christ, and, the old man being dead, a new man has been born, who says: Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord, who has delivered me from the body of death.

But if to anyone it does not seem that the Apostle says this of others under his own person, let him explain how Daniel, whom we know to have been righteous, speaks as it were of himself when he intercedes for others: We have sinned, we have done iniquitously, we have dealt unjustly, we have done wickedly, and have withdrawn, and turned aside from thy commandments and thy judgments, and have not hearkened unto thy servants the prophets, who spoke in thy name to our kings, and our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. To thee, O Lord, belongeth righteousness, but unto us confusion of face. So too what is said in the thirty-first Psalm: I have made known to thee my sin, and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said: I will confess against myself my injustice unto the Lord, and thou hast forgiven the wickedness of my sin.

For this shall every saint pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found—this suits not David alone, and a righteous man, and (to speak simply) a prophet whose words are related, but a sinner also. And when the righteous man, under the person of one doing penance, had poured forth such words, he deserves to hear from God: I will give thee understanding, and I will teach thee in this way wherein thou shalt go: I will fix mine eyes upon thee. In the thirty-seventh Psalm too, whose title is, For a remembrance, so as to teach us that we ought always to be mindful of our sins and do penance, we read something of this sort: There is no peace in my bones because of my sins. For mine iniquities are gone over my head: as a heavy burden they are grown heavy upon me. My sores are corrupted and putrefied, because of my foolishness. I am afflicted and bowed down even to the end.

This whole passage of the Apostle, both in what precedes and in what follows, indeed his whole Epistle to the Romans, is wrapped in exceeding obscurities, and if I should wish to discuss it all, not one book alone, but many great volumes would have to be written by me.

Wherefore the Apostle Paul writes in the same Epistle to the Romans: I wished myself to be anathema from Christ, for my brethren and kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service, and the promises: whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is over all things, God blessed for ever, amen. Truly it is a hard question, how the Apostle, who had said above: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?

And again: For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which we have in Christ Jesus our Lord, now confirms with an oath, and says: I speak the truth in Christ Jesus, I lie not, my conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow, and continual grief in my heart; for I wished myself to be anathema from Christ, for my brethren and kinsmen according to the flesh; and so on.

For if he is of so great love toward God, that neither fear of death, nor hope of life, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor the sword, can separate him from the love of Him; and if angels also, and powers, and things present or things to come, and all the powers of the heavens, and height and depth alike, and all creation together should rush upon him, which can by no means happen: yet he would not be separated from the love of God which he has in Christ Jesus: what is this so great a change, or rather this unheard-of prudence, that for the love of Christ he should be unwilling to have Christ?

And lest perhaps we should not believe him, he swears, and confirms it in Christ, and calls the Holy Spirit to witness his conscience, that he has sorrow, not slight and accidental, but great and unbelievable, and that he has grief in his heart, not such as pricks for an hour and passes, but such as remains continually in the heart. To what does this sorrow tend? To what purpose does this unceasing grief avail? He wishes to be anathema from Christ, and to perish, that others may be saved. But if we consider the voice of Moses, entreating God for the people of the Jews, and saying: If Thou wilt forgive them their sin, forgive it; but if not, blot me out of Thy book which Thou hast written, we shall perceive the same affection in both Moses and Paul toward the flock entrusted to them. For the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. But the hireling, when he sees the wolf coming, flees, because they are not his sheep.

And this is the very same as to say: I wished to be anathema from Christ; and blot me out of Thy book which Thou hast written. For those who are blotted out of the book of the living, and are not written with the just, become anathema from the Lord. And at the same time observe how great is the Apostle’s love toward Christ, that he desires to die for Him, and to perish alone, provided only that the whole race of men should believe in Him. To perish, however, not forever, but for the present time. For he who shall lose his soul for Christ, saves it. Whence also he takes an example from the forty-third Psalm: For Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. The Apostle therefore wishes to perish in the flesh, that others may be saved in the spirit; to shed his own blood, that the souls of many may be preserved.

And that “anathema” sometimes signifies destruction, can be proved by many testimonies of the Old Testament. And lest we should think the sorrow slight, and the cause of grief small, he adds and says: For my brethren and kinsmen according to the flesh. When he calls them kinsmen, and brethren according to the flesh, he shows that in spirit they are estranged from him. Whose, he says, is the adoption, which is more significantly expressed in Greek as υἱοθεσία, concerning whom the Lord once spoke: Israel is my firstborn son: and, I have begotten sons, and exalted them; now He says: Strange children have lied to me. And, whose is the glory, in that out of all the nations they were chosen for the peculiar people of God: And, whose are the covenants, one in the letter, the other in the spirit: so that they who had formerly served in the flesh the ceremonies of the abolished Law, might afterward serve in spirit the commandments of the everlasting Gospel.

And the giving of the law corresponds to both, the new and the old Testament. And the service, that is, true religion. And the promises; so that whatever was promised to the fathers might be fulfilled in the children. And (what is greater than all) of whom Christ was born, of the Virgin Mary. And that we might know who this Christ is, he sums up in one sentence the causes of his grief: who is over all things, God blessed for ever, amen. And He, so great and such as He is, is not received by those from whose stock He was born. And nevertheless he praises the truth of the judgment, lest the sentence of God against his kinsmen and brethren should seem displeasing, or either too severe or excessive. In those, therefore, in whom there were once such great goods, he grieves that now there should be such great evils.

What does he wish to be understood, that the same Apostle writes to the Colossians: Let no man beguile you, willing in humility of mind and religion of Angels, walking in the things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up in the sense of his flesh, and not holding the Head, from which the whole body, by joints and bands, being supplied and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God, and the rest. That saying which we have often mentioned: And though rude in speech, yet not in knowledge, we now again affirm that Paul spoke this not out of humility, but out of the truth of his own consciousness. For the tongue does not unfold profound and hidden meanings. And though he himself perceives what he is saying, he cannot transfer it into the ears of others in pure speech.

Even in his own native tongue, in which he was most eloquent (for he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and taught at the feet of Gamaliel, a man most learned in the Law), when he desired to interpret himself, he becomes entangled. But if this happened to him even in the Greek tongue, which, reared in Tarsus of Cilicia, he had drunk in from early age, what must be said of the Latins, who, striving to render word for word, make his meanings more obscure, and, like weeds growing up, choke the abundance of the fruit? We shall therefore attempt to unfold the meanings paraphrastically, and to restore the tangles of his involved speech to their proper order and connection; so that the threads of the words may run in a simple weft, and, with a pure woof, the fabric of the Apostle’s discourse may grow together.

Let no man beguile you, that is, let no one take the prize away from you against you: for this is what is said in Greek, καταβραβευέτω, when someone, engaged in a contest, loses through the injustice of the judge of the games, or through the treachery of his trainers, the βραβεῖον, that is, the palm due to him. And there are many words which the Apostle uses more familiarly according to the custom of his city and province. Of which (for example) a few must be set down. But to me it is a very small thing to be judged by man’s day, that is, ἀπὸ ἀνθρωπίνης ἡμέρας: And, I speak as a man, that is, ἀνθρώπινον λέγω: And, οὐ κατενάρκησα ὑμᾶς, that is, I did not burden you: and what is now said, μηδεὶς ὑμᾶς καταβραβευέτω, that is, let no one take the prize against you. These and many other such expressions the Cilicians use even to this day.

Nor should we wonder at this in the Apostle, if he uses the idiom of the tongue in which he was born and reared, since Virgil, a second Homer among us, following the custom of his own country, calls frost “wicked.” Let no one therefore surpass and overcome you, wishing to follow the humility of the letter, and the religion and worship of Angels; so that you may not serve spiritual understanding, but the patterns of things to come, which he himself has not seen, who desires to surpass you, or sees (for both readings are found in the Greek), especially since he walks puffed up, and struts inflated, displaying the pride of his mind by the gesture of his body—for this is what ἐμβατεύων signifies. But he is vainly puffed up and swollen with the sense of his flesh, understanding all things carnally, and searching out the ravings of Jewish traditions, and not holding the Head of all the Scriptures, that of which it is written: The head of the man is Christ.

But the head and principle of the whole body, and of those who believe, and of all spiritual understanding. From which head the body of the Church, through its joints and connections, receives the vital sap of heavenly doctrine, so that all the members may gradually be enlivened, and, through the hidden channels of the veins, the purified blood of nourishment may be poured out and administered and increased, indeed held together by the temperance of the body, so that, watered from the fountain of the head, the limbs may grow into the perfection of God, and the prayer of the Savior may be fulfilled: Father, I will that as I and thou are one, so also these may be one in us: that after Christ shall have delivered us to the Father, God may be all in all.

Something of the same kind, both in words and in meanings and in manner of expression, he writes most obscurely to the Ephesians: But speaking the truth in love, may we grow up in him in all things, who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined together and connected through every joint of supply, according to the working in the measure of every part, makes increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love. Concerning which we have spoken more fully in the Commentaries on that same Epistle. He speaks all this against those who, believing from among the Jews in the Lord the Savior, wished to observe Jewish ceremonies. Concerning which matter no small controversy arose also in the Acts of the Apostles. Whence also Paul says above, concerning those who boast themselves to be teachers of the Law: Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink, as though some things were clean, others unclean; or in respect of a festival day, as though some days were festive, others not.

For to us who believe that Christ has risen, there is a continual and everlasting festivity. Or in respect of the new moon, that is, of the Calends, and of the new month, when the waning moon comes to an end and is covered with the shadows of night. For the light of Christians is eternal, and is always illumined by the rays of the Sun of righteousness. Or in respect of the sabbaths, that they may not do servile work, nor bear burdens, since we have been endowed with the liberty of Christ, and have ceased to bear the burdens of sins. All these things, he says, are a shadow of things to come; and images of the coming happiness, so that whereas the Jews hesitate according to the letter, and are held fast upon earth, we, according to the spirit, may pass over to Christ, who, in contrast to the shadows, is now called the body.

For just as in a body there is truth, and in the shadow of a body there is falsehood, so in spiritual understanding all food and drink is clean, and the whole festivity, and the perpetual Calends, and the eternal rest are to be awaited. We ask what he meant to say by humility and religion of Angels, or what sense it has. From the time when the Lord spoke to his disciples: Arise, let us go hence: And, Your house shall be left unto you desolate: And, the place where the Lord was crucified is spiritually called Egypt and Sodom, all the worship of Jewish observances has been destroyed, and whatever victims they offer, they do not offer to God, but to fugitive angels and unclean spirits.

Nor is it a wonder if they do this after the Passion of the Lord, since also through the prophet Amos it is said to them: Did ye offer to me victims and sacrifices forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel; and ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, the figures which ye made, that ye might worship them? Which the martyr Stephen, expounding more fully in an assembly of the Jews, and reviewing the ancient history, thus stated: And they made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifices to the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their hands. But God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven: as it is written in the book of the Prophets. Now the host of heaven is called not only the sun and moon and glittering stars, but also the whole multitude of the Angels, and their armies, which in Hebrew are called SABAOTH, that is, of powers, or of hosts.

Whence also in the Gospel according to Luke we read: And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will. For God maketh his Angels spirits, and his ministers a burning fire. And that we may know that those who worshipped idols, although they seemed to offer sacrifices in the Temple, did not offer them to God but to Angels, we learn more fully through Ezekiel: I gave them statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live. For God requires not the blood of goats or of bulls; but the sacrifice of God is a broken spirit: a contrite and humbled heart God does not despise.

And therefore those who had made the calf at Horeb, and worshipped the star of the god Remphan, concerning which we have discoursed more fully in the Prophet Amos, worshipped the figures which they themselves had made: and God gave them up, that they might serve the host of heaven, which is now called by the Apostle the religion of Angels. Instead of humility, in the Greek is read ταπεινοφροσύνη, that is, humility of mind, or of sense. For it is truly a humble mind, and a pitiable superstition, to believe that God delights in the blood of goats and bulls, and in the smoke of incense, which we ourselves as men often turn away from.

As for what follows: If ye be dead with Christ from the elements of the world, why, as though living in the world, do ye decree: Touch not, taste not, handle not, which things are all unto destruction by the very use, according to the precepts and doctrines of men, which things indeed have a show of wisdom in superstition, and humility, and not sparing the body; not in any honor to the satisfying of the flesh—this seems to be his meaning for us. Let us run through each point, and, Christ disclosing it, lay open the obscurity of the meanings and the words. If ye have been baptized in Christ, and buried together with Christ in baptism, but dead as regards the elements of this world, as it were, from the elements—why do you not say with me, But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world?

Have ye not heard the Lord saying to the Father: They are not of the world, as I also am not of the world, and the world hates them because they are not of the world, just as I also am not of the world? But on the contrary, as though living in the world, ye decree: Touch not the body of a dead man, nor a garment, nor a stool on which a menstruous woman has sat: taste not swine’s flesh, nor of hares, and cuttlefish, and squid, of moray eel, and of eel, and of all fish that have not scales and fins—all which things are unto corruption and perishing by the very use, and are passed off in dung? For meat is for the belly, and the belly for meats. And, Whatsoever enters in by the mouth defiles not a man; but those things which go out from us.

According to the precepts, he says, and doctrines of men; according to that which Isaiah says: This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. Whence also the Lord rebukes the Pharisees, saying: Ye have made void the commandment of God, that ye might establish your traditions. For God said: Honor thy father and thy mother, and he that curses father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say, whosoever shall say to father or mother, whatever gift is from me shall profit thee, and he shall not honor his father or his mother, and the rest. To whom he adds: And ye have made void the commandment of God for the sake of your traditions. How great are the traditions of the Pharisees, which they today call δευτερώσεις, and what old-wives’ fables—I am unable to unfold.

For neither does the size of this book permit it, and many of them are so shameful that I would blush to speak of them. Yet I will mention one, to the disgrace of that hostile nation. They have set over their synagogues the wisest men, assigned to a filthy task, that they may judge, by taste, whether the blood of a virgin or of a menstruous woman is clean or unclean, if they cannot discern it by sight.

Moreover, because it is commanded that on the Sabbath days each one should sit in his house, and not go out, nor walk from the place in which he dwells; if ever we press them literally to constrain them not to lie down, not to walk, not to stand, but only to sit, if they wish to keep the precepts, they are wont to answer and say: Barachibas, and Simeon, and Hillel our teachers have handed down to us that we may walk two thousand paces on the Sabbath, and other things of this kind, preferring the doctrines of men to the doctrine of God. Not that we say that one must always sit on the Sabbath, and never at all withdraw from the place where one has been occupied; but that what is impossible according to the letter of the Law, in which it is weakened through the flesh, must be fulfilled by spiritual observance.

There follows: Which things indeed have a reasoning of wisdom. In this place,indeed(quidem) is a superfluous conjunction: which we find the apostle doing in many places on account of unfamiliarity with the art of grammar. For there does not followsed(but), or another conjunction, which usually corresponds to that preposition, whereverquidemhas been placed. It appears therefore that Jewish observances, among the ignorant and the base common folk, have an image of reason and human wisdom. Whence also their teachers are called σοφοὶ, that is, wise men. And whenever on certain days they expound their traditions, they are accustomed to say to their disciples, οἱ σοφοὶ δευτερώσιν, that is,the wise men teach the traditions.Forsuperstitionin the Greek there is placed ἐθελοθρησκεία, that is, false religion: and forhumility,ταπεινοφροσύνη, which usually signifies a virtue rather than a vice. But here ταπεινοφροσύνη is to be understood in this sense, that they hold low and earthly things.

But Αφειδία σώματος, whose name Latin speech does not explain, is called among usnot sparing the body.The Jews do not spare their bodies in the taking of food, sometimes despising what they have, and seeking what they do not have. From which necessity they sometimes contract weaknesses and diseases. Nor do they honor themselves, since all things are clean to the clean, and nothing can be polluted which is received with thanksgiving, and is therefore created by the Lord, that by satiety and the filling of the flesh it might nourish and sustain human limbs. But by the elements of the world, from which, or rather by which, we are dead, the Law of Moses and the whole Old Testament is to be understood: by which, as by elements and the beginnings of religion, we learn God.

For just as the letters are called elements, by which we join syllables and words, and by long practice proceed to weave discourse; the art of Music also has its elements, and Geometry begins from the elements of lines, and Dialectic and Medicine have their εἰσαγωγὰς (introductions): so the infancy of a holy man is trained by the elements of the Old Testament, that he may come to the fullness of the Gospel. Whence the hundred and eighteenth Psalm, and all others which are marked by letters, lead us through the Ethical to the Theoretical, and from the elements of the letter that killeth, which is destroyed, cause us to pass over to the spirit that giveth life. Therefore we who are dead to the world and its elements ought not to observe those things which are of the world, because in the one is the beginning, in the other the perfection.

What is meant by that which the same Apostle writes to the Thessalonians: Unless the falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed, and the rest.

In the first Epistle to the Thessalonians he had written: But of the times and moments, brethren, you have no need that I write to you: for yourselves know perfectly, that the day of the Lord shall so come as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, peace and security: then sudden destruction shall come upon them, as the pains upon her that is with child, and they shall not escape. For above he had written to them: This we say unto you in the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them who are asleep: for the Lord himself shall come down from heaven with commandment, and with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead who are in Christ, shall rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air, and so shall we be always with the Lord.

Wherefore comfort ye one another with these words. Which the Macedonians hearing, did not understand whom the Apostle calls those living with him, and who are said to be the ones remaining, who are to be caught up with him in the clouds to meet the Lord; but they thought that, while they were still in the body, and before they had tasted death, Christ would come in his majesty. Which the Apostle hearing, beseeches them, and adjures them by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, that they be not quickly moved; either by spirit, or by word, or by epistle, as if sent by him, as though the day of the Lord were at hand.

That there are two comings of the Lord the Savior, both all the volumes of the Prophets teach, and the faith of the Gospels: that the first he came in lowliness, and afterward he is to come in glory; the Lord himself declaring what things are to come before the consummation of the world, and how Antichrist is to come, when he speaks to the Apostles: When ye shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place (let him that readeth understand), then let them who are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let him that is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house. And again: Then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, do not believe. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible, even the elect should be led into error. Behold I have told you beforehand.

If therefore they shall say to you, behold he is in the desert, go ye not out; behold he is in the closets, believe it not. For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. And then: Then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven; and then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty. And he shall send his angels with a trumpet, and a great voice: and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the farthest parts of the heavens to the utmost bounds thereof. And again he speaks of Antichrist to the Jews: I am come in my Father's name, and you receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him you will receive.

Therefore either the occasion of a not-understood epistle, or a feigned revelation which had deceived sleeping men through a dream, or the conjecture of certain persons interpreting for that time the words of Isaiah and Daniel and the Gospels foretelling Antichrist, had moved and troubled the minds of the Thessalonians: so that they hoped Christ would then come in his majesty. This error the Apostle heals, and sets forth what things must be awaited before the coming of Christ; so that when they see those things done, they may then know that Antichrist, that is, the man of sin, and the son of perdition, who opposes and is exalted above all that is called God, or that is worshiped; so that he sits in the Temple of God, is about to come.

Unless, he says, the falling away come first (which in Greek is called ἀποστασία), that all the nations subject to the Roman empire withdraw from it, and he be revealed, that is, shown, whom all the words of the prophets foretell, the man of sin, in whom is the fount of all sins; and the son of perdition, that is, of the devil; for he is the perdition of all, who opposes Christ, and is therefore called Antichrist: and is exalted above all that is called God, so that he tramples under his foot the gods of all nations, or all approved and true religion: and sits in the Temple of God, either at Jerusalem (as some think), or in the Church, showing himself as though he were Christ himself, and the Son of God. Unless, he says, the Roman empire be first laid waste, and Antichrist have gone before, Christ will not come; for he is to come for this very purpose, that he may destroy Antichrist.

Do you remember, he says, that these very things which I now write by letter, I used to tell you in person when I was present with you: and I said to you that Christ would not come unless Antichrist had first come. And now you know what withholds, that he may be revealed in his own time: that is, what the cause is that Antichrist does not come at present, you know very well. Nor does he wish to say openly that the Roman empire must be destroyed, since those who rule it think it eternal. Whence according to the Apocalypse of John, on the forehead of the purple-clad harlot is written the name of blasphemy, that is, of eternal Rome. For if he had said openly and boldly,Antichrist will not come, unless the Roman empire be first destroyed,it would have seemed a just cause for persecution then to arise against the Church in the East.

And what follows: For the mystery of iniquity already worketh; only that he who now holdeth, do hold, until he be taken out of the way: and then that wicked one shall be revealed—has this sense: By the many evils and sins with which Nero, the most impure of the Caesars, was pressing the world, the coming of Antichrist was being brought forth in travail, and what he is going to do afterward is in part fulfilled in this one; only that the Roman empire, which now holds all the nations, may withdraw and be taken out of the way, and then Antichrist will come, the fount of iniquity, whom the Lord Jesus shall slay with the spirit of his mouth; namely by divine power, and by the command of his own majesty, for whom to have commanded is to have done it; not by the multitude of an army, not by the strength of soldiers, not by the aid of angels: but as soon as he himself comes, Antichrist will be slain.

And just as the darkness is put to flight by the coming of the sun, so by the illumination of his coming the Lord will destroy and wipe him out. Whose works are the works of Satan. And just as in Christ the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily, so also in Antichrist there shall be all mighty works, and signs, and wonders, but all lies. For just as against the signs of God which he wrought through Moses, the magicians withstood him with their own lies, and the rod of Moses devoured their rods: so the truth of Christ will devour the lie of Antichrist. But those shall be seduced by his lie who are prepared for destruction. And because a silent question might arise, why God granted to him all power, signs, and wonders, by which even the elect of God, if it were possible, might be seduced; he forestalls the question with a solution, and resolves what might be objected before it is objected.

He will do, he says, all these things not by his own power, but by the concession of God, on account of the Jews, that they who would not receive the love of the truth, that is, the Spirit of God through Christ, since the love of God is poured out in the hearts of believers; And he himself says: I am the truth: of whom it is written in the Psalms: Truth is sprung out of the earth. Those, therefore, who did not receive love and truth, so that, having received the Savior, they might be saved, God will send them not the worker, but the working itself, that is, the fount of error, that they may believe a lie. Because he himself is a liar, and his father also. And indeed, if Antichrist had been born of a virgin, and had come first into the world, the Jews could have an excuse, and say that they thought it was the truth, and that therefore they received the lie in place of the truth.

But now they are to be judged, or rather, without doubt, condemned: because, having despised the truth of Christ, they are afterward going to receive the lie, that is, Antichrist.

That I, unknown, dare to write to an unknown person, the entreaty of the holy handmaid of Christ, Hediibia, and of my daughter, your wife, Artemia—nay, of your sister by marriage and fellow-servant—has brought about. She, by no means content with her own salvation, has both formerly sought your welfare in your homeland and now seeks it in the Holy Places; desiring to imitate the kindness of the Apostles Andrew and Philip, of whom each, having been found by Christ, desired to find, the one his brother Simon, the other his friend Nathanael; that one of them might merit to hear: Thou art Simon the son of John, thou shalt be called Cephas, which is interpreted, Peter. The other, the gift of God (for this is what Nathanael means in our tongue), might be uplifted by the testimony of Christ speaking to him: Behold truly an Israelite, in whom there is no guile.

Lot too had once desired, together with his daughters, to save his wife, and, bursting forth half-scorched from the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, to lead out her who was still bound by her former vices; but she, trembling with despair, and looking back, was condemned by the eternal mark of unfaithfulness. And burning faith, for the sake of one lost woman, liberates the whole city of Segor. Finally, after leaving behind the valleys and darkness of Sodom, he ascended into the mountains, and the sun rose for him in Segor, which is interpreted “little”: so that the little faith of Lot, since it could not do greater things, might at least preserve lesser ones. For he who had once dwelt in Gomorrah and in error could not at once arrive at the noonday, in which Abraham, the friend of the Lord, received God with the Angels. And Joseph feeds his brothers in Egypt, and the bridegroom hears from the bride: Where dost thou lie down? Where dost thou feed at noon?

Samuel once mourned for Saul, because he did not cure the wounds of pride with the medicine of penitence. And Paul grieved for the Corinthians, who were unwilling to wash away the stains of fornication with tears. Whence also Ezekiel devours the book written within and without, with lamentation, and mourning, and woe. Lamentation, over the praise of the just; mourning, over those doing penance; woe, over those of whom it is written: When the wicked man has come into the depth of evils, he despises. These Isaiah points out, saying: The Lord of hosts called in that day to weeping and mourning and baldness and the girding of sackcloth; but they made gladness and rejoicing, slaughtering calves, and killing sheep, that they might eat flesh, saying: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die. Of these Ezekiel also speaks: And thou, son of man, say to the house of Israel: Thus have you spoken, saying: Our errors and our iniquities are upon us, and in them we waste away: and how can we be saved?

