The Tractates of Zeno of Verona

It follows that we ought to know whether we should assert the treatise of faith, or the faith of the treatise. If we say the treatise of faith, we shall err greatly: for the nature of faith does not suffer itself to be subjected to the artifice of loquacity, by which nothing else is labored at but that it be approved by its own virtues alone; for that cannot be perfect which looks to something else for what is necessary to itself. But if we begin to say the faith of the treatise, it will assuredly be neither ours, nor its own, nor his whose it is said to be: because a treatise, when it builds up faith, by that very act by which it builds it up, destroys it; nor will it give to anyone what it does not itself possess, but rather, that it may not possess it, still continues to inquire.

I observe moreover, as the names of the assertors indicate (which names, if you remove them, there is perhaps no dispute at all), that there have been many treatises, many faiths, and indeed novel ones, nourished by the toil and favor of contention: which, because the true one can scarcely be found, I believe have been set up for sale, lest the people should suffer from want. Yet from all these it cannot be known or comprehended what is to be chosen: because that which has an ever uncertain standing will be neither proper nor firm; inasmuch as the choice of one is the rejection of another; or if all are altogether to be embraced, so that one may have as many faiths as one has not words, one will have far less than nothing, because the treatise which begot them, or daily begets them, can still beget more; and on the other side, being provoked, it consumes them again by re-examining and refuting them according to the strength of its wits and arguments.

But if, as is necessary, that one is noble and ancient, which I would say was born not by treatise but by its very own nativity: furthermore it is greater than the law, which by believing God unto God merited, and which did not learn to believe but presumed to believe; let that pernicious invention declare to me, by its treatise, what the strife profits. Lest faith perish, it says, when it is either badly believed or badly taught. What evil that reasoning is, we shall see presently.

Now I desire to know whether faith consists of doctrine, or of belief, or of both. If it consists of doctrine, then those who do not know letters have no faith, nor indeed do those who do know them: because they are unable by any reasoning to bring the knowledge and observance of the law to perfection. If it consists of belief, then no interpretation of it is needed: because just as one believes once, so from that very thing which has been believed, faith once consummated is neither diminished nor increased. But if indeed it consists of both, then the faith of the Patriarchs is a seedling faith: and on this account those books of our constitution must evidently be assigned to them, so that they may be able to be perfect. O how wretched is the faith that words put together! O how feeble is that whose members are daily scattered by various arguments!

O how undefended is that which at every moment seeks the patronage of kings, judges, rich men, and sometimes, what is worse, even of Gentiles! O how base and slippery is that with which another's opinion plays! O how adulterous is that which does not acknowledge by whose author it was born! O how ridiculous is that which, when two Christians are in conflict, is called perfidy by one of them if it is not won over, and faith when it has been won over! O how untrue, if it prevails by factions! O how common, whose secrets even the profane babble about! O how presumptuous, which prefers to have trust placed in its own novel tradition rather than in antiquity, rather than in God the Lord saying: You reject the commandment of God, that you may establish your traditions.

But I do not say this in order to make the benefit of doctrine unwelcome, but so that each person may know that faith is one thing and a treatise is another: and that faith cannot be either given, or known, or destroyed through a treatise. It cannot be given; because if it can be given by words, it will also be able to be taken away by words. Likewise it cannot be known; because it can happen that someone carries one thing on his lips and another in the inner chambers of his heart. Similarly it cannot even be destroyed; because if it is true faith, it can be nothing other than what it is. Therefore, since it is not within human capacity to see the secrets of faith, nowhere, brother, does your curiosity profit, nowhere does your striving profit: because he whom you think most faithful even from among your own devoted ones is unfaithful; and he whom you shall have thought unfaithful is faithful.

Perhaps someone may esteem himself more faithful in this, if he speaks cleverly; whereas that man is more truly faithful who in sacred preaching has not stretched the edge of his mind further than is lawful: for the matter has been brought to such a point that our faith is sought through injury to God. Solomon foretold that this would come to pass, and taught in these words what must be guarded against: Better is he who lacks understanding in the fear of God, than he who abounds in cunning and transgresses the law. And again: Be not overly wise; and do not argue more than is fitting. Likewise Paul: Be not high-minded, but fear. V. Since these things are so, why do you bind the law with law? Why under the image of faith do you lay faith aside? Why do you strive to drain the very fountain of divinity with philosophical arguments? If you desire to display skill in the law, clear away the clouds of its readings.

Teach that it is not contrary to itself: teach that all things which it sings are to be believed. But if you approve one part of it and disapprove another part, how do you seek faith through this, when you make even faith itself guilty of unfaithfulness, since you do not believe it in its entirety? But if you are versed in the faith of the Spirit, demonstrate some virtue. Command the mountains to move themselves. Let the rage of lions vanish in admiration of you with a fawning grin. Under your steps let the wave of the sea, growing thick, be solidified in marble-like stillness. Let the boat of a whale faithfully carry your faith through the anxious bosom of the surging deep. Restrain with the bridle of prayer the courses of the Sun and Moon from the receptacle of the western prison. Let the blazing fire of the panting furnace, with nature overcome, feel through you and with you its own refreshment. Breathe back into the dead souls restored to the return of life.

Dispel diseases from the suffering, heal infirmities, rejoice in temptations and in torments for the name of the Lord. If hardships befall, demonstrate that you have faith like a grain of mustard seed. But if, what is more the case, inflamed by love of worldly boasting under the sound of law and faith, you presume that you are able by arguments to compel, examine, measure, and discern the inestimable and incomprehensible perpetuity of the divinity of the God born of God and of the Holy Spirit, by that very right by which he is from himself; here I dare not answer you: for it is surely safer to seem unlearned than to be sacrilegious. And yet I have one who will stand against you on my behalf: for the law, through which you perhaps compel me, less learned, to err, will itself greatly blunt and refute and confound you, as Solomon says: Seek not the things that are higher than you, and search not into things stronger than you.

Think always upon the things which God has commanded you, and in their many works you shall not be curious: for the suspicion of them has led many astray, and has held their understanding in vanity. Likewise Paul writes back to the curious man saying: O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and how untraceable his ways! For who has known the thought of God? And you seek his nature? But also in another place he expressed plainly what is here at issue, when he speaks to Timothy to instruct him in these words: I exhorted you to charge certain persons not to use perverse doctrine, nor to give heed to fables and genealogies, which are without end, which furnish questions rather than the true dispensation of God which is in faith. Now the end of the commandment is charity from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith.

Therefore if you are a servant of God, avoid foolish and unlearned questions, knowing that they breed strife. But a servant of God ought not to quarrel; for strife is the enemy both of charity and of faith: and whoever has lost these knows neither divine nor human things. These things, if you are devout, keep; if you are truly God-fearing, guard: avoid disputing about that which exceeds the measure of human understanding.

Whoever asserts God in some manner denies God: for a defense is rendered only to something weak; nor can he reverence God who thinks it belongs to his own wit that God has been esteemed as He is. Moreover, this is the true nobility of faith: to serve God faithfully; to place trust in Him alone; to know that one is called faithful from fidelity and trust; to live with blameless conduct; to presume to know Him by a good conscience, not by loquacity, which is assuredly the mother of sin; and not to violate but to honor the one fullness of power of the Trinity, which is grasped by one mind and one belief.

The foundations of the Christian summit consist in three things, that is, in hope, in faith, and in charity; which appear to be so bound together with one another that each is necessary to the others. For if hope does not come first, for what does faith labor? If faith is not present, how will hope itself be born? If you deny charity to both of these, both will cease: because neither can faith work without charity, nor hope without faith. And so a Christian, if he desires to be perfect, ought to be built up in three things; for if any one of these is lacking to him, he will not have the perfection of his work. Wherefore first of all hope of things to come must be set before us, without which we perceive that not even present things themselves can stand. So great is it that, take away hope, and all humanity grows torpid. Take away hope, and all arts and virtues will cease. Take away hope, and all things are destroyed.

Why does a boy go to the schoolmaster, if he does not hope for the fruit of learning? Why does a sailor commit his vessel to the deep abyss, if no profit, no longed-for harbor ever presents itself to him? Why does a soldier despise, I will not say the hardships of harsh winter or scorching summer, but his very self, if he carries no hope of future glory? Why does the farmer scatter seeds, if he does not gather the harvest as the reward of his toil? Why does a Christian believe in Christ, if he does not believe that the time of perpetual happiness promised to him by Christ is yet to come?

But hope is from faith, which, although it is placed in the future, is nevertheless rightly subject to faith; for where faith is not, neither is hope; for faith is the substance of hope, and hope is the glory of faith; since the reward which hope holds, faith merits; and faith indeed fights for hope, but conquers for itself. We must therefore, brethren, embrace it tenaciously and guard it with every kind of virtue; we must press upon it with strength; for it is the immovable foundation of our life, an unconquered bulwark against the assaults of the devil and likewise a weapon, an impenetrable breastplate of our soul, a compendious and true knowledge of the law, a terror to demons, the virtue of martyrs, the beauty or wall of the Church, the minister of God, the friend of Christ, the guest of the Holy Spirit. Both present and future things are subject to it; the former, because it despises them; the latter, because it presumes them to be its own.

Nor does hope fear that they will not come; because it always carries them with it in its own virtues. This is what it means that Abraham believed God in hope against hope, that he might become the father of many nations. Now that which is impossible and not seen is against hope: but by this hope it becomes possible, when the word of God is believed without doubt and with strength; for the Lord says: All things are possible to one who believes. Hence Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness; who was therefore just, because faithful; for the just man lives by faith; therefore faithful, because he believed God; because had he not believed, he could have been neither just nor the father of nations. Wherefore it is manifest that hope and faith have one inseparable nature: because in a man, whichever of these fails, both die.

Faith, then, is above all a thing properly our own, the Lord himself saying: Thy faith hath made thee whole. If therefore it is ours, let us keep it as our own, that we may rightly hope for things belonging to another; for no one entrusts his estate to a spendthrift, nor will he honour a deserter with triumphal rewards, especially since it is written: He that hath, to him shall be given and he shall abound; but he that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away from him. Through this, brethren, Enoch merited to be translated by God with his body contrary to the law of nature. Through this Noah, escaping, found no one with whom he might compare the fact that the flood had been. Through this Abraham attained to the friendship of God. Through this Isaac shone forth beyond the rest. Through this Jacob prevailed to wrestle with God. Through this Joseph subjected Egypt to his dominion. This made the Red Sea a glassy floor for Moses.

This, that the sun and moon might obey the desire of Jesus of Nave, the accustomed measure of their course being set aside, put its own bridles upon the sun and moon. This brought triumphs to the unarmed David over the armed Goliath. This in Job did not despair amid frequent and grievous evils. This was a physician in the blindness of Tobias. This in Daniel bound shut the mouths of lions. This in Jonah turned the whale into a skiff. This in the army of the Maccabean brotherhood alone conquered. This made the fires pleasant for the three young men. This presumed in Peter that the sea could be walked upon on foot. Through this the Apostles stripped many of the foul contagion of deforming leprosy and of the scabrous and festering ulcers that were spreading over their heads, restoring them to clean skin.

Through this, I say, they commanded the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak, the lame to run, paralytics to be restored, demons to flee from the possessed, and even the dead themselves often to return from their tombs together with their own funeral rites, so that all marvelled that the tears of bereavement which had been shed were turned into tears of joy.

But it would be a long matter, brethren, to go through each instance, especially since charity of its own accord urges things more powerful; which is so endowed with all things that it is by right itself the queen of all. Let faith triumph with whatever virtues it will, and let hope set forth many and great things; yet without charity neither of the two will stand; faith first of all if it does not love itself, hope if it is not loved. Add that faith profits itself alone; charity profits all. Add that faith does not fight without reward; but charity is accustomed to bestow even upon the ungrateful. Add that faith does not pass over into another; charity—it is too little to say passes over into another—passes over into a whole people. Add that faith belongs to few; charity to all.

Add that hope and faith have their time; but charity has no end, it grows at every moment, and the more it is believed in by those who love one another, the more is owed to one another in return. It loves no one on account of his person, because it knows not how to flatter; not on account of honour, because it is not ambitious; not on account of sex, because to it one is both; not on account of time, because it is not changeable; it is not envious, because it knows not what envy is; it is not puffed up, because it cultivates humility; it thinks no evil, because it is simple; it is not angered, because it willingly embraces even injuries; it does not deceive, because it itself keeps faith; it lacks nothing, because to it nothing is necessary beyond what it is. This keeps fields, cities, and peoples in order and in peace. This makes swords safe at the sides of kings.

This suppresses wars, removes quarrels, empties courts of law, restrains the forum, eradicates hatreds, extinguishes angers. This penetrates the sea, circles the globe, supplies to nations through commerce what is needful. I will quickly declare its power, brethren. Whatever nature has denied to places, charity restores. This by a venerable sacrament compels two persons in conjugal affection into one flesh. This grants to humanity that what is born should exist. Its gift is the dear wife, the noble children, the true fathers. Its gift is that others, like us, or more than us, are neighbours or friends to us. Its gift is that we love our servants as sons, and they in turn willingly honour us as masters. Its gift is that we love—I will not say acquaintances or friends, but often even those whom we have never seen. Its gift is that we recognise either the virtues of the ancients from their books, or their books by their virtues.

But why then do I linger longer among human examples, as though these alone were endowed with this affection? Do we not see that every kind of living creature bears witness to charity by gathering together and by concord; and that all their movements are turned, as if by one sense, under the guidance of love, so that anyone may understand that this could not happen without the discipline of natural friendship?

What they do for one another in times of need, the nearly daily examples of pigs engaged in so pleasant a contest make known to all: for when one of their number happens to be seized and drawn into present danger by the savage fury of a bold wolf, all suddenly hasten together; they come to the aid of the one in distress; they vie with one another in repeatedly throwing themselves almost bodily against the enemy's weapons; they confound him with a mighty din; and with their foul tusks bared, they resist as if in a kind of tortoise-formation; and they more easily conquer through charity what individually, with bare strength alone, they could scarcely overcome. The very elements also, brethren, so different and so mutually opposed, would long ago have been overtaken by destruction, had not kindly charity, endowed with the gifts of mutual and equal temperance, bound them together in the faithful propagation of an everlasting union.

There is absolutely nothing that without charity can be pleasing, without charity peaceful, without charity faithful, without charity secure, without charity glorious, without charity joined to God, without charity perfect. Finally, when the Lord was asked what was the greatest commandment of the sacred law, he spoke thus, saying: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, with thy whole soul, and with thy whole strength. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. Hence it is manifest that love is the substance and natural teacher of all divine virtues: for it is learned from the law, but it is born in minds: for the law depends on charity, not charity on the law, as sacred Scripture says: The law is not made for the just man, but for the sinner. Now that man is a sinner who has not the charity of God: and on this account he who works wrath is rightly subject to the law.

But perhaps someone may say, the law is to be despised, because it is not necessary for the just man, and is burdensome to the sinner. Far be it, brethren: rather it is to be venerated, because it is the mirror of truth, because it is a certain strict form of love: for whatever it has learned from the just man, it compels the unjust man also to do: renowned in two ways, glorifying the one, correcting the other. VI. It is established, therefore, that the whole of Christianity is deposited more in charity than in hope or faith: as a clear example attests. Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of the Lord, lost both hope and faith: because charity did not remain in him: for heresies and schisms are likewise sown when inflated faith and hope are torn from the foundation of love.

But what not only these but other virtues also are without charity, learn from Paul as your witness: And if I should have, he says, all faith so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. For charity, brethren, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never falleth away. Therefore not without reason does the Lord God commend the love of one's neighbour: since he alone presumes to be able to preserve what he commands. VII. The first duty of love, therefore, is to render back to God that we were born: and to owe to him alone that we live: and to retain absolutely nothing in the inner chambers of our heart that we might keep under another's claim.

But when we have begun to be inhabited by him through the invitation of this devotion, or to dwell in him ourselves, as John says: God is charity; and he that abideth in charity abideth in God, and God in him; then at last, brethren, we shall worthily render charity back to him through himself, because, the exchange having been made, what is his becomes, on our part, ours. The next duty is that we also love our neighbours with the same affection with which we love ourselves: especially since the very bonds of kinship demand this: for the prophet cries out: One God created you. Is there not one father of you all? Whoever, therefore, retains the consciousness of his own nobility, loves his brother: nor does he wait to hear anything from the law, lest by admonition something be taken away from natural piety: and he loves himself so much in his brother that he would hate himself without him.

There is added to this abundance the fact that God therefore made man in his own image and likeness, so that by contemplating the image we might suffer reverence for the truth; and the matter was left in this condition, that whatever evil or good we do to anyone, we may be seen to have done it to God; on account of which John, the special confidant of the Lord's mysteries, steadfastly declares: If any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not? Let us therefore strive, brethren, among ourselves with the glorious rivalry of mutual love; and by venerating the image of God most worthily, let us declare what we owe to the truth itself, knowing that if anyone has injured the image, he provokes the truth to the destruction of his own soul. Nor is the proof far from the saying.

If anyone has violated in any way the face of some renowned King (a man, however), does he not immediately pay the capital penalty as for a committed sacrilege? How much more carefully must one guard against this in the cause of God, whom alone whatever is feared in the virtues of nature even by Kings themselves holds in awe? VIII. But it is necessary for each person to know the proper character of sincere love, lest under the sound of the name the rule of truth be violated; for there is also another love that is truly contrary to our salvation; to which the form of a human being is rightly attributed, because it is known to be temporal and fragile. Therefore it is depicted with the features of a boy, because its wanton slipperiness is not tempered even by the years of old age. Therefore naked, because its will is shameful. Therefore winged, because wherever it has conceived a desire, it rushes swiftly. Therefore furnished with arrows and torches, because the sword is always joined to unlawful ardors.

Therefore blind, because when it has blazed up, it considers neither age, nor form, nor sex, nor rank, nor even that sacred affection of sound piety. This one set fire to Eve's breast with its torches. This one slew Adam with its arrows. This one attempted either to subject Susanna to the monstrous flames of two elders, or to cut her throat with a murderous sword. This one demands that Joseph be violent toward the woman; whom even while it strips, it does not find to be shameless. This one stormed the synagogue when it granted its weapons to her. There it is everywhere turbulent, everywhere it is carried along in madness. It promises, deceives, gives, takes away: now sad, now cheerful, now humble, now elated, now drunk, now fasting, now accuser, now accused. It jests, plays, grows pale, wastes away, sighs, conceals, complies: either it tempts or deceives, and flatters more wickedly than it rages. It lets no opportunity for harm pass by whatsoever. Do you wish to know what an evil it is?

In its very fruit it hates even itself. The whole world seethes daily with its poisons: and all things have been so corrupted by its pestilential pleasures, that whatever is done in it, when we are commanded by sacred voices not to love it, seems rightly execrable to those of sound wisdom, as John says: Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him: because all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life: which is not of the Father, but of the concupiscence of the world: for through this the devil, as he captures and deceives the diverse minds of men, began to be called desire by his own luxurious worshippers. IX. Now therefore let us see whence true charity comes, where it abides, to whom it is most especially owed.

Surely to him who made man; who gave him the likeness of himself as the gift of everlasting charity; who bestowed the orb of the earth; who subjected all the elements of the world together with their living creatures to his power; who commanded years, seasons, months, nights, days, and the most brilliant courses of two royal orbs always to serve him with the pleasurable gift of alternation; who, when man had been slain by the aforesaid love's evilly sweet poisons and plunged into the seat of hell, quickened him by the sacrament of his own majesty, and moreover enriched him with participation in the heavenly kingdom. O charity, how holy and how bountiful! O how mighty! He who has thee not has nothing. Thou wast able to transform God into man. Thou madest him, diminished, to sojourn for a little while from the immensity of his majesty. Thou didst bind him for nine months in a virginal prison. Thou didst restore Eve in Mary. Thou didst renew Adam in Christ.

Thou didst provide the sacred cross for the salvation of a world already lost. Thou didst empty death by teaching God to die. It is thine that when God, the Son of almighty God, is slain by men, neither of the two is angered. Thou holdest the soul of the heavenly people, when thou adornest peace, keepest faith, embracest innocence, cultivatest truth, lovest patience, makest hope present. Thou makest men diverse in character, in age, in station, from one nature into one spirit, one body. Thou dost not permit the glorious martyrs to be separated from the confession of the Christian name by any torments, by any novel form of death, by any rewards, by any friendships, by any affections—all of which are surely more biting torturers of piety than any executioner. Thou, in order to clothe the naked, art content to be naked. To thee hunger is satiety. If a needy hungry man has eaten thy bread, thy wealth consists in having all that thou hast for mercy. Thou alone knowest not how to be asked.

Thou dost rescue the oppressed without delay, even at cost to thyself, in whatever straits they are placed. Thou art the eye of the blind. Thou art the foot of the lame. Thou art the most faithful shield of widows. Thou art more than either parent to orphans. Thee neither mercy nor joy ever permits to have dry eyes. Thou dost so love thine enemies that no one can discern what difference there is between them and those dear to thee. Thou, I say, joinest heavenly things to human, human things to heavenly mysteries. Thou dost guard divine things. Thou dost reign in the Father. Thou dost obey thyself in the Son. Thou dost exult in the Holy Spirit. Though thou art one in three, thou art in no way divided; thou art moved by no calumny of human curiosity. From the Paternal source thou art wholly poured back in the Son; and yet thou art wholly present where thou art poured back, nor dost thou depart.

Rightly art thou called God: because thou alone dost encompass the power of the Trinity.

Perhaps some learned person among those standing about may burst into laughter, because I, a man most unskilled and tongue-tied, dare to dispute something concerning justice, about whose proper nature men of excellent intellect and learning have produced nothing certain in their great volumes. But I care not how anyone may mock me: for in the Church of God it is not an adorned discourse that is sought, but pure truth; from which all those men not undeservedly strayed far, who supposed that the justice of God resided in the powers of eloquence. And so, since they could not comprehend it (nor indeed could they, without the guidance of divine wisdom, of which they had no knowledge), they asserted two justices, one civil, the other natural: of which the Apostle made most open mention when speaking to the Romans, saying: For they, being ignorant of God's justice and seeking to establish their own, have not submitted to the justice of God.

But since, having no opinion of the future, they look only to the advantages of the present life, and defend the false against the true as if it were true; thus they lost both, slipping from their very hands with eyes wide open: God's justice, because they think it foolish that it labors at the cost of its own—I will not say wealth, but even, if need be, of its very safety—to benefit others more than itself: their own, because although it is falsely clothed with the name of wisdom, yet by looking after its own advantages, which cannot be procured at all without disadvantage to others, it cannot be denied to be unjust by any truly most foolish person. II.

But if they had been able to know true justice, whose reward is immortality, and which is therefore covered with the veil of simulated folly, so that a great thing might be sought with great virtues and great labors; they would without hesitation prefer to be judged foolish and just, rather than wise and unjust: especially since all their deceit is now laid bare, for they were not able to transfer the thing itself, but only the names, defaming justice with the word folly, and injustice with the word wisdom: which, if you correct to their proper meanings and restore to their proper seats, you will find that folly belongs rather to injustice, and wisdom to justice; which I shall not cease to prove also by the testimonies of sacred law, whose words are these: For seeing that the world through wisdom knew not God, God was pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe.

And again more plainly: If any man among you seems to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise: for the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For which reason the same God protests through the prophet to this day: Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, neither let the rich man glory in his riches, but let him that glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises mercy and judgment and justice upon the earth. O with how very few words has he pleaded the whole of this business of the world that is so strenuously carried on! For by these three things, which are the foundations of all vices, the entire human race is driven at every moment, as if by certain violent storms, to shipwreck and destruction.

For wisdom, seething with dense arguments, adorned with the persuasive and pleasing falsehood of polished speech, armed with the trumpet of the voice and the sword of the tongue, draws all actions to itself, gathers crowds, harangues them; so settles disputes as to sow them, collects corrupt and slippery customs; with its own laws it assails its own laws: it binds right with right. Who does not see that it never does or has done anything rightly in what it does? Do you wish to know how just it is? It thinks itself wretched unless it has overturned the truth. Furthermore, fortitude, which men share with wild beasts, holds all right in strength; whatever it has prevailed to do, it deems right: and therefore without any reverence for divine or human religion it abruptly destroys with fire and sword, together with all their substance, the inhabitants, cities, and countryside, fearing nothing at all in the confidence of a friendly death; and indeed what wisdom laboriously gathers through laws, fortitude sometimes scatters at a single charge with eyes closed.

Third is the rich man, that is avarice, toward whose aggrandizement both of the others strive with wondrous speed; in whose service the whole world is enlisted; to whom every age is enslaved. O wickedness! What darkness is this? It is present in all, and is accused by all as though it did not exist. It is denounced, and yet it is worshipped: it slays, and is loved. Truly it is an invincible kind of calamity, to which, with wisdom subjugated, virtue shall be enslaved. III. Do you now see clearly that the wisdom of this world is not justice?

And indeed it is not even true wisdom: because it cannot be that a truly wise man is not also just: and equally that a truly just man is not also wise: because a fool cannot be just, nor a wise man unjust, as reason itself teaches: for he who is foolish does not know what is good and what is evil; nor can he know what to reject and what to hold; and therefore he always sins, which is contrary to justice: but the just man abstains from all sin: and he does this because he carries the knowledge of evil and good, which is certainly the mark of the wise man. Whence it follows that he who is foolish can never be just: nor he who has been unjust, wise. But whether to the just man or to the wise man, if one of the two be lacking—as those men supposed—he will assuredly be neither wise nor just.

The deceits of the world have been sufficiently laid bare, as I think: since all men practice them more skillfully than can be told, it is superfluous to linger upon them. Wherefore let us now come to true justice, the fountain and mother of all virtues: which, beyond all others, gathers and unfolds itself wholly toward the benefit of others, knowing what is owed principally to God, appropriating nothing to itself, leaving nothing as its own, save that it faithfully fulfills His will without any boasting. Moreover it is wholly prominent and spread abroad in public: yet in such a way that it desires to be felt rather than seen: plainly cautious lest it turn aside in any direction, lest it find fault with itself in anything, lest it ever fail in a work once begun.

This justice breaks the yokes of captives by ransoming them: by ministering to those in prison, its gentle and watchful care knows the prison more than the prison does: it shares sickness with the sick: it suffers not that cast-down corpses lie uncovered and unburied: upon the poor and wretched, neglecting its own need, it scatters the seeds of piety lavishly and secretly: it does not permit itself to be asked, nor to be repaid with the vicarious reward of praise: this it counts a grievous loss, this a crime: for by leaving nothing to itself, it surpasses avarice with a blessed greediness: for avarice possesses men; this possesses God. Hear further, with what love, with what devotion it hastens toward its proper seat and the prize set before it.

If anyone summons it to judgment to take away its tunic, it willingly grants him its cloak as well; it is cursed, and it blesses: it is struck, and gives thanks: it is slain, and does not resist; it even prays to God on behalf of those who strike it. Its one chief concern and greatest caution is this alone: lest it owe anything to the world, lest it suffer any of these things worthily.

Those who have either not read the divine scriptures, or have counted them void when read, by the benefit of a lowly and unpolished saying, yet one that declares: Unless you shall have believed, you shall not understand (from the LXX), think this justice foolish and mock it as vain, because, when it could enjoy the goods of the world and neglects them, it makes itself willingly wretched; not believing that, by keeping God's commandments and, through such duties, trampling down worldly pleasures, when it shall have been victorious and free from the bonds of the flesh, it will enjoy the inestimable blessedness of the promised immortality.

But what does it matter to us what they say? As our distinguished man says: The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain. Let them leave our foolishness to us: let them keep their wisdom with themselves; whose followers I perceive to be nearly all Christians, who think it perfect justice to protect what is one's own and not seek what belongs to another, neglecting the command of true wisdom, which is contained in these words: If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all that thou hast: and give to the poor, and take up thy cross, and come, follow me. Concerning this I know not what anyone can advance; yet one thing I know, that there is none among us who does not labor at every moment to have more than he had; and in striving for this, he plays the part of avarice, which is the enemy of justice. So it is from this that the granaries of the few are full of grain, while the belly of the many is empty.

From this come prices worse for the people than scarcity itself. From this come fraud, perjury, plunder, lawsuits, and wars: daily profit is sought from the groans of others; and dispossession is called industry: and the seizure of another's property, under the pretext of defending and managing one's own, is pressed with the most cunning arguments, so that someone undefended or innocent loses by law what he has; which is worse than all violence: because what is seized by force can sometimes be recovered: what is taken by the circumventions of the laws cannot. Let whoever wishes glory in that kind of justice: yet let him know that he is more wretched than the wretched man by whose miseries he is enriched. Can anyone think just the man who sets the advantage of his household above piety? Who, while men labor under hunger and nakedness, feeds moths, weevils, and worms? Who, with unhappy tenacity, withholds what he has not only from others but even from himself?

But, you will say, it is just that I keep what is mine and not pursue what belongs to others. This too the Gentiles have been accustomed to say. But how unjust this is before God, we shall see presently. Now first of all, most excellent Christian, I desire to know what things are yours, since all things are held in common among those who fear God, as it is written: But the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one mind: nor was there any distinction among them, nor did any of them count anything his own among the goods they possessed: but all things were common to them, as are day, sun, night, rain, and the condition of being born and dying: which divine justice has bestowed equally upon the human race, without any exception of persons. Since these things are so, without doubt he is not unlike a Tyrant who alone possesses what could benefit the needs of very many.

What of this, that while the poor man dies daily from oppression, hunger, cold, and injury, you cultivate gold as your friend: you guard your silver: you hold precious clothing and proud and superfluous ornaments as something sacrosanct, like an idol: you adorn yourself at every moment, rich in public, richer in private: and you do not understand that he who, when a man is dying in want, could relieve him with such great wealth and does not, seems himself to be killing him? O how many deaths of souls hang upon the trappings of adorned matrons! If you were to dissolve the price of but one ornament and distribute it to the needs of individuals, from their recovery of breath you will learn at how great an evil to many that adornment is purchased.

This is the excuse of unbelief, which the Holy Spirit refutes through the prophet, saying thus: I have been young, and now am old: and I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed seeking bread: And again, The rich have been in want and have hungered, but they that seek the Lord shall not be diminished of any good: which it is very easy to prove by example. We recall that it is recorded in the Books of Kings, that in a time of famine, when the whole people were dying everywhere, a memorable widow, when Elijah asked for food, gave him not a portion but the whole of her last sustenance for herself and her children, and chose rather to die with her children than to pass by justice: for which so illustrious a deed she received from God immortal foods, which no appetite could diminish: for they grew by their own decrease.

The condition of these vessels remained always full and intact, and as much as the necessity of long use had taken from them, so much did a renewed fruitfulness restore. Wherefore if you desire to be a good father, provident and useful, like that Abraham, you ought to love God more than your children, so that you may deserve to have them whole, safe, and blessed. But it is a foolish thing to wish to provide the substance of life for those to whom you have neither given birth, nor breathed souls into, nor are able to provide salvation. Wherefore, if only belatedly, suppress that sacrilegious voice, mindful of human frailty, since in this very moment of which we speak, you do not know what may come to pass: and lay aside the deceit of your vain excuse. You store up avarice as a sin for ungrateful heirs. It is the power of God alone to provide for the needs of things to come.

