Letters 51 to 60: On the Clergy, Scripture, and Widowhood

Thou askest of me, dearest Nepotian, by letters from across the sea, and thou askest often, that I compose for thee in a short volume precepts for living, and by what method he who, having left the warfare of the world, has begun to be either a Monk or a Cleric, may keep the straight path of Christ, lest he be swept off into the various byways of vices. When I was a young man, indeed almost a boy, and was restraining, by the harshness of the desert, the first onsets of a wanton age, I wrote to thy uncle, the holy Heliodorus, an exhortatory Epistle, full of tears and complaints, and such as would show the affection of a deserted companion. But in that work I trifled somewhat, in keeping with that age, and being still fired with the studies and teachings of the Rhetoricians, I painted certain things with a scholastic flourish. Now, however, with hair grown grey, and a brow furrowed with wrinkles, and with dewlaps hanging from the chin like an ox's,

The cold blood resists round about my heart

Wherefore also in another place the same Poet sings: Age bears away all things, even the mind. And a little after: Now so many songs have slipped from my memory, and even my voice now itself flees me, Moeris.

2. But lest we should seem to produce examples only from Gentile literature, learn the mysteries of the sacred volumes. David, seventy years of age, once a man of war, growing cold with old age, could not be warmed. And so a maiden was sought from all the borders of Israel, Abishag the Shunammite, who might sleep with the king, and warm his aged body. Does it not seem to thee, if thou follow the letter that killeth, either a fiction from a mime, or the sport of Atellan farces? A cold old man is wrapped in garments, and does not grow warm except by the embrace of a young girl. Bathsheba was still living, Abigail survived, and the rest of his wives and concubines, whom Scripture records.

All are, as it were, rejected as cold, and the old man grows warm only in the embraces of one young girl. Abraham was much older than David, and yet, while Sarah lived, he sought no other wife. Isaac had twice the years of David; and, though Rebecca was already an old woman, he never grew cold. I say nothing of the men before the Flood, who after nine hundred years, I will not say of aged, but of limbs already almost decayed, by no means sought the embraces of maidens. Certainly Moses, leader of the people of Israel, was a hundred and twenty years old, and did not exchange Zipporah for another.

3. Who then is this Shunammite, wife and virgin, so fervent that she warmed the cold man, so holy that she did not provoke the warmed man to lust? Let most wise Solomon set forth the delights of his father, and let the peaceful man tell the embraces of the warrior. « Possess wisdom, possess understanding. Forget not, and decline not from the words of my mouth.

Neither forsake her, and she shall keep thee: love her, and she shall preserve thee. The beginning of wisdom, possess wisdom, and with all thy possession possess understanding: embrace her, and she shall exalt thee: honor her, and she shall embrace thee; that she may give to thy head a crown of graces. A crown of delights also shall protect thee ». Almost all bodily powers are changed in old men, and while wisdom alone increases, the rest decrease: fastings, vigils, and almsgivings, lying on the bare ground, running hither and thither, receiving strangers, defense of the poor, persistence in prayers, perseverance, visiting the sick, labor of the hands, whereby alms may be provided—and, not to draw out my discourse too long, all things that are exercised through the body become less as the body is broken.

Nor do I say this because wisdom, which in most old men withers with age, grows cold in the young and those still of firmer age, at least in those who by labor and most ardent zeal, and by holiness of life too, and by frequency of prayer to the Lord Jesus, have attained knowledge: but because youth sustains many wars of the body, and amid the incitements of vices and the ticklings of the flesh is, as it were, suffocated like fire in green wood, and cannot unfold its own brightness. But the old age of those who have trained their youth in honest arts, and have meditated in the law of the Lord day and night, becomes with age more learned, more polished by use, wiser as time proceeds, and reaps the sweetest fruits of former studies.

Whence also that wise man of Greece, Themistocles, when, having completed one hundred and seven years, he saw that he was dying, is said to have declared that he grieved that he was departing from life just when he had begun to grow wise. Plato, writing in his eighty-first year, died. And Isocrates completed ninety-nine years in the labor of teaching and writing. I say nothing of the other philosophers, Pythagoras, Democritus, Xenocrates, Zeno, and Cleanthes, who flourished in the pursuits of wisdom already at an advanced age. I come to the poets, Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Stesichorus, who, being of great age, sang, as death drew near, something swan-like and sweeter than usual. Sophocles, when because of excessive old age and neglect of his family estate he was accused by his sons of madness, recited to the judges the play of Oedipus which he had recently written; and gave such a proof of wisdom even in a body already broken by age, that he turned the severity of the tribunal into the favor of the theater.

Nor is it strange, since even Cato the Censor, most eloquent of the Roman race, though already an old man, was not ashamed nor did he despair of learning Greek letters. Certainly Homer relates that from the tongue of Nestor, now aged and almost decrepit, discourse flowed sweeter than honey. But even the very name Abishag by its mystery indicates the greater wisdom of old men. For it is interpreted, "my father is superfluous," or "the roaring of my father." The word "superfluous" is ambiguous; but in the present passage it signifies virtue, because wisdom is ampler in old men, and overflowing and abundant. In another place, however, "superfluous" is set down as meaning "not necessary." Abishag, that is, "roaring," is properly so named when the surge of the sea resounds, and, so to speak, a roar coming from the deep is heard. By this it is shown that a most abundant thunder of divine speech, beyond human voice, dwells in old men.

Furthermore, Shunammite in our tongue is called "scarlet," to signify that wisdom is warm and glows with divine reading: which, although it points to the mystery of the Lord's blood, nevertheless also shows the fervor of wisdom. Whence also that midwife in Genesis binds a scarlet thread on the hand of Perez, who, from the fact that he had divided the wall separating the two peoples before him, obtained the name of "divider," that is, Perez. And Rahab the harlot, as a type of the Church, hung out a scarlet cord, containing the mystery of the blood, so that when Jericho perished her house might be saved. Whence also in another place Scripture recalls concerning holy men: These are they who came from the heat of the house of the father Rechab. And our Lord in the Gospel says: I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish that it were kindled.

He, kindled in the hearts of the disciples, compelled them to say: « Was not our heart burning within us, while he spoke to us on the way, and opened to us the Scriptures? ». To what end has this been repeated with so long a beginning? That you should not seek from me childish declamations, little flowers of sentences, allurements of words, and, at the ends of individual chapters, certain sharp and briefly concluded points which stir up the applause and shouts of hearers. Let wisdom now embrace me, and let our Abishag, who never grows old, rest in my bosom. For she is undefiled, of perpetual virginity, and, like Mary, though she daily brings forth and is ever in labor, is incorrupt. Hence I think the Apostle also said, "fervent in spirit". And in the Gospel the Lord foretold that at the end of the world, when, according to the prophet Zechariah, the foolish shepherd shall have begun to be, wisdom decreasing, the charity of many shall grow cold.

Hear then, as blessed Cyprian says, not eloquent words, but strong ones. Hear a brother in fellowship, a father in age, who from the cradle of the faith may lead you to perfect maturity, and, establishing precepts through each stage of living, may instruct others in you. I know indeed that from your uncle, blessed Heliodorus, who is now a bishop of Christ, you have learned, and daily learn, the things that are holy: and that you have the norm of his life as an example of virtues. But take also these words of mine, such as they are, and join this little book to his, so that as he has trained you to be a monk, this may teach you to be a perfect cleric. 5. Therefore let the cleric who serves the Church of Christ first interpret his own name, and, once the definition of the name has been set forth, let him strive to be what he is called.

For if κλῆρος in Greek is called "sors" (lot) in Latin: therefore they are called clerics, either because they are of the Lord's lot, or because the Lord Himself is the lot, that is, the portion, of clerics. But whoever either is himself a portion of the Lord, or has the Lord as his portion, ought to show himself such that he both possesses the Lord and is possessed by the Lord. He who possesses the Lord, and says with the prophet, "The Lord is my portion", can have nothing outside the Lord. But if he shall have anything else besides the Lord, the Lord will not be his portion. For example: if gold, if silver, if possessions, if various furnishings: with these portions, the Lord will not deign to become his portion.

But if I am a portion of the Lord, and the cord of his inheritance: I do not receive a portion among the other tribes, but, like a Levite and priest, I live on tithes, and, serving the altar, am sustained by the offering of the altar, having food and clothing, I shall be content with these, and, naked, shall follow the naked cross. I beseech you therefore, and repeating it, I will warn you again and again, that you not think the office of the clerical order a kind of ancient warfare: that is, that you seek not worldly gain in the warfare of Christ: that you have no more than when you began to be a cleric: and that it not be said of you, "Their clergy shall not profit them". Let the poor and strangers know your table, and with them Christ as guest. Flee as a kind of plague the cleric who is a trader, who from poor becomes rich, from ignoble becomes glorious. Evil communications corrupt good manners.

You despise gold, another loves it: you tread wealth underfoot, he pursues it: silence is dear to your heart, gentleness, and privacy; to him wordiness, a hardened brow, the markets and the streets, and the shops of physicians are pleasing. In so great a discord of morals, what concord can there be? Let the feet of women wear the path to your little lodging rarely, or never. All girls and virgins of Christ, either be equally unacquainted with them, or love them equally. Do not dwell under the same roof: nor trust in past chastity. You cannot be holier than David, nor wiser than Solomon. Remember always, that woman cast the tiller of paradise out of his possession. Let some holy brother attend you when sick, and a sister, or mother, or any woman of tried faith among all. But if there are no persons of such kinship and chastity, the Church nourishes many old women, who may both render service and receive benefit by ministering, so that even your infirmity may have the fruit of almsgiving.

I know that some have recovered in body, and begun to be sick in soul. It is dangerous for you to be ministered to by one whose face you frequently regard. If, on account of the office of the clerical order, either a widow or a virgin is visited by you, never enter the house alone. Have as companions such as by whose company you will not be defamed. If a lector, if an acolyte, if a psalmist follows you, let them be adorned not with dress, but with manners: let them not curl their hair with a curling-iron; but let them promise modesty by their bearing. Do not sit alone with a woman alone, in secret, and without a witness or overseer. If something more familiar must be spoken, she has the elder nurse of the household, a virgin, a widow, or a married woman: she is not so inhuman as to have none but you to whom she dares entrust herself.

Beware of all suspicions, and whatever can plausibly be feigned, take care beforehand that it not be feigned. Frequent little gifts, and little handkerchiefs, and little bands, and garments applied to the mouth, and foods offered and tasted, and flattering and sweet little letters, holy love does not have. "My honey, my desire": all these delights and charming pleasantries, and laughable urbanities, and other follies of lovers, we blush at in comedies, we detest in men of the world: how much more in monks and clerics, whose priesthood is adorned by their profession, and whose profession is adorned by their priesthood? Nor do I say this because I fear these things either in you or in holy men; but because in every calling, in every rank and sex, both good and bad are found: and let the condemnation of the bad be the praise of the good.

6. It is shameful to say, priests of idols, mimes, and charioteers, and harlots, may receive inheritances: only to clerics and monks is this forbidden by law: and it is forbidden not by persecutors, but by Christian princes. Nor do I complain of the law; but I grieve that we have deserved this law. Cauterization is good, but why should I have a wound, that I should need cauterization? The provident and severe caution of the law—and yet even so avarice is not restrained. By trusts we mock the laws; and as though the decrees of emperors were greater than those of Christ, we fear the laws, we despise the Gospels. Let her be heir—but the mother of the children, that is, the Church, of her own flock, which bore them, nursed and fed them. Why do we insert ourselves between the mother and her children? It is the glory of a bishop to provide for the want of the poor. It is the disgrace of all priests to be zealous for their own riches.

Born in a poor house, and in a rustic hut, I who could scarcely satisfy my growling belly with millet and coarse bread, now disdain fine flour and honey. I know both the kinds and the names of fish, I am skilled in knowing on what shore a shell was gathered: I distinguish provinces by the flavors of birds; and the very rarity of costly foods, and even their utter waste, delight me. I hear besides of a certain shameful servitude of some toward old men and childless old women. They themselves set the chamber-pot, they beset the bed, they receive with their own hand the discharge of the stomach and the phlegm of the lungs. They tremble at the entrance of the physician, and with trembling lips ask whether he is better; and if the old man is a little more lively, they are in peril: and with feigned joy, their greedy mind is inwardly tormented. For they fear lest they lose their ministry: and they compare the long-lived old man to the years of Methuselah.

Oh, how great would be the reward with God, if they did not hope for a reward in the present! With what great toil is a barren inheritance sought! With less labor the pearl of Christ could have been bought. 7. Read the divine Scriptures very often; nay, let not sacred reading ever be laid from your hands. Learn what you may teach: hold fast the faithful word that is according to doctrine, that you may be able to exhort in sound doctrine, and to confute those who contradict. Continue in the things which you have learned, and which have been entrusted to you; knowing from whom you learned them: always ready to give satisfaction to every one who asks you a reason concerning the hope and faith that is in you. Let not your works confound your speech: lest when you speak in the Church, someone silently answer, Why then do you not yourself do the things which you say? It is a dainty teacher who, with a full belly, disputes about fasting. Even a robber can accuse avarice.

Let the mouth, mind, and hand of the priest of Christ agree together. Be subject to your Bishop, and receive him as a father of your soul. To love belongs to sons, to fear belongs to servants. "If I be a father," he says, "where is my honor? If I be a Lord, where is my fear?" There are more names for you to observe in the same man: Monk, Bishop, your uncle, who has already taught you in all things that are holy. This too I say, that bishops should know themselves to be priests, not lords: let them honor clergy as clergy, that honor may in turn be paid to them by the clergy as to bishops. That saying of the orator Domitius is apt: Why, he says, should I regard you as a leading man, when you do not regard me as a Senator? Let us know that what Aaron and his sons were, the Bishop and Presbyters are: One Lord, one temple, let there also be one ministry.

Let us always remember what the Apostle Peter enjoins upon priests: "Feed the flock of the Lord which is among you; taking the oversight not by constraint, but willingly according to God; not for filthy lucre, but voluntarily; not as being lords over the clergy, but made a pattern to the flock from the heart: that when the chief Shepherd shall appear, you may receive a crown of glory that fades not away". It is the custom of the worst sort in certain churches, that the Presbyters keep silence, and do not speak in the presence of the Bishops, as though either they envied them, or did not deign to listen. "And if," says the Apostle Paul, "anything be revealed to another that sits by, let the first hold his peace. For you may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted: and the spirit of the prophets is subject to the prophets. For God is not the God of dissension, but of peace". "The glory of a father is a wise son".

Let the Bishop rejoice in his own judgment, when he has chosen such priests for Christ. 8. When you teach in the Church, let not the clamor of the people be raised, but their groaning. Let the tears of your hearers be your praises. Let the speech of the Presbyter be seasoned with the reading of the Scriptures. I would not have you be a declaimer and a wrangler and a babbler without reason, but skilled in the mysteries, and most learned in the sacraments of your God. To roll forth words, and by swiftness of speech to win admiration of oneself among the unlearned crowd, is the mark of unlearned men. A brazen forehead often interprets what it does not know: and when it has persuaded others, it claims knowledge for itself as well.

My former teacher Gregory of Nazianzus, when asked by me to explain what he meant in Luke by the Sabbath called δευτερόπρωτον, that is, second-first, jested elegantly, saying: I will teach you about this matter in the Church: where, with all the people applauding me, you will be compelled, against your will, to know what you do not know. Or certainly, if you alone remain silent, you alone, of all men, will be condemned for folly. Nothing is so easy as to deceive a cheap and unlearned crowd with fluency of tongue, which admires most whatever it does not understand. Marcus Tullius (of whom that most beautiful eulogy is spoken: "Demosthenes snatched from you the honor of being first among Orators": you from him, the honor of being sole)—in his oration for Quintus Gallius, attend to what he says about popular favor, and about unskilled orators, lest you be twice deceived by frauds. For I speak of what I myself have lately experienced.

A certain man, called a poet, highly literate, whose are those dialogues of poets and philosophers, in which he makes Euripides and Menander converse together, and in another place Socrates and Epicurus discoursing, whose ages we know to be separated not by years but by centuries—what applause and shouting does he stir up? For he has many fellow-students in the theater, who likewise never learned their letters. 9. Avoid dark garments equally as white ones. Adornment and squalor are alike to be shunned in the same measure, because the one smells of luxury, the other of vainglory. Not to go without a linen garment, but to have no care for the price of linen garments, is praiseworthy. Otherwise it is ridiculous and full of disgrace, to boast, with a well-filled purse, that you have no kerchief or napkin. There are those who give a little to the poor, that they may receive more; and under the pretext of almsgiving they seek riches, which ought rather to be called hunting than a kind of almsgiving.

So beasts, so birds, so fish are caught. A little bait is placed on the hook, that the purses of matrons may thereby be drawn out. Let the Bishop, to whom the Church has been entrusted, know whom he sets in charge of the dispensation and care of the poor. It is better not to have what to give, than shamelessly to beg what you may hoard up. But it is also a kind of arrogance to wish to seem more merciful than the Bishop of Christ himself is. We cannot all do all things. One is the eye in the Church, another the tongue, another the hand, another the foot, the ear, the belly, and the rest. Read Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians: how diverse members make up one body. Yet let not the rustic and simple brother, therefore, think himself holy merely because he knows nothing; nor let the skilled and eloquent man reckon holiness by his tongue. It is much better, of two imperfect things, to have holy rusticity than sinful eloquence.

10. Many build walls, and set up the columns of the church: the marbles gleam, the ceilings shine with gold, the altar is set with jewels, and yet there is no choice made in the ministers of Christ. And let no one oppose to me the rich Temple in Judea, its table, lamps, censers, dishes, cups, small mortars, and the rest wrought of gold. These things were then approved by the Lord, when the priests offered up sacrifices, and the blood of cattle was the redemption of sins. Although all these things went before as a figure: "Now these things were written for our sakes, upon whom the ends of the ages are come". But now, since the poor Lord has dedicated the poverty of His own house, let us think on His cross, and we shall reckon riches as mud. Why do we marvel that Christ calls unjust wealth "mammon"? Why do we look up to and love that which Peter gloriously testifies he does not have?

Otherwise, if we follow only the letter, and the simple history of gold and riches delights us, let us observe the rest along with the gold as well. Let the priests of Christ take virgin wives; although he be of good mind who has a scar, yet, being disfigured, let him be deprived of the priesthood: let leprosy of the body be preferred to vices of the soul. Let us grow and multiply, and fill the earth: and let us not sacrifice the lamb, nor celebrate the mystic Passover, since these things are forbidden by the law to be done apart from the Temple. Let us pitch the tabernacle in the seventh month, and sound the trumpet for the solemn fast.

But if, comparing all these spiritual things with spiritual things, and knowing with Paul that the law is spiritual, and the words of David singing: "Open my eyes, and I shall behold wondrous things out of Your law", we thus understand them, as our Lord also understood and interpreted the Sabbath: either let us repudiate gold along with the rest of the superstitions of the Jews; or, if gold pleases us, let the Jews also please us, whom, along with their gold, we must either approve or condemn. 11. You must avoid the banquets of worldly men, and especially of those who are puffed up with honors. It is shameful that before the doors of a priest of Christ crucified and poor, who himself also lived on another's food, the lictors of consuls and soldiers should keep watch, and that the judge of the province should dine better at your house than in his own palace.

But if you plead that you do this in order to intercede for the wretched and the subject, The judge of the world will show more deference to a continent clergyman than to a rich one: and will venerate your holiness more than your wealth. Or if he is such a one as will not hear the clergy on behalf of any afflicted persons except amid the wine-cups, I will gladly go without a kindness of that sort; and I will ask Christ instead of the judge, who is able to help more, and more quickly, than the judge: "For it is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in man. It is better to hope in the Lord, than to hope in princes". Never let your breath smell of wine, lest you hear that saying of the Philosopher: This is not to offer a kiss, but to proffer wine. The Apostle condemns wine-drinking priests, and the old law forbids it. Let those who serve the altar drink no wine nor strong drink.