Say to them: As I live, saith the Lord: I do not desire the death of the wicked, but that he turn from his way. And again: Return, ye who have departed from your way; why will you die, house of Israel? Nothing so offends God, as clinging to worse things out of despair of better ones; although this very despair is itself a sign of unbelief. For he who despairs of salvation does not think that judgment will come. But if he feared it, he would surely prepare himself for the judge by good works. Let us hear God speaking through Jeremiah: Turn thy foot from the rough way, and thy throat from thirst. And again: Shall not he that falleth, rise again? Or he that is turned away, shall he not return? And through Isaiah: When thou hast turned and groaned, then shalt thou be saved, and shalt know where thou hast been. We cannot know the evils of sickness, except when health has followed.

And how much good virtue possesses, the vices demonstrate; and light becomes clearer by comparison with darkness. Ezekiel too, in the same words—because in the same spirit—says: Turn, and return from your iniquities, house of Israel; and your impieties shall not be a torment to you. Cast away all your impieties, by which you have acted impiously against me, and make for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. And why will you die, house of Israel? For I do not desire the death of the sinner, saith the Lord. Whence also in what follows he says: As I live, saith the Lord. I do not desire the death of the sinner, but rather that he turn from his way, and live; lest the unbelieving mind despair of the promise of good things, and the soul, once destined for perdition, apply no cure to the wound which it judges cannot possibly be cured.

Therefore he says he swears, so that if we do not believe God when he promises, we might at least believe him when he swears, for our salvation. For which reason the just man prays, and says: Turn us, O God our saviour, and turn away thy wrath from us. And again: Lord, in thy will thou hast granted strength to my comeliness. Thou didst turn away thy face from me, and I became troubled. For after I had exchanged the foulness of my sins for the beauty of the virtues, thou didst strengthen my weakness by thy grace. Behold I hear him promising: I will pursue my enemies, and overtake them, and I will not turn back, until they fail: that I, who before fled from thee, and was an enemy, might be overtaken by thy hand. Do not cease from pursuing, until I fail from my most wicked way, and return to my former husband; who will give me my linens, and oil, and fine flour, and will feed me with the richest foods.

He who therefore hedged in and blocked up my most wicked ways, that I might find that way which says in the Gospel: I am the way, the truth, and the life. Hear the Prophet speaking: They that sow in tears, shall reap in joy. Going they went and wept, carrying their seeds. But coming, they shall come with exultation, carrying their sheaves. And speak with him: I will wash my bed every night, I will water my couch with my tears. And again: As the hart panteth after the fountains of waters, so my soul panteth after thee, O God. My soul hath thirsted for thee, O God, the living fountain: when shall I come and appear before the face of God? My tears have become my bread day and night. And in another place: O God, my God, I watch for thee from the light. My soul hath thirsted for thee; how many ways doth my flesh long for thee. In a desert and pathless and waterless land, so have I appeared to thee in the sanctuary.

For although my soul thirsted for thee, yet I sought thee much more by the labor of my flesh, and I could not appear to thee in the sanctuary, unless I first dwelt in a land desert of vices, and pathless to the adversary powers, and without the moisture and flux of any lust. The Lord too wept over the city of Jerusalem, because they had not done penance: and Peter washed away his threefold denial with the bitterness of tears, and fulfilled that prophetic word: Streams of waters my eyes have run down. Jeremiah too laments over the people not doing penance, saying: Who will give water to my head, and to my eyes a fountain of tears, that I may weep for this people day and night? But why he laments and mourns, he shows in the following words: Weep not for the dead, neither bemoan him. Weep with the weeping of one who goes forth, for he shall return no more.

Therefore neither the Gentile nor the Jew is to be mourned, who were never in the Church, and have died once for all, of whom the Saviour says: Let the dead bury their dead; but mourn for those who by crimes and sins go forth from the Church, and are unwilling to return to it again, by reason of their condemnation to vices. Whence also to the men of the Church, who are called the walls and towers of the Church, the prophetic word speaks, saying: Walls of Sion, pour forth tears: fulfilling that saying of the Apostle: To rejoice with them that rejoice, to weep with them that weep; that by your tears you may provoke to weeping the hard hearts of sinners, lest, persevering in wickedness, they hear: I planted thee a fruitful vine, wholly a true seed: how art thou turned into the bitterness of a strange vine?

And again: They said to a piece of wood, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast begotten me; and they turned their backs to me, and not their faces. And the meaning is: They were unwilling to turn back to me, that they might do penance; but through hardness of heart they turned their backs to my injury. Wherefore also the Lord speaks to Jeremiah: Hast thou seen what the habitation of Israel has done to me? They have gone up upon every high mountain, and under every leafy tree, and have committed fornication there; and I said, after she had committed fornication and had done all these things: Return to me; and she did not return.

O the clemency of God! O our hardness! While even after so many crimes he calls us to salvation. And not even so are we willing to be turned to better things: If a wife, he says, shall leave her husband, and marry another, and afterward wish to return to him: shall he take her again, and not rather abhor her? For which it is written, according to the Hebrew Truth—which is not found in the Greek and Latin codices: And thou hast left me, yet return, and I will receive thee, saith the Lord. Isaiah too, to the same sense, speaks in almost the same words: Turn, ye who devise deep and wicked counsel, sons of Israel: return to me, and I will redeem thee. I am God, and there is no other besides me, there is no just one and saviour besides me. Return to me, and you shall be saved, you who are in the ends of the earth. Remember these things, and groan, and do penance, you who have gone astray.

Turn in heart, and remember the former things from of old: for I am God, and there is no other besides me. Joel too writes: Turn to me with your whole heart, in fasting, and tears, and mourning: rend your hearts, and not your garments. For the Lord is merciful and compassionate, and relenting concerning evils. But how great is his mercy, and how (so to speak) excessively and ineffably clement, let the Prophet Hosea teach us, through whom God speaks: What shall I do to thee, Ephraim? How shall I protect thee, Israel? What, I say, shall I do to thee? I will make thee as Adama, and as Seboim. My heart is turned within me, and my repentance is troubled. I will not act according to the fury of my wrath. Whence also David speaks in a Psalm: There is none in death that is mindful of thee: and in hell who shall confess to thee? And in another place: I have made known my sin, and I have not hidden my iniquity.

I said, I will declare against myself my iniquity to the Lord, and thou hast forgiven the impiety of my heart. For this shall every saint pray to thee in a seasonable time. But yet in the flood of many waters they shall not come near to him.

See how great is the magnitude of weeping, that it should be compared to the flood of waters. Whoever has these tears, and says with Jeremiah: Let not the pupil of my eye be silent, in him immediately shall be fulfilled: Mercy and truth have met each other; justice and peace have kissed: so that if justice and truth terrify you, mercy and peace may call you forth to salvation. The fiftieth Psalm shows the whole repentance of a sinner, when David went in to Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, and being rebuked by Nathan the prophet, answered: I have sinned. And immediately he deserved to hear: And the Lord has taken away your sin. For he had joined murder to adultery, and yet, turning to tears, he said: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your great mercy; and according to the multitude of your mercies, blot out my iniquity. For a great sin needed great mercy. Hence he joins and says: Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my iniquity, and my sin is always before me. Against you only have I sinned (for I was king, I feared no other) and I have done evil before you, that you may be justified in your words, and may overcome when you are judged. For God has shut up all things under sin, that he might have mercy on all. And he made such progress that, from being formerly a sinner and penitent, he passed over into a teacher, and says: I will teach the unjust your ways, and the impious shall be converted to you. For confession and beauty are before him, so that whoever confesses his sins, and says: My scars have rotted and become corrupt because of my foolishness, may exchange the foulness of wounds for the beauty of health. For he who hides his iniquity shall not prosper.

Ahab, a most impious king, took possession of Naboth's vineyard through bloodshed; and when Jezebel, joined to him not so much in marriage as in cruelty, was rebuked by Elijah's reproach: Thus says the Lord: You have killed, and you have taken possession. And again: In the place where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth, there shall they lick your blood also; and the dogs shall eat Jezebel before the walls of Jezreel. When Ahab heard this, he tore his garments, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted, and slept in haircloth. And the word of the Lord came to Elijah, saying: Because Ahab has humbled himself before my face, I will not bring the evil in his days. One crime was Ahab's and Jezebel's, yet, since Ahab turned to repentance, the punishment was deferred to his descendants; while Jezebel, persisting in wickedness, was condemned by present judgment.

The Lord also speaks in the Gospel: The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it, because they did penance at the preaching of Jonah. And again: For I have not come to call the just, but sinners to repentance. The coin is lost, and yet it is found in the dung. Ninety-nine sheep are left in the wilderness, and the one sheep that had strayed is carried back on the shepherd's shoulders. Hence there is joy among the angels over one sinner doing penance. What great happiness, that the heavens should exult over our salvation! Of these it is said: Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. There is no middle ground. Death and life are contrary to one another, and yet they are joined by repentance. The prodigal son had squandered all his substance, and far from his father he could scarcely sustain his hunger even with the food of swine.

He returns to his parent; the fattened calf is sacrificed for him; he receives a robe and a ring, that he may put on again the garment of Christ, which he had formerly defiled, and may deserve to hear: Let your garments always be white; and having received again the seal of God, he cries out to the Lord: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; and being reconciled by a kiss, may say to him: The light of your countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us. The justice of the just shall not deliver him in whatever day he shall have sinned; and the iniquity of the wicked shall not harm him, in whatever day he shall be converted. God judges each one as he finds him; he does not consider what is past, but what is present, provided that the old crimes be changed by a new conversion. The just man falls seven times, and rises again. If he falls, how is he just? If he is just, how does he fall?

But he does not lose the name ofjustwho always rises again through repentance. And not only seven times, but seventy times seven, sins are forgiven the offender if he turns to repentance. He to whom more is forgiven loves more. The harlot washes the Savior's feet with tears, and wipes them with her hair; and, as a type of the Church gathered from the Gentiles, she deserves to hear: Your sins are forgiven you. The Pharisee's righteousness perishes through pride, and the publican's humility is saved by confession. Through Jeremiah God testifies: At one moment I will speak against a nation and a kingdom, to root it up and destroy and pull it down. If that nation shall repent of the evil for which I have spoken against it, I also will repent of the evil that I thought to do to it. And at another moment I will speak of a nation and a kingdom, to build and to plant it.

If it does evil in my sight, so that it does not hear my voice, I will repent of the good that I said I would do to it. And immediately he adds: Behold, I frame an evil against you, and devise a device against you. Let every one return from his evil way, and direct your ways and your endeavors. They who said: We have despaired; for we will walk after our own devices, and we will every one do the evil of his own hard heart. Simeon the just speaks in the Gospel: Behold, this child is set for the fall and for the resurrection of many—for the fall, namely, of sinners, and for the resurrection of those who do penance. The Apostle writes to the Corinthians: It is heard that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not even among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife.

And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. And in the second Epistle to the same, lest he who is such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow, he calls him back, and beseeches them to confirm their love toward him, that he who had perished by incest might be preserved by repentance. No one indeed is clean from sin, not even if his life were but one day; yet the years of his life are numbered. Even the stars themselves are not clean in his sight, and he has found something perverse against his angels. If there is sin in heaven, how much more on earth? If there is fault in those who are free from bodily temptation, how much more in us, who are surrounded by frail flesh, and say with the Apostle: Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

For no good dwells in our flesh, nor do we do what we wish, but what we do not wish, so that the soul desires one thing, and the flesh is compelled to do another. But if certain ones are called just in the Scriptures, and not only just but just in the sight of God, they are called just according to that justice of which it was said above: The just man falls seven times, and rises again; and according to which the iniquity of the wicked shall not harm him in whatever day he shall be converted. Even Zechariah, the father of John, who is written as just, sinned in that he did not believe, and was immediately condemned to silence. And Job, who is written at the beginning of his book as just and blameless and without complaint, is afterward, both by the word of God and by his own confession, convicted as a sinner.

If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Prophets also and the Apostles, were by no means without sin; if the purest wheat has chaff mixed in with it, what can be said of us, of whom it is written: What is the chaff to the wheat, says the Lord? And yet the chaff is reserved for the fire to come, and the tares are mixed at this time with the crops of wheat, until he comes who has the winnowing fan in his hand, and shall cleanse the threshing floor, that he may gather the wheat into the barns, and burn the refuse with unquenchable fire.

All these things, running as it were through the most beautiful meadows of the Scriptures, I have wished to gather into one place, and to weave for you, from the most lovely flowers, a crown of repentance, which you may place upon your head; and take up the wings of a dove, and fly away, and be at rest, and be reconciled to the most merciful Father. Your wife once, now your sister and fellow-servant, has told me that, according to the Apostle's precept, by mutual consent you abstained from the marriage act, that you might devote yourselves to prayer; but that your own footsteps, as if set upon a rolling sea, wavered—nay, to speak more plainly, fell. But that she heard from the Lord, as with Moses: But stand here with me; and said of the Lord: He has set my feet upon a rock. Your house, however, which did not have the solid foundations of faith, afterward collapsed in the whirlwind of the devil.

Moreover, that she stands firm in the Lord, and does not deny you her hospitality; so that you, to whom she was formerly joined in body, may now be united to her in spirit. For he who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit with him. And when the fury of the barbarians and the threatening captivity separated you, she promised under oath, that when she crossed over to the holy places, you would follow her either at once or later, and would save your soul, which you seemed by neglect to have lost. Render, therefore, what you promised in the presence of God. The life of mortals is uncertain; lest you be snatched away before you fulfill your promise, imitate her whom you should have taught. Oh, for shame! The weaker sex conquers the world, and the stronger is overcome by the world. A woman has become the leader of so great a deed, and you do not follow her, for whose salvation you stand pledged in faith?

But if the remnants of your household estate hold you back, so that you may indeed see the deaths of friends and citizens, and the ruins of cities and villas—at least amid the evils of captivity, and the fierce faces of enemies, and the countless shipwrecks of your province, hold fast to the plank of repentance, and remember your fellow-servant, who daily sighs for your salvation, and does not despair of it. You wander in your homeland—nay, not your homeland, since you have lost your homeland; she, on your behalf, in the venerable places of the Resurrection and the Cross, and of the Cradle of the Lord and Savior, where as a little child he wailed, remembers your name, and draws you to herself by prayers, that if not by your own merit, at least you may be saved by her faith.

Once a paralytic lay upon his bed, and was so dissolved in all his limbs that he could neither move his feet to walk nor his hands to pray; and yet he is brought forward by others, and restored to his former health, so that he who had long been carried by his bed now carried it himself. And so your fellow-servant offers you, absent in body but present in faith, to the Lord and Savior; and says with the Canaanite woman: My daughter is grievously vexed by a demon. Rightly indeed shall I call your soul the daughter of hers, since the soul knows no difference of sex; for she invites you, as a little one, still nursing, and not yet able to take solid food, to the milk of infancy, and shows you the nourishment of a nurse; so that you may be able to say with the Prophet: I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commandments.

In an old road we seek a new path, and in ancient and worn material we contrive a rough elegance of art, so that the things may be neither the same, nor yet not the same. There is one way, and many shortcuts to reach where you wish to go. We have often written to widows, and repeating in exhortation the same many examples from the holy Scriptures, we have woven various flowers of testimonies into one crown of chastity. Now our discourse is addressed to Ageruchia, who received her name by a kind of prophecy of things to come, and by the aid of God presiding over her. A noble throng of women, approved in Christ—grandmother, mother, and aunt—surrounds her. Of these, her grandmother Metronia, persevering as a widow for forty years, recalls to us Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, from the Gospel. Her mother Benigna, completing the fourteenth year of her widowhood, is surrounded by a chorus of a hundred virgins.

The sister of Celerinus, Ageruchia's father, who nursed her as an infant, and received her, newborn, into her own lap, being deprived of her husband's comfort for twenty years, instructs her niece, teaching what she learned from her mother.

I have touched briefly upon these things, to show that my young friend does not confer monogamy upon her lineage but rather repays a debt owed to it; and that she is not so much to be praised if she grants it, as she would be execrable to all if she should attempt to refuse it—especially since her posthumous son Simplicius bears back the name of his father, and there is no excuse of a deserted house without heirs, under whose patronage lust sometimes flatters itself, so that what people do out of their own intemperance, they may seem to do out of desire for children.

But why do I speak as if to one who resists, when I hear that she avoids, under the Church's protection, many suitors of the Palace, whom the devil kindles in rivalry, that they may test the chastity of our widow—a chastity which her nobility, her beauty, her age, and her wealth make desirable to all: so that the more numerous the things that assail her modesty, the greater may be the rewards of her victory?

And because, as we go forth from the harbor, a certain rock, as it were, is set against us, lest we be able to run on to the safe waters of the deep, and the authority of the Apostle Paul writing to Timothy is brought forward, in which, discussing widows, he says: But I will that the younger widows marry, bear children, be mistresses of families, give no occasion to the adversary for reviling. For some are already turned aside after Satan: we must first treat the sense of the precept, and examine the whole continuity of this passage (the context or connection of the discourse); and thus, following in the footsteps of the Apostle, we should not, as the saying goes, turn aside a nail's breadth to either side.

Above he had written what sort of woman a widow ought to be: The wife of one man, who has brought up children, who has had testimony in good works, who has ministered to her own in tribulation out of her own small substance; whose hope is God, and who continues in supplication and prayers night and day.

After which he joins the contrary: But she that liveth in pleasures is dead while she liveth. And immediately he adds, so as to arm his disciple with every art of teaching: But the younger widows avoid, who, when they have grown wanton against Christ, will marry, having damnation, because they have made void their first faith. Therefore on account of these, who have committed fornication to the injury of their husband Christ (for this is what the Greek word καταστρηνιάσωσι signifies), the Apostle wills a second marriage, preferring digamy to fornication—by way of indulgence only, not by way of command.

At the same time each word of the testimony must be examined. I will, he says, that the younger women marry. Why, I ask? Because I do not want the younger women to fornicate. To bear children. For what reason? Lest, from fear of childbirth arising from adultery, they be compelled to kill their children. To be mistresses of families. Why, I beseech you? Because it is far more tolerable to be twice-married than to be a harlot, and to have a second husband than several adulterers. For in the one there is the consolation of miseries, in the other the penalty of sin. There follows: Giving no occasion to the adversary for reviling; in which brief and compact precept many admonitions at once are contained. Lest an overly refined adornment bring infamy upon the widow's resolve. Lest by the nod of the eyes and the gaiety of countenance she draw after her flocks of young men.

Lest she promise one thing by word and another by dress, and there apply to her that well-known little verse: She laughed, and with her arch little eye promised something.

And that he might, in brief speech, sum up all the reasons for marrying, he shows why he had commanded this, saying: For some are already turned aside after Satan. Therefore he opens second, and if necessary third, marriages to the incontinent, that he may draw them away from Satan, that he may rather make the woman one joined to some husband or other than to the devil. But to the Corinthians also he says something like this: But I say to the unmarried and to widows: it is good for them if they so remain, even as I. But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn. Why, O Apostle? He immediately added, because it is worse to burn.

Otherwise it is an absolute good, and without comparison to something worse, to be what the Apostle is, that is, unbound, not bound; not a servant, but free; thinking on the things that are of God, not the things of a wife. And immediately in what follows: A woman, he says, is bound to her husband as long as her husband lives; but if her husband shall have fallen asleep, she is free: let her marry whom she will, only in the Lord. But she shall be more blessed if she so remain, according to my counsel. But I think that I also have the Spirit of God, and in this the sense is the same, because the spirit is the same; the Epistles are diverse, but there is one author of the Epistles. While the husband lives, the woman is bound; and when he is dead, she is loosed. Therefore marriage is a bond, and widowhood a release.

The wife is bound to the husband, and the husband is bound to the wife: to such an extent that they do not have power over their own body, and each renders the debt to the other. Nor can those have the freedom of chastity who serve the dominion of marriage. And what he added, only in the Lord, cuts off the marriages of the Gentiles, of whom he had said in another place: Bear not the yoke with unbelievers. For what participation hath justice with iniquity? Or what fellowship hath light with darkness? What agreement hath Christ with Belial? Or what part hath the faithful with the unbeliever? What consent hath the temple of God with idols? So that we may not, as it were, plough with an ox and an ass; lest the wedding garment be woven of mixed thread.

And immediately he takes back what he had granted, and, as if repenting of his own opinion, draws it back: She shall be more blessed if she so remain; and he says this to be rather his own counsel. And lest this be despised as merely a man's word, he confirms it by the authority of the Holy Spirit, so that it may be heard not as a man indulging the frailty of human flesh, but as the Holy Spirit giving command in the Apostle. Nor should the widow flatter herself in this on account of the years of a young girl, since he commands that a woman of not less than sixty be chosen. For he does not compel the unmarried or the young girls to marry, he who also, speaking of marriages, says: The time is short: It remaineth, that they also who have wives be as if they had none; but he is discussing those widows who are supported by the sustenance of their own kin, who are laid upon the necks of sons and grandsons.

He commands these to learn to take care of their own household, and to requite their parents and provide sufficiently for them, so that the Church may not be burdened, and may be able to minister to certain widows. Of whom it is written: Honor widows that are widows indeed, that is, who, destitute of all help from their own, who cannot labor with their hands, whom poverty enfeebles, and age wears down: to whom God is the hope, and every work is prayer. From which it may be understood that young widows, except those whom infirmity excuses, are to be assigned either to their own labor, or to the ministry of children and relatives. Honor, in the present context, is taken either for alms or for a gift, as in that saying, Let the priests that rule well be esteemed worthy of double honor, especially they who labor in the word and in doctrine.

And in the Gospel the Lord expounds the commandment of the Law, in which it is said: Honor thy father and thy mother; not to be understood in the mere sound of words, which could cheat the want of parents with empty flattery, but as owed in the ministering of the necessities of life. For when the Lord commanded that children should nourish their poor parents, and render to the aged the benefits which they, as little ones, had received, the Scribes and Pharisees, on the contrary, taught the children to answer their parents: Corban, that is, a gift, which I have promised to the altar, and pledged as an offering to the temple—if you should receive food from me, it shall turn to your refreshment. And so it came about that, while father and mother were in need, the children offered a sacrifice which the priests and scribes consumed.

If, then, the Apostle compels poor widows (yet those who are young, and broken by no infirmity) to labor with their own hands, lest the Church be burdened, and be able to sustain the aged widows; what excuse will she use, who abounds in the riches of the world, who is able even to minister to others, and to make friends for herself out of the mammon of iniquity, who might receive her into everlasting habitations? And consider at the same time, that a widow is not to be chosen unless she has been the wife of one man: and we suppose that this is a privilege belonging only to priests, that none be admitted to the altar except one who has had but one wife. For not only is the twice-married man excluded from the office of the priesthood, but also from the alms of the Church, since one who has fallen into a second marriage is thought unworthy of the dole.

Although even a layman is bound by the priestly law, who ought to show himself such that he may be capable of being chosen for the priesthood. For he is not chosen, if he has been twice married. Now priests are chosen from among the laity. Therefore the layman also is bound by the commandment through which one arrives at the priesthood.

One thing is what the Apostle wills, another what he is compelled to will. That he grants second marriages belongs to my incontinence, not to his own will. He wills all to be as he himself is, and to think on the things that are of God, and, once loosed, never again to be bound. But if he sees them, through incontinence, slipping into the abyss of debauchery, he stretches out his hand to a second marriage, that they may be tossed about with one rather than with many. Which is by no means to be heard by the twice-married as spoken bitterly and contrary to the Apostle's rule. For there are two wills of the Apostle: one by which he commands, But I say to the unmarried, and to widows: it is good for them if they so remain, even as I. The other by which he indulges: But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn.

First he shows what he wills; then what he is compelled to will. He wills that we remain after marriage as he himself is, and sets forth the Apostolic example of the blessedness proposed. But if he sees us unwilling to will what he himself wills, he grants indulgence to our incontinence. Which of the two wills do we choose, that which he wills more, and which is good in itself, or that which becomes lighter by comparison with a worse thing, and in a certain manner is not even good, because it is preferred to evil? Therefore if we choose what the Apostle does not will, but is compelled to will, nay, in which he acquiesces for those desiring worse things, we make it our own will, not the Apostle's. We read in the Old Testament: that daughters of priests once married, if they become widows, ought to eat of the priestly foods; and that, on their death, the office of the funeral rites should be rendered to them as to a father and mother.

But if they have taken other husbands, they become strangers, both to their father and to the sacrifices, and ought to be reckoned among outsiders.

This indeed even the heathen observe, to our condemnation, if truth does not render to Christ what falsehood grants to the devil, who has found chastity a source of ruin. The Hierophant at Athens forswears his wife, and by a perpetual debility becomes chaste. The Flamen is admitted to the priesthood as husband of one wife. The Flaminica also is chosen as the wife of one husband. For the sacred rites of the Egyptian bull, a husband is taken only once. Not to mention the virgins of Vesta, and of Apollo, and of Achivan Juno, and of Diana and Minerva, who wither away in the perpetual virginity of the priesthood. I will briefly touch on the queen of Carthage, who preferred to burn rather than marry King Iarbas: and the wife of Hasdrubal, who, taking her children in either hand, hurled herself into the fire beneath, lest she feel the loss of her chastity: and Lucretia, who, her glory of chastity lost, refused to survive with a polluted conscience.