Whoever cultivates chastity most easily recognizes how great a nobility it possesses: for it is of such great virtue that it is honorable even to its enemies. It strengthens the foundations of the entire human race; it bestows the properties of all things upon all affections; it guards the sacred rights of parents, spouses, and children; conspicuous in either sex, admirable in every age, unambiguous in whatever condition, devoted to itself alone, always of good conscience, subject to nothing whatsoever, fearing only one thing—lest it be no longer what it is called. Indeed in solitude, which by those who fear it is called opportunity, it dreads itself as though it were a witness; and it reveres every secret place more than any public one. It hates the pestilent flatteries of the hostile flesh; and whatever pleasure or gift the world may thrust upon it, it rejects entirely, presuming that it possesses everything if it be pure. It desires no one shamefully, nor does it make itself similarly desirable to anyone.

It remains in its own state, in every place, at every time, consulting honor more than advantage. Do you wish to know how great a happiness it is? If it loves you: he who has it loves it, and he who does not have it loves it. If therefore its glory often exults among the Gentiles—though there it can be neither fruitful nor true, because it dwells under an unchaste plunderer—how much more ought it to be more glorious among the Christian people, who serve the God who is its inviolable sanctifier? For if the Church is the bride of Christ for this reason, that she is chaste; if she is honored with the yoke of the heavenly bridal chamber for this reason, that even after marriage she thereafter remains a perpetual virgin: we, who are born of so great a union, ought in every way to strive to prove the nobility of our lineage not only by report but also by the faith of resemblance.

Yet I declare openly, most beloved brethren, that this assertion shines in you clearly and without ambiguity: for you show that you both have and possess God as Father, when you not merely—I will not say love—but adorn with illustrious conduct that chastity in which God dwells. Great glory it is, therefore, to adorn that by which you are adorned; to preserve that by which you yourself are preserved. Finally, your praise is made equal to the praise of chastity: for it bestows holiness upon you, and you bestow love upon it. Through it you attain Christ; nay rather, it through you embraces Christ together with you. Through it you obtain from God the Father what you ask; nay rather, it obtains through you that for which you labor with care, lest, when it asks for something, it should blush. Blessed is it when it plays among children; more blessed when it happily fears the falls of youth; most blessed when it labors to extinguish the carnal fires in young men.

Truly in the aged it is to be honored as much as it is not to be wondered at: for although it is victorious, it yet shares the palm of its triumph with the rigor of old age; for the battle of concupiscence ceases where, as diseases increase, even the members of the unchaste become chaste by very necessity. II. Come now, let us briefly expose the rage of its rival, even by a comparison of names, so that what is to be sought and what is to be fled may most easily be recognized. Under the veil of the name of Christ, brethren, Antichrist likewise attempts to assert itself as chaste, in order to deceive: it drags after itself the sound of the name of chastity; but its author shows what fruits it bears. For it rages madly through the peoples, and hurls the slippery minds of men into frenzy with the burning goads of lusts, sparing neither sex, nor age, nor piety, nor itself—for he who pursues another's shame first loses his own.

Neither night nor day succeeds for it in purity, for it is always submerged in the storm of its own foul whirlpool, while the ever-seething foulness of lust is perpetrated either in reality or in imagination. It gives or receives rewards; it corrupts or is corrupted; it kindles love, intending shortly afterward to make hatred out of love. It sows illicit heirs, and knowing the crime, excuses it with the names of affection. It either kills or strips its own of feeling. It considers nothing whatsoever shameful either to suffer or to do, provided that its attempts succeed in effect. Yet even in its very fruit, in which it is accustomed to rejoice at the ruin of another's conquered shame, it is always unhappy. Indeed, after the deed is done, it hates both itself and the one it has conquered.

This has often declared war upon peaceful nations; this has at times overthrown mighty kingdoms; this has triumphed over subjugated marriage-beds either through shameful or through cruel deeds; this, driving men mad with feminine ardor in a manner unknown even to women themselves, has taught them to overcome their own nature; this has placed the reward of lust chiefly in the deaths of parents, children, husbands, and wives; this has not seldom blotted out the names of affection by monstrous intercourse, persecuting the chaste indeed, but fittingly slaying only the unchaste; this, I say, at every moment both brings forth all that is evil and has brought forth all that is worse; for among idols it is a goddess, but among their worshippers it is a servant. It procures itself to be venerated in temples, merry in theatres, importunate in public places, opportune in whatever secret places there are.

Wanton, sparing neither tongues, nor eyes, nor ears, it jests, hopes, courts, flatters, is jealous, rages, arms itself with prayers, arms itself also with anger, likewise at times extorting by force what it could not obtain by blandishments. It always rejoices in the varied exchange of lusts, and repents, never arriving at satiety through its slippery pleasure. It desires to do what it fears to have made public; it attempts everything utterly, so as to claim everything for itself. It is a new kind of prodigy. It hates chastity; and yet it desires to be seen as what chastity is.

Meanwhile she adorns herself with wondrous arts, and seeks in herself her own face, which she does not have. She paints herself upon herself, and with the flattering dye of the master's varied cosmetic, she clothes her own face with the faces of others, destined to be not what nature has bestowed, but what the judgment of the moment, tested against the mirror's verdict, has dictated to her. Now she corrects, now she erases the features she had loved, now she applies others, now she brings forth new ones. Made by her own hands, a hydra of forms, she walks ever wanton, because she knows not how to blush beneath alien colors—known neither to her household, nor to her kin, nor to her husbands, nor to herself, because that which is always shifting can be neither known nor true. Moreover, she never loves God, whom she knows to be opposed to her works.

She is assuredly the slave of the devil, for she possesses his kingdom; for she herself gave birth to gods, she herself brought them into the world, through whom, or in whom, the devil is worshipped, and whose origin is shown forth in their deeds. She herself made Jupiter the greatest by his innumerable, varied, and great crimes. She herself, worse than a stepmother, shamefully overcame Hercules in the lust of Omphale—him whom the terrible horde of monsters could not overcome. She herself, after many adulteries, also prostituted Venus—stripped bare of all her limbs, striving to cover herself with cupped hands, and thus displaying the vice of her own soul and body—as a spectacle to the whole world. There is no need to go through each case; although even these things were not worthy of mention, yet they seemed necessary for expressing the force of shamelessness, so that each person may know that licentiousness belongs to idolatry.

She herself, I say, converted the tombs of the dead into temples, burial mounds into altars, corpses into images, funeral rites into sacrifices, customs into sacred observances. Thus, thus did she snatch the human race away from the worship of God, while with beguiling festivity she persuades men that the crimes of criminals are both to be venerated and to be imitated.

So greatly does it unhappily inspire men, against the law of God and the justice of God, a kind of free license for wandering outside the lawful bed into foreign licentiousness, and thus also to tear their women away from modesty—women who, abandoned and driven by passion or by grief, if they do such things, think they are either imitating or avenging themselves. On account of this the Lord says in his precepts: Whosoever shall put away his wife, except for the cause of fornication, maketh her to commit adultery.

What answer the lecherous husbands can give here I do not see; who, deceived by the unjust impunity of human laws, not knowing true justice even from their own will, freely do what they are unwilling to suffer: who, drawn away by the detestable theft of profane lust, no longer content with shameful hiding-places, sometimes (O wickedness!) sweat in mad congress under the very eyes of their matrons, not perceiving in their wretchedness that in such a matter, with God as judge, what is not permitted to wives is not permitted to husbands either; as the Apostle Paul, prescribing for such persons, says: The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.

Thus therefore, since they are one flesh, one sacrament of the divine work, since the woman was made from her husband, and each is bound in obligation to the other, and on this account they are touched by one line of legal right as well, there is no doubt that he who of the two shall have transgressed will be consumed by the everlasting torments of a dreadful punishment. But neither does it turn out with impunity for those who, without wives, more freely for love of sinning, purchase for themselves the uncertain and dishonourable wages of lusts, not perceiving that whatever lies outside lawful marriage is unhappy and shameless: for I do not think, brethren, that a Christian is permitted more than to be either continent or a husband. V. I come now to examples, which are most necessary to the matter; because what is done is more than what is said, so that both the evil of immodesty and the good of chastity may most easily be recognised in one and the same discourse.

Joseph the Hebrew youth, illustrious by birth, more illustrious by beauty, and most illustrious also by the uprightness of his character, was among the sons of Jacob lesser in age but greater in spirit. He was carried off to Egypt and sold by his brothers at the impulse of envious kinship; the wife of his master had begun to love him worse than his brothers had hated him: for when the woman was burning to the marrow with the fire of mad passion, strongly armed with arguments for a sacrilegious solicitation, she seeks out solitude, seeks out a secret place and opportunity, such as even youth not provoked is accustomed often to be violent in against unwilling women. But when, breaking forth into her purpose, she perceives that neither flatteries nor promises avail her; seizing him by the hand, with the roles reversed, she attacked with all her strength to draw the fire of the youth into her own tinder.

But he, leaving his garment violently torn from him in the struggle, fled naked from the pit of immodesty: yet clothed in the splendour of chastity, after a slanderous condemnation, he was both freed by God and honoured. In the end he was made second in the kingdom by right, who was already before a distinguished king of modesty. VI. Susanna also, the pillar of matronhood, whose unstudied beauty was a more beautiful ornament than her own loveliness, a distinguished testimony of chastity—two elders, yet inflamed by one prodigy, had begun to desire her beyond what was fitting: when they perceived her surrounded by the wall of chastity, which is certainly the true and eternal beauty, in the solitude of a garden, where they remembered that Eve had been deceived by the author of her own work; taking counsel from this very circumstance, they set about to ensnare her by guile, and unless she yield to guilt, they threaten her, as one caught in adultery, with great destruction.

But she, not shut off by the contemplation of ambiguous fear as Eve was—for either her honour must be slain or her soul—calling to witness God alone, who is privy to her conscience, chose an honourable death rather than a shameful life, believing it better to show herself guilty before men than before God. Meanwhile those men press on, having become accusers from being lovers, and while they artfully exaggerate the crime transferred from themselves onto the simplicity of the one they had ensnared, they thereby already condemn themselves first. But (O wickedness!) belief is given to age, belief is given to authority: the adulterers exult: innocence is condemned. Even now Susanna, undeserving, was being dragged to punishment: even now the whole people was swelling for her blood: even now her own household too, struck by the atrocity of the strange event, groaning miserably with bowed heads, had cast aside all effort of defence.

Even now she herself, for the sake of the gain of modesty, hated the delays of death, displeasing to all, but pleasing to her conscience alone. When suddenly—he who is never deceived by any cunning—God was straightway present in the boy Daniel. He tore apart at once the whole scene of wickedness: the imported crime is quickly laid open: the guilt returns upon its authors: modesty is cleared through innocence. And so Susanna, whom lying immodesty had dragged into public, proved and vindicated, victorious chastity brought back with great triumph to her husband's chamber. VII. But O how greatly art thou to be wondered at, O chastity, who dost not wish to be praised in any other way than that thou be kept, content with the sole ornament of a good conscience! Thou art happy in virgins, strong in widows, faithful in marriages, pure in priests, glorious in martyrs, bright in Angels, and in all things truly a queen. Thou art never subject to the flesh, never to any law.

Thou art born of the will, but by the good of purity thou dost bring forth the will itself: because the will thereafter becomes thy pleasure, when through it thou dost daily gather fruits of thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. Thou art rich in the poor, richer in the rich, equal in all the perfect. Thou art the honour of bodies. Thou art the treasure of souls. Thou art the foundation, the summit, and the fruit of all thy equals. Thou art the eternal, indissoluble knot of thy purpose. Through thee lawful fasts are celebrated. Through thee prayers, once offered before they are poured forth, are accepted. Thou art a sacrifice dear to God: thou art the lawful temple of God: the sanctuary of modesty. Into thee corruption knows not how to enter. Through thee the world is conquered, all concupiscence is crushed, the devil is subjugated, Antichrist is not feared, the Holy Spirit is brought in, Christ is glorified, God the Father Almighty is made propitious.

Finally, he shall reign happily in the age to come who shall have arrived there with thee.

If perchance what we speak of boldly seems harsh and hard to anyone, brethren—a thing almost contrary to nature—let him cease at once to be troubled, understanding that this is the greatest glory of Christian virtue: to trample upon nature itself. But because virtue always obscures pleasures, and nothing seems right to each person except what he has loved, especially since all peoples cultivate it with one desire; there is no doubt that whoever has discouraged marriage is judged either a public enemy or certainly a madman. Yet I shall not fear what the envy of public talk may fable about me: for I do not condemn marriage, but I set before marriage what is better—and indeed with the encouragement of the Apostle Paul himself: I say therefore to the unmarried and to widows, it is good for them if they so abide, even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

But in another place he says: But I speak this by permission, not of commandment: for I would that all men were even as I myself: and therefore marriage is better, because to burn is worse. All things indeed are lawful, but not all things are expedient. Here now, O Christian, take note; choose what you will—a remedy, or health.

Come then, if it seems good, let us compare what the distinction is between a virgin and a married woman. The married woman thinks of how she may please her husband: the virgin, of how she may please God. The one adorns herself with outward ornaments: the other is far more adorned, because she knows not how to be adorned from any other source. The one is fragrant with various ointments and perfumes: the other, more pleasant than any meadow with the flower of her uniqueness, breathes up into heaven itself with joyful honour. The one rejoices in children: but the other does not fear the bereavement of children. The one is nourished by their blossoming caresses and delighted daily by their growing youth: but the other, sick with the weariness of nine months, does not bear that burden; she does not groan under an uncertain delivery over the safety of mother and child in the bearing and the birth, nor is she tormented at every moment by the anxiety of varied solicitude.

But someone will say: Mary too was a virgin, and yet she married and gave birth. Let there be someone such as she, and I yield. But she was a virgin after wedlock, a virgin after conception, a virgin after her son. Moreover, if there were anything better than virginity, the Son of God could all the more have bestowed it upon his mother, to whom he bestowed that she should shine with the honour of divine virginity. And so, remaining in the state in which you were born, glory as a virgin, and subject to no law, guard the flower of holy chastity as a treasure of faith: be holy both in body and in spirit: quench the fire of the flesh with the love of Christ—to say nothing of the glory of the resurrection, which you already claim for yourself here, in which, as the Lord says, They neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but shall be as the Angels.

Obtain the great benefit of living for God with pure morals, free, and of being no man's handmaid.

But you, widow, why do you desire a second marriage, when you see the Apostle restraining even the first? These are his words: The time is short: it remaineth that they who have wives be as though they had none, for the fashion of this world passeth away. But since this apostolic decree was issued nearly four hundred years ago, or even more, at a time when men lived longer and Christians were exceedingly rare; why should I now, when the Christian world is itself almost entirely spread abroad, and the vitality of men is worn away as the world grows old, blunt the edge of truth with soothing words, and not fully declare with what perfection of observance the worship of God ought to be kept? Especially since it is written in Solomon: And if children be multiplied, rejoice not in them, if the fear of the Lord be not with them; trust not in their life: for one that feareth God is better than a thousand ungodly children.

Since these things are so, come then, widow, you who like an innocent virgin so often hasten to marry, answer me when I ask: did you lose a good husband or a bad one? If a bad one, and you desire to marry again, you deserve to be afflicted by one worse. If a good one, keep the seal of your faith: he to whom you bear witness does not deserve to suffer injury. Where is he who, when you both longed for each other, seemed to all others too slow in coming—that first day of marriage? Where are the festivities of your precious virginity, that sweet slaughter shared by both? Where is the love which, in an equal and united marriage, does not die even when one of the two surpasses the other? Are you not the very one who washed your husband's exposed body with tears, wiped it with your eyes, veiled it at the cost of your hair, with torn cheeks, with breasts disfigured by bruising, covered more by squalid dust than by garment?

Are you not, I say, the one who, now rending the very heavens with your wailing, cried out that after such a husband you could not live a single moment? Now, with groans shut in by grief, often dead in spirit among your kinsmen, with your limbs sinking to the ground, you made the funeral rites uncertain: to whom should they more readily lend their tears, to the dead man or to the dying woman? After all this, if it pleases you to marry, you lied in all those things. What is this? Behold, you return again to your enticements, you borrow from the box a complexion so recently condemned. Behold, you tend your hair with indulgence; with scented powder you exchange the dust of mourning; you enclose your weeping in eye-paint; you bind with an ornament the neck you had vowed to the noose; you consult the mirror as an oracle, how conveniently you might ensnare a suitor.

Whatever you do, you will no longer be a virgin: yet one thing I know, that it differs nothing from a prodigy, whoever for another's sake changes both his appearance and his character.

But you say: The ardour of my tender age compels me. I believe it. Behold, you have married. To say nothing of the frailty of human nature and of other misfortunes—behold, on the very next day some necessity carries your husband away, which, as commonly happens, keeps him detained far from you for ten years or more. What will you do? Will you wait for his return, or will you seek a remedy for your ardour elsewhere? If you promise fidelity, you are without doubt deceiving, since your profession of impatience is already established. But if you are going to seek a remedy, there is no doubt that this remedy is only one: to restrain your flames by contemplation of the sword of marriage. Believe me, concupiscence has no place where patience holds sway, where one lives soberly, where death is feared. Therefore transfer this observance, this fear—which is truer and more just—to God, and however great that fire may be, it will suddenly be extinguished.

But thus I linger over matters that are nearly sound, as though the sins that are truly to be execrated were already corrected. I am ashamed to say it before a grave assembly: old women are often seen as new brides, whose marriages are almost more numerous than their birthdays; who are not asked to marry but invited to sleep, being nearer to the tomb than to the bridal chamber; who, when they themselves perish, by their detestable example compel young women also to perish. What son loves them? What husband?—they who confound the bonds of blood, efface the merits of husbands, flatter the living, sigh for the dead, now hating their former children, now their new ones, and their husbands likewise. But on the other hand, let them themselves consider what it means that in such solemn vows it so often comes to pass that they have neither children nor husbands.

Such also is the case of husbands, to whom it is superfluous to say anything further, because if wife and husband are one flesh, there is no doubt that what one hears belongs to both. What I should do, where I should turn, I know not: for I do not see what I should preach to the Gentiles in exhortations to divine and true worship. Shall I speak of the happiness of virginity? But they have their own virgins: and if not happy ones, they have them nonetheless. But if I call them to the glorious toil and palm of widowhood, they will perhaps mock us, because our sacred virgins and widows labour for a great reward of immortality, while their own labour for nothing. This alone is the truth in which we surpass them: that for their own holiness, Christian women marry more. Add what concerns the Gentiles: which cannot be said without great sorrow or lamentation.

For what voice, what rebuke, can worthily convict these women?—who, endowing their disgrace with sacrilege, give over the members of Christ to the servants of demons; throw open the temple of God to the profane; strip bare even the very sanctuaries; confound sacred things; rejoicing in darkness when the light is lost, possessing shrines, not homes. They are rightly slaughtered, who, ungrateful for the benefits of Christ, return of their own will to the death from which they had escaped. Since, therefore, the devil always lies in ambush for those who do not seek him, consider what he does when invited: to whom all approaches for doing harm, thrown open, afford victory without a fight, without any labor; for he will not strive to bring into his power one who has sought to be his handmaid.

Finally, what goes on in the house, and even in the very shrines themselves, faithful Christian woman, cannot be without you, because you are an unhappy wife if you do not know what is done in the house; and certainly more unhappy if you do know.

Let us suppose, then, as often happens, that a day of different religion falls together for both of you at once, on which you must attend the Church and he the temples. By what manner will each of you provide your own sacrifice? At what expense? With what vessels? With what ministers? But if these things are done separately, it profits nothing: for setting out from one place and returning to one place, if not by confusion, they are made one at least by error. What of the fact that his sacrifice is public, yours secret? His can be freely handled by anyone; yours cannot even be seen by Christians themselves who are not consecrated, without sacrilege. Finally, the condition of living is detestable where a wife is not permitted to do what pleases her husband; where you set forth that he allows you to do nothing except what he has arranged and himself completed first.

But if this has not been done, or if what was done has displeased him, then the whole house will bellow with quarrels, God will be blasphemed, and perhaps seizing your very sacrifice, he will beat your breast, disfigure your face, sometimes even bestowing a benefit when he orders you not to come to church. But it is far worse if you please your husband: for you cannot please a sacrilegious man without sacrilege. To settle the matter briefly: returning from the temple he will necessarily tell you, when you ask, what responses the gods gave concerning the welfare or harmony of both of you. If they were terrible, struck with fear, perhaps, even when he himself desists, you will make unlawful vows to them—which many women, worse Eves even under faithful husbands, have done, not as disciples but as teachers; for she was deceived, but these of their own will gave themselves to the devil.

But if the responses were peaceful and favorable, you will surely rejoice, and to him for so great a piece of news, as an obedient wife, if you do not press peace upon him, you will not refuse it. IX. What are you doing, wretched woman? Why, mad one, do you rejoice? This is not peace, but war; not a kiss, but poison. O wickedness! You embrace limbs still smoking from the funeral pyre, and wipe with your own flesh the sweat of the foul vapor of the altars; you jest, you flatter, you comply; if by chance some solemn mystery received or brought back from the fanatic has been performed, you yourself receive it, you yourself put it away, you yourself keep it.

Moreover, you take food together; the remaining portions of the cup that has been offered you drain with your lips by licking, and you take as it were the first-fruits of the draught to come, and willingly conceive through your husband the entire spirit of iniquity: unhappy woman, now there is more in you than remained in the temple. But if you keep and restrain yourself, he will judge that this is contrived not out of love of divine worship but out of desire for someone else, as an insult to himself: he will drag down the virtue of chastity and continence into a charge of crime. For what evil will he not suspect, will he not bring about, he who serves cruel gods, adulterous gods? Therefore henceforth flee, O virgin; mourn, O widow, such marriages. Absolutely no excuse is available to you. If you cannot be continent, at least do not put your marriage out at interest, lest on that day of resurrection, among your many husbands, you be unable to recognize whose wife you were.

Do not be sacrilegious, do not be a betrayer of the law. Why should you marry a pagan, when you can marry a Christian?

Although the blessed life is sought through diverse virtues, for the desire of which burning humanity sighs from moment to moment, yet all men by one and the same consent are borne, as it were, into a certain harbor of patience, without which nothing can be heard, conceived, learned, or taught. For assuredly it alone is that to which every matter looks in all respects: since there is no doubt that hope, faith, justice, humility, chastity, uprightness, concord, charity, all arts and all virtues, and even the elements themselves, cannot stand without its instruction or its restraint. For it is always mature, humble, cautious, prudent, provident, content with every necessity, tranquil amid whatever storm of disturbances. It knows not how to cloud its own serenity with mists. It knows not repentance; it is ignorant of what contention is; it either avoids all injuries or bears them. It is uncertain whether it should be judged impassible, since when it has suffered something, it is found to be as though it had suffered nothing.

Finally, brethren, it is impossible to estimate the virtue of that which is conquered only to conquer. No force of any kind diverts it from its course, nor labor, nor hunger, nor nakedness, nor persecution, nor fear, nor danger, nor death, nor torments more grievous than death itself, nor power, nor ambition, nor prosperity. It remains always unmoved, strongly balanced by a certain lofty and divine temperance, restraining with calm moderation all the agitations of souls, and, that it may overcome all things without great effort, it first overcomes itself.

Virtues cannot be virtues, the enduring states of the elements cannot persist, nor could the seasons, bound together in familiar connection, travel back to their appointed returns, unless patience, like a watchful mother, guarded the order and revolution of all things. The sun, for instance, though with wondrous swiftness it illumines the alternating boundaries of the world, yet never outstrips the beloved and modest dawn: and what is greater, it could not divide itself equally into twelve—I will not say stretches, but moments of the hours—if impatience were to press on its courses. The moon also, which to some seems to wander in its monthly circuit, never untimely anticipates nor diminishes the appointed fires of its age; what else is to be understood from this, than that it serves the moderation of its Maker, a distinguished discipline of surpassing patience?

But also the sea, provoked by winds, when it rages—though in reciprocal alternation, now beating the sky, now seeking the earth, seething on all sides, armed with glassy mountains, with violent heaps of raging waves, it raves with its whole body—yet at the pale retreat of its outermost billows, as though acknowledging the right of the land and taking care not to violate it, it breaks upon itself with wondrous patience, and is restrained by those very waves by which it is driven. This patience bestows both fruitfulness and grace upon the flowering meadows, the golden harvests, the bending vines, the half-pale olives; since impatience does not allow the fruit of each season to be hurried forth in unripe birth to the dishonor of another. What of the fair and lettered commerce of the diverse birds? What of the aerial cranes in their lofty flights? What of the countless wedge-shaped squadrons of unlike fishes, each with their own leaders, arranged by gradations of age?

Do they not, when they obey the invitation of the seasons, and in the fair procession of their customary passage either furrow the waters or divide the air, both come patiently and depart patiently? III. Man alone is headlong, man alone is impatient, rejoicing daily in depraved inconstancies; he pursues variety; he thinks himself wretched if he remains himself, and does not understand that it is a thing akin to madness for the mind not to remain in its own condition.

For what is impatience but a slippery mind, ever overcoming itself with frequent and rapid agitations; a faithless spirit; an agent improvident even toward itself, unstable, blind, incautious, inconstant, wholly rushing toward ruin; a thing without substance, a business without a person: it attempts all things quickly, it disturbs all things in a moment, the mother of crimes, the mistress of curiosity, the edge of rashness, the author and likewise the teacher of detestable evils: for it burst forth from the very cradle of the world in order that death might cut down and continue to cut down the salvation of man. For Adam, when he was still established in the citadel of paradise, and in his blessedness held dominion over the blessed world, lived so long happy, so long indestructible, as he kept the commands of the royal edict.

But when by sinister consent he borrowed impatience from the slipperiness of the envious serpent, and tasted the ill-sweet fruit of the sacred tree, he found tears, sorrows and groans, thorns and thistles he procured for himself, and troubled by the final sweat, he left to his posterity the inheritance of undigested death, which soon gave birth to murder. And indeed there was no delay. Cain, envious of his brother's offering, impatiently pants for his brother's destruction; and with God watching, the deed makes him a parricide: nor is he restrained even by the voice of God checking him, but presses on more and more, until by the shedding of blood the conceived sin is doubled. The empty world marvels that it is too narrow for two. The elements marvel that a man, who was made in the image and likeness of God, could be slain, and this by a brother. The raw earth blushes, defiled by innocent blood.

Cain alone exults in his wretchedness, and because he lacks a witness, thinks himself free of the crime: yet God saw him, conscience convicts him, his brother's blood accuses him. What of the impatient Sodomites? Where men were unlawfully oppressed by men, divine fire kindled the fires of monstrous lust: and the covenant of internal wickedness, by which the perpetrators, more wretched than those they subdued, ravaged the backs of guests with their infamous weapon, was destroyed by a shower poured from heaven by the Lord, armed with flames and sulphur, in a punishing storm. The Jews swell with murmurings, they overturn the divine altars even as they venerate them, they destroy the prophets with various slaughter, they attempt in their excessive love to stone Moses: always ungrateful toward the Lord, they fight against him with various schemes, and eagerly desire to serve many gods and kings, who through impatience were utterly unable to serve the one God.

But let the examples of impatience brought forward thus far suffice; for it is not, I think, worth studying to remember what you would wish to suppress; especially since its nature is such that it never remains within its own bounds, but is wholly diffused into the public, thrives on slanders, and bursting forth blindly, seething this way and that in various directions, is overcome only if dissimulation obscures its notoriety. Now let us return to the virtue of patience, which brought to our forebears, through illustrious virtue, everlasting glory and salvation. Abel is a martyr because he is just; just because he is patient; from whom martyrs learned to suffer, willingly enduring what they do not deserve.

Noah, when God declared that a flood by which all flesh would be utterly destroyed was imminent moment by moment, both believes and fears, and does not hastily nail together the ark which he was commanded to make so that he and his might be saved; nor does he seize so great a charge as though a presumptuous man or a madman, but builds it patiently, adorns it patiently, fills it patiently with various living creatures. He waits patiently to be told when to enter, when to close the door; worthy to escape, because in so great a terror of the world he did not hasten to escape.

Now I must call to mind that wondrous trial of Abraham, which would have made him either sacrilegious, had he despised God, or cruel, had he slain his son, unless by a certain singular and truly divine patience he had balanced the matter between religion and filial love, not denying to God in hope what he had received from God against hope. Therefore he sets aside Isaac, his most beloved son, as a victim more beloved to God, in order to preserve him; he resolves to slay him so as not to slay him, confident that he cannot displease God by that deed which was done at God's own bidding. O new spectacle, and truly worthy of God! In which it is difficult to determine whether the priest or the victim is the more patient. The color of neither the striker nor the one to be struck falters, their limbs are not shaken with trembling, their eyes are neither downcast nor fierce.

No one pleads, no one trembles, no one makes excuse, no one is troubled, lest it truly be parricide. The one carries before him the wood on which he is to be burned; the other builds the altar. The one draws the sword, the other offers his neck, with one will, one devotion; lest anything be profane, that which is performed by the one is carried out carefully and patiently by the other. Amid so great a dread—I will not say of humanity, but rather of nature itself—they are joyful. Affection alone yields to piety, piety to religion; religion favors both. The sword stands motionless in the midst, suspended without any hindrance, having rendered glory, not guilt, by its terrible slaughter. What is this? Behold, savagery passes into faith, and a crime passes into a sacrament: the parricide returns unstained with blood, and he who was sacrificed lives. Both are glory to themselves, both an example of renown, both an admirable testimony of God's worship to the ages.

Happy would the world have been, brethren, if all men had thus become parricides.

Jacob through patience gained both the blessing and his brother: he gives place to wrath, confident that he will return home: he commends himself to his father, and departs gently and mildly, so as to prove that he both deserved and did not covet what he deserved. And lest anyone obscure this patience with the name of timidity, such also is his situation in taking wives. He accepts willingly: he observes the long periods of time: he willingly endures all the commands of his father-in-law: had he been impatient, deceived by cunning, he would have served afterward for Rachel in a time never to be recovered. Likewise Joseph is found patient when he is seized from the pasture by his brothers, patient when he is let down into the pit, patient when he is sold for a harsh price, patient in prison, more patient in the kingdom, most patient when he recognized his long-desired brothers: and where boastfulness cannot contain itself, placed in honor he contained it.

Truly heavenly is that patience which neither hardship, nor prosperity, nor affection could move from its steadfast state.

Against Job the devil, who is not reported to be gentle, one may imagine what he could have contrived when provoked; especially since he received from God the power to strive against the trial of a just man with his long-practiced cruelty, with whatever weapons, with whatever forces he could. Therefore a new and almost incredible combat is joined. The devil fights beyond his custom, but Job by dissembling fights the more. He scatters Job's great and most abundant wealth in a single moment: and the most flourishing company of his beloved children, with savage violence, the walls of the roofs collapsing in ruin together, he buries with excessive cruelty in haste before he slays them. Finally, him whom he had stripped of great riches he clothes with great ulcers, into which he moreover sends devouring worms, so that in the torments of the dying man the adventitious wound might be ended together with the man by the wound already dwelling within.

But Job, having routed with placid endurance all the forces of the opposing side, stronger than ever within himself, having recovered in better measure all that the war had destroyed, did not lose the state of his former happiness by dissembling, but transformed it. Here I dare not call to mind the patience of the Lord, lest he suffer some injury whom God, reckoned among men, endures; for praise is not adequate for one whose pre-eminence persecution diminishes. But since all those mentioned, and all the blessed, are such by his gift, it is an insult to praise the Lord when you cannot worthily praise his servant.