In the Hebrew tongue, "strong drink" designates every drink that can intoxicate; whether that which is made from grain, or from the juice of fruits, or when honeycombs are boiled down into a sweet and barbarous drink, or the fruit of palms is pressed into a liquor, and, the grain having been cooked, water is colored and made thicker. Whatever intoxicates, and overturns the state of the mind, flee likewise as you would wine. Nor do I say this so that the creature of God be condemned by us (since indeed the Lord Himself was called a drinker of wine; and to Timothy, suffering in his stomach, a modest sip of wine was permitted); but we require moderation in drinking, according to age, health, and bodily constitution. But if, without wine, I burn with the fire of youth, and am inflamed with the heat of blood, and am of a vigorous and full-blooded body, I will gladly do without the cup, in which there is suspicion of poison.

It is well said among the Greeks, and I know not whether it sounds equally well among us: A fat belly does not breed a fine mind. 12. Set for yourself only such a measure of fasting as you can bear. Let your fasts be pure, chaste, simple, moderate, and not superstitious. What does it profit not to eat oil, and yet to seek out certain troublesome and difficult foods—dried figs, pepper, nuts, dates, fine flour, honey, pistachios? The whole cultivation of gardens is put to trouble, that we may not eat common bread; and while we pursue delicacies, we are drawn back from the kingdom of heaven. I hear, moreover, that certain persons, contrary to the nature of things and of men, drink no water, nor eat bread; but sip dainty little broths and mashed vegetables, and the juice of beets, not from a cup, but from a shell. For shame, we do not blush at follies of this sort; nor are we weary of such superstition! And besides, we seek even the fame of abstinence amid delicacies.

The strongest fasting is on bread and water. But because it has no glory, and we all live on bread and water, it is reckoned as no fast at all, being, as it were, common and public. 13. Beware lest you go hunting for men's little rumors of praise; lest you exchange the praise of peoples for offense against God. "If I yet," says the Apostle, "pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ". He ceased to please men, and became the servant of Christ. Through good report and evil, on the right hand and on the left, the soldier of Christ marches on: neither is he lifted up by praise, nor broken by reproach: he is not puffed up by riches, nor shrunk by poverty; and he despises alike joyous and sorrowful things. By day the sun does not burn him, nor the moon by night. I would not have you pray in the corners of the streets, lest the breeze of popular favor break the straight path of your prayers.

I would not have you widen your fringes, and make a show of your phylacteries, and, your conscience resisting, be surrounded with Pharisaic ambition. How much better it would be to bear these things not in the body, but in the heart; and to have God as one's patron, not the gaze of men? On this hangs the Gospel; on this the Law and the Prophets; that is, the sacred and Apostolic doctrine. "For it is better to carry all these things in the mind, than in the body." Faithful reader, you understand with me what I leave unsaid, and what, by my very silence, I say the more. Let so many rules run through as there are kinds of glory. Do you wish to know what adornments the Lord seeks? Have prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude. Be enclosed within these regions of heaven; let this fourfold team, as it were, carry you, the charioteer of Christ, swiftly to the goal. Nothing is more precious than this jewel, nothing more distinguished than this variety of gems.

You are adorned, girded, and protected on every side, and these serve you both as ornament and as protection, the gems being turned into shields. 14. Beware also lest you have either an itching tongue or itching ears, that is, lest you either yourself slander others, or listen to others slandering. "Sitting," he says, "you spoke against your brother, and against your mother's son you set a stumbling-block: these things you did, and I kept silence. You thought unjustly that I should be like unto you: I will reprove you, and set your case before your face". Spare from slander of the tongue, guard your speech, and know that by everything you say concerning others you are judged by your own sentence, and you yourself are caught in the very things you were accusing in others. "Nor indeed is that a just excuse, 'When others repeat it to me, I cannot but do injury.'" No one gladly repeats a thing to an unwilling hearer.

An arrow is never fixed in stone; sometimes rebounding it strikes the one who aimed it. Let the slanderer learn, when he sees that you do not gladly listen, not to slander easily: "With slanderers," says Solomon, "do not mingle, for their destruction will come suddenly, and who knows the ruin of both?"—namely, of him who slanders, as well as of him who lends his ear to the slanderer. 15. It is your duty to visit the sick, to know the houses of matrons and their children, and to guard the secrets of noble men. Let it be your duty not only to keep your eyes chaste, but also your tongue. Never discuss the looks of women, nor let one household learn through you what is being done in another. Hippocrates makes his disciples swear an oath before he teaches them, and compels them to bind themselves by an oath to his words: by sacrament he extracts silence, and he prescribes their speech, gait, dress, and manners.

How much more ought we, to whom the medicine of souls has been entrusted, to love the houses of all Christians as our own? Let them know us rather as comforters in their sorrows than as guests at their feasts. A clergyman is easily held in contempt who, often invited to dinner, does not refuse to go. Let us never seek, and rarely accept when asked. For it is more blessed to give than to receive. For I know not how it is, but even the one who begs you to accept something, once you have accepted it, judges you the more worthless; and, strange to say, if you have scorned him when he asked, he afterwards reveres you the more. Let no preacher of continence arrange marriages. He who reads the Apostle saying, "It remains that they who have wives be as though they had none"—why does he compel a virgin to marry? He who is a priest of monogamy—why does he urge a widow to become twice-married?

How can stewards and managers of other men's households and estates be clergymen, who are commanded to despise their own possessions? To snatch anything from a friend is theft; to defraud the Church is sacrilege. To have received what should be distributed to the poor and to the many who hunger, and then to wish to be cautious or timid about it, or—what is most manifest crime—to withhold something from it, surpasses the cruelty of all robbers. I am tormented by hunger, and do you judge how much is enough for my belly? Either distribute at once what you have received, or, if you are a timid steward, let the donor go and distribute his own goods himself. I do not want your purse to be filled under pretext of me. No one can keep what is mine better than I. The best steward is he who reserves nothing for himself.

17. You have compelled me, dearest Nepotian, though my little book on Virginity, which I had written at Rome for the holy Eustochium, has already been stoned, to open my mouth again after ten years from Bethlehem, and to hand myself over to be pierced by everyone's tongues. For either nothing ought to have been written, so that we might not undergo men's judgment—which you have forbidden me to do—or, if we write, we must know that the darts of all slanderers are to be hurled against us. I beg them to be quiet and cease from cursing; for I have written not as to adversaries, but as to friends; nor have I inveighed against those who sin, but have warned them lest they sin. Nor have I been a severe judge of them alone, but of myself as well; and wishing to remove the mote from another's eye, I first cast out my own beam. I have injured no one; no one's name has even been indicated by description.

My speech has assailed no one specifically. It is a general discussion concerning vices. Whoever wishes to be angry with me will first confess of himself that he is such a one as I describe.

Brother Ambrose, bringing me your little gifts, also delivered your most sweet letter, which from the very beginning of our friendship showed the good faith of an already proven trust and old friendship. For that is true intimacy, and joined by the glue of Christ, which is fostered not by advantage of worldly property, not merely by bodily presence, not by crafty and flattering adulation, but by the fear of God and the study of the divine Scriptures. We read in ancient histories that some men traversed provinces, approached new peoples, crossed seas, in order to see with their own eyes those whom they had come to know through books.

So Pythagoras visited the seers of Memphis; so Plato most laboriously traveled through Egypt and to Archytas of Tarentum, and that region of Italy which was once called Magna Graecia; so that he who was a teacher and a man of power at Athens, whose doctrine the halls of the Academy resounded with, became a stranger and a disciple, preferring to learn foreign things with modesty rather than to thrust forth his own with impudence. In short, while he was pursuing learning as though it were fleeing throughout the whole world, he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery, and even obeyed a most cruel tyrant (Dionysius of Sicily), as a captive, in chains, and a slave; yet because he was a philosopher, he was greater than the one who bought him.

We read that certain nobles came from the farthest bounds of Spain (from Gades) and of the Gauls to see Titus Livius, flowing with the milk-white fountain of eloquence; and that those whom Rome had not drawn to look upon herself, the fame of one man had brought thither. That age had a miracle unheard of in all ages and worthy to be celebrated for ever, that men who had entered so great a city should seek something else outside the city.

Apollonius (whether he was a magician, as the common people say, or a philosopher, as the Pythagoreans hold) entered Persia, crossed the Caucasus, passed through the Albanians, the Scythians, the Massagetae, penetrated the richest kingdoms of India; and at last, having crossed the very broad river Physon (the Ganges), came to the Brahmans, so that he might hear Hiarchas, sitting on a golden throne and drinking from the fountain of Tantalus, teaching a few disciples about nature, about motions, and the course of the stars; thence, having passed back through the Elamites, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Medes, Assyrians, Parthians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Arabs, Palestinians, he returned to Alexandria, and proceeded to Ethiopia, to see the Gymnosophists, and the most famous Table of the Sun in the sand. That man found everywhere something to learn; and always progressing, he always became better than himself. Philostratus has written most fully on this in eight volumes.

2. Why should I speak of men of this world?—when the Apostle Paul, the chosen vessel and teacher of the Gentiles, who spoke of the consciousness of so great a guest within him—"Or do you seek a proof of Christ who speaks in me?"—after traversing Damascus and Arabia, went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and stayed with him fifteen days. For by this mystery of the week and the eighth day, the future preacher to the Gentiles had to be instructed. And again, after fourteen years, taking Barnabas and Titus with him, he set forth the Gospel to the apostles, lest perhaps he should run, or should have run, in vain. The living voice has, I know not what, of hidden power; and, poured from the speaker's own mouth into the disciple's ears, it resounds more forcefully.

Whence also Aeschines, when he was in exile at Rhodes, and that Oration of Demosthenes was being read which he had delivered against him, while all admired and praised it, sighed and said: "What if you had heard the very beast himself, sounding forth his own words?"

3. I do not say this because there is in me anything of the sort that you either could or would wish to learn; but because your zeal and eagerness for learning ought to be proven of itself, even without us. A teachable mind is praiseworthy even without a teacher. We consider not what one finds, but what one seeks. Soft wax, easy to be shaped, even if the hands of the craftsman and the modeler are absent, is nevertheless in potentiality (τῇ δυνάμει) wholly whatever it can become.

The Apostle Paul boasts that he learned the Law of Moses and the Prophets at the feet of Gamaliel, so that, armed with spiritual weapons, he might afterward say with confidence: "The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience". He writes to Timothy that from infancy he had been instructed in the sacred letters; and he exhorts him to the study of reading, lest he neglect the grace which was given him through the laying on of hands of the presbytery. He commands Titus that, among the other virtues of a bishop, which he sketched in a brief discourse, he should also choose knowledge of the Scriptures: "Holding fast," he says, "the faithful word as he has been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers".

Holy rusticity indeed profits only itself; and as much as it builds up the Church of Christ by the merit of its life, so much does it harm if it does not resist those who destroy. The prophet Haggai, or rather the Lord through Haggai, says: "Ask the priests concerning the Law".

So much is it the office of the priest to answer when asked concerning the Law. And in Deuteronomy we read: "Ask your father, and he will declare to you; your elders, and they will tell you". Also in Psalm: "Your justifications were my song in the place of my pilgrimage". And in the description of the just man, when David compared him to the tree of life which is in Paradise, among the other virtues he added this also: "His will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he will meditate day and night". Daniel, at the end of his most sacred Vision, says that the just shall shine as the stars; and the wise, that is, the learned, as the firmament. Do you see how far apart from each other are mere righteous rusticity and learned righteousness? Some are compared to stars, others to heaven.

Though, according to the Hebrew truth, both may be understood of the learned; for so we read among them: "But they who are learned shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they who instruct many unto righteousness, as stars for everlasting eternities". Why is Paul the Apostle called a chosen vessel? Surely because he is a storehouse of the Law and the holy Scriptures. The Pharisees are astounded at the Lord's teaching; and they marvel at Peter and John, how they know the Law, since they had not learned letters. For whatever practice and daily meditation on the Law is accustomed to give to others, the Holy Spirit supplied to them; and they were, as it is written, θεοδίδακτοι (taught of God). The Savior had completed twelve years, and in the Temple, questioning the elders about matters of the Law, he teaches all the more by his prudent questioning.

4. Unless perhaps we call Peter rustic, or call John rustic—either of whom could say: "Though rude in speech, yet not in knowledge".

Was John a rustic, a fisherman, unlearned? And whence, I ask, that voice: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"? For Λόγος in Greek signifies many things; for it is both word, and reason, and reckoning, and the cause of each thing, through which individual things subsist. All these we rightly understand in Christ. This the learned Plato did not know; this the eloquent Demosthenes did not know. "I will destroy," he says, "the wisdom of the wise, and I will reject the prudence of the prudent". True wisdom will destroy false wisdom; and although the folly of preaching is in the Cross, yet Paul "speaks wisdom among the perfect. Yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, who are coming to nothing; but he speaks the wisdom of God in a mystery, which is hidden, which God predestined before the ages". The wisdom of God is Christ. "For Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God".

This wisdom is hidden in a mystery—of which also the title of the ninth Psalm is inscribed beforehand, "for the hidden things of the Son": in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden; and he who was hidden in mystery was predestined before the ages. But he was predestined, and prefigured, in the Law and the Prophets. Whence also the prophets were called Seers: because they saw him whom others did not see. "Abraham saw his day, and was glad". The heavens were opened to Ezekiel, who belonged to a sinful people. "Reveal," says David, "my eyes, and I will behold wondrous things out of your law". For the Law is spiritual, and revelation is needed that it may be understood, and that with face revealed we may behold the glory of God.

5. The book in the Apocalypse is shown sealed with seven seals: which if you give to a man knowing letters, that he may read it, he will answer you: I cannot, for it is sealed.

How many today think themselves to know letters, and yet hold the sealed book; nor can they open it, unless he shall unseal it "who hath the key of David: who openeth, and no man shutteth; shutteth, and no man openeth?" In the Acts of the Apostles the holy eunuch, nay rather the man (for so Scripture calls him), when he was reading Isaiah, being asked by Philip, "Thinkest thou that thou understandest what thou readest?" answered, "How can I, unless some man show me?" I myself, to speak for the moment of myself, am neither holier than this eunuch, nor more studious; who came from Ethiopia, that is, from the farthest ends of the world, to the Temple, left the royal court; and was so great a lover of the Law and of divine knowledge, that he read the sacred letters even in his chariot: and yet, though he held the book, and conceived the words of the Lord in his thought, turned them over on his tongue, sounded them upon his lips, he knew not him whom, unknowing, he venerated in the book.

Philip came, and showed him Jesus, who lay hidden, shut up in the letter. O wondrous power of the teacher! In that same hour the eunuch believes, is baptized, is faithful and holy; and from a disciple becomes a master: he found more in the desert fountain of the Church, than in the gilded Temple of the synagogue.

6. These things I have touched upon briefly (for the narrowness of a letter did not allow me to range further), that you might understand that you cannot enter into the holy Scriptures without a guide and one to point out the path. I say nothing of grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, geometers, dialecticians, musicians, astronomers, astrologers, physicians, whose knowledge is most useful to mortals, and is divided into three parts, τὸ δόγμα, τὴν μέθοδον, τὴν ἐμπειρίαν. I will come to the lesser arts, and those which are practiced not so much by reason as by hand.

Farmers, masons, craftsmen, cutters of metals or of wood, wool-workers too, and fullers, and the rest who fashion various furnishings and cheap little works, cannot without a teacher be what they desire to be. "What belongs to physicians,"

Physicians make promises, craftsmen handle craftsmen's tools.

7. The art of the Scriptures alone is that which all everywhere claim for themselves.

We write, unlearned and learned alike, poems on every side.

This the chattering old woman, this the doting old man, this the wordy sophist, this all men presume upon, mangle, teach, before they learn. Some, with brow drawn up, weighing grand words, philosophize about the sacred letters among little women. Others learn, shame to say, from women what they may teach to men: and lest this be too little, with a certain facility of words, nay rather with boldness, they expound to others what they themselves do not understand. I say nothing of men like myself, who, if perchance they have come to the holy Scriptures after secular letters, and have soothed the ear of the people with composed speech, think that whatever they have said is the law of God: nor do they deign to know what the Prophets, what the Apostles meant; but they fit incongruous testimonies to their own sense; as though it were a great thing, and not a most vicious kind of teaching, to distort meanings, and to drag Scripture, resisting, to one's own will.

As though we had not read the Homerocentones and the Virgiliocentones; and as though we could not likewise call Maro a Christian without Christ, who wrote:

Now the virgin returns, the Saturnian kingdoms return.
Now a new offspring is sent down from high heaven.

And the father speaking to the son, Son, my strength, my great might, thou alone. And after the words of the Saviour on the cross, Thus he kept on, remembering, and remained fixed. These things are childish, and like the sport of jugglers—to teach what you do not know; nay, to speak with indignation, not even to know this, that you do not know.

8. Clearly Genesis is most manifest, in which is written the nature of the world, the origin of the human race, the division of the earth, the confusion of tongues, and the descent down to Egypt of the nation of the Hebrews. Exodus lies open, with the ten plagues, with the decalogue, with mystical and divine precepts. Ready to view is the book Leviticus, in which each sacrifice, indeed almost every syllable, and the vestments of Aaron, and the whole Levitical order, breathe heavenly mysteries. And Numbers, does it not contain the whole of arithmetic, and the prophecy of Balaam, and the mysteries of the forty-two stations through the wilderness?

Deuteronomy too, the second law, and prefiguration of the Evangelical law, does it not so hold the things that are earlier, that yet all things are new out of the old? Thus far the Pentateuch: with these five words the Apostle glories that he wishes to speak in the Church. Job, the model of patience, what mysteries does it not embrace in its speech? It begins in prose, glides into verse, ends in prose speech; and it determines all the laws of dialectic, by proposition, assumption, confirmation, conclusion. Every single word in it is full of meanings. And, to say nothing of the rest, it so prophesies the resurrection of bodies that no one has written of it either more plainly or more guardedly: "I know," it says, "that my redeemer lives, and on the last day I am to rise again from the earth; and again I shall be clothed round with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God. Whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

This hope of mine is laid up in my bosom". I shall come to Joshua the son of Nun, who, a type of the Lord not only in his deeds but even in his name, crosses the Jordan, overthrows the kingdoms of the enemies, divides the land to the victorious people, and through each city, village, mountain, river, torrent, and boundary describes the spiritual kingdoms of the Church and the heavenly Jerusalem. In the book of Judges, as many princes of the people as there are, so many figures there are. Ruth the Moabitess fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah, who says: "Send forth the lamb, O Lord, the ruler of the earth, from the rock of the desert to the mount of the daughter of Sion". Samuel, in Eli dead and in Saul slain, shows the old law abolished. Further, in Zadok and David he attests the mysteries of the new priesthood and the new empire.

Malachim, that is, the third and fourth book of Kings, from Solomon down to Jechoniah, and from Jeroboam son of Nebat down to Hoshea, who was led away into Assyria, describes the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel. If you look at the history, the words are simple; if you look into the hidden meaning in the letters, the smallness of the Church, and the wars of the Heretics against the Church, are narrated. The twelve Prophets, compressed into the narrow compass of a single volume, prefigure much other than what they sound in the letter. Hosea repeatedly names Ephraim, Samaria, Joseph, Jezreel, and the harlot wife, and the children of fornication, and the adulteress shut up in her husband's chamber, sitting a widow for a long time, and under mourning garb awaiting the return of her husband.

Joel son of Pethuel describes the land of the twelve tribes, corrupted and laid waste by the caterpillar, the cankerworm, the locust, the mildew; and after the overthrow of the former people, that the Holy Spirit was to be poured out upon the servants of God and the handmaids, that is, upon the hundred and twenty names of believers, which was to be poured out in the upper room of Sion: which hundred and twenty, rising gradually and by increments from one up to fifteen, make up the number of the fifteen steps, which are mystically contained in the Psalter. Amos, shepherd and rustic, "gathering the fruit of the sycamore trees," cannot be explained in few words. For who could worthily express the three or four crimes of Damascus, and Gaza, and Tyre, and Idumea, and the children of Ammon, and Moab, and, in the seventh and eighth degree, of Judah and Israel? Here he speaks to the fat cows that are in the mountain of Samaria, and testifies that the greater and lesser house will fall.