And lest I weave together at great length many things which you can take for your own edification from the first book against Jovinian, I will repeat only one thing which was done in your own homeland; that you may know that chastity is venerable even to barbarians and wild and bloodthirsty peoples. The nation of the Teutones, having set out from the farthest shores of the Ocean and of Germany, flooded all the Gauls; and though the Roman armies were often cut down, they were overcome at Aquae Sextiae, in the battle of Marius. Three hundred of their matrons, when they learned that they were to be handed over, along with other men, under the condition of captivity, first entreated the Consul that they might be delivered into servitude to the temple of Ceres and Venus. When they could not obtain this, being driven off by the lictor, having slain their little children, they were found dead in the morning, their throats strangled with a noose, holding one another in mutual embraces.

What, then, captivity could not inflict upon barbarian chastity, shall a noblewoman do this? And shall she try a second husband, she who has either lost a good one or found the first a bad one, so that she strives again to act against the judgment of God? What if she should straightway lose the second, will she draw lots for a third also? And if that one too should fall asleep, will she proceed to a fourth and a fifth, so that there is nothing by which she differs from harlots? By every reasoning provision must be made for the widow, lest she overstep the first bounds of chastity. And if she overstep them, and break matronly modesty, she will run riot into every kind of excess, so that she deserves to hear the Prophet saying: Thou hast had the face of a harlot: thou hadst no shame. What then? Do we condemn second marriages? By no means; but we praise the first. Do we cast the twice-married out of the Church?

Far from it: but we call the once-married to continence. In Noah's Ark there were not only clean, but also unclean animals. It had men, it had also serpents. In a great house also there are diverse vessels; some unto honor, some unto dishonor. There is a cup for drinking; there is also a chamber-pot for the more private needs of nature. For since the Gospels teach that in the sowing of good earth there is a hundredfold, and sixtyfold, and thirtyfold fruit; and the hundredfold holds the first rank for the crown of virginity; the sixtyfold is in the second rank for the labor of widows; the thirtyfold, by the very joining of the fingers, attests the bonds of marriage—in what number will digamy be? Rather, outside the number.

Certainly it does not arise in the good earth, but among briars and the thornbrakes of foxes, which are compared to the most impious Herod, so that it may think itself praiseworthy in this, if it is better than harlots: if it surpass the victims of public lusts, if it be prostituted to one man, not to several.

I am about to relate an incredible thing, but one attested by the testimony of many. Very many years ago, when I was assisting Damasus, bishop of the city of Rome, in ecclesiastical correspondence, and answering the synodal consultations of East and West, I saw two persons paired together, of the most base sort among the common people, one man who had buried twenty wives, and a woman who had had a twenty-second husband, joined to each other, as they themselves supposed, in a final marriage. There was the utmost expectation on the part of men and women alike, after so many rehearsals, as to which of the two would carry the other to burial first. The husband won, and, with the people of the whole city flocking together, crowned and holding a palm branch, with everyone acclaiming him and his prize, he walked before the bier of his much-married wife. What shall we say of such a woman?

Surely that which the Lord said to the Samaritan woman:You have had twenty-two husbands, and the one by whom you are now being buried is not your husband.

Therefore I beg you, daughter religious in Christ, not to become acquainted with such examples, by which the incontinent and the wretched find their support; but rather read again and again those by which chastity is crowned. Let it suffice you that you have lost the first degree of virginity, and have come, through the third, to the second—that is, through the office of marriage, to the continence of widowhood. Do not think upon the extreme, indeed the abject, examples; nor seek out instances that are foreign and far removed. You have your grandmother, your mother, and your aunt, whose abundant example, teaching, precepts of living, are for you a rule of virtue.

For if many women, while their husbands are still living, understand that saying of the Apostle:All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient,and make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven, either from the second birth after the font by mutual consent, or after marriage from the ardor of faith—why should not a widow, who by God's judgment has ceased to have a husband, rejoice and repeat that saying,the Lord gave, the Lord has taken away,and seize the occasion offered of freedom, so that she may have power over her own body, and not again become the handmaid of a man? And certainly it is far more laborious not to enjoy what you have, than to desire what you have lost.

Whence virginity, in this respect, is easier, in that it does not know the incitements of the flesh; and widowhood is in this respect more anxious, in that it recalls to mind past pleasures—especially if it thinks it has lost its husband, rather than sent him on before; of which the one belongs to grief, the other to joy.

Let the creation of the first man teach us to reject multiple marriages. There was one Adam, and one Eve; indeed, one rib is separated from him into a woman. And again what had been divided is joined together in marriage, Scripture saying:They shall be two in one flesh—not in two, nor in three.For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and cleave to his wife—certainly not to his wives. Paul, expounding this testimony, refers it to Christ and to the Church, so that the first Adam in the flesh, and the second in the spirit, might be a man of one marriage. Let there be one Eve, mother of all the living, and one Church, the parent of all Christians. Just as the accursed Lamech divided her into two wives, so the heretics tear this Church into many churches, which, according to the Apocalypse of John, should be called synagogues of the devil rather than assemblies of Christ.

We read in the book of Canticles:There are sixty queens, and eighty concubines, and maidens without number. One is my dove, my perfect one; she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her.To her the same John writes an Epistle:The elder unto the elect lady and her children.But also into the Ark, which the Apostle Peter interprets as a type of the Church, Noah brought in, with his three sons, wives one at a time, not two at a time. Even of the unclean animals two are taken, male and female, so that not even among beasts, serpents, crocodiles, and lizards does bigamy have a place. But if of the clean animals seven are set, that is, an odd number, in this also the palm of virginity and chastity is shown. For Noah, going out of the ark, offered victims to God—not of course from the even number, but from the odd, because the one was prepared for offspring and marriage, the other for sacrifice.

But the Patriarchs did not have single wives; indeed, they even had very many concubines. And, lest this be too little, David had many, and Solomon had innumerable. Judah goes in to Thamar as to a harlot. And according to the letter of the West, the Prophet Hosea is joined not only to a harlot, but even to an adulteress. But if this is also lawfully granted to us, let us neigh after every woman, and, after the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, let us be found, up to the very last day, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, and let there be an end of marriage only when there is an end of life.

And even if before the Flood and after the Flood that saying held force:Increase and multiply, and fill the earth,what is that to us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come, to whom it is said:The time is short; and,Now the axe is laid to the root of the trees,to cut down the forest of the Law and of marriage by the chastity of the Gospel? There isa time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.Jeremiah, with captivity near at hand, is forbidden to take a wife. Ezekiel in Babylon says:My wife is dead, and my mouth is opened.Neither he who is about to take a wife, nor he who has already taken one, can prophesy freely in the work of marriage. Formerly it was a matter of glory to hear that verse:Thy sons like young olive plants round about thy table; and,Mayest thou see thy children's children.Now of the continent it is said:He who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit.

And,My soul has cleaved after thee; thy right hand has upheld me.Then it was eye for eye; now we offer the other cheek to him who strikes. In that time it was said to warriors:Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty; now Peter hears:Put up thy sword into its sheath. For he who strikes with the sword shall perish by the sword.We say these things, not separating the Law and the Gospel, as Marcion falsely charges, but acknowledging one and the same God, who, according to the variety of times and causes, is beginning and end; he sows, that he may reap; he plants, that he may have what to cut down; he lays the foundation, that upon the building, when the age is completed, he may set the crown. Otherwise, if we come to the sacraments, and to the types of things to come, let us consider them not by our own judgment, but as the Apostle explains them: Hagar and Sarah, or Mount Sinai and Sion, signify the two Testaments.

Leah, bleary-eyed, and Rachel, whom Jacob loved exceedingly, testify to the Synagogue and the Church. Whence also Hannah, at first barren, is more fruitful than the fertility of Peninnah. Although monogamy also went before us in Isaac and Rebecca, whose child alone was the Lord's own revelation. Nor did any other woman consult God by herself. What shall I say of Thamar, who bore the twin infants Zara and Pharez? At whose birth a wall of partition divided and separated two peoples; and the hand bound with scarlet thread sprinkled even then the conscience of the Jews with the passion of Christ. And of the prophetic harlot, whose likeness signifies either the Church gathered from the Gentiles, or (which fits the place better) the Synagogue, first taken from the idolaters through Abraham and Moses; then, after adultery and the denial of the Saviour, sitting for a very long time without altar, priests, and prophets, awaiting the fellowship of her former husband; that after the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, then all Israel may be saved.

As on a small tablet I have wished to show the widest regions of the earth, that I might proceed to certain other small questions; the first of which concerns the counsel of Anna:Wilt thou alone, sorrowing, waste thy youth thus lonely? Wilt thou not know sweet children, nor the rewards of Venus? Dost thou think that the buried ashes, that the shades, care for this?To whom she who suffered these things replies briefly:Thou, overcome by my tears; thou, sister, art the first to burden my raving with these ills, and to expose me to the enemy. It was not permitted me, ignorant of the marriage bed, to spend a blameless life after the manner of a beast, nor to touch such cares. The faith promised to the ashes of Sichaeus has not been kept.

You set before me the joys of marriage; I will set against you the pyre, the sword, and the fire. There is not so much good in marriage as we hope for, as there is evil which can occur, and which is to be feared. Lust once spent always leaves behind its own repentance; it is never satisfied, and once extinguished, is rekindled. It grows and fails by use; nor does it obey reason, being led by impulse. But you will say: Ample wealth and the management of household affairs need the authority of a husband. As if the houses of the unmarried had perished, and unless you yourself become a slave along with your own slaves, you cannot govern your household! Your grandmother, your mother, and your aunt—are they not of former authority and greater honor, while both you and the whole province, and the leaders of the churches, look up to them? Do soldiers, then, and travelers, not manage their little lodgings without wives, and neither invite to feasts nor are invited?

As if you could not have servants or freedmen of tested age, in whose hands you were reared, who might preside over the household, answer for you in public matters, pay the taxes; who would look up to you as their patroness, love you as their foster-child, revere you as a holy woman. Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you. If you are anxious about clothing, the lilies of the Gospel are set before you. If about food, you are referred to the birds, which neither sow nor reap, and your heavenly Father feeds them. How many virgins and widows, without any stain of scandal, have governed their own small substance!

Beware of joining yourself to young men; do not attach yourself to those on account of whom the Apostle permits second marriages, and so suffer shipwreck in the midst of calm waters. If it is said to Timothy:Avoid younger widows; and again:Love the aged women as mothers, the younger as sisters, with all chastity—why should you not listen to me giving you the same advice? Flee persons concerning whom there can be suspicion of evil conversation, and do not keep ready that common saying from the crossroads:My conscience is enough for me; I care not what men say of me. And surely the Apostle took care to provide good things not only before God, but also before men, lest through him the name of God be blasphemed among the Gentiles. He indeed had the power of leading about a sister, a woman, but he was unwilling to be judged by an unbelieving conscience.

And though he might have lived by the Gospel, he labored day and night with his own hands, that he might not burden any of the believers.If meat scandalizes my brother,he says,I will eat no flesh forever.Let us also say: If a sister or a brother is scandalized, not one or two, but the whole Church, I will see neither sister nor brother. It is better that one's estate be diminished, than that the health of the soul perish. It is better to lose what we would keep—since, whether we will or not, it will one day perish—than not to lose it. It is better to let go of one's own accord, than to lose that for the sake of which all things must be let go. Which of us can add, I will not say a cubit, which is enormous, but even the tenth part of a single small inch, to his stature? And are we anxious about what we shall eat or what we shall drink?

Let us not then think of tomorrow:Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.Jacob, fleeing his brother, leaving great riches behind in his father's house, went naked into Mesopotamia; and, that he might set before us an example of his fortitude, having placed a stone under his head, he saw a ladder set up reaching to heaven, and the Lord leaning upon it; by which the angels ascended and descended; so that neither should the sinner despair of salvation, nor the just man be secure in his own virtue. And, to pass over many things (for it is not the time to expound fully all the testimony I have taken up), after twenty years the rich lord, and the still richer father, who had once crossed the Jordan with only a staff, returns to his homeland with three companies of flocks. The Apostles, pilgrims throughout the whole world, had no money in their purse, no staff in hand, no sandals on their feet, and yet they could say:Having nothing, and possessing all things.

And:Silver and gold have we none; but what we have, this we give thee: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.For they were not weighed down by the burden of riches. And therefore, standing with Elijah in the cleft of the rock, they were able to pass through the narrow way of the needle, and to behold the hinder parts of the Lord. But we burn with avarice, and, while disputing against money, spread wide our lap for gold; nor is anything ever enough for us. And that which is said of the Megarians may justly be applied to the wretched:They build as if they were always to live; they live as if they were to die on the morrow. And we do these things because we do not believe the words of the Lord; and because our chosen age promises to all not the nearness of death, which is due to mortals by the law of nature, but, by an empty hope, further spans of years.

For no one is of such broken strength and decrepit old age that he does not think he will live yet one more year. Whence there steals in a forgetfulness of one's own condition, so that an earthly creature, on the very point of being dissolved, is lifted up into pride, and in his mind lays hold of heaven.

But what am I doing? With the ship wrecked, I am arguing about the cargo. He who was restraining is removed from the midst, and we do not understand that Antichrist is drawing near, whom the Lord Jesus Christ will slay with the breath of his mouth. Woe to those who are with child, and to those who give suck, in that day; both of which are fruits of marriage. Let me briefly run through a few of our present miseries. That we few remain here up to now is not of our merit, but of the Lord's mercy. Innumerable and most savage nations have seized all the Gauls. Whatever lies between the Alps and the Pyrenees, bounded by the Ocean and the Rhine, the Quadi, the Vandal, the Sarmatian, the Alani, the Gepids, the Heruli, the Saxons, the Burgundians, the Alemanni, and—O commonwealth to be mourned!—the Pannonian enemies have laid waste. For Assur has come with them.

Mainz, once a noble city, has been captured and overthrown, and in the church many thousands of men have been slaughtered.

The Vangiones have been destroyed after a long siege. The most powerful city of the Remi, Amiens, Arras, and the Morini at the ends of the earth, Tournai, Speyer, Strasbourg have been carried off into Germany. Aquitaine, and the provinces of the Nine Peoples, of Lyons, and of Narbonne, except for a few cities, have all been laid waste. And these very cities the sword ravages from without, famine from within. I cannot without tears make mention of Toulouse, which, that it has not fallen up to now, is owing to the merits of its holy bishop Exuperius. The Spains themselves, on the point of perishing at any moment, tremble daily, remembering the invasion of the Cimbri, and whatever others have suffered once, they suffer always through fear.

The rest I pass over in silence, lest I seem to despair of God's clemency. Once, from the Pontic Sea as far as the Julian Alps, what is ours now was not ours. And for thirty years, the frontier of the Danube being broken, war was waged in the very midst of the regions of the Roman empire. Tears have dried up with age. Except for a few old men, all who had been begotten in captivity and siege did not long for a liberty they had never known. Who will believe this? What histories will set it down in worthy speech? That Rome fights within her own bosom, not for glory, but for safety? Nay, not even fights, but redeems her life with gold and with all her household goods? This has happened not through the fault of the princes, who are indeed most devout, but through the crime of a half-barbarian traitor, who armed our enemies with our own resources against us.

Once the Roman empire labored under everlasting disgrace, when, the Gauls laying waste all things and the army routed at the Allia, Brennus entered Rome. Nor could it wipe away that former ignominy, until it had subjugated to its rule both the Gauls, the native soil of the Gauls, and Gallo-Greece, in which the conquerors of East and West had settled. Hannibal, a storm that arose from the borders of Spain, when he had devastated Italy, saw the city, and did not dare to besiege it. Such reverence for the Roman name held Pyrrhus that, having destroyed everything, he withdrew from the nearby place: nor did the victor dare to look upon the city he had learned was the mother of kings. And yet for this injury (for I will not say arrogance), which had good outcomes, the one, a fugitive over the whole world, at last found death by poison in Bithynia; the other, having returned to his homeland, fell in his own kingdom; and the peoples of both provinces are now tributaries of the Roman people.

Now, so that all things may turn out with a prosperous end, apart from what we have lost, we have nothing left to take from our conquered enemies. Describing the power of the city of Rome, the ardent poet says: What is enough, if Rome is too little?

Which we might change into another saying: What is safe, if Rome perishes?

Not if I had a hundred tongues, and a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I tell all the punishments of the captives,
Or run through all the names of their sufferings.

And these very things which I have said are perilous, both for those who speak and for those who hear, so that not even a groan is free, we being unwilling, nay not even daring, to weep for what we suffer.

Answer me, dearest daughter in Christ: amid these things are you to marry? What husband, pray, are you to receive? One who will flee, or one who will fight? You understand what follows either way. And instead of the Fescennine song, a terrible trumpet will blare its hoarse sound at you, so that those you have as bridesmaids, you may perhaps have as mourners. Or in what delights will you abound, you who have lost the revenues of your possessions; who see your besieged little household wasting away with disease and hunger? But far be it from me to think such things of you, to suspect anything untoward of one who has consecrated her soul to the Lord.

It is not so much to you as under your name that I have spoken to others: women who go about idle and curious and talkative through the houses of matrons, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who know nothing else from the Scriptures except the precepts on second marriage; who console their own desires in another's body, so that they may see others do what they themselves have done, and be flattered by the fellowship of evil women. When you have crushed their impudence and their propositions by the interpretation of the apostolic sayings, read how you ought to live in preserving widowhood, the book to Eustochium on preserving virginity (Epistle XXII to Eustochium), and the others to Furia and Salvina, of whom the one is the daughter-in-law of Probus, once consul, the other the daughter of Gildo, who held Africa. This little book on monogamy will bear your name as its title.

About ten years ago, the holy man Pammachius sent me the notebooks of a certain person, which contained the translated—or rather corrupted—volumes of Origen's Peri Archon; earnestly requesting this, that a Latin translation should preserve the Greek truth, and that, whether the writer had spoken well or ill on either side, without the patronage of the translator, he might know it in the Roman tongue. I did as he wished, and sent him the books, which when he had read, he was horrified, and shut them away in a chest, lest, brought forth to the public, they should wound the minds of many. A certain brother, who had zeal for God but not according to knowledge, asked to have them for reading, as though he would return them at once, and because of the shortness of time, he could not suspect fraud. He who had received them to read, having employed shorthand writers, transcribed the whole work, and returned the book much sooner than he had promised.

And with the same rashness, and (to put it mildly) ineptitude, what he had wickedly stolen he entrusted, still more wickedly, to others. And because large books discussing mystical matters can hardly preserve their sense in shorthand abbreviations, especially when they are dictated stealthily and hastily, everything in them is so confused that in many places it lacks both order and sense. Wherefore you ask, dearest Avitus, that I send you that very copy which was long ago translated by me, and given to no one else, but which has been perversely published by the aforesaid brother.

Receive, then, what you asked: but on this condition, that you know that very many things in it are to be detested by you, and, according to the word of the Lord, that you must walk among scorpions and serpents, as is that statement immediately in the first book: that Christ the Son of God was not born, but made: that God the Father, invisible by nature, is not seen even by the Son. That the Son, who is the image of the invisible Father, compared to the Father, is not the truth: but among us, who cannot receive the truth of God omnipotent, he seems to be an imaginary truth; so that the majesty and greatness of the greater is felt to be, in some manner, circumscribed in the Son. That God the Father is incomprehensible light. That Christ, in comparison with the Father, is a very small splendor, which among us, because of our weakness, seems great.

He sets forth the example of two statues, a larger and a smaller; one which fills the world and, by its greatness, is in a manner invisible, and another which falls under the eyes; comparing the Father to the former, the Son to the latter. He calls God the Father omnipotent good, and of perfect goodness. That the Son is not good, but a certain breath, and image of goodness; so that he is not called good absolutely, but with an addition,the good shepherd,and so forth. He asserts the Holy Spirit to be third in dignity and honor after the Father and the Son. Concerning whom, when he says he does not know whether he was made or unmade, in later passages he expressed what he thought of him: affirming that nothing except God the Father alone is unmade. That the Son too is less than the Father, in that he is second from him, and the Holy Spirit inferior to the Son, dwelling in the saints, whoever they be.

And in this order, that the strength of the Father is greater than that of the Son and the Holy Spirit. And again that the strength of the Son is greater than that of the Holy Spirit, and consequently that the virtue of the Holy Spirit himself is greater than that of the others which are called holy.

And when he had come to rational creatures, and had said that they had slipped down into earthly bodies through negligence, he added this too: It is a great negligence and sloth, for anyone to flow down and become so emptied, that in coming to vices he can be bound with a coarse body like that of irrational beasts of burden. And in what follows:Moved,he says,by these arguments, we suppose that some are, of their own accord, among the number of the saints and in the ministry of God; others, through their own fault, falling away from holiness, have fallen into such negligence that they have even turned into contrary powers. And again, that the beginning is born from the end, and the end from the beginning, and that all things vary thus, so that he who is now a man can become a demon in another world, and he who is a demon, if he acts more negligently, is relegated to grosser bodies, that is, so that he becomes a man.

And so he mixes up everything, so that from an archangel a devil can be made, and again a devil can revert into an angel. But those who have wavered, and, their feet having moved, have not utterly fallen, will be subjected altogether to the Principalities, Powers, Thrones, Dominations, for the sake of being dispensed and ruled and guided toward better things, and perhaps from these the race of men will consist, in some one of the worlds, when, according to Isaiah, a new heaven and a new earth shall come to be. But those who shall not have merited to return, through the race of men, to their former state, shall become the devil and his angels, and most wicked demons: and according to the variety of their merits they shall be allotted different offices in each world.

And these very demons and rulers of darkness, in some world or worlds, if they wish to be converted to better things, become men, and thus return to their ancient beginning: provided only that, through the punishments and torments which they shall have endured for a long or a short time, being instructed in human bodies, they come again to the summit of the angels. From which it is shown, by consistent reasoning, that all rational creatures can become men, not once and suddenly, but repeatedly: and that we too, and the angels, shall become demons, if we act more negligently, and again that demons, if they are willing to take hold of virtues, arrive at angelic dignity.

That bodily substances too will utterly dissolve away: or certainly that in the end of all things bodies will be that which now is ether and heaven, and whatever other body can be understood as more pure and sincere. Since this is so, it is clear what he thinks about the resurrection. That the sun too, and the moon, and the other stars, are living beings: nay, that just as we men, on account of certain sins, are surrounded with these bodies, which are coarse and sluggish, so too the lights of heaven have received such or such bodies, that they might shine more or less, and that demons, on account of greater offenses, are clothed with an aerial body. That every creature, according to the Apostle, is subjected to vanity, and shall be freed into the revelation of the sons of God.

And lest anyone think this is our own statement, let us set down his own words:In the end and consummation of the world, when souls and rational creatures shall have been sent forth by the Lord, as it were from certain barriers and prisons, some of them move more slowly on account of sluggishness, others fly with a swift course on account of diligence. And since all have free will, and can of their own accord take hold either of virtues or of vices; those will be in a far worse condition than they now are. These will arrive at a better state: because different motions and various wills, on either side, will receive a different status; that is, that angels, men, or demons, and again from these, men, or angels, may come to be.

And when he had treated all things in varied discourse, asserting that the devil is not incapable of virtue, and yet does not yet wish to take hold of virtue, at the very last, in a most extensive discourse, he argued that an angel, or a soul, or certainly a demon—which he asserts to be of one nature, but of different wills—according to the magnitude of negligence and folly, can become a beast of burden, and, because of the pain of punishments and the burning of fire, may rather choose to be a brute animal, and dwell in waters and waves; and to assume the body of this or that beast: so that we must fear not only the bodies of quadrupeds, but also of fish.

And at the very end, lest he be held guilty of the Pythagorean doctrine, which asserts metempsychosis, after so nefarious a discussion, by which he wounded the mind of the reader, he says:These things, according to our opinion, are not doctrines, but merely inquiries and suggestions thrown out, lest they should seem to have been entirely left untreated.

In the second book, moreover, he asserts that there are innumerable worlds, not, as Epicurus held, many at the same time and similar to one another; but that after the end of one world, another begins. And that before this our world, there was another world, and that after this one there will be another, and after that, another; and again others after others. And he doubts whether the future world will be so partly similar to another world that they seem not to differ from one another at all, or whether indeed no world will ever be wholly indistinguishable from and similar to another. And again a little further on he says:If all things (as the very order of the discussion compels us to say) shall live without body, then the whole corporeal nature will be consumed, and reduced to nothing, which was once made from nothing; and there will be a time when the use of it will again be necessary.