But O how I would wish, if I could, to celebrate thee more by conduct than by words, O patience, queen of all things! For I know that thou dost rest more willingly in thy own ways, thy own foundations, and thy own counsels, than in the words of others which are nothing; nor dost thou place so great a glory in multiplying virtues as in bringing them to completion. Thou dost attend upon virginity, lest its flower wither through any disease or any passage of time. Thou art ever the most faithful harbour of widowhood, set amid the frequent storms of varied tempests. Those who submit their untrained necks to the most holy yoke of marriage thou dost compose, with gentle reins, like some skilled charioteer, to an equal straining of labour and of love. Thou hast taught friendship to will the same things and to refuse the same things. Thou, the one and mightiest consolation of servitude, dost often bring forth liberty.

Thou dost attend upon poverty, so that it may possess everything, content with its own, while it endures everything. Thou hast advanced the Prophets; thou hast bound the Apostles to Christ. Thou art the daily mother and crown of martyrs. Thou art the wall of faith, the fruit of hope, the friend of charity. Thou dost gather in a special way all the people and the divine virtues, as loose tresses gathered into the knot of a single crown, into honour and beauty. Happy, and forever happy, is he who shall always have thee within himself.

The men of Greece, who wish to be thought wise, more curious than all others, have lifted up their hearts in idle business, beyond what is lawful, with insolent arguments. These men, when they ascend in words to heaven, when they persuade others that God is what they wish him to be, when they pretend to know the secrets of the nature of things, when they impose names upon the stars and labours upon the sun, when they ascribe their own errors to the lunar cycle, when they most eagerly desire that the song of their genius be cultivated—thus they have destroyed both themselves and others: for, with the name and worship changed, as though it had been advanced by dreams, they transmitted those scholastic calumnies against God all the way to the Church, so that even within it, if anyone should wish to be mad, God is not to be worshipped by him but to be sought out.

What the unbelievers, who do this now, are told by divine Scripture, let us hear; these are its words: They have diminished truth from the sons of men. Every man hath spoken vain things to his neighbour: with deceitful lips they have spoken evil in their hearts. The Lord destroy all deceitful lips and the tongue that speaketh proud things. Who have said: We will magnify our tongue; our lips are our own; who is Lord over us?

The Prophet, avoiding this pride of a swollen heart, thus says to the Lord: Lord, my heart is not exalted, knowing as he does that it is written: Man seeth the face, but God seeth the heart. Will it not be thought injurious, or superfluous, to declare to God what he already knows? Far from it: he declares it, but to us, whom he desires to imitate what he does and proclaims. Therefore he says: My heart is not exalted, teaching that the best sacrifice to God is a contrite heart. Wherefore, brethren, we must not be lifted up by prosperous circumstances, but must be restrained within the bounds of meekness by the bridle of reverence through the fear of God, so that we may worthily deserve what Scripture says: The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a contrite heart, and he will save the humble of spirit. But hear also what the Lord himself exhorts us to by his gracious promise.

Come, he says, to me all you that labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls. Our God, brethren, is humble of heart, and that ineffable power of his wisdom and might lies hidden within the man he took upon himself, all the more wonderful because he is so great and such as he is. And shall a curious man lift up his own heart and strive to comprehend the height of him whose humility he does not follow?

He continues and says: Neither are my eyes lifted up. The case of the eyes is worse, because the exaltation of the heart belongs to few, but the lifting up of the eyes belongs to all: concerning which it is common knowledge what John preaches to all his disciples. Love not, he says, the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him, because all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life: for by these as authors it is conceived, by these as leaders it is carried out, by these as ministers it is fulfilled, whatever each day burns in the world through concupiscence, ambition, and avarice. Wherefore both are vain: because the exaltation of the heart finds no fruits, and the lifting up of the eyes, carried from one thing to another, straightway loses by its fleeting restlessness whatever it has seen.

Next follows: Neither have I walked in great things, nor in things wonderful above me. The great things are the words of God; he himself is wonderful in the highest. Since the Prophet was in dangers, if he did not walk in these things, how does he moreover assign to himself a good work by withdrawing from those things in which he ought to have walked? The latter parts, brethren, answer to the former: for he speaks of worldly matters. He says he did not walk in great things and in wonderful things—certainly not those of God, but in those things which are thought great by men in this age. But when he added, Above me, he showed that he had never been lifted up, though he could have been: for none are more easily puffed up than those whom the summit of unexpected honour exalts. David indeed, humble, abject, of no account, lay in his father's house, always feeding sheep, almost a stranger, reckoned innocent among the innocent.

He pleased God, was anointed as king, inspired as a prophet: he does not grow insolent in his kingdom: he overshadows no one with the terror of a prophet: he does not pursue his own injuries with royal power: he loves those who hate him: he spares his enemies: he forgives his parricide sons: his persecutor, and—what is more—a king several times delivered into his hands by God, he always prefers to spare rather than to slay: grateful in a reversed service, he is to please God by retaining God's gift. A gentle king, a dutiful father, a modest prophet, he can do all things, yet dissembles from all things; he is not changed by the great and wonderful things of the world, and everywhere retains the meek and humble shepherd.

Afterwards he added: If I was not humbly minded, but exalted my soul. Let us see lest perhaps the Prophet himself contradicts himself by exalting his soul, he who glories in not having exalted his heart. He does not contradict himself, but shows that it is the sublimity of the soul to have overcome higher things, because he who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted: for the depression of the soul is an exalted heart; a restrained heart is the advancement of the soul. Witnesses of this matter are two men who expound the prophetic song by their own deeds, the Pharisee and the Publican standing in the temple of God. The Pharisee foolishly stretches out his hands to heaven—hands that are often ministers of slaughter, often of rapine. He impudently raises his eyes, by whose allurement the unhappy world is ensnared. His tongue thunders, a tongue that has never lacked the venom of the serpent; and what surpasses all madness, he praises himself before God.

The Publican, however, does not pray to God limb by limb, but wholly, because in fear he is wholly humble, confessing his own sins—which, according to the Lord's word, from whom all kinds of sins proceed—striking his breast repeatedly, in a manner modestly chastising his own heart with his hand, and seeking only pardon for his offences by silence, not by voice. Hear what each of them obtained. He who had promised everything to himself departed empty; he who presumed nothing departed from the temple justified.

The word fear, dearly beloved brethren, is indeed one, but with reason applied, fear is distinguished from fear; for there come to be two: one of God, the other which belongs to nature: that of nature is born in man, but that of God is both learned and taught, because it consists not in trembling but in the principle of teaching; as it is written: Come, children, hear me: I will teach you the fear of God. Natural fear therefore is not learned, but meets us by the impulse of our own weakness: because it is not a matter of skill to fear what you dread; and you dread what you would not wish to happen to you.

It arises indeed from various causes: either when conscience seethes with some guilt; or when a threatening hostile hand presses life with the sword; or when a serpent, rearing to strike in the path of a traveller, inflamed with burning scales, swollen, sets itself in the way; or when the fury of a wild beast, seeking slaughter, has tried to burden the back of one fleeing with its nearby roaring; or when, with the rudder lost, amid contending waves and winds, the groaning hull labours to bring forth shipwreck. Among all these, the fear of conscience is the worst, because the things we have mentioned and others like them pass away with their own suffering: the fear of conscience is not blotted out.

Now let us see how we ought to understand what the Prophet says: Blessed are all they that fear the Lord. If all who fear the Lord are blessed, then no one is not blessed: because there is no nation, no cattle, no nature of living things whatsoever, that does not fear God. When we are weighed down by bursting sounds, with the hinges of the world shaken on every side; when the sky thunders and crashes with a terrifying roar beyond its usual manner; when amid blind darkness drawn together by heavy clouds, frequent flames flashing with curved fires unceasingly imitate the light of the intercepted day; when many things are set ablaze by lightning; when the earth either trembles or opens and swallows itself into itself; there is no place here for blessedness, where what is feared comes not from devotion but from necessity.

Therefore let us hear what Scripture says, whose admonitions these are: And now, Israel, what does the Lord thy God require of thee, but that thou fear the Lord thy God, and walk in all his ways, and love him, and keep his commandments with all thy heart and with all thy soul, that it may be well with thee? Do you see that this fear is necessary for us? Which consists in the love of God; which brings itself forth by its own will; which builds comeliness through the knowledge of the divine law; which fearlessly corrects toward every kind of virtue; which faithfully obeys all commandments; which, once begun, lives innocently; which cultivates justice; which strives without end to fear, lest it fear anything besides God, whom it loves.

Indeed, by the aid of this fear Daniel slays unarmed a dragon terrible to the peoples; cast to the lions, he dines in peril, he who was accustomed to fast outside of peril. And Jonas, fearing the Lord, does not fear to go willingly to shipwreck: with the whale gaping he is buried more wretchedly than he is cast down, and yet he finds the shore toward which he was heading before he sees it, more fortunate in his tomb than in his ship. In prayer a mountain trembles: the trembling belongs to the mountain, not to the apostles. Peter is carried over the sea's surge not as a shipwrecked man but as a traveler: the deep fears to intercept one who does not fear; and yet he does not altogether dissemble, lest he should not be believed to have walked upon the sea on foot.

Against Thecla the most fierce accuser draws the sword of his tongue: the public laws are made void against her together with their ministers; ferocity is sharpened by goads into savageness, and yet she is found milder than men. Lest anything of humanity seem to be lacking to so dreadful a scene, even sea monsters are sent in; the girl is stripped of all her garments and clothed in fire. Amid so many instruments of death, while the spectator trembles, she treads securely upon every kind of terror: unharmed, as though the world were subdued, she departs from that deadly cage now not pitiable but—pitiable in its funereal circuit—bearing the triumph over a vanquished age, she whom so many torments had led all to believe would perish. O necessary fear! Which does nothing else but make men blessed: which fears by art, not by chance; by will, not by necessity; by religion, not by fault: which dreads God, not nature. Do you wish to know what its property is?

All fears, by whatever means they assail, consume by their increase: this one alone grows to this end, that it may make immortal the one it has possessed.

It is no singular or trivial crime, brethren, for a Christian above all to be bound in the fetters of greed and, blinded by the deadly darkness of deepest night, to be carried miserably down to the depths. But because the whole world has blazed with the fire of this inextinguishable plague, avarice, as it is supposed, has ceased to be a crime, because it leaves no one who can accuse it: for all are headlong driven everywhere by insatiable frenzy into base gains, nor can anyone at all be found who would impose upon it even for one moment the bridle of justice. Ever restless it seethes, rages, fights, snatches, hoards, keeps, clinging to its own, grasping at another's, content neither with its own, nor with another's, nor with the whole world itself: it possesses everything, and always complains of want. In the end it never reaches its own desires. The more it has grown, the more wretched it becomes: without rest, without satiety.

Through right and wrong, armed with many arts, methods, and cunning devices, it rages, contemptuous of its own salvation and that of others: fearing only lest there be nothing left for it to scrape from anyone. Hence it is that all nations fall by mutual wounds at every moment: cities groan when shaken: ravaged countrysides cannot breathe again: the seas are more savage with pirates than by nature. Roads barred with swords grow fat with human blood: wills cause heirs unknown to themselves to marvel at being read out from them: a storm of poison drunk in secret safely destroys innocent souls under the guise of friendly hands: buried by a new fury of hatred before it is born, an unknown creature in the womb—now no longer a womb but a tomb—of its mother, which could experience neither lawful death nor life.

Rightly therefore does the Apostle say: The root of all evils is avarice: for from this mother and likewise teacher, all the evils we have named, and many others, indeed all evils, which pour forth everywhere without pause, are born and celebrated, evils which humanity is eager to condemn falsely: for it swallows a camel and strains out a gnat, rejecting drops of crimes, and drinks up the fountain of avarice, from which streams of crimes flow. II. Against this, neither laws, nor statutes, nor any honor stands firm; because whatever is either bought or sold is not free: not nobility, because through avarice it borrows, through it cultivates, through it finds this name for itself: not holiness, not fortification, because there is nothing so holy that it cannot be violated, nothing so fortified that it cannot be stormed by money: not the bond of blood, not friendship, because one is loved or hated not by one's own merit but by the benefit of gold, silver, and wealth.

This indeed is the reason why we see that the pious names of brothers are for the most part more friendly to swords than to each other: why wealthy parents, having abolished the sanctity of their own name, suffer their children to wander, subjected to beggary at the crossroads, not without disgrace to both: why children, judging their parents' life to be their own loss, laying violent hands upon nature itself, seizing inheritances before their time, compel their parents to live wretchedly and to die stripped of their means. O wickedness! Why, unhappy one, do you take away what is yours? What would you do to a stranger, you who are greedy toward yourself? O evil more detestable than the detestable! While they mutually despoil, persecute, and deceive one another, they approve of enemies, praise plunderers, excuse robbers, and it never comes into their mind that tomorrow is not in human power, nor even the very moment in which the matter is transacted (Jacob.

Iv, 14); because what is always rolling on, what it may bring in a moment, is uncertain. But with open eyes they are blind: they enlarge their granaries, narrow their lands, join forest to forest, and if they possessed the whole world, they would hate its boundaries: they count it unlawful to have a neighbor. They build estates, they dig tombs, they fear the omen who do not fear death. Thus, thus, intercepted for the most part, they lie given over to dogs, birds, and beasts, scattered everywhere, lost on both sides, with gnawed bones, stripped even of their own flesh. Behold a sight worthy of the miser. That man, that man who had a great fortune, has not even a small tomb—men whom the excellent Prophet rebukes to this day, saying: What did pride profit us? Or what did the ambition of riches bring us? All those things have passed away like a shadow: But the Lord himself also says: What does it profit any man to gain the world and suffer the loss of his own soul?

Go now, insatiable man, and by new arts compel even the very elements into the deadly gains of your detestable accumulation. Though your inner chambers, filled with the varied forms of precious stones, may shine with many colors, though the earth may groan under the weight of silver, though your whole house ablaze with gold may contend with its own flame against the Sun, and though the rank of honors, emptied out by you, may find nothing left to bestow upon you; you must nevertheless remember that death fears neither riches nor honors. O blind mind of men! How variously, yet toward one and the same death, it strives: the poor man, when he unhappily seeks wealth which he does not happily possess; the rich man, when he thinks he does not have the riches which he has; avarice labors in the one, rages in the other, grows in both, ceases not in both. Yet in one moment a little earth both levels them and satisfies them, which gold with all its ambition cannot do.

Hence one man sets out his money like a hook, to draw to himself the wealth of others, which he does not cease to feed with deadly reckoning as it travels abroad, so that he seeks not the sum which the loan gave, but that which armed numbers of days, months, and fingers have bred for him. But very often the moneylender himself is stripped bare by his own industry, when some chance has wrested the debtor from him by fraud, poverty, flight, or death: for it is the nature of avarice to make one more avaricious; it has often taken more from the miser than it yields; and so it frequently comes to pass that he deservedly loses even his own, who covets what belongs to others. There another man closes the roads to travellers; bars them from the grass, bars them from the woods, bars them from the waters. And indeed, with many ample spaces lying vacant, he denies to men what he cannot deny to birds, serpents, and wild beasts.

It is sheer madness, truly, to begrudge the gifts of nature. Another man there watches for a dearth of all things, lies in wait for the moment to sell, short in measure, high in price: he denies that he has anything to sell, so that he may be begged, so that he may cut throats—and would that at least the goods he sold were unadulterated. He groans besides if the year is barren, and far more if it has been fruitful: in the one case because he sells too little, in the other because he is not the only seller. Do you wish to know how great are the shadows that wrap him round? He is angry with God if he is not always made rich by the public's grief. Well, well—when one seeks gold, he finds a sword.

Amid all this, no one considers the condition of human frailty, no one the enemy, no one the tax-collector, no one the robber, no one the household slave who, through knowledge of secrets, is worse than all the rest, no one the flames of the coming day of judgment, through which we must all pass naked. The only thing worshipped is that of which it is said: The idols of the nations are silver and gold, for which one man is either slaughtered or slaughters. Yet I would like to know what pleasure so great a madness for it holds, what it bestows upon its own worshipper.

It does not quench fever, does not dispel diseases, does not heal wounds, does not remove pains, does not drive away death—except that it kills the healthy; nor is it ever eaten, certainly, nor drunk, nor will it descend into hell with its own plunderer; its sole effect is to hurl unhappy eyes and an empty conscience into a dire craving for the desire of its malignant gleam, with the hope of possessing it, lest a man seem to have been slain for nothing.

But we have directed our discourse not to the avaricious, brethren, but concerning the avaricious: otherwise it would have been fitting to plead solely with divine examples, if there were anyone here of that sort. But because faith and piety remain and glory in you—which is the proper expeller of avarice—you are all worthy not so much to possess gold and silver as to be it; for you are the living gold of God, you are the silver of Christ, you are the riches of the Holy Spirit, you are, if you have despised earthly metals, a treasure of your life far surpassing them. For you that heavenly city built of gold is destined: no delay for those who wish to enter; the twelve gates stand open, dwelling-places without number are prepared, let no one be anxious about a lodging. It will be a notable mark of our assured glory if we have made the city of God narrow by the happiness of our number.

Therefore be secure: nothing is ever lacking there, nothing is removed from its place or declines; all good things, and everlasting, abound on every side. Certainly, what is foremost: no one is in want, no one envies, no one steals, no one seizes, no one proscribes, no one slaughters, no one dies; all are blessed, all are of one mind, all are immortal, all are always equal; what belongs to one belongs to all, what belongs to all belongs to each. Do you wish to know what blessedness dwells there? No one hides his garment, no one his pearls, no one his precious stones, no one his gold, no one his silver—and yet no one fears theft.

Avarice, how easily it is condemned by all—would that it could be as easily not loved: for it is a cunning and sweet evil, and always hostile to all mankind. In short, upon those who do not have riches it inflicts the desire of having; upon those who have them it takes away satisfaction. Thus it hurls all into madness in a single storm, so that you cannot tell where it is greater. It is moreover like fire consuming dry fodder, which, unless the fodder gives out, is not itself extinguished. Those of middling station cultivate it through frauds, the rich through excess of power, judges through favour, the eloquent through a mercenary and double tongue, kings through pride, merchants through cunning, the poor through vain desire, worshippers of God through feigned hatred, but whole peoples and all nations through the sword.

Throughout the whole world it rages in madness, seething with new and varied arts: never at rest, not by day, not by night, not in war, not in peace; never satisfied; the more wretched for the enormity of its gains. It is a new kind of calamity, one that only grows and knows not how to grow old. The piety of parents does not break it, nor the sweetness of children, nor conjugal affection, nor dear brotherhood, nor the bond of friendship, nor the tender orphan, nor harsh widowhood, nor pitiable poverty, nor the contemplation of God: for upon all of these, as best it can, by various arts it either fawns or does harm, if they have anything, only to take it away. Yet whom will it spare, when it hastens to die at every moment, even for a trifling and base gain?

Why then, wretched man, inflamed by the vain desire of gold and silver, are you tormented by vain anxiety? Why do you heap up great piles of talents? Why do you keep them here, where they must remain, with wakeful and fruitless solicitude, granting yourself nothing from them, preserving them untouched? Moreover you complain of poverty, you who do not know what you have. Whatever you do, you will carry none of these things with you to the underworld; for what belongs to nature can be transferred from place to place, but cannot be taken away from it. In the end, gold and silver, which are dug out from deep in the bowels of the earth, are again committed to the earth to be hidden: for it is a thing of which the possession is a false joy, and the making public a most certain peril. But there is no need to go through each point in detail; since all its evils are known by a single example, the Prophet saying: The idols of the nations are silver and gold.

Whence it appears that he who loves gold and silver not only worships gods, but imitates their ways and deeds, of which thing the proof is easy. Let us meanwhile look at those things which are our own.

Gold and silver, O Christian, if the truth must be told, you execrate only in images, not in your own inner chambers; for even there you know that in countless golden and silver pieces, struck as it were like round temples with smooth coinage, the faces and emblems of kings are likewise present; and there is no other difference, except that in your house they are small, in the temple larger: which, if you spend them, are money, if you hoard them, are idols. You, a handmaid of Christ, reject the false idol: believe me, you worship in yourself the one whose adornment, whose image you do not lay aside. You come to the Church of God with your whole body gilded with varied workmanship, laden with execrable metal, delicate everywhere, strong under your necklaces. In the end, by the very stiffness of your adornment you do not bend in prayer, you do not stretch out your hands, you disdain to prostrate your breast swollen with necklaces. You do indeed bow your neck, not from devotion, but from the weight.

When will you make your confession, you who are more anxious for your adornment than for your salvation? What do you believe you can obtain from God, you who entreat him through that very thing by which he is angered? Open at last the eyes of your heart, and you will find that you are insulting rather than beseeching. Finally, brethren, she who does not fear Christ cannot fear her husband.

Hence it is that spouses, resisting the most holy bond of marriage, each striving for themselves, through excessive love forsooth, each seeks the inheritance of the other; that parents hate their children and children their parents; that friendship plays more upon the face than it dwells in hearts; that the whole human race takes delight in its own ruin and its own calamities, holding the soul cheaper than money. Hence it is that justice, honour, piety, faith, and truth perish; that God himself suffers insult at every moment, whose precepts are despised, to whom the worship and love of the world is preferred; for any impiety, crime, disgrace, or wickedness is willingly committed by one whose inmost heart an implacable and pestilential flame of greed has filled.

But these things are not addressed to you, brethren, whose generosity is known throughout all provinces, whose pious seeds are scattered, as it were, through the members of the whole world. Many give thanks to you who have been ransomed by you, many freed from deadly edicts, many released from harsh conditions. Your houses are open to all strangers; under your care neither the living nor the long-unseen dead has ever been found naked. Now our poor no longer know how to beg for food. Now widows and the destitute draw up wills. I could say more in praise of this your blessedness, were you not my own people. Yet one thing I cannot pass over in silence for joy: by lending to the poor, you transfer all the wealth subdued from avarice into your own account without envy. For what can be richer than the man of whom God professes himself to be the debtor? Who is blessed for ever and ever.

Rightly, brethren, as you have heard, God hates avarice: for it is a deep lust, a blind desire, a mad tempest, a rapacity without end, an anxiety without rest, never arriving at its own wishes, because it does not know how to be satisfied: it breaks faith, neglects charity, denies justice, knows no affections, despises divine law, excludes human law by cunning arguments, and would seize the whole world, if it could. Do you wish to know what kind of calamity it is? Assuredly it rages more against the one who has loved it: but whoever has conquered it shall have eternal life.

If anyone, out of eagerness either to know or to attack the sacred law, should repeatedly read through the book of Moses concerning the nature of birth; perhaps, as minds are wont to be, delighting daily as we see in crafty disputes, he may bring against us a calumnious question from the saying of the Apostle, who says: The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is from heaven: since it is not in doubt that only one man was formed from the clay of the earth by God, and that a woman was drawn from his side as a conjugal comfort for him, from whom all the human race has flowed; but that the heavenly man is nowhere in Genesis mentioned, nor can it be shown that he was made or born there.

To this is added also the very inverted order of mention: for it is incongruous and absurd that the second should be immortal, and that he who is mortal should be first—since immortality does not in itself admit the order of time, whereas mortality does; or if the heavenly is first, what need was there that the earthly should also be made? That like saying of the Gospel can be assailed by a consistent line of argument; for it is written: No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, which is in heaven. How could the Son of man, or of what man, be born in heaven, so as to descend from heaven; since both the possession and the nature of humanity are far removed from heaven? Come, rouse your understanding, reader, and you will find the truth.

He who was in heaven descended from heaven: he who descended is himself also he who ascended into heaven, the Son of man, who was in heaven—Son of man in name, not in nature: for the Lord did not put on flesh twice; but it was fitting that it should be so proclaimed, because before he yet was what he had willed to become, he made it known both by figure and by frequent oracles. Therefore the title Son of God pertains to his ineffable origin, and Son of man to the mystery; the secret of which mystery I shall endeavour to open by clear reasoning, as with a certain key: so that anyone may most easily be able to recognise both the providence of God, and the force of the union of flesh and soul, and wherein the highest good of man is established.

After God, brethren, had with wondrous skill completed this world—as a kind of dwelling for the future human race, fitted out and adorned in manifold ways with elements, riches, living creatures, nourishments, and diverse and very numerous utilities, so that the inhabitant might have no cause for complaint—then to His own image and likeness He made for Himself a sensible and intelligent likeness: for taking clay from the earth He fashioned man, and breathed into him the soul by which we breathe, from the proper fountain of His own spirit; and from the earth (humus) He gave man (homo) his name: I believe, as the matter itself teaches, so that by contemplation of the maker and of the material, he might always both revere and venerate his own craftsman. After this He subjected to him all the good things of the world: and because man was now endowed with wisdom, furnished with senses for choosing death or life, and admonished by the instruction of a commandment, He committed him to his own free will.

But that envious accuser, who received the name of serpent because he creeps stealthily, inflamed with detestable envy, since he could not prevail by himself, fawned upon man in another's form, and by persuading him through the woman to transgress God's commandment, miserably slew him: and from that time onward the whole human race, undone by an inherited condition, was perishing uniformly. Nor was there any place of any consolation: for toil, groaning, impiety, pain, sickness, and misery consumed the living man, as they do even to this day; and the earth devoured for eternity the body and that most flourishing form of the dead; and hell, implacable, afflicted with perpetual punishment the soul banished to bearable darkness in the penalty of a perpetual prison. Neither those above nor those below spared the image of God: for the dominion of death had claimed the whole for itself. III.

While these things had long been thus, that most skilful craftsman of all things, the Son of God, whose wisdom has no end nor His strength any measure, descended from heaven out of love for His own image: He illumines the lodging of a virgin womb, and therein encloses God within man. He makes use both of human form and of mortal condition. He teaches that justice is the purchaser of immortality: He fulfils His precepts by deeds. Finally He accepted death, so that, having conquered it, rising again He might through the man whom He bore bring to man both the hope of conquering death and admit him to the rewards of immortality. Thus it came to pass that just as through the condemnation of one, condemnation flowed down upon all men, so through the justification of one, the justification of eternal life might flow down upon all men. Do you not now see plainly that in the taking up of man there was providence, in the passion a sacrament, in the resurrection the highest good? IV.

There now, first of all, we ought to know that the fabric of man is composed of two diverse and conflicting elements, joined together in discordant concord, and encompassed by the lineaments of the soul within the body. Whence also two lives have been assigned to us by God: one, by which, unknowing, we are poured forth by nature under the common law shared with cattle, which is bodily and therefore also brief; the other truly of the soul, which we ourselves acquire for ourselves in this life through faith from the living stream of the sacred font, noble and eternal: because the soul which shall have conquered the world by acknowledging and keeping true religion and true justice must of necessity, as the reward of its labour, enjoy immortal blessedness in immortality. Hence it is that within man a hidden war rumbles at every moment, as each part strives to subjugate the other, the Apostle saying thus: The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, these two are contrary the one to the other.

V. Hence the flesh, flowing entirely with delights, adorned with the varied gifts of the seasons, promises, displays, thrusts forward, bestows manifold and abundant riches, and sets forth its own appearance: and its face, ever uncertain in whatever forms it pleases, it changes daily with foreign colours, aided by the mirror: cultivated by the labour of the palate, gleaming from the bath, smeared with ointments, varied in dress, wholly adorned with necklaces, pleasant with the festivity of banquets, drenched with wine, crowned with gems or flowers, wanton with the gaiety of eyes and jests, blind with avarice, driven by lust, proud in the feathery tomb of a delicately swelling and billowing couch: it sports and gambols through groves, fountains, meadows, Baiae, cities and countryside: hemmed in by every pleasure, inviting both sexes, all souls, all ages into desire of itself with this song: The time of our life is short and tedious, and there is no remedy when a man cometh to his end, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell: for we are born of nothing, and after this we shall be as though we had not been: for the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and a little spark in the moving of our heart: which being extinguished, our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit shall vanish as the soft air, and our name shall be forgotten in time, and no man shall have any remembrance of our works: and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist that is driven away with the beams of the sun, and overcome with the heat thereof: and our name shall be forgotten in time.

And below: Come therefore, and let us enjoy the good things that are present, and let us speedily use the creatures as in youth: let us fill ourselves with costly wine and ointments: and let not the flower of the time pass by us. Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered. Let no meadow escape our wantonness. Everywhere let us leave tokens of joy: for this is our portion, and this our lot.

Thence the spirit, like a most skilled commander, foretells the flight of all these, that one must stand most readily in arms, watch diligently, fortify the camp on every side, defend the royal standards bravely and tenaciously; that heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and all dangers must be borne with equanimity: that the world must be trodden down by renunciation, and that death itself, to which everlasting blessedness succeeds, is more the reward of victory than death. Through John he preaches thus far in splendid speech: Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him: because all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the Father, but of the lust of the world: and the world passeth away, and the lust thereof. But he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever, even as God abideth for ever.

But someone says: if this is so, why is it overcome most of all within itself? First, because the human race consents more to pleasure than to virtue; and then because it loves delights more than toil. To this is added the fact that the flesh finds its goods, it does not seek them: and it prefers even small present goods to great goods that are slow in coming. But the goods of the spirit are not only invisible, slow, and hidden, but also set in too steep a place, so that no one can reach them except with the greatest difficulty, great labors and dangers. Add that the flesh dwells in its native land alone: the spirit is a stranger. The flesh bestows its gifts indiscriminately upon all, especially upon the unworthy, without regard for merit, so as to gather crowds to itself: the spirit never rewards anyone unless one has first passed as a victor beyond the laws of death.

This is what causes, whether through fear or through unbelief, present things to be preferred to future, evil to good, fragile to solid, false to true, earthly to heavenly, temporal to eternal.

O blind mind of men! Why do you let yourself be mocked by the fleeting allurement of present carnal things? Why do you compel the better to lie subject to the worse? For since you know it is written: All flesh is grass, and the glory thereof as the flower of grass; if you take care of it, you recognize yourself to be of the nature of cattle. Do you love its strength? Any pain breaks and subdues it. Do you love its beauty? It is a light and changeable thing, and one that is most easily destroyed by a single fever or any injury whatsoever. Behold, the eyes, its stewards and governors, put out by some blow, sink down. Is it not a living corpse? Behold, the diseased lung, eaten away by thick spittle, lays bare with detestable leanness all the bones of its bearer. Will not even that fleshless, tractable shadow shudder in some way at itself? It would take long to go through each case. Behold, some deadly disease prostrates the whole frame upon a bed.

Behold, the storm of death presses in from every side. Does not that which was the mistress of pleasures immediately become the prey of diseases? Finally, death claims for itself the prostrate remains, and is moreover about to bring upon it the punishments of hell. Then that carnal farce is ended, and all those adornments avail nothing to the bloodless corpse, except that they are snatched away by those who falsely mourn while the person still lives.

Wherefore, brethren, as true Christians, abstain as strangers and pilgrims from carnal desires, which war against the soul: and let not your affection be broken by the fact that you do not know its secret and its form; for if you despise it on that account, because you do not see it, you will likewise be able to despise God also, who is invisible; for he who does not love its likeness, it follows that he hates the truth. Hence it is that fools prefer the body to the soul, an idol to God. But we, who have put off Adam, have put on Christ; who have learned, with God as our teacher, what the power, what the end, what the reward of the flesh is, and what of the soul; who are not ignorant that by the victory of the flesh both are destroyed, by the victory of the soul both are saved; let us follow the better things, at least with the same zeal with which we follow evil things.

No excuse is fitting for anyone, especially since the matter has been committed to our will, the Prophet saying: Before man are good and evil, death and life; whatsoever he shall choose, that shall be given him. Whence it is not doubtful that our will, to whichever side it shall have joined itself, grants victory; and that in the resurrection it shall either enjoy an everlasting reward, or be punished with a like punishment.