He himself beholds the maker of the locust, and the Lord standing upon a wall daubed or of adamant, and the hook of fruits, drawing punishments upon sinners, and famine upon the land—not a famine of bread, nor a thirst of water, but of hearing the word of God. Obadiah, which is interpreted "servant of God," thunders against bloody, earthly Edom, and strikes with a spiritual spear the brother of Jacob, ever his rival. Jonah, "the dove," most beautiful, prefiguring in his shipwreck the Passion of the Lord, calls the world back to repentance; and under the name of Nineveh announces salvation to the Gentiles. Micah of Morasthi, "co-heir" of Christ, announces the devastation of the daughter of the robber, and lays siege against her, because she struck the cheek of the judge of Israel. Nahum, "comforter" of the world, rebukes the city of blood, and after its overthrow says: "Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that brings good tidings and announces peace".

Habakkuk, "wrestler," strong and stern, stands upon his watch, and fixes his step upon the fortress, that he may contemplate Christ upon the cross, and say: "His glory covered the heavens, and the earth is full of his praise. His brightness shall be as the light: horns are in his hands: there is his strength hidden". Zephaniah, "watchman" and knower of the secrets of the Lord, hears a cry from the fish gate, and a howling from the second, and a great crashing from the hills. He also announces a howl to the inhabitants of the mortar, because all the people of Canaan has been brought to silence; all are perished who were wrapped up in silver. Haggai, "festive" and joyful, who sowed in tears that he might reap in joy, rebuilds the destroyed Temple, and brings in the Lord the Father speaking: "Yet one little while, and I will move the heavens and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land, and I will move all nations: and the desired of all nations shall come".

Zechariah, "one mindful of his Lord," manifold in his prophecy, beholds Jesus clothed in filthy garments, and a stone of seven eyes, and a golden candlestick with as many lamps as there are eyes, and also two olive trees, one to the left of the lamp and one to the right; so that, after the red, black, and white horses, and the varied ones, and the scattered chariots out of Ephraim, and the horse out of Jerusalem, he may prophesy and preach the poor King, sitting upon a colt, the foal of a subjugated ass. Malachi, openly, and at the end of all the Prophets, speaks of the rejection of Israel and the calling of the Gentiles: "I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hand. For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles: and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation".

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel—who could either understand or expound them? Of whom the first seems to me not to weave a Prophecy, but a Gospel. The second weaves a rod of nut-wood, and a boiling pot facing the north, and a leopard stripped of its own colors, and a fourfold alphabet in different meters. The third has his beginning and end wrapped in such great obscurities that among the Hebrews these parts, together with the beginning of Genesis, are not read before the age of thirty years. The fourth indeed, who is also the last among the four Prophets, knowing the times, and a lover of the history of the whole world, in clear speech pronounces the stone cut out of the mountain without hands, overturning all kingdoms. David, our Simonides, our Pindar and Alcaeus, also our Flaccus, Catullus, and Serenus, sounds forth Christ upon the lyre, and on the ten-stringed psaltery raises him rising again from the dead.

Solomon, the peaceful one, and the beloved of the Lord, corrects morals, teaches nature, joins together the Church and Christ, and sweetly sings the epithalamium of the holy marriage. Esther, in the type of the Church, delivers the people from danger, and, Haman being slain, which is interpreted "iniquity," sends down to posterity the portions of the banquet and the festal day. The book of Chronicles, that is, the ἐπιτομή (epitome) of the Old Instrument, is of such greatness and such a kind that without it, if anyone would arrogate to himself the knowledge of the Scriptures, he mocks himself. For through each single name, and each joining of words, both the histories omitted in the books of Kings are touched upon, and countless questions of the Gospel are explained.

Ezra and Nehemiah, that is, "helper" and "comforter from the Lord," are compressed into one volume: they restore the Temple, build the walls of the city; and all that crowd of the people returning to their homeland, and the description of the Priests, the Levites, Israel, the proselytes, and, family by family, the works of the walls and towers divided, bear one thing on the surface, and hold another in the marrow. You see that I, carried away by love of the Scriptures, have exceeded the measure of a letter, and yet have not fulfilled what I wished. We have only heard what we ought to know, what we ought to desire, so that we too may be able to say: "My soul has desired to long for thy justifications at all times". But for the rest, that Socratic saying is fulfilled in us: This only I know, that I know nothing. Let me touch also briefly upon the New Testament.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the chariot of the Lord, and the true Cherubim, which is interpreted "multitude of knowledge," are full of eyes over their whole body, sparks flash forth, lightnings run to and fro, they have feet straight and stretching upward, backs winged and everywhere flying. They hold one another mutually, and are interlaced with each other, and are rolled as it were wheel within wheel, and go wherever the breath of the Holy Spirit has led them. Paul the Apostle writes to seven Churches (for the eighth, to the Hebrews, is by most placed outside the number); he instructs Timothy and Titus, he intercedes with Philemon for his fugitive servant (Onesimus). Concerning which I think it better to be silent than to write a few words.

The Acts of the Apostles seem indeed to sound a bare history, and to weave the infancy of the newborn Church; but if we know that the writer of them is Luke the physician, "whose praise is in the Gospel," we shall perceive likewise that all his words are medicine for the languishing soul. James, Peter, John, Jude, Apostles, put forth seven Epistles, as mystical as they are concise, and equally short and long: short in words, long in meaning, so that rare is he who does not grow blind in reading them. The Apocalypse of John has as many mysteries as words. I have said too little for the merit of the volume. All praise falls short: in each single word manifold meanings lie hidden.

9. I beg you, dearest brother, to live amid these things, to meditate on these, to know nothing else, to seek nothing else—does it not seem to you already here on earth a dwelling-place of the heavenly kingdom?

Do not be offended at the simplicity of the holy Scriptures, and at the seeming meanness of the words, which have been set forth either by the fault of the translators, or on purpose, so that they might more easily instruct a rustic assembly, and, in one and the same sentence, the learned might hear one thing, the unlearned another. I am not so impudent and dull as to promise that I know these things, and to gather on earth the fruits of those things whose roots are fixed in heaven; but I confess that I wish it: I prefer myself to one who sits still, refusing to be a master, I pledge myself a companion. To him who asks it is given, to him who knocks it is opened: he who seeks finds. Let us learn on earth those things whose knowledge may abide with us in heaven.

10. I shall receive you with outstretched hands, and, though I babble something inept, and out of the tumidity of Hermagoras, whatever you shall ask, I shall try to know together with you. You have here your most loving brother Eusebius, who has doubled for me the grace of your letter, reporting the honorableness of your character, your contempt of the world, your faithfulness in friendship, your love of Christ. For your prudence and the charm of your eloquence, even without him, the letter itself displayed. Hasten, I beg you, and rather cut than loose the rope of the little boat clinging in the shallow water. No one about to renounce the world can well sell what he has despised in order to sell it. Whatever you take from your own for expenses, count as gain. It is an ancient saying: the miser lacks what he has as much as what he does not have. To the believer the whole world is a store of riches. But the unbeliever needs even a penny.

Let us so live as having nothing, and possessing all things. Food and clothing are the riches of Christians. If you have your property in your power, sell it; if you do not have it in your power, cast it away. To him who takes your tunic, the cloak also must be left. For unless you, ever putting off till tomorrow, and dragging out day by day, cautiously and step by step sell your little possessions, Christ will have nothing from which to feed his poor. He gave everything to God, who offered himself. The Apostles left only their boat and their nets. The widow put two mites into the treasury, and is preferred to the riches of Croesus. He easily despises all things, who always thinks that he is going to die.

I say nothing of Paula and Eustochium, the flowers of your stock, lest under the occasion of exhorting you I should seem to be praising them. And I pass over Blæsilla, who, following her husband, your brother, in the short space of her life fulfilled many seasons of virtue. And would that men imitated the praises of women: and that wrinkled old age would render what youth freely offers of its own accord. Knowing and seeing, I put my hand into the flame: eyebrows will be raised, an arm will be stretched out; and Chremes, in his wrath, will rage with swollen mouth. The great men will rise up against my letter; the patrician crowd will thunder, crying out that I am a magician, a seducer, and that I ought to be deported to the farthest lands. Let them add, if they wish, even the Samaritan, so that I may acknowledge the title of my Lord.

Certainly I do not separate the daughter from the parent, nor do I say that saying from the Gospel: Let the dead bury their dead. For he lives who believes in Christ. And he who believes in him ought certainly, as he walked, himself also to walk.

3. Let envy depart, which the innate malice of evil-speakers always inflicts upon the Christian name: so that, while men fear reproaches, they are not called forth to virtues. Except by letters, we do not know one another. And the only bond is that of piety, where there is no acquaintance of the flesh. Honor your father; but only if he does not separate you from your true Father. Know that the bond of blood lasts only so long as he acknowledges his own Creator. Otherwise David will straightway sing to you: "Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline your ear, and forget your people and your father's house: and the king shall desire your beauty, for he is your Lord".

Great is the reward of one who forgets her parent: the king shall desire your beauty. Because you have hearkened, because you have seen, because you have inclined your ear; and have forgotten your people and your father's house, therefore the king shall desire your beauty, and shall say to you: You are all fair, my love, and there is no spot in you. What is more beautiful than a soul which is called the daughter of God, and seeks no outward adornments? She believes in Christ, and enriched with this ambition goes forth to the Bridegroom, having the same one as Lord whom she has as Husband.

4. What straits marriage holds, you have learned in marriage itself: and you have been sated, as it were with the flesh of quails, even to nausea: your palate has tasted the most bitter gall. You have voided the sour and sickly food; you have relieved your seething stomach. Why do you wish again to swallow what was harmful to you?

The dog returns to his vomit, and the washed sow to her wallowing in the mire. Even dumb animals and wandering birds do not fall into the same snares and nets twice. Or do you fear that the Furian offspring may fail, and that your parent may not have from you a little one to crawl upon his breast, and smear his neck with filth? Indeed, all who have had marriages have children; and those to whom children were born have answered to their kind. Did Cicero's son display his father's eloquence? Did your own Cornelia, a model at once of chastity and fecundity, rejoice that she had borne her Gracchi? It is ridiculous to hope for certain what you see many either not having, or, having had, losing. To whom will you leave such great riches? To Christ, who cannot die. Whom will you have as heir? The very one who is also your Lord. The father will be saddened, but Christ will rejoice; the household will mourn, but the Angels will congratulate.

Let the father do what he will with his substance: you are not his, to whom you were born, but his, to whom you were reborn: and his who redeemed you at a great price, his own blood.

5. Beware of nurses, and maidservants, and venomous creatures of this sort, who desire to fatten their own belly from your hide. They do not urge what will profit you, but what will profit themselves. And often they mutter this:

Will you alone waste away, mourning, your whole youth long?

Nor know sweet children, nor the rewards of Venus!

Where there is the sanctity of chastity, there is frugality. Where there is frugality, there is loss to the little slaves. Whatever they do not receive, they think has been taken from them; nor do they consider from how great a source, but only how much they receive. Wherever they see a Christian, at once comes that word from the street corner, "the Greek, the impostor." These men sow the most shameful rumors; and what has come forth from themselves, they pretend to have heard from others, being at once the authors and the exaggerators. The rumor goes forth from a lie: and when it has reached the matrons, and been fanned by their tongues, it penetrates the provinces. You may see very many raging with foaming mouth, and with painted face, with viper-like eyes, and pumice-smoothed teeth, tearing at Christians. Here is one such,

She about whose shoulders is a hyacinth-colored cloak;
Speaking something rancid, lisping through her nose.
She rattles on, and her tender palate trips up her words.

The whole chorus joins in, and all the benches bark together. Men of our own order join in, who are both gnawed at and gnaw others. Talkative against us, mute for themselves; as though they themselves were something other than Monks; and as though whatever is said against Monks did not redound also upon Clerics, who come from the ranks of Monks. Loss to the flock is disgrace to the shepherd-fathers. Just as, on the other side, the life of that Monk is to be praised who holds the Priests of Christ in veneration, and does not detract from the rank through which he was made a Christian.

6. I have said these things, daughter in Christ, not doubting your resolve (for you would never have asked for exhortatory letters, if you were uncertain about the good of a single marriage), but so that you might understand the wickedness of the little slaves who carry you about for sale, and the plots of relatives by marriage, and the pious error of your parent: to whom, while I grant love for you, I do not grant knowledge of love, saying with the Apostle something of this sort: "I confess, they have zeal for God, but not according to knowledge". Rather imitate (for I will repeat this often) your holy mother, as often as I remember whom there comes to mind her ardor for Christ, her pallor from fasting, her almsgiving to the poor, her deference toward the servants of God, the humility of her garments and of her heart, and in all things her measured speech.

Let your father, whom I name out of honor (not because he is Consular and Patrician, but because he is a Christian), fulfill his name. Let him rejoice to have begotten a daughter for Christ, not for the world. Rather let him grieve that you lost your virginity in vain, and lost the fruits of marriage as well. Where is the husband whom he gave you? Even if he had been lovable, even if good, death would have snatched away everything, and destruction would have dissolved the bond of the flesh. Seize, I beg you, the occasion, and make virtue out of necessity. In Christians, beginnings are not what is sought, but the end. Paul began badly, but ended well. Judas's beginnings are praised; but his end is condemned by betrayal. Read Ezekiel: "The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him, in whatever day he shall sin. And the wickedness of the wicked shall not harm him, in whatever day he shall turn from his wickedness".

This is the ladder of Jacob, by which Angels ascend and descend: on which the Lord leans, reaching out his hand to those who fall, and sustaining, by contemplation of himself, the weary steps of those who ascend. But just as he does not wish the death of the sinner, only that he be converted and live: so he hates the lukewarm, and they quickly make him sick. He to whom more is forgiven loves more.

7. That harlot in the Gospel, baptized by her own tears, and wiping the Lord's feet with the hair by which she had before deceived many, was saved. She had no curling head-bands, nor creaking little shoes, nor eyes darkened with soot of antimony. The more foul, the more beautiful. What is rouge and white lead doing on the face of a Christian woman? One of which feigns the redness of cheeks and lips, the other the whiteness of face and neck: fire for the young, fuel for lust, marks of an immodest mind.

How can she weep for her sins, she who bares her skin with tears and draws furrows on her face? That adornment is not the Lord's; that veil belongs to Antichrist. With what confidence does she lift toward heaven a face which its Maker would not recognize? In vain is youth pleaded, and the age of girlhood alleged. A widow who has ceased to please her husband, and who according to the Apostle is truly a widow, has nothing necessary except perseverance. She remembers her former pleasure, she knows what she has lost, in what she took delight. The burning arrows of the devil must be quenched by the rigor of fasts and vigils. Either we must speak as we are dressed, or we must dress as we speak. Why do we promise one thing and show another? The tongue rings out chastity, while the whole body displays immodesty.

8. This as far as concerns dress and adornment.

But moreover the widow who lives in luxury (this is not my word, but the Apostle's) is dead while she lives. What does this mean, that he says: living, she is dead? She seems indeed to live to those who do not know, and is not dead to sin, but she is dead to Christ, whom secret things do not deceive. "The soul that sins, it shall die". "The sins of some men are manifest, going before them to judgment; but some men's sins follow after. Likewise also good works are manifest beforehand; and those which are otherwise cannot be hidden". What he says is of this sort: some sin so openly and freely that, as soon as you see them, you understand at once that they are sinners. Others, however, who cleverly hide their vices, we come to know from their subsequent way of life. Likewise good deeds too are in some plain to see, in others we learn of them only after long acquaintance.

What need is there, then, for us to boast of chastity, which without its companions and appendages—continence and frugality—cannot make itself believed? The Apostle mortifies his own body, and subjects it to the rule of the soul, lest what he enjoins on others he himself should not keep: and shall the young girl, her body aglow with food, be secure about her chastity?

9. Nor indeed in saying this do I condemn foods, which God created to be used with thanksgiving; but I take away from young men and girls the incentives of pleasures. Not the fires of Etna, not the Vulcanian land, not Vesuvius and Olympus burn with such great heat, as young marrow full of wine and inflamed with feasting. Avarice is trodden underfoot by very many, and laid aside along with the purse. A slanderous tongue is corrected by an imposed silence. The care of the body and the fashion of garments are changed within the space of a single hour. All other sins are external; and what is outward is easily cast off.

Only lust, implanted by God for the procreation of children, if it has gone beyond its bounds, overflows into vice, and by a certain law of nature is eager to burst forth into intercourse. It is, therefore, a matter of great virtue and anxious diligence to overcome what you were born to be: to live in the flesh, not according to the flesh; to fight with yourself every day, and to watch the enclosed enemy, as the fables say of Argus, with a hundred eyes. This is what the Apostle was saying in other words: "Every sin that a man commits is outside the body. But he who commits fornication sins against his own body".

Physicians say, and those who have written on the nature of human bodies, especially Galen in his books entitled περὶ ὑγιεινῶν (Galen's books "On the Preservation of Health"), that the bodies of boys and young men, and of men and women of mature age, burn with an innate heat, and that foods which increase that heat are harmful to these ages; and that it conduces to health to take cold things in food and drink. Just as, on the contrary, for old people, who suffer from phlegm and cold, warm foods and aged wines are beneficial. Whence also the Savior: "Take heed to yourselves," he says, "lest perhaps your hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life". And the Apostle: "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess". Nor is it strange that the potter should have perceived this about the vessel which he himself fashioned, since even the Comic poet, whose purpose it is to know and describe human manners, has said:

Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus grows cold.

10. First, then, if the strength of your stomach allows it, until you pass beyond the years of girlhood, take water as your drink, which by nature is the coldest thing. Or if weakness forbids this, listen with Timothy: "Use a little wine for your stomach's sake, and your frequent infirmities". Then among the foods themselves avoid all that is heating: I speak not only of meats, concerning which the vessel of election delivers this judgment: "It is good not to drink wine, nor to eat flesh"; but also among the vegetables themselves, all that is inflating and heavy is to be shunned: and know that nothing is so beneficial to Christian young women as the eating of vegetables. Whence also in another place: "Let him that is weak," he says, "eat vegetables"; and the ardor of the body must be tempered with cooler foods. Thus indeed the three youths and Daniel fed on vegetables. They were boys, not yet come to that frying-pan in which the Babylonian king fried the aged judges.

We seek not bodily comeliness, which shone forth in them (apart from the privilege of God's grace) from such foods; but vigor of soul, which becomes stronger through weakness of the flesh. Hence it is that some who aspire to a chaste life fall midway on the journey, while they think abstinence from meat alone suffices; and they burden the stomach with vegetables, which, taken moderately and sparingly, are harmless. And, to say what I think, nothing so inflames the body and tickles the members of generation as undigested food and convulsive belching. I would rather, my daughter, that you suffer some embarrassment before me than that your cause be endangered. Whatever is a seed-bed of pleasures, consider it poison. A sparing diet, and a stomach always somewhat hungry, is to be preferred to three-day fasts; and it is much better to take a little every day, than rarely to take enough. That rain is best which descends gently upon the earth. A sudden and excessive downpour overturns the fields headlong.

11. When you eat, consider that immediately afterward you must pray, and at once must read. Keep a fixed number of verses from the holy Scriptures; render this task to your Lord. Nor grant rest to your limbs before you have filled the basket of your breast with this woof. After the holy Scriptures, read the treatises of learned men: those, at any rate, whose faith is known. You have no need to seek gold in mud; with many pearls, purchase the one pearl. Stand, as Jeremiah says, in the many ways, that you may arrive at that way which leads to the Father. Transfer the love of necklaces and gems, and of silken garments, to the knowledge of the Scriptures. Enter the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey. Eat fine flour and oil: be clothed like Joseph in a coat of many colors: let your ears be pierced with the word of God, as Jerusalem's were, that from them the precious grains of new harvests may hang.