And in what follows:But if, as has been shown by reason and by the authority of the Scriptures, this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal shall put on immortality, death shall be swallowed up in victory, and corruption in incorruption, and perhaps every corporeal nature will be taken away from the midst, in which alone death can operate. And a little later:If these things are not contrary to the faith, perhaps we shall at some time live without bodies. But if he who is perfectly subjected to Christ is understood to be without body, and all are to be subjected to Christ, then we too shall be without bodies, when we shall have been perfectly subjected to him. And in the same place:If all shall have been subjected to God, all will lay aside their bodies, and then the whole nature of corporeal things will be dissolved into nothing. Which, if a second necessity should demand it, will exist again on account of the fall of rational creatures.

For God has left souls in contest and struggle, that they may understand that they have attained full and complete victory not by their own strength, but by the grace of God. And therefore I think that, for the sake of the variety of causes, diverse worlds are made, and that the errors of those are refuted who contend that the worlds are alike to one another. And again:A threefold surmise, then, is suggested to us concerning the end: of which the reader must inquire which is true and better.

For either we shall live without body, when, subjected to Christ, we shall be subjected to God, and God will be all in all; or, in the manner in which, subjected to Christ, they shall together with Christ himself be subjected to God, and shall be drawn together into one covenant: so that all substance will be reduced to the best quality, and dissolved into ether, which is of a purer and simpler nature; or else certainly that sphere which above we called ἀπλανῆ (unwandering), and whatever is contained within its circle, will be dissolved into nothing; but that sphere which is held and encompassed by the ἀτειχώνη itself will be called the good earth; and likewise the other sphere, which encircles this same earth in its revolution, and is called heaven, will be preserved as the dwelling-place of the saints.

When he says these things, does he not most manifestly follow the error of the Gentiles, and force the ravings of the philosophers upon Christian simplicity? And in the same book:It remains that God is invisible. But if he is invisible by nature, neither will he be visible to the Saviour. And further on: No other soul, which descended to a human body, has expressed in itself a pure and genuine likeness of the earlier sign, except that soul of which the Saviour speaks: No one takes my soul from me, but I lay it down of myself. And in another place:Whence we must proceed with infinite caution, lest perhaps, when souls have obtained salvation, and have come to the blessed life, they cease to be souls. For as the Lord and Saviour came to seek and to save that which was lost, so that it might cease to be lost: so the soul which had been lost, and for whose salvation the Lord came, when it has been saved, will cease to be a soul.

This also must equally be inquired: whether, just as that which was lost was once not lost, and there will be a time when it will not be lost: so also the soul was once a soul, and there will be a time when it will by no means continue to be a soul. And after a lengthy treatment concerning the soul, he added this:nous, mind, that is, the mind, falling, became soul, and again the soul, furnished with virtues, will become mind. Which we can also find by examining the case of the soul of Esau, that on account of ancient sins he was condemned to a worse life. And it must be inquired concerning the heavenly bodies, that it was not at the time when the world was made that the soul of the sun—or whatever it ought to be called—began to be, but before it entered that shining and burning body.

Let us think similarly of the moon and stars, that from preceding causes, though unwilling, they were compelled to be subjected to vanity, for the sake of the rewards of future things, doing not their own will, but that of the Creator, by whom they were assigned to these offices.

The fire of gehenna too, and the torments which Holy Scripture threatens to sinners,he places not in punishments, but in the conscience of sinners, when by the power and might of God the whole memory of their sins is set before our eyes. And as if from certain seeds left in the soul, the whole crop of vices springs up: and whatever base or impious thing we had done in life, the whole picture of it is depicted before our sight, and the mind, beholding past pleasures, is punished by the burning of conscience, and is pierced by the stings of remorse. And again: Unless perhaps this heavy and earthly body is to be called mist and darkness; through which, when this world is finished, when it will be necessary to pass into another world, it will again take up the beginnings of birth. Saying these things, he plainly defends the μετεμψύχωσις (transmigration of souls) of Pythagoras and Plato.

And at the end of the second volume, discoursing on our perfection, he added:And when we shall have advanced so far that we shall no longer be flesh and bodies, and perhaps not even souls, but mind and sense coming to perfection, and clouded by no mist of disturbances, it shall behold rational and intelligible substances face to face.

In the third book also these errors are contained:But if we have once admitted that from preceding causes one vessel was created unto honor, another unto dishonor, why should we not have recourse to the hidden secret of the soul, and understand that it acted of old, on account of which it was loved in the one, and held in hatred in the other, before, in the body of Jacob, it supplanted, and in Esau was held by the heel by his brother?And again:But that some souls became for honor, others for dishonor, the merits of matters and causes went before.

And in the same place: But according to us, from preceding merits, the vessel which was fashioned for honor, if it has not done a work worthy of its name, will become in another age a vessel of dishonor; and again that vessel, which from an earlier fault had received the name of dishonor, if in the present life it wishes to be corrected, will become in a new creation a vessel sanctified, and useful to the Lord, and prepared unto every good work. And straightway he adds:I think that some men, beginning from small vices, can arrive at such wickedness—if indeed they refuse to be turned to better things, and to amend their sins by repentance—that they even become opposing powers; and again, from enemies and opposing powers, that some, over long periods of time, apply medicine to their own wounds, and restrain their formerly flowing offenses, so much that they pass over to the place of the best.

We have often said that, in the infinite and perpetual ages in which the soul subsists and lives, some of them fall so far toward the worse that they hold the last place of wickedness, and some so advance that from the last degree of wickedness they come to perfect and consummate virtue.Having said these things, he attempts to show both that men, that is, souls, can become demons, and again that demons can be restored to angelic dignity. And in the same volume:But this too must be inquired, why the human soul is now moved by these powers, now by others toward different things. And he thinks that the merits of certain persons preceded their coming into bodies, as in the case of John exulting in his mother's womb, when at the voice of Mary's greeting Elizabeth confesses herself unworthy of her converse.

And straightway he adds:And on the contrary, little children, though scarcely weaned, are filled with evil spirits, and are inspired to become diviners and soothsayers; so much so that even a Pythonic demon possesses some from a tender age; and that these should be left thus by the providence of God, though they have done nothing such as to deserve to endure such madness, is not consistent with him who wills that nothing happen apart from God, and that all things be governed by his justice.

And again concerning the world he says:It pleases us to hold that before this world there was another world, and that after this one there will be another. Do you wish to learn that after the corruption of this world another is to be? Hear Isaiah speaking: There shall be a new heaven and a new earth, which I make to endure before me. Do you wish to know that before the fabric of this world, other worlds existed in the past? Listen to Ecclesiastes: What is it that has been? The very thing that shall be. And what is it that has been made? The very thing that is to be made. And there is nothing new under the sun, of which one may speak and say, Behold, this is new. For it has already been in ages past, which were before us. Which testimony attests not only that there have been, but that there will be, worlds; not that all come to be at once and equally, but one after another.

And straightway he adds:I consider that the dwelling-place of the Godhead and the true rest is to be understood as being among the beings above, in which rational creatures, dwelling before they descended to the lower regions, and migrated from things invisible to things visible, and, rushing down to earth, came to need gross bodies, enjoyed their ancient blessedness. Whence God the founder made for them bodies suited to their lowly places, and fashioned this visible world; and sent ministers into the world for the salvation and correction of those who had fallen: of whom some obtained fixed places, and were made subject to the necessities of the world; others, with diligent mind, discharged the offices enjoined upon them at their several times, which God the artificer knows. And of these, the more sublime places of the world—the sun, and the moon, and the stars, which are called by the Apostle 'creature'—received their portion. Which creature was made subject to vanity, in that it is surrounded by gross bodies, and lies open to sight.

And yet it was not subjected to vanity of its own accord, but on account of the will of him who subjected it in hope. And again:But others, in their several places and times, which the artificer alone knows, serve the governance of the world, whom we believe to be his Angels. And a little further on:Which order of things the providence of the whole world governs, while some powers fall from more sublime places, others gradually slip down to earth. These descend voluntarily, others are cast down unwillingly. These of their own accord take up ministries, that they may lend a hand to those who are falling; those are compelled against their will, so that for so long a time they persevere in the office they have undertaken. And again: From which it follows that, on account of varied movements, varied worlds are created, and after this one which we inhabit, another world, much unlike it, comes to be.

And no one else can, by various circumstances and advances, and by either the rewards of virtues or the punishments of vices, in the present and in the future, and in all times both past and to come, dispense merits, and draw all things again to one end, except God alone, the founder of all things, who knows the causes for which he permits some to enjoy their own will, and gradually to slip down from greater things to the last, while he begins to visit others, and by degrees, as it were giving them a hand, draws them back to their former state, and sets them in the heights.

And when he had begun to dispute about the end, he added this: Since (as we have already often said) the beginning is again generated from the end, the question is asked whether at that time also there will be bodies, or whether at some point one must live without bodies, when they shall have been reduced to nothing, and the life of incorporeal beings must be believed to be incorporeal, of the sort we know God’s life to be also. Nor is there any doubt that, if all bodies belong to this sensible world, which are called by the Apostle visible things, the future life of incorporeal beings will be incorporeal. And a little after: That saying also of the same Apostle: Every creature shall be freed from the bondage of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the sons of God, we understand thus, that we say the first creation of rational and incorporeal beings does not serve corruption, because it is not clothed with bodies; and wherever bodies shall be, corruption immediately follows.

But afterward it will be freed from the bondage of corruption, when they shall have received the glory of the sons of God, and God shall be all in all. And in the same place: But that we should believe the end of all things to be incorporeal, that saying of the Saviour urges us, in which He says: That as I and thou are one, so may these also be one in us. For we ought to know what God is, and what the Saviour will be at the end, and how the likeness of the Father and of the Son has been promised in the saints, that as they are one in themselves, so these also may be one in them.

For either we must suppose that the God of the universe is clothed with a body, and that, just as we with flesh, so He is surrounded by some matter, so that the likeness of the life of God may be able to be equaled in the saints at the end; or if this is unseemly, especially among those who wish to conceive of the majesty of God even from the smallest part, and to surmise the glory of the unbegotten and all-surpassing nature, we are compelled to accept one of two alternatives: either we must despair of the likeness of God, if we are always to have the same bodies, or if blessedness is promised to us of the same life as God’s, we must live under the same condition by which God lives.

From all these things it is proved what he thinks about the resurrection, and that he affirms all bodies will perish: so that we may be without bodies, as we were before, before we were clothed with gross bodies. And again, disputing about the diversity of worlds, and asserting that either demons will become angels, or from demons angels or men, or on the contrary from men demons, and all things from all things, he confirms his opinion with this conclusion: Nor is it doubtful that after certain intervals of time, matter again subsists, and bodies come to be, and the diversity of the world is constructed, on account of the various wills of rational creatures, which after perfect blessedness, gradually, right up to the end of all things, slipping down to lower things, have received so much malice that they are turned to the contrary: while they refuse to keep to the beginning, and to possess incorrupt blessedness.

Nor should this be ignored, that many rational creatures, up to the second, and third, and fourth world, keep to the beginning, and grant no place in themselves for change. But others will lose so little of their original state that they seem to have lost almost nothing, and some are to be cast down with great ruin into the last abyss. And God, the dispenser of all things, knows how to make use of each one in the making of the worlds according to merit, and the occasions and causes by which the helms of the worlds are sustained and set in motion: so that he who shall have surpassed all others in wickedness, and shall have utterly made himself equal to the earth, in another world, which is afterward to be fashioned, becomes the devil, the beginning of the Lord’s creation, that he may be mocked by the angels, who lost the strength of their beginning.

By these words, what else does he attempt to show, than that the sinful men of this world can become the devil and demons in another world? And again, that demons now can, in another world, be made either angels or men? And after a very long disputation, in which he says that every corporeal creature is to be changed into spiritual and subtle bodies, and the whole substance is to be converted into one most pure body, purer than all splendor, and such a one as the human mind can now conceive, he finally adds: And God will be all in all, so that the whole corporeal nature is reduced into that substance which is better than all others, namely the divine, than which none is better.

Book iv.—In the fourth book also, which is the last of his work, he inserts these things which are to be condemned by the Church of Christ. And perhaps just as in this world those who die, at the separation of flesh and soul, obtain, according to the difference of works, different places in the underworld: so those who die, so to speak, from the administration of the heavenly Jerusalem, descend to the underworld of our world, so that according to the quality of their merits, they may possess different places on earth.

And again: And since we have compared the souls going from this world to the underworld, to those souls which, coming from the higher heaven to our dwellings, are in a certain manner dead, it must be investigated with prudent inquiry, whether we can say this same thing also of the birth of each: that just as souls born in this earth of ours either come up from the underworld again, desiring better things, to the higher regions, and take on a human body, or descend from better places all the way to us; so also those places which are above in the firmament are possessed by some souls which advance from our seats to better things; others which have slipped down from the heavens all the way to the firmament, and have not committed so great a sin as to be thrust down to the places we inhabit.

By these words he strives to prove that the firmament, that is, the heaven, is, in comparison to the higher heaven, hell; and that this earth which we inhabit, in comparison with the firmament, is called hell; and again, in comparison with the underworld, which is beneath us, we are called heaven: so that what is hell to some is heaven to others. Nor content with this disputation, he says, At the end of all things, when we are about to return to the heavenly Jerusalem, wars will arise of the adversary of the Powers against the people of God, so that their strength may not be idle, but may be exercised for battles, and may have material for strength, which they cannot obtain unless, being brave, they first resist their adversaries: whom we read in the book of Numbers to have been overcome by reason, and order, and skill in fighting back.

And when he had said, according to the Apocalypse of John, that the eternal Gospel, that is, the one that will be in the heavens, precedes this Gospel of ours by as much as the preaching of Christ precedes the sacraments of the old Law, at the end he added (which it is sacrilege even to have thought) that for the salvation of demons, Christ will also suffer in the air and in the heavenly places. And although he did not say this, yet it is understood as a consequence: just as He was made man for the sake of men, that He might free men, so also for the salvation of demons, God is to become that which those are, whom He comes to free. And lest we be thought perhaps to be asserting this from our own sense, his own words must be set down.

For just as through the shadow of the Gospel he fulfilled the shadow of the Law: so, since every law is an example and shadow of heavenly ceremonies, it must be inquired more diligently whether we rightly understand that the heavenly Law also, and the ceremonies of the supernal worship, do not have their fullness; but need the truth of the Gospel, which in John’s Apocalypse we read as the eternal Gospel, namely in comparison with this Gospel of ours, which is temporal, and preached in this passing world and age.

And even if we wished to inquire into this all the way up to the passion of the Lord Savior, although it be bold and rash to seek His passion in heaven: yet if the spiritual forces of wickedness are in the heavenly places, and we are not ashamed to confess the cross of the Lord on account of the destruction of those things which He destroyed by His passion: why should we fear to suspect something similar even in the supernal places, at the consummation of the ages, that the nations of all places may be saved by His passion?

And again, blaspheming about the Son, he spoke thus: For if the Son knows the Father, it seems that in that he knows the Father, he can comprehend Him: as if we should say that the mind of a craftsman knows the measure of his art. Nor is it doubtful that if the Father is in the Son, He is comprehended by him in whom He is. But if we call that comprehension such, that one comprehends not only by sense and wisdom, but also holds all things by strength and power, once he has known them; we cannot say that the Son comprehends the Father: but the Father comprehends all things. And among all things, the Son also is included; therefore He comprehends the Son also.

And that we might know the reasons by which the Father comprehends the Son, and the Son cannot comprehend the Father, he adds these words: Let the curious reader inquire whether the Father is known by Himself in the same way as He is known by the Son: and knowing that which is written: The Father who sent me is greater than I in all things, he will maintain that it is true to say that in knowledge also the Father is greater than the Son, since He is known more perfectly and purely by Himself than by the Son. 14. He is also convicted of holding transmigration of souls, and the abolition of bodies, through this passage again.

But if anyone shall be able to show that the incorporeal and rational nature, when it has stripped itself of the body, lives by itself, and is in a worse condition when it is clothed with bodies; in a better one, when it lays them aside: it is doubtful to no one that bodies do not subsist as a primary thing, but come to be at intervals, and on account of the various motions of rational creatures; so that those who need them may be clothed, and again, when they have corrected themselves toward better things from that depraved fall, may be dissolved into nothing, and be varied always by this succession. And lest we should think small the impiety of the things he had set forth before, at the end of the same volume he joins together: that all rational natures, that is, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Angels, Powers, Dominations, and the other Virtues, and man himself too, according to the dignity of the soul, are of one substance.

God, he says, and His only-begotten Son, and the Holy Spirit, perceive an intellectual and rational nature: the Angels perceive it, and the Powers, and the other Virtues, the inner man perceives it, who was made according to the image and likeness of God. From which it is concluded that God and these things are, in a certain manner, of one substance. He adds one word, “in a certain manner,” so that he might escape the charge of so great a sacrilege, and he who elsewhere does not wish the Son and the Holy Spirit to be of the substance of the Father, lest he seem to cut the divinity into parts, bestows the nature of the almighty God upon angels and men.

Since this is so, what madness it is, having changed a few things about the Son and the Holy Spirit, which displayed open blasphemy, to have brought forth the rest into the open just as they are written, and to have praised them with an impious voice: since indeed both these and those proceeded from one fountain of impiety? To write against all of it is not the task of this present time, and all who have written against Arius, and Eunomius, and Manichaeus, and the various heresies, are to be believed to have answered these impieties also. Whoever, therefore, wishes to read these books, and to go with shod feet to the land of promise; lest he be bitten anywhere by serpents, and be struck by the arched wound of the Scorpion, let him first read this book, and before he enters upon the way, let him know what things are to be avoided by him.

Nothing is more blessed than a Christian, to whom the kingdom of heaven is promised. Nothing more laborious, since he daily risks his life. Nothing braver, since he conquers the devil. Nothing weaker, since he is overcome by the flesh. There are very many examples of each. The thief believes on the cross, and immediately merits to hear: Amen I say to thee: today thou shalt be with me in paradise. Judas slips from the summit of the apostolate into the hell of perdition, and is broken neither by the intimacy of table-fellowship, nor by the prompting of the morsel, nor by the grace of the kiss, so as not to betray as a mere man the one whom he had known to be the Son of God. What is baser than the Samaritan woman?

Not only did she herself believe, and after six husbands find one Lord, and recognize the Messiah at the well—whom the people of the Jews did not know in the Temple—but she also became the source of salvation for many, and, while the Apostles were buying food, refreshed one who was hungry and sustained one who was weary. What is wiser than Solomon? Yet even he was made foolish by the love of women. Salt is good, and no sacrifice is accepted without its sprinkling. Whence also the Apostle instructs: Let your speech be always seasoned with grace, as with salt. But if it loses its savor, it is cast out, and so far loses the dignity of its name that it is not even useful for the dunghill, with which the fields of believers are usually enriched, and the barren soil of souls made fertile.

We say these things so that we may teach you at the very outset, son Rusticus, that you have undertaken great things and are pursuing lofty ones; and that, treading down the incitements of adolescence—nay, of youth—you are climbing to the level of perfect age: but that the path by which you enter is slippery, and that glory does Not follow victory as much as disgrace follows a fall.

I need not now lead a little stream through the meadows of the virtues, nor labor to show you the beauty of the various flowers: what purity the lilies hold within themselves, what modesty the rose possesses, what the purple of the violets promises in the kingdom, what the painted array of gleaming gems foretells. For already, by God's favor, you hold the plow. Already with the Apostle Peter you have gone up to the roof and the upper chamber; he who, hungering among the Jews, is satisfied by the faith of Cornelius, and quenches the hunger of their unbelief by the conversion of the Gentiles; and in the four-cornered vessel of the Gospels, which came down from heaven to earth, he is taught, and learns that all men can be saved.

And again, what he had seen in the form of the whitest linen cloth is transferred to the things above, and snatches the crowd of believers from earth to heaven, so that the Lord's promise may be fulfilled: Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. The whole of what I desire, taking you by the hand, to impart to you—since, like a skilled sailor after many shipwrecks, I am trying to instruct an untrained passenger—is this: that you may know on what shore lies the pirate of chastity; where Charybdis is, and avarice the root of all evils; where are the Scyllean dogs of detractors, of whom the Apostle speaks: Lest, biting one another, you be consumed one of another; how, even in the midst of tranquil calm, we are sometimes overwhelmed by the Libyan Syrtes of vices; what venomous creatures the desert of this present age nourishes.

Those sailing the Red Sea—in which we ought to wish that the true Pharaoh be drowned with his army—arrive, through many hardships and dangers, at the city of Auxuma. On either shore dwell wandering peoples, or rather the most savage beasts. Always watchful, always armed, they carry provisions for the whole year. Everything is full of hidden rocks and treacherous shallows, so that the lookout and pilot sits at the top of the mast, and from there proclaims the orders for steering and turning the ship. The voyage is fortunate if, after six months, they reach the harbor of the aforesaid city, from which the Ocean begins to open before them; through which one scarcely arrives, in a full year's course, at India, and at the river Ganges (which Holy Scripture calls the Phison), which encircles the whole land of Evilat, and is said to carry down many kinds of spices from the fountain of paradise.

There is born the carbuncle, and the emerald; and gleaming pearls, and single pearls, for which the ambition of noble women burns: and mountains of gold, which it is impossible for men to approach because of gryphons, and dragons, and monsters of immense bodies: so that it may be shown to us what kind of guardians avarice has.

To what end is this said? It is plain: if the merchants of this world endure so much, in order to attain uncertain and perishable riches, and to guard, at the risk of their souls, what they have sought amid many dangers, what must be done by the merchant of Christ, who, having sold all things, seeks the most precious pearl? Who buys, with all the resources of his substance, a field, in which he may find a treasure that neither thief can dig up, nor robber carry off?

I know that I shall offend very many, who refer a general discussion of vices to their own reproach; and while they are angry with me, they betray their own conscience, and judge worse of themselves than I do. For I shall name no one, nor, with the license of the Old Comedy, bind and censure particular persons. It is the mark of a prudent man, and of prudent women, to dissemble—nay, rather to amend—what they recognize in themselves, and to be angry with themselves rather than with me, and not to heap abuse upon the one who admonishes them. Even if he is held by the same faults, he is at least better in this, that his own evils do not please him.

I hear that you have a devout mother, a widow of many years, who nursed you, who educated you as an infant; and after the studies of Gaul, which are most flourishing indeed, sent you to Rome, not sparing expense, and enduring the absence of her son in hope of the future; that Roman gravity might season the richness and polish of Gallic speech, and use on you not the spur but the rein—which we read also of the most eloquent men of Greece, who tempered Asian bombast with Attic salt, and pruned back the luxuriant vines with sickles, so that the winepresses of eloquence might overflow, not with leaves of words, but with the pressings of meaning, as it were of grapes. Look up to her as a parent; love her as a nurse; venerate her as a saint. Do not imitate the example of others, who abandon their own kin and seek out strangers; whose disgrace is out in the open, seeking, under the names of piety, suspect companionships.

I have known certain women, already of riper age, and many of freedwoman's rank, who delight in young men and seek spiritual sons; and gradually, shame overcome, break out, under the feigned name of mothers, into marital license. Others, virgin sisters abandon, and attach themselves to unrelated widows. There are some who hate their own kin, and are not soothed by affection for their own; whose impatience, an index of the mind, admits no excuse, and tears through the empty veils of unchastity as though they were spiders' webs. You may see some, with loins girded, in a dark tunic, with a long beard, unable to part from women, remaining under the same roof, going together to banquets, having young maidservants in attendance, and, apart from the wordmarriage,having everything that belongs to matrimony. Nor is this the fault of the Christian name, if a pretender of religion be at fault; rather it is the confusion of the pagans, when they see that the Churches disapprove of what does not please good men generally.

The Duty of a Good Monk.—But you, if you wish to be a monk, not merely to seem one, take care not of your family estate, to which by renouncing you have begun to be this, but of your soul. Let sordid garments be tokens of a bright mind; let a cheap tunic prove contempt of the world—only so long as the mind does not swell with pride, and the manner of dress and speech do not disagree. Let him not seek the comforts of the baths, who desires to quench the heat of the body with the cold of fasting. And let these very fasts be moderated, lest excess weaken the stomach, and, demanding greater refreshment, break out into indigestion, which is the parent of lust. Moderate and temperate food is useful both to flesh and soul. See your mother in such a way that you are not compelled, through her, to see other women, whose faces might cling to your heart, And a silent wound live beneath your breast.

Know that the maidservants who wait upon her are lying in wait for you; because the lower their condition, the easier their fall. John the Baptist too had a holy mother, and was the son of a high priest; and yet he was overcome neither by a mother's affection, nor by a father's wealth, so as to live in his parents' house at the risk of chastity. He lived in the desert, and with eyes longing for Christ, deigned to look at nothing else. Rough clothing, a girdle of skin, locusts for food, and wild honey—all things prepared for virtue and continence. The sons of the prophets (whom we read to be the monks of the Old Testament) built themselves little huts by the streams of the Jordan, and, having left behind the crowds of the cities, lived on porridge and wild herbs. As long as you are in your homeland, consider your cell as paradise: pluck the varied fruits of the Scriptures; enjoy these delights; delight in their embrace.