Most diligently, dearest brethren, the reason for circumcision—of which not only in the present reading but also in several other places the most blessed Paul makes mention—seems to need to be set forth, so that both the Christian may know the truth and the Jew may know his own error. For he is accustomed often with great outcries to boast that this is the nobility of his people, this the virtue of a heavenly sacrament, this the lawful mother of eternal life, this the perpetual companion of the kingdom to come, without which no one can attain at all to the knowledge of God. Wherefore I think it must first of all be defined what circumcision is, so that then at last it may rightly be recognized for what it is. Circumcision is, brethren, a scar traced in a circle by iron to the injury of a rounded wound.

If the Jew esteems this a glory—to say nothing of other things—greater is his glory who, in honor of his goddess (a foul and wanton old woman, to be sure), sacrificed not a small piece of skin from the same member, but the member itself cut away at the root, to yet more shameful rites; for this reason, namely, that the Jew after his sacrament can still sin through this part, whereas that man henceforth can sin through this part no more.

It follows that he should declare whether he maintains this circumcision to be spiritual or carnal. If spiritual, why does he glory in the flesh? If carnal, it will not be able to profit the soul, because flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God. There is the further point that circumcision conflicts with the sabbath, which it proclaims must not be violated by any work whatsoever. For it frequently happens that a son is born to him on the sabbath, whom, if he does not circumcise on the eighth day—that is, when the next sabbath comes—the soul of the infant will perish from his people. Here, dearest brethren, let him choose whichever he will: let him circumcise or let him delay.

If he circumcises, he breaks the sabbath; if he does not circumcise, he has voided the ordinances of the prescribed circumcision along with the destruction of an innocent soul, because the eighth day alone received from God the privilege of circumcision—not the seventh, not the ninth—and therefore it is necessary that both be void, if either of the two can be made of no effect.

What of the fact that Abel was found just without this wound? What of the fact that Enoch is read to have been taken up by God whole? What of the fact that Noah, uncircumcised, when the flood raged, was appointed by divine providence as heir and father to the human race? What of the fact that Melchisedech, that great high priest most acceptable to God, was ignorant of this scar? What of the fact that the people of Nineveh, with their foreskin, were freed by the indulgence of God? All of these He would surely have commanded to be circumcised, if He had foreseen that circumcision of the flesh was necessary for the salvation of those whom He loved. He would certainly have done so first with Adam himself.

But perhaps someone may say: was Abraham therefore a sinner, that he was circumcised; or was he just, and ought not to have been circumcised? Abraham, brethren, was both a just man and yet was circumcised of necessity. For what does Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Did it say, Abraham was circumcised, and it was counted to him as righteousness? Since therefore Abraham, like Enoch and the others, was justified while whole, and was circumcised afterward, it is manifest that circumcision was not necessary for Abraham, but was arranged for the designation of the Jewish people, who were to be carnal. In the end it conferred nothing upon him, because he pleased God before, not after, he was circumcised; and he received the reward not of circumcision, but of the promise merited in uncircumcision. Whence it is manifest that Abraham bore in himself the type of a twofold people, so that the mark of circumcision might represent the Jew, and the righteousness of faith the Christian.

Add to this, that this circumcision not only promises no salvation, but rather points out the place and source of sin. For when Adam plucked the forbidden fruit with this member, he thus introduced the law of death upon the human race. Therefore God necessarily gave this sign to a lustful people: so that, by marking the place of the original fault, it might also teach them to flee other sins. "By your own mouth you have been conquered," he says, "O Christian." Hence it is that I too contend that I possess eternal life, because I acknowledge that the care of death has been specially provided for me by God. A Jew would rightly say this, brethren, if that care could have benefited both sexes. For since a graver cause remains—he acknowledges that he will perish unless he seeks the truth—if indeed Adam is cured, certainly Eve, in whom is the sum of all transgression, cannot be cured by this remedy. What of the fact that I see it profits not even the man himself?

Because the marking of this character is subject to the power of the heart, which, unless it shall have been purged by the spiritual sacrament of true circumcision, the man in question will perish forever: for the flesh can suffer harm, but it cannot command the soul; for the soul, by the authority of its royal power, compels the body subject to it to fulfill the servile offices of its own desires; and if the soul be corrupt, as many members as each person has, so many sins will he be able to commit. VI. Finally, in this manner Scripture marks out the Jews, beginning from the ears: "I cried to them," it says, "and they did not hear; they shall cry to me, and there shall be none to hear them." Likewise it says of the hands: "For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with sins. But your lips have spoken iniquity, and your tongue meditates injustice".

And again of the other members: "Their throat is an open sepulchre, they dealt deceitfully with their tongues, the poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood: destruction and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known, there is no fear of God before their eyes". And of circumcision itself he says in figures: "They asked, and their staffs declared unto them, they were led astray by the spirit of fornication, and they committed fornication against their God". Acknowledge therefore, O Jewry, even if late, the wretched and damnable peril of your error, and tell us whether you observe circumcision or the law. If circumcision, the law is not necessary for you, because the just Abraham, who lived by faith, merited God by belief, not by law.

If the law, then despise your circumcision, which we see rendered void by the law, as Jeremiah says: "Thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and to all who dwell in Jerusalem: Renew among yourselves a newness, and sow not among thorns. Circumcise the foreskin of your heart, lest my anger go forth like fire, and burn, and there be none to quench it". You see therefore, brethren, that to those circumcised in this manner God not only promises no salvation, but also threatens the punishment of unquenchable fire, unless they be lawfully circumcised in heart. But Moses himself, whose disciples they often claim to be, speaks to Israel in the same spirit, saying: "In the last days the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your seed to love the Lord your God". VII. Hence I will now speak to you again. O Pharisee, answer where you hold the heart to be situated. If in the region of the chest, why do you measure the lower parts with a shameful wound?

If, as you rightly judge, in the lower parts, then without doubt you surpass all the sacrilegious, who, rejecting the word of Moses, presume that you can please God through this injurious bodily tribute. "It is already fulfilled in me," he says, "through Joshua the son of Nun, at the Lord's command, the second circumcision which Moses had foretold: for it is written: 'And God said to Joshua: Make for yourself knives of stone, very sharp, and sit down and circumcise the sons of Israel a second time'". Let us now see therefore, dearest brethren, in what manner that second circumcision was performed by Joshua the son of Nun with those stone knives: whether it circumcised the heart or the foreskin.

For if we too, following them, think carnally, both prophets will be held guilty of a fault, so that either Moses is a deceiver, if circumcision is circumcised again to do the same thing, or so that it loses what it does not have; or certainly Joshua the son of Nun is a parricide, if he cuts out the hearts of men with knives.

But far be it from us, brethren, to touch spiritual men with any error, especially since the prophecy has now come to the truth of its own saying: for Joshua son of Nun bore the image of Christ, who is known to be the true saviour of all both in deeds and in name: for since he himself was also called a rock, he rightly made flint knives (whence not without reason he also imposed on Simon, upon whom he built the Church, the name Peter), that is, he established the apostles and all the disciples as men formed by his own teaching and sharpened by the file of the Holy Spirit: whose saving admonitions, with tongues singing as with certain spiritual knives among the peoples of believers, according to the saying of Moses, cut away not to the harm of man the foreskin of the flesh, but to the increase of man the foreskin of the wicked heart.

But perhaps someone may still ask why he himself also received the seal of the flesh, if it was not necessary for him. Receive, brethren, what is the reason for this question. He therefore who had come to give life to man was obliged, through man, lest he be thought a phantom, to fulfil all the ordinances of the law: for he could have been neither the end of the law nor the true Christ, if he had omitted anything that could have been provided by another for the salvation of men. To this is added that he was foretold as the future son of David according to the flesh; and unless he answered to the ancestral seal of his lineage, he would neither be the son of David, nor could Christ have come except into a son of David; he was therefore circumcised because he had been promised to the Jews, and therefore born with a foreskin because he was to benefit the uncircumcised gentiles for ever.

We have spoken of the first circumcision of the flesh, which belongs to the Jews: now let us briefly set forth the second, spiritual one, which is ours, which carries such great power that it has begun from a woman, which was impossible for the former. Finally the care of circumcision begins from the woman who had sinned first. And because the devil, creeping in through the ear by persuasion and wounding Eve, had slain her; Christ, entering through the ear into Mary, cuts away all the vices of the heart: and the wound of the woman he heals by being born of a virgin. Receive the sign of salvation. Integrity followed corruption, virginity followed childbirth. Adam is likewise circumcised by the Lord's cross, and because through the woman, who alone had touched the deadly wood, both sexes had received destruction; on the contrary, through the man hung upon the wood, all the human race was given life.

And lest the beginning should not seem to have been fully restored to its original state, the man is first consummated on the cross: and when he had happily fallen asleep, likewise from his side by the stroke of a lance not a rib is torn away, but through water and blood, which is baptism and martyrdom, the spiritual body of the spiritual woman is poured forth, so that Adam might be renewed through Christ and Eve through the Church in due order.

By this sacrament, brethren, both men and women are circumcised: by this we are marked not with a seal but with the sign of the Holy Spirit. By this circumcision we lose nothing, but we find ourselves growing with heavenly increases: we do not shed blood in a barren solemnity, but we retain the blood of modesty, which we pour out ambitiously for the most part when in persecution for the name of the Lord we lay waste the devil by dying. Finally we cut away what we ought not to have had, what we recognise as having been added to men by the enemy, the Lord saying thus: The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat. These we necessarily tear out by the roots through circumcision, so that, purged of the contagion of the dreadful seed, we may remain whole in the fruitfulness of the Father's seed.

This, I say, is not driven away from the salvation to be granted to man by day, by night, by hour, by sex, by age, by condition, by place, or by kind, but is always found glorious in all things. For the former circumcision cuts away the flesh, the second cuts away the vices of the soul: the former with iron, this with the spirit; the former a portion, this the whole man; the former the male alone, this both sexes; the former the foreskin of a small piece of skin, this the foreskin of all worldly concupiscence. The former serves the eighth day; times, days, hours, and all moments serve this one. The former does not even help the dying child before the eighth day or after the eighth day; this from the very cradle of infancy to the last departures of any age imparts its saving gift to both sexes.

The former rejoices in blood, this in grace; the former in image, this in truth; the former in loss, this in gain; the former acts as a captive under the law, this bestows upon all in Christ the freedom of good faith. Therefore you who are circumcised with a circumcision not made by hand in the stripping away of the flesh, but with the circumcision of our Lord Jesus Christ, strive that your integrity be not mutilated; lest the spiritual foreskin of inrushing sins, as with Adam and Eve, be again condemned by a nakedness ill resumed; lest the new man seem to have anything of the Jew or of the Gentile. For both of those are carnal, both without fruit. Wherefore there is no doubt that neither is the foreskin anything, nor circumcision, but that the sole observance of the will of God is necessary for those who live faithfully.

I would wish, dearly beloved brethren, to employ a kind of triumphal discourse, and to double the praises of the sacred citadel of this new work. But although it is an excellent thing to praise the things that are God's, yet that is not the chief thing which can be common to us with the Gentiles or the Jews; for even they, if it be permitted them, or if they will, might perhaps build their synagogues more splendidly, more splendidly raise their capitols; but in all these works, by true judgment, the builders are more able to please than the priests. What of the fact that there is no member, or a very rare one, of any place of prayer throughout the whole Church of God, that can in any degree be compared even now with the buildings of idolatry, however ruinous and collapsing upon themselves?

For we have received that the temple of Solomon was constructed with brilliant workmanship, and so elaborately wrought that the beholder knew not what he should most admire in it—the magnitude, the workmanship, the ornament, or the material: for all things had so come together into one beauty, that that fleeting ambition was reckoned a lawful house of God. But if it were so, it would always be found inferior in adornment among the things mentioned.

But God declares that these worldly things, without a lawful and devout worshipper, are neither sufficient nor necessary for His honour, saying thus: Heaven is my throne, and the earth is the footstool of my feet. What house will you build me? Or what is the place of my rest? For all these things my hand has made. In the Gospel also He speaks thus: Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not? Behold, your house shall be left unto you. And again: There shall not be left in the temple a stone upon a stone, that shall not be thrown down.

He therefore rejects a temple so immense, so distinguished, so opulent, because in it there was no true temple; for the joining together of those walls is but an assembly of men; but the faithful people is the temple of God, as the Apostle says: You are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. And it is true; for just as temples like unto senseless idols are fitting for them, so for the living God living temples are necessary; for in these alone the building of God's priests is both proper and everlasting; whereby we surpass both Jews and Gentiles and all others. Moreover, the glory is incomparable, and truly worthy of God, when with one accord, one faith, each commending the other, with like devotion both priest and temple are turned to God.

Rejoice therefore, brethren, and learn your own edification from this newly built church, whose capacity also you have made narrow by your happy number: for from the very fact that the place does not contain us, it is thereby understood that your faith contains God. Therefore, lest anyone perhaps inquire of me about the construction, I will set it forth in a few words.

In the foundations of the whole fabric, not as in the temple of Judaea many stones, but one great, illustrious, precious, and beautiful stone alone sustains the entire mass with all its squared members: upon which there does not serve a countless and varied array of very strong columns, because for it seven alone suffice: no brazen sea is attached to it, because within it there is a living sea of its own perennial spring—not one that makes shipwrecked men, but one that leads the shipwrecked to a sweet life: no gold, no silver; because it reckons all in its martyrs. It implores no light from windows; because the eternal sun abides in it. The three members of its one inestimable fullness are: one inner chamber, and twelve gates ever open, which a beam of wood projecting in the form of the letter Tau defends from hostile assault. O truly wondrous thing!

It is built daily and daily dedicated: it is adorned moment by moment with perpetual flowers and diverse gems, stones, and pearls: and because it is a living work, it has no roof but heaven.

I will say moreover what daily wages, what provisions are paid out. To all alike one loaf of bread is given with wood, water with wine, salt, fire and oil, a plain tunic and one denarius; whoever shall willingly receive it, and having received it shall not despise it, but shall persevere in labour to the very end, when the tower is completed, shall possess inestimable riches dwelling therein. V. It is also necessarily to be noted, who does what in the temple. The priest calls, the door faith opens, simplicity leads in, understanding invites, truth persuades, fear keeps watch, discipline restrains, continence holds itself in check. Faith stands in a narrow place, chastity in a hidden place, innocence in the first place, equity in the middle, patience at the end. Peace gathers, charity binds, solicitude guards, justice distributes, piety ministers, purity supplicates, the spirit petitions, hope promises, wisdom the mistress of the house bestows gifts in advance. Rejoice, ye elders, you are the foundations of this work. Rejoice, ye young men, you are better than stones of adamant.

Rejoice, ye children, sweet pearls of the sacred tower, and without price. Rejoice, ye happy marriages: you carve gems for adornment better than you yourselves are. Rejoice, ye widows: by the squareness of your virtue you cleave to the fellowship of the cornerstone. Rejoice, ye virgins: you adorn all this assembly with the honour of your flower. Rejoice, ye rich, made truly rich by frequent and just acts of giving: for to the advancement of your heavenly dignity is owed this everlasting praise of the divine work. Rejoice, ye poor in spirit: through you, and in you, the house of God is greater: for you are equal to all, and you surpass all the floor-spaces with the compass of your body. Finally, holy rich men are few; you are more numerous. VI. These, most beloved brethren, are your gifts of grace: these are the virtues by which the spiritual Jerusalem is built up, by which this place of holy prayer and a new people are daily prepared by the providence of Christ our God and Lord.

This is our glorious labour: this is the glory of all priests: this mystery is dear to God, this work is dear, this living work is carried on in the flesh, but is advanced in the spirit. Moreover God the Father Almighty will grant that, just as in this earthly dwelling we give thanks to him, so in the heavenly kingdoms we may render fuller thanks together with all the saints.

In every matter, most beloved brethren, unless one first knows the person and the reason, he cannot know the truth of it; for this very thing has caused, and does cause, the Jew, and the Christian who is worse than a Jew, not to believe that the Son of God is God: whom I would wish to be present for a little while, and to lend an ear to the present reading, so that they might declare to us who that God is who says: Hear, O my people, and I will speak, O Israel, and I will testify to thee: for I am God, thy God. And below: The world is mine and the fulness thereof. Shall I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God the sacrifice of praise, and pay thy vows to the Most High. And call upon me in the day of thy trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.

If it is the Father who speaks, brethren, who is this one to whom he defers so greatly? Who is he whom he calls the Most High, when he himself is the only one than whom no other is higher? But if the words are those of the Son deferring all honour to the Father, you ought to recognise with how many chains the mind of unbelievers is held bound in darkness.

Offer, he says, to God the sacrifice of praise. First of all, learn anew, O Christian, that there are three kinds of sacrifices, lest you be led astray by any error. One is detestable, another reprobate, the third clean. The detestable is that of the Gentiles, the reprobate that of the Jews, the clean that of the Christian people. The sacrifice of the Gentiles therefore is as execrable as it is empty: for vain men worship vain images fashioned into whatever forms, faces, sexes, and ages, shaped by the moderate tooth of the mother file at the cost of gold and silver. What madness is this, then? To procure sacrifice for those who know nothing, to bring light to the blind, to burn incense before those who do not breathe, to address prayers to the deaf: to seek protection from those whom a thief does not fear to rob.

Against these God rightly is angered, saying: Walk not after other gods to serve them; and adore them not: lest you provoke me to anger by the works of your hands, and I destroy you. But what those works of human hands are, the Holy Spirit declares in the ninety-fifth psalm, saying: All the gods of the Gentiles are devils; but the Lord made the heavens. And in Deuteronomy: They sacrificed to devils, and not to God. And lest anyone should think that sacrilege would go unpunished for him, Scripture again says in the same place: He that sacrificeth to gods shall be put to death, save only to the Lord. This divine sentence awaits the Gentiles, unless they be converted: who do not even recognise themselves to have either a true God or a lawful sacrifice.

Now learn also that the sacrifices of the Jews have been repudiated by God, who says to them in the book of Isaiah: What is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? I am full of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of lambs. The blood of bulls and goats I do not want: for who required these things at your hands? Through another Prophet likewise the Holy Spirit cries out and says: Gird yourselves and lament, O priests, mourn, all you who serve the altar: because the offering and the oblation have been taken away from the house of your Lord. Many things could be said: but it is sufficiently idle to linger over those things which now no longer exist at all.

One example we shall of necessity bring forward, which both proves the Jewish sacrifice hateful and the Christian sacrifice pleasing to God. In the prophet Malachi: I have no will concerning you, says the Lord: and I will not accept a sacrifice from your hands: because from the rising of the sun even to its setting my name is glorified among the Gentiles, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a clean sacrifice: because my name is great among the Gentiles, says the Lord. Offer to God the sacrifice of praise. Offer, he says, to God, not to demons, the sacrifice of praise, not of reproach, and pay your vows to the Most High. He pours back all honour upon the Father, from whom are all things. And call upon me in your tribulation, and I will deliver you—by saying this he shows that he has accomplished all things through himself.

And you shall glorify me: which saying, brethren, you ought not to receive in such a way as to suppose he testified that the praise of his own work was owed to himself alone, who says in the Gospel: If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not: but if you will not believe me, believe the works; and know that the Father is in me, and I in him: it is said with the single signification of majesty and the inseparable affection of piety; because the praise of the Son is the Father's, and the praise of the Father belongs to both.

Now it befits us to know the proper character of our sacrifice, which is easily understood by contrast: for if a bodily sacrifice befits bodily gods, then assuredly a spiritual sacrifice is also necessary for a spiritual God: one which is brought forth not from a purse but from the heart; which is obtained not from rank-smelling beasts but from the sweetest conduct; which is offered not with blood-stained hands but with clean senses; which is not slaughtered so as to perish, but, like Isaac, is immolated so as to live, the Apostle Paul exhorting us, whose words these are: Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God: for this is pleasing to the Lord, when a pure soul has immolated itself to the Lord; but all other things will profit nothing if the mind of the worshipper be not pure, since Solomon in Ecclesiasticus cries out: The Most High does not approve the gifts of the wicked.

Here, O Christians, inquire whether your sacrifice can be acceptable—you who know every clod, every little stone, and every twig of your neighbours' estates; yet on your own estates you do not know the shrines smoking on all sides, which (if the truth must be told) you subtly preserve by looking the other way. The proof is not far off. Lest anyone wrest from you the legal title to temples, you litigate daily.

Not only those who are such as these displease God, but also those who run about through sepulchres; who sacrifice meals to the fetid corpses of the dead; who, out of love of feasting and drinking, have suddenly created for themselves martyrs in disreputable places with flagons and cups; who observe days; who turn white days into Egyptian ones; who seek omens and look for their salvation in the entrails of beasts violently torn open; who embitter the conjugal yoke and, trampling affection underfoot, entrust the management of their household to substitute persons in order to conceal the thefts of most shameful advantage, moved by love not of fidelity but of lust; who forcibly subject women of the streets to themselves, thereby showing that they are more base than those women are; who swell with anger, who rage in quarrels, who give birth to slanders; who despoil the poor, widows, and orphans; who, with profane tales, neglecting the discipline of God, drawing others away to no good end, defile the divine sacraments.

Now let each one see how he either receives or offers the sacrifice: for just as it is sacrilege to offer unworthily, so it is deadly to eat unworthily, as Scripture says in Leviticus: Every clean person shall eat of the flesh. But the soul that shall eat of the flesh of the sacrifice of peace offerings, which belongs to the Lord, having his uncleanness upon him, that soul shall perish from among his people. These things, brethren, are to be avoided by us; but those things which are good, which are pure, which are simple, which are pious, which are holy, are to be embraced, as you do: that men, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father who is in heaven. Therefore, my sweetest flowers, procure such sacrifices as the Holy Spirit may willingly offer, the Father may approve, and the Son, who is our master, may glory in those approved through him, who is blessed for ever and ever.

Whoever denies the resurrection condemns his own life by his own judgment: for why should he deserve to behold the happiness of the age to come, whom you see detracting from the power of God with sacrilegious unbelief?

But they do this out of love of their sins, so that they may think that what they do in secret will go unpunished: for if they perceived that the course of the day of judgment was already drawing near, without doubt they would both have hated the present and believed in the future, and feared them equally: for there is no one so empty even of a taste of this world's wisdom as to dare to say that souls perish together with bodies, that heavenly things are consumed along with earthly ones; especially since that most wise man among them says that this is death, when the soul is held enclosed with the body as in a prison; and that this is true life, when the same soul, freed from the custody of the prison, returns to that place from which it came.

If therefore he thought this, who had not known Christ, why should a Christian doubt, who both hears of the resurrection to come, and hopes for it, and presumes it to be laid up for him through Christ? II. Therefore I think it must first of all be proved that our souls are not dissolved along with the cast-off shells of their bodies, nor with the corruption of this fleshly dwelling-place, by that first death; but that some are banished to places of punishment according to the quality of their deeds, and some are refreshed in peaceful abodes: so that it may then at last be believed that what is plainly manifest to all as not utterly perishing does rise again. The nations, who do not believe these things, nevertheless run together with ill-omened libation to the tombs, and contend that food is sometimes demanded of them by the dead whom they have recognized in the stillness of the silent night: and so they give credence to the very thing which they reject.

The philosophers have said various things about the soul: yet they refute by manifest argumentation the vanity of Epicurus, Dicaearchus, and Democritus, who hold it to be mortal. The poets, however, speak better, who posit a twofold way among the shades below: one for the impious, which leads to Tartarus; another for the pious, which leads to Elysium; adding with all the more force that among the dead there it is not so much their forms as their deeds that are known, and that they necessarily receive according to what they bear in their acts of worldly conduct, rightly saying:

Each of us suffers his own shades.
(Æneid. Vi, v. 743.)

But we, brethren, whom not clever conjecture but God as teacher has instructed, have sufficient means to approve—by proving it in himself on our behalf, by living what he taught—that the souls of the dead live: not so much by words as by things seen with the eyes. For unclean wandering spirits, by the deceitful enticement of blandishments or by violence of either human sex, break into the bodily dwellings of the living and seek a hiding-place for themselves in the ruinous captivity of those they possess. But when they have come to the field of divine combat and have begun to be struck by the weapon of the sacred name, then you know one thing is happening while you pity another that is being fought.

The color changes from moment to moment, the face is taken from its natural form, the eyeballs of the frenzied roll into oblique horrors, the edge of the teeth, bristling with foamy masses, grinds between livid lips, all the limbs are shaken everywhere with writhing trembling; he groans, he weeps: he dreads the day of judgment that has been announced to him, and laments that he is being driven out; he confesses his sex, confesses the time and place of his assault, and confesses his own name, and his departure; or he shows by evident signs who he is, so that we very often recognize them to be those whom we remember as having died recently, or especially by some violence, while persisting in idolatry. Answer me now, you who contend that nothing of a man survives after death: how did that dead man whom you knew speak through another? But you say: Demons fabricate these things. All the better is the proof, in that even deceivers bear witness to the truth.

But why should they fabricate names whose confession in other matters is true, or for what reason do they rely on this argument, which profits more toward the fear of God for the men whom they desire to destroy, and profits themselves nothing toward their own advantage? Indeed they would rightly be thought to do this if, under the pretext of another's name, they could retain what they had invaded. But since by divine adjuration on the spiritual rack they both declare against their will who they are, and depart unwillingly, without doubt they are what each of them confesses itself to be. IV. Receive also other examples, and indeed more certain ones. In the first book of the Words, that distinguished priest Samuel, already discharged by the law of death, not only presents himself without ambiguity to King Saul who desired him, but also answers his consultations, and sings more freely as a dead man than he was accustomed to sing as a living one; whence one is pleased to exclaim: He has departed rather than died.

In the Gospel also, Peter and the sons of Zebedee see Moses and Elijah standing resplendent beside the Lord—whom they could not have seen on account of the then-present impediment of the flesh—with the freedom of the spirit, understanding thence that what is seen to perish for a time in this world rests safe and sound, laid up in the treasury of nature. Likewise in hell that most tenacious rich man, whom an immense chasm separates from the poor man's felicity, imploring relief for his torments, recognizes too late that Lazarus is the true rich man, and desires, though dead, to be touched by even one finger of those hands to which, when alive, he had denied alms. He now hates without cause what he had loved before; he proves that what he had hated is more blessed. He laments that nothing from his well-known resources can relieve his present punishment, and is ready without hesitation to offer everything, if it were permitted, for one moment of rest.

He desires that at least his surviving brothers be counseled. He earnestly entreats father Abraham that some messenger go to make them certain of so great a matter; to whom Abraham replied: They have Moses and the prophets; if they do not believe them, neither will they believe one who has been sent from here, clearly showing that the truth is not established in carnal eyes but in the faith of believers. V. For the Lord also, confirming these examples, said to one of the robbers who believed in him—who hung with him from the gibbet on the right and on the left: Amen, amen I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. Therefore if a dead man perishes forever, then the Lord lied, who promised paradise to one who would thereafter have no future existence. But also the man himself whom the Lord had assumed perishes, if Jesus did not rise again.

But if he rose again, he gave a pattern to the human race, since God for this reason tasted the laws of death on behalf of man, that man through God might receive back the right of immortality which he had lost. On account of which the most blessed Paul says: But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who sleep, that you may not grieve as others who have no hope: for if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, so also God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For God also speaks through the prophet Ezekiel, saying: Behold I will open your graves, and will bring you out of your graves, and will lead you into the land of Israel: I will put my spirit in you, and you shall live. VI. Since these things are so, why, O Christian, do you not believe in the future resurrection? Why do you so stubbornly mourn those who migrate from the filth of this world to better things? O wickedness!

Hence a mother, with torn garment, with torn hair, with torn cheeks also, her whole breast livid with repeated blows, raves in pagan vanity like a bacchante around the corpse of the one she has lost, and does not recall the memory of the Maccabean mother, who, girded with hope of things to come, while Antiochus raged, willingly—I will not say brought forth—but rather herself happily slew by her own exhortations, one after another, seven sons, trusting religiously that she had borne sons for God, not for the world.

Hence a wife testifies that she cannot bear the desolation of her lost husband, and complains of the cold side in the bed too widely spread; with envious words she heaps reproach upon God; she sometimes breaks with profane wailings the very divine solemnities in which the departed are customarily commended by the priests of God; and, disfiguring her whole appearance with foul squalor, she embraces the body that has been laid out; she warms its cold lips with repeated kisses; she bathes the whole body with showers of tears, covering it with the loss of her own hair; with pitiful words she kindles even those whom the cause does not touch into more abundant weeping—so much the more ambitious in grief as she is wealthier—and soon after, wretched (and would that it were but once), she is to marry again, driven by excessive grief. Here, here I do not see how anyone can excuse himself; for there is no lack of one who can say: If there is a resurrection, why do you weep?

If you do it out of love for your husband, why do you afterward marry? It is an execrable thing, brethren, to keep neither fidelity to a husband nor faith toward God. This reproach awaits men as well.

A Christian, therefore, ought not to doubt at all that the dead are raised to their former state: and that on the appointed day they are brought forth before the sight of God from that secret place of nature, each such as he was received according to his own quality, as the Apostle says: We must all be made manifest before the tribunal of Christ; that each one may receive the things done in the body according to what he hath done, whether good or evil.

For indeed, brethren, it is easier to reform what has existed than to establish what did not exist before: but if what did not exist now is, much more shall that be able to exist which once was; since it is the very practice of that most powerful artificer, the creator of all things, to assert the possibility of impossibilities, to make from that which is not that which is, to create nature outside of nature, to have nothing whatsoever difficult, and to lack only this—that which he wills not to be; for this is the property of God, to bring about that which cannot be believed.

Therefore not men alone, but nearly all things live by their own deaths. Hence I shall touch upon a few out of many, so that I may set forth the proof of all things without doubt in a few examples. Stars fall headlong from the sky, and with a long trail of whitening flames behind them, with the solemnity of a funeral torch, are conducted to their settings as if by a kind of funeral procession: if you seek them through the regions from which they were unloosed, you would recognize that by the law of revived light they have risen again in their own places.

The sun is born each day, and on the very day on which it is born, it dies; and yet it is not terrified by the lot of its impending end so as to slow its course, to prolong its hours and moments, or to linger even a little longer in the life of its day; but ever faithful, ever undaunted, it hastens to the tomb of kindred night, knowing that it holds within that very tomb what it lives by: in short, its rising is taken away from it if its setting is taken away. The moon also, which truly depicts in itself all the lineaments of human reason, born with the tender redness of blood, appears at first with uncertain horn as if from a cradle, and gradually growing—now a girl, now a maiden—advancing with the increase of each day's age, gathers the tasks of the world in the windings of its wanton course.

But when, ripened by the golden fire of the light-bearing charioteer blazing bright, and equal to the labors of her brother, she has filled her silver orb within the narrow circles, she gradually declines into old age, until, consumed by the last senility, reviving by her own death, she takes again from her end a beginning, kindled by the solemn seed of her monthly fire.

Similarly, that precious bird the Phoenix clearly teaches us the laws of resurrection—a bird which does not receive the nobility of its kind from parents, nor transmit it to offspring: it is itself both sexes, itself all affection, itself its kind, itself its end, itself its beginning: it is not born from mating, nor nourished by another's service: it does not die unwillingly or unwittingly, but when the ripe time of death has come, it most willingly burns itself up, having invited the sacred flames of its own accord. Its nest is its tomb, the ashes its nurses, the cinder the seed for propagating its body, death its birthday. Then after a moment it exults upon its festive mound—not a shadow, but a reality; not an image, but a Phoenix; not another, but though better, yet itself the former one. Blush, O Christian conscience; learn at least from so many and so great things how you, being the same as you are, shall be better in the future.