You have holy Exuperius, a man of proven age and faith, to instruct you often with his counsels.

12. Make for yourself friends of the mammon of iniquity, who may receive you into the eternal tabernacles. Bestow your riches on those who eat not Phasian birds, but common bread; who drive away hunger, not who increase luxury. Understand concerning the needy and the poor. Give to everyone who asks of you; but especially to those of the household of faith: clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick. Whenever you stretch out your hand, think of Christ. Beware lest, while the Lord your God is begging, you increase another's riches.

13. Flee the company of young men. Let your house's roof never see the long-haired, the adorned, and the wanton. Let the singer be driven away as harmful. Cast out from your dwelling the flute-girls and harp-girls, and that chorus of the devil, as though they were the deadly songs of sirens.

Do not go out into public repeatedly, and be carried about with the freedom of widows, an army of eunuchs going before you. It is a very bad habit when the frail sex and weak age abuse their own judgment, and think it lawful to do whatever pleases them. "All things indeed are lawful, but not all things are expedient". Let neither a curled steward, nor a handsome foster-brother, nor a fair and ruddy attendant cling to your side. Sometimes the character of mistresses is judged from the dress of their maids. Seek the fellowship of holy virgins and widows. And if the necessity of conversing with men should arise, do not choose the rich as witnesses: let your confidence in conversing be such that, should another enter, you neither fear nor blush. The face is the mirror of the mind, and silent eyes betray the secrets of the heart. We have lately seen a certain shameful rumor flying through the whole East.

And age, and adornment, and attire, and gait, and undiscriminating company, exquisite banquets, royal display, spoke of the nuptials of Nero and Sardanapalus. Let another's wound be our warning. "When the pestilent man is scourged, the fool will become wiser". Holy love knows no impatience. A false rumor is quickly suppressed, and a later life passes judgment on an earlier one. It cannot indeed happen that anyone should pass through the course of this life without the bite of men's tongues; and it is the consolation of the wicked to carp at the good, thinking that guilt is lessened by the multitude of sinners. But yet the fire of stubble soon subsides, and the overflowing flame, its fuel failing, gradually dies away. If last year rumor lied, or if indeed it spoke truly, let the vice cease, and the rumor too will cease. I say these things, not because I fear anything untoward of you, but because, out of affection of devotion, I dread even what is safe.

Oh, if you could see your sister, and it were granted you to hear before you that speech of her sacred mouth, you would perceive in a tiny little body a mighty spirit. You would hear the whole furniture of the Old and New Testament glowing from her heart. She holds fasting for play, prayer for delight. She holds the timbrel in imitation of Miriam, and, Pharaoh having been drowned, she leads the chorus of virgins in song: "Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnified; the horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea". These she teaches to be harpists for Christ, these she trains to be lyre-players for the Savior. So the day, so the night is spent, and with oil prepared for the lamps, the coming of the bridegroom is awaited. Imitate, then, you too your kinswoman. Let Rome have what Bethlehem, narrower than the city of Rome, possesses.

14. You have wealth; it is easy for you to minister the aid of sustenance to the needy.

Let virtue consume what was being prepared for luxury: let no moth-eaten poverty scorn marriage feasts. Redeem virgins, whom you may bring into the king's chamber. Take in widows, whom you may mingle, like certain violets, among the lilies of virgins and the roses of martyrs: in place of the crown of thorns, in which Christ bore the sins of the world, weave such garlands. Let your most noble father also rejoice and be aided: let him learn from his daughter what he had learned from his wife. Now his head has grown white, his knees tremble, his teeth fall out; and with his brow furrowed by age's wrinkles, death is near at the door; the pyre is marked out close by. Whether we will or no, we grow old. Let him prepare for himself the provision necessary for the long journey. Let him carry with him what he is unwilling to leave behind; nay, let him send ahead to heaven what, if he refuses, the earth will take.

15. Young widows, some of whom have turned back after Satan, are wont, when they have grown wanton against Christ in marrying, to say: My patrimony perishes daily: the inheritance of my forebears is being squandered: a slave has spoken insolently to me: a maidservant has neglected her orders. Who will go forth into public? Who will answer for the taxes on the lands? Who will educate my little ones, and who will bring up the household slaves? And this, alas, they set forth as the reason for marriage, which alone ought rather to have prevented it. A mother brings upon her children, not a nurse, but an enemy; not a parent, but a tyrant. Inflamed with lust, she forgets her own womb; and amid her little ones, who know nothing of their misfortunes, she who was mourning but lately is decked out as a new bride. Why do you plead your patrimony? Why the insolence of your little slaves? Confess the shameful truth. No woman takes a husband for the purpose of not sleeping with her husband.

Or if indeed lust does not goad her, what madness is it, in the manner of harlots, to prostitute chastity in order to increase riches; and for the sake of a vile and perishable thing, to pollute chastity, which is both precious and eternal? If you have children, why do you seek marriage? If you have none, why do you not fear a sterility you have already proven; and prefer an uncertain thing to a certain chastity? The marriage-contract is now being written for you, so that shortly after you will be compelled to make a will. The husband's illness will be feigned: and what he wants you to do while about to die, he himself, meaning to live, will do; or if it should happen that you have children by a second husband, a domestic war arises, an internal battle. You will not be permitted to love your children, nor to look with equal eyes on those you have borne.

You will secretly hand out food, and he will begrudge it to the dead man's children: and unless you hate your children, you will still seem to love their father. But if, having offspring by a former wife, he brings you into his house; even if you should be most gentle, all the comic poets and mime-writers, and the common commonplaces of rhetoricians, will declaim against you as the cruelest of stepmothers. If the stepson falls ill, and his head aches, you will be defamed as a poisoner. If you do not give him food, you are cruel; if you do give it, you are called a sorceress. I ask you, what so great good do second marriages have, that it could compensate for these evils?

16. Do we wish to know what widows ought to be? Let us read the Gospel according to Luke: "And there was," it says, "Anna a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser".

Anna is interpreted "grace." Phanuel, in our tongue, resounds as "the face of God." Aser is rendered either "blessedness" or "riches." Since therefore from adolescence up to eighty-four years she had borne the burden of widowhood, and did not depart from the temple of God, persisting day and night in fastings and supplications: therefore she deserved spiritual grace, and to be called the daughter of the face of God; and from her forebears she is reckoned in blessedness and riches. Let us recall the widow of Sarepta, who preferred, for the salvation both of herself and of her sons, hunger to Elijah's need: so that, about to die that very night with her son, she might leave her guest surviving, choosing rather to lose life than to lose almsgiving: and in a handful of meal she prepared for herself the seed-bed of the Lord's harvest. Meal is sown, and a jar of oil springs up. In Judea there is a shortage of wheat.

For the grain of wheat there had died, and in the widow of the Gentiles the streams of oil flowed. We read in Judith (if indeed anyone is pleased to accept that book) of a widow wasted by fastings, and squalid in mourning garb, who was not mourning a dead husband, but through bodily squalor sought the coming of the bridegroom. I see a hand armed with a sword, a bloody right hand. I recognize the head of Holofernes brought back from the midst of the enemy. A woman conquers men, and chastity beheads lust: and with her attire suddenly changed, she returns to her victorious squalor, cleaner than all the world's finery.

17. Some, unskillfully, number Deborah also among the widows, and think Barak the commander to be Deborah's son; whereas Scripture records something different. For us she will be named for this reason, that she was a prophetess, and is reckoned in the order of the Judges.

And because she could say: "How sweet are your words to my throat: above honey and the honeycomb to my mouth", she received the name "bee," fed on the flowers of the Scriptures, suffused with the fragrance of the Holy Spirit, and composing the sweet juices of ambrosia with prophetic mouth. Naomi (which sounds to us like παρακεκλημένη, which we can translate as "comforted"), her husband and children having died abroad, brought back her chastity to her homeland; and, sustained by this provision, kept her Moabite daughter-in-law; that this prophecy of Isaiah might be fulfilled: "Send forth, O Lord, the lamb, the ruler of the earth, from the rock of the desert, to the mount of the daughter of Sion". I come to the widow of the Gospel, the poor widow, richer than the whole people of Israel, who, taking the grain of mustard seed and putting leaven into the three measures of meal, tempered the confession of the Father and the Son with the grace of the Holy Spirit, and cast two mites into the treasury.

Whatever she could have in her substance, and all her riches, she offered in each Testament of her faith. These are the two Seraphim thrice glorifying the Trinity, and stored up in the treasuries of the Church. Whence also, by the tongs of both Testaments, a burning coal is taken up, and purges the lips of the sinner.

18. Why should I repeat old stories, and bring forth the virtues of women from books, when you can set before your own eyes many examples in the City in which you live, whose example you ought to imitate? And lest I seem to run through each one out of flattery, let holy Marcella suffice for you, who, answering her son-in-law, related to us something from the Gospel. Anna had lived with her husband seven years from her virginity, Marcella seven months. Anna awaited the coming of Christ: Marcella holds him whom Anna had received. Anna sang of him as a wailing infant: Marcella proclaims him triumphant.

Anna spoke of him to all who were awaiting the redemption of Israel: Marcella cries out with the redeemed nations: "A brother does not redeem, a man shall redeem", and from another Psalm, "Man is born in her, and the Most High himself has founded her". I know that about two years before this, I published books against Jovinian, in which I crushed, by the authority of the Scriptures, the contrary questions arising where the Apostle allows second marriages. And there is no need to write the same things over again in full, since you can borrow from there what has been written. This only, lest I exceed the bounds of a letter, I wish to admonish you: Think every day that you are going to die, and you will never think of second marriages.

To the truly holy and venerable brother AMANDUS the Presbyter, JEROME.

1. A short letter cannot suffice to explain long questions, and by confining many matters into a narrow space, cannot compress in words what has been expanded in meaning. You ask what is meant by that saying in the Gospel according to Matthew: "Be not solicitous for tomorrow; for tomorrow shall have its own solicitude, sufficient for the day is the evil thereof". "Tomorrow," in the Holy Scriptures, signifies future time: as Jacob also speaks in Genesis: "My justice shall answer for me tomorrow". And where the altar is built by the two tribes of Reuben and Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, and a delegation is sent to them from all Israel, when they answered Phinehas the High Priest that they had made the altar for this reason, lest tomorrow the possession of worshipping God should be denied to their children. And you will find many such things in the Old Testament.

He, therefore, who forbade us to think about the future, allowed us to think about the present, because of the frailty of human life. But as to what he adds, "sufficient for the day is the evil thereof", understand it in this way: it is enough for us to think about the present difficulties of this age. What need is there to extend our understanding to uncertain and future things, which we either cannot attain, or which, if perhaps quickly found, we may lose?

For κακία, which the Latin translates as "malitia" (malice), signifies among the Greeks two things: both malice, and affliction, which the Greeks call κάκωσις; and here, rather than "malice," it ought to have been translated "affliction." But if anyone contentiously insists on not having κακία mean affliction and hardships, but malice, it must be explained in that sense in which the world is said to be placed "in the wicked one," that is, in evil; and in the Lord's Prayer we say, "Deliver us from evil": so that it may be enough for us to have the present struggle against the malice of this age.

2. In the second place you asked about the blessed Apostle Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians, in which he says: "Every sin that a man doth, is without the body. But he that committeth fornication, sinneth against his own body". Let us then read a little above, and so come to these words, lest we wish to know the whole meaning from the last parts, and, so to speak, from the tail of the chapter.

He says: "The body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. Now God hath both raised up the Lord, and will raise us up also by his power. Know you not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of a harlot? God forbid. Or know you not, that he who is joined to a harlot, is made one body? For they shall be, saith he, two in one flesh" "But he who is joined to the Lord, is one spirit. Fly fornication. Every sin that a man doth, is without the body: but he that committeth fornication, sinneth against his own body", and so forth. The holy Apostle, disputing against luxury, and having said above, "Meat for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them", comes consequently to fornication.

For luxury is the mother of lust, and upon a belly distended with food and drenched with wine-drinking, the pleasure of the genital organs follows; and as is said elsewhere, according to the order of the members is the order of vices. Thus every sin—for example theft, murder, robbery, perjury, and other things like these—brings repentance after the deed; and although gain may invite it, yet conscience gnaws at it. Pleasure and lust alone, even at the very time of repenting, suffer past stings, and the titillation of the flesh, and the incitements of sin: so that by thinking of the very things we desire to correct, there arises again material for wrongdoing. Otherwise: The other sins are external.

For whatever we do, we do to others: fornication defiles not only the conscience of the fornicator, but also the body, and according to the sentence of the Lord, who says, "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they two shall be in one flesh", he himself too, with a harlot, becomes one body; and he sins against his own body, while he makes the body which is the temple of Christ to be the body of a harlot. Let us say it also in another way, lest we seem to pass over any Greek opinion. It is one thing to sin through the body, another to sin in the body. Theft, murder, and other sins besides fornication, we perform outwardly by the hand: fornication alone is exercised inwardly by us in our own body, not through the body upon others: and the preposition "through" implies an instrument, while "in" implies suffering in oneself.

There are those who explain it thus, that according to Scripture the wife is the husband's body, and whoever has committed fornication, sins against his own body, that is, against his wife, while he defiles her by his fornication, and makes her, though not sinning, to sin by his union with her.

3. I found joined to your letter and memorandum a short note, in which the following was contained: it must be asked of him, that is, of me, whether a woman, having left her adulterous and sodomite husband, and taken another by force, can, without penance, communicate with the Church, while he whom she first left is still alive. Reading this, I was reminded of that verse: "To invent excuses in sins". For we all men favor our own vices; and what we do of our own will, we refer to the necessity of nature.

As if a young man should say: I suffer the violence of the body, ardor drives me to lust, the very organs of the genital members, and the composition of the body, seek feminine embraces. And again, if a murderer should say: I was in want, I needed food, I had no covering for my body; therefore I shed another's blood, lest I myself should die of hunger and cold. Answer, then, to the sister who asks of us about her condition, not our own opinion, but the Apostle's judgment. "Know you not, brethren (for I speak to them that know the law), that the law hath dominion over a man, as long as it liveth? For the woman that hath a husband, whilst her husband liveth, is bound to the law. But if her husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. Therefore, whilst her husband liveth, she shall be called an adulteress, if she be with another man".

And in another place: "A woman is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth: but if her husband die, she is at liberty; let her marry to whom she will, only in the Lord". The Apostle, therefore, cutting off all pretexts, most plainly determined that, while the husband lives, the woman is an adulteress if she marry another. I do not want you to bring before me the violence of the ravisher, the persuasion of the mother, the authority of the father, the crowd of relatives, the treachery and contempt of servants, the losses of household property. As long as the husband lives, though he be an adulterer, though a sodomite, though covered with every disgrace, and abandoned by his wife because of these crimes, he is still reckoned her husband, and she is not permitted to take another husband.

Nor does the Apostle decree this on his own authority, but, with Christ speaking in him, he followed the words of Christ, who says in the Gospel: "Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, maketh her to commit adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery". Notice what he says: "he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery": whether she herself put away her husband, or was put away by her husband, whoever marries her is an adulterer. Hence also the Apostles, understanding the heavy burden of marriage, said: "If the case of a man with his wife be so, it is not expedient to marry." To whom the Lord said: "He that can take it, let him take it". And immediately, under the example of the three eunuchs, he brings in the blessedness of virginity, which is bound by no law of the flesh.

4. Nor could I sufficiently perceive what he meant to say by "another husband taken by force." What is meant by "taken by force"? Namely, having gathered a multitude, he seized her against her will: and why then did the ravished woman not afterward dismiss the ravisher? Let her read the books of Moses, and she will find that a betrothed woman, if she was violated in the city, and did not cry out, is to be punished as an adulteress. But if she was violated in the field, she is innocent of the crime; and the violent man is subject to the laws. Therefore this sister too, who, as she says, suffered violence in being joined to another, if she wishes to receive the body of Christ, and not to be reckoned an adulteress, let her do penance: on this condition at least, that from the time of her penance she is not joined to the second husband, who is not called a husband, but an adulterer.

But if this seems hard to her, and she cannot abandon one once loved, nor prefer the Lord to pleasure, let her hear the Apostle crying out: "You cannot drink the chalice of the Lord, and the chalice of devils: you cannot be partakers of the table of the Lord, and of the table of devils". And in another place: "What communication hath light with darkness? What concord hath Christ with Belial?" I speak of a new thing, or rather not a new thing, but an old one, which is confirmed by the authority of the Old Testament. If she leaves the second husband, and wishes to be reconciled to the first, she cannot. For it is written in Deuteronomy: "If a man take a wife, and have her, and she find not favour in his eyes, for some uncleanness: he shall write a bill of divorce, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.

And when she is departed, and marrieth another husband, and he also hateth her, and hath given her a bill of divorce, and hath sent her out of his house, or is dead: the former husband cannot take her again to wife: because she is defiled, and is become abominable before the Lord: lest thou cause thy land to sin, which the Lord thy God hath given thee to possess". Wherefore I beg you, console her, indeed call her to salvation. Putrid flesh needs the knife and the cautery: nor is it the fault of the medicine, but of the wound, when the physician spares not, with a merciful cruelty, that he may spare, he rages, that he may have mercy.

5. Your third, that is, your last proposition, was concerning the same Epistle of the Apostle, where, disputing about the resurrection, he comes to that place where it is written: "For he must reign until he hath put all his enemies under his feet.

And the enemy death shall be destroyed last: for he hath put all things under his feet". But when he says that all things are put under him, without doubt this excepts him who put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then the Son also himself shall be subject unto him that put all things under him, "that God may be all in all." And I marvel that you wished to ask this of me, since the holy Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, filled the eleventh book against the Arians with this question and its solution. Nevertheless let us say a few things at least. The whole scandal in this is why the Son is said to be subject to the Father. What is more base or lowly, to be subject to the Father (which is often a mark of piety, as it is written in the Psalm: "Shall not my soul be subject to God?") or to be crucified, and made a curse of the cross?

"For cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree". He, therefore, who was made a curse for us, that he might free us from the curse, do you marvel if he was made subject for us, that he might make us subject to the Father, saying in the Gospel: "No man cometh to the Father, but by me": and "When I shall be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all things to myself". Christ is subject to the Father in those who are faithful: because all believers, indeed the whole human race, are reckoned members of his body. But in those who are unbelieving, that is, Jews and Gentiles and Heretics, he is said not to be subject, because that part of his members is not subject to the faith.

But at the end of the world, when all the members shall see Christ reigning, that is, his body, they too shall be subjected to Christ, that is, to his body, so that the whole body of Christ may be subjected to God and the Father; "that God may be all in all." He does not say, "that the Father may be all in all," but "that God may be": which is the proper name of the Trinity, and can be referred as much to the Father as to the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that humanity may be subjected to divinity. By "humanity" here we mean, not gentleness and clemency, which the Greeks call φιλανθρωπία, but the whole race of men. Further, what he says, "that God may be all in all," must be understood in this sense: our Lord and Saviour is not now all in all, but a part in each.

For example, in Solomon wisdom, in David goodness, in Job patience, in Daniel knowledge of future things, in Peter faith, in Phinehas and Paul zeal, in John virginity, in the others other things. But when the end of all things shall have come, then he will be all in all, so that each of the Saints may have all virtues, so that Christ may be whole in all.

To his most beloved lord, and one to be obeyed and embraced with the devotion of most sincere charity, brother and fellow-presbyter JEROME, AUGUSTINE.

1. Never has anyone become so easily known to anyone as to me the tranquil joy of your studies in the Lord, and truly your liberal exercise of them. Although then I greatly desire to know you fully, yet I lack a small part of you, namely the presence of your body: which itself, after our brother Alypius—now indeed a most blessed Bishop, but then already worthy of the Episcopate—saw you, and returning was seen by me, I cannot deny is impressed upon me in large part by his report: and before his return, both he saw you there, and I saw you too, but with his eyes. For one who knew that he and I are two in body, not in mind, would speak truly—by harmony, indeed, and most faithful familiarity, not by merits, in which he surpasses me.