If your eye, your foot, your hand scandalizes you, cast them away. Spare none, that you may spare only your soul. Whoever, says the Lord, looks upon a woman to lust after her, has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Who will boast that he has a chaste heart? The stars are not pure in the sight of the Lord: how much more men, whose life is a temptation? Woe to us, who, as often as we lust, so often commit fornication. My sword, it says, has been made drunk in heaven, much more on earth, which brings forth thorns and thistles. The vessel of election, in whose mouth Christ resounded, chastises his own body and brings it into subjection; and yet he perceives the natural ardor of the flesh warring against his own resolve, so that he is compelled to do what he does not wish, and, as one suffering violence, cries out and says: Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

And do you think that you can pass through without stumbling and wound, unless you guard your heart with all vigilance, and say with the Savior: My mother, and my brethren are those who do the will of my Father? This cruelty is piety; nay, what is so pious as for a holy son to keep himself holy for a holy mother? She too wishes you to live, and not to see you for a time, that she may see you forever with Christ. Anna bore Samuel not for herself, but for the Tabernacle. The sons of Jonadab, who drank neither wine nor strong drink, who dwelt in tents, and had for their dwellings whatever place the night compelled, are written of in the Psalm as being the first to endure captivity, being those who, by the army of the Chaldeans laying waste Judea, were compelled to enter the cities.

Let others see what they think. For each man is led by his own judgment. To me, a town is a prison, and solitude is paradise. Why should we desire the crowding of cities, we who are esteemed for our solitariness? Moses, that he might be set over the people of the Jews, was trained for forty years in the desert; a shepherd of sheep, he became a shepherd of men. The apostles passed from the fishing of the Lake of Genesareth to the fishing of men. Then, having a father, a net, a little boat, following the Lord, they immediately left everything, carrying daily their cross, and not even holding a staff in hand. I say these things so that, even if the desire for the Clerical office tickles you, you may learn what you are able to teach, and offer a rational sacrifice to Christ; lest you be a soldier before being a recruit, lest you be a teacher before being a disciple.

It is not for my humility, nor within my measure, to judge concerning clerics, and to say anything unfavorable of the ministers of the Churches. Let them have their order and their rank; and if you attain it, how you ought to live in it, the book published to Nepotianus will be able to teach you. Now we are discussing the cradle and habits of a monk, and of that monk who, having been trained in liberal studies in his youth, has placed the yoke of Christ upon his neck.

Praise of the Cenobitic Life.—First it must be considered whether you ought to live alone, or with others in a monastery. My own preference is that you have the fellowship of the saints, and not teach yourself, and enter without a guide upon a way you have never traveled, whereby you would at once have to turn aside to one side or the other, and lie open to error, and walk either more or less than is necessary; lest, running, you grow weary, or, delaying, you fall asleep. In solitude pride quickly creeps in; and if one has fasted a little, and seen no man, he thinks himself of some importance; and forgetting himself, whence and whither he has come, wanders within in heart, though outwardly he stays put in body—no, rather his tongue roams abroad.

Against the will of the Apostle, he judges the servants of another; he stretches out his hand wherever his appetite wills; he sleeps as much as he wills; he fears no one; he does whatever he wills; he thinks all others beneath him; and he is more often in the towns than in his cell; and among the brethren he feigns modesty, though he is jostled by crowds in the streets. What then? Do we condemn the solitary life? By no means: indeed we have often praised it.

But from the training-ground of monasteries we wish such soldiers to go forth as are not terrified by the hard first trials of the desert; who have given proof of their manner of life over a long time; who have been the least of all, that they might become first of all; whom neither hunger at any time, nor fullness, has overcome; who rejoice in poverty; whose bearing, speech, countenance, and gait are a teaching of the virtues; who do not know how to invent, after the manner of certain foolish men, portents of demons fighting against them, so as to make themselves a marvel among the unlearned and the common folk, and thereby seek gain.

We have recently seen and lamented how the wealth of a Croesus was swallowed up by one man's death, and the city's alms, gathered as it were for the use of the poor, left to his stock and descendants.

Then the iron which lay hidden in the depth floated upon the water, and among the palm trees the bitterness of Marah was shown. Nor is it a wonder: for he had such a companion and master, who made the hunger of the needy his own riches, and reserved for his own misery what had been left to the wretched. Their outcry at last reached heaven, and overcame the most patient ears of God, so that a most evil angel was sent to say to Nabal of Carmel: Fool, this night they shall require thy soul of thee; and the things which thou hast prepared, whose shall they be?

I wish therefore that you, both for the reasons which I have set forth above, and especially for this reason, should not live with your mother: lest, by refusing delicate foods that she offers, you sadden her; or if you accept them, you add oil to the fire; and amid the throng of maidens by day you see what by night you would think upon. Let the book never depart from your hand and your eyes; let the Psalter be learned by heart; let prayer be without ceasing; let the mind be watchful, and not open to vain thoughts. Let body and soul alike be stretched toward the Lord. Conquer anger by patience: Love the knowledge of the Scriptures, and you will not love the vices of the flesh. Let not your mind be free for various disturbances, which, if they settle in the breast, will dominate you and lead you to the greatest offense. Do some work, so that the devil may always find you occupied.

If the Apostles, having the power to live by the Gospel, labored with their own hands, that they might burden no one, and gave refreshment to others, from whom they ought to have reaped carnal things in return for spiritual, why should you not prepare for your own future use? Either weave a little basket of rushes, or plait a hamper of lentils with willow twigs; let the ground be hoed; let the little plots be divided by an even boundary, in which, when the seeds of vegetables have been scattered, or plants set in rows, let watering channels be led in, so that you may stand as a spectator of most beautiful verses:

Behold, from the brow of a sloping path he draws forth the wave, which falling raises a hoarse murmur over the smooth stones, and with its trickling streams tempers the parched fields.
(Georg. L. 3.)

Let unfruitful trees be grafted, either with buds or with shoots, so that after a little while you may pluck the sweet fruits of your labor. Build hives for bees, to which the Proverbs of Solomon send you; and learn, in small bodies, the order of monasteries and royal discipline. Let nets also be woven for catching fish, let books be copied, so that the hand may work out food, and the mind be filled with reading. Every idle man is full of desires. The monasteries of the Egyptians hold this custom, that they receive none without the labor of work, not so much for the necessity of sustenance as for the salvation of the soul. Lest the mind wander with pernicious thoughts, and, like fornicating Jerusalem, spread its feet for every passer-by.

When I was young, and the deserts of solitude walled me in, I could not bear the incentives of vices and the ardor of nature, which, though I broke it with frequent fasts, still the mind seethed with thoughts. To subdue it, I gave myself into the discipline of a certain brother who had believed from among the Hebrews, so that after the sharpness of Quintilian, the rivers of Cicero, the gravity of Fronto, and the smoothness of Pliny, I might learn the alphabet, and practice hissing and panting words. What labor I spent there, what difficulty I endured, how often I despaired, and how often I ceased and began again with fresh effort to learn, my conscience bears witness, both mine who suffered it, and of those who then lived with me. And I give thanks to the Lord, that from the bitter seed of letters, I gather sweet fruits.

I will tell also another thing which I saw in Egypt: there was a Greek youth in a monastery, who by no abstinence, by no greatness of labor, could extinguish the flame of the flesh. The Father of the monastery, seeing him in peril, preserved him by this device: he ordered a certain grave man to attack the youth with quarrels and abuse, and after the injury had been inflicted, to be the first to come with a complaint. Witnesses, being summoned, spoke in favor of him who had done the wrong. The youth wept against the lie, since no one would believe the truth; the Father alone craftily opposed his defense, lest the brother be swallowed up by too abundant sorrow. Why say more? So a year was spent; when it was completed, the youth, being asked about his former thoughts, whether he still endured any trouble, said: Alas, I am not even allowed to live: and shall I wish to fornicate? If he had been alone in this, by what helper would he have overcome?

The philosophers of the world are wont to drive out an old love with a new one, as it were nail by nail. This too the seven princes of Persia did for King Ahasuerus, that they might quench the longing for Queen Vashti with the love of other maidens. They cure vice with vice, and sin with sin; let us overcome vices by the love of virtues. Turn away, it says, from evil, and do good: seek peace, and pursue it. Unless we hate evil, we cannot love good. Rather, good must be done, that we may turn away from evil. Peace must be sought, that we may flee wars. Nor is it enough to seek it, unless, once found and fleeing, we pursue it with all zeal, it which surpasses all understanding: in which is the dwelling of God, the Prophet saying: And his place is made in peace.

And well is the pursuit of peace spoken of, according to that saying of the Apostle: Pursuing hospitality, so that we may not invite guests with a light and customary speech, and (so to say) with the mere tips of our lips; but hold them with the whole ardor of the mind, as though carrying them off as our own gain and profit.

No art is learned without a teacher. Even dumb animals, and herds of wild beasts, follow their own leaders. Among bees there are princes; cranes follow one in lettered order. There is one emperor; one judge of a province. Rome, as soon as founded, could not have two brothers as kings together, and was dedicated by fratricide. In Rebecca's womb, Esau and Jacob waged wars. There is one bishop of the churches, one archpriest, one archdeacon: and every ecclesiastical order rests upon its own rulers. In a ship there is one pilot; in a house one master; in however great an army, the standard of one is awaited.

And lest by repeating too many things I weary the reader, through all these my discourse tends to this: that I may teach you that you ought not to be left to your own judgment, but ought to live in a monastery under the discipline of one father, and in the company of many, that from one you may learn humility, from another patience: let this one teach you silence, that one gentleness. Do not do what you wish, eat what you are bidden, be clothed with what you receive, fulfill the measure of your assigned work, be subject to one whom you would rather not be, come weary to your bed, and half-asleep as you walk, and be compelled to rise before your sleep is finished. Say your Psalm in your turn; in which not sweetness of voice, but the affection of the mind is sought, the Apostle saying: I will sing with the spirit, I will sing also with the understanding: And, Singing in your hearts to the Lord.

For he had read that it was commanded, Sing praises wisely. Serve the brothers, wash the feet of guests; having suffered wrong, be silent; fear the Superior of the monastery as a lord, love him as a parent. Believe that whatever he commands is for your salvation; nor judge concerning the decision of your superiors, whose duty it is to obey and fulfill what is commanded, Moses saying: Hear, O Israel, and be silent. Occupied with so many tasks, you will be free for no idle thoughts, and while you pass from one thing to another, and work follows upon work, you will hold in mind only that which you are compelled to do.

False Monks.—I have seen some who, after renouncing the world, have changed nothing of their former manner of living except their clothing and the profession of their speech, not the substance. Their household wealth is rather increased than diminished. The same retinue of servants, the same lavish banqueting. Gold is eaten from glass and earthen dishes, and amid crowds and swarms of attendants they claim for themselves the name of solitaries. But those who are poor, and of slender means, and who seem to themselves rather clever, go forth in public like the dishes of a procession, that they may exercise their canine eloquence. Others, with shoulders raised on high, croaking I know not what within themselves, with eyes stupidly fixed upon the ground, weigh out swelling words, so that if you added a herald, you would think a prefecture was advancing.

There are those who, from the dampness of their cells, from immoderate fasts, from the tedium of solitude, and from too much reading, while day and night they din it into their own ears, turn to melancholy, and need the remedies of Hippocrates more than our admonitions. Very many cannot do without their former arts and trades, and, having changed the names of their wares, carry on the same commerce: not seeking food and clothing, which the Apostle commands, but greater profits than men of the world pursue. And formerly indeed the frenzy of sellers was restrained by the aediles, whom the Greeks call ἀγορανόμους, nor did wrongdoing go unpunished. But now, under the title of religion, unjust gains are practiced, and the honor of the Christian name serves rather to cover fraud than to suffer it.

And what shames me to say, but must be said, that at least thus we may blush at our own disgrace: stretching out our hands publicly, we cover gold with rags; and, contrary to the opinion of all, we die rich with full purses, we who have lived as though poor. When you are in the monastery, this will not be allowed you: and as habit gradually grows, what you were at first compelled to do, you will even begin to do willingly, and your labor will delight you; and, forgetting past things, you will always press on to what lies before, considering not at all what evil others do, but what good you yourself ought to do.

Praise of the Clergy.—Neither should you be led by the multitude of sinners, nor should the crowd of those perishing trouble you, so that you silently think: What then? Shall all perish who dwell in cities? Behold, those men enjoy their goods, serve the churches, go to the baths, do not shun perfumes; and yet they are on the lips of all. To which I have already answered before, and now answer briefly, that in the present little work I am not disputing about clerics, but instructing a monk. Holy are the clergy, and the life of all is praiseworthy. Act, therefore, and live in the monastery in such a way that you may deserve to become a cleric, that you may stain your youth with no defilement, that you may go forth to the altar of Christ as a virgin from her chamber, and that you may have a good testimony from those without: let women know your name, and not know your face.

When you come to full maturity, if life shall accompany you, and if either the people or the bishop of the city should choose you for the clergy, do what belongs to clerics, and among them follow the better ones. For in every condition and rank, the worst are mixed with the best.

What is to be avoided.—Do not rush hastily into writing, nor be led by a light-minded folly. Learn for a long time what you would teach. Do not trust your flatterers, nay rather do not readily lend your ear to your mockers; who, when they have fed you with flatteries, and rendered you in a way powerless of mind, if you suddenly look back, you will find either the necks of storks bent behind you, or the ears of an ass wagged by a hand, or the panting tongue of a dog stretched out. Detract from no one, nor think yourself holy on this account, if you tear others apart. We often accuse in others what we ourselves do, and, eloquent against ourselves, inveigh against our own vices, judging the eloquent while ourselves mute. Grunnius used to advance to speak with a tortoise's gait, and at certain intervals could hardly scrape out a few words, so that you would think he was sobbing rather than speaking.

And yet, when the table had been set and he had laid out a pile of books, with brow drawn together, nostrils contracted, and forehead wrinkled, he would snap his two little fingers, by this sign summoning his disciples to listen. Then he would pour forth mere trifles, and declaim against individuals: you would say he was Longinus the critic, and the censor of Roman eloquence, marking whom he pleased and excluding him from the senate of the learned. There, being well supplied with money, he pleased all the more at dinners. Nor is it any wonder, if he who was accustomed to entice many, advanced into public having formed a wedge of chattering hangers-on around him: within, a Nero; without, a Cato. Wholly ambiguous, so that from contrary and diverse natures you would say one monster and a new beast had been compounded, according to that poetic saying: a lion in front, a dragon behind, and in the middle a very chimera.

Never, then, should you look upon such people, nor attach yourself to men of this kind, nor let your heart incline to words of malice, lest you hear:Sitting, you spoke against your brother, and against your mother's son you laid a stumbling-block. And again:The sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows. And elsewhere:His words are smoother than oil, and yet they are darts. And more openly in Ecclesiastes:As a serpent bites in silence, so does he who secretly detracts his brother.But you will say: I myself do not detract; what can I do while others are speaking? These are the excuses we put forward to excuse our sins. Christ is not deceived by artifice. It is not my judgment, but the Apostle's sentence:Do not err: God is not mocked.He sees in the heart, we see only the face.

Solomon says in Proverbs:The north wind scatters clouds, and a sad countenance, backbiting tongues.For just as an arrow, if shot against a hard substance, sometimes returns upon the one who shot it, and wounds the wounder—so is fulfilled that word:They have become to me a warped bow. And elsewhere:He who casts a stone on high, it will fall back upon his own head.So the detractor, when he sees the sad face of his listener—or rather not even of a listener, but of one who stops up his ears lest he hear the judgment of blood—immediately falls silent, his face grows pale, his lips cling together, his saliva dries up. Whence the same wise man says:Do not mingle with detractors, for their ruin will come suddenly, and who knows the ruin of both?—namely, of him who speaks as much as of him who listens to the speaker. Truth loves no corners, nor does it seek whisperers. To Timothy it is said:Against a presbyter, do not readily receive an accusation.

But him who sins, rebuke before all, that the rest also may have fear.One should not readily believe things against advanced age, which both a past life defends and the title of dignity honors. Yet because we are men, and sometimes, despite the maturity of our years, fall into the faults of boys—if you wish to correct me when I offend, rebuke me openly, only do not bite me in secret.The just man shall correct me in mercy, and shall reprove me: but let not the oil of the sinner fatten my head.Forwhom the Lord loves, He chastens; and He scourges every son whom He receives. And through Isaiah the Lord cries out:My people, they that call you blessed lead you into error, and destroy the paths of your feet.For what does it profit me if you report my faults to others?

If, without my knowledge, through my sins—or rather through your detractions—you wound another; and while you eagerly relate the same to all, you speak to each as if you had told no one else? This is not to correct me, but to satisfy your own vice. The Lord commands that those who sin be rebuked to their face in private, or with a witness present; and if they refuse to listen, that it be reported to the Church, and that they be held as obstinate in evil, like heathens and publicans.

I speak these things more expressly, so that I may free my young man from the itching of tongue and ears alike: so that, reborn in Christ, I may present him without wrinkle or stain, like a chaste virgin, pure both in mind and in body; lest he glory in the name alone, and, his lamp extinguished for lack of the oil of good works, be shut out from the Bridegroom. You have there the holy and most learned Bishop Proculus, who may surpass our little writings with his living and present voice, and by daily discourses direct your path; and who will not suffer you, by turning aside to one part or the other, to abandon the royal road, by which Israel, hastening to the land of promise, promises to pass through.

And would that the voice of the Church imploring might be heard:Lord, give us peace: for Thou hast given us all things.Would that our renunciation of the world be a matter of will, not of necessity; and that poverty, being sought, might have glory, not being imposed, torment. Yet, given the miseries of this time, and swords raging everywhere, he is rich enough who lacks not bread. He is powerful enough who is not forced to serve. Holy Exuperius, Bishop of Toulouse, imitator of the widow of Sarepta, though hungry himself, feeds others; and with face pale from fasting, is tormented by another's hunger; and has given over his whole substance to the bowels of Christ. Nothing is richer than he, who carries the Body of the Lord in a wicker basket, and the Blood in a glass.

He who cast avarice out of the Temple; who, without cord or rebuke, overturned the seats of those selling doves—that is, the gifts of the Holy Spirit—and the tables of mammon, and scattered the coins of the money-changers; that the house of God might be called a house of prayer, and not a den of thieves. Follow closely in his footsteps, and those of others like him in virtue, whom the priesthood makes both humbler and poorer. Or if you desire perfection, go out with Abraham from your country and your kindred, and journey to a place you do not know. If you have substance, sell it, and give to the poor. If you have none, you are freed from a heavy burden: naked, follow the naked Christ. Hard, great, difficult—but great are the rewards.

At last I have received from Africa the letter of your unanimity; and I do not repent of the impudence by which, while you were silent, I frequently pressed my letters upon you, so that I might merit a reply, and might learn that you were well—not from others reporting it, but rather from your own words.

Concerning the state of the soul I remember your little question, or rather the very great ecclesiastical question: Whether it fell from heaven, as the philosopher Pythagoras, and all the Platonists, and Origen think; or is from God's own substance, as the Stoics, Manichaeus, and the Spanish heresy of Priscillian suspect; or is kept in the treasuries of God, created long ago, as some ecclesiastical writers foolishly and confidently believe; or is made daily by God and sent into bodies, according to that which is written in the Gospel,My Father works until now, and I work; or indeed comes by propagation, as Tertullian, Apollinaris, and the greater part of the Westerners maintain—so that, just as body is born from body, so soul is born from soul, and subsists under a condition similar to that of brute animals.

On this matter I know that I wrote my opinion in my little works against Rufinus, against that book which he gave to Anastasius, Bishop of the Roman Church, of holy memory: in which, by a slippery and deceitful, indeed foolish, confession, while striving to deceive the simplicity of his hearers, he deceived his own faith—or rather, his own perfidy. I suppose that your holy father Oceanus has these books; for they were published long ago, replying to many of Rufinus's books against his calumnies. Certainly you have there the holy and learned man, Bishop Augustine, who will be able to teach you by living voice, as they say, and to explain his own opinion—or rather, through himself, our own.

Long ago I wished to undertake the volume of Ezekiel, and to fulfill a promise long made to studious readers; but at the very outset of dictation my mind was so thrown into confusion by the devastation of the Western provinces, and especially of the city of Rome, that, as the common proverb has it, I forgot even my own name; and for a long time I kept silence, knowing that it was a time for tears. But this year, when I had explained three books, a sudden onrush of barbarians, of whom your Virgil speaks, and the far-wandering Barcaei, and the holy Scripture concerning Ishmael,he shall dwell over against the face of all his brethren,so overran the borders of Egypt, Palestine, Phoenicia, Syria, like a torrent sweeping all things along with it, that we were scarcely able to escape their hands by the mercy of Christ. But if, according to the famous orator, laws are silent amid arms, how much more the studies of the Scriptures?

Which require both a multitude of books, and silence, and the diligence of scribes, and, what is most proper to them, the security and leisure of the one dictating. I have therefore sent two books to my holy daughter Fabiola, whose copies, if you wish, you may borrow from her. For owing to the shortness of time she has not been able to have others copied; and when you have read them and seen the entryway, it will be easy to conjecture what kind of house it is going to be. But I trust in the mercy of God, who helped us in the most difficult beginning of the aforesaid work, that He Himself will help also in the penultimate parts of the Prophet, in which the wars of Gog and Magog are narrated: and in the last parts, in which the construction, variety, and measurement of the most sacred and inexplicable temple is described.

Our holy brother Oceanus, to whom you send greetings, is so great and of such a kind, and so learned in the Law of the Lord, that, without any request of mine, he could instruct you, and explain, according to the measure of our common understanding, my opinion on all questions of Scripture. May Christ our God, the Almighty, keep you safe and flourishing to a long age, truly holy lords.

Often and greatly you urge me, virgin of Christ, Principia, to recall in writing the memory of the holy woman Marcella, and to describe for others also to know and to imitate the good which we long enjoyed. And I grieve enough that you should urge on one who runs of his own accord, and think that I need entreaties, I who would not yield even to you in love of her: and I shall receive far more benefit than I shall give, by the recollection of such great virtues. For that I kept silent until now, and let two years pass in silence, was not, as you wrongly suppose, from dissembling, but from an incredible sorrow, which so oppressed my mind that I judged it better for the present to be silent, than to say nothing worthy of her praises.

Nor indeed shall I proclaim your Marcella—or rather mine, and, to speak more truly, ours, and of all the Saints, and the illustrious glory of the city of Rome herself—according to the practices of rhetoricians; so as to set forth her illustrious family, the glory of high blood, and genealogies running through consuls and praetorian prefects. I shall praise in her nothing except what is properly her own, and the more noble for this, that, having despised wealth and nobility, she became more noble through poverty and humility.

Bereft of her father by death, she was also deprived of her husband in the seventh month after her marriage. And when Cerealis (whose name is illustrious among the consuls), on account of her age and the antiquity of her family, and her notable beauty of body (which is what most pleases men), and the moderation of her character, sought her rather ambitiously, and, being advanced in years, promised her his riches, and wished to transfer the gift not as to a wife but as to a daughter; and when Albina's mother, too, of her own accord sought so illustrious a support for her widowed house—she replied:If I wished to marry, and did not desire to dedicate myself to eternal chastity, I would certainly seek a husband, not an inheritance.

And when he urged that old men could live long, and young men die quickly, she wittily replied:A young man indeed can die quickly; but an old man cannot live long.Rejected by this reply, she became an example to others, so that they gave up hope of her marriage. We read in the Gospel according to Luke:And there was Anna a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with her husband seven years from her virginity. And she was a widow until fourscore and four years; who departed not from the temple, serving God with fastings and prayers night and day.Nor is it a wonder that she merited to see the Savior, whom she sought with such great labor. Let us compare seven years to seven months: to hope for Christ and to hold Him; to confess Him born, and to believe on Him crucified; not to deny Him as an infant, and to rejoice in Him as reigning King.

I make no distinction among holy women, as some among holy men and princes of the Churches are foolishly wont to do: but my assertion tends to this, that of those whose labor is one, the reward also is one.

It is difficult, in a slanderous city, and in a city which was once the people of the world, and the very palm of vices, if they detracted from honest things, and stained things pure and clean, not to contract some tale of sinister rumor. Whence the Prophet wishes for, rather than presumes upon, something as if it were most difficult, and almost impossible, saying: Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord. He calls those undefiled in the way of this world whom no breath of shameful rumor has stained: who have not received reproach against their neighbors. Concerning whom the Savior says in the Gospel: Be well-disposed, or think well, of your adversary, while you are in the way with him. Who ever heard anything displeasing of this woman, so as to believe it? Who believed it, so as not rather to condemn himself for malice and slander?