Moreover, the grain of each kind of wheat, buried in the earth, perishes, and yet within it that which is inside revives, and does not receive death to its very marrow, but breathing out its generative power into a shoot, with the surface of the aged body erased—nay, transferred into the rights of a better nature—it lifts its happy head, crowned with green tresses, as if shorn from the underworld, up into the heights above, destined to hold the glory of perpetuity with abundant fruit: this Paul confirms thus far, saying: Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. And he added, saying: So also is the resurrection of the dead; it is sown in corruption, it rises in perpetuity: it is sown in humility, it rises in glory: it is sown in weakness, it rises in power: it is sown a natural body, it rises a spiritual body. The truth of the resurrection, I think, is sufficiently clear to all.

But it must necessarily be discussed what distinction there is in it between the unjust and the just, lest the generality of the name, in comparison with the wicked, draw to itself the glory of Christian blessedness. There are therefore two forms of rising: the first is that of the Saints, in which those summoned by the royal signal of the first trumpet shall receive that kingdom of blessedness with great triumph under Christ the eternal king: the second, however, which destines the impious together with sinners and all unbelieving nations to everlasting punishment, as the Holy Spirit says in the Psalms: Therefore the ungodly shall not rise in judgment, nor sinners in the council of the just; for the Lord knoweth the way of the just, and the path of the ungodly shall perish.

It follows that it is fitting for us to know in what condition this our man, who tends toward heaven, is to reign: lest perchance he perish together with the flesh in vain hope, if he has been captivated by that which is fleeting and carnal, of which the Apostle says: Flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God. But on the other side I seem to hear one crying out: If this is the condition of the flesh, what then is it that we believe in the Church—the remission of sins and the resurrection of the flesh? Easily, brethren, this conflict is reconciled, and the quality of the future state is made plain, if faith be held inviolate. Wherefore I shall set the matter forth briefly. All flesh, so long as it is driven by the shameful enticements of this world and by deadly darkness, is assuredly brutish, and exists under a wretched, fragile, and detestable law.

But when it has been slain by the saving baptism of a believer's pure faith, it rises anew from the sacred whirlpool of the paternal font—now pure, now free, now estranged from the conversation of this world, now superior to death, now aspiring to heavenly things, now despising—I will not say the mockeries of the age, but, that it may be more honoured, its very self—now seeking truth, not its image, now desiring spiritual things, not its own; of which Paul says: Not all flesh is the same flesh: one is the flesh of man, another of beast, another the flesh of birds, another of fishes. And there are heavenly bodies, and there are earthly bodies.

And so, by the seed of immortality—of which even the most wise Poet gave a foretaste, saying: Igneus est ollis vigor, et coelestis origo Seminibus: that is, by the implanted conception of the Holy Spirit, it is made fruitful beforehand, so that when the time of its dissolution and lawful restoration shall have come, answering to its own seed, it may by right be able to merit what we believe. Nor is the matter in doubt; for just as that prince of iniquity by his own seed through envy derived the first-formed from angels into men, so the Lord will raise up again from the dead all who believe in him, glorious, into angels, by the seed of the Holy Spirit.

To this end let us bring forward one further evident example, although a likeness cannot have as great force as the truth. The wild olive is in its nature unhappy and bitter; but when it has been cut back by the necessary provision of the hand of a most skilled and artful farmer, it is laden with the nobility of another's seed, and is nourished by that very thing which it nourishes, until, taken up by the adoptive richness of the guest-graft, nay, itself made that richness, and wholly translated into the honour it has received, adorned with the promotion of new foliage on rising branches, it is now not a wild olive but an olive; while it is also a wild olive, and yet in a certain manner even itself marvels that it is not a wild olive. If therefore man can cause a tree to be what it was not, while preserving what it was, how much more will God be able to raise up man into what he was before he sinned in paradise?

This reasoning concerning seeds the most blessed Paul also subtly set forth, saying: He who sows according to the flesh, from his flesh shall reap corruption; but he who sows in the spirit, from the spirit shall reap life eternal. But indeed the Lord, teaching this plainly, thus spoke to his disciples: The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat.

But perhaps someone may still say: If the flesh perishes, how is he who rises recognized? The flesh, brethren, is like a certain mirror, laden with the fullness of the one who gazes into it, which bears not so much its own image as the image of him whose service it is in. In short, it produces as many expressions as he within has made his movements of sadness or joy, Paul teaching us this reason: We see, he says, now through a mirror in an enigma, but then face to face.

Whence there is no doubt that in our bodies, while they are sown according to the law of death, not the substance, not the image, but only that which is useless is dissolved, that which is worn away is changed, as it is written: For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality: for otherwise that robe of immortality is not taken up, unless first this carnal spoil, the sweet poison of the soul, is poured back, according to God's sentence, whence it was taken, for God says to Adam: Cursed shall the earth be in all thy works, in the groaning of sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life: thorns and thistles shall it cast forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the food of the field: in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread, until thou return to the earth. But also the Lord, speaking in the person of the man whom he had assumed, says: My soul is sorrowful even unto death.

Which saying belongs not so much to one who fears, as to one who exults and teaches. Indeed: for he could fear nothing, who raised the dead, who had power to lay it down, and to take it up again; but that he might teach, that while one lives in this world, the just man is always in tribulation, always in punishment. But when death, which is thought to be feared, is tasted; then the promised happiness is bestowed upon him in the blessed seats of glory remaining unto eternity, henceforth to feel no more the miseries of the world, the holy David saying: Return, O my soul, to thy rest, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with me, because he hath delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, my feet from falling: I will please the Lord in the land of the living. This happiness awaits us, this gift expects us.

Let us therefore so live that, adorned with good works, we too may merit to please God the Father, with the help of our Lord Christ, who is blessed unto ages of ages.

is proclaimed. Hence it is that, despising the foundations of the law, by crafty disputation, passing over God going forth from God, they hasten to the common names of humanity, which can be reached by arguments, of Father and Son: nor do they understand that in the beginning of the sacred poem God compared to God in his own divinity and name excludes all opinions of human sense: since he says: Let us make man to our image and likeness, he does not say, make to thine, but says, let us make to ours: lest the Son, who was to put on man, should seem to suffer any injury. Do you see, most beloved brethren, that here no one openly commands the other, no one is idle in the work? O holy equality, most worthy of itself alone, of the undivided deity! One man is fashioned to the image and likeness of two: and yet in him, what belongs to which, is not found.

If therefore in an external work the sacred parity cannot be distinguished; how can God be inferior to another in himself, for whatever you take away indiscriminately from one of two who are in all things alike to one another, you do not know from whom you have taken it. II. But he to whom the command is given, you say, is inferior. What of the fact that he is thereby shown not to be inferior: because he from whom he proceeded is the executor of the paternal heart; for it is no less a thing to do great things than to say them.

Although also what has been said by the Father, or can be said, because the Son is the Word, is not without the Son: and what has been done by the Son, or can be done, is not without the paternal condescension; because the Son is not without the Father, he himself saying: If I do not the works of the Father, believe me not: but if you will not believe me, believe the works: and know that the Father is in me, and I in him. It is established therefore that he is equal, because they mutually contain one another together with the Holy Spirit.

Unless one defeats the enemy by whom one is attacked, one will never be able to enjoy one's goods in security: for there are many who endeavour to assert that chaos existed in the beginning, that is, a formless and undigested mass of hidden nature, remaining in itself through itself by a kind of heap of its own magnitude; but that afterwards God separated this, and from it constituted the world and likewise adorned it. If, therefore, as they would have it, God did not make the matter which he used, but it is eternal as he himself is, then there are two principles, and indeed opposing ones: and on this account we shall necessarily be required to ask which of the two is the stronger—that which is capable of sensation, or that which lacks sensation.

But who would doubt that that is stronger which feels, which is wise, which thinks, which moves, which is moved, which by wondrous providence brought it about that chaos itself should not be chaos, which separated its members, arranged them by reason, adorned them with colours, bounded them by measure, and commanded them to serve in their fitting offices? Hence that is not a principle which grows old; which is a work made by another; which is not placed in its own power; which is taken away from its own substance; which is changed; which is moved by an alien impulse; which cannot at any time perceive what it is, what it has been, what it shall be. God alone, therefore, is the principle, who from himself gave himself his own beginning.

Alone before all things and after all things, since in his hand all things are enclosed; from himself he is what he is. Alone conscious of himself, how great and of what nature he is. Alone perfect, because nothing can be either added to him or taken from him. Alone omnipotent, because he established all things from nothing, governs them by his power, and guards them by his majesty. Alone unchangeable and always equal to himself, because he does not admit age within himself. Alone everlasting, because he is the Lord of immortality. This is our God, who unfolded himself into God. This is the Father, who, while his own state remained whole, gave back all of himself into the Son, lest he should detract anything from himself. And so the one exults in the other, shining forth with the fullness of the Holy Spirit in one original co-eternity.

Just as—if it is worthy to say so—two seas which rest within themselves, joined by a strait that brings their alternating tides into one, though they are distinct in their own property, in their locations and their names, yet the one power, one substance, and one nature of flowing belongs to the vapour of the threefold deep; nor can the incomprehensible and common magnitude of the wave be divided, flowing abundantly from each into each, proper to both, private to neither: for they would suffer loss of abundance and grace, if that were taken away by which the one is adorned from the other in one and the same tide.

The beginning, most beloved brethren, is without doubt our Lord Christ, whom before all ages the Father embraced in the deep and unsearchable secret of his sacred mind, in a consciousness known to himself alone, with affection for the Son, yet without disclosure. Therefore that ineffable and incomprehensible wisdom begets wisdom, omnipotence begets omnipotence. God is born of God, the only-begotten of the unbegotten, the only of the only, the whole of the whole, the true of the true, the perfect of the perfect. Possessing all that the Father has, detracting nothing from the Father. He who was, before he was born, equal to the Father in all things, proceeds into birth in the Father; because the Father begot from himself another self, namely from that unbegotten substance of his, in which, remaining blessed for ever, he brought forth a Son possessing equally all things that he himself possesses, who is God blessed for ever and ever.

As holy Scripture testifies, before all things there remained one and the same God, another from himself into himself, alone conscious of his own secret, from whose mouth, that the nature of things which did not exist might be fashioned, the only-begotten Son went forth, the noble dweller of his heart, thenceforth made visible of necessity, because he himself was to make the orb of the earth and to visit the human race, otherwise equal to the Father in all things: for whatever the Father commanded to be done, the Son, as the power of God and the wisdom of God, fulfilled all those things by his wondrous work together with his word. The curious endeavour to violate him with vain opinions; now the wretched understand that curiosity makes one guilty, not learned.

The beginning, brethren, is without doubt our Lord Christ, whom before all ages the Father, still God in himself on both sides, wrapped in some consciousness of his own, veiled by the undivided fullness of spirit of blessed eternity, embraced as Son not without affection, yet without distinction. But in order to set in order the things he had conceived, that ineffable power and incomprehensible wisdom pours forth the word from the region of the heart, and propagates itself by omnipotence. God is born of God, possessing all that the Father has, taking nothing from the Father. Each shines in the other; the glory of either is a common honor: because what belongs to the Son belongs to the Father, and what belongs to the Father belongs to both. The Father rejoices in another self, whom he begot from himself. But how he who proceeded was generated, it is madness to speculate; for the Son tempers himself on account of the nature of things, lest the mediocrity of this world be unable to bear the Lord of unveiled majesty.

When the Father commands the world to be made, the work is completed by the Son together with the word. But how, how great, or of what kind it ought to be made, no one prescribes, no one asks; for it could not be without injury to the Father if there were need of this necessity for him who, dwelling in the bosom of the Father, had not learned the perfection of his will, but possessed it.

Therefore, when the world was completed, man, last of all, is fashioned by the finger and hand of God from the clay of the earth. A moving likeness is constructed, wholly ignorant of itself: and, that it might be the image of God, it is breathed into by God as a living soul. It has received a spirit equally, which it does not know; it does not see it entering; it cannot prevent it from departing: and does anyone suppose he can know the secret of God, who does not know the mystery of his own body? Wherefore, brethren, on account of that for which we were made and born, let us fear, love, and honor the God whom we have found. Indeed, let those seek him who do not have him with them.

The divine Scripture, when it speaks of the Son of God, does not contradict itself; but between God and the man whom he assumed, it distinguishes with necessary moderation. For if it were continually to proclaim him pure God, there would be no place for the passion and resurrection, and Christ would have rendered nothing to the world: if only a man, as some think, taking his beginning from the womb of a virgin; what hope of future blessedness for the believer, since it is written: Cursed is the man who places his hope in man? Therefore where it signifies pure God, it speaks thus in Genesis: And God made man in the image and likeness of God: and in the Psalms: But God our king before the ages has wrought salvation in the midst of the earth! And in another place: Thy throne is prepared, O God, from thenceforth, and from everlasting thou art.

Where it treats of him as mixed man, it continues thus: Say to the daughter of Sion: Behold thy king cometh to thee, just, holy and saving, meek, sitting upon a young ass; and again: Lift up your gates, O ye princes, and be ye lifted up, O eternal gates, and the king of glory shall enter in: and again the Magi: Where, say they, is he that is born king of the Jews?

This is he, brethren, who was announced as coming through the prophets: who according to the flesh was born in time; who is exalted in the heights, humble on earth; begetter of the ages, son of a virgin, immortal for himself, destined to die for man: he tastes death, that he might overcome death; he penetrates the underworld, that he might lead back the dead from thence as living. The Only-begotten in going forth from the Father before the origin of things: the firstborn from the dead (Col.), as the Apostle says, after the deaths of many peoples. This is he to whom power was given in heaven and on earth, new glory from his own God, he himself saying: I have glorified thee on earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now glorify thou me with thyself, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. Who rising again said: All things are delivered to me by my Father.

This is he who descended pure from heaven, and ascended into heaven made flesh. This is he, I say, of whom Paul says: He who receives the kingdom reigns, and shall deliver it up to God and the Father.

Why do you take scandal here, O Christian, and form your opinion of the divine mysteries from your own nature and from pious conjecture? If you think less of the Son because the kingdom is handed over to the Father, the injury to the Father is greater if he is ever without a kingdom. Add to this that we pray daily that the kingdom of the Father may come; and we hope likewise for that of the Son. The governance of the present age is therefore vacant while both are idle; and the world and all the substance of the world is done for, if the rule of the divinity ceases even for a single moment.

But if, as reason itself proclaims, this variety of kingdom cannot by any means cease in him who is the author of the law, then it has been assigned to the man assumed by God and to his just arrangements of affairs—not to God, not to the eternal ruler—especially since the Gospel says thus: The Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father, and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end. Solomon likewise says in the book of Wisdom, when he speaks of his servants: And if they suffered torments in the sight of men, their hope is full of immortality; and having been chastised in a few things, they shall be well rewarded in many; because God hath tried them, and found them worthy of himself. As gold in the furnace he hath proved them, and as a holocaust he hath received them, and in time there shall be respect had to them.

They shall judge nations, and rule over peoples, and their Lord shall reign for ever. What is this? If he reigns for ever, Paul was in error; if he is to hand over the kingdom, these others are lying. Far be it. There is no error here, there is no discrepancy. For Paul spoke of the temporal kingdom of the man assumed, in which he is to come and judge the living and the dead, as the whole reading attests, which declares that Christ must reign with his saints until, all principality and power and virtue and dominion having been brought to nothing, all his enemies are placed under his feet, and death, the last enemy, is destroyed.

But those other testimonies referred to the principal power, in whose perpetuity the Son, abiding with the Father for ever, neither received the kingdom at any time nor laid it down; for he always reigned with him, and when the kingdom of his servants, now completed, is handed over by Christ to the Father, they shall look up to him for the eternal kingdom. But Christ, who as the Son of God, abiding in the perpetuity of the Father, neither received the kingdom at any time nor laid it down, shall reign in them for ever, as is expressed by the two testimonies of the Gospel and of Solomon; and so at last, while the mind of Paul shines forth plainly, the apparent contradiction between him and those others vanishes, since he is to be understood as speaking of the temporal kingdom of Christ, while they speak of the eternal kingdom which shall succeed that former one once it is completed after the judgment.

John, with him saying: My kingdom is not of this world. But Paul expressed this more openly, saying: For this you know, that no fornicator, or unclean person, or covetous man, which is a serving of idols, hath inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ, showing that the kingdom of the Father and of the Son is one. IV. Rightly therefore shall he hand over the kingdom to the Father, who said in his warnings that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. Wherefore it is not to be thought, brethren, that the Father is about to receive what he did not have, or that the Son, by handing over what he has, is about to lose it; since the Father also has what he is about to receive, and the Son is not without what he is about to give.

The Father possesses all things, the Son possesses all things; what belongs to both is one, what one possesses belongs to each, the Lord himself saying: All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine; and again: Father, all mine are thine, and thine are mine; because the Father abides in the Son and the Son abides in the Father, to whom he is subject in affection, not in condition; in charity, not of necessity; in seemliness, not by compulsion—through whom the Father is always honored. Finally he says: I and the Father are one.

Wherefore the Son is subject to the Father not by a diminishing but by a devout subjection, as I have said; with whom the one possession of the original and perpetual kingdom, the one substance of co-eternity and omnipotence, one equality, one power of august majesty, one dignity in a single light is maintained; for if you take anything away from the Son, it will pertain to the injury of the Father, whose whole he possesses; nor is there anything in him that is inferior, because, just as the Father, he can have neither more nor less; for the one is poured into the fullness of the other, so that God may be all in all—the blessed Father in the Son, the Son in the Father, with the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Although there are many sects which strive to fabricate slanders against Christ, yet there are in some manner three principal ones: of which two simulate themselves to be worshippers of him whom they desire to corrupt. One of these asserts that Jesus Christ took his beginning from the womb of the Virgin Mary, and that he was made God thenceforth on account of his righteousness, not born God. The other, more moderately but more harmfully injurious, says indeed that the Son of God is God, but not begotten of the Father with the perpetuity of his nobility; that there was a time when he was not.

The third is the truly blind Jewish sect, which, although it reads everywhere in its law (as it is wont to say) that two persons of the Father and the Son are designated, nevertheless contends even now that God has no Son. Against all of these, the examples or the reasoning of the whole argument which we shall pursue will sever all their sinews at a single stroke. Wherefore the Christian people must necessarily know that there are two nativities of our Lord Jesus Christ, lest they suffer any error: one by which he was born, the other by which he was reborn. But just as the first is spiritual without a mother, so the second carnal is without a father. This one is wondrous, that one is ineffable, as the prophet says: Who shall declare his generation? But why it is ineffable, let us learn from the Father speaking. The Lord himself teaches us: My heart hath uttered a good word.

And in Solomon he speaks thus: I came forth from the mouth of the Most High before all creatures.

Since these things are so, crafty humanity, recognize yourself, if belatedly, and impose the bridles of silence upon your intemperate tongue. It is a kind of madness to wish to form opinions about the secret of one who is invisible and incomprehensible, and to examine his inner things, when one cannot even conjecture his outer things: because God is that which he is: but what a man shall have thought fit to define, he is not. For also hear, brethren, what John the apostle proclaims in the Gospel: In the beginning, he says, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God: this was in the beginning with God. Wondrous is the grace, most beloved brethren, of manifest truth, which, while it can be distinguished, nevertheless cannot be external to itself.

For if the Word is in God, and God is the Word, and that in which it is is the same as what he is who is within; there is a twofold person, a twofold name, but one substance of original perpetuity and deity, the Lord himself saying: I and the Father are one: which he said not in such a way as to confound the two by reducing them into one, but to teach us that the omnipotence of divinity and power is one for the two. He continues and says: All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing. III. Let us see now, most excellent Christian, how you insert time between the Father and the Son: for if they owe to time, and not to each other, what makes one subject to the other; then beyond all doubt, as you would have it, nature is greater than God.

But since Christ made nature out of nothing, and time comes from nature, it is quite absurd to set a work before its own craftsman: and therefore the only difference is that they alone know themselves. Furthermore, in Isaiah he speaks thus to the Son: The Lord God of Sabaoth: Egypt hath laboured, and the merchandise of the Ethiopians: the tall men of Saba shall come over to thee, and shall be thy servants, and shall follow thee bound in fetters, and they shall worship thee, and shall make supplication to thee, because God is in thee, and there is no God besides thee. But Jeremiah also speaks in the same spirit saying: This is our God, and there shall no other be accounted of in comparison with him: who hath found out all the way of knowledge, and hath given it to Jacob his servant, and to Israel his beloved. Afterwards he was seen upon earth, and conversed with men.

In what form, let us learn from the Holy Spirit speaking: And he is a man, it says, and who shall know him (from LXX)? If it is so, how then he could be recognized, Isaiah disclosed in these words: Hear therefore, O house of David: It is no small contest for you with men; for God furnishes the contest. Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat before he knows to refuse the evil and choose the good. Which sign he also made clear from the designation of his forerunner in another place with these words: Behold I send my Angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way. Who is this Angel, brethren, if not John the Baptist? Whose preparation is: A voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God.

Now let us see what follows. At the same time two kinswomen conceive: one against hope, the other by a word. The latter marvels that she has what she does not understand; the former rejoices because she learns. Elisabeth's barren womb swells happily with fruitfulness, Mary's with majesty. The one carries a herald, the other a judge. Rejoice, O women, and acknowledge the advancement of your sex. The ancient guilt having been blotted out, behold, through you we are joined to heaven: for an old woman has brought forth an angel, and a virgin God. This is our God, who, having set aside his dignity for a time—yet not his power—out of love for his man whose form he was about to take on, and his creature, was to be called angel, man, child, bridegroom, giant, crucified, buried, firstborn from the dead. This is he, I say, who is all things in all: because through him and in him are all things.

And let not the worldly and truly childish disputation of inconsiderate men move you, brethren—men who rightly suffer error because they consider Christ not as God made man, but as man made God. But if they were spiritually wise, in that very thing which they think most weak, they would preach this above all. For truly he would not be perfect God, if there were anything which, wishing to be, he could not be. Finally, do you wish to know the truth in brief? He became what he was not; and yet he did not cease to be what he had been before.

The true knowledge of an unsearchable mystery and of a venerable majesty is this: that none knows God but God; and that nothing more is to be sought from him than that one should know his will, without which one can neither lawfully serve him nor please him. But to wish to form an opinion about the disposition of provident God concerning God by means of vain arguments is the mark not of one who worships, but of a madman: especially if God, as contentious persons suppose, is subject to disposition; for, setting aside for a moment the names of Father and Son, you cannot know which of the two suffers injury—except that both suffer it, because the one name of both is God. Therefore, O Christian, whether you are unlearned or negligent, learn that there are two nativities of our Lord Jesus Christ, lest you be led astray by any error. One you are not permitted to inquire into; the other you are allowed, if you can, to be lawfully taught.

The first nativity of our Lord therefore remains in the knowledge of the Father and the Son alone, and has nothing interposed or privy to it, since it proceeded from the affection of the Father's mouth by one consent. But the second, which is carnal, as it has been set forth by frequent oracles, so we find it to have been fulfilled.

For God the Son of God, at the appointed time, his majesty meanwhile concealed, setting forth from his heavenly seat, pitches his camp for himself in the temple of the predestined virgin, into which he is secretly poured, about to be born as man, and there, keeping safe what he was, he meditates being what he was not. Thus, mingled with human flesh, he fashions himself as an infant. Mary's womb swells gloriously, not by conjugal gift, but by faith, by the Word, not by seed. It knows not the weariness of ten months, inasmuch as she had conceived within herself the creator of the world: she brings forth not in pain, but in joy. A wondrous thing: rejoicing, she brings forth an infant greater in age than all of nature. Meanwhile the inexperienced mother does not groan in labour. The infant, poured forth entering the world as is customary, does not of his own accord inaugurate the life of one who crawls with the forerunning tears of weeping.

His mother, exhausted by the weight of so great a birth, did not lie pale and spent with all her vitals undone. The Son was not smeared with his mother's or any other filth; for in truth he could have nothing unclean about him who had come to cleanse the sins, filth, and stains of the human race. Finally, no damages from the maternal womb followed the child in the purgations which are dangerous by reason of their delay. No remedies were applied in the customary manner to the inexperienced mother in labour; for, brethren, she could not need these things who had merited to receive into her womb the Son, the saviour of all souls. O great Sacrament! Mary the virgin conceived without corruption; after conception, a virgin she gave birth; after birth, a virgin she remained.

The hand of an unbelieving midwife, who doubted the birth, is set on fire, found as a testimony of that same virginity; but when the infant was touched by it, that devouring flame was at once extinguished; and so that woman, a physician happily curious, then marvelling at a woman who was a virgin, marvelling at an infant who was God, exulting with great joy, she who had come to heal departed herself healed. Thus Christ caused himself to be born into man in the manner in which man cannot be born. His whole body, finally, he bore resplendent with his own light, without shadow: humble in flesh, but exalted in the majesty of omnipotence. He who indeed deigned to put on flesh for this reason, that no one, when the day of judgment shall come, may be able to excuse himself on account of the flesh.

According to what God had promised through the prophets—that He would send His Son as savior to the human race at a fitting and mature time—having laid aside for the moment the dignity of His divinity, yet not the power, He went forth from heaven and, the lodging having been foretold, slipped modestly as a guest into the sanctuary of the virginal temple; and there He arranges what He wills to be. Nay rather, what He had long since arranged to be fulfilled, He takes up in secret; for He rests willingly in that most flourishing dwelling-place of chastity, and in the womb of the holy virgin He prepares for Himself a body, being about to be born by His own judgment. Fitted into a man, God is enclosed in the covering of flesh; and He borrows human life from time, He who bestows eternity upon the ages.

A wondrous thing: Mary conceives of Him whom she brings forth; the womb swells with majesty, not with seed, and the virgin contains Him whom the world and the fullness of the world cannot contain. Meanwhile the members advance their own maker, and the form of the work clothes the craftsman. Mary brings forth not in pain but in joy: the Son is born without a father, not wholly of His mother, owing to Himself that He was conceived, granting to His mother that He was born—she who marvels above all that such a Son came forth from her, who would not be believed to have been born of her, were it not that, just as she was a virgin uncorrupted after conception, so she remains such also after birth.

O new manner of things! Compelled by love of His own image into an infant, God wails; and He suffers Himself to be bound in swaddling clothes, He who had come to discharge the debts of the whole world. He is laid in the manger of a stable, bearing witness that He is the shepherd and the food of the peoples. He submits Himself to the stages of age, He whose eternity admits no age within itself. All this He suffers contrary to His own nature, as a weak man, so that immortality may be granted to man consumed by the law of death. For this is the power of God: that while remaining what He is, He can be what He is not. This is our God, the coeternal Son of the eternal God. He is both man and God, because He stood as mediator between the Father and men, proving flesh by its weaknesses and majesty by its mighty works.

He is our sun, the true sun, who kindled the most brilliant fires of the world—the kindred stars and the brightness of the glowing poles—from the fullness of His own light. He who once set and rose again shall never return to setting. He, I say, whom a crown of twelve rays, that is of twelve Apostles, surrounds; whom throughout the whole compass of the world not four mute living creatures, but four Gospels carry about with their saving proclamations. Of what power His mantle and chariot possess, the prophet bears witness in these words: God shall come as fire, and as a tempest His chariot, to render vengeance in wrath.

What a gift of divine goodness Abraham received, most beloved brethren, the records of the ancient law bear witness. His wife Sara, no less worthy, after the long courses of a lengthy life had passed, came to know by the outpouring of childbirth what manner of son she had brought forth. But because old age had taken from them both the hope of offspring, they merited a pledged substitute. Thus faith merited what time had taken away; belief wrested forth what nature had denied. Abraham our Patriarch, tested by God, received in old age his only son—a son causing his father no anxiety, though his age was advancing in years toward the end of its decline, and the time for upbringing was short, and the end of old age already near.

Behold the first act of devotion: to receive gladly what is given late, and in the most sorrowful old age to rejoice under the burden of an undertaken care—for Sara too laughed, taking up the gift of youth in old age; whence the infant received his name, who afterward proves that Abraham's mind was consecrated to God.

That only son of an anxious old man, still a little child, to whom greater piety and compassion is owed, is demanded as a victim; if through human frailty some bodily infirmity had befallen him, or a natural death had come upon him, the father could scarcely have survived such misfortunes, had he died in his tender years. This infant, then, upon whose life both paternal and maternal affection depended, is demanded as a victim by the divine voice, to test his faith. I will, said God, that a sacrifice be made to me, Abraham, by your own hands on the mountain, of your son: this victim pleases me, with this blood you shall appease me, he is owed to my sacred rites: I now command that he be sacrificed. The most devoted Abraham does not cloud his brow, nor did grief persuade tears from the father, but he exults and rejoices. Nor did he fear that parricide would be imputed to him, but rather, that he might obey his devotion, he rejoiced that God had commanded this.

He prepares his son as the offering: he hastens at last to complete the sacrifice, lest delay make it a sin. The things necessary for the sacred rites are straightway made ready; the mountain is ascended. With every mystery and sacrifice arranged, the son is led rejoicing, with the father rejoicing, to be struck by the father's right hand. Before he came to the mountain, when he asked his father where the victim was that he was preparing to offer and sacrifice, the father, secure in the faith of his lineage, disclosed to his son, of whom he had no doubt, that the Lord had demanded him; and he showed what he himself had promised to the Lord. The boy too rejoiced in his faithful father, and was himself yet more faithful: nor did he refuse the death which God, who had given him life, was commanding. The father rejoices with the son also rejoicing, and with joy binds the hands of his only pledge, which the son offers more willingly to be bound.

He also binds his feet, lest the victim, stirred at the moment of death, should kick: for the best of fathers, being secure, feared lest pain might gain some power over death.

O brethren, what secure devotion! O father, who grasps after the spirit, yet despises the body and death! O one who so remembered that he was a servant of the Lord, that he forgot he was a father. What is a father? Behold, his son lies before his eyes, bound in chains. Where are the tears? Where is the grief that is wont to dwell in human feelings? Amid such misfortunes of his son he rejoices and is glad; and he triumphs that he has merited the Lord's favor. He has already received the rewards he deserves; for the trials of divine testing are extended; he indeed draws forth the blade, and raises his armed right hand on high: but the voice of him who had demanded the victim speaks against it. Look back, said God, and before you look, spare him. Behold, even the chief merit has deserved divine indulgence amid these trials: for Abraham, looking back, found the victim which, as an innocent man, he might sacrifice.

With the same blade with which he was already preparing to strike his son, he slew the ram. He transferred his right hand from his son to the lamb, ever rejoicing and glad. Nor was his countenance changed when the victim was exchanged. He offered the ram with as great joy as he had offered his son: for where there was faith, there was no grief. In that sacrifice, God alone grieved, because he provided another victim: for Abraham was so proved by God together with his son, that, without asking, he merited mercy.

Let us see, dearly beloved brethren, the hidden mysteries of the law: and let us bring forth understanding more deeply. Abraham was not under the law, but he alone fulfilled the law; and he who was bound by no requirement of the law kept every divine ordinance above all others: in whose immolation even he who was being prepared as a victim would rejoice. The ram was caught in a thicket, entangled in thorns, bound by the head. This is he who was sacrificed to God in place of Isaac. Him Abraham offered: him he was commanded to sacrifice.

For virginity is not urged by precept, nor is continence, once relinquished, driven away. As a witness to this, dearest ones, we have as our author holy Abraham, who once had a son Isaac. A simple name indeed, but one of manifold significance. For this man, dearest ones, despaired of by his parents yet received by God's promise, was conceived in the flower of a past age and of a generative power already spent: he deserved to be brought forth not so much from his parents as by divine command, and in the last courses of life a son opened the womb of Sara for the first time by name, to whom a modest old age had already rendered the reverence due to a grandmother.