Since therefore you love me, first through the communion of spirit by which we are bound into one; and then already through his report, I commend to your brotherhood, not at all impudently as if to a stranger, brother Profuturus, whom we hope will truly be profitable, first by our efforts, then by your assistance: unless perhaps, because he is such a man, he himself makes me more commended to you through him, than he through me. Thus far perhaps I ought to have written, if I wished to be content with the custom of ordinary letters: but my mind overflows with things to share with you concerning our studies, which we hold in Christ Jesus our Lord; who deigns to minister to us many benefits and certain provisions for the journey he has shown us, not in small measure also through your charity.

2. We ask therefore, and with us the whole zealous fellowship of the African Churches asks, that you not be unwilling to devote care and effort to interpreting the books of those who have treated our Scriptures most excellently in Greek. For you can bring it about that we too may have such men as those, and one especially whom you more gladly sound forth in your letters. But as to translating the sacred canonical writings into the Latin tongue, I would not want you to labor except in the manner in which Job was interpreted: so that, with signs applied, it may appear what difference there is between this translation of yours and that of the Seventy, whose authority is most weighty. I cannot sufficiently marvel, if anything is still found in the Hebrew writings and copies which escaped so many interpreters most skilled in that language.

For I set aside the Seventy, concerning whose either counsel or greater concord of spirit—as if they were one man—I dare not pronounce a definite judgment on either side; except that I think preeminent authority ought without controversy to be attributed to them in this task. Those move me more, who, since they interpreted later, and (as is said) held tenaciously to the way and rules of Hebrew words and expressions, not only did not agree among themselves, but also left many things to be dug out and brought forth so long afterward. For if these things are obscure, you too are believed capable of having erred in them; but if manifest, they are not believed capable of having erred in them. On this matter, then, I would beg you, out of your charity, having set forth the reasons, to make me certain.

3. I have also read certain writings, said to be yours, on the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, one of which, to the Galatians, when you wished to unravel, came to that passage in which the Apostle Peter is called back from a pernicious dissimulation. There I confess I grieve not a little that a defense of lying has been undertaken, whether by you, such a man, or by someone else, if another wrote those things, until the points that trouble me are refuted (if indeed they can be refuted). For it seems to me most destructive to believe that any lie is contained in the sacred books, that is, that those men through whom that Scripture was ministered and written to us, lied in any way in their writings. For it is one question, whether a good man may sometimes lie: and another question, whether it was fitting for a writer of the sacred Scriptures to lie: nay rather it is not another question, but no question at all.

For once a dutiful lie is admitted into so lofty a pinnacle of authority, no particle of those books will remain which someone, finding it difficult for morals or incredible for faith, will not, by that same most pernicious rule, refer to the design and duty of a lying author.

For if the Apostle Paul was lying when, rebuking the Apostle Peter, he said: "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how do you compel the Gentiles to judaize?"—and it seemed to him that Peter had acted rightly, whom he both said and wrote had not acted rightly—in order, as it were, to soothe the minds of those in tumult, what shall we answer, when perverse men arise, forbidding marriage, whom he himself foretold would come; and say that all that the same Apostle spoke about establishing the right of marriage was a lie, spoken on account of men who might be stirred up by love of their wives: that is, not because he meant it, but so that their opposition might be appeased? For there is no need to recall many instances.

For even the praises of God might seem to be dutiful lies, so that among more sluggish men love of Him might be kindled: and thus nowhere will the authority of chaste truth be certain in the sacred writings. Do we not notice the same Apostle, with immense care for commending the truth, saying: "But if Christ is not risen, our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain. We are found even false witnesses of God: because we have testified against God that He raised up Christ, whom He raised not up"? If someone were to say to him: why do you shudder at this lie, since what you have said, even if false, pertains especially to the praise of God? Would he not, having detested this madness, with whatever words and meanings he could, lay open to the light the inmost parts of his heart? Crying out that it is no less a crime—perhaps even a greater one—for falsehood to be praised in God, than for truth to be blamed?

It must therefore be brought about that a man approach the knowledge of the divine Scriptures with such disposition, that he think so holily and truthfully about the sacred books, that he does not wish to be pleased by any part of them through dutiful lies: and rather let him pass over what he does not understand, than prefer his own heart to that truth. For indeed when he says this, he seeks to be believed himself: and does this so that we may not believe the authorities of the divine Scriptures.

4. And I indeed, with whatever strength the Lord supplies, would show that all those testimonies which have been adduced to establish the usefulness of a lie ought to be understood otherwise, so that everywhere their firm truth might be taught. For as much as testimonies ought not to be lies, so much they ought not to favor a lie. But this I leave to your understanding. For with more diligent consideration applied to the reading, you will perhaps see it much more easily than I.

To this consideration, moreover, piety will compel you, by which you recognize that the authority of the divine Scriptures would waver, so that each might believe what he wishes in them, and not believe what he does not wish, if it were once persuaded that those men through whom these things were ministered to us could, for some reason, have lied dutifully in their Scriptures; unless perhaps you are going to give certain rules by which we may know where it is fitting to lie, and where not. But if this can be done, by no means explain it, I beg, by lying and dubious reasonings. Nor should you judge me burdensome or impudent, by the most truthful kindness of our Lord. For, not to say there is no fault, certainly there is no great fault, if my error favors truth: if indeed truth can rightly favor a lie in you.

5. I would wish to speak many other things with your most sincere heart, and to confer about Christian study: but no letter is sufficient for this desire of mine. I can do this more fully through brother Profuturus, whom I rejoice to have sent to mingle with and be nourished by your sweet and useful conversations. And yet, however much I might wish, not even he himself (may I say this with his leave) perhaps grasps it, though in nothing have I preferred myself to him. For I confess that I am more capable of you; but I see that he becomes fuller, wherein he without doubt surpasses me, and after he returns—which may happen, God helping, with a prosperous journey—when I shall have become a partaker of his breast filled up by you, he will not fill up what will still be empty in me, and eager for your understanding. Thus it will happen that I too shall then be more needy, he more abundant.

Indeed the same brother carries with him certain writings of ours, in reading which, if you deign to give attention, I beg you also to apply sincere and brotherly severity. For I understand what is written no otherwise: "The just man shall correct me in mercy, and reprove me: but let not the oil of the sinner fatten my head"; except that the one who rebukes in order to heal loves more than the flatterer who anoints the head. But I am a most difficult judge of what I have written; I am either more timid than is right, or more eager. I see also sometimes my faults; but I prefer to hear of them from better men: lest, when I have perhaps rightly reproved myself, I flatter myself again, and seem to myself to have passed a timid rather than a just sentence upon myself.

The Apostle Paul, in the presence of King Agrippa, about to answer for charges, so that he who was to hear might understand, secure of victory in the case, immediately at the beginning congratulates himself, saying: "Concerning all things of which I am accused by the Jews, O king Agrippa, I think myself happy, that I am to make my defense before you today, who especially know all the customs and questions that are among the Jews". For he had read that saying of Jesus: "Happy is he who speaks in the ears of one who hears"; and he knew that the words of an orator profit only so much as the judge's prudence has understood. Whence I too judge myself happy in this business at least, that I am to answer before learned ears against an unlearned tongue: which charges me with either ignorance or falsehood; whether I did not know how to interpret the writings of others truly, or was unwilling to: of which the one is error, the other crime.

And lest perhaps my accuser, by the facility with which he says everything, and the impunity by which he thinks all things are permitted to him, should accuse me also before you, as he accused Pope Epiphanius, I have sent this letter, to teach you, and through you others who deign to love us, the order of the affair.

2. About two years before this, the aforesaid Pope Epiphanius had sent letters to Bishop John, rebuking him on certain points of doctrine, and afterward gently calling him to penitence. Copies of these were being eagerly seized throughout Palestine, both for the merit of the author and for the elegance of the writing.

There was in our monastery a man not ignoble among his own people, Eusebius of Cremona, who, when this letter was flying about on the lips of many, and both learned and unlearned alike were marveling at it for its teaching and purity of language, began earnestly to ask me to translate it for him into Latin, and, for ease of understanding, to explain it more openly: for he was utterly ignorant of Greek eloquence. I did what he wished; and having summoned a scribe, I dictated hastily and quickly: noting briefly on the side of the page what inner sense each chapter contained. Since he had indeed begged exceedingly that I do this for him alone, and I had asked of him in return that he keep the copy at home, and not easily let it go abroad among the public. The matter passed thus for a year and six months: until the aforesaid translation, by a new trick, migrated from his cases to Jerusalem.

For a certain pseudo-monk, whether for money received, as is clearly given to understand, or from gratuitous malice, as a corrupter strives in vain to persuade, having plundered his papers and at his expense, became a Judas, a betrayer: and gave to my adversaries an occasion for barking against me, so that they might proclaim among the unlearned that I am a falsifier, that I did not render word for word: that instead of "honorable" I said "dearest," and by malicious interpretation—what is shameful to say—refused to translate αἰδεσιμώτατον Παππαν (most venerable Pope). These and suchlike trifles are my crimes.

3. And first, before I answer concerning the translation, I wish to ask those who call malice prudence: Whence did you get the copy of the letter? Who gave it to you? With what face do you produce what you purchased by crime? What will be safe among men, if we cannot conceal our secrets even behind walls and in our cabinets?

If I were to charge you with this crime before the tribunals of judges, I would subject you as guilty to the laws, which even in behalf of the interests of the treasury impose penalties on harmful informers: and while they accept the betrayal, they condemn the betrayer. The gain, forsooth, is welcome; the will behind it is displeasing. Not long ago the emperor Theodosius condemned to death Hesychius, a man of consular rank (against whom the Patriarch Gamaliel had waged the bitterest enmities), because, having suborned a notary, he had seized his papers. We read in the ancient histories that a schoolmaster, who had betrayed the children of the Faliscans, was handed over bound to the boys, and sent back to those whom he had betrayed; nor did the Roman people accept a criminal victory.

Fabricius considered it a wicked thing that Pyrrhus, king of the Epirotes, while he was being treated in camp for a wound, should be killed through the betrayal of his own physician; rather, he sent the man back bound to his master, so that he might not even approve the crime in an adversary. What the public laws protect, what enemies themselves respect, what is held sacred amid wars and swords, this among us, among monks and priests of Christ, has found no safety. And someone among them dares, with brow drawn up and fingers snapping, to belch forth and say: What of it, if he bought it, if he suborned someone? He did what profited himself. A marvelous defense of crime; as though robbers and thieves and pirates too do not do what profits themselves. Certainly Annas and Caiaphas, in seducing the unhappy Judas, did what they judged useful to themselves.

4. I wish, in my own papers, to write whatever trifles I please; to comment on the Scriptures, to bite back at those who wound me, to vent my spleen, to exercise myself on common topics, and to lay up, as it were, arrows sharpened for battle. So long as I do not bring forth what I have thought, they are not crimes, but mere reproaches: nay, not even reproaches, since the public ear knows nothing of them. You corrupt my little servants, you suborn my dependents; and, as we read in the fables, you penetrate to Danae by gold, and, concealing what you have done, call me a falsifier: though in accusing you confess a far worse crime against yourself than you charge against me. One man accuses you of being a heretic, another of perverting doctrines. You yourself are silent; you dare not answer; you tear at the translator, you cavil over syllables; and you think your whole defense consists in detracting from one who is silent. Suppose that in translating I either erred, or omitted something.

Here turns the whole hinge of your case; this is your defense. Does it follow that you are not a heretic, merely because I might be a poor translator? Nor do I say this because I know you to be a heretic—let him who accused you know it, let him who wrote know it—but because it is the height of folly, when accused by one man, to accuse another, and, with your body pierced through on every side, to seek comfort from the wound of a sleeping man.

5. Thus far I have spoken as though I had altered something of the letter, and as though a simple translation might contain an error, not a crime. But now, since the letter itself shows that nothing has been changed in sense, that nothing has been added in substance, that no doctrine has been fabricated—"they truly so understand as to understand nothing at all"; and while they wish to expose another's inexperience, they betray their own.

For I not only confess, but freely and openly profess, that in translating the Greeks—apart from the Holy Scriptures, where even the order of the words is a mystery—I render not word for word, but sense for sense. And I have as master in this matter Tully, who translated Plato's Protagoras, and Xenophon's Oeconomicus, and the two most beautiful orations of Aeschines and Demosthenes composed against each other. How much he omitted in them, how much he added, how much he altered, so as to explain the properties of one tongue by the properties of his own, it is not the business of this occasion to say. It is enough for me to cite the authority of the translator himself, who spoke thus in the Preface to those very orations: "I thought I should undertake a labor useful to students of eloquence, though not necessary for myself.

For I have translated from the Attic the noblest orations of the two most eloquent men, opposed to one another, Aeschines and Demosthenes: nor have I translated as an interpreter, but as an orator, preserving the same thoughts and their forms, both figures and words, fitted to our own usage. In which I did not consider it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the whole character and force of the words.

For I did not think I ought to count them out to the reader, but rather to weigh them out." And again at the end of the discourse he says: "Of these men's orations, if, as I hope, I shall have so rendered them, using all their virtues—that is, their thoughts, and their figures, and the order of their matter—while following the words only so far as they do not clash with our own idiom: even if all is not turned from the Greek, yet we have labored that they be of the same kind." But Horace too, a keen and learned man, gives this same precept to the skilled translator in his Art of Poetry:

Nor shall you take care to render word for word, faithful
interpreter that you are.

Terence translated Menander, and Plautus and Caecilius translated the ancient comic writers. Do they cling to the words? Do they not rather preserve in translation the grace and elegance? What you call faithfulness of interpretation, the learned call κακοζηλία (bad imitation). Whence I too, having been taught by such men about twenty years ago, and then likewise deceived by a similar error, unaware, to be sure, that this would be objected to me by you, when I was translating the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea into Latin, used among other things this Preface: "It is difficult, when following another's lines, not to stray somewhere; and it is arduous that things well said in another language should preserve the same grace in translation. Something has been signified by the propriety of a single word: I have no word of my own by which to render it; and while I seek to fill out the sense by a long circuit, I scarcely finish in the space of a short life.

There are besides the windings of inverted order, the dissimilarities of cases, the varieties of figures, and finally the language's own, so to speak, native idiom. If I translate word for word, it sounds absurd; if from necessity I change something in the order or in the wording, I shall seem to have departed from the duty of a translator." And after many things, which it would now be idle to pursue, I added also this: "But if it seems to anyone that the grace of a language is not altered in translation, let him render Homer word for word into Latin. I will say something more: let him render the same author, in his own language, into prose: he will see the order become ridiculous, and the most eloquent of poets scarcely able to speak." 6.

But lest the authority of my own writings be too slight (though I should wish only to prove this, that from my youth I have always translated not words but meanings), learn from your own reading what sort of little preface exists on this subject, in the book in which the Life of blessed Antony is described. "A translation made word for word from one language into another conceals the sense and, like rank grass, chokes the crop. For while the language serves cases and figures, it scarcely unfolds by a long circuit what it could have indicated in a brief expression." Avoiding this, therefore, I have so rendered blessed Antony, at your request, that nothing is lacking from the sense, though something may be lacking from the words. Let others hunt after syllables and letters; you seek the meanings. The day would fail me if I were to review the testimonies of all who have translated according to the sense.

It is enough for the present to have named Hilary the Confessor, who translated from Greek into Latin the Homilies on Job, and very many treatises on the Psalms, and did not sit dozing over the letter, nor torture himself with a foul, rustic manner of translation, but transposed the captured meanings into his own tongue as by the right of a conqueror. 7. Nor is this to be wondered at in others—men of the world, that is, or of the Church—since the Seventy translators, and the Evangelists and Apostles, did the same thing in the sacred volumes. We read in Mark the Lord saying: Talitha cumi, and immediately it is added, "which is interpreted, girl, I say to you, arise".

Let the Evangelist be accused of falsehood, because he added "I say to you," when in the Hebrew there is only "girl, arise." But that he might make it more emphatic, and express the sense of one calling and commanding, he added, "I say to you." Again in Matthew, when the thirty pieces of silver had been returned by the betrayer Judas, and a potter's field bought with them, it is written, "Then was fulfilled what was said through Jeremiah the Prophet, saying: And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value; and they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed to me". This is not found at all in Jeremiah, but in Zechariah, in words very different and with the whole order changed; for the Vulgate Edition reads thus: "And I said to them: If it be good in your sight, give me my price, or refuse it. And they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver.

And the Lord said to me: Cast it into the melting-pot; and consider if it be a tried price, as I was prized by them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them into the house of the Lord, into the melting-pot". How much the translation of the Seventy differs from the Evangelist's testimony is evident. But even in the Hebrew, though the sense is the same, the words are transposed and almost different. "And I said," he says, "to them: If it be good in your eyes, bring my price; and if not, forbear. And the Lord said to me: Throw it to the statuary: a handsome price, at which I was valued by them.

And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and threw them into the house of the Lord to the statuary." Let them accuse the Apostle of falsehood, because he agrees neither with the Hebrew nor with the translators of the Seventy, and—what is more serious than these—errs in the name, for he put Jeremiah instead of Zechariah. But far be it to say this of the attendant of Christ, whose concern was not to hunt after words and syllables, but to set forth the meanings of the doctrines. Let us come to another testimony of the same Zechariah, which John the Evangelist takes according to the Hebrew Truth. "They shall look on him whom they pierced", for which in the Seventy we read, καὶ ἐπιβλέψονται πρός με, ἀνθ' ὧν ἐνωρχήσαντο, which the Latins have translated: "And they shall look upon me, because of those things which they mocked, or insulted." The Evangelist, the Seventy translators, and our own translation disagree; and yet the variety of wording agrees in unity of spirit.

In Matthew also we read the Lord foretelling to the Apostles their flight, and confirming this very thing by the testimony of Zechariah. It is written, he says, I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered. But in the Seventy and in the Hebrew it is far otherwise; for it is not said in the person of God, as the Evangelist would have it, but in that of the Prophet asking God the Father: "Strike the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered." In this passage, as I think, according to the shrewdness of certain persons, the Evangelist is guilty of an offense, in that he dared to refer the Prophet's words to the person of God.

The aforesaid Evangelist writes that, at the Angel's warning, Joseph took the child and his mother, and entered into Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod, that what was spoken by the Lord through the Prophet might be fulfilled: "Out of Egypt have I called my son." This our copies do not have; but in Hosea, according to the Hebrew Truth, it is written: "Because Israel is a child, and I loved him: and out of Egypt I called my son". For which also in the same place the Seventy translated: "because Israel is a young child, and I loved him: and out of Egypt I called his children." Are they to be wholly rejected, because they translated differently a passage that pertains especially to the mystery of Christ? Or should indulgence rather be granted them, as to men, according to the saying of James: "In many things we all offend; and if any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body".

But that also which is written in the same Evangelist: "And coming he dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was said by the Prophets, that he shall be called a Nazarene". Let the λογοδαίδαλοι (word-jugglers) and the fastidious critics of all commentators answer where they have read this; and let them learn that it is set down in Isaiah. For in that place where we read and have translated: "There shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise up out of his root": in the Hebrew, according to that language's ἰδίωμα, it is written thus: "There shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a Nazarene shall grow out of his root." Why did the Seventy omit this, if it is not permitted to translate word for word? It is sacrilege either to have concealed or to have been ignorant of the mystery.

8. Let us pass to the rest, for the brevity of a letter does not allow lingering longer over individual points. The same Matthew says: "Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the Prophet, saying: Behold a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel". Which the Seventy translated: "Behold a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel." If they quibble about words, certainly "shall have" and "shall receive" are not the same; nor "they shall call" and "you shall call." Moreover in the Hebrew we read it written thus: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel." Not Ahaz, who was being accused of unbelief, not the Jews who were going to deny the Lord, but she herself who shall conceive, he says, shall call—the virgin herself, who shall bring forth.