By her first was gentile paganism confounded, when it became evident to all what Christian widowhood was, which both her conscience and her attire promised. For those women are accustomed to paint their faces with purple and white lead, to gleam in silken garments, to shine with gems, to wear gold on their necks, and, with pierced ears, to hang the most precious pearls of the Red Sea, to be fragrant with musk, and to mourn their husbands in such a way that at last they rejoice to be free from their dominion, and seek others—not to serve, according to God's judgment, but to rule over. Whence also they choose poor men, so that they may seem to have husbands in name only, men who patiently endure rivals; and if they should murmur, are at once cast off. Our widow used such garments as would keep off the cold, not lay bare her limbs: refusing gold even down to the mere signet of a ring, and storing it rather in the bellies of the poor than in purses.

Never was she without her mother; she saw no cleric or monk (a necessity which the needs of a great house sometimes required) without witnesses present. She always kept in her company virgins, and widows, and grave women themselves; knowing that from the wantonness of maidservants the character of mistresses is often judged, and that each woman delights in the company of such as herself.

Her ardor for the divine Scriptures was incredible, and she was always singing: In my heart I have hidden your sayings, that I may not sin against you. And that saying about the perfect man: And his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night. She understood meditation on the law not as repeating what is written, as the Pharisees among the Jews think; but as consisting in deeds, according to that saying of the Apostle: Whether you eat, or drink, or do anything, do all things to the glory of the Lord. And the words of the Prophet, saying: From your commandments I have understood; so that after fulfilling the commandments, then he knew himself to merit the understanding of the Scriptures. Which also we read elsewhere: that Jesus began to do and to teach.

For however brilliant a doctrine may be, it is put to shame if one's own conscience reproves it; and in vain does his tongue preach poverty, and teach almsgiving, who swells with the riches of Croesus; and, clothed in a cheap cloak, fights against the moths of silken witnesses. Her fasts were moderate, her abstinence from meat, and wine more by smell than by taste, on account of her stomach and frequent illnesses. She rarely went out in public, and especially avoided the houses of noble matrons, lest she be forced to see what she had scorned. She celebrated the basilicas of the Apostles and Martyrs with private prayers, and those which avoided the crowding of the people. She was so obedient to her mother that at times she did what she did not wish to do.

For while her mother neglected her own blood, and, without children or grandchildren, wished to bestow everything upon her brother's children, this woman chose the poor, and yet could not oppose her mother: giving up jewels, and whatever furnishings there were, to the rich, doomed to perish, preferring rather to lose money than to grieve her parent's mind.

At that time no noblewoman at Rome knew the purpose of the Monks, nor dared, because of the novelty of the thing, which was then thought disgraceful.

And to take up a name held vile among the people. This she learned from the Alexandrian priests, and from Pope Athanasius, and afterward from Peter, who, fleeing the persecution of the Arian heresy, had taken refuge at Rome as though at the safest harbor of their communion, learning the life of the blessed Antony, then still living, and the discipline of the monasteries in the Thebaid, of Pachomius, and of the virgins and widows. Nor did she blush to profess what she had learned pleased Christ. Her example was followed many years later by Sophronia, and others: to whom that verse of Ennius can most fittingly be applied: Would that it had not happened in the Pelian grove. The venerable Paula enjoyed her friendship. In her bedchamber Eustochium, the glory of virginity, was nurtured: so that one may easily judge what sort of teacher she was, where such disciples were formed.

Perhaps the unbelieving reader will laugh that I linger in the praises of mere little women; but if he recalls the holy women, companions of the Lord and Savior, who ministered to him from their substance, and the three Marys standing before the cross, and Mary properly called Magdalene, who, because of her diligence and ardor of faith, received the name of the tower, and was the first before the Apostles to deserve to see Christ risen, he will rather condemn himself of pride, than us of folly: we who judge virtues not by sex but by spirit; and who, having scorned nobility and riches, account it the greater glory.

Whence also Jesus loved John the Evangelist most of all: who, because of the nobility of his family, was known to the High Priest, and did not fear the plots of the Jews: so much so that he brought Peter into the courtyard, and stood alone of the Apostles before the cross: and received the mother of the Savior into his own home; and the virgin Son received as inheritance the virgin mother of the virgin.

For very many years, therefore, she so spent her life that people beheld her an old woman before they remembered her as a young one, praising that Platonic saying, that Philosophy is the meditation of death. Whence also our Apostle says: Daily I die for your salvation. And the Lord, according to the ancient copies: Unless one takes up his cross daily, and follows me, he cannot be my disciple. And long before, through the Prophet, the Holy Spirit said: For your sake we are put to death all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. And, after many ages, that saying: Remember always the day of death, and you will never sin. And the precept of the most eloquent Satirist: Live mindful of death; the hour flees; what I say now is already past. So then (as we began to say) she led her life, and lived, in such a way that she always believed herself about to die.

So did she clothe herself, as one mindful of the tomb, offering herself a reasonable, living sacrifice, pleasing to God.

When she came to Rome.—At length, when ecclesiastical necessity had drawn me too to Rome along with the holy bishops Paulinus and Epiphanius (of whom the one ruled the Church of Antioch in Syria, the other that of Salamis in Cyprus), and I, out of modesty, was avoiding the eyes of noble women, she acted, according to the Apostle, in season and out of season, so that her diligence overcame my reserve. And because I was then thought to have some name for the study of the Scriptures, she never met me without asking something about the Scriptures: nor did she at once acquiesce, but on the contrary raised questions; not in order to contend, but that by inquiring she might learn the solutions to those difficulties which she perceived could be raised against them. What virtue, what talent, what sanctity, what purity I found in her, I am afraid to say, lest I exceed the bounds of credibility, and inflict on you a greater sorrow, as you recall how great a good you have lost.

I will say only this: that whatever had been gathered in us by long study and daily meditation, as it were turned into nature—this she tasted, this she learned, and made her own; so that after our formation, if any dispute arose concerning some testimony of Scripture, recourse was had to her as judge. And because she was very prudent, and knew what the Philosophers call τὸ πρέπον, that is, what is fitting to do: she so answered questions that she would attribute even her own opinions, not to herself, but to me, or to someone else, so that in the very act of teaching she would confess herself a disciple. She is said to have done. For she knew what was said by the Apostle: But I do not permit a woman to teach; lest she seem to do injury to the male sex, and at times to priests, when they inquired about obscure and ambiguous matters.

Into our own place we soon heard that you had attached yourself to her company, and that never, as they say, did you withdraw from her even the breadth of a fingernail. You lived in the same house, the same chamber, so that it became known to all in that most illustrious city, and that you were found to be both mother and she daughter. The suburban estate served you as a monastery, and the chosen countryside for solitude. And for so long a time did you live thus, that, in imitation of you, we rejoiced that Rome, through the conduct of many women, had been made a Jerusalem. Frequent monasteries of virgins, an innumerable multitude of monks; so that, because of the great number of those serving God, what had before been a disgrace was afterward a glory. Meanwhile we comforted our absence from each other with mutual letters, and what we could not do in the flesh, we accomplished in spirit. Always did she meet with letters, surpass in kindnesses, anticipate in greetings.

Absence lost little of its force, when it was joined by constant correspondence.

The Origenists.—In this tranquility, and service of the Lord, a heretical storm arose in these provinces, disturbed everything; and was roused to such madness that it spared neither itself nor any of the good. And as if it were too little to have stirred up everything here, it brought a ship full of blasphemies into the Roman harbor. And straightway the pot found its lid, and they mingled the purest fountain of Roman faith with muddy filth. Nor is it any wonder if, in the streets and in the marketplace of things for sale, a false soothsayer beats the buttocks of fools, and, with cudgel snatched up, shakes the teeth of those who bite: since a poisoned and filthy doctrine found at Rome those it might seduce. Then came the infamous translation of the books Περὶ ἀρχῶν; then the disciple ὄλβιος (truly of his name), had he not stumbled upon such a teacher. Then arose the διάλυσις, the contradiction, of our people, and the school of the Pharisees was thrown into confusion.

Then holy Marcella, who had long restrained herself, lest she seem to act out of rivalry, after she perceived that the faith praised by apostolic mouth was being violated in many respects, so much so that even priests, and some monks, and especially men of the world, were being drawn into agreement with it; and that the simplicity of the Bishop was being mocked, who judged others by his own disposition, publicly resisted: preferring to please God rather than men.

The Savior in the Gospel praises the steward of iniquity, because he acted deceitfully indeed against his master, yet prudently for himself. The heretics, seeing that from a small spark the greatest fires are kindled, and that the flame long since kindled beneath had now reached the roof, and that what had deceived many could no longer be hidden, seek and obtain ecclesiastical letters, so that they might seem to have departed while still in communion with the Church. Not long after, there succeeded to the pontificate a man of distinction, Anastasius, whom Rome did not deserve to keep long, lest the head of the world be beheaded under such a bishop. Rather, for this reason was he taken away and translated, lest by his prayers he try to bend a sentence once pronounced: the Lord saying to Jeremiah: Do not pray for this people, nor make intercession for their good. For if they fast, I will not hear their prayers. And if they offer holocausts and victims, I will not accept them.

For by sword and famine and pestilence I will consume them. You may say, what has this to do with the praise of Marcella? This was the beginning of the condemnation of the heretics: while she brought forward witnesses, who had first been instructed by them, and afterward had been caught up by heretical error; while she showed the multitude of those deceived; while she brought forth the impious volumes Περὶ ἀρχῶν, which were shown to have been corrected by the hand of a scorpion; while the heretics, summoned by frequent letters to defend themselves, dared not come; and such was the force of their conscience, that they preferred to be condemned absent rather than convicted present. The origin of so glorious a victory was Marcella: and you, who are the head and cause of these good things, know that I speak the truth: things which you know, I scarcely mention a few out of many, lest a hateful repetition weary the reader; and lest I seem, before the malicious, to be venting my own spleen under the pretext of praising another.

Let me proceed to what remains.

From the regions of the West the whirlwind passed over to the East, threatening great shipwrecks to very many. Then was fulfilled: Do you think, when the Son of man comes, he will find faith on the earth? With the love of many grown cold, the few who loved the truth of the faith joined themselves to our side, whose head was publicly sought; against whom all resources were mustered; so that even Barnabas was drawn into that pretense, indeed into open parricide, which he committed not by will, but under compulsion. And behold, the whole storm, at the Lord's breathing, was destroyed, and the prophetic prediction was fulfilled: You shall take away their spirit, and they shall fail, and shall return to their dust. In that day all their thoughts shall perish. And that saying of the Gospel: Fool, this night your soul shall be required of you: and the things you have prepared, whose shall they be?

While these things are being done in Jebus (Jerusalem), a terrible rumor is brought from the West, that Rome is besieged, and that the safety of its citizens is being bought back with gold, and that, once despoiled, they are again surrounded, so that after their substance they might lose their lives also. My voice sticks, and sobs interrupt the words as I dictate. The City is captured which captured the whole world: nay, she perishes by famine before the sword, and scarcely a few were found who could be taken captive. The madness of the starving burst forth into unspeakable food, and they tore their own limbs one from another, while the mother did not spare her nursing infant, and took back into her womb what a little before she had brought forth. In the night Moab was taken, in the night her wall fell. O God, the nations have come into thy inheritance, they have polluted thy holy temple.

They have set Jerusalem as a guard for orchards; they have given the bodies of thy saints as food for the birds of heaven, the flesh of thy holy ones for the beasts of the earth. They have poured out their blood like water round about Jerusalem, and there was none to bury them.

Who could tell in speech the disaster of that night, who the deaths, or match the grief with tears? The ancient city fell, which had ruled for many years; very many lifeless bodies are strewn everywhere through the streets and through the houses, and death has many a likeness.

Meanwhile, as in so great a confusion of affairs, the bloodstained victor entered the house of Marcella also. Let it be permitted me to relate what I have heard, nay, to narrate what has been seen by holy men who were present there, who say that you also were joined with her in danger. She is said to have received the intruders with an unafraid countenance; and when gold was demanded, and she pleaded her buried wealth with her cheap tunic, still she did not gain credit for her voluntary poverty. Beaten with clubs and scourges, they say she did not feel the tortures; but this she did with tears, this prostrate at their feet, that they should not separate you from her company: that youth should not have to endure what old age could not fear. Christ softened their hard hearts, and among the bloody swords piety found a place.

And when the barbarians had led both her and you to the basilica of the apostle Paul, either to show you safety, or a tomb; she is said to have burst into such joy that she gave thanks to God, that he had preserved you unharmed for herself: that captivity had not made her poor, but had found her so: that she was in need of daily food: that being filled with Christ, she did not feel hunger: that she declared both by voice and deed,Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return.As it pleased the Lord, so it has been done. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

After some days, with her little body sound, whole, and vigorous, she fell asleep in the Lord: and left you as heirs of her poverty, nay, through you left the poor as heirs, closing her eyes in your hands, giving up her spirit amid your kisses; while, amid your tears, that consciousness of a good life and of the rewards of things to come made her smile. This I have dictated to you, venerable Marcella, and to you, daughter Principia, in one brief night’s labor, not with beauty of eloquence, but with the will of a most grateful mind toward you, desiring to please both God and my readers.

It is a difficult task to write to a little girl who does not understand what you say: whose mind you cannot know: about whose will you promise perilously; so that, according to the exordium of the illustrious Orator, the hope in her is to be praised more than the actuality. For to what purpose would you exhort to continence one who desires little cakes? Who babbles with a chattering voice in her mother's bosom? To whom honey is sweeter than words? Should she hear the depths of the Apostle, whose mind delights more in fables? Should she perceive the enigmas of the Prophets, whom the sadder countenance of her nurse disturbs? Should she understand the majesty of the Gospel, at whose lightning-flashes every mortal sense grows dull? Should I urge her to be subject to her parent, who with her tender hand strikes her laughing mother? So then let our little Pacatula receive this little letter to be read hereafter.

Meanwhile, let her only learn the letters of the alphabet, join syllables, learn names, put words together: and that she may practice these with a ringing voice, let little cakes be set before her, honeyed rewards, and whatever is sweet to the taste: let her hasten to receive what blooms among flowers, what glows in gems, what allures in dolls. Meanwhile let her also attempt with tender thumb to draw out threads: let her often break the threads, so that one day she may not break them; after labor let her rejoice in play: let her hang upon her mother's neck: let her snatch kisses from her relatives: let her sing the Psalms for a reward: let her love what she is compelled to learn, so that it may not be a task but a delight, not a necessity but a choice.

Some women, when they have promised a future virgin, are accustomed to dress her in a dark tunic, and cover her with a dusky cloak, to take away her fine linens: to allow nothing of gold on her neck, nothing on her head: indeed for good counsel, lest she learn in her tender years to possess what afterward she will be compelled to lay aside. But to others it seems otherwise. For what, they say, if she herself has not had it, will she not see others who have it? The female sex is fond of adornment; and we know that many women of notable chastity, though for no man, yet gladly adorn themselves for their own sake. Rather, let her be sated by having, and see others praised who do not have these things. And it is better that, being satiated, she should despise them, than that, by not having them, she should desire to have them.

Something of this sort, they say, the Lord did also to the people of Israel, that to those craving Egyptian flesh, he furnished swarms of quails even to nausea and vomiting: and that many men of the world find it easier to do without a bodily pleasure once experienced, than those who from childhood have known no lust. For by some, what is known is trampled underfoot; by others, what is unknown is sought after. The former avoid, through repentance, the snares of a sweetness they have fled; the latter, flattered by the pleasant titillation of the flesh's allurements, while they think they find honey, discover deadly poison. For honey drips from the lips of the harlot; which for a time smears the palate of those who taste it, and afterward is found more bitter than gall. Whence also in the sacrifices of the Lord they do not offer honey, and wax, which is the lodging of honey, being despised, oil is kindled in the temple of God; which is pressed out from the bitterness of olives.

The Passover also is to be eaten with bitter herbs in the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth: which whoever has, will endure persecution in this world. Whence also the Prophet sings mystically: I sat alone, because I was filled with bitterness.

What then? Must one live in luxury in adolescence, so that afterward luxury may be more strongly despised? Far from it, they say. Let each remain in the calling wherein he was called. Let one who is circumcised, that is, called as a virgin, not bring on a foreskin, that is, let him not seek the garments of skins belonging to marriage, with which Adam, cast out of the paradise of virginity, was clothed. Let one who was called in uncircumcision, that is, having a wife, and surrounded by the skin of matrimony, not seek the nakedness of virginity and eternal chastity, which he has once ceased to have; but let him use his own vessel in sanctification and honor, and drink from his own fountains, and not seek the shattered cisterns of harlots, which cannot hold the purest waters of chastity. Whence also the same Paul, in the same chapter, discussing virginity and marriage, calls those established in matrimony servants of the flesh: he calls free those who, without the yoke of marriage, serve the Lord with entire liberty.

What we say, we do not say universally, but treat it in part: we speak not of all, but of some. For our discourse is directed to both sexes, not only to the weaker vessel. You are a virgin; why does the company of a woman delight you? Why do you entrust a fragile, patched-up raft to great waves, and calmly board so great a peril of uncertain voyage? You do not know what you desire, and yet you join yourself to her, as though either you had desired it before, or (to put it most mildly) you will desire it afterward. But that sex, you say, is more suited for service. Choose then some deformed old woman; choose one of proven continence in the Lord. Why does a young girl, why does a beautiful one, why does a luxurious one delight you?

You use the baths, you walk with glossy skin, ruddy cheeks, you feed on meats, you overflow with riches, you are wrapped in costly garments, and do you believe you can sleep safely beside a deadly serpent?But I do not live in the same lodging with her.Only at night. But you spend whole days in conversation with her. Why do you sit alone with her alone, and not with witnesses present, so that even if you yourself do not sin, you may seem to others to sin; that you may be an example to the wretched, who may transgress under the authority of your name? You too, virgin or widow, why are you detained so long in conversation with a man? Why, being left alone with him alone, do you not fear? At least let the necessity of the bowels or bladder compel you to go outside, to leave him for that purpose, with whom you have behaved more freely than with a brother, far more immodestly than with a husband.

But you ask something about the Holy Scriptures? Ask it publicly; let your maidservants hear, let your companions hear. Everything that is made manifest is light. A good discourse does not seek secrecy, but rather delights in its own praises and in the testimony of many. An excellent master despises men, looks down on brothers, and toils in the secret instruction of a single little woman.

I have digressed a little from my discussion, on the occasion of others; and while instructing, nay also nursing, the infant Pacatula, I have suddenly taken up wars with many ill-pacified women. Let me return to my purpose. Let the female sex join itself to its own sex; let it not know, nay let it fear, to play with boys. Let it know no immodest word; and if by chance, amid the tumult of the running household, it hears something, let it not understand it. Let it hold its mother's nod as words and admonitions, and as a command. Let it love her as a parent, be subject to her as a mistress, fear her as a teacher.

But when the seventh year of age has received the rough and toothless little girl, and she begins to blush, to know what to keep silent, to hesitate what to say: let her learn the Psalter by heart, and up to the years of puberty let her make the books of Solomon, the Gospels, the Apostles, and the Prophets the treasure of her heart. Let her not go out too freely into public, nor always seek the gatherings of churches. Let her have all her delights in her own chamber. Let her never see young men, never curled-haired youths; let the sweetnesses of voices that wound the soul through the ear, and the wantonness of girls, be kept away from her. The more freely these approach, the more difficult they are to avoid; and what they have learned, they teach in secret, and violate the enclosed Danaë with the talk of the common crowd.

Let her have as companion a governess, as guardian a tutor: not given to much wine: not, as the Apostle says, idle and talkative; but sober, grave, given to wool-working, and speaking only such things as instruct a girlish mind toward virtue. For as water in a little garden bed follows the finger that precedes it, so a soft and tender age is flexible in either direction, and is drawn wherever you lead it.

Wanton and curled young men are wont, by flatteries, by affability, by little gifts, to seek entrance for themselves through nurses or foster-sisters; and when they have gently entered, to kindle fires from sparks, and gradually to advance to shamelessness: and it can by no means be prevented, that verse being well proven in such a case:You scarcely reprove what you allow to become a habit.It is shameful to say, and yet it must be said: noblewomen, who, having spurned nobler suitors, are joined to men of the vilest condition, and to little slaves; and under the name of religion, and the shadow of continence, sometimes desert their husbands, follow Alexanders as Helens, and do not fear Menelauses. These things are seen, are lamented, and are not avenged: because the multitude of sinners furnishes license to sin.

Oh the shame of it, the whole world is collapsing, and yet our sins do not collapse within us. The renowned city, the head of the Roman empire, has been swallowed up in a single conflagration. There is no region that does not have Roman exiles. Churches once sacred have crumbled into ashes and cinders, and yet we still devote ourselves to greed. We live as though we were to die on the morrow, and we build as though we were to live forever in this world. Our walls gleam with gold, our ceilings with gold, the capitals of our columns with gold, and yet Christ, naked and hungry, dies before our doors in the person of the poor man. We read that Aaron the high priest went out to meet the raging flames, and, having lit the censer, restrained the wrath of God. The great priest stood between death and life, and the fire dared advance no further than his footsteps.

God says to Moses:Let me alone, and I will destroy this people.When He sayslet me alone,He shows that He can be restrained from doing what He has threatened; for the prayers of His servant hindered the power of God. Who, do you suppose, is there now under heaven who could go out to meet the wrath of God? Who could confront the flames? And say with the Apostle,I could wish to be an anathema for my brethren? Flocks perish with their shepherds, for as is the people, so is the priest. Moses spoke out of the feeling of compassion:If Thou wilt forgive this people, forgive them; but if not, blot me out of Thy book.He is willing to perish with those who perish, and is not content with his own safety alone. For the glory of a king is the multitude of his people. It is in such times as these that our little Pacatula has been born.

Amid these rattles she begins to grasp her first years, destined to know tears before laughter, to feel weeping before joy. Scarcely has she entered, and already there is an exit. Let her always suppose the world to have been like this. Let her know nothing of the past, flee the present, and long for the future. It was your affection, brother Gaudentius, that impelled me to dictate these things in hasty speech, and, after the deaths of friends and unceasing grief, to write, as an old man returning after long absence, to an infant: I preferred to give a little rather than nothing at all to one who asked; because in the one case the will is oppressed by grief, in the other there would be a pretense of friendship.

You ask, Dardanus, noblest of Christians and most Christian of the nobility, what is the land of promise which the Jews possessed on their return from Egypt, since it had already been possessed before by their ancestors, and therefore was not promised but restored? For you use these words at the end of your letter. In asking this, you seem to hold the view that pleases many of us, that another land of promise must be sought, of which David also speaks in the psalm:I believe to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.

And the Lord in the Gospel:Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the land.Surely David, when he sang these things in the spirit, was in the land of promise, and he not only dwelt within the borders of Judea, but had become victor over many nations round about, which stretched from the torrent of Egypt, which is Rhinocorura, as far as the river Euphrates; saying in another place:Over Edom will I stretch out my shoe: to me shall foreigners be subject.How then did he believe he was receiving what he already possessed by victory?

And lest perhaps he should leave it ambiguous for Jewish readers what that land might be which he desired to see, he shows it by his own words, saying:I believe to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.Therefore the land of Judea, which was under his dominion, is not the land of the living, that is, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of whom the Lord says in the question concerning the Resurrection:God is not the God of the dead, but of the living: but rather it is the land and region of the dead, of whom Ezekiel speaks:The soul that sins, it shall die.

And:Not the dead shall praise Thee, O Lord, but we who live: who also at the resurrection shall go forth to meet the Lord the Savior, the Apostle saying:For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we who live, who remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who sleep: of whom Jeremiah also speaks:They that forsake Thee shall be written on the earth. And what David promises:I believe to see the good things of the Lord,clearly draws us toward a spiritual understanding. For what other good things could a king seek, or what could he lack, who was of such great power that his son Solomon, from the wealth acquired through him (than whom none in the whole world was richer), was content? But he sought those good things in the land of the living whicheye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath entered into the heart of man,which God has prepared for those who love Him.

But as for what is said in the Gospel:Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the land,according to the letter it seems contrary to itself. For the possession of land is not the mark of the meek and gentle, who often even lose what has been left them by their parents on account of their meekness: but rather it belongs to strong and violent men, who are most ready for wars. Indeed, in the forty-fourth psalm also, which under the name of Solomon is referred to the mystery of Christ and His Church, it is written:Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty. With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously, and reign. Because of meekness and justice and truth; and thy right hand shall lead thee wonderfully.This is He who also said in another psalm:Remember, O Lord, David, and all his meekness. And again:The Lord taking up the meek.

And more openly in the Gospel:Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart.In whose type also Moses is described as the meekest of all men who were upon the earth.

