spired, the day being called the day of that for his protection against adverse powers, and event, although it is not the very day on which will avail so much on his behalf, that if before the event took place, but one corresponding to he arrives at the use of reason he depart from it by the revolution of the same time of the this life, he is delivered by Christian help, year, and the event itself being said to take place namely, by the love of the Church commending on that day, because, although it really took place him through this sacrament unto God, from that long before, it is on that day sacramentally cele- condemnation which by one man entered into brated. Was not Christ once for all offered up the world.3 He who does not believe this, and in His own person as a sacrifice? and yet, is He thinks that it is impossible, is assuredly an unnot likewise offered up in the sacrament as a sac-believer, although he may have received the sacrifice, not only in the special solemnities of Eas-rament of faith; and far before him in merit is ter, but also daily among our congregations; so the infant which, though not yet possessing a that the man who, being questioned, answers faith helped by the understanding, is not obthat He is offered as a sacrifice in that ordinance, structing faith by any antagonism of the underdeclares what is strictly true? For if sacraments standing, and therefore receives with profit the had not some points of real resemblance to the sacrament of faith. things of which they are the sacraments, they would not be sacraments at all. In most cases, moreover, they do in virtue of this likeness bear the names of the realities which they resemble. As, therefore, in a certain manner the sacrament of Christ's body is Christ's body, and the sacrament of Christ's blood is Christ's blood,' in the same manner the sacrament of faith is faith. Now believing is nothing else than having faith; and accordingly, when, on behalf of an infant as yet incapable of exercising faith, the answer is given that he believes, this answer means that he has faith because of the sacrament of faith, and in like manner the answer is made that he turns himself to God because of the sacrament TO THE VERY DEVOUT ITALICA, AN HANDMAID OF of conversion, since the answer itself belongs to the celebration of the sacrament. Thus the apostle says, in regard to this sacrament of Baptism: "We are buried with Christ by baptism into death." 2 He does not say, "We have signified our being buried with Him," but "We have been buried with Him." He has therefore given to the sacrament pertaining to so great a transaction no other name than the word describing the transaction itself. I have answered your questions, as it seems to me, in a manner which, if I were dealing with persons of weaker capacity and disposed to gainsaying, would be inadequate, but which is perhaps more than sufficient to satisfy peaceable and sensible persons. Moreover, I have not urged in my defence the mere fact that the custom is thoroughly established, but have to the best of my ability advanced reasons in support of it as fraught with very abundant blessing. LETTER XCIX. (A.D. 408 OR BEGINNING OF 409.) GOD, PRAISED JUSTLY AND PIOUSLY BY THE 1. Up to the time of my writing this reply, I had received three letters from your Grace, of which the first asked urgently a letter from me, the second intimated that what I wrote in answer had reached you, and the third, which conveyed the assurance of your most benevolent solicitude for our interest in the matter of the house be 10. Therefore an infant, although he is not yet a believer in the sense of having that faith which longing to that most illustrious and distinguished includes the consenting will of those who exer- young man Julian, which is in immediate contact cise it, nevertheless becomes a believer through with the walls of our Church. To this last letter, the sacrament of that faith. For as it is answered just now received, I lose no time in promptly that he believes, so also he is called a believer, replying, because your Excellency's agent has not because he assents to the truth by an act of written to me that he can send my letter without his own judgment, but because he receives the sacrament of that truth. When, however, he begins to have the discretion of manhood, he will not repeat the sacrament, but understand its meaning, and become conformed to the truth which it contains, with his will also consenting. During the time in which he is by reason of youth unable to do this, the sacrament will avail delay to Rome. By his letter we have been greatly distressed, because he has taken pains to acquaint us with the things which are taking place in the city (Rome) or around its walls, so as to give us reliable information concerning that which we were reluctant to believe on the auIn the letters which thority of vague rumours. 