The Treatise and Letter of Potamius of Lisbon

Hence it is that, through the distance of things compacted into one mass, the whole nature of the members grows numb. When therefore the soul departs, which had tended the body's flower-garden, the entire matter relaxes into putrefaction with livid cheek; and in place of the voice of the corpse, the foul stench of black dead bile is inhaled.

The bodily fabric, therefore, composed of earth, moisture, cold, and heat—which four parts always warring against one another overturn the body of sins in a storm (heat does not love cold, and cold is tormented by heat, contraries are enslaved to contraries: earth is corrupted by excessive moisture, and moisture grows foul from earth)—these four-formed elements standing together in one fourfold mass, when the charioteer who had assigned places to those four parts is separated by the divorce of death, lest anyone should more violently remove his own mobility, and who, wielding the governing whip, drove the divided parts bound in one harmonious junction to their ends; these four parts, I say, when the soul departs, are mingled into the mass of the widowed body, the author of their union being cast out. But because the Lord had loved this young man (I speak of Lazarus) in the world, foreknowing things to come, He told His Apostles that Lazarus had fallen asleep, and promised that if He came to that city, he would straightway be raised.

This Lazarus, therefore, whose limbs had wasted through a livid wandering struggle along the blue veins, who had been shut in the cave of a hewn rock, thrust down by a great stone set against it as an everlasting door, a heavy weight—that he could rise again, if they believed this, the most holy and true piety of God thundered forth. Presently the sisters, hemmed in by a crowd, drunk with wailing, heat, fasting, and floods of tears, cast themselves down in wretched prostration of their whole bodies at the knees of God, and breathed out Hebrew words mingled with broken sobs in praises of the Saviour. How great a throng of people hastened there, I ask you? What a crowd of spectators? What manner of harmony could there be at so great a miracle, where there were weeping women, a dead brother, and Christ promising to raise the man?

There gathered (I believe) to this spectacle, destined to be kept in everlasting memory, soldiers, Jews, Gentiles, proselytes, most illustrious senators, noble judges, slaves, and almost the whole city ran together in rivalry to see whether Lazarus could rise again, whose stench was already striking the people from afar out of the tomb. At the sight of this, the whole city marvelled. What wert Thou there, Christ Jesus? How golden, how beautiful, purer than a spring, whiter than snow, more radiant than the sun, and brighter in appearance than the moon? Alas, why do I ask about one whom I did not deserve to see then? Yet now I have come to know who and how great Thou art in piety. Behold, amid all this, Jesus Christ the Saviour is told to have wept. Come, come, Potamius, servant of the living God: if you have any power, tell even a little of the praises of the Lord.

God wept, moved by the tears of mortals; and while, trusting in His own power, He was recalling Lazarus from the bond of death, He was performing the duty of piety with the consolation of tears. God wept, not because He knew that one who had perished lay dead before Him, but that He might temper the weeping of the sisters. God wept because those to whom He had given all things and brought under their power, and had set over paradise, flowers, and lilies without any toil, the devil by teaching sin had made outcasts from nearly all. God wept because those whom He had made innocent, the devil through malice had caused to be found guilty. Alas, thin breath from heaven, you were deserting the body you had ruled with failing skill. But neither the Father nor the Son ever despised you. For your death Christ Himself also became mortal. Moved by piety at these women's tears and the scattered tresses of their pitiable hair, the Saviour was gathering His weeping together with their weeping.

Then therefore Jesus Christ drew near to the tomb of Lazarus. Immediately at His command the stones are rolled away; the inner chamber of horror is laid open. The eyes of the groaning peoples were sent in abundance curiously into the cave. Lazarus was seen with his face covered, his hands and feet bound: and as a demonstration of His power, he who was dead, and still bound at the feet, was loosening himself with his own hands, as Christ had commanded. What voices were there, I ask you, brethren? What a press of beholders? How curious the eyes of those who marvelled? What a multitude hung upon the necks of those who went before? What weeping? What rejoicing? What murmuring? How new and heavenly a miracle?

Death is conquered, a man is restored, the chains of the underworld are broken, and after four days Lazarus's tongue moves, his hands are made ready for their office, his eyes run in their own sockets, his steps are unfolded in walking, hearing is renewed in his ears, his gaze is directed toward his kindred, his family is counted with reviving looks, cold water is asked for, bread is not refused, home is sought, the miracles of Christ are recounted.

When Isaiah was proclaiming Christ, or when he had announced to the Israelite people the sentence of future damnation, the savage barbarity of the blasphemers, stirred to fierce cruelty, cut him from the head with violent punishment and split him as it were into chunks, and ordered his neck to be sawn from the head through the ears down to the shoulders: as though it were too little if in raving madness they were to run the martyr of God through with a sharp sword, or if the very blade were to furrow the sides of the innocent man with a hissing stroke through the length of a fig-tree's wood; unless the savage one sought to make two chunks of equal joined flesh from one body, as though two near-corpses of cleft flesh, and to cut out two portions as it were equal in their joining.

But in so great a miracle of the heavenly arena, no one, as I think, at the resulting spectacle, will be able to see it thus, unless he attempts to count the deeds. Therefore with attentive eyes mark the new celebration of the ancient discipline's passions; and what manner of nobility of martyrdom was there, how glorious, how brave. When the saw was making its way through the head, that is, through the navel of the gathered senses, and was drawing the furrows of its teeth with reciprocal rasping, the blade slipped (I believe) as it drove in its teeth, and through the harvest of the hair and the thick covering of the scalp, or the glue of the callous skin, it plunged the Hebrew letters of the head into the woven crown of the vertex.