Born therefore, dearest ones, under this despair and wonder of nativity, in the first rudiments of infancy he is offered as an innocent martyr to God who commands and demands, an immaculate victim, and no unprepared sacrifice: he who is sought by the Lord as a witness of divine fear unto faith, is led thither by his father—yet a victim not of blood, but of salvation. To this glory, therefore, the abundance of a late birth and a despaired-of fruitfulness is brought forth. II. The wife of Abraham, ignorant of offspring, since with her viscera chilled by advancing age she could neither hope for a child nor trust herself to carry one, took up the duties of a mother, she who had already ceased to know the functions of a wife. And the birth was brought forth at that time when warmth was already abandoning the generative parts.

Truly wondrous, dearest ones, and not to be hoped for in ages to come, the offspring of divine ordering is formed: an age already spent is called back to its beginning; fruitfulness is girded from sterility, that what was written through the Prophet might be fulfilled: Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for many are the children of the desolate. For behold, dearest ones, in Sara, with the sinews drawn tight by age and the sap of blood failing, the veins drying up, the skin hard together with the viscera, a misshapen and sallow pallor already nearly losing human features, and no movement of pleasure in the limbs—nothing had remained in the substance of the body; and yet nothing was denied in the womb to the infant: and she whose age would testify to a grandmother, the birth adorned as a mother, while under the uncertain name of affection piety wavered, and while the womb brought forth a son, old age longed for a grandson.

Thus at last, by the dissension of time and nature, an angel imposed on Isaac, born contrary to expectation, his name: so as to confirm with joy what the weakness of age had despaired of. A new affection of the parents toward the son grows apace: he was reckoned more certain by reason of the promise, sweeter by reason of the delay, more blessed by reason of the despair. Unique in number, and already first in the solidity of love, he had occupied the whole breast of maternal devotion: nurtured with hastened upbringing, he was about to offer to God a victim, to his parents a pious parricide.

Behold, dearest ones, as the Apostle says, Abraham leads to the altar his son, born against hope, to be immolated to the Lord at God's command: nor is the sword lacking for the ministry, so that the father might be priest as well. The offspring of the son likewise by divine will, as in old age it surpasses all hope just as Isaac did, and wonder arises concerning a thing of which there is no hope, not however concerning a thing which it is permitted to hope for again. The offspring of divine ordering is called Isaac, who, as is said a little before, deserved to be brought forth by divine command. Security: who, since he did not see the victim in whose place he had been chosen, was asking after it. But the tender hands are given over to bonds: and lest he seem in any way less than a victim, the binding constrains the foot, lest the roused victim prove displeasing. Let there cease here, therefore, dearest ones, the abominable suspicion of impiety.

Abraham preferred the Lord to his son, the priest to the father; nor did he believe himself dutiful unless he had proved himself faithful. Finally, dearest ones, he is armed undaunted for the ministry of immolation; the mind, secure, searches out the spot for the blow of the wound, but the hand more secure still; the sword raised for the immolation is poised; nor does approaching death dismay the boy, lest trembling betray a weak faith. Under this constancy, then, of the one immolating and the one to be immolated, he deserved to be released, while he puts aside from himself human fear; and insofar as faith is concerned, the father fulfilled his promises, the Lord, with the will thus proved, forbade the parricide.

To the person of this one, therefore, the modest nativity of Christ is referred, but the more secret chamber of a virginal womb: the womb of a body wasting away within itself bore him formed by the art of the divine word. But against the heavenly offspring, begotten not of seed, the impious counsels of the Jews blazed forth against the most certain Lord: him silent, as though guilty, and grieving only on account of their blindness, as Isaac not about to perish was led to the altar, so the wicked led Christ to be raised upon the cross. But because eternity knows not how to die, the Lord rose again after the tomb, and there remained with the Jews only the envy of a condemned will, because they neither wished to acknowledge the Lord, and believed that he whom it would have been wicked even to adore too late was punished by thought alone.

At the savagery of this monstrous daring the fearful aspect of the elements is changed, and nature betrays the injury done to God before the people of the Jews can understand it. From the author, therefore, the horror of the frenzy began. The deadly crowd is girded, and the point of swords is turned against the one suspended invisibly. Nor did the cruelty of their crime, as I said, obtain the fruit thereof: because just as in Isaac one thing is offered and another is immolated, so also in the passion of Christ, what had sinned through Adam is set free through Christ.

Abraham, that he might be the father of many nations, did not learn justice here, but begot it. The approach of cities had not corrupted him. He had no law, whose manner of life was itself a law. He hears the exile commanded him by God, that he should leave behind at once his kindred and his land. And then Abraham, lifting up his eyes, saw three, ran, worships prostrate on his face, offers a sacrifice. Refresh yourselves, he said, under that great tree. He kneads fine flour, slaughters a calf. After these things a son is promised to him from a lawful marriage, by faith, not by age. Sara conceives: she bears without the labor of the womb a burden, she who could not walk about: then she learns to be a mother when she ceases to be one. Withered breasts display an abundance of milk, and from a barren age the boy is nourished more robustly. Nothing is difficult even for faith, which has as much as it believes.

Therefore Isaac, the only son, the hope of peoples and nations, the origin of so many kings, clung to the embraces of his beloved father. He had bound to himself his father's tenderness, because he was the only one, because he came late, because he was promised, because he alone, the sole hope, might make good the losses of all past barrenness. A cause was found whereby Abraham's faith might serve more mightily through trial. He is commanded, armed with a sword, to slay the limbs of his dearest one, which he had been accustomed to press with kisses. What was devotion to do? The command cannot be deferred. You had done your part, O mother, when you were barren; the boy is born for the sword. No one grieved at such a fate except she who had borne him, the mother. No one mourns the living funeral rites, and no one bedews with tears beforehand the obsequies of an innocent man; lest the father should seem to have wavered, had he wept.

Devoted, with stern countenance he leads the boy to the altar: he draws out the sword fully, the breast of faith was in service: the face does not grow pale, the hand did not tremble. The boy asks where the victim is: which soon, lest so tender an age should be struck, presented itself; where even the father could not strike, because the Lord would not demand human blood. The devout executioner draws the sword. It was the father's part that he raised it: it was God's part that he spared. Neither did he who was to be struck fear, nor did he who was striking tremble. The sacrifice of the Lord is not abandoned, but changed. He preserved his son better by not sparing him: for faith alone walks safe among swords, friendly among hungry beasts, cold in fires; faith alone is to be preferred. By this faith, we who have been made sons of Abraham through faith, let us believe that we shall arrive in his very bosom.

Truly, dearest brethren, his heart does not sleep who knows this man's dream and its secrets: for prophecy always speaks in varying figures; but one reality is found in all of them. Therefore Jacob bears the image of Christ; and so too does the very stone which he is known to have placed at his head: since the head of man is Christ, who has several times been called a stone. The ladder, moreover, signifies the two Testaments, which, interwoven also with evangelical precepts, have been accustomed to raise believing men and those doing the will of God into heaven, as it were by certain steps of observance. This, in the Apocalypse, John called a twice-sharpened sword with a single hilt, which he described as proceeding from the mouth of the Lord.

For the sword is the Holy Spirit, having one hilt, that is, one substance, power, deity, majesty, and will of the Father and the Son; bearing witness to two edges, that is, bearing the two Testaments; by whose royal admonitions both the believing and devout are preserved, and the unbelieving and deserters are punished. This Isaiah saw in the form of tongs: with which, as he prophetically declared, a coal taken from the altar of God by one of the Seraphim was used to purify unclean lips. For by unclean lips we ought to understand the two peoples of the Jews and the Gentiles: who, when they had been defiled by the crimes of their former life—the one by blaspheming and persecuting Christ, the other by asserting gods and worshipping abominable idols—are known to have been fused into one people by the touch of the coal through confession of the name of Christ.

For the fusion signifies both purity and unity: for the coal is the word of God, the altar is the law, the tongs are the two Testaments, which hold fast those who believe, and cut those who do not believe.

But David also called this a reed, saying: My tongue is the reed of a scribe writing swiftly. The reed is split, brethren, and bears two tips arranged in the fineness of a single point, forming one letter with both together: if you take away one, its use is thenceforth empty. Hence the two Testaments are rightly so called, which likewise with two heads form one letter, that is, with two edicts of the sacred law they write together one Christ the Son of God by a spiritual blending. These cannot be of use without each other: because just as the New lends credence to the Old, so the Old bears witness to the New: as it is written: Once has the Lord spoken, and we have heard these two things. But the Lord himself also sets forth this reasoning in the Gospel, saying to Peter: Cast the hook into the sea, and take the fish that comes up first, and opening its mouth you will find two coins; give them for me and for you.

We must understand the first fish ascending from the dead as Christ; from whose mouth two coins were brought forth, that is, the two Testaments, which have profited two peoples unto salvation, together with the glory of the Lord and the happiness of Peter, inasmuch as upon him he built the Church. That the sea signifies the world is not in doubt. The hook, however, signifies preaching, because just as a hook cast into the sea brings about the death of the fish, so evangelical preaching sent through the world bears witness to the death and coming of the Lord: as it is written to the Corinthians: You shall proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes. You will open the mouth of the fish, that is, the mystery: or, what I have spoken in proverbs you will explain to those who do not understand.

Finally, elsewhere he says this more plainly to all the disciples: Go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And you will give for me and for you, that is, you will preach my cross, but you also will likewise rejoice in the dignity of your own cross.

Therefore, of what material this ladder was made, upon which the Lord leaned, we learn from the saying of David, who says: Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me. The rod and the staff are indeed the two Testaments, which are therefore compared to the material of wood, either because in its use the will of the testator, both perpetual and entire, remains inscribed, or because, meeting as it were crosswise into one faith, they proclaimed that the Son of God had to be crucified: whom they confirm as most rightly placed upon the ladder, because the history of all Scripture was both on account of him and, through him as its author, fulfilled. Hence he thus speaks to his disciples: Every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings forth out of his treasure things new and old.

The scribe, brethren, is the preacher; the householder is Christ; his treasures are the paternal substance and paternal will of his undiminished divinity; the new and the old are the two Testaments, which you see rightly clothed here likewise by the Lord, without ambiguity, in the figure of two denarii, for this reason namely, that in his treasures he wished the two Testaments to be understood by their newness and oldness as two denarii. These two denarii the Lord recalls as having been given by the Samaritan to the innkeeper on behalf of him who had suffered an assault from robbers; which parable, doubt removed, has laid open to those who behold the mystery of the ladder spiritually: for the man who suffered the assault is recognized as Adam, the robbers as the devil, Eve as concupiscence, the Samaritan as the Lord, of whom the Jews said: This man is a Samaritan, and hath a devil.

The innkeeper is the teacher of the law, who, having received the two denarii, that is, the saving counsels of the two Testaments, tends in the inn, that is, in the Church, whither the divine flock comes in, the man who suffered the assault through the robbery of the devil and his angels and of this world, received there in the venerable sacrament, and heals him with the daily medicines of preaching. IV. Now as to his saying that Angels ascended and descended, some think that those ascending are angels of light, and those descending are angels of darkness. But I observe, dearest brethren, that this is quite absurd and incongruous; because neither do the fallen ones descend, who are known never to have been received back into heaven after their sin, nor do those of light ascend, because they have never remained on earth but always in heaven.

Wherefore I think that angels are rightly called men, to whom the Lord says through the Holy Spirit: I said, Ye are gods, and all of you children of the Most High; but ye shall die like men. And also we recall that it was thus said of John the Baptist: Behold, I send my Angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way. Therefore it is manifest that, after the manner of prophecy, angels is a general term applied to just and unjust men alike. But who the ascending and descending are, we recognize from examples. Those descending are they who, having renounced the world, return again to the world, of whom the Lord says: No man putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. And again: Remember Lot's wife. And the Apostle likewise: How turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements.

But those ascending are the just, who by upright conduct are borne day by day through the degrees of observance of the divine commandments in the glory of a spiritual journey toward heaven, whom the Apostle Paul exhorts and points out, saying: If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. We can also understand this, brethren, as said of the ministers and angels whom we find to have performed service for the Lord when he was on earth, he himself saying: Amen, amen I say to you, you shall see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man: as indeed came to pass, the Evangelist saying: Then the devil left him, and behold angels came and ministered unto him. Whence it is not doubtful that the path through the height of the air is one and the same for the angels of light and for just men.

V. All these things therefore combined have borne the fruit of one thing thus: of undiminished divinity, having obtained, having attained, having followed upon the paternal substance are reduced to a sum, because although all things are known to be twofold, they are nonetheless poured forth from one root. The testaments are two, but the testator is one. And the writing reed is split in two, but it is one pen. And the scissors extend into two blades, but their bite is one. And the sword bears two edges, but they are the sides of one body. And the coins are two, but stamped from one mint. And the ladder has two uprights and many rungs; but its ascent is one. Now if you wish to know, dearest brethren, what its rungs are called, hear. Conversion, hearing, understanding, belief, fear, wisdom, sobriety, meekness, temperance, chastity, piety, charity, faith, truth, humility, grace, honesty, modesty, patience, perseverance, consummation. The names of the two uprights are the two Testaments.

The ladder, however, is called by its proper name the cross, because through it the Lord Jesus Christ, completing and concluding all mysteries, carried them back to the Father and to Adam, and opened the way to heaven for all who follow him.

Judah had three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. He took a woman whose name is Tamar as wife for his eldest son. When that son behaved wickedly before the face of the Lord, Scripture bears witness that he was slain by God. He commands the second to go in to his brother's wife and raise up seed for his brother; but he, having gone in, spilled his seed upon the ground. Since this too appeared wicked to God, He condemned him with an equal death. He excuses the union of the third son with his daughter-in-law on account of his age, deterred lest he too should likewise die, and commanded the woman that, remaining a widow in her father's house, she should await a mature marriage. While matters stood thus, his wife dies.

He, having been consoled, went to shear his sheep; and when this was reported to Tamar, who had seen Shelah grown to maturity yet had not married him, she put off her widow's garment, put on summer clothing, adorned herself becomingly, and stationed herself at a place where Judah was to pass. But he, seeing her, supposed her to be a harlot—she who, by veiling her face, was displaying the integrity of her modesty. He accosts her, seeks entrance, promises to send a kid. But she demands a pledge of the promise, content with that rather than with the reward. And she received from him his necklace, his ring, and his staff. Then, the business concluded, marked by a conception which true harlots hold in abhorrence and always avoid, she took back the widow's garment. Meanwhile, according to the agreement, the kid is sent, the harlot is sought, and the inhabitants report that no such woman had ever been there. But as time advances, so does the womb of our Tamar. Behold, truly, a wondrous mystery.

She who had hidden her face does not hide her belly. The pregnant widow is brought forward as guilty of fornication, without effort on the part of the accuser. The father-in-law is enraged, orders her to be brought out and burned with fire. But she stands firm, she who had arranged the matter not for immodesty but for future purposes concerning herself, and says that she owes the conception to him whose necklace, ring, and staff she holds. When this was made known, Judah not only restrained himself from her, but moreover also justified her. II. Judah, as far as may be understood, was in part a type of the prophets, in part of the patriarchs and fathers, who on account of the justice of God reckoned all men as sons.

Therefore Er, the firstborn son, is the firstborn people—that is, the demigods, all most mighty men and kings, who, fighting with the ferocity of valor and the rage of lust, had corrupted the whole world, and moreover decreeing temples for themselves in place of houses, erecting altars to their own name—who did not know what sepulchres they would have, promising heaven to themselves, for whose deeds the very earth, if it could, would blush; finally asserting themselves to be gods against God: who by men of sound mind were judged unworthy even of the name of men. For these reasons they were not only destroyed by God, but also destined to perpetual penal punishment. III.

Now Onan, the second brother, is the Jewish people, who are commanded to raise up the seed of his brother—not, to be sure, that seed which appeared rightly condemned by God, but to rouse the remaining nations, whom the disseminated poisons of the idolatry of which we have spoken had destroyed, to the worship of God by examples of good life and by the religious exhortations of the sacred law. But he spilled his seed upon the ground. Seed signifies not that of the body, but of the heart. For the seed of the heart is the word of God, according to Luke, the Lord speaking thus (and this is the parable): The seed is the word of God. Those who are by the wayside are they who hear the word, and the devil comes and takes the word from their heart, lest believing they should be saved. Now the earth signifies both man and the idol, because God fashioned man from the earth, and man composed the idol from the earth.

He therefore spilled his seed upon the ground—that is, he neglected the commandments of God and poured them out to idols: on account of which he likewise received from God the present sentence of condemnation, because just as he is detestable who, being a man, feigns himself to be God, so is he more detestable who worships a god whom he himself has fashioned. IV. Now Shelah, the third and youngest of the aforementioned brothers, depicted the image of the new people coming from the Gentiles: Tamar that of the Church, to whom he was rightly not married, because, Christ coming, reborn in the spiritual wave of baptism in her bosom, he was to be her son, not her husband. Judah loses his wife—that is, the faith of the synagogue dies. That it says he was consoled is understood to mean by the hope of Christ coming, who not only provided consolation to the prophets desolated by the fall of the synagogue, but has also been accustomed to refresh all of us when placed in any distress.

He goes to shear his sheep—that is, he demands from just men the fruit of good works. Upon hearing this, Tamar, while she was in her father's house—that is, in the temples and infamous places of all spectacles (for the devil is designated as the father of all who live corruptly, the Lord thus rebuking the Jews: You are of your father the devil, and you wish to do the desires of your father)—put off the widow's garment, that is, cast away the sordid rites of a sordid religion. She put on summer clothing. Summer clothing, brethren, is both clean and fitted, with which work may easily be done and the heat of summer—that is, of temptation—endured; which heat is undoubtedly to be understood as faith, because whoever possesses it must of necessity live freely and cleanly. Therefore, lest she be recognized, she necessarily obscures her face with a veil, because Christ, the defender of her modesty, had not yet come.

She is not recognized by her father-in-law, for the prophets had been sent to the Jews, not to the Gentiles. He rightly supposes her to be a harlot, because she was serving the people of the gods. He desires to come together with her, because the Gentiles were to believe the prophecies more than the Jews, the Lord saying: Amen I say to you, that the publicans and harlots shall go before you into the kingdom of God. He promises her a kid—that is, he shows what is the reward of sin for a sinner. She avoided receiving it, because whoever shall have received the pledge of the Trinity is numbered among the lambs in the time to come, not among the kids. Finally she is described as having sought and received the necklace, the ring, and the staff. To what do these signify?

The necklace, most beloved brethren, is the law, which by its salutary admonitions, with diverse virtues and diverse gifts of grace, is accustomed to adorn not the necks but the hearts of all believers. The staff announced through wood the sacrament of the Lord's passion, as the evident example found in the book of Psalms clearly declares: Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me. Thou hast prepared a table before me in the sight of them that trouble me. Thou hast anointed my head with oil, and thy cup which inebriateth, how excellent it is. Assuredly, brethren, the chalice signifies the blood, the table the body, the oil the gift of the Holy Spirit, the rod with the staff the cross, upon which God deigned to hang for man, that He might transform into God the man whom He had put on.

The ring also is the seal of faith, which is Christ, by the illumination of whose majesty, being impressed and sealed, we who live sincerely bear and hold the image for the safeguarding of our salvation through the Holy Spirit. That he came together with her signified the sacrament of holy communion of the faithful. Tamar conceived in the womb; the Church conceived in the heart: the former by seed, the latter by the word. The kid is sent to her—a sign, namely, of temptation: for whoever follows justice must of necessity be proved. Finally, the harlot sought was not found, because one reborn through water and the Holy Spirit ceases to be what he was and begins to be what he was not.

It follows that she took back the widow's garment—not, to be sure, in order to do what she had done, but to mourn that she had done what she had done; for otherwise no one can be saved, however just he may be, unless, making confession, he both extinguishes his present sins and repels those to come. Tamar is accused of having conceived through fornication. And the Church, as an adulteress of the law, was accused by the elders of the Jews of having broken the sabbath, of having cast away their traditions. Tamar brought forth the necklace, the ring, and the staff, and freed herself by the sacrament of the number from the impending punishment. The Church itself, by the very truth in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, not only extinguishes the present fires of the devil, but shall also overcome the flames of the future day of judgment.

That one departed justified; this one, glorified by the increase of the true number and of faith, shall remain with Christ unto eternal ages, through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who is blessed with the Father and the Holy Spirit before the ages and in the ages and unto all ages of ages. Amen.

Job, then, was a just and truthful man, withdrawn from all the desires of this world, pure in his conduct, purer still in his mind, so circumspect and blameless that he was praised by the testimony of God. Hence not undeservedly did this blessed man enjoy a blessed life. For he had a most splendid house, abundant wealth, and likewise an abundant number of children—and, what is pleasing to parents, of both sexes and loving one another—for whose number he offered daily sacrifices to God. Moreover, he was so fortified by a wall of purity and faith that the devil did not dare to assail him unless commanded by God. Now consider carefully, brethren, how savagely he raged when provoked, he who cannot be endured even when gentle. A famous battle is therefore joined.

On one side the devil, thundering dreadfully with all his weapons, and moreover rousing his ministers to his aid, blaring with a terrible trumpet, with the hearts of his plunderers kindled by a furious torch, attacks with repeated assaults the entire possessions of the man of God on every side; suddenly by plunder, fire, and sword he scatters everything in a single moment. On the other side Job, made strong by the deep root of faith, is battered by so many mournful messengers, yet is not moved; but only blesses God and, by despising his possessions, keeps them safe. But when the devil recognizes that he has gained nothing by such great attacks, he pours out all the fury of his wickedness upon Job's children.

For while they were feasting together as usual in one accord in a single house, suddenly, with all four corners of it shaken with full force, the walls and roof collapsing into a confused heap, he buries that most holy band of brothers before he slaughters them; and he devised such a ruin of wickedness that in that crowd of a single funeral the father's grief was not equal to his bereavement, since he did not know whom to mourn first, whom to find first, to whom first to pay the rites of the cruel untimely burial. Upon receiving this news the servant of God tore his garments—not to cast reproach upon God, but so that, unencumbered, he might fight the enemy. He disregarded, in the loss of his possessions, the wealthy man; he concealed, in the loss of his children, the father; in the affliction of his own body, the just man.

For struck by the enemy's blow from the very crown of his head down to the tips of his toenails, he was not marked out by numerous sores but was made entirely one single wound. Yet in all these things he speaks nothing improper against God. He does not yield to his wife urging unlawful things, he does not give way to his friends who mock him; but as a conqueror of cruelty and wickedness he sits on a dung-heap teeming with worms, as though he had suffered nothing, content with the fear of God alone. O happy man! Who by wondrous patience merited God's favor, conquered the devil, recovered his health, and did not lose his possessions and children, but exchanged them.

Job, as far as can be understood, dearest brethren, bore the image of Christ. Let comparison then bring forth the truth. Job was called just by God. He himself is justice, from whose fountain all who are blessed drink: for behold, it is said of him: The sun of justice shall rise upon you. Job was called truthful. But the Lord is true truth, who says in the Gospel: I am the way and the truth. Job was rich. And what is richer than the Lord? Whose servants are all the wealthy: whose is the whole world and all of nature, as most blessed David says: The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein. The devil tempted Job three times. Likewise, as the Evangelist attests, he also attempted to tempt the Lord three times. Job lost the possessions he had. And the Lord, out of love for us, set aside his heavenly goods and made himself poor, that he might make us rich. The raging devil slew Job's children.

And the mad Pharisaic people slew the Lord's children the prophets. Job was disfigured with sores. And the Lord, by taking on flesh, was defiled with the filth of the sins of the whole human race. Job's wife urges him to sin. And the synagogue compels the Lord to follow the corruption of the elders. Job's friends are said to have mocked him. And the Lord's own priests, his own worshippers, mocked him. Job sits on a dunghill full of worms. The Lord also dwelt in a true dunghill, that is, in the filth of this world, among men seething with various crimes and lusts, who are true worms. Job also recovered his health and his wealth. But the Lord, rising again, bestowed not only health but immortality upon those who believe in him, and recovered dominion over all of nature, as he himself testified saying: All things have been delivered to me by my Father. Job begot children in place of those lost. The Lord also, after the prophets, brought forth holy children, the Apostles.

Job rested blessed in peace. But the Lord remains blessed forever before the ages and from the ages and unto all ages of ages.

As often as in this perverse age manifold snares are stretched against praiseworthy men, and factious causes arise from various kinds of calumnies, let the just man not fear what a pestilent person may devise or what the devil may contrive, because God is with him. Hence Susanna, the illustrious Hebrew woman, the glory of true modesty, taught women by the example of her chastity. Susanna stood in judgment, oppressed by the lies of wicked false witnesses, yet content with the good secrets of her conscience, not so much as a guilty person about to receive sentence, as one dedicated to God, ready to die bravely for chastity; and she whom the wicked sentence of the judges had cast down, the integrity of her illustrious conscience raised up. The consciousness of chastity is therefore sufficient; God is the witness. Chastity did not regard what the false witnesses said, or how the deceived judges condemned, nor finally how the devil defamed her, who was unable to overturn the foundations of her modesty.

Going to punishment was not an adulterous body, in which the last lust of old age had burned, but that which the devil had defamed, and which virtue had protected, and uninjured modesty adorned. Then the Holy Spirit, entering into the holy boy Daniel, said, when she was being led to punishment: Return to judgment: for they have borne false witness against her. The people are astonished that one already condemned is called back from punishment to have judgment repeated. Fear seizes the false witnesses. The devil trembles, because his own fabrications are laid bare. The angels rejoice, because oppressed truth is at last defended on earth. The husband triumphs, because he has found his wife chaste. The whole household rejoices, because rumor finds nothing in her to strike at. The devil is tormented, because he has in no part accomplished his will: for neither did he bring about the adultery which he was spreading as already done, nor did he find the murder which he was contriving.

It is the religious confession of human devotion to know of God that which is lawful: for just as His testimonies are to be searched with a simple heart, so His secrets are not to be inquired into with curiosity. For who knows the causes and natures of this heaven and of those above? Who would falsely claim to be able to discourse upon the bodily emptiness of this air, as some suppose? Who would presume to know whether the earth is borne upon water, or whether the water is contained in the bosom of the earth? Who will glory in having discovered the airy spirits, the forms of the winds, the swellings of rivers amid the surges of the sea, and finally the workmanship of the Lord and the counsel of God? Since the Apostle says: O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unspeakable are His judgments, and how unsearchable His ways! For who hath known the mind of the Lord?

For it is not while burning with inquiry into these things that the Prophet says: Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord; for he cries out of the depths, that is, from the inmost recesses of his heart: he cries out of the depths, but those depths by which he was hemmed in, sorrowful and sad, amid human calamities: and he cries not with voice, but with heart: not with clamour, but with faith, which he knows God willingly hears. Crying thus from the deep, Peter likewise obtained from the Lord that he might both walk upon and escape the slippery hollows of the deep sea and the surface of the liquid plain unsubdued by human steps, by which the trembling wayfarer was being swallowed up.

Paul also cries from the depths, overwhelmed by blessed calamities, when for the name of the Lord he suffers robbers on journeys, robbers in cities: when beaten three times with rods by the Jews he is washed clean by a triple shipwreck: when by the raging storm of a frenzied people he is happily pelted with showers of stones: when having spent a day and a night in the deep of the sea, crying to God, he is cast back thence unharmed.

Jonas likewise, a prophet, was sent by God to the Ninevites to announce that destruction was imminent upon their city: for they were weighed down by enormous burdens of sins. But he, turning aside by another route, boarded a ship bound for Tarsus; when suddenly the sea, provoked by the violent blast of contending winds, roars and rages, and the troubled deep, dashing its foaming lips against the resisting shores with the white coils of bursting mountains, threatens shipwreck at every moment: the growing storms rage madly, the ropes whistle horribly, the yards groan as the sails give way; the prow, beaten back on every side, finds no passage. The sailors tremble, they hasten in vain to lighten the ship of the weight of the cargo, a ship that was weighed down by the weight of the prophet.

Then Jonas, whom alone that good storm was seeking, is drawn by lot and rendered a shipwrecked man, or rather is transferred from a wooden vessel to a living one: he who had been snoring in the ship keeps watch in the whale, once he is cast into the deep and received into the hospitality of the beast's maw. A wondrous thing! After shipwreck, after a swimming tomb, he emerges unharmed on the third day thereafter and enlightens the Ninevites, about to bring salvation to the believing city through terrible oracles.

As far as one may understand, brethren, the ship is a type of the synagogue: its prow we take to represent the priestly body, the sailors the scribes and Pharisees, the casting overboard of the vessels the rejection of the prophets and of all the saints, whom the Jews, having driven them out, slaughtered with unworthy slayings to the ruin of their own salvation. The raging winds are the various kings who scattered the Jews miserably throughout the whole world, with the mournful blare of trumpets and the terrible crash of arms, as the storms of battle pressed in from every side. Jonas sleeping in the ship bore the image of the Lord's mystery, for the wood of the ship signified the cross, and the sleep signified the passion. Now the sea is this swelling world: its waves we take to be the peoples of the Jews and the Gentiles, who raged vainly against God.

The lot revealed that Jonas was to be cast forth; prophecy proclaimed that the Lord was to suffer; both of them willing—Jonas by condition, the Lord by love. There is no doubt that the whale is hell: for just as Jonas was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, and being vomited out made his way to the city of Nineveh; so the Lord, rising from hell on the third day, made his way to the city of Jerusalem before going to heaven. Now Nineveh bears the image of the Church, in which our people from among the Gentiles were already dwelling, and which was not without reason called by God a great city; for it was to come to pass that, with the peoples of all nations believing in Christ, the whole world would be rendered to God as one city. Finally, the saving deeds confirm the comparison, and they abide in us as well.

As it is, brethren, when destruction is announced to the Ninevites, they believe and fear; and the more they know the Lord to be no liar, the more readily do they presume upon his mercy, and straightway condemning the deeds of their former life, they do not run in their accustomed manner to senseless idols to purchase salvation, they do not kindle deadly fires on reeking altars, they do not burn incense, they do not pour out wine, nor, seizing an animal in sudden death, do they consult the lobes of its still-breathing liver, nor through the various flights of birds do they seek by empty conjecture the state of a feathery salvation; but they seek a saving remedy from their own heart, and ambitiously sacrifice their spirit crushed in all humility: and so, having duly performed penance, they rendered God propitious to themselves. Which we also have done, and ought very often to do, that we may deserve to escape both the temptations of the present time and the punishments of the future judgment, through Christ our Lord.

While we commit to the annals the deeds of the blessed martyr Arcadius, to be celebrated in triumph, the Christian ardor is ever kindled unto the contest of immortal praise. There will be a twofold exchange of piety, when the people are inflamed toward the heavenly reward, and the merits of the martyr are not passed over in silence. But who could set forth in fitting speech the palm-bearing crown of an illustrious martyrdom laden with trophies, when in one body there appear to be as many martyrdoms as there are members? The devil, that ancient asserter of long-standing hatred, had armed his satellites against the people of the Lord, and was troubling the whole household of God with the ravaging of an insatiable ferocity. He had declared war upon God in man, and by the pyre of an ill-omened superstition, making the whole world complicit in wickedness, had heaped up a funeral pyre of corpses.