3 Rom. v. 12. were sent to us previously by our brethren, tid- dangerous and baneful is the love of this world. ings were given to us of events, vexatious and God grant that the plants which are small and grievous, it is true, but much less calamitous still flexible may be bent in the right direction than those of which we now hear. I am sur- in a time in which the great and hardy are being prised beyond expression that my brethren the shaken. As to the house of which you speak, holy bishops did not write to me when so favour- what can I say beyond expressing my gratitude able an opportunity of sending a letter by your for your very kind solicitude? For the house messengers occurred, and that your own letter which we can give they do not wish; and the conveyed to us no information concerning such house which they wish we cannot give, for it was painful tribulation as has befallen you, tribu- not left to the church by my predecessor, as they lation which, by reason of the tender sympathies have been falsely informed, but is one of the of Christian charity, is ours as well as yours. I ancient properties of the church, and it is atsuppose, however, that you deemed it better not tached to the one ancient church in the same to mention these sorrows, because you consid-way as the house about which this question has ered that this could do no good, or because you been raised is attached to the other.3 LETTER C. did not wish to make us sad by your letter. But in my opinion, it does some good to acquaint us even with such events as these: in the first place, because it is not right to be ready to "rejoice with them that rejoice," but refuse to "weep with them that weep ;" and in the second TO DONATUS, HIS NOBLE AND DESERVEDLY HONplace, because "tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope; and hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." 2. Far be it, therefore, from us to refuse to hear even of the bitter and sorrowful things which befall those who are very dear to us! For in some way which I cannot explain, the pain suffered by one member is mitigated when all the other members suffer with it. And this mitigation is effected not by actual participation in the calamity, but by the solacing power of love; for although only some suffer the actual burden of the affliction, and the others share their suffering through knowing what these have to bear, nevertheless the tribulation is borne in common by them all, seeing that they have in common the same experience, hope, and love, and the same Divine Spirit. Moreover, the Lord provides consolation for us all, inasmuch as He hath both forewarned us of these temporal afflictions, and promised to us after them eternal blessings; and the soldier who desires to receive a crown when the conflict is over, ought not to lose courage while the conflict lasts, since He who is preparing rewards ineffable for those who overcome, does Himself minister strength to them while they are on the field to battle. 3. Let not what I have now written take away your confidence in writing to me, especially since the reason which may be pled for your endeavouring to lessen our fears is one which cannot be condemned. We salute in return your little children, and we desire that they may be spared to you, and may grow up in Christ, since they discern even in their present tender age how 1 Rom. xii. 15 and v. 3-5. 2 1 Cor. xii. 26. OURABLE LORD, AND EMINENTLY PRAISEWORTHY SON, AUGUSTIN SENDS GREETING IN THE LORD. 1. I would indeed that the African Church were not placed in such trying circumstances as to need the aid of any earthly power. But since, God," it is unquestionable that, when by you as the apostle says, "there is no power but of the sincere sons of your Catholic Mother help is given to her, our help is in the name of the Lord, "who made heaven and earth."5 For oh, noble and deservedly honourable lord, and eminently praiseworthy son, who does not perceive that in the midst of so great calamities no small consolation has been bestowed upon us by God, in that you, such a man, and so devoted to the name of Christ, have been raised to the dignity of proconsul, so that power allied with your goodtheir wicked and sacrilegious attempts? In fact, there is only one thing of which we are much afraid in your administration of justice, viz., lest perchance, seeing that every injury done by impious and ungrateful men against the Christian society is a more serious and heinous crime than if it had been done against others, you should on this ground consider that it ought to be punished with a severity corresponding to the enormity of the crime, and not with the moderation which is suitable to Christian forbearance. We will may restrain the enemies of the Church from beseech you, in the name of Jesus Christ, not to act in this manner. For we do not seek to revenge ourselves in this world; nor ought the things which we suffer to reduce us to such dis tress of mind as to leave no room in our memory for the precepts in regard to this which we have 3 We have no further information regarding this affair. The prospect of an amicable settlement seems remote. 4 Rom. xii. 1. 5 Ps. cxxiv. 8. received from Him for whose truth and in whose name we suffer; we "love our enemies," and we "pray for them." It is not their death, but their deliverance from error, that we seek to accomplish by the help of the terror of judges and of laws, whereby they may be preserved from falling under the penalty of eternal judgment; we do not wish either to see the exercise of discipline towards them neglected, or, on the other hand, to see them subjected to the severer punishments which they deserve. Do you, therefore, check their sins in such a way, that the sinners may be spared to repent of their sins. 2. We beg you, therefore, when you are pronouncing judgment in cases affecting the Church, how wicked soever the injuries may be which you shall ascertain to have been attempted or inflicted on the Church, to forget that you have the power of capital punishment, and not to forget