This, as we have said, is the land of the living, in which the good things of the Lord are prepared for holy and meek men: which, before the coming in the flesh of the Lord the Savior, neither Abraham, nor Isaac, nor Jacob, nor the Prophets, nor other righteous men could attain.

Indeed even Abraham, though in a different place, appears with Lazarus in the netherworld: and Jacob, a righteous man, says:Mourning and lamenting I shall go down to Hell.The blood of Christ is the key of paradise, He saying to the thief:Today thou shalt be with me in paradise.This, as we have said, is the land of the living, the land of the riches and good things of God, which the first Adam lost, and the second Adam found: indeed the latter restored what the former had lost, the Apostle saying:Death reigned from Adam unto Moses(under whose person the law is understood)after the similitude of the transgression of Adam, who is the figure of him that was to come.If we wish to know more plainly what this land is, let us read in Malachi:Blessed shall all men call you, saith the Lord: for you shall be in the land of desire,which is more significantly called in Greek θελητή, that which either the saints desire, or that which pleases God.

Isaiah also agrees with this in these words, saying:And there shall be a man who hides his words, and he shall appear in the land of Sion, as a glorious river in a thirsty land.What is the land of Sion, in which a glorious river shall appear? Namely that of which the same David sings in another psalm:Glorious things are said of thee, O city of God. And again:The Lord loveth the gates of Sion above all the tabernacles of Jacob.Does God love those gates which we see turned into ashes and cinders? I say not to the wise, but not even to fools could this be persuaded. I think also that what we read in the sixty-fourth Psalm:Thou hast visited the earth, and hast made it drunk: thou hast multiplied to enrich it. The river of God is filled with waters: thou hast prepared their food, for so is its preparation: water its furrows abundantly, multiply its fruits: in its dripping it shall rejoice as it springs forth; agrees with this sense.

For that land is daily visited by God, and made drunk, and is full of all riches. From it goes forth the river of God, of which it is written:The stream of the river maketh glad the city of God; which is also narrated in mystical speech in Ezekiel's description of the temple: on whose banks there are trees, on either side, abounding every month with new fruits. Of this land also, in the Proverbs, the wisest of men has written:He who tills his land shall be filled with bread.But if anyone should think this must be understood of the land which we see, and which is rather possessed by sinners, of which it is written:Cursed is the earth in thy works,let him answer how this saying can stand:He who tills his land shall be filled with bread.For how many till the land, and work it with the plow, and yet, hindered by many causes, are consumed with want and poverty?

But it must be considered what Scripture says:He who tills his own land,which is properly his own by right, from which he can never be cast out: according to which sense also this is written:The ransom of a man's soul is his own riches. And this cannot be understood according to the letter. For how many are ransomed with the money of strangers and friends? The tillers and farmers of this land are the Apostles, to whom it is said:You are the salt of the earth. And in another place:In your patience you shall possess your souls: one of whom, the vessel of election, spoke most confidently:For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's tillage, God's building; and many other things, which I do not repeat, lest I seem to dull the reader's understanding, and to distrust his memory.

Let us also carefully consider this in our mind, and let the authority of the Scriptures teach us, that the saints of this land, which the Jews suppose to be the land of promise, were not inhabitants but sojourners and pilgrims. From the person of a righteous man we read:I am a stranger and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.Who, when he had long dwelt in the darkness of this land, groans tearfully and says:Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged, I have dwelt with the inhabitants of Cedar, my soul has been long a sojourner.

And whereverinhabitant of the landis read—let us examine the beginning, the middle, and the end—and it can be clearly proved by the rule of the Scriptures that the inhabitants of the land are always called sinners: of whom there is this example in the Apocalypse of John:Woe to the inhabitants of the earth.Abraham, to whom the promise was first made, the Lord saying:To thee will I give this land and to thy seed,according to the speech of Stephen, the first martyr in Christ, is said not to have received even a footprint of this land. For it is written thus:Then he went out from the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Haran: and from there, after his father died, he removed into the land in which you now dwell: and He gave him no inheritance in it, no not so much as to set his foot on, yet he promised that he would give it to him in possession, and to his seed after him.

And lest perhaps the reader's silent thought should draw him to that understanding, that what was not given to the parent should be given to his descendants, the vessel of election speaks to the Hebrews:By faith he who is called Abraham obeyed to go out into a place which he was to receive for an inheritance: and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the co-heirs of the same promise: for he looked for a city having foundations, whose builder and maker is God. And again, when he had spoken of Abel and Enoch, and Noah and Sarah, he added:These all died according to faith, not having received the promises, but seeing them afar off, and saluting them, and confessing that they were pilgrims and strangers upon the earth.

For they who say these things declare plainly that they seek a country: and if indeed they had been mindful of that from which they came out, they had opportunity to have returned: but now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. And after commemorating many saints in between, he added at the end:And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise, God providing some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. For you are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, the general assembly, and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven.Nor does it escape me that the perfidy of the Jews does not accept these testimonies, which are certainly confirmed by the authority of the Old Testament.

This must be said to our own: that this epistle which is inscribed to the Hebrews is received as the Apostle Paul's, not only by the churches of the East, but by all the ecclesiastical writers of the Greek tongue of former times, although many think it to be either Barnabas's or Clement's; and that it makes no difference whose it is, since it is the work of an ecclesiastical man, and is read daily in the reading of the churches. And if the custom of the Latins does not receive it among the canonical Scriptures, neither indeed do the churches of the Greeks receive the Apocalypse of John with the same freedom; and yet we receive both, following not the custom of this present time, but the authority of ancient writers, who for the most part use the testimonies of both, not as they are sometimes wont to do with apocryphal writings—seeing that they rarely use even examples from pagan literature—but as though canonical and ecclesiastical.

Let those answer me who think that this land (which now, by the passion and resurrection of Christ, has been made for us the land of promise) was possessed by the people of the Jews, after they returned from Egypt, as to how much they possessed; certainly from Dan to Bersabee, which extends scarcely one hundred and sixty thousand paces in length. For Scripture does not testify that David and Solomon, most powerful kings, held more than this, except for those whom after victory they received into friendship. And I say this, to say nothing of the five cities of Palestine, Gaza, Ascalon, Geth, Accaron, and Azotus: the Idumeans also, scarcely seventy-five thousand paces separated from Jerusalem on the southern side; the Arabs and Agarenes, whom they now call Saracens, in the vicinity of the city of Jerusalem. I am ashamed to state the breadth of the land of promise, lest we seem to have given the heathen an occasion for blasphemy.

From Joppa to our little village of Bethlehem there are forty-six miles, to which succeeds a vast wilderness, full of fierce barbarians, of whom it is said, He shall dwell over against the face of all his brethren; and of whom the most eloquent poet makes mention. The wide-wandering Barcaei, from the town of Barca, which is situated in the wilderness; whom now, by a corruption of speech, the Africans call Baricians. These are they who, according to the character of the places, are called by different names; and from Mauritania, through Africa and Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia, Coele-Syria and Osrhoene, Mesopotamia, and Persia, they stretch toward India. This, O Judea, is the length and breadth of your lands; in these you glory, and over these you boast to those in the various provinces who know no better. Trappings for the mob—I know you, inside and under the skin.

But if you object that the land of promise, as contained in the book of Numbers, is said to extend from the south, from the Sea of Salt, through Sinai and Cades-Barne, unto the river of Egypt, which flows into the great sea near Rhinocorura; and on the west the sea itself, which stretches along Palestine, Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, and Cilicia; on the north Mount Taurus and Zephyrium as far as Emath, which is called Epiphania of Syria; and on the east, through Antioch and the lake of Cenereth, which is now called Tiberias, and the Jordan, which flows into the Sea of Salt, now called the Dead Sea; and beyond the Jordan is the possession of two and a half tribes, Reuben and Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh—I too will confess that these things were promised to you, not delivered: if you had kept the commandments of God, and had walked in his precepts; if you had not worshipped, in place of Almighty God, Beelphegor and Baalim, Beelzebub and Chamos; whom, because you preferred them to God, you have lost all that had been promised to you.

And to me in the Gospel the kingdoms of heaven are promised, which the old instrument does not name at all. But if I do not do what has been commanded, the fault will by no means lie with the one who promises, but with me, who have not merited to receive the promise. For where a choice is set before one for the choosing, he who refuses to work in vain desires what was promised. Read the book of Joshua and of Judges, and you will understand into what narrow bounds of possession you were confined.

Why should I mention the aliens of the various cities, whom the people of the Jews were not able to expel from their cities and dwellings, when your very metropolis, first Jebus, then Salem, third Jerusalem, and now Aelia, was not able to expel the Jebusites; but dwelt with them, to the scandal and example of its neighbors: so much so that your temple was founded there, where the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite had been, and the temple itself, of seventy thousand bearers and eighty thousand carriers, that is, one hundred fifty thousand, apart from the overseers of the works, was built by the heathen, because of the multitude of the uncircumcised who dwelt with you.

Nor do I say this to disparage the land of Judea, as the heretical slanderer falsely claims; nor to take away the truth of history, which is the foundation of spiritual understanding, but to shake off the arrogance of the Jews, who prefer the narrow bounds of the synagogue to the breadth of the Church. For if they follow only the western letter, and not the life-giving spirit, let them show the land of promise flowing with milk and honey. But if they think it was said by way of tropology, for the abundance of all things, then we too will prefer the land of confession and the land of the living to the land of thorns, the Lord saying to Moses concerning the rejection of Israel and the assumption of the nations, Let me alone, that I may destroy this people, and make of you a great nation. And the same Father to the Son, Ask of me, and I will give you your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.

And more openly through Isaiah, It is a small thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to gather the dregs, or remnants, of Israel. I have given you as a light to all the nations, that you may be the salvation of the whole earth. From which it is clearly shown that all the things of that people went before in shadow and type and image, but were written for us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.

Many crimes, O Jew, you have committed, you have served all the nations round about you. Because of what deed? Certainly because of idolatry. And when you had served often, God took pity on you, and sent judges and saviors, who freed you from servitude to the Moabites and Ammonites, and to the Philistines and various nations. At last, under the kings, you offended God, and your whole province, ravaged by the Babylonian nation, was destroyed. For seventy years the desolation of the temple continued. By Cyrus, king of the Persians, the captivity was relaxed. Ezra and Nehemiah relate this most plainly. The temple was rebuilt under Darius, king of the Persians and Medes, by Zerubbabel the son of Salathiel, and Jesus the son of Josedec, the high priest. What you suffered from the Medes, the Egyptians, and the Macedonians, I do not enumerate. Nor will I bring to your memory Antiochus Epiphanes, the cruelest of all tyrants, nor will I recount Gnaeus Pompeius, Gabinius, Scaurus, Varus, Cassius, and Sosius, who trampled upon your cities and especially upon Jerusalem.

At last, under Vespasian and Titus, the city was captured, and the temple overthrown. Then the remains of the city endured for fifty years, up to the emperor Hadrian. After the overthrow of the Temple, for a little less than four hundred years, the ruins of both city and temple have remained. Because of what such great crime? Certainly you do not worship idols, but even while serving the Persians and the Romans, and pressed under the yoke of captivity, you do not know foreign gods. How is it that the most merciful God, who was never once forgetful of you, is not now, after so long a stretch of time, moved by your miseries, to loosen your captivity, and, to speak more truly, to send you the Antichrist you have awaited? Because of what deed, I say, and what execrable crime has he turned his eyes away from you? Do you not know? Remember the voice of your fathers: His blood be upon us, and upon our children.

And, Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours. And, We have no king but Caesar. You have what you chose; you shall serve Caesar until the end of the world, until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, and so all Israel shall be saved, so that he who was once at the head shall be turned into the tail.

These things, most eloquent man, I have dictated to you, now that the honor of a double Prefecture has passed and you are more honored still in Christ, in a hasty and brief night's labor, lest I should seem to remain wholly silent. For at the same time, indeed on the very same day, both your letter was delivered to me and mine was requested, so that either I must be silent, or must answer with unpolished eloquence: of which the one belongs to modesty, the other to charity.

Among all the subjects which, from my youth up to this age, I have written either with my own hand or that of scribes, nothing has been more difficult than the present work. For, about to write to Demetrias, virgin of Christ, who is first in the Roman world both in nobility and in riches, if I say all things that befit her virtues, I shall be thought to flatter; if I withhold some things, lest they seem incredible, my own modesty will do damage to her praises. What then shall I do? What I cannot fulfill, I dare not refuse: so great is the authority of her grandmother and mother, women of distinction, in commanding, their trustworthiness in asking, their perseverance in extorting.

For they are not demanding of me something new and extraordinary, my talent having often been worn thin in such matters; but only that the testimony of my voice, to the best of my ability, should not be lacking in setting forth her virtues, of whom, to use the saying of the famous orator, Hope is more to be praised than achievement. Although she has surpassed her girlish years by the ardor of her faith, and has begun from the point where others usually leave off, which is the mark of perfect and consummate virtue.

Far be detraction; let envy depart. Let there be no charge of ambition in this. We who are unknown write to one unknown, at least as to bodily appearance. Otherwise the inner man is beautifully known to himself, by that knowledge by which the apostle Paul also knew the Colossians and many of the believers, whom he had not seen before. How great is my regard—nay, my wonder—for our virgin, may be estimated from this, that, occupied in the explanation of the Temple of Ezekiel, a work which, among all the holy Scriptures, is most difficult, and in that part of the shrine in which the Holy of Holies and the altar of incense are described, I preferred for a little while to use this digression, so that I might pass from altar to altar, and consecrate to eternal chastity a living victim, pleasing to God, and without any blemish.

I know that at the priest's invocation the virginal veil covered her holy head; and that celebrated apostolic word was fulfilled: But I would have you all present a chaste virgin to Christ. When the queen stood at his right hand, in a robe of gold, arrayed in diverse colors. With which many-colored garment, woven with the diversity of many virtues, Joseph too was clothed, and the daughters of kings once wore the like. Whence also the bride herself rejoices and says: The king has brought me into his chamber. And the chorus of her companions answers: All the glory of the king's daughter is within. But our discourse too will contribute some benefit. The course of horses is made swifter by favor. The courage of boxers is roused by shouting: the ranks drawn up for battle, and the drawn swords, are kindled by the speech of the commander. So too in the present work, the grandmother indeed and the mother have planted; but we shall water, and the Lord will give the increase.

It is the practice of rhetoricians to adorn the one they praise from grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and all the nobility behind, so that the fruitfulness of the root may compensate for the barrenness of the branches, and what you cannot find in the fruit, you may admire in the trunk. Doubtless now I must repeat for you the illustrious names of the Probi and the Olybrii, and the famous lineage of the Anician blood, in which there is either none, or scarcely one, who has not merited the consulship. Or I must bring forward Olybrius, the father of our virgin, whom Rome mourned, snatched away by untimely death. I fear to say more, lest I aggravate the wound of her holy mother, and the remembrance of his virtues become a renewal of grief. A dutiful son, a lovable man, a merciful lord, an affable citizen, a consul indeed in his youth, but more illustrious as a senator by the goodness of his character.

Happy in his death, who did not see his fatherland collapsing; nay, happier in his offspring, who made the nobility of Demetrias his grandmother more distinguished by the perpetual chastity of Demetrias his daughter.

But what am I doing? Forgetful of my purpose, while I admire the young man, I have praised something of worldly goods, whereas in our virgin what is rather to be praised is this, that she has despised all these things, that she has thought of herself not as noble, not as excelling in riches, but as a human being. It is an incredible strength of spirit, amid gems and silk: amid throngs of eunuchs and maidservants, and the flattery and services of a bustling household, and the exquisite feasts which the abundance of a great house afforded, that she desired the labor of fasting, the roughness of clothing, the restraint of diet. For she had read the words of the Lord saying: They who are clothed in soft garments are in the houses of kings.

She was struck with wonder at the manner of life of Elijah and John the Baptist, each of whom girded and mortified his loins with a leather belt: the one, forerunner of the Lord, is said to have come in the spirit and power of Elijah, prophesying while yet in his mother's womb, and, before the day of judgment, praised by the voice of the Judge. She marveled at the fervor of Anna the daughter of Phanuel, who served the Lord in the temple with prayers and fastings even to extreme old age. She longed for the company of the four virgin daughters of Philip, and desired to be one of those who, by virginal chastity, obtained the gift of prophecy. With these and similar thoughts she fed her mind, fearing nothing so much as offending her grandmother and mother.

Though roused by their example, she was terrified by their will and inclination: not because her holy purpose was displeasing to them, but because, on account of the greatness of the matter, they would not dare to wish and desire it for her. Christ's young recruit was aflame. She hated her adornment; and with Esther she spoke to the Lord: Thou knowest that I hate the emblem of my head (that is, the diadem which she wore as a queen), and I regard it as filth, like the rag of a menstruous woman.

Holy and noble women say—who saw her, who knew her, whom a savage tempest of enemies drove from the coast of Gaul, through Africa, to dwell in the Holy Places—that at night, in secret, known only to the virgins of God who were in the company of her mother and grandmother, she never used linen, never the softness of feathers; but had sackcloth on the bare ground for her bed, that she constantly bathed her face with tears, and, in mind prostrate at the knees of the Savior, prayed that she might recover her purpose, that she might fulfill her desire, that she might soften the mind of her grandmother and mother.

Why do I delay further? When now the day of the wedding drew near, and the bridal chamber was being prepared for the coming marriage: in secret, without witnesses, having the night for her comfort, she is said to have armed herself with such counsels. What are you doing, Demetrias? Why do you defend your chastity with such fear? There is need of freedom and boldness. You who fear thus in peace, what would you do in enduring martyrdom? You who cannot bear the countenance of your own kin, how would you endure the tribunals of persecutors? If the examples of men do not spur you on, let the blessed martyr Agnes exhort you and make you secure, who conquered both her age and the tyrant, and consecrated the title of chastity by martyrdom. Do you not know, wretched one, do you not know to whom you owe your virginity? Not long ago you trembled amid barbarian hands, covered in the bosom and mantles of your grandmother and mother.

You saw yourself a captive, and your chastity not in your own power. You shuddered at the fierce faces of enemies: you saw, with silent groaning, virgins of God carried off. Your city, once head of the world, is the sepulcher of the Roman people; and will you, in exile yourself, receive an exiled husband on the shore of Libya? What matron of honor will you have? With what escort will you be led forth? The harsh grating of the Punic tongue will sing to you shameless Fescennine verses. Break off all delays.

Perfect love of God casts out fear. Take up the shield of faith, the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, go forth to battle. Chastity preserved has its own martyrdom. Why do you fear your grandmother? Why do you dread your parent? Perhaps they themselves wish for what they do not believe you wish. Inflamed by these and many other such goads, she cast aside all bodily adornment and worldly attire, as though they were hindrances to her purpose: precious necklaces and pearls heavy with worth, and blazing gems, are returned to their caskets: she is clothed in a cheap tunic, covered with a still cheaper cloak: and, unexpected, she suddenly falls at her grandmother's knees, and shows by weeping and lamentation alone what she was. The holy and grave woman was astonished, seeing in her granddaughter an alien garb. The mother stood amazed with joy. Both were unwilling to believe true what they longed to be true. Their voice stuck in their throats, and between blushing and paling, fear and joy, varied thoughts wavered.

One must yield at this point, nor will I attempt to narrate what I would only diminish by telling. To unfold the magnitude of that incredible joy, even the river of Tullian genius would run dry, and the twisted and vibrant sentences of Demosthenes would be carried along too slowly and feebly. Whatever the mind can conceive, whatever speech can express, occurred at that time. Granddaughter, daughter, mother, and grandmother rushed rivalrously to kisses. To weep abundantly for joy, to raise up with the hand her who lay prostrate, and to embrace her though trembling. To recognize in her purpose their own mind, and to rejoice that a virgin, by her virginity, would make a noble family more noble still. To have found that she should confer upon her lineage, that she should soften the ashes of the city of Rome. Good Jesus, what exultation was there in the whole house! As from a fruitful root, many virgins sprang up at once, and the crowd of clients and maidservants followed the example of their patroness and mistress.

Throughout every household, the profession of virginity was fervent: though their condition in the flesh was unequal, the reward of chastity was one. I say too little. All the Churches throughout Africa rejoiced with a kind of dance. The famous report penetrated not only to cities, towns, and villages, but even to the huts themselves. All the islands between Africa and Italy were filled with this rumor, and joy ran on with unimpeded step even further. Then Italy exchanged her mourning garments, and the half-ruined walls of the city of Rome partly recovered their former splendor, judging God propitious to them in the perfect conversion of their nursling. One would have thought the hand of the Goths extinguished, and the rabble of deserters and slaves of the Lord thundering from above had collapsed by a thunderbolt. Not so, after Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae, in which places thousands of Roman armies were slain, did the Roman people raise themselves up, first at the battle of Marcellus near Nola.

With lesser joy did the Roman people formerly learn of the scattered ranks of the Gauls, the nobility ransomed with gold, and the seed-bed of the Roman race preserved in the citadel. This report reached the shores of the East, and even in the cities of the interior the triumph of Christian glory was heard. What virgin of Christ did not boast of fellowship with her? What mother did not proclaim your womb blessed, Juliana? Let the rewards of things to come be uncertain among unbelievers. Meanwhile, virgin, you have received more than you offered. She whom, as a bride of man, only one province would have known, as a virgin of Christ, the whole world has heard of. Wretched parents, and Christians of not fully sincere faith, are wont, because they cannot find worthy sons-in-law, to hand over to virginity daughters who are deformed and weak in some limb, since they cannot find worthy husbands. Glass, as the saying goes, is valued as highly as pearl.

Certainly those who seem to themselves more religious give a small sum, barely sufficient for sustenance, to their virgin daughters, while they bestow their whole estate upon their worldly children, of either sex. This a certain wealthy Presbyter recently did in this city, leaving two daughters in the virginal state destitute, while providing for the sons of others every abundance for luxury and delights. Many women of our profession have done this, alas; and would that the example were rare—which, the more common it is, the more fortunate are those who have not followed the example of the many.

It is reported, and celebrated with the praise of all Christians, that whatever had been prepared for the wedding was handed over by the holy comrade of Christ to the virgin, lest injury be done to the Bridegroom: rather, that she might come to the Bridegroom dowered with her former wealth, and that what would have perished among worldly things might sustain the poverty of God's household. Who would believe this?

That Proba, more illustrious in name than all dignities and all nobility in the Roman world, whose sanctity and goodness, poured out upon all, was venerable even among barbarians; whom the ordinary consulships of her three children, Probinus, Olybrius, and Probus, did not weary—now, when everything in the City had been burned and plundered in captivity, is said to be selling the possessions she still holds, and to be making for herself friends of the mammon of iniquity, who may receive her into everlasting dwellings; so that every rank of ecclesiastical ministry, and the empty names of monks, should blush to buy estates, while such nobility is selling them.

She had scarcely escaped the hands of barbarians, and had wept for virgins torn from her embrace, when suddenly she was struck by the unbearable, never-feared bereavement of her most beloved son, and, as though soon to be the grandmother of a virgin of Christ, received a death-dealing wound with hope of things to come: proving true in herself what is said in the lyric poem in praise of the just man:

If the shattered world should fall upon him,
The ruins would strike him unafraid.

We read in the book of Job: While he yet spoke, there came another messenger. And in the same book: Trial (or, as it is better rendered in the Hebrew) warfare is the life of man upon earth. For to this end we labor, and are put in peril in the warfare of this age, that we may be crowned in the age to come. Nor is it strange to believe this of men, since the Lord Himself was tempted. And of Abraham Scripture testifies that God tempted him. For which reason the Apostle also says: Rejoicing in tribulation. And, knowing that tribulation produces patience; patience, proof; proof, hope; and hope does not disappoint. And elsewhere: Who shall separate us from the love of God? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written: For thy sake we are put to death all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.

And Isaiah exhorts men of this kind, saying: You who are weaned from milk, who are drawn from the breast, expect tribulation upon tribulation, hope upon hope. The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the future glory that shall be revealed in us. Why I have repeated these things, the following discourse will show. She who from the midst of the sea had seen her fatherland smoking, and had entrusted her safety and that of her kin to a fragile boat, found the shores of Africa more cruel. For she was received by one whom you could not tell whether he was more avaricious or more cruel; to whom nothing was sweet except wine and profit; and who, under the pretext of the party of the most clement Prince, proved the most savage of all tyrants; and (to say something drawing on the fables of the poets) like Orcus in Tartarus, he had not a three-headed, but a many-headed Cerberus, to drag and tear everything apart.