In the same Evangelist we read that Herod, at the coming of the Magi, was troubled; and that the Scribes and Priests having been gathered together, he inquired of them where Christ should be born; and that they answered, "in Bethlehem of Judah: for so it is written by the Prophet: And you Bethlehem, land of Judah, are in no wise least among the princes of Judah: for out of you shall come forth a ruler who shall rule my people Israel." This passage in the Vulgate Edition reads thus: "And you Bethlehem, house of Ephratha, are small to be among the thousands of Judah; out of you shall come forth to me one who shall be a prince in Israel." How great is the disagreement between Matthew and the Seventy, both in wording and in order, you will marvel the more if you look at the Hebrew, where it is written thus: "And you Bethlehem Ephratha, are a little one among the thousands of Judah; out of you shall come forth to me one who shall be ruler in Israel." Consider step by step what was set down by the Evangelist: And you Bethlehem, land of Judah.

For "land of Judah," the Hebrew has Ephratha; the Seventy, house of Ephratha. And for "you are in no wise least among the princes of Judah," in the Seventy it reads, "you are small, to be among the thousands of Judah"; in the Hebrew, "you are a little one among the thousands of Judah"; and the sense is contrary, the Seventy agreeing with itself and with the Hebrew in this one point at least. For the Evangelist said that it is not small among the princes of Judah, whereas the opposite is set down: small indeed and little; yet nevertheless from you, small and little, shall a ruler come forth in Israel, according to that saying of the Apostle: "God has chosen the weak things of the world, that he may confound the strong". Further, what follows, "who shall rule," or "who shall feed my people Israel," is clearly otherwise in the Prophet.

9. I repeat these things not in order to accuse the Evangelists of falsehood (this indeed belongs to the impious, to Celsus, Porphyry, Julian), but to accuse my critics of ignorance, and to obtain from them the pardon of granting to me, in a simple letter, what—whether they will or not—they will have to grant to the Apostles in the holy Scriptures. Mark, the disciple of Peter, thus begins his Gospel: "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is written in Isaiah the Prophet: Behold I send my angel before your face, who shall prepare your way before you. The voice of one crying in the desert, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths." This passage is composed from two Prophets, namely Malachi and Isaiah. For the first part, which says: "Behold I send my angel before your face, who shall prepare your way before you", is written at the end of Malachi.

But the following part which is added: "The voice of one crying in the desert," and so on, we read in Isaiah. And how did Mark, right at the beginning of his volume, put "as it is written in Isaiah the Prophet: Behold I send my angel", which, as we have said, is not written in Isaiah, but in Malachi, the last of the twelve Prophets? Let unlearned presumption resolve this little question; and I shall beg pardon for my error.

The same Mark introduces the Savior speaking to the Pharisees: "Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and hungry, he and those who were with him; how he entered the house of God under Abiathar the High Priest, and ate the loaves of proposition, which it was not lawful to eat, except only for the priests?" Let us read Samuel, or (as it is called in the common title) the Books of Kingdoms, and there we shall find it written not Abiathar, but Abimelech the High Priest, who afterward, along with the other priests, was slain by Doeg at Saul's command. But this passage of Matthew we shall explain and reconcile in the Commentaries. He was struck down. Let us come to the Apostle Paul. He writes to the Corinthians: “For if they had known the Lord of glory, they would not have crucified him.

But as it is written: What eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him.” Some are wont at this passage to follow the ravings of the apocrypha, and to say that this testimony was taken from the Apocalypse of Elijah: whereas in Isaiah, according to the Hebrew, it reads thus: “From of old they have not heard, nor perceived with their ears. The eye hath not seen, O God, besides thee, what things thou hast prepared for them that wait for thee”. The Seventy translated this quite differently: “From of old we have not heard; neither have our eyes seen God besides thee, and thy true works, and thou wilt show mercy to them that wait for thee.” We understand whence the testimony was taken, and yet the Apostle did not render word for word, but expressed the same sense paraphrastically, in other words.

In the Epistle to the Romans the same Apostle Paul, taking an example from Isaiah, says: “Behold, I lay in Sion a stumbling stone, and a rock of offence”, which differs from the old Translation; and yet agrees with the Hebrew truth. For in the Septuagint the sense is contrary: “that you should not run against as against a stone of stumbling, nor as against a rock of ruin”: whereas the Apostle Peter also, agreeing with the Hebrews and with Paul, put it thus: “But unto them that believe not, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence”. From all these it is clear that the Apostles and Evangelists, in interpreting the old Scriptures, sought the sense, not the words: nor were they greatly concerned about order and phrasing, so long as the matter was clear to the understanding.

10. Luke, an apostolic man and Evangelist, writes that Stephen, the first Martyr of Christ, in a Jewish assembly narrated: “Jacob went down into Egypt with seventy-five souls: and he died, and our fathers were carried over into Sichem, and were laid in the sepulchre which Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Hemor the father of Sichem”. This passage is found much otherwise in Genesis, namely that Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite, son of Seor, near Hebron, for four hundred shekels of silver, the double cave, and the field around it, and buried Sarah his wife in it.

And in the same book we read that afterward, when Jacob was returning from Mesopotamia with his wives and sons, he pitched his tent before Salem, a city of the Shechemites, which is in the land of Canaan, and dwelt there, and bought a part of the field in which he had his tents, from Hemor the father of Shechem, for a hundred lambs: and he set up an altar there, and invoked there the God of Israel. Abraham did not buy the cave from Hemor the father of Shechem, but from Ephron the son of Seor: nor was he buried at Shechem, but at Hebron, which is corruptly called Arboch. But the twelve Patriarchs were not buried at Arboch, but at Shechem, which field was not bought by Abraham, but by Jacob. I defer the solution of this little question also, so that my detractors may inquire and understand that in the Scriptures it is not the words but the sense that must be considered.

The beginning of the twenty-first Psalm, according to the Hebrews, is the very thing which the Lord spoke on the cross: Eli eli lama azabthani: which is interpreted, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Let them give a reason why the Seventy translators inserted “look upon me.” For thus they translated: “God, my God, look upon me, why hast thou forsaken me?” They will answer, no doubt, that there is no harm to the sense if two words are added. Let them hear from me too that no danger comes to the state of the Churches if, through the speed of dictation, I have left out some words. 11. It would take long now to review how much the Seventy have added of their own, how much they have omitted, which in the copies of the Church are marked with obeli and asterisks. For that which we read in Isaiah: “Blessed is he that hath seed in Sion, and household in Jerusalem”, the Hebrews are wont to deride when they hear it.

Likewise also in Amos, after the description of luxury: “They thought these things to be lasting, and not fleeting”. Truly a rhetorical sense and a Ciceronian declamation. But what shall we do with the authentic books, in which these things are not found written, and other things like them, which if we attempted to bring forward, would require endless volumes. Moreover, how much they have omitted, either the asterisks bear witness, as I have said, or our translation does, if it be compared by a careful reader with the old Translation: and yet the Septuagint Edition rightly holds its place in the Churches, either because it is the first, and was made before the coming of Christ, or because it was used by the Apostles (in whom, however, it does not differ from the Hebrew). But Aquila, a proselyte and contentious interpreter, who tried to translate not only words but even the etymologies of words, is rightly rejected by us.

For who could, instead of grain, wine, and oil, either read or understand χεῦμα, ὀπωρισμόν, στιλπνότητα, which we can call “pouring, ripe-fruiting, and shininess”? Or because the Hebrews have not only ἄρθρα (articles), but also πρόαρθρα (pre-articles), he, in bad taste, interprets even syllables and letters, and says σὺν τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ σὺν τὴν γῆν, which the Greek and Latin tongue does not admit at all; an example of which we may take from our own speech. For how many things are well said among the Greeks, which if we translate word for word, do not sound well in Latin: and conversely, things which please us, if translated according to their order, will displease them.

12. But that I may pass over countless instances, and show you, most Christian of all noblemen, and most noble of Christians, of what sort of falsification they accuse me in the translation of the letter, I will set down the beginning of the letter itself along with the Greek text, so that from one instance the rest may be understood: Ἔδει ἡμᾶς ἀγαπητὲ μὴ τῇ οἰήσει τῶν κλήρων φέρεσθαι, which I remember having translated thus: “It behooved us, dearest one, not to abuse the honor of the clergy unto pride.” Behold, they say, in one little verse how many falsehoods. First, ἀγαπητός means “beloved,” not “dearest.” Then, οἴησις means “estimation,” not “pride”; for he did not say οἰήματι, but οἰήσει: of which the one denotes swelling, the other judgment. And all that follows, “not to abuse the honor of the clergy unto pride,” is your own. What say you, O pillar of letters, and Aristarchus of our times, who pass judgment on all writers? So then, have we studied all this time in vain; and often withdrawn our hand from the rod? Leaving the harbor, we struck a rock at once.

Therefore, since to err is human, and to confess an error is the mark of a prudent man: you, whoever you are, the critic, correct me, I beseech you, master, and render word for word. You ought, he says, to have said: “It behooved us, beloved, not to be carried away by the estimation of the Clergy.” This is Plautine eloquence, this is Attic charm, and to be compared, as they say, with the speech of the Muses. In me is fulfilled the common proverb: he loses both oil and expense who sends an ox to the wrestling-ground. This is not the fault of him under whose mask another plays the Tragedy; but of Rufinus and Melanius his teachers, who for great pay taught him to know nothing. Nor do I reproach any Christian for lack of skill in speech: would that we had that Socratic saying: I know that I know nothing; and that of another wise man (Chilon, as it is thought): Know thyself.

To me it has always been a matter of reverence, not wordy rusticity, but holy simplicity. He who says he imitates the Apostle in speech, let him first imitate the virtues in the life of those men, in whom the greatness of holiness excused simplicity of speech; and whom, though dead, rising again refuted the syllogisms of Aristotle, and the twisted subtleties of Chrysippus. But it is ridiculous, if any of us, remaining amid the riches of Croesus, and the luxuries of Sardanapalus, should boast of mere rusticity alone: as though all robbers, and men guilty of divers crimes, were eloquent, and hid their bloody swords in the volumes of Philosophers, and not in the trunks of trees. 13. I have exceeded the measure of a letter, but I have not exceeded the measure of my grief. For I, who am called a forger, and torn apart amid the spindles and looms of little women, am content to deny the charge, not to give a full account of it.

Wherefore I leave all things to your judgment; that you may read the letter itself, both in Greek and in Latin: and at once you will understand the idle tales and shameful complaints of my accusers. Moreover it is enough for me to have instructed a dearest friend; and, hiding away in my cell, to await only the day of judgment. And I hope, if it can be done, and if my adversaries permit, to write to you rather Commentaries on the Scriptures, than the Philippics of Demosthenes and Cicero.

A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth good things, and a tree is known by its fruits. You measure us by your own virtues, and, being great, exalt small men: and you take the last place at the feast, that you may be advanced by the judgment of the householder. For what is there in us, or how much, that we should deserve the praise of a learned voice? That by that mouth, by which the most religious Prince is defended, we humble and small men should be praised? Do not, then, dearest brother, judge faith by number of years: nor think wisdom lies in gray hairs, but gray hairs in wisdom, as Solomon testifies: “The gray hair of man is his prudence”. For Moses too was bidden to choose seventy Elders, whom he himself knew to be Elders: to be judged, certainly, not by age, but by prudence. And Daniel, while still a boy, judges men of great age, and wanton old age condemns immodest old men.

Do not, I say, weigh faith by time: nor think me better for this reason, that I began earlier to serve in the army of Christ. Paul the Apostle, a chosen vessel, changed from a persecutor, last in order, is first in merit: because, though the last, he labored more than all. Judas, who once had heard: “But thou, O man, who didst eat sweet meats together with me, my guide, and my acquaintance, who together with me didst walk with consent in the house of God”, betrayer of friend and master, is convicted by the voice of the Savior;

And ties the knot of shapeless death from a high beam.

On the contrary, the thief exchanges the cross for paradise, and makes the penalty of murder a martyrdom. How many today, by living long, carry about their own funerals, and, like whitened sepulchres, are full of dead men's bones? A sudden warmth conquers a long-lasting lukewarmness.

2. Finally you too, having heard the sentence of the Savior: “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and come, follow me”; you turn words into deeds, and, naked, following the naked cross, more unencumbered and lighter, you climb Jacob's ladder. You change your tunic along with your soul, and, not with a full purse, do you seek glorious rags: but with pure hands and a bright breast, you glory in being poor both in spirit and in works. It is no great thing, with a sad and sallow face, either to feign or to make a show of fasts: to abound in the revenues of possessions, and to flaunt a cheap little cloak.

That famous Crates the Theban, a man once very rich, when he was going to Athens to study philosophy, threw away a great weight of gold; nor did he think that he could at the same time possess both virtue and riches. We, laden with gold, follow the poor Christ; and under the pretext of almsgiving, brooding over our former wealth, how can we faithfully distribute what belongs to another, we who timidly keep back our own? A full belly easily discourses on fasting. It is not to have been at Jerusalem, but to have lived well at Jerusalem, that is to be praised. That city is to be sought, that city is to be praised, not the one that killed the Prophets and shed the blood of Christ; but the one which the rush of the river makes glad: which, set upon a mountain, cannot be hidden: which the Apostle proclaims to be the mother of the saints: in which he rejoices to have his citizenship together with the righteous.

3. Nor indeed, in saying this, do I accuse myself of inconstancy, and condemn what I do: so that I might seem to have left, in vain, my own people and my fatherland after the example of Abraham: but I do not dare to shut up the omnipotence of God within a narrow boundary, and to confine to a small spot of earth Him whom heaven cannot contain. Each and every one of the believers is weighed not by diversities of places, but by the merit of faith. And true worshippers adore the Father neither at Jerusalem, nor on Mount Garizim: because God is a Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. "But the Spirit breatheth where it will. The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof".

After the fleece of Judea was dried and the whole world was drenched with the heavenly dew, and many, coming from the East and the West, reclined in the bosom of Abraham; God ceased to be known only in Judea, and His great name in Israel alone: but the sound of the Apostles went out into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world. The Savior, speaking to His disciples while He was in the temple, said: "Arise, let us go hence": and to the Jews: "Your house shall be left unto you desolate". If heaven and earth shall pass away, certainly all things that are earthly shall pass away. Therefore the places of the Cross and of the Resurrection are of profit to those who bear their own cross, and who rise daily with Christ; who show themselves worthy of so great a dwelling-place.

But as for those who say, "The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord", let them hear from the Apostle: "You are the temple of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit dwelleth in you". And from Jerusalem and from Britain alike the heavenly court lies open: for "the kingdom of God is within you." Anthony, and all the swarms of monks of Egypt, and of Mesopotamia, Pontus, Cappadocia, and Armenia, never saw Jerusalem: and without that city the door of paradise lies open to them. Blessed Hilarion, though he was a Palestinian and lived in Palestine, saw Jerusalem only once in his life, that he might seem neither to despise the holy places on account of their nearness, nor again to confine the Lord to a place.

From the time of Hadrian down to the reign of Constantine, for about a hundred and eighty years, an image of Jupiter was worshipped in the place of the Resurrection; and on the rock of the Cross, a statue of Venus carved in marble was set up by the pagans and worshipped: the authors of the persecution supposing that they would take away from us our faith in the resurrection and the cross, if they polluted the holy places with idols. Bethlehem, now ours, and the most august spot in the world, of which the Psalmist sings: "Truth is sprung out of the earth", was overshadowed by a grove of Thamuz, that is, of Adonis: and in the cave where once the infant Christ cried, the lover of Venus was mourned.

4. Why, you will say, has this been repeated with so long a preamble?

Namely, that you may not think anything is lacking to your faith because you have not seen Jerusalem: nor should you reckon us the better for enjoying a dwelling in this place: but whether here or elsewhere, that you may have an equal reward before our Lord for your works. In truth, to confess simply the movement of my mind, when I consider both your purpose and the fervor with which you have renounced the world, I think there is a difference of places, if, having left cities and the crowds of cities, you dwell in a small field, and seek Christ in solitude, and pray alone on the mountain with Jesus, and enjoy only the neighborhood of the holy places—that is, that you both lack a city and not lose the purpose of a monk.

What I say, I do not say of bishops, nor of presbyters, nor of clerics, whose office is different; but of a monk, and a monk once noble in the eyes of the world: who for that reason laid the price of his possessions at the feet of the Apostles, teaching that money is to be trodden underfoot; so that, living humbly and in secret, he may always despise what he once despised. If the places of the Cross and of the Resurrection were not in a most crowded city, in which there is a court, in which there is a hall of soldiers, in which there are harlots, mimes, buffoons, and everything that is wont to be in other cities: or if it were frequented only by crowds of monks, such a dwelling-place would truly be desirable for all monks.

But as it is, it is the height of folly to renounce the world, to give up one's fatherland, to forsake cities, to profess oneself a monk, and yet to live among greater crowds of people just as you would have lived in your own country. From the whole world men run together to this place. The city is full of every kind of people: and there is such a crowding together of both sexes, that what you fled from elsewhere only in part, here you are compelled to endure in full.

5. Since, then, you ask as a brother by what way you ought to walk, I will speak with you with unveiled face. If you wish to exercise the office of a presbyter, if perhaps the work or the honor of the episcopate delights you, live in cities and towns; and, by working the salvation of others, make gain for your own soul.

But if you desire to be what you are called, a monk, that is, a solitary, what are you doing in cities, which are certainly not dwellings for the solitary, but for the many? Every calling has its own leaders. Let Roman generals imitate the Camilluses, the Fabricii, the Reguli, the Scipios. Let philosophers set before themselves Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Let poets emulate Homer, Virgil, Menander, Terence. Let historians emulate Thucydides, Sallust, Herodotus, Livy. Let orators emulate Lysias, the Gracchi, Demosthenes, Cicero. And, to come to our own concerns, let bishops and presbyters have as their example the Apostles and apostolic men: that, possessing their honor, they may strive also to possess their merit. But let us have as leaders of our calling, the Pauls and the Anthonys, the Julians, the Hilarions, the Macarii. And, to return to the authority of the Scriptures, our leader is Elijah, our leader Elisha, our chiefs the sons of the Prophets, who dwelt in the fields and in solitudes, and made for themselves tabernacles near the streams of the Jordan.

Of these too are the sons of Rechab, who drank neither wine nor strong drink, who dwelt in tents, who are praised by the voice of God through Jeremiah, and to whom it is promised that a man standing before the Lord shall not fail from their stock. This too, I think, is signified by the title of the seventieth Psalm: "Of the sons of Jonadab: and of those who were first led into captivity." This is that Jonadab the son of Rechab, who is written in the Book of Kings to have ridden in the chariot with Jehu. And these are his sons, who, always dwelling in tents, were at last compelled, because of the invasion of the Chaldean army, to enter Jerusalem, and are said to have endured this captivity first, because, after the freedom of the wilderness, they were shut up in a city as in a prison.

6. I beseech you, therefore, since you are bound by the tie of your holy sister (Therasia, your wife), and do not proceed with a step wholly free, that whether here or there, you flee crowds of men, and duties, and salutations, and banquets, as so many chains of pleasure. Let your evening meal be cheap—herbs and pulse: and now and then count little fish as the greatest of delicacies. He who longs for Christ, and feeds on that bread, does not greatly concern himself as to how costly the food is out of which he makes his dung. Whatever is not felt after the throat, let it be to you the same as bread and pulse. You have, against Jovinian, books discussing more fully the contempt of the belly and the throat. Let sacred reading always be in your hand. Prayer should be frequent, and, the body being bent, the mind should be raised up to the Lord. Let vigils be frequent: and with an empty stomach you should more often sleep.