Public crime seethed through the rooftops of houses, nor was there any place in which sacrilege did not stand in place of religion. The people of Christ were compelled to take part in vain superstitions, and in the worship of an abominable rite either to pour out libations in impure fashion, or to lead forth victims adorned with garlands, or to kindle heavy incense with its fumes, or amid smoking fires to offer up pale fat and deadly blood, so that by the administration of this infamous ministry God might be driven out from Christian minds. II. But while the war of a hard contest was being waged, and the household of the Lord was being tested with heaven looking on, the most blessed martyr Arcadius, struck with horror at this unexpected sacrilege, deferred the battle for a little while, already destined for the crown.

For after he learned that the city was being thrown into confusion by a deadly assembly, and that individuals one by one were being dragged to that deadly spectacle, having despised all his possessions and cut off the roots of the world, he hid himself and entrusted himself to the shelter of a retreat, fulfilling both purposes with a Christian vow: that he might not seem too far from the battle, and that by withdrawing he might be encouraged by the example of the Gospel's command. Behold, into his lodging, as into hostile plunder, a headlong band of rampaging satellites rushed: they hasten to be able to seize the servant of God, whom a kinsman of the blessed martyr, who happened to be dwelling in his abode, was loudly proclaiming with repeated cries to be absent. But him, as he made this declaration, the agents of a guilty mind seized and dragged off to abominable custody; and the most cruel governor orders him, once brought before him, to be held under strict watch.

As a testimony to future glory, the blessed Arcadius had in a certain manner set aside this pledge of the martyrdom owed to him, in which he would neither abandon Christ nor his kinsman. Straightway the blessed martyr did not suffer himself to remain in hiding; offering himself voluntarily to the judge, he excused the delay on his part by the prejudice of a voluntary act. When the governor of the province promised him pardon for his earlier flight under a compact, if he had joined himself even belatedly to the abominable superstitions, the most holy martyr burst forth against him with these words: What, he said, most vain of all judges? Do you think that the household of God can be terrified either by the undue usurpations of this present light, or by the sudden losses of a premature death, when we know it is written down by Apostolic faith: For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain?

Devise torments more grievous, with whatever punishments you can; kindle yourself with greater goads of fury; exercise the full weight of tortures however you will—you cannot for that reason overcome us.

Straightway the judge, stirred by the gall of viperous venom, commands the executioners to rage against the martyr's limbs with an unusual infliction of punishments, not with the customary law applied to criminals. The iron claws were held cheap, the blows of the leaded whips were deemed useless, the rack stood scorned, the frequent showers of cudgels were disregarded in contemplation of a greater punishment. A new and astounding torment is devised, by which he believed he could overcome God in a man. Let the hands be cut off at the joints, he says, the feet at the legs; let him behold himself a living corpse. To him blessed Arcadius said: O madman among men! Your fury has cheated you: there remained yet in the Lord's victim something you could offer. You did not know to order the tongue cut out, which in the struggle of martyrdom is wont to confess the Lord first.

At last blessed Arcadius was led to the place longed for by the prayers of the righteous, and gazing up at heaven he stood secure with God watching. He had stretched out his neck for the coming blows; he had bared his throat to the approaching swords; he had thought to satisfy the judge's deadly madness with the lot of a swift death; when suddenly he is ordered to stretch out his hands, and, stripped and cast face down upon the turf, to bare the extremities of his feet. Behold, even amid the very torments he is not allowed to be at rest, but meditates in the manner of prayer through the tortures of the executioner. The frenzied striker had raised his axe, and marking with his eyes the line of the wounds, he was poising the deadly blow with unceasing deliberation. The hands of the fearless martyr had clung fast by the glue of his confession: nor did his fingers flinch, trembling at the doom of coming death.

So great was the constancy in the martyr's devotion that he came ready in his whole body for glory. IV. And so as soon as the executioner saw the devoted body, the blow of the falling axe at once dissolved the connected sinews, and shattered the frame, breaking apart all the joints of the body. The severed hands leaped away, and the stream of blood, checked for a moment by the stupor of the veins, rushed back upon itself. Then, with the hams and calves stretched out, the boundary of the soles is cut away from their natural union by the sword of the savage butcher, and the body of the martyr is bereft of the service of its feet. Let those count the martyrdoms who can count the torments; and in one body let it be acknowledged that the Lord triumphed as greatly as the devil was shown to rage. But amid all this the spirit of the martyr endures, and preserved by the multitude of delays he persists alive, already buried in part of his own body.

O worthy end of a glorious departure! About to ascend to the height of heaven, he sends ahead the encumbrances of his body, and himself goes before at his own funeral procession. With whose confession is this to be compared? It is to be joined to the number of the Maccabees: it is to be equalled to the purpose of Eleazar, compared to his resolve. Arcadius, most blessed martyr, still lingers in the world, and is already recounted as a martyr in heaven.

There is nothing, dearly beloved brethren, so necessary and fitting for a man who fears God above all things as that he should know himself: for it is a kind of madness for one who cannot give an account of his own life to inquire into the reason of the secret of nature; for the substance of nature, which none knows save he alone who made it, can in no way be comprehended by human opinions. And so, as regards what pertains specially to our part, let us see what it is that God says: Let us make man in our image and likeness. And God made, it says, man in the image and likeness of God; and in another place it says: I am who I am, and I change not. Since this is so, how does man bear the image of God?

Whose countenance is subject to passion, subject to every change, altered at every moment by toil, age, sickness, anger, joy, sadness, and puts on as many faces as there are movements of the soul; and there is absolutely no day on which he appears to remain continuously like himself. Since these things are otherwise, do we therefore not have the image of God? We have it plainly, and indeed it is manifest from the very fact that it is not known to us who bear it. For the image of the incomprehensible God must needs be invisible. In short, it is not subject to bodily eyes. For neither when it enters our body nor when it departs from the body can it be apprehended by anyone; and it has such great power that, though it is held within the enclosure of its dwelling, it nevertheless illumines whatever it wills at every moment.

We ought not therefore to take this fleshly dwelling as the image of God, but the spiritual image of the heavenly man, which the Lord bestows upon believers renewed in themselves by a heavenly birth, from the holy fount of his fullness, through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Nothing, dearest brethren, is so necessary and fitting for a man born into this world as that he should know himself: for it is a kind of madness that one who cannot give an account of his own life should seek to investigate the hidden workings of nature; for the elements cannot be set forth more beautifully or more truly in human words than they have been made by God, or than they appear. And so, as regards what concerns us, let us see what it is that God says: Let us make man in our image and likeness. Whose countenance, subject to every change, is altered at every moment by toil, by age, by sickness, by joy, by sorrow: now disfigured by leanness, now by excessive fatness: so uncertain, indeed, that the same face cannot be found in two persons throughout the whole world. Therefore, since these things do not befall God, do we not have the image of God? Far from it, brethren.

We have it plainly, and indeed manifestly, from the very fact that it is not known to those who bear it: for the image of God, being incomprehensible, must of necessity be invisible. In the end it is not subject to mortal eyes; for neither when it enters the body, nor when it departs from the body, can it be seen by anyone: and it has such great power that, though it is held within the enclosure of its dwelling, it nevertheless illumines whatever it wills at every moment. We ought not, therefore, to take this fleshly garment as the image of God, but rather the spiritual image of the heavenly man, which he bestows upon us from the holy fountain of his fullness.

This reasoning Paul set forth plainly, saying: As we have borne the image of him who is of the dust, let us also bear the image of him who is of heaven: those who shall have borne it holily, as the Apostles and all the righteous, shall bear not only the image but God himself as well, as it is also written: You are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you.

Negligent cultivators of the sacred law are often entangled in great error, either because they do not understand sayings according to their context, or because they do not at all inquire into the reasons behind the sayings. Therefore, in the present psalm, when the Prophet says: I will sing of mercy and judgment to thee, O Lord, how is it that the Lord says in the Gospel: He who believes in me shall not be judged; but he who does not believe is already judged? By saying this he exempts the faithful from judgment, and does not admit the unfaithful to judgment. But if both parties are exempt from judgment, how shall a reward be rendered to each one according to his own deed? For the just man will seem to have labored in vain, unless he receives according to his own deeds, as will the unjust man. It is not, therefore, to be understood in the way that the imprudent suppose.

Moreover, the Lord's saying, with what weight and by what reasoning it was uttered, the very character of the words makes plain: He who believes, he says, in me shall not be judged. Rightly so: for what need is there to judge one who believes? For judgment arises from doubtful matters; when doubt is removed, the examination of judgment is not required. For the same reason it is not necessary that unbelievers be judged either, because they are already condemned by their own unbelief; for from this life does not each person carry with him either a crown or a punishment? This reasoning David expressed in the first psalm in these words: The ungodly, he says, shall not rise in judgment, nor sinners in the council of the just. Step by step, according to their merits, as it were with certain distinctions, in very few words he designated the judgment of the whole human race: for as great as is the difference between the ungodly and the sinner, so great is the difference between the sinner and the just.

In the end, he does not even leave judgment to the ungodly, because they have already been prejudged by their own impiety: nor did he consider sinners, who are to be judged, worthy of the council of the just, who shall not be judged.

Now we ought to know (since the just are destined for eternal life, the impious for eternal punishment, and no further judgment awaits them) who those are for whom judgment has been prepared: and from whom should we learn this, if not from the Lord himself, who continues his own saying: But this is the judgment, that light came into this world, and men loved darkness more than light? He designated, to be sure, those Christians who are ambiguous and slippery, who stand midway between the pious and the impious, holding neither side fully, while they never cease to hold both. They are not faithful, because they have something of unfaithfulness inserted in them. They are not unfaithful, because they have the image of faith, serving God in profession and the world in deeds. They wish to know the law, but are unwilling to keep its precepts. They venerate the saving sign, and yet do not withdraw from the mysteries of demons. For the fear of God holds many in the Church, but nevertheless worldly pleasure draws them to itself.

They do not remain impious, because the name of God is held in honor among them. They are not pious, because they wound their venerable Father by their depraved conduct. They pray, because they fear; they sin, because they will it. Hence the guilt is not discharged, where judgment is demanded on the basis of a comparison of love between two mutually contrary sides; for ambiguity, unless it has been examined, cannot by right deserve a sentence. And who are those whom ambiguity has reserved for judgment? Surely those, as the Apostle also says, who, having known God, did not honor him as Lord, nor gave him thanks, but their thoughts were led astray by vain persuasions, and darkness covered their heart, so that they love darkness more than light, the creature rather than the Creator.

And so it is fitting that there be three judgments. One of the just, who not only, as has been said, shall not be judged, but shall judge this world, the Apostle saying: Do you not know that the saints shall judge this world? A second of the impious, who are not to be judged, because they have already been judged, but are to perish, Scripture saying: The way of the impious shall perish. A third of sinners, whose secrets of an oblique and wavering life must necessarily be examined, the Apostle pursuing both points, for he says: those who have sinned without the law shall perish without the law. But those who have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law. Do you see, brethren, how great a difference there is between one who is condemned and one who is to be judged? This form of judgment even human society itself, unjust as it is, observes.

For no head of a household judges a servant who offers him the gains of his honest fidelity, but honors him as a son. But another, whom he has caught grinding poisons, in adultery, in murder, in fraud, in sorcery, he immediately consigns to the executioner, not to be heard but to be subjected to fitting punishments. A third also, whom he has noticed to be fraudulent, excusing his thefts with plausible accounts, he reserves for examination, so that, with the losses weighed and the goods accounted for, a sentence may by right be pronounced against him according to the extent of his debt. So it shall be that to the just a crown is given, to sinners either pardon if excused or corrected, but to the impious eternal punishment. Through the Lord Jesus Christ, who is blessed with the Holy Spirit for eternal ages of ages.

Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken: I have begotten and exalted sons, but they have despised me. The opening words of this book declare the great offense of the Jewish people, and reveal the wrath of divine indignation, which exhorts other persons to hear the word of God from them rather: for it is no small crime that, whereas the divine word was always proclaimed among them, it now appears to be addressed to others. Hence the rejection of the Jews is the election of other persons; because when it is said to others that they ought to hear the word of God, Israel is found thus reprobate; and while the prophet cries out: Hear, O heaven, and earth, he signifies that they have scorned to hear.

Hear, he says, O heaven, and give ear, O earth. Was the prophet bearing witness concerning heaven and earth, as though complaining about some matter? Or, when he says: Hear, O heaven, and earth, is it as though heaven had never heard, or earth, since both heaven and earth comply with the command of God, because heaven does not withhold rain, nor earth its fruits? But because this prophecy was to be fulfilled in the last times at the coming of the Lord and Saviour, who was not to be heard by the peoples of the Jews, since the Apostles and men from among the Gentiles were to hear him, therefore he says: Hear, O heaven, and earth. Moreover, that the Apostles are the heavens he affirms by the clear testimony of truth, for thus he says: And I will see the heavens, the works of thy fingers. Here certainly he does not speak of those heavens which he had always seen, but of the Apostles whom he longed to see.

And again: His virtue covered the heavens; because the Holy Spirit overshadowed and covered the Apostles for the working of wonders. And again: The heavens, he says, declare the glory of God. And here too he does not say that those heavens speak, which no one has ever heard speaking, but he affirms it is the Apostles, by whose preaching the glory of the Lord 226 was proclaimed throughout all the regions of the earth. That men are to be understood by earth, the frequent assertion of the prophets has shown: Shout for joy, he says, all the earth. And elsewhere: Hear, he says, O earth, from my mouth; by which word he comprehends without doubt the Gentile peoples, in whom earthly works still remained. This therefore is what he says: Hear, O heaven, and earth, namely that, the Jews not hearing, Christ the Lord was to be heard by the Apostles and the Gentiles.

I have begotten sons, he says, and exalted them. This is the voice of the Lord, because even then through the prophet he was rebuking the unbelieving Jews, and warning them of what was to come before it came to pass. For it is proper to God to know things past and to know things to come.

The Jews by their boundless faithlessness have merited hatred before our Lord, so that as great as was the grace of his love, so great will be the vengeance to come for their offence: for it is certain that a son who has sinned is punished more severely by the father who loved him with the greatest affection; and as much tenderness as a loving father showed to a beloved son, so much retribution does he demand when wronged, because when the beloved son did not render due return to the father, the disowned son receives a fitting sentence: for one whose impiety does not render to paternal affection a like gratitude—how great a crime it is cannot be said—not to have loved God as father, when it is already a sin not to have loved a man. Hence the Jews are unhappy and wretched, who have rejected God their father, by whom they were begotten, unmindful of so great an honour, ignorant of so great a dignity.

For what is more blessed than if God should deign to regard men with a father's honour, and that so great a sublimity should hold human lowliness either dear or beloved? I have begotten sons, he says. How sweet it is that the Lord said this of men! How shameful to have wronged such a father! I have begotten sons and exalted them. Certainly the Lord begot the sons of Israel, who chose Abraham from whom they should be born. He begot them in Egypt, where from a few men who entered an innumerable multitude came forth, and the Lord led them to the desert with a strong hand and a high arm. Israel was exalted when for three days darkness and gloom surrounded all Egypt. Israel was exalted when he alone neither feared nor felt so many and so great torments of the Egyptians. What of the fact that he led them through the midst of the sea on a path of dry land?

What of the daily manna from heaven in the desert, the drink from the rock, the bitter water made sweet through wood?—even as through the wood of the cross, the bitterness of the Gentiles being driven out, we were to drink. The sons of Israel were exalted when from Horeb he came safely to the Jordan. What of the daily colloquies with God? But they have despised me; for they led him to the cross, through which cross they had escaped Pharaoh; but again shall the daughter of Sion be forsaken.

As the song of the most blessed Isaiah indicates, God is angry with the Jewish people, and confounds them with public rebuke, lest perhaps they repent. For one who thinks in human fashion, to be put to shame is worse than to be punished. Accordingly he calls them sons, that they may fear disownment; exalted, that their fall may be a terror; despisers, that they may know the punishment of chastisement is hanging over them. This example, brethren, flee with all your strength: and at the same time rejoice that through the stripes of others you learn the discipline of God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is a grievous disturbance, brethren, when he complains of his injury who is most easily able to avenge himself. But because among the wise and honorable it is more serious to be confounded by some mark of shame than to die, God refutes the Jewish people, corrupted by the overflowing heat of luxury, with public rebuke: he calls heaven and earth as witnesses to aggravate the crime; he calls them sons, so that disinheritance may be feared; exalted, so that their fall may be feared; despisers of himself, so that he may show them to be impious. It is a wretched fault, brethren, in which an excuse of any kind finds no place. Truly detestable is the son whom a devoted father, whom a father condemns against his will.

Human speech falls short in the face of the impiety of the Jewish people, who surpassed the patience of God with the impatience of their hardened heart; for his crime is no light matter, since he of whom that one complains could straightway both punish him. But because death is reckoned by unbelievers as a shortcut to future punishment, and what is not made infamous is considered almost as if it had not been done, he judged it right to mark them out with heaven and earth as witnesses, so that they might be subject to fitting judgment for a crime admitting no excuse. In the end the thing was fulfilled in the Lord's passion: heaven lost the day in its midst, the earth lost its firmness through violent trembling. From this one may estimate what is reserved for those in whose cause nature endured the penalty of mournful grief as punishment.

That the whole Jewish people abandoned the support of their own salvation, the text of the divine song makes plain. In which, venerable brethren, it is not severity that condemns him before all, but piety; for one cannot be well regarded by anyone whom a most patient and most merciful father has disowned, and indeed convicted not by accusation but by proof. In the end he calls heaven and earth as witnesses of his injury: the earth, in which all things are done; heaven, beneath which they are done. He calls them sons, to aggravate the crime; exalted, to show them ungrateful. He sets the ox and the ass before them, so that, if they come to their senses, they may be more grievously tormented by the comparison than by punishment.

That what the Prophet was seeking on behalf of the old vineyard, which had been established by the Lord in Egypt, had in time advanced to a new shoot, the very inscription of the title of the psalm that was read makes clear; for it runs thus: Unto the end, for those who shall be changed. For the Jewish people, who were first called the Lord's vineyard, did indeed flourish, but with their blossom unhappily shed they could bear no fruit. In the end, instead of fruits they produced thorns, instead of a grape a wild berry. The Lord, abhorring the wretchedness of that thing, planted for himself another, that is, of our people, according to his own will, into which all prophetic fruit has flowed down. Here, most blessed farmers, forgive your rustic speaker if our sloth has taken anything away from your skill in rendering an account of the vineyard.

Therefore, as you very often recall most well, with due measure observed, it is cut into a shoot, the branch is let down into a trench, so that the life-giving moisture may there nourish it, animated, with its substance always remaining with it; a supporting piece of wood is necessarily joined to it, under whose protection, defended, it may raise itself up. But when it has grown into a perfect vine and has reached the trellis, all its luxuriant tendrils are shorn with the pruning-hook, the clean stock is laid upon the frames, bound with knots, lest it be separated by any force from the wood by which it is carried, or by whose support or guidance it is drawn out further to abundant fruits. Then, solemnly weeping, it gently bedews with its own moisture and announces the streams of must conceived in its happy tears.

Straightway, with eyes opened, radiant leaves come forth, beneath which the attendant fruits smile, commending themselves, which the heat of the sun, rains, and winds, by exercising them, advance and bring to ripeness. But when the time of the vintage has come, with its beauty scattered, the grape is plucked on all sides, and placed under the feet of the workers in the winepress it is trodden, pressed by the beam, and forcefully squeezed between two planks, until all its sweetness is drawn out from its very marrow. And so the precious liquid is both drunk by those who tread it and brought into the wine-cellars of the master of the household, to be rendered better by growing old.

As far as our modest capacity can spiritually conjecture, the Candidate, reckoned according to measure, is understood as a vine-shoot, tested by the lawful number of examination. The trench we ought to receive as the sacred font, which indeed receives dead men by the sacrament, and, once breathed upon by heavenly water, straightway makes them alive. The supporting stake, by which the shoot is stretched or borne up, is the sign of the Lord's cross, without which a Christian can in no way live or lay hold of immortality. By the fact that it is brought in upon the framework, the height of the heavenly way and life is shown. It is bound with ties, when, renouncing the world, having made a pledge, it is spiritually bound by the sacred interrogations. The luxuriant shoots are pruned with the pruning-hook, that is, all sins whatsoever are cut away by baptism and the power of the Holy Spirit.

The purged vine weeps happily over its material; from the washed man the divine streams of heavenly teaching flow more happily, when the eyes are opened, that is, spiritually laid bare. The fruit commends itself as the sequel to the leaves that precede it. Likewise the Christian, by complying with the divine admonitions that go before—in which is the fruit of eternal life—is both defended and nourished alike. He comes to the yoke when, having given all his possessions to the poor, bearing his own cross, with all justice fulfilled, he follows Christ more freely. By the force of storm, sun, and rain he is driven to maturity; and the just man is led through frequent, great, and varied temptations to the crown. But when the time of the vintage comes, that is, the day of persecution, the grapes are torn away on every side, that is, violent hands are laid inconsiderately upon all the saints. They are carried to the winepress, that is, they are led to the place of punishment.

There they are trodden down by the workers, that is, mocked with the utmost contempt they are slaughtered by the persecutors. Their juice is pressed out under the final weight of the press and between the two boards. Likewise on the day of judgment, vengeance for the blood of the confessors is exacted by Christ according to the tablets of the law, even to the last farthing. The treaders drink of that same must; and the persecutors often, believing in Christ, taste the precious cup which a little before they had poured out by treading, and some even drink it. The must is stored away in the cellar of the father of the household, so that it may be rendered more precious by the pouring, and the martyr is taken up into the hidden place of the Lord's dwelling, so that there, poured from man into Angel, he may glory in the blessedness of eternal life.

As far as the sound of the reading indicates, brethren, the Jewish people is indeed convicted of impiety, but the Christian is equally warned lest he become such. And so, that the latter may fear the more, the former is terrified: the former is beaten, that the latter may profit. It is a compendious kind of happiness to learn by another's peril what you ought to avoid. Wherefore, brethren, in such a matter it is not eloquence that must be displayed, but care; receive it in a few words. He who wishes to escape the wrath of God threatening in general must serve him blamelessly. The aforementioned discourse on the vineyard, most beloved brethren, has far and wide extended boundaries, which the weight of the pressing sacraments does not permit us to traverse in a fitting sermon. Nevertheless, lest the solemnity cease altogether, taste its discourse in a few words.

The vineyard of God was indeed first the synagogue, worthless with the tangled shoots of wandering branches; which, spreading its wanton foliage hither and thither through voluptuous and profane places, brought forth thorns instead of fruits, and wild grapes instead of the grape. Moved by the indignity of this, the Lord, leaving that one behind, planted for himself another according to his own will, namely the Church as mother, which, cultivating with priestly offices and making fruitful with devout pruning, he taught, suspended upon the blessed wood, to bring forth a most abundant vintage. Hence it is that today from your number young vines, led to the yoke, seething with the sweet flow of gushing must, have filled the Lord's wine-cellar with common joy. That this may befall you also as your faith grows, God the Father Almighty will grant it through the Lord Jesus Christ, who is blessed with the Holy Spirit for ever and ever.

Christ entered the world in secret, lest the devil, wise in his own eyes, should perceive him. He who had deceived man by cunning is overcome by cunning, so that just as man in paradise had not recognized the devil, so also the devil in the world might not easily recognize Christ.

Rejoice, brethren, in Christ, and hastening with all desire, receive the heavenly gifts. Already the saving warmth of the everlasting font invites you. Already our mother adopts you, that she may bring you forth: but not by that law by which your mothers bore you, who, themselves groaning with the pain of childbirth, clothed you, weeping, filthy, bound in filthy rags, given over to this world; but joyful and rejoicing, heavenly, free, absolved from all sins, not in foul cradles but in the sweetly fragrant enclosures of the sacred altar, she will happily nurture you: through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, now, swifter than the word, enter the ethereal gates, brethren; and hiding yourselves in the generative channel of the eternal flood, do not think that any favor is being shown here with respect to persons. You are born by your own judgment, knowing that he who shall have believed more will render himself the more noble. Therefore steadfastly and faithfully cast off this old man of yours together with his foul rags, all of you newborn, all of you clothed in white, all of you about to go forth presently rich with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Come now, why do you linger, brethren, you whom the birth-giving wave has conceived through faith and now brings forth through the sacraments—hasten as quickly as possible to the Desired One. Behold, the solemn hymn is now being sung: behold, the voice of infants and their sweet crying is heard: behold, a most radiant throng proceeds from the one womb of her who gives birth. A wondrous thing, that each one may be born by spiritual right. Run further to the mother, who does not labor then if she cannot count those she bears. Enter therefore, enter, O blessed ones, all of you at once, about to be nursed together in a moment.

Why do you linger, you who differ in birth, age, sex, and condition, yet are soon to be one? Hasten to the sweet womb of the font, ever-virgin mother; and there, knowing yourselves in your own nobility and faith, since as much as each one shall have believed, so much of blessedness shall he also possess. O admirable and truly divine most sacred condescension! In which she who gives birth does not groan; he who is reborn knows not how to weep. This is renewal, this is resurrection, this is eternal life, this is the mother of all, who, having united us, gathered from every people and nation, thereafter makes us one body.

Rejoice, brethren, whom your own faith brings forth, who, fleeing the snares of this world, its guilt, its wounds, and its death, have implored the aid of the paternal majesty—hasten, not with swiftness of feet but of mind, to the depths of the holy font. Plunge in steadfastly, preserving the state of salvation, about to live by the blessed death of your old self.

Hasten, hasten, brethren, who are about to be well washed. The living water, tempered by the Holy Spirit and most sweet fire, now invites you with its gentle murmur. Now the bath-keeper, girded, waits, about to provide what is needed for anointing, for drying, and also the golden coin marked with the union of a threefold stamp. Rejoice therefore. Into the font you shall indeed be plunged naked, but clothed in a heavenly garment you shall soon rise thence as those robed in white; and whoever shall not defile it shall possess the heavenly kingdom: through the Lord Jesus Christ.

Come now, brethren, whom the longed-for ardor of blessed thirst inflames, whom the sweet murmur of the nectarean stream invites—hasten without delay to the milky water of the birth-giving font, and drink deeply while it is permitted, placed beneath the waves of the overflowing river, and with full force and full devotion fill your vessels, knowing above all else that this water may neither be poured out nor drawn again.

Come now, brethren, whom the longed-for ardor of blessed thirst inflames—with the desire and swiftness of a deer hasten to the milky water of the birth-giving font. Drink deeply, that the water may always suffice for you, knowing above all else that it is lawful neither to pour this out nor to draw it again.

After the most devout chaste fasts of sacred purification have been completed, after the sweet vigils of the most radiant night with its own sun, after souls sprouting in the hope of immortality through the life-giving bath of the milky font—from which you who were diverse in age, diverse in nation, suddenly emerged as kindred brothers, suddenly as newborn infants of one birth—I exhort you to celebrate the feast of so great a nativity with a joyful banquet: but not that banquet in which, with various dishes competing in the height of their seasoned flavor, the overwhelmed breast is often burdened with raw and sour vomiting; in which the sweetness of your worldly new wine is corrupted by the exhaling stench of yesterday's wine: but with a heavenly meal, honorable, pure, wholesome, and everlasting; which, that you may always be full and blessed, receive with hunger. The father of the household bestows upon you from his own table, from his own use, precious bread and wine.

Three boys in harmony bring in the vegetables first, upon which, that the flavor may be refined, they sprinkle the salt of wisdom: Christ pours in the oil: Moses hastily procured the firstling and well-ripened lamb; Abraham faithfully prepared the fat and seasoned veal. Isaac innocently carries the oil and the wood.

Jacob patiently sets out various flocks. Joseph, sent ahead, distributes grain to all in measured portion. Indeed, if anyone shall have desired anything, Noah, who stored it all away, as keeper of the ark will deny him nothing. Peter the fisherman sets out in abundance fresh fish from the sea, together with a wondrous sardine. Tobias the pilgrim carefully prepares and roasts the entrails of a river fish. John the camel-man, devoutly running ahead, brought honey from the forest, and locusts. Lest one denounce another for eating, Paul the inviter gives warning. David the royal shepherd at every moment supplies silver milk and cheese. Zacchaeus without delay settles the fourfold gifts: God and our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, offers sweet things, as the first one who was fed at this banquet before us says: How sweet to my palate are thy words, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb to my mouth!

These things, brethren, if anyone shall have believed them gladly, he will find yet more abundant foods; and if he shall be diligent in them, he will always satisfy both himself and others with all good things: through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Rightly does the most holy David say: Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered: for he cannot be blessed, brethren, who persists in his first birth, whom the kindled torch of burning transgressions consumes at every moment: who carries with him the stench of his own prison: who feels the executioner before he sees him: who trembles at the name of the judge: who, from whatever quarter a whisper breaks in, thinks himself about to be found and followed: for whom there is no advance of security, even if it should happen that he lacks an accuser, with a knowing witness; since he cannot lack himself, because conscience, more violent than any torturer, never abandons its own sinner. In this guilt, brethren, you have been until now: but you have been vigorously examined: but, that you might receive pardon, you have kept good watch on your own behalf, you have been heard most excellently. A new kind of judgment, in which the accused, if he excuses his crime, is condemned; is absolved, if he confesses.

O great power, great skill, great mercy of our judge! By whom sinners of every kind hasten to be punished, that they may be able to live blessedly; for the merciful sword descends into the bowels of the sinner, and with one and the same stroke, the substance of the body remaining unharmed, slays the old man, creates the new, and buries him in the element of the sacred flood. And whereas the nature of all waters is such that, when they have received men alive into the deep, they cast them out dead; our water receives the dead, and casts out the living, made true men from mere animate beings, destined to pass from men into angels, if the advance of their age does not change their infancy.

Let us exult, brethren, in Christ: and let us render thanks to the perpetual conqueror with hymns, harps, timbrels, and canticles, who, fulfilling his promises to us by a holy ordinance, has sent us (as they say) truly golden keys: and indeed not those which, by a malign favour, receive crimes, which spare the body but cannot free the soul; which, when they pass over sins by overlooking them, do not take them away but lock them in; which dismiss the accused just as they found him; which in an equal cause can profit nothing to the giver himself. But ours absolve in heaps whatever they find, and suffer nothing to remain as a remnant: but they open all the inner chambers of hearts, diligently drive out every crime, and diligently close them again, lest anything, even trifling, of what is driven out should return thither. Wondrous method, wondrous blessedness! The accused being safe, the guilt is punished in the accused, and in unimpaired condition that dies in the man on account of which the man was about to die.

Hence it is that our confession has no need of necessary torments; that without the sweat of a torturer the accused of his own accord confesses his deeds, that he may become innocent. It is a precious pardon, brethren, which both grants forgiveness and healing. For the rest, one who spares the poisoner, the murderer, the adulterer, the incestuous, the sacrilegious, unless he has cured his mind, I do not see what he has bestowed upon him. O the deep providence of our liberator! O singular excellence! O sweet sentence! O necessary condemnation! The man is slain that he may live: the slayer and the slayer's sword are not seen: the wound of the slain does not gape, blood does not flow, colour is not discoloured. He is the same, and yet he is not the same. The dwelling-place indeed appears old, but the tenant is new, showing by various virtues to unbelievers the nobility of his birth through a change of conduct.

Keep his ordinance, throughout the whole course of your age, ever remaining in its own infancy: and take strong heed never to recall the memory of your former first man.

Exult, brethren, in Christ, and having received pardon, guard the royal benefit diligently, vigorously, and faithfully; for every account of your conduct has been taken away, rejoice in security: you owe nothing to the world any longer. You were indeed an image of guilt until now, but you have been vigorously examined: and, that you might receive pardon, you have kept good watch on your own behalf: you have been heard most excellently. It is a new kind of judgment, in which the accused, if he excuses his crime, is condemned; is absolved, if he confesses. Great is the method, great the power, great the mercy of our judge, by whom sinners of every kind hasten to be punished, that they may be able to live blessedly. Wondrous method: truly wondrous mystery. The accused being safe, the guilt is punished in the accused, and in unimpaired condition that dies in the man on account of which the man was about to die.