our request. Nor let it appear to you an unimportant matter and beneath your notice, my most beloved and honoured son, that we ask you to spare the lives of the men on whose behalf we ask God to grant them repentance. For even granting that we ought never to deviate from a fixed purpose of overcoming evil with good, let your own wisdom take this also into consideration, that no person beyond those who belong to the Church is at pains to bring before you cases pertaining to her interests. If, therefore, your opinion be, that death must be the punishment of men convicted of these crimes, you will deter us from endeavouring to bring anything of this kind before your tribunal; and this being discovered, they will proceed with more unrestrained boldness to accomplish speedily our destruction, when upon us is imposed and enjoined the necessity of choosing rather to suffer death at their hands, than to bring them to death by accusing them at your bar. Disdain not, I beseech you, to accept this suggestion, petition, and entreaty from me. For I do not think that you are unmindful that I might have great boldness in addressing you, even were I not a bishop, and even though your rank were much above what you now hold. Meanwhile, let the Donatist heretics learn at once through the edict of your Excellency that the laws passed against their error, which they suppose and boastfully declare to be repealed, are still in force, although even when they know this they may not be able to refrain in the least degree from injuring us. You will, however, most effectively help us to secure the fruit of our labours and dangers, if you take care that the imperial laws for the restraining of their sect, which is full of conceit and of impious pride, be so used that they may not appear either to themselves or to others to be suffering hardship 1 Matt. v. 44. in any form for the sake of truth and righteousness; but suffer them, when this is requested at your hands, to be convinced and instructed by incontrovertible proofs of things which are most certain, in public proceedings in the presence of your Excellency or of inferior judges, in order that those who are arrested by your command may themselves incline their stubborn will to the better part, and may read these things profitably to others of their party. For the pains bestowed are burdensome rather than really useful, when men are only compelled, not persuaded by instruction, to forsake a great evil and lay hold upon a great benefit. LETTER CI. (A.D. 409.) TO MEMOR, MY LORD MOST BLESSED, AND WITH ALL VENERATION MOST BELOVED, MY BROTHER AND COLLEAGUE SINCERELY LONGED FOR, AUGUSTIN SENDS GREETING IN THE LORD. 1. I ought not to write any letter to your holy Charity, without sending at the same time those books which by the irresistible plea of holy love you have demanded from me, that at least by this act of obedience I might reply to those letters by which you have put on me a high honour indeed, but also a heavy load. Albeit, while I bend because of the load, I am raised up because of your love. For it is not by an ordinary man that I am loved and raised up and made to stand erect, but by a man who is a priest of the Lord, and whom I know to be so accepted before Him, that when you raise to the Lord your good heart, having me in your heart, you raise me with yourself to Him. I ought, therefore, to have sent at this time those books which I had promised to revise. The reason why I have not sent them is that I have not revised them, and this not because I was unwilling, but because I was unable, having been occupied with many very urgent cares. But it would have shown inexcusable ingratitude and hardness of heart to have permitted the bearer, my holy colleague and brother Possidius, in whom you will find one who is very much the same as myself, either to miss becoming acquainted with you, who love me so much, or to come to know you without any letter from me. For he is one who has been by my labours nourished, not in those studies which men who are the slaves of every kind of passion call liberal, but with the Lord's bread, in so far as this could be supplied to him from my scanty store. 2. For to men who, though they are unjust and impious, imagine that they are well educated 2 We regard Memori, not Memorio, as the true reading. in the liberal arts, what else ought we to say than 3. Forasmuch, however, as the powers belongwhat we read in those writings which truly merit ing to numbers 5 in all kinds of movements are the name of liberal, — "if the Son shall make most easily studied as they are presented in you free, ye shall be free indeed." 1 For it is sounds, and this study furnishes a way of rising through Him that men come to know, even in to the higher secrets of truth, by paths gradually those studies which are termed liberal by those ascending, so to speak, in which Wisdom pleaswho have not been called to this true liberty, antly reveals herself, and in every step of provianything in them which deserves the name. dence meets those who love her," I desired, when For they have nothing which is consonant with I began to have leisure for study, and my mind liberty, except that which in them is consonant was not engaged by greater and more important with truth; for which reason the Son Himself cares, to exercise myself by writing those books hath said: "The truth shall make you free." 2 which you have requested me to send. I then The freedom which is our privilege has