Flee rumors and petty glories and fawning flatterers as enemies. Distribute refreshments of expense to the poor and the brethren with your own hand. Faith is rare among men. Do you not believe that what I say is true? Think of Judas's purse. Do not, with a swollen mind, affect humility of dress. Avoid the company of worldly people, and especially of the powerful. What need have you to see so often those things whose contempt made you begin to be a monk? Let your sister especially avoid the conversations of matrons; nor, sitting in her shabby dress among women clad in silk garments and jewels, should she either grieve or marvel at herself: for the one is repentance of a resolve, the other a seed-plot of boasting. Take care not, as a once faithful and famous steward of your own household, to receive other people's money for distribution. You understand what I am saying; for the Lord has given you understanding in all things.

Have the simplicity of the dove, that you may plot deceit against no one: and the cunning of the serpent, that you may not be tripped up by the snares of others. It is not much different, in point of fault, whether a Christian is able to deceive, or is deceived. Whomever you perceive to speak to you either always, or often, about money—except in the case of almsgiving, which lies open indifferently to all—regard him rather as a trader than as a monk. Beyond food and clothing, and manifest necessities, give nothing to anyone; lest the dogs eat the bread of the children.

7. But the true temple of Christ is the soul of the believer: adorn that, clothe that, offer your gifts to that, receive Christ in that. What profit is it that the walls should shine with gems, while Christ in the person of the poor is in danger of perishing with hunger? What you possess is now no longer your own, but a stewardship has been entrusted to you. Remember Ananias and Sapphira.

They fearfully kept back what was their own: take heed, you, lest you pour out imprudently the substance of Christ, that is, lest by immoderate judgment you give to those who are not poor what belongs to the poor, and, according to the saying of a most wise man, by liberality, liberality itself perish. Do not look to the trappings, and empty names of Catos. I know you, he says, within and under the skin.

It is a great thing to be a Christian, not merely to seem one. And I do not know how it is that those please the world more, who displease Christ. This is not, as they say, a sow teaching Minerva; but as one entering the sea, I, a friend, have warned a friend, preferring that my capacity be questioned by you rather than my goodwill: that in that wherein I have stumbled, you may proceed with a firm step.

8. I have gladly read your book, which you sent me, prudently and elegantly composed in honor of the Emperor Theodosius; and in it, its arrangement into subdivisions pleased me especially. And while in the earlier parts you surpass others, in the closing parts you surpass yourself. Moreover, the very style of the diction is compact and polished: and while it shines with Ciceronian purity, it is also dense with weighty sentiments. For (as someone has said) that speech lies flat in which only the words are praised.

Besides, there is a great logical sequence of matter, and each part hangs upon another. Whatever you take up is either the conclusion of what precedes or the beginning of what follows. Happy Theodosius, who is defended by such an orator of Christ! You have made his purple robes illustrious, and have consecrated the usefulness of his laws to future ages. Well done, by your virtue: you who have such beginnings—what a soldier will you be when fully trained!

Oh, if only it were granted me to lead a talent such as this, not over the Aonian mountains and the heights of Helicon, as the poets sing, but over Sion and Tabor, and the heights of Sinai. If it were my lot to teach what I have learned: and to hand down, as it were, from hand to hand, the mysteries of the Prophets, something would be born to us which learned Greece does not possess.

9. Hear then, my fellow-servant, friend, brother: listen for a little while, along what path you should walk in the holy Scriptures. All that we read in the divine Books shines indeed, and gleams even in the outer rind, but is sweeter in the marrow. He who wishes to eat the kernel must break the nut. "Open thou," says David, "mine eyes, and I will consider the wondrous things of thy law". If so great a Prophet confesses the darkness of ignorance, in what night of ignorance do you think we, mere babes and almost still nursing infants, are surrounded?

Now this veil is placed not only on the face of Moses, but also on the Evangelists and on the Apostles. The Savior spoke to the crowds in parables, and, attesting that what was said was mystical, said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear". Unless all things that are written be opened by Him who has the key of David: who opens, and no one shuts; who shuts, and no one opens: with no other one unlocking them, they will not be laid open. If you had this foundation, nay, if the finishing touch, as it were, were put to your work, we would have nothing more beautiful, nothing more learned, nothing sweeter, and nothing more truly Latin than your volumes.

10. Tertullian is dense with weighty sentences, but difficult in his manner of speaking. Blessed Cyprian, like a most pure spring, flows sweetly and gently; and though he is wholly given to exhortation to the virtues, being occupied with the straits of persecution, he never discoursed on the divine Scriptures.

Victorinus, crowned with a glorious martyrdom, cannot express what he understands. Lactantius, like a certain river of Ciceronian eloquence, would that he had been as able to affirm our own doctrines as he was to destroy those of others! Arnobius is uneven and excessive, and confused for want of a division of his work. Saint Hilary is raised up on the Gallican buskin: and though he is adorned with the flowers of Greece, he is at times entangled in long periods, and is far removed from the reading of simpler brothers. I say nothing of the rest, whether dead or still living, on whom others after us will pass judgment, one way or another.

11. I will come to you yourself, my fellow-initiate, my comrade, and my friend—my friend, I say, even before he was known to me; and I will beg you not to suspect flattery in this close bond: rather think me to err, or to slip through love, than to deceive a friend by adulation.

You possess great natural gift, and an unlimited store of speech: you speak both fluently and purely, and that very fluency and purity are mingled with prudence. For where the head is sound, all the senses flourish. If to this prudence and eloquence there were added either zeal or understanding of the Scriptures, I should soon see you holding the citadel of our people, and ascending with Joab the roof of Sion, singing on the housetops what you had learned in your chamber. Gird yourself, I beg you, gird yourself. "Nothing has life given to mortals without great labor". Let the Church hold you noble, as the Senate once held you. Prepare for yourself riches which you may daily spend, and which will never fail, while your age is vigorous, while your head is not yet sprinkled with gray hairs; before "sicknesses come on, and sad old age, and toil, and the harshness of relentless death seizes you." I am not content that anything in you be mediocre: I desire everything to be the highest, everything perfect.

With what eagerness I received the holy priest Vigilantius, it is better that you learn from his own words than from my letter; why he departed from us so quickly, and left us, I cannot say, lest I seem to injure someone. Yet, as one passing by and in haste, I detained him a little, and gave him a taste of our friendship, so that through him you may learn what you are missing in us. I wish your holy fellow-servant, who serves with you in the Lord, to be greeted through you.

You provoke us with great Questions; and while you ask, you teach a mind grown sluggish through idleness. Your first inquiry was, what are those things "which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, which God has prepared for those who love him". And how, again, the same Apostle adds: "But God has revealed them to us through his Spirit". And if it was revealed to the Apostle, we ought to understand how he revealed it to others as well. To which the brief answer is, that we ought not to inquire what that is which neither eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man. For if it is unknown, how can it be known? What is promised in the future is not seen in the present. For "hope that is seen is not hope", but already a certain possession: as if someone should wish to say: show me what is invisible; speak what cannot be heard; explain what human thought does not comprehend.

Therefore the Apostle must be believed to have spoken in this sense, that spiritual things cannot be comprehended by carnal eyes, and carnal ear, and mortal thought. "For even though we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him no longer". And in the Epistle of John it is written: "Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been made manifest what we shall be. We know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is". And that which he testifies was revealed to himself and to the saints through the Spirit does not immediately follow that he himself revealed it to others. Otherwise, he heard in paradise words unspeakable, which he could not tell to others; or if he did tell them, they are by no means unspeakable.

2. The second Question was, in which you say you had read in passing in my little works, that the sheep who stand on the right, and the goats who stand on the left, are Christians and gentiles, rather than the good and the evil. I do not remember ever having said this, and if I had said it, I would not be stubborn in error. As far as I can suddenly recall while dictating, I know that in the second volume against Jovinian I discussed this chapter, and not only this, but also that which falls under the same question, where the bad fish will be separated from the good fish. What was fully said there, then, need not be repeated here.

3. Third, you had asked, concerning what the Apostle says of the coming of the Lord Savior, that some living will be caught up together in the clouds, so that they are not preceded by those who have fallen asleep in Christ; and you wish to know whether they thus meet him in bodies and do not die beforehand; since our Lord himself died, and Enoch and Elijah, according to the Apocalypse of John, are said to be destined to die, so that indeed there be no one who has not tasted death. This can be known from the context of that passage itself, that the saints who are found in the body at the coming of the Savior will meet him in those same bodies; yet in such a way that what is inglorious, corruptible, and mortal is changed into glory, incorruption, and immortality; so that just as the bodies of the dead are to rise, so also the bodies of the living will be transformed into the same substance.

Whence the Apostle says elsewhere: "Wherefore we do not wish to be unclothed, but to be further clothed, that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life", that is, so that the body may not be deserted by the soul; but with the soul dwelling in the body, that which was before inglorious may become glorious. But concerning Enoch and Elijah, whom the Apocalypse relates as coming and destined to die, a discussion does not belong to this occasion, since that whole book must either be understood spiritually, as we judge, or if we follow a carnal interpretation, we must acquiesce in Jewish fables, that Jerusalem be rebuilt again, and sacrifices offered in the Temple, and, with spiritual worship diminished, carnal ceremonies prevail.

4. The fourth thing you asked was, how in John's Gospel, after the resurrection, it is said to Mary Magdalene: "Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father".

And again in Matthew it is written that the women fell at the feet of the Savior; since surely it is not the same thing to touch his feet after the resurrection, and not to touch them. Mary Magdalene is the same one from whom he had cast out seven demons; so that where sin had abounded, grace might abound the more; and because she thought the Lord was the gardener, and spoke to him as if to a man, and sought the living among the dead, she rightly heard, "Do not touch me". And the sense is: You do not deserve to cling to my footsteps, nor to worship as Lord, nor to hold the feet of him whom you do not believe to have risen. For to you I have not yet ascended to my Father. But the other women, who touch his feet, confess him as Lord, and deserve to cling to the footsteps of him whom they trust has ascended to the Father.

Although, even if the same woman is reported in different Gospels both to have held his feet and not to have held them, the solution is easy, since she could first have been corrected as unbelieving, and afterward not repelled, as one who had changed her error by confession—which can also be understood concerning the thieves, since one Evangelist relates that both blasphemed, another that one confessed.

5. The last page of your letter contained this: whether after the resurrection, for forty days, the Lord dwelt with the disciples, and was never elsewhere? Or whether he secretly ascended to heaven and descended again, and nevertheless did not deny his presence to the Apostles?

If you consider the Lord the Son of God, of whom this discourse is, and that it is he who speaks: "Do I not fill heaven and earth, says the Lord", and of whom another Prophet testifies: "Heaven is my throne, and earth is the footstool of my feet"; and again elsewhere: "Who holds heaven in his palm and earth in his fist", of whom David sings: "Where shall I go from your Spirit? And where shall I flee from your face? If I ascend into heaven, you are there; if I descend into hell, you are present; and if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will hold me"—surely you will not doubt that even before the resurrection the Word of God so dwelt in the body of the Lord, that he was also in the Father, and enclosed the circle of heaven, and was infused into and poured around all things—that is, that he penetrated all things within and contained them without.

It is foolish, therefore, to confine his power to the smallness of one little body, whom heaven does not contain: and yet he who was everywhere was also wholly present in the Son of Man. For the divine nature, and the Word of God, cannot be cut into parts, nor divided by places: but since he is everywhere, he is wholly everywhere. He was, therefore, at one and the same time both with the Apostles for forty days, and with the Angels, and in the Father, and in the uttermost parts of the sea; he moved about in all places: with Thomas in India, with Peter in Rome, with Paul in Illyricum, with Titus in Crete, with Andrew in Achaia, with each of the Apostles and apostolic men, in each and every region. But when it is said that he leaves some, or does not leave them, this is not a limit set upon that nature; rather, it describes the merits of those with whom he deigns to be, or not to be.

Small talents cannot sustain great subjects, and in the very attempt, daring beyond their strength, they collapse; and the greater what must be said, the more he who cannot explain the greatness of the matter in words is overwhelmed by it. My Nepotian, yours, ours—nay, Christ's, and because Christ's, therefore all the more ours—has left us old men wounded by the dart of longing for him, and worn out with unbearable grief. Him whom we thought our heir, we now hold as a corpse. For whom now shall my talent labor and sweat? Whose pleasure shall my little writings seek? Where is that our taskmaster, and that voice sweeter than the swan's song? The mind is stunned, the hand trembles, the eyes grow dim, the tongue falters. Whatever I shall say seems mute, because he does not hear it. The very pen, as if feeling it, and the wax somewhat sadder, is overspread either with rust or with mold.

As often as I strive to break out into words, and to scatter the flowers of this Epitaph over his tomb, so often my eyes fill with tears, and with grief renewed, I am wholly absorbed in his funeral. It was once the custom that over the bodies of the departed, free-born sons should speak their praises before the assembly at the rostra, and, like mournful songs, stir the hearts of the hearers to weeping and groaning. Behold, the order of things among us is changed, and to our calamity nature has lost her rights. What a young man ought to have rendered to old men, this we old men render to a young man.

2. What then shall I do? Shall I join my tears with yours? But the Apostle forbids it, calling the Christian dead "those who sleep". And the Lord in the Gospel says: "The girl is not dead, but sleeps". Lazarus too, because he had slept, was raised up.

Let me rejoice and be glad, because "he was taken away, lest wickedness should change his understanding," because "his soul was pleasing to God". But against my will and in spite of my resistance, tears flow down my cheeks, and amid the precepts of virtue and the hope of resurrection, the feeling of longing breaks my believing mind. O death, who dividest brothers, and cruelly and harshly separatest those united by love. The Lord has brought a burning wind rising from the desert, which has dried up your veins, and laid waste your fountain. You devoured Jonah indeed, but he was alive even in your belly. You bore him as though dead, that the storm of the world might be stilled, and that our Nineveh might be saved by his preaching. He, he has conquered you; he has slain you, that fugitive Prophet, who left his house, gave up his inheritance, delivered his beloved soul into the hands of those who sought it.

He who once through Hosea threatened you sternly: "I will be your death, O death; I will be your bite, O hell". By his death, you have died; by his death, we live. You devoured, and you are devoured. And while you were busied with the allurement of the assumed body, and thought it prey for your greedy jaws, your very inward parts were pierced through by the hooked tooth.

3. We give thanks to thee, Christ Saviour, thy own creature that we are, that thou, while being slain, didst slay so powerful an adversary of ours. Who before thee was more wretched than man, who, prostrated by the terror of eternal death, had received the sense of living only for this, that he might perish? For "death reigned from Adam even unto Moses, even over them that had not sinned, after the similitude of Adam's transgression". If Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were in hell, who then was in the kingdom of heaven?

If thy friends, under the penalty of Adam's offense, and those who had not sinned, were held bound by others' sins, what must be believed of those who "said in their hearts, there is no God"? Who "are corrupt and become abominable in their pursuits"? Who "have all gone aside, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doth good, no not one"? But if Lazarus is seen in Abraham's bosom, in a place of refreshment, how is this like hell, and how like the kingdoms of heaven? Before Christ, Abraham was among the dead; after Christ, the thief was in paradise. And therefore at his resurrection, many bodies of them that slept arose, and were seen in the heavenly Jerusalem. Then was that saying fulfilled: "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise, and Christ shall give thee light". John the Baptist proclaims in the wilderness: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For from the days of John the Baptist the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force".

That flaming sword, guard of paradise, and the Cherubim standing before its gates, have been quenched and unbarred by the blood of Christ. Nor is it strange that this is promised to us at the resurrection, since all we who, though in the flesh, live not after the flesh, have our citizenship in heaven; and even here, still set upon earth, it is said: "The kingdom of God is within you".

4. Add also that before Christ's resurrection, God was "known" only "in Judea: in Israel was his name great". And even those who had known him were nevertheless dragged down to the dead. Where then were the men of the whole world, from India even to Britain, from the rigid region of the north even to the burning heats of the Atlantic Ocean, so countless peoples, and so vast multitudes of nations?

How varied in tongues, in dress, and in arms:

Like fish and locusts, and like flies and gnats, they were crushed to nothing; for without knowledge of his Creator, every man is a beast. But now the passion of Christ, and his resurrection, the voices and letters of all nations proclaim. I say nothing of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins, whose nations the Lord dedicated to his faith in the title of the Cross. The immortal soul, subsisting even after the dissolution of the body—a thing Pythagoras dreamed, Democritus did not believe, Socrates argued in prison as a consolation for his condemnation—the Indian, the Persian, the Goth, the Egyptian now philosophize upon it. The savagery of the Bessi, and the crowd of fur-clad peoples, who once sacrificed men as offerings for the dead, have broken their harsh voices into the sweet melody of the Cross, and the one voice of the whole world is Christ.

5. What are we doing, my soul? Whither do we turn? What do we take up first? What do we pass over in silence?

Have the precepts of the Rhetoricians slipped from thee? And, seized by grief, overwhelmed by tears, hindered by sobs, dost thou not keep the order of speech? Where now is that study of letters from childhood, and the ever-praised saying of Anaxagoras and Telamon: "I knew that I had begotten a mortal"? We have read Crantor, whose book, to soothe his own grief, Cicero followed; we have run through the little works of Plato, Diogenes, Clitomachus, Carneades, Posidonius, for the assuaging of griefs, who at different times endeavored, by books or by letters, to lessen the grief of different men, so that even if our own genius were dry, it might be watered from their springs.

They set forth countless men, and especially Pericles and Xenophon the Socratic, of whom the one, having lost two sons, discoursed crowned in the assembly; the other, when sacrificing, having heard that his son had been slain in war, is said to have laid aside his garland, and to have put it back upon his head, after finding that his son had fallen fighting bravely in the battle-line. Why should I mention the Roman generals, by whose virtues, as by certain stars, the Latin histories shine? Pulvillus, while dedicating the Capitol, on being suddenly told that his son had died, ordered him to be buried in his absence. Lucius Paulus, in the midst of the funerals of two sons, entered the city in triumph for seven days. I pass over the Maximi, Catos, Galli, Pisones, Bruti, Scaevolae, Metelli, Scauri, Marii, Crassi, Marcelli, and Aufidii, whose virtue in grief was no less than in war, and whose bereavements Tully set forth in his book of Consolation, lest I should seem to seek foreign examples rather than our own.

And yet even these things have been briefly said to our shame, if faith does not display what unbelief has shown.

6. Let us then come to our own matters. I will not lament, with Jacob and David, sons dying under the Law; but with Christ, in the Gospel, I will receive them as rising again. The mourning of the Jews is the joy of Christians. "Weeping shall tarry for the evening, and joy cometh in the morning". "The night is far spent, but the day is at hand". Whence also Moses, dying, is mourned, while Joshua is buried on the mountain without funeral or tears. Whatever can be said from the Scriptures on the subject of lamentation, I have briefly set forth in that book by which I consoled Paula at Rome. Now we must come by another path to the same goal, lest we seem to tread again upon tracks once already trodden and worn away.

7. We know indeed that our Nepotianus is with Christ, and mingled with the choirs of the Saints, and that he now says, seeing near at hand what he here with us on earth searched out from afar and sought by conjecture: "As we have heard, so have we seen, in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God": but we cannot bear the longing for his absence, grieving not his lot but our own. The happier he is, the more we grieve, because we lack such a good. The sisters of Lazarus also wept, though they knew he would rise again. And, to express the true feelings of a man, the Saviour himself wept for him whom he was about to raise up.

His Apostle too, who said, "I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ", and elsewhere, "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain", gives thanks that Epaphroditus was restored to him from the nearness of death, lest he should have sorrow upon sorrow, not from fear born of unbelief, but from the longing of love. How much more dost thou, both uncle and Bishop—that is, father both in the flesh and in the spirit—grieve that thy own flesh and blood is absent, and sigh as though torn from thyself? But I beg thee to set a measure upon thy grief, mindful of that saying: "Nothing in excess"; and, the wound being bound up a little while, mayest thou hear the praises of him in whose virtue thou hast always rejoiced; and grieve not that thou hast lost such a one, but rejoice that thou hast had him.