Hence it is that our confession has no need of necessary torments, that without the savage sweat of a torturer the accused of his own accord confesses his deeds, that he may become innocent. It is a precious thing, brethren, which both bestows honour and reward. O the deep providence of our liberator! O singular excellence! O sweet sentence! O necessary condemnation! Within himself the man is slain that he may live: the slayer is not seen, the slayer's sword is not seen, the wound of the slain does not gape, the blood of the dying does not flow, the body does not quiver, colour is not discoloured. He is the same, yet he is not the same. The dwelling-place indeed appears old: but the new tenant exults in a change of conduct, about to prove the nobility of his birth to unbelievers by various virtues.

Hail today, brothers born in Christ, and guard carefully, bravely, and faithfully the royal gift of the indulgence you have received; for your entire debt has been taken away: rejoice in security; you owe nothing more to the world. Behold, there is no weight, no rattling of worldly chains upon your necks. Your hands are hindered by no bonds, your feet burdened by no fetters. No terror agitates you, no defilements cloud you. You who feared one who knew your secrets no longer fear your own conscience: for your old self has been happily condemned, that it might be acquitted: buried by the wave of the sacred flood, that, brought to life in the nest of the tomb, it might taste the rights of resurrection. O great providence of our God! O pure charity of a good mother!

Receiving persons of different kind, sex, age, and condition, she slays with hatred of sins, as a stepmother; she preserves with love, as a mother; and she does not bring the slain back to life until she has extinguished every poison of the old nature. Lest she bring forth anything adulterate, and lest she seem to love one more or another less, she bestows upon all one birth, one milk, one stipend, one dignity of the Holy Spirit. How beautiful it is, brothers, and how salutary, to admire one whom a little while ago you held in ridicule; to wish to imitate the virtue of one whose corruption you once execrated; to be astonished at one whom you always dreaded as greedy, now pouring out all his goods freely upon the poor and needy; and finally to rejoice that one whom you knew as a temple of idolatry is now a temple of God.

Therefore he is always blessed who remembers that he has been reborn; more blessed is he who does not remember what he was before he was reborn; most blessed of all is he who has not changed his infancy with the advance of time.

Heavenly peoples, exult, new pledges in Christ, and guard with unceasing diligence the brightness of your most flourishing spiritual birth of this day, lest you stain it in any way; for it knows not how to repeat what it bestows. Behold, children, adolescents, youths, old men and women of both sexes, who were guilty, who were also unclean by worldly birth, now free from every charge, you are clean infants: and, what is wonderful and pleasing, suddenly in one moment, though of different ages, made coeval. But I know well your curiosity from the habit of your former life; which indeed will no longer be permitted to you. Perhaps you ask of us also by what nativity, or by what sign, your mother, so diverse, so numerous, so unlike, has borne you all together in one single birth. As I shall humor little ones, I will unfold in all brevity the secrets of the sacred horoscope. II. Therefore, brothers, your genesis is as follows.

First, not the Ram, but the Lamb received you—he who rejects no one who believes in him—who clothed your nakedness with the snowy whiteness of his fleece; who poured his blessed milk indulgently into your gaping lips at your first cry. The same admonishes you—not the Bull, proud of neck, fierce of brow, threatening with horn, but the best, sweet, gentle, and mild Calf—that, seeking no auguries in any work whatsoever, and submitting to his yoke without malice, and by taming and making fruitful the earth of your flesh, you may bring a joyful harvest of divine seeds into the heavenly granaries. And the following Twins admonish you—that is, the two testaments proclaiming salvation—that you flee above all idolatry, unchastity, and avarice, which is an incurable cancer.

Our Lion, however, as Genesis declares, is a lion's cub, whose holy sacraments we celebrate, who lay down and slept to this end, that he might conquer death; who awoke to this end, that he might confer upon us the gift of immortality through his blessed resurrection. Him the Virgin fittingly follows, foretelling the Balance, that we might know that through the Son of God, who incarnate came forth from a virgin, equity and justice were brought to the earth: and whoever shall hold fast to this steadfastly and minister it faithfully, shall tread underfoot—I will not say the Scorpion, but, as the Lord says in the Gospel, all serpents altogether—with unharmed foot.

Nor shall he ever fear even the devil himself, who is truly the most fierce Archer, armed with varied and fiery arrows, piercing the hearts of the whole human race at every moment: on account of which the Apostle Paul says thus: Put on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, taking up the shield of faith, by which you will be able to quench all the fiery arrows of that evil one. For he sometimes sends against the unhappy the Goat, deformed of face, and boiling through foaming veins from the lips of its meaner horn, he rages miserably through all the limbs of his captive in trembling ruin. Some he makes mad, some frenzied, some murderers, some adulterers, some sacrilegious, some blind with avarice. It would take long to go through each one.

He has varied and innumerable arts of doing harm: but all these our Waterman, flowing with a saving stream, is accustomed to destroy without great effort; whom of necessity two Fish follow in one sign, that is, two peoples from Jews and Gentiles, living by the water of baptism, sealed into one people of Christ by one sign.

Let us rejoice, brethren, in Christ, and enriched by the return of so great a harvest, let us render praises and thanks to God the Father almighty; who has changed tares, darnel, burs, and thorns into joyful grain—grain which, cleansed by diligent cultivation and happily broken by the pious weight of the millstone, sifted in due order, all bran cast away, has gleamed in wondrous brightness into white flour; flour which has been adulterated by no leaven, carefully sprinkled and kneaded. Salt has been added to it; it has been smoothed with oil of chrism, tempered with fitting ministrations, rendered into unleavened loaves. Those whom you see, fragrant with excellent baking, were baked not in a furnace but in a font; not by human but by divine fire: no breeze has corrupted them, no bitter smoke has tainted them, no cold has crushed them; and—what is more—they have been leavened without leaven. Certainly they are not misshapen, not stale, not burnt, not raw, not mouldy. Their colour is milky; their flavour is milky.

But perhaps, because some appear smaller in size, if anyone should think otherwise of the baker, it is no concern of mine, brethren: for though I am poor, I yet guard my reputation and know my own faithfulness. Certainly, if they know anything, let the workmen who are with me speak. I rejoice in the gain, but without the consciousness of theft—that I freely confess. Moreover, you yourselves retain the ancient weight: you have the scale; make the assay as you will; weigh them one by one: you will find none to be wanting. They are all three-pound loaves, stamped with one pound of sacred coin, which serve at the table.

The eternal day has shone forth—heir of the ages, running forward and returning in swift course, turned upon itself in solemn motion, bringing forth from its end a beginning, infinite birthdays from its setting—a day everlasting: in which, the gloom of the enveloping winter having been dispelled, with the new west wind Favonius gently blowing, and flowers of every kind, colour, and fragrance alike diffused in a single birth, the budding meadows breathe sweetly on every side. The new summer exults, but rich, happily bearing off the spiky palm in the varied masses of grain: which the grape-laden autumn will fittingly follow, so that the joy of wine might be joined of necessity to the grace of bread. Who would not recognise these things as fitted to the heavenly mysteries? For sluggish, sordid, and gloomy winter belongs to those who, serving idolatry, shackled by worldly pleasures, given over to lust and the belly, have long been fashioned—that is, destined by God to eternal death—because they loved the work of darkness.

The sacred spring we must understand as the font, from whose rich channel, with Favonius—not a wind, but the Holy Spirit—generating, breathing forth the divine fragrance in blessed faith, the most radiant and sweet flowers of the Church, our infants, are poured forth in diverse charism but in one birth. Summer, moreover, is the faithful people, angelic and pure, who, openly and boldly holding fast to their pledge, cleansed of the chaff of sins, desiring to bring themselves as precious grain into the divine granaries, though they abound from their own spring, yet always burn with the ardour of righteous work. Autumn likewise is the place of martyrdom, in which not the vine but the blood of the vinedresser is shed: so that the blessed life may be obtained as the vintage of a precious death.

The day, however, pertains to the mystery of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is all things in all: who is truly eternal, and a day without night; to whom twelve hours serve in the Apostles, twelve months in the Prophets; whom the four saving seasons of the Gospels proclaim; to whom not yearly but daily fruits respond, singing a hymn to God for the believing peoples, who are propagated unto the ages with every seed of immortality. Walking in the light of this day, let us rejoice in faith, let us be glad in good conduct, that we may be worthy to attain eternal life; through the Lord Jesus Christ.

In steady course, adorned with manifold grace, treading the solemn track of the seasons, the day of salvation has arrived. The same its own successor and the same its own predecessor, ever young in long-enduring age, parent of the year and offspring of the year, it goes before and follows after times and ages without end. It brings forth from its end a beginning; and yet it does not depart from its natal cradle. Assuredly it bears the image of the Lord's mystery; for in its setting it celebrates the Passion, and in its reviving rising the Resurrection, through which it pledges to us the gift of future blessedness: this also it is about to bestow upon our competentes, whom the blessed setting now invites, so that, plunged in the milky depth of the sacred ocean, rising thence new and renewed with the new day, they may be able to attain with us to the glory of immortality.

A steadfast runner, adorned with manifold grace, retracing with swift feet its own steps through the windings of the seasons in solemn duty, the day of salvation has arrived. The same its own successor and the same its own predecessor, ever young in long-enduring age, parent of the year and offspring of the year, it goes before the times that follow, and scatters them abroad through ages without end. It brings forth from its end a beginning; this also it is about to bestow today upon our competentes, whom the blessed setting now already invites, so that, plunged in the milky depth of the sacred ocean, rising thence new and renewed with the new day, radiant in its light, they may be able to come with us along the airy path, keeping their course to the time of the promise, where one rises for ever.

Living by his own death, quickened in the nest of the tomb, traversing innumerable boundaries of time with his everlasting chariot, ever in one and the same orbit, the great day arrives: unfolding months into seasons, seasons into years, years into ages. Without pause he grows toward old age; and yet he does not depart from his natal cradle. Truly he bears the image of the Lord's mystery; for by his setting he celebrates the Passion, and by his renewed rising he celebrates the Resurrection, through which he pledges to us also the resurrection of future blessedness.

The driver of the eternal rounded chariot, retracing his own steps by winding them back in his solemn circuit, the day of salvation arrives. He is at once his own successor and his own predecessor: ever young in long-lasting age: parent of the year and offspring of the year: he goes before the times that follow him: and that he may scatter the ages to be gathered, he begets from his end a beginning. This is the day on which, in like manner, yet but once, out of love for his own creature man, God his Maker and our Lord both died and rose again, never indeed to repeat his setting. This, I say, is the day on which the deadly darkness was broken asunder: on which death was subdued: on which the underworld, which had received men dead, was compelled to give them back alive. That we may celebrate it always and everywhere, increased in faith, in number, and in charity, together with our brethren, God the Father Almighty will grant.

Not with idle course, perpetuating the tasks of the world's work in alternating windings, ever generative, ever young at his setting, revolving from himself back into himself along his own tracks, the day of salvation arrives; generous in all the offices of the Lord's mystery, with every kind of gift for all. For he bestows reward upon faithful priests, increase of advancement upon the ministers who follow, the fruit of immortality upon the faithful, healing upon penitents, the way of light upon Catechumens, the remission of all sins upon the Competentes. And thus, gathering all together into the one grace of Christ's body, he leads them to the heavenly kingdoms, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who is blessed for ever and ever.

Sweeping the swift course of the unending year into the increase of its twelvefold change, in one and the same orbit, yet not itself, yet itself, the great day arrives, ever young at his own setting. What has passed, follows; what is to come, goes before. In all things he is new; and yet in all things he is old. He is changed at every moment, not in nature but in number. He becomes the son of the hours, who is the father of all ages. This is the day, brethren, on which our whole world was redeemed by our Lord; on which, made new by heavenly seed, that is, our people was given life. This, I say, is the day that shows us the example of the resurrection: and in truth we are more blessed than he by reason of his condition: for he sets, that he may always live; but the faithful, rising after the setting of his second birth, is never overtaken by the horror of darkness.

Bent in his beautiful circle, the sacred day is borne along in the tasks of the world's work by the four-horse chariot of the seasons, rich in the unceasing changes of the twelve months, content with no resting-place: for his immortality is his course. Yet whether he runs forward or runs back is uncertain: for his past remains, that it may return. A wondrous order indeed! By wearing away the varied spans of countless ages he renews them; and yet his orbit is always one: he who admonishes us, brethren, to celebrate with one mind and in harmony the saving mysteries of the Lord's passion and resurrection; through our Lord and Preserver Jesus Christ.

The magnificent father of the ages is present, most beloved brethren, the day teeming with fruits of every kind, dispensing from his rich bosom, at whatever moments you choose, the gifts of the four seasons. And so for our Competentes the winter of their sins ends today: they shall rejoice, anointed with oil. Today also the smiling spring will render them forth into varied flowers with its varied gift of grace, when, washed in the saving water, rejoicing in the harvest of the clear summer, they shall have begun to eat the new bread: nor shall the autumn vintage delay them either, filled and made drunk with which, they shall glow happily with the warmth of the Holy Spirit: that they may never grow cold, God the Father Almighty will grant to all of us.

As the divine reading attests, in Egypt the people of Israel, God's people, were most bitterly oppressed by Pharaoh and his people under the great yoke of captivity. God commands them to set out, with Moses and Aaron as leaders, the way being shown to us by a pillar of cloud by day, and the same pillar of fire by night (cap. XIII, 21 and 22). The sea is divided; and with the banks parted to right and left into a sheer wall, the astonished wave is made solid (XIV, 21 and 22). God's people sail on foot. A wondrous thing! With the barbarians pressing hard upon their journey, neither horseman can follow, nor ship. Mary strikes the timbrel with the women; a hymn is sung; God's people are set free; and with the waves released, the way is destroyed together with the persecutor. To the extent that spiritual understanding is granted, Egypt is this present world. Pharaoh with his people is the devil and every spirit of iniquity.

Israel is the Christian people, who are commanded to set out, that they may press on toward things to come. Moses and Aaron, by what they were—the priesthood—and by their number, pointed to the sacrament of the two Testaments. The pillar showing the way is Christ the Lord. That it bears the twofold image of cloud and fire signifies two judgments: one of water, which has already come to pass, and another of fire, which is yet to come. The sea we must receive as the sacred font: in which waters the servants of God are set free, while those who do not flee but carry their sins are destroyed by those same waters. Mary, who strikes the timbrel with the women, was a type of the Church: which, singing a hymn together with all the Churches she has brought forth, and striking the true timbrel of the breast, leads the Christian people not into the wilderness, but to heaven.

He who receives the sacred law spiritually, brethren, is the one who is nourished by its fruit. For the Jews, since they understand carnally, seek among flocks of sheep for a lamb of twofold nature combined—which cannot be found—and have thus lost the true Lamb, Christ, whom they had found: for they did not understand that from the goats was signified human flesh laden with its own sins, and from the sheep the spirit of majesty: both of which, united in Christ, furnished the lawful lamb. This is the lamb, brethren, of whom the Law says: It is the Lord's Passover. The Apostle Paul also says: Christ our Passover is sacrificed. But why he deigned to be sacrificed, John the Baptist foretold beforehand in these words: Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. He therefore is called the firstborn, because he alone is privy to the antiquity of the Father. He is the mature one, because after him there is none.

He is the eternal one, because he was slain and was found alive. He is spotless from sin, because he alone is pure. He is the saving one, because through him we conquer death. He is male, because he is the power of God. He, I say, is the perfect lamb, because in him that great high priest, enclosed in his own victim by a holy mystery, today rendered God the man whom he offered as a sacrifice.

Time does not permit, brethren, to render the truth to the image. Nevertheless, O Judah, why do you rejoice in the monuments of your crime? In Egypt you served long, not by the lot of a stranger, but by your own desert. You were snatched from there: you did not escape by your own strength. A pillar of cloud led you through the day, to show that you were blind: a pillar of fire through the night, to warn you that you would burn. A preceding angel moved your camp forward, so that you might be proved ungrateful even in the presence of God. You walked through the sea on foot, so that you might suffer shipwreck on dry land. To this end indeed in the wilderness you drank water from the rock, you tasted manna from heaven, so that when you had afterward been brought down to destitution, you might be more sharply tormented by the recollection of past blessings.

Wondrous, dearest brethren, is the narrative of sacred history, so perfectly told. When the people of Israel, weighed down by the enormous yoke of captivity, were being destroyed in Egypt by King Pharaoh under harsh conditions (Exod. Cap. I); by the mercy of God, with Moses as leader, they were commanded to set out. For them it was not the circle of the sun by day, but a pillar of cloud; not the bright moon, but a pillar of fire by night, that opened an unknown path: and when they came between the two elements, there they were seized with terror at the prospect of immediate death. For on one side they were pressed by the hostile swords of the pursuing Egyptians: on the other side they were hemmed in and pressed by the great barrier of the sea.

For they had no ships, no means of crossing: when suddenly by divine providence the sea is divided: the waters, reined in on right and left by an icy stupor, are directed into glassy walls, awaiting the passage of God's people, so that the sea might be for the pursuers. The ungrateful Israel is led into a path in which he could fear neither swords nor waves. A wondrous thing! Dusty in the midst of the deep he exults, who might see around him his own triumph happily perishing in shipwreck. This the Jew proclaims, brethren: and yet in his madness he still does not believe in God, who is blessed for ever and ever. Amen.

Time does not permit rendering the truth to the image. Yet, O Judaea, why do you rejoice in the designation of your crime? In Egypt you served long, not by necessity, but by desert. You were snatched from there: you did not escape by your own virtue. A pillar of cloud led you by day, to show that you were blind; a pillar of fire by night, to signify that you would burn. An angel goes before your camp, lest you excuse your crime anywhere. You walk through the sea: the wave fleeing to right and left into itself bears witness to your swift feet for shedding blood.

At last you are received into the wilderness, where you now know yourself to have arrived. There indeed you drank water from the rock, you tasted manna from heaven, so that you might know, wretched one, what you were going to lose.

The Jews, from the very thing by which they think themselves blessed, are known to be unhappy: for I think it more fitting for a wretched man to remain in his own condition than for a blessed man to have fallen into the uttermost miseries. For they proclaim that their fathers destroyed the Egyptian people by fleeing: that God was present with their ancestors and went before their journey: not understanding that from that point he had removed them from his face and cast them behind his back together with those who would come after them: that the Red Sea also, cleft in two to its middle banks, with the waters heaped up and massed in ranks to right and left, the liquid of the waves preserved, the dried-up depth straining against itself, stood suspended in stupor, a nature astonished: that a terrestrial path gleamed between the waves, which assuredly proclaimed not the merit of a heavenly people, but the doom of an earthly one's future dispersion throughout the whole world.

For this reason he led them thence into the wilderness, and admonished them that the wounds of their detestable mind were to be healed by providing milk with honey: for upon the weak and languid he showered the tenderness of manna; for they were neither fit nor worthy to enjoy the perpetual solidity of the heavenly bread. The rock gushed forth for them into a spring: so that they might drink, as they deserved, a muddy stream afterward from worn-out cisterns, as the Lord says: They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have dug for themselves broken cisterns, which cannot hold water. Finally, what do the unhappy hope from the image, whose truth they did not merit to know, our Lord Jesus Christ?

How the Pharisee can celebrate a lawful Passover I do not see: whose lofty and famous temple, levelled to the ground by miserable devastation, lies buried under its own dust. The priestly seat of pestilence, by the sacrilege of its own worshippers, has been justly destroyed. The emptied horn breathes forth ointments no more. The prophets testify that his feast days have been turned into mourning, and his songs into lamentation. Bulls, rams, goats, and lambs we have received as often rejected by the Lord. What more? He cannot, brethren, celebrate any mystery, he whose sacrifice you perceive to have been condemned by divine sentence, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who is blessed with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever.

The Jew contends that he observes a lawful Passover; for whom nothing remains of the ancient sacrament but a tale woven together with empty sighs. For that royal temple lies levelled to the ground. Its altars, overturned by hand together with their sacrifices, scattered into dust, have come to nothing. The priestly seat of pestilence has been destroyed by its own name. The saving Lamb, who is designated from among sheep and from among goats, cannot be found among the flocks. His feast days and his songs, according to the voice of God, have issued in weeping and mourning. That proud city is in servitude. He does indeed slaughter infinite flocks of sheep, which he takes up in bitterness. Who does not understand, brethren, that this is not the Passover, but the foul banquet of a blood-stained robber?

The Pharisees contend that they observe the lawful Passover: yet they lost the high priesthood along with the temple, which was held to be the highest, when it perished; they have been deprived of the horn of royal anointing. Circumcision, as a testimony of an impure mind, threatens that punishment is now imminent upon them, inflicted by the wound already marked. Every kind of cattle, together with its sacrifice, is rejected. Their fasts, their feast days, and all their solemnity are an abomination before God. Since these things are so, by whom, in what manner, and from what source is the Passover celebrated? Add to this that they lost, through their own fault, the lawful lamb which they had found: the lamb which Scripture designated as taken from sheep and goats: from goats, on account of the garment of sinful flesh; from sheep, on account of the spirit of majesty. He is called the firstborn, because apart from the Father there is none who is first before him. Mature, because he is eternal.

Perfect, because he is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Spotless, because he alone has no sin. Saving, because he changed death into life: for our sake he was slain, and lives; was buried, and rose again; was reckoned a man, and was found to be God, glorious for ever and ever.

If the Jews glory in the recollection of an emptied image, how much more should the Christian, in whom there is not a figure but the truth? Recognize this equally from the things themselves, and prove it. The Jews proclaim that their ancestors, weighed down by the heavy yoke of servitude under Pharaoh and his army, were freed from Egypt. From the fury of the devil and the violent throng of idols, not only our ancestors but the whole Christian race is always being freed at every moment from the true Egypt, that is, from this world. Moses provided them with leadership: our leader is Christ the Lord. A pillar of cloud and fire showed them the way: to us the most luminous oracles of the Old and New Testament have revealed the way and the true Christ the Lord, who says: I am the way and the truth.

The fugitive people of Israel passed through the Red Sea on dry foot, the walls of waves standing still on right and left: but our sea makes those whom it willingly receives happily shipwrecked; and, destroying all sins, it submerges them in the regenerating wave, so that, made heavenly, they may not know how to desire the earth. Finally, they after the sea came to the wilderness: we after baptism come to paradise. Manna was rained down upon them when they were hungry: but we who carry with us the provision of the heavenly bread cannot hunger for eternity. For them when they thirsted the rock flowed as a cup: whoever drinks at the fountain of Christ shall never know thirst for eternity. For them in the desert the sweetness of milk and honey was displayed: but to us, which is greater, sweeter than honey and whiter than milk, the blessedness of eternal life shall be granted by God in his kingdom.

Why does the vain Pharisee swell with pride, whom the passing shadow of a moment delights? He exults that he grew great in Egypt: yet he has diminished in his native soil. That he was loosed from the bonds of captivity: but he is bound even now by the customs of barbarian fury. God provided him with leadership: the same God afterward cast him away from his presence. He obtained a kingdom, so that after royal dignity he might serve the Roman Empire with greater disgrace. Indeed, do you wish to know how great his holiness is? He whom the sea sustained when gathered together, the earth cannot bear when scattered abroad.

How long, O Judaea, do you not yet dispel the darkness of your dull heart, and fail to recognize by proof the oracles of the sacred law now fulfilled in Christ? Nevertheless, if according to your own understanding you wish to celebrate the lawful Passover, a lamb must be sought by you, as was commanded, joined from the discordant nature of lambs and goats, which your own ancestors did not find among the flocks of cattle. And would that you might find it: for you are worthy of such an immolation, you who suppose your salvation to lie in the entrails of an uncertain beast. Indeed, that you slay many indiscriminately is a mark of your gluttony. That you do so in various places, of your vanity. That you eat with bitterness, of your wretchedness. I say nothing of the fact that it is a memorial of an ungrateful person, not a remedy—a sacrifice which he who commanded it to be done himself rejects. This one thing I say.

Fulfil at least the law in the remaining matters, as it is written: Gird your loins. Put sandals on your feet. Take a staff in your hand. Set out into the wilderness, if you wish to imitate your ancestors.

Hear in a few words, O Christian, that the Jews cannot celebrate the lawful Passover. The temple of Solomon, overthrown by hostile devastation, lies buried with its own ruin: where do they sacrifice? They no longer have priests to sacrifice on behalf of their salvation. The Lord abhors bulls, goats, rams, and lambs; from what do they sacrifice? They have forsaken God and overturned his altars: to whom do they sacrifice? Indeed, this one thing alone they retain as their own: that, in order to increase their base licentiousness more and more, they baptize themselves in ever more base washings at every moment, always ungrateful to God.

Hear in brief that the Jews are not only unable to celebrate the lawful Passover, but retain absolutely nothing of divine religion. The temple of Solomon, on which they presumed, has fallen. They themselves overturned the altars of God. The Law and the prophets extended until John. Mourning is proclaimed upon their priests. Sacrifice is taken away. The anointing oil ceases. Circumcision is made void. The Sabbath is condemned. New moons and feast days are held in hatred. The Romans have taken possession of their kingdom. Nothing, as I judge, has remained proper to them, except that, having neglected the saving Lamb, ungrateful men, bitter themselves, eat worthless lambs with bitterness.

That the Jews cannot celebrate the lawful Passover, let those skilled in the law recognize, from God himself speaking: by whom their synagogue is called a den of robbers; the priestly seat a seat of pestilence; their sacrifice the slaughter of a dog; their fasts hatred; their people a brood of vipers. After this, what they presume upon I cannot estimate—men who place their salvation in the death of cattle—since God, after they went out of Egypt, where they performed the figurative Passover, says: I am full of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of lambs: for who has required these things at your hands? Assuredly, brethren, he took away the Passover from them without hesitation, who rejected that by means of which the Passover is performed by them. But they worship the image. Not even that, indeed, does he truly worship who falsely worships the image and does not love its truth. Truly this one thing they fittingly do, the innocent ones: that they slay lambs everywhere, like ravening wolves.

Awake, O Christian, and with all the torpor of worldly slumber shaken off, with the ears of your heart open, learn virtue from the children. But take care lest you think false what the fire yielded to them. Reason bears witness to the truth. He who now baptizes those believing in him with the Holy Spirit and fire, was himself also present then in the number of his Trinity.

Know then that the thing was done as a sacrament. When they were cast into the furnace, as they were plunged into the flames, immediately the fires are tempered by an invisible dew; death, recoiling, changes its office; those who kindled the fire are burned; upon those who were set afire and sing a hymn, the flame fawns; God is blessed by every creature. In the three, one mind, one strength, one triumph exults. Life is improved by punishment. The king would not have begrudged the children, had he not commanded them to burn.

It is in some manner a part of martyrdom, most beloved brethren, not to have shrunk from the punishment of martyrs: for by as much as the mournful contemplation of manifold cruelty draws one back from the crown, by so much does a noble and perfect faith, whatever torment may have been his, bind together its own vows. Thus the three children in that sacred contest set before their eyes God, not the flames; the reward to come, not the punishment. And so, amid the dark billowing masses of the raging fire, triumphing, they taught the barbarian king, all his threats, and the punishment itself, that fires are not stronger than holy men, through the Lord Jesus, who is blessed unto ages of ages.

He who believes without fear in the martyrdom of the three children can himself also attain martyrdom. For so great was the force of the contest that the fire itself also shrank from it: for when the barbarian king, with excessive cruelty, was deliberating concerning the three children, the furnace was armed with fire fed sevenfold beyond its usual measure. I believe that by divine providence the spiritual number also corresponds to the sacrament of the Trinity. Moreover, the grace of baptism was not lacking to them in the bedewed furnace. O wondrous fire! O truly a spectacle worthy of God! Those who hear, tremble; those who had kindled the fire, burn; those who were set afire go forth from the furnace sanctified and unharmed, through our Lord Jesus Christ.

An immense punishment is sometimes followed by a yet greater glory, especially in divine matters: in which the blessed guard their religion by steadfast devotion rather than their safety. Therefore when I hear of the three children set afire, I am first greatly horrified; but soon thereafter I would wish to become a sharer with them, when I learn that amid the flames, bedewed and secure, they sang a hymn to God: for so great is the power of faith and so great its might, that it compels even the elements themselves to serve its worshippers contrary to their own nature. Wherefore, brethren, let not the contemplation of a most dreadful thing terrify you: for no punishment is now to be feared, since the surviving life of those who were set afire triumphs over the flames.

A wondrous and delightful contest, most beloved brethren, between fire and faith, has sacred history set before us. For two discordant things came together in one harmony through devotion to the Lord: for in the three children faith did not fear to be punished; when they were cast into the furnace, the raging fire yielded, as it perceived that they were of one power. Thus the fire burned those who kindled it, not those who were set afire. O admirable order! O inestimable glory of God! By the sacrament of the Trinity the nature of so powerful an element was subdued. Those who were thought to be extinguished by the fire shine forth more blessed for having been set afire.

Receive with a believing heart a wondrous thing, O Christian, and one celebrated by every example of virtue. The three Hebrew youths, greater in constancy than old men, stronger in virtue than young men, equal to one another, fortified by the mystery of the Trinity, firm in the one faith of unity, equal in equality, glorious in the victory of their passion. These the barbarian king commanded to be burned, because they had scorned to adore his statue. When they were cast into the furnace of burning fire, the fire received them with devout eagerness. The fawning flames lick them as they glisten with dew. A wondrous thing! Within there is shade, without there is fire: within a hymn is sung, without wailing is heard. O great power of God! The kindlers were consumed by the fire: and those who were set alight, surviving their own fire, come forth from the furnace in triumph, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Rejoice, O Christian, and fear God mightily, if you wish not to fear the fires of the devil. Behold the youths fortified by the mystery, three in number but one in virtue, are not harmed by the panting flames and the roaring furnace. Set alight, they sing a hymn: they confound the barbarian king by their tenacity of faith. They are avenged upon those who set them alight. They behold God. Death passes into life, fear into glory. Who then would not wish to burn?

The three venerable Hebrews, fortified by the mystery of their number, tender in age but robust in the firmness of their faith, made glorious by the assistance of their punishment, scorned out of love for the divine religion to adore the image of the king, inasmuch as they had scorned the king himself: who, puffed up with rage, commanded the furnace to be heated seven times more than usual; and lest anything should seem to be lacking to the cruelty of his raging, the fire is stirred up armed with pitch and tow: as the glowing masses seethe, even the sky itself reddens with alien fires. The innocent are hurled into it: and there they find him for whose sake they are hurled. In the end they are received not by flame but by dew; by the condescension of God, not by punishment.

O happy punishment, which immortality and a crown attend, with safety prevailing!

My discourse to you today, dearest brethren, is not about human deeds or merits: nor is Daniel brought forward, fearless amid the raging gaping jaws of roaring lions, satisfied with a heavenly meal: nor Jonas amid the surging storms and the wild waves of an anxious sea, safer in the belly of a fish than in the belly of a ship: nor the three youths, avenged upon those who set them alight by the very fire in which they were thought to burn: but concerning our Lord, whom (O wickedness!) outsiders venerate while (if it may even be said) his own revile him. Armed indeed with none of those arguments which those willingly employ who set falsehoods against truth in opposition, but with heavenly testimonies many, plain, and pure, so that the learned may approve, the less instructed may strengthen themselves, the unlearned may learn, and those very persons who strive to blaspheme may, for the good of their salvation, though late, if it can be, come to their senses.