Presently, when the cutter, intent with careful effort, had fixed himself as it were toward the chamber of the heart, the flowing streams of the purple spring, with the channels of the veins loosened, poured themselves out in a saffron shower abundantly, lest the profane one should stretch out the veins worm-like with his thumb, so that the painted picture of the veins covered by the flood of blood should not tremble, nor wonder what that was by which the conquered one would be forced to blush. For the vaulted recesses of the inner organs of the chaste young man were laid open—the sound of the striking trumpet, the deep vitality and dry fastings of pleasures. But Belias, son of Hezekiah, a bloodthirsty man and prodigal of lineage, master of the mathematicians of the subversive ones, of soothsayers, and chief of the pythonists, was seeking within the breastplate of the holy breast the fellowship of faith, the court of the letters of political preaching.

And although the possession of the body was already divided limb by limb, he sought to expose what was within, to reveal what was hidden, to bring forth what was obscure, and to discover what that was by which the conquered one would be forced to blush, so that the infamous persecutor might tear the man of God with alien teeth; yet the distinguished and illustrious prophet, amid those who sawed him supine and those who hung over him, persevered so long in the immovable and unshaken state of his body, until there began to be two who would condemn the figures of the nations together with their persecutor.

The pit of so great a prison heaped up the raw filth of the damnable workshop, as you rightly write, the beginning and the bloody stench of the dung of dead corpses—what hand could have been able to disentangle or scrape it away with fiery powers, unless that a solemn anathema of yours, made perpetual by the chaste titles of the crowned head in exile, had shut out the sect of heresy? You smiled upon us, I say, perfected in catholic virginity, by slaying the perfidious, by condemning the perjured: the minds corrupted by adultery, wavering, the licentious commerce of the accursed beast damnably laden with poison, you conquered with the sword of one faith striking.

Let the serpent lie, and let the earth that received him grow black with festering venom: let the serpent lie, condemned by a heavenly blow, let the serpent lie, touched with bloody horror: let the serpent lie with the hollow of his eyes crushed, let the bilge of his three-forked mouth gape open and vomit forth, let it flow away: let the author of sins be tormented, for whom it was not enough that he had deprived the first-formed man of eternity, unless he also burst forth against the Saviour more venomous than a hydra. He wished to separate our Lord Jesus Christ, as though the word of Christ could be cut, from the clasp of substance joined in the unity of the Trinity, as He says: I and the Father are one. And: He who sees me, sees the Father also. And: I am in the Father, and the Father is in me. And: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The savage dog, parricide deserter, with kite's talons, as I think, or with unsound teeth, if he could, attempted to rend asunder. And after this, what shall I set against the blasphemies? He who sent me, they say, is greater than I. From what was the Father begotten? Surely because the Son confesses it; is the Father therefore greater because He is Father than the Son? Order is placed first, substance is not separated. What do you say to this, infamous adulterer? It is well that the antiquity of the fathers in a holier synod, with the viperous will of impure venom inflated, pierced you also with chaste missiles. For here too you are shown to have laid beforehand the snares of calumny, because the Saviour says: I came not to do my own works, but his who sent me. What do you say, serpent? Do you pour darkness in this light upon this simple profession, which they think a trivial question?

Time is the issue: the Saviour among men, because He had put on the body of men, was seen in the body; therefore He said: I came not to do my own works: did He deny the offices of man in Himself? He cries out therefore, to proclaim in Himself that ordainer whom He remembers as the Father, the author in Himself; because the Son follows in name, so He who precedes is greater; but also of the sender and the sent, because the three are one, from the unity of divinity there is one substance: I and the Father are one. And the Saviour Himself to the Apostles: So long a time, He says, have I been with you, and you have not known the Father? They also say that in the books of the Lord the word substance is never seen to have been written.

Give back what you had stolen, most thievish tempter: behold you are overcome in your attempt to confute concerning substance; for the ancient flocks of the holy prophets cry out all their proclamations, as he says; the voice of substance was feared by the birds of heaven even down to the cattle, and they cried out: I will give Jerusalem into captivity. Behold, when Christ God had by no means been heard by the former people, with those dwelling there wasting away, the pillars of Jerusalem fell. Behold, wretch, though even one sentence of God ought to have sufficed, which the holy prophet thundered: If they had stood in my substance, and had heard my words, and had taught my people, I would have turned them away from their many pursuits. Behold, here a blessed hearing of substance burst forth for unhappy peoples, so that the prophet also in the person of Adam seeks Christ in tears: I am stuck, he says, in the deep mire, and there is no substance.

Namely because the substance of the Father had not yet come together in Christ in the flesh. As also that Evangelist, when having wasted his goods by living luxuriously he lost all his substance, as the holy prophet of God wrote: The Spirit of God will flee from the deceitful. Therefore he lost his substance, because through luxury he lacked holiness: if it suffices you, he said; for those who are already at rest in this, all things are full: if you are still tormented, I press on; we read it written: I gathered gold and silver and the substance of kings and of provinces. This is that substance which the prophet recalled saying: Once has God spoken, these two things have I heard. For in one voice the prophet testifies to having heard these two things, as David says: My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

For as a pen is guided by the equal subdivision of its nibs and is set in motion by harmonious strokes; so the Saviour is united with the works of the Father by an indivisible connection. For what the Father said, the Son proclaimed; and what the Son spoke, the Father fulfilled. Rightly, he says, Once has God spoken, these two things have I heard. Two persons bore one judgment, as in the decalogue one sentence is written on two tablets. Let heresy fall silent, condemned beforehand to eternal silence, struck down by divine blows, cast into the abyss and the depths of Tartarus. Let the virgin mother alone always with her laurels, one with God, our dove more fruitful than fruitfulness, lift her crowned head even to the clouds of heaven. May she be blessed with the peoples gathered together in the unity of the Trinity most justly; of whose praise all is full, from now and unto eternal ages of ages may the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit bless her.