This man snatched betrothed girls from their mothers' laps; sold the marriages of noble maidens to merchants and to the Syrians, the most avaricious of mortals; spared neither the poverty of orphans, nor of widows, nor of virgins of Christ, looking rather at the hands of suppliants than at their faces. This fierce Charybdis, and Scylla girded with many dogs, the matron endured while fleeing the barbarians; who neither spared shipwrecks nor were bent by captivities. Imitate, cruel one, at least the enemy of the Roman Empire. Brennus of our time took only what he found; you seek what you do not find. And rivals wonder (for virtue is always exposed to envy) why she purchased, by a silent proscription, the chastity of so many with her, when even he deigned to accept a part who could have taken all; and she did not dare refuse, as it were, a Count, since she understood herself, under the name of private rank, to be serving a tyrant.

Do I feel myself exposed to the bites of enemies, because I seem to flatter a most illustrious and most noble woman? They will not be able to accuse me, if they know that I have hitherto kept silence. For I have never praised in her the antiquity of her lineage, the greatness of her riches and power, whether her husband was living or dead—things which others perhaps have praised in mercenary speech. My purpose is to praise, in ecclesiastical style, the grandmother of my virgin, and to give thanks that she has aided her granddaughter's will with her own will. Otherwise, the monastery cell, the meager food, the despised garment, and an age now near to death, with but a brief journey's provision remaining, are free from every reproach of flattery. Finally, in the remaining parts, all my discourse shall be directed to the virgin—and a noble virgin, noble no less in sanctity than in lineage: whose ascent, the more sublime it is, the more perilous is her fall.

This one thing, daughter of God, and before all else this one thing. I shall proclaim it, and repeating it, again and again I shall admonish you, that you occupy your mind with the love of sacred reading; nor allow the sowing of tares and wild oats to be received into the good soil of your breast: lest, while the master of the household sleeps (who is nous, mind, that is, the mind, ever cleaving to God), the enemy man sow weeds in it; but say always: In the nights I sought him whom my soul loved, where you feed, where you lie down at noon? And, My soul has clung after you, your right hand has upheld me. And that saying of Jeremiah: I have not labored following you, for there is no sorrow in Jacob, nor labor in Israel.

When you were in the world, you loved the things that were of the world: to polish the face with rouge, and to paint the countenance with white lead; to adorn the hair, and to build up a towering crown with borrowed locks. To say nothing of the price of earrings, the whiteness of pearls witnessing to the depths of the Red Sea, the greenness of emeralds, the flames of the cerauniae, the sea-blue of the hyacinths, for which the zeal of matrons burns and grows mad.

But now, since you have left the world, and, in the second step after baptism, have entered into a covenant with your adversary, saying to him: I renounce you, devil, and your world, and your pomp, and your works—keep the covenant which you have pledged, and be consenting, and keeping the pact with your adversary while you are on the way of this world, lest perhaps he hand you over to the judge, and convict you of having usurped something of his own; and you be handed over to the officer, who is himself both enemy and avenger; and you be cast into prison and into outer darkness, which, the more it is separated from Christ the true light, the more it surrounds us with greater horror; and you not come out from there until you pay the last farthing, that is, every smallest fault: because we shall also render account for an idle word on the day of judgment.—

Let these things be said, not as an unlucky prophecy against you, but in the office of a fearful and cautious monitor, one who dreads even for you those things that are safe. If, it says, the spirit of one having power ascend upon you, do not leave your place. As if in battle array, and in the line of combat, we stand always ready for the fight. The enemy wishes to move us from our place, and to make us step back from our rank; but our footing must be made firm, and it must be said: He has set my feet upon a rock; And, The rock is a refuge for hares, for which many read Hedgehogs. The hedgehog is a small and timid animal, weighed down with thorny bristles.

But for this reason Jesus was crowned with thorns, and bore our sins, and grieved for us, that from the thorns and tribulations of women, to whom it is said, In anxiety and sorrow shall you bring forth children, and your turning shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you, the roses of virginity and the lilies of chastity might be born. Whence also the bridegroom feeds among the lilies, and among those who have not defiled their garments, for they have remained virgins, and have heard the precept: Let your garments always be white, and as the author and prince of virginity he speaks confidently: I am the flower of the field, and the lily of the valleys. The rock, therefore, belongs to the hares, who in persecutions flee from city to city; nor do they fear that prophetic word: Flight has perished from me.

But the high mountains belong to the deer, whose food are the serpents, which the little child draws out from the hole, when the leopard and the kid rest together; and the ox and the lion eat straw, so that the ox may in no way learn ferocity, but the lion may be taught gentleness. Let us return to the testimony proposed. If the spirit of one having power ascend upon you, do not leave your place. After which it follows: For healing makes the greatest sins to cease.

Which little verse has this meaning: If a serpent ascend into your thoughts, guard your heart with all watchfulness, and sing with David: Cleanse me, Lord, from my hidden faults, and spare your servant from those of others, and you will by no means come to the greatest sin, which is committed in deed: but you will straightway strangle in your mind the incitements to vice, and dash the little ones of Babylon against the rock; in which no traces of the serpent are found, and you shall promise the Lord cautiously: If they have not had dominion over me, then I shall be blameless, and I shall be cleansed from the greatest sin.

This is what Scripture testifies elsewhere: I will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation; that it may not immediately punish our thoughts and the mind’s resolve, but visit it upon posterity, that is, upon evil works and the persistence of sins, since through Amos he speaks: For three and for four iniquities of that man, and of that city, shall I not turn away from it?

Let it suffice to have plucked these small flowers hastily, as it were, from the most beautiful meadow of the sacred Scriptures, for your admonition; that you may both shut the chamber of your breast, and fortify your forehead with the frequent sign of the cross, lest the destroyer of Egypt find a place in you; but let the firstborn, who perish among the Egyptians, be saved in your mind, and say with the Prophet: My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready: I will sing and make melody. Awake, my glory, awake, psaltery and harp. Which even Tyre is bidden to take up, pierced with many wounds of sins; that she may do penance, and wash away the stains of her former foulness with Peter's bitter tears. But let us not be ignorant of penance, lest we sin the more readily. Let that be, as it were, a second plank for the wretched after shipwreck: let the ship be preserved intact in the virgin.

It is one thing to seek what you have lost, another to possess what you have never lost. Whence also the Apostle chastised his own body, and brought it into subjection; lest, while preaching to others, he himself be found reprobate; and, inflamed on behalf of the human race in the person of the body, he said: Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? And again: I know that there dwells not in me, that is, in my flesh, any good thing: for to will is present with me; but to perform the good, I find not. For it is not the good that I will that I do, but the evil that I will not, that I do. And again: They who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.

After the most diligent guarding against thoughts, you must take up the weapons of fasting, and sing with David: I humbled my soul with fasting. And, I have eaten ashes like bread. And, When they troubled me, I was clothed with sackcloth. Eve was cast out of paradise through food. Elijah, exercised with a fast of forty days, is carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Moses, for forty days and nights, is fed with the familiarity and speech of God; proving in himself most truly what is said: Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. The Savior of mankind, who left us an example of his virtues and manner of life, is immediately, after his baptism, taken up by the Spirit to fight against the devil, and, having crushed and broken him, hands him over to the disciples to be trodden underfoot. Whence also the Apostle says: But the God of peace shall quickly crush Satan under your feet.

And yet the ancient enemy, after a fast of forty days, contrives snares through food, and says: If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. In the Law, in the seventh month, after the sounding of the trumpets, on the tenth day of the month, there is a fast for the whole Hebrew nation; and that soul is cut off from its people which has preferred fullness to abstinence. It is written in Job concerning the dragon: His strength is in his loins, and his force is above the navel of his belly. Against the young, both men and women, in the heat of youth, our enemy takes advantage, and inflames the wheel of our birth, and fulfills that saying of Hosea: All committing adultery are like an oven in their hearts; which the mercy of God and the rigor of fasting extinguish.

These are the fiery darts of the devil, which both wound and inflame at once, and by which the three young men were prepared by the king of Babylon, who kindled a furnace of forty-nine cubits, having himself also seven weeks unto destruction, which the Lord had commanded to be observed unto salvation. But just as there the fourth, having a form like the son of man, tempered the vast heat, and taught the flames, in the midst of the burning furnace, to lose their heat, threatening one thing to the eyes while offering another to the touch, so also in the virginal soul, by heavenly dew and the rigor of fasting, the heat of girlhood is extinguished; and in the human body, the company of angels is obtained.

Wherefore the vessel of election also says, concerning virgins, that he has no commandment of the Lord, because it is against nature, nay, beyond nature, not to exercise that for which you were born: to slay in yourself your own root, and to pluck only the fruits of virginity, to know not the marriage bed, to shudder at every contact with men, and to live in the body without the body.

We do not, however, enjoin upon you immoderate fasts, and an excessive abstinence from food, by which delicate bodies are at once broken, and begin to sicken before they have laid the foundations of a holy way of life. It is also the opinion of the philosophers, μεσότης ἀρετά· ὑπερβολὰς κακίας εἶναι, which Latin speech may render thus: that virtues are moderate, and that things exceeding measure and bound are reckoned among vices. Whence also one of the seven wise men said: Nothing too much. Which became so celebrated that it was even expressed in a comic verse. Thus should you fast, that you do not throb with faintness, and can scarcely breathe, and are carried or dragged by the hands of your companions; but that, with the appetite of the body broken, you do nothing less than usual in reading, in the Psalms, or in vigils.

Fasting is not perfect virtue, but the foundation of the other virtues; and sanctification and chastity, without which no one shall see God, offer a step to those climbing to the heights, yet if it stand alone, it cannot crown a virgin. Let us read the Gospel of the wise and foolish virgins; of whom some enter the bridegroom's chamber, others, not having the oil of good works, are shut out with their lamps extinguished. Wide is the field concerning fastings, in which we too have often run, and there are proper books of many authors, to whose reading we send you, that you may learn what good continence has, and, on the other hand, what evil satiety has.

Imitate your bridegroom: be subject to your grandmother and mother. See no man, especially young men, except in their company. Know no one whom they do not know. This too is a worldly saying: To will and to reject the same things, this at last is firm friendship. That you might seek virginity, that you might know Christ's precepts, that you might know what was expedient for you, what you ought to choose, their examples have taught you: their holy manner of life at home has instructed you. Do not, therefore, think that only what is yours is your own, but also that which they, expressing their own chastity in you, and of honorable marriage and an undefiled marriage bed, have brought forth in you as your most precious flower: which will bear perfect fruits, if you humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, and remember always what is written: God resists the proud, but to the humble he gives grace.

Where there is grace, it is not the recompense of works, but the bounty of the giver; that the saying of the Apostle may be fulfilled: It is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. And yet to will and to reject is ours; and even that which is ours is not truly ours without the mercy of God.

Let the character of eunuchs, and of maidservants and menservants also, be chosen for you rather than the elegance of their faces, because in every sex and age, and even in the forced chastity of mutilated bodies, the disposition must be considered, which cannot be amputated except by the fear of Christ. Let scurrility and wantonness have no place in your presence. Never listen to a dishonorable word; or if you should hear one, let it not entice you. Men of ruined mind often, by one light word, tempt the fastenings of chastity. Leave laughing and being laughed at to worldly people. Gravity befits your character. Even Cato—I mean the Censor, and once the leading man of your city—did not, as censor, blush, nor, as an old man, despair of learning Greek letters in his last years; and Lucilius writes that Marcus Crassus laughed but once in his life.

That may have been an affected severity, seeking glory and popular applause; but as for us, as long as we dwell in the tabernacle of this body, and are surrounded by frail flesh, we can moderate and govern our affections and disturbances; we cannot cut them off entirely. Whence the Psalmist also says: Be angry, and sin not. Which the Apostle, expounding, says: Let not the sun go down upon your anger; for to be angry is human, but to put an end to anger belongs to the Christian.

I think it superfluous to admonish you against avarice, since it is characteristic of your family both to possess and to trample upon riches, and since the Apostle teaches that avarice is the worship of idols, and the Lord answers one inquiring: Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may possess eternal life? If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me. It belongs to apostolic height and to perfect virtue to sell all things and distribute to the poor, and thus, light and unencumbered, to fly upward to heavenly things with Christ. To us—nay rather to you—a careful stewardship has been entrusted, although in this matter freedom of choice has been left to every age and every person. If thou wilt, he says, be perfect.

I do not compel, I do not command, but I set forth the palm, I show the rewards: it is yours to choose, if you wish to be crowned in the contest and struggle. And let us consider how wisely Wisdom has spoken: Sell what thou hast. To whom are these things enjoined? Surely to him to whom it was said: If thou wilt be perfect. Not a part of your goods are you to sell, but all. And when you have sold, what follows? And give to the poor. Not to the rich, not to relatives, not for luxury, but for need. Whether he be a priest, or a kinsman, or a connection by marriage, consider nothing else in him but his poverty. Let the bowels of the hungry praise you, not the opulent banquets of those belching with excess.

In the Acts of the Apostles, when the blood of our Lord was still warm, and faith was fervent and fresh in believers, they sold all their possessions and brought the prices of them and laid them at the feet of the Apostles, to show that money must be trampled underfoot: and distribution was made to each, as any had need. Ananias and Sapphira, timid stewards, or rather of a double heart, and therefore condemned, because after their vow they offered as their own, and not as belonging to him to whom they had once vowed it—reserving for themselves a part of another's substance, fearing hunger, which true faith does not fear—deserved a present punishment, not by the cruelty of the sentence, but as an example of correction. Finally, the apostle Peter by no means calls down death upon them, as the foolish Porphyry slanderously charges; but announces God's judgment by a prophetic spirit, so that the punishment of two persons might be the instruction of many.

From the time when you were consecrated to perpetual virginity, your goods are not your own—nay, they are truly yours, because they have begun to be Christ's—which, while your grandmother or mother still lives, are to be disposed of at their discretion. But if they shall have died, and rested in the sleep of the Saints (for I know that this too is their wish, that they should have you as their survivor), when your age is riper, and your will more weighty, and your judgment firmer, you shall do as seems good to you—nay rather, as the Lord shall command—knowing that you shall have nothing except what you shall have spent in good works. Let others build churches, clothe walls with marble veneer, bring in masses of columns, and gild their capitals with costly, though senseless, ornament; let them adorn doors with ivory and silver, and altars gilded with jewels. I do not blame this, I do not refuse it. Let each abound in his own sense.

And it is better to do this than to brood over accumulated wealth lying idle. But for you another purpose is set: to clothe Christ in the poor, to visit him in the sick, to feed him in the hungry, to receive him in those who lack shelter, and especially among the household of the faith, to nourish monasteries of virgins, and to have care for the servants of God and the poor in spirit, who serve your Lord day and night; who, though placed on earth, imitate the conversation of angels, and speak of nothing but what pertains to the praises of God; and having food and clothing, rejoice in these riches, they who wish to have no more—if only they keep their purpose. Otherwise, if they desire more, they are shown to be unworthy even of what is necessary. These things I have said to a rich virgin, and a virgin of noble birth.

Now I will speak only to the virgin, that is, considering only what is within you, not what is outside you. Besides the order of psalms and prayer, which must always be observed by you at the Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours, at Evening, at Midnight, and in the Morning, determine how many hours you ought to devote to learning holy Scripture by heart; how much time to reading, not for labor, but for the delight and instruction of the soul. And when you have finished these intervals, and the solicitude of your soul has frequently roused you to bend the knee, always have wool in your hands, or draw out threads of warp with your thumb, or let the spindles turn in their little basins for twisting the woof-threads; and inspect the spun work of the other women, either gathering it into a ball, or arranging it for weaving. Examine what has been woven; reprove what is faulty; determine what is to be done.

If you are occupied with so great a variety of tasks, the days will never seem long to you; but however much they may be stretched out under the summer sun, they will seem short. By observing these things, you will save both yourself and others, and you will be a mistress of holy living, and you will make the chastity of many your own gain, as Scripture says: The soul of the idle is in desires. Nor should you cease from work for this reason, that by God's favor you lack nothing; rather you must labor along with everyone, so that through the occasion of work you may think of nothing else than what pertains to the service of the Lord. I will speak plainly.

Although you distribute your whole fortune to the poor, nothing will be more precious in Christ's sight than what you yourself have made with your own hands, either for your own use, or as an example to the other virgins; or what you offer to your grandmother and mother, who will receive greater rewards from it for the refreshment of the poor.

I had almost passed over what is indeed of chief importance. While you were still a little girl, and Anastasius, bishop of holy and blessed memory, was ruling the Roman church, from the regions of the East a savage storm of heretics attempted to pollute and undermine the simplicity of faith which was praised by the Apostle's voice. But that man of most abundant poverty and apostolic solicitude at once struck down the noxious head and silenced the hissing mouths of the hydra. And because I fear—nay, I have learned by report—that in certain persons poisonous seedlings still live and sprout, I think you should be forewarned, out of pious affection of charity, to hold to the faith of holy Innocent, who is the successor and son of the above-mentioned man in the apostolic chair; and not to receive foreign doctrine, however prudent and clever you may seem to yourself. For such people are wont to whisper in corners, and to seek, as it were, the justice of God.

Why was that soul born in that province? What was the reason that some are born of Christian parents, others among wild beasts and most savage nations, where there is no knowledge of God? And when they have struck simple souls with this as with a scorpion's sting, and have made a place for themselves through the fistulous wound, they spread their poisons. Do you suppose it is for nothing that a tiny infant, one who scarcely recognizes his mother by a smile and the brightness of her face—who has done nothing good, nor is seized by a demon for evil—is oppressed by jaundice, and endures what we see impious men not enduring, while those who serve God do endure it?

But if, they say, the judgments of the Lord are true, justified in themselves, and nothing is unjust with God, we are compelled by reason itself to believe that souls existed in the heavens, and on account of certain ancient sins were condemned into human bodies, and, so to speak, buried, and that we, in the valley of tears, are paying the penalties of old sins. Whence the Prophet also says: Before I was humbled, I sinned. And: Bring my soul out of prison. And: Did this man sin, that he should be born blind from the womb, or his parents? And other things of this kind. This impious and wicked doctrine was formerly current in Egypt and the regions of the East, and now, hidden away as if in the lairs of vipers, it is current among many, and pollutes the purity of those regions, and, like a hereditary evil, creeps among the few, so that it may reach the many; but I am certain that if you hear it, you will not receive it.

For you have with God teachers whose faith is the norm of doctrine. You understand what I am saying. For God will give you understanding in all things. Nor should you at once demand of me a human response against this most savage heresy, and against things much worse than these which I have mentioned, lest I seem not so much to have forbidden as merely to have advised—since the task of the present work is to instruct a virgin, not to answer heretics. But all their frauds, and the underground passages by which they strive to undermine the truth, we have overturned, with God's help, in another work; which, if you wish, we will send you promptly and gladly. For they say that unbought wares grow rank; and prices decrease with easy availability, which are always greater in scarcity.

There is generally a dispute among many, whether the solitary life, or life among many, is better; of these the former is indeed preferred to the latter; but if it is dangerous for men—lest, withdrawn from the company of men, they lie open to base and impious thoughts, and, full of arrogance and haughtiness, look down on all, and arm their tongues by detracting either clergy or other monks, of whom it is most rightly said: The children of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword—how much more is it dangerous in women, whose changeable and wavering judgment, if left to its own discretion, quickly slides into worse things? I have known in both sexes certain persons whose soundness of mind was disturbed by excessive abstinence—especially among those who dwelt in damp and cold cells—so that they did not know what to do, or which way to turn; what they ought to say, what to keep silent.

Certainly if the unlearned in secular literature read anything from the treatises of eloquent men, they learn only wordiness, without knowledge of the Scriptures; and, according to the old saying, since they do not know how to speak, they cannot keep silent; and they teach Scriptures which they do not understand; and when they have persuaded others, they assume the haughtiness of the learned—teachers of the ignorant before they are disciples of the learned. It is good, therefore, to obey one's elders, to be obedient to superiors, and, following the rules of the Scriptures, to learn the path of one's life from others; and not to employ the worst of teachers, namely, one's own presumption. Of such women the Apostle also speaks: Who are carried about by every wind of doctrine, always learning, and never arriving at the knowledge of the truth.

The company of worldly people is to be avoided.—Let the company of married women who serve their husbands and the world be avoided by you, lest your mind be troubled, and you hear what a husband has said to his wife, or a wife to her husband. Conversations of this kind are poisonous. Concerning the condemnation of such things, the Apostle, taking up a secular verse, made it Ecclesiastical: Evil communications corrupt good manners. The Latin translation, while keeping to the word from the word, has by no means preserved the metre of that iambic line. Let grave women be chosen as your companions, and especially widows and virgins, whose manner of life is approved, whose speech is measured, whose modesty is holy. Flee the wantonness of girls who adorn their heads, let their hair fall down over their foreheads, polish their skin, use cosmetics, wear tight sleeves, garments without a wrinkle, and crimped slippers—so that under the name of virgin they may sell themselves the more saleably and perish.

For the manners and pursuits of mistresses are generally judged by the manners of their maidservants and companions. Let her be beautiful to you, let her be lovable, let her be held as a companion, who does not know herself to be beautiful; who neglects the good of her form, and, going out in public, does not bare her breast and neck, nor, throwing back her mantle, uncover her neck; but who conceals her face, and enters scarcely with one eye open, as much as is necessary for the way.

What is to be fled.—I hesitate whether to speak; but whether I will or not, since it happens frequently, it must be said: not because I ought to fear these things in you, which perhaps you do not even know, nor have ever heard of; but because, by occasion of you, others must be forewarned. Let the virgin shun little curly-headed boys and crimped-haired ones, and men reeking, with their little skins, of foreign musk, of whom that saying of Arbiter holds true:He does not smell well who always smells well—let her shun these as certain plagues and poisons of chastity: to say nothing of others, whose importunate visiting both inflames itself and others; so that even if nothing wicked is committed, yet this itself is the very greatest evil, to lie open in vain to the slanders and bites of the heathen.

And I do not say this of all, but of those whom the Church herself reproves; whom she sometimes casts out; against whom now and then the censure of bishops and presbyters rages fiercely: so that it is almost more dangerous for wanton girls to go forth to places of religion than into public. Those who live in a monastery, and of whom there is a great company together, let them never go forth alone, never without their mother. From a flock of doves the hawk often singles out one, which he straightway seizes and tears, and glutted himself on her flesh and blood. Diseased sheep leave their flock, and are devoured by the jaws of wolves. I know holy virgins who, on feast days, because of the crowding of the people, keep their foot at home; nor do they go out at that time when the greater watchfulness is called for, and the public is utterly to be avoided.

About thirty years ago I published a book on the Preservation of Virginity, in which I was compelled to speak against vices, and, for the instruction of the virgin whom I was admonishing, to lay bare the snares of the devil. That discourse offended a great many, since each one, understanding in himself what was being said, did not gladly hear it as an admonisher, but shunned it as an accuser of his own doing. And yet what did it profit that an army of protesters was armed, and the wound of conscience shown by its pain? The book remains; the men have passed away. I have also written to very many virgins and widows σπουδασμάτια (little treatises of zeal), and whatever could be said has been culled in those little works: so that either the same things would be superfluously repeated by us again, or, if now omitted, would do the greatest harm.

Certainly blessed Cyprian too published an excellent volume on virginity, and many others also, both in Latin speech and in Greek; and in the letters and tongues of all nations, especially in the Churches, the ἁγνὴ (chaste) life has been praised. But let this apply to those who have not yet chosen virginity, and need exhortation, that they may know of what sort is that which they ought to choose. For us, what has been chosen must be kept, and we must walk as it were among scorpions and serpents, with loins girded, feet shod, and staff grasped in hand, making our way through the snares of this age and amid its poisons; that we may be able to reach the sweet waters of Jordan, and enter the land of promise, and go up to the house of God, and say with the prophet:Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house, and the place where Thy glory dwelleth.

And that other:One thing have I asked of the Lord, this will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.Happy that conscience, and blessed that virginity, in whose heart, besides the love of Christ, who is wisdom, chastity, patience, and justice, and the other virtues, no other love dwells; who neither sighs at any time in remembrance of a man, nor desires to see one whom, having seen, she would be unwilling to let go. The holy purpose of virgins, and the glory of the heavenly family of the Angels, is defamed by the name of certain ones who do not conduct themselves well. To such it must be plainly said, that either they should marry, if they cannot contain themselves, or contain themselves, if they do not wish to marry.

It is a thing worthy of laughter, nay rather of lamentation, that as the masters go forth, the maidservant virgin walks abroad more adorned, so that, through excessive habit, whomever you see unkempt, you suspect to be the mistress. Some seek out separate lodgings without witnesses, that they may live more licentiously: that they may use the baths, and do what they will, and avoid the consciences of very many. These things we see and endure, and if a golden coin should gleam, we reckon it among good works.

I join the end to the beginning: nor am I content to have admonished but once. Love the holy Scriptures, and wisdom will love you; cherish her, and she will keep you; honor her, and she will embrace you. Let these be as jewels clinging to your breast and to your ears. Let your tongue know nothing else but Christ. Let it be able to utter nothing but what is holy. Let the sweetness of your grandmother's and your mother's speech ever dwell upon your lips: the imitation of whom is the very form of virtue.