And as those who paint on a small tablet the situation of lands, so in this little volume mayest thou behold the outline, not the full expression, of his virtues; and mayest thou receive from us not the full strength, but the good will.

8. These are the precepts of the Rhetoricians, that the ancestors of him who is to be praised, and their deeds, be traced further back, and that the discourse proceed to the man himself by degrees; so that he may become more illustrious by the virtues of grandfather and father, and may seem either not to have degenerated from good men, or himself to have adorned men of middling worth. I shall not seek the goods of the flesh, which he himself always despised, in the praises of his soul; nor shall I boast of lineage, that is, of others' goods, since even Abraham and Isaac, holy men, begot Ishmael and Esau, sinners.

And on the other hand, Jephthah, counted in the catalogue of the just, numbered by the Apostle's voice, was born of a harlot. "The soul," it says, "that sinneth, it shall die"; therefore that which has not sinned, it shall live. Neither the virtues nor the vices of parents are imputed to children. We are reckoned from that time when we are reborn in Christ. Paul, persecutor of the Church, and in the morning a ravening wolf, "Benjamin", by evening gave food, bowing his head as a lamb to Ananias. So too our Nepotianus, like a wailing infant and untaught boy, was suddenly born to us, as it were, from the Jordan.

9. Perhaps another would write, that for his sake thou didst leave the East and the desert; and that thou didst beguile me, thy dearest companion, with the hope of return, so that first, if it could be done, thou mightest keep his widowed sister with her little son; then, if she should refuse the counsel, at least preserve thy most beloved nephew.

For this is he of whom I once made a kind of prophecy to thee: though a little nephew hang from thy neck. Another, I say, would relate how, in the service of the palace, under the cloak and shining linen, his body was worn by hair-cloth; how, standing before the powers of the age, he bore a face pale with fasting; how, still under another's garb, he served another master; and how he wore the belt of office only that he might aid widows, orphans, the oppressed, and the wretched. To me these delays of an imperfect service to God are not pleasing. And I read that the centurion Cornelius, being a just man, was immediately baptized.

10. Nevertheless, let us approve, as it were, certain cradle-beginnings of his budding faith; so that he who was a devoted soldier under another's standards should be given the crown of laurel, once he had begun to serve his own King.

Laying aside his belt and changing his habit, whatever store of camp-money he had, he distributed to the poor. For he had read: "If thou wilt be perfect, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and follow me". And again: "Ye cannot serve two masters, God and mammon". Except for a cheap tunic and a covering to match, wherewith merely to keep his body covered and shut out the cold, he kept nothing more for himself. His very manner of dress, following the custom of the province, was remarkable neither for elegance nor for squalor. And though he burned daily either to go to the monasteries of Egypt, or to visit the choirs of Mesopotamia, or at least to occupy the solitudes of the islands of Dalmatia, which are separated from Altinum only by a strait, he did not dare to abandon his uncle the Bishop, seeing in him so many examples of virtues, and having at home whence to learn. In one and the same man he both imitated the Monk and venerated the Bishop.

It was not, as commonly happens, that familiarity bred contempt out of constant closeness; rather he revered him as a father, and marveled at him as though he beheld something new each day. What more shall I say? He becomes a Cleric, and through the usual grades is ordained a Presbyter. Good Jesus, what groans, what wailing, what refusal of food, what avoidance of every eye! Then, for the first and only time, he was angry with his uncle. He complained that he could not bear it, and pleaded that his youthful age was unsuited to the priesthood. But the more he resisted, the more he stirred the zeal of all toward him, and he deserved, by refusing, that which he did not wish to be, and was the more worthy the more he proclaimed himself unworthy. We have seen the Timothy of our own time, gray-haired in wisdom, and chosen a Presbyter by his own Moses, who himself knew him to be already a Presbyter.

Therefore, understanding the clerical office not as an honor but as a burden, his first care was to overcome envy by humility, then to give no occasion for any tale of scandalous rumor about himself; so that those who carped at his age were amazed at his continence; to help the poor, visit the sick, invite to hospitality, soothe with kindness, rejoice with them that rejoice, weep with them that weep. He was the staff of the blind, the food of the hungry, the hope of the wretched, the solace of mourners. So did he excel in each single virtue, as though he possessed no other. Among the Presbyters and his equals, first in labor, last in rank. Whatever good he had done, he referred to his uncle. If anything happened to turn out otherwise than he had thought, he said that his uncle had not known, and that he himself had erred. In public he acknowledged him as Bishop, at home as father: he tempered gravity of manner with cheerfulness of countenance.

One would perceive joy in his laughter, not mere loud mirth. Virgins and widows he honored as mothers, exhorted as sisters, with all chastity. Now indeed, after he had betaken himself home, and, leaving the Cleric outside, had given himself to the austerity of Monks, he was frequent in prayers, wakeful in supplication, offering tears to God, not to men; his fasts he moderated, like a charioteer, according to weariness and the strength of his body. He was present at his uncle's table, and so partook of what was set before him that he avoided superstition, yet kept his continence. His talk throughout the whole meal was to propose something from the Scriptures, to listen gladly, to answer modestly, to accept what was right, not to refute what was wrong harshly, to teach rather than to conquer one who argued against him. And with that ingenuous modesty which adorned his youth, he would simply confess whose saying each thing was; and in this manner, by declining the glory of learning, he was held to be most learned.

"That," he would say, "is Tertullian's, this Cyprian's: this is Lactantius', that Hilary's. So spoke Minucius Felix, thus Victorinus, in this manner Arnobius." Me too, because he loved me for the sake of his uncle's friendship, he would sometimes bring forward in the midst of talk. And by constant reading and long meditation, he had made his breast a library of Christ.

11. How often did he beg me in letters from across the sea, that I would write something to him? How often did he present to me the nocturnal petitioner from the Gospel, and the widow who importuned the harsh judge? And when I refused by silence rather than by writing, and by the shame of remaining silent covered with shame the one who was asking, he set his uncle before me as an intercessor, who might both plead more freely on another's behalf, and, out of reverence for the priesthood, obtain more easily. I did therefore what he wished, and in a brief little book consecrated our friendship to eternal memory.

When he had received it, he boasted that he had surpassed the wealth of Croesus and the riches of Darius. He held it with his eyes, with his hands, in his bosom, in his mouth. And when he often unrolled it in his bed, frequently, as he lay sleeping, the sweet page fell upon his breast. But if any stranger, if any friend had come, he rejoiced in our testimony concerning him. And whatever was lacking in the little work, he made up for by measured pauses and variety of delivery, so that in the reading of it, he himself seemed either to please or displease each day. Whence comes this fervor, if not from the love of God? Whence this untiring meditation on the law of Christ, if not from desire for him who gave the law?

Let others add coin to coin, and, stifling their purse, poison themselves with the wealth of matrons obtained by servile flattery; let monks be richer than they had been as laymen; let them possess, under Christ the poor one, riches which they did not have under the wealthy devil; and let the Church sigh over them as rich men, whom the world had held before as beggars. Our Nepotianus, trampling gold underfoot, pursues manuscripts. But just as he is a despiser of himself in the flesh, and walks the more adorned in poverty, so he seeks out the whole adornment of the Church.

12. In comparison indeed with the things said above, what we are about to say is modest, but even in small things the same spirit is shown.

For just as we marvel at the Creator not only in heaven and earth, in the sun, the ocean, elephants, camels, horses, oxen, leopards, bears, lions; but also in the tiniest creatures, the ant, the gnat, flies, little worms, and creatures of that sort, whose bodies we know better than their names, and in all of them we venerate the same skill: so a mind devoted to Christ is equally intent on both greater and lesser things, knowing that an account must be rendered even for an idle word. He was therefore careful whether the altar shone, whether the walls were free of soot, whether the pavements were clean, whether the doorkeeper was frequently at the door, whether the curtains were always in place at the entrances, whether the sacristy was clean, whether the vessels were bright: and in all the ceremonies a devout care was so ordered that it neglected neither lesser nor greater duty. Wherever you sought him in the church, you would find him.

Antiquity admires the noble man Quintus Fabius, who was also a writer of Roman history; but he finds his name more from a painting than from his writings; and Scripture testifies that our Bezaleel was full of wisdom and of the Spirit of God. Also Hiram, the son of the woman of Tyre, because the one fashioned the furnishings of the tabernacle, the other of the temple. For just as joyous crops, and fertile fields, sometimes luxuriate in stalks and ears of grain, so brilliant talents, and a mind full of virtues, overflow into the elegance of various arts. Whence also among the Greeks that philosopher is praised who boasted that everything he used, down to his cloak and ring, was made by his own hand.

We can say the same thing of this man, who adorned the basilicas of the Church, and the meeting-places of the Martyrs, with the shade of various flowers, and the foliage of trees, and the tendrils of vines: so that whatever pleased in the Church, both in arrangement and in appearance, testified to the labor and zeal of the priest.

13. Well done for such virtue—of what sort will the end be, when such were the beginnings? O wretched condition of humanity, and vain is all that we live without Christ! Why do you draw back, my speech? Why do you hesitate, as if we could delay his death and make his life longer, so we fear to arrive at the end. "All flesh is grass, and all its glory as the flower of grass". Where now is that comely face, where the dignity of his whole body, with which, as with a beautiful garment, the beauty of the soul was clothed?

Alas, the lily withered as the south wind blew, and the purple of the violet gradually faded into pallor. And when he burned with fevers, and the heat drained the springs of his veins, with weary breath he consoled his grieving uncle. His countenance was joyful, and while all around him wept, he alone smiled. To throw off his cloak, to stretch out his hands, to see what others did not see, and, as if rising up to meet someone, to greet those who were coming: you would understand that he was not dying, but emigrating, and changing friends, not leaving them. Tears roll down my face, and with a hardened resolve, I cannot conceal the grief that I suffer. Who would believe that at such a time he remembered our friendship, and, while his soul struggled, knew the sweetness of our studies?

Taking hold of his uncle's hand, he said: send this tunic, which I used in the ministry of Christ, to him most beloved to me, a father in age, a brother in fellowship; and whatever affection you owed to your nephew, transfer it to him whom you loved equally with me. And he grew faint upon such words, touching his uncle's hand in remembrance of me.

14. I know that you would not wish the love of the citizens for you thus—"The Senate," he says, "sent Quintus Fabius, who himself also wrote a history of the events of the Hannibalic war, to the oracle at Delphi." And Livy, book 22, chapter 7, testifies that he held Fabius, a contemporary of the events of this war, as his chief authority. To prove, and that he sought the affection of his country more in prosperous times. But a service of this kind is more pleasant in good times, more welcome in bad. The whole city, all Italy, mourned for him.

His body was received by the earth, his soul given back to Christ. You sought a nephew, the Church sought a priest. Your successor went before you. What you were, he, after you, was deemed worthy of by the judgment of all. And so from one household a twofold episcopal dignity went forth, while in the one there is rejoicing, that he held it; in the other, mourning, that he was snatched away lest he should hold it. It is Plato's opinion that the whole life of the wise is a meditation on death. The philosophers praise this, and extol it to the skies. But the Apostle far more strongly: "Daily," he says, "I die through your glory". For it is one thing to attempt, another to accomplish; one thing to live as one about to die, another to die as one about to live. The former is about to die out of glory; the latter dies always unto glory.

We too, therefore, ought to meditate beforehand in our minds on what we shall someday be; and whether we wish it or not, it cannot be far off. For even if we were to exceed nine hundred years of life, as the human race lived before the Flood, and the years of Methuselah were granted to us, still the length of the past would be nothing, once it had ceased to be. For between him who lived ten years, and him who lived a thousand, once the same end of life has arrived, and the inescapable necessity of death, the whole span passed is equal: except that the old man departs more heavily laden with the burden of sins.

The best days of life for wretched mortals flee first,
diseases steal in, and sad old age,
and toil, and the harsh cruelty of death carries all away.

The poet Naevius says: "It is necessary for a mortal to suffer many evils." Whence also antiquity imagined that Niobe, because she wept so much, was changed into stone and into various beasts. And Hesiod, lamenting the births of men, rejoices at their death; and Ennius wisely says.

The common people, he says, surpass kings in this respect: it is permitted
for the common folk to weep, but it is not fitting for kings to do so honorably.

As it is for a king, so for a bishop—indeed less for a bishop than for a king. For the one rules over the unwilling, the other over the willing; the one subjects by terror, the other rules by service; the one guards bodies unto death, the other preserves souls unto life. The eyes of all are fixed upon you; your household, and your manner of life, set as if upon a watchtower, is a teacher of public discipline. Whatever you do, all think it ought to be done by themselves. Take care not to commit what either those who wish to blame you may seem justly to tear apart, or what those who wish to imitate you may be compelled to sin in doing. Conquer as much as you can—indeed even more than you can—the softness of your spirit, and restrain your abundantly flowing tears, lest great piety toward a nephew be taken, among unbelieving minds, as despair toward God.

He should be longed for by you as one absent, not as one dead: so that you may seem to be awaiting him, not to have lost him.

15. But what am I doing, healing a grief which I think has already been calmed by time and by reason, and not rather unfolding to you the neighboring miseries of kings, and the calamities of our time, so that he is not so much to be mourned who has been deprived of this light, as to be congratulated who has escaped from such great evils? Constantius, patron of the Arian heresy, while preparing against the enemy, and being swept eagerly into battle, dying in the little village of Mopsus, left the empire to his enemy amid great grief. Julian, betrayer of his own soul, and slayer of the Christian army, perceived Christ in Media, whom he had first denied in Gaul; and while wishing to extend the boundaries of Rome, he lost the territories already extended.

Jovian, having tasted only royal blessings, perished suffocated by the stench of coals: showing to all what human power is. Valentinian, having laid waste his native soil, and leaving his country unavenged, was extinguished by a hemorrhage of blood. His brother Valens, defeated in the Gothic war in Thrace, had the same place both for his death and his burial. Gratian, betrayed by his own army, and not received by the cities he approached, became a mockery to the enemy, and the walls of you, Lyons, bear witness to the traces of the bloody hand. The young Valentinian, almost a boy, after flight, after exiles, after recovering his empire with much bloodshed, was slain not far from the city that was privy to his brother's death, and his lifeless corpse was disgraced by hanging. What shall I say of Procopius, Maximus, Eugenius, who indeed, while they held power, were a terror to the nations?

All, when captured, stood before the faces of their victors, and—what is most wretched for those who were once most powerful—were pierced first by the ignominy of servitude, before by the enemy's sword.

16. Someone may say: such is the condition of kings, and "lightning strikes the highest mountains." I will come to private ranks, and I will not speak of those who exceed two years in office; and, to pass over the rest, it suffices for us to write of the different ends of three recent consulars. Abundantius, in want, is exiled at Pityus. The head of Rufinus was carried on a pike to Constantinople, and his right hand, cut off, for the disgrace of his insatiable avarice, begged for alms from door to door. Timasius, suddenly cast down from the highest step of dignity, thinks he has escaped, because he lives ingloriously at Assa. I do not narrate the calamities of the wretched, but the fragile state of the human condition. My mind shudders to pursue the ruins of our times.

It is twenty years and more that, between Constantinople and the Julian Alps, Roman blood is daily poured out. The Goth, the Sarmatian, the Quadian, the Alan, the Huns, the Vandals, the Marcomanni lay waste, drag off, and plunder Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Dardania, Dacia, Thessaly, Achaia, Epirus, Dalmatia, and all the Pannonias. How many matrons, how many virgins of God, and freeborn and noble bodies, have been the sport of these beasts? Bishops taken captive, priests slain, and the offices of various clerics. Churches overthrown, horses stabled at the altars of Christ, the relics of the Martyrs dug up: everywhere mourning, everywhere groaning, and the manifold image of death everywhere. The Roman world is falling, and yet our stiff neck is not bent. What do you think now to be the spirit of the Corinthians, the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, the Arcadians, and all Greece, over whom the barbarians rule? And I have named but a few cities, in which once stood no small kingdoms. The East seemed free from these evils, and was troubled only by rumors.

Behold, last year, from the farthest crags of the Caucasus, wolves—not now of Arabia, but of the North—were let loose upon us, and in a short time overran so many provinces. How many monasteries were captured? How much water of the rivers was turned into human blood? Antioch was besieged, and the remaining cities through which the Halys, the Cydnus, the Orontes, and the Euphrates flow. Flocks of captives were dragged away: Arabia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt were captive with fear. "Not if I had a hundred tongues, and a hundred mouths, an iron voice, could I run through all the names of punishments". For I have not proposed to write history, but briefly to weep over our miseries. Otherwise, to unfold these things as they deserve, even Thucydides and Sallust would be struck mute.

17. Happy Nepotianus, who does not see these things: happy who does not hear these things.

We are wretched, who either suffer, or discern our patient brothers suffering such things; and yet we wish to live, and think that those who lack these things are rather to be wept for than deemed blessed. Long ago we felt God offended, and yet we do not appease Him. By our sins the Barbarians are strong. By our vices the Roman army is overcome: and as though these things were not sufficient for disasters, civil wars have consumed almost more than the hostile sword. Wretched Israelites, in comparison with whom Nabuchodonosor is written to be the servant of God. Unhappy are we, who so displease God that through the rage of the Barbarians His wrath rages against us. Ezechias did penance, and one hundred eighty-five thousand of the Assyrians were destroyed by one Angel in one night. Josaphat sang the praises of the Lord, and the Lord conquered on behalf of the one praising Him. Moses fought against Amalec, not with the sword, but with prayer. If we wish to be raised up, let us be cast down.

O shame, and mind foolish even to the point of unbelief: the Roman army, victor and lord of the world, is conquered by these men, fears them, is terrified at the sight of these men, who are not able to walk, who if they touch the ground think themselves dead. And do we not understand the voices of the Prophets: "Shall a thousand flee before one pursuer?" Nor do we cut away the causes of the disease, so that the disease might likewise be removed: and straightway we would see arrows yield to javelins, tiaras to helmets, nags to horses.

18. We have exceeded the measure of consolation, and while we forbid the weeping over one man's death, we have lamented the dead of the whole world. That Xerxes, the most powerful king, who overturned mountains, who paved seas, when from a lofty place he had seen an infinite multitude of men, and an innumerable army, is said to have wept, because after a hundred years none of those whom he then beheld would survive.

Oh, if we could ascend to such a watchtower, from which we might behold the whole earth beneath our feet; already I would show you the ruins of the whole world, nations dashed against nations, and kingdoms against kingdoms; some tortured, some slain, some swallowed by the waves, some dragged into slavery: here weddings, there mourning: these being born, those dying: some overflowing with riches, some begging: and not only the army of Xerxes, but the men of the whole world who now live, would in a short space be no more. Speech is overcome by the greatness of the matter, and all that we say is less than it.

19. Let us therefore return to ourselves, and as though descending from heaven, let us for a little while look upon our own affairs. Do you feel, I ask you, when you were an infant, when a boy, when a youth, when of vigorous age, when made an old man? Daily we die, daily we are changed, and yet we believe ourselves eternal.

This very thing which I say, which is written, which I re-read, which I correct, is taken away from my life. As many points as the notary marks, so many are the losses of my time. We write and rewrite, letters cross the sea, and as the keel cleaves the furrow, through each wave the moments of our age are diminished. We have only this gain, that we are joined together by the love of Christ. "Charity is patient, is kind: charity does not envy, does not deal perversely, is not puffed up, endures all things, believes all things, hopes all things, suffers all things: Charity never fails." This ever lives in the breast; because of this our Nepotianus, though absent, is present, and though divided by such great expanses of lands, embraces us with both hands. We have a pledge of mutual love.

Let us be joined in spirit, let us be bound in affection, and let us imitate in the son the fortitude of mind which the blessed Pope Chromatius showed at the falling asleep of his brother (Eusebius, his own brother). Let our little page sing of him, let all letters resound with him. Whom we cannot hold in the body, let us hold in remembrance. And of him with whom we cannot speak, let us never cease to speak.