therefore wrote six books on rhythm alone, and proposed, nothing in common with the innumerable and I may add, to write other six on music, as I at impious fables with which the verses of silly that time expected to have leisure. But from poets are full, nor with the fulsome and highly- the time that the burden of ecclesiastical cares polished falsehoods of their orators, nor, in fine, was laid upon me, all these recreations have with the rambling subtleties of philosophers passed from my hand so completely, that now, themselves, who either did not know anything when I cannot but respect your wish and comof God, or when they knew God, did not glorify mand, for it is more than a request, I have Him as God, neither were thankful, but became difficulty in even finding what I had written. vain in their imaginations, and their foolish If, however, I had it in my power to send you that heart was darkened; so that, professing them- treatise, it would occasion regret, not to me selves to be wise, they became fools, and that I had obeyed your command, but to you changed the glory of the incorruptible God into that you had so urgently insisted upon its being an image made like to corruptible man, and to sent. For five books of it are all but unintelligibirds and four-footed beasts, and to creeping ble, unless one be at hand who can in reading things, or who, though not wholly or at all de- not only distinguish the part belonging to each voted to the worship of images, nevertheless of those between whom the discussion is mainworshipped and served the creature more than the Creator.3 Far be it, therefore, from us to admit that the epithet liberal is justly bestowed on the lying vanities and hallucinations, or empty trifles and conceited errors of those men - unhappy men, who knew not the grace of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, by which alone we are "delivered from the body of this death," and who did not even perceive the measure of truth which was in the things which they knew. Their historical works, the writers of which profess to be chiefly concerned to be accurate in narrating events, may perhaps, I grant, contain some things worthy of being known by "free" men, since the narration is true, whether the subject described in it be the good or the evil in human experience. At the same time, I can by no means see how men who were not aided in their knowledge by the Holy Spirit, and who were obliged to gather floating rumours under the limitations of human infirmity, could avoid being misled in regard to very many things; nevertheless, if they have no intention of deceiving, and do not mislead other men otherwise than so far as they have themselves, through human infirmity, fallen into a mistake, there is in such writings an approach to liberty. I John viii. 36. 2 John viii. 38. 3 Rom. i. 21-25. 4 Rom. vii. 24, 25. tained, but also mark by enunciation the time which the syllables should occupy, so that their distinctive measures may be expressed and strike the ear, especially because in some places there occur pauses of measured length, which of course must escape notice, unless the reader inform the hearer of them by intervals of silence where they occur. The sixth book, however, which I have found already revised, and in which the product of the other five is contained, I have not delayed to send to your Charity; it may, perhaps, be not wholly unsuited to one of your venerable age.8 As to the other five books, they seem to me scarcely worthy of being known and read by Julian, our son, and now our colleague, for, as a deacon, he is engaged in the same warfare with ourselves. Of him I dare not say, for it would not be true, that I love him more than I love you; yet this I may say, that I long for him more than for you. It may seem strange, that when I love both equally, I long more ardently for the one than the other; but the cause of the difference is, that I have greater hope of seeing him; for I think that if ordered or sent by you he come to us, he will both be doing what is suitable to one of his years, especially as he is May the shadow of the wings of the Most High be for ever the dwelling-place' of you all, who with oneness of heart occupy one home,2 father and mother, bound in the same brotherhood with your sons, being all the children of the one Father. Remember us. LETTER CII. (A.D. 409.) TO DEOGRATIAS, MY BROTHER IN ALL SINCERITY, GREETING IN THE LORD. ing that, as you have told me, he begged this from you; and it is a task to which, even before receiving this letter, you were competent; for when you have read this letter, you will see that scarcely anything has been said by me which you did not already know, or which you could not have come to know though I had been silent. This work of mine, therefore, I beg you to keep for the use of yourself and of all other persons whose desire for instruction you deem it suited to satisfy. But as for the treatise of your own composition which I demand from you, give it to him to whom this treatise is most specially adapted, and not to him only, but also all others who find exceedingly acceptable such statements concerning these things as you are able to make, among whom I number myself. May you live always in Christ, and remember me. 2. QUESTION I. Concerning the resurrection. This question perplexes some, and they ask, Which of two kinds of resurrection corresponds to that which is promised to us? is it that of Christ, or that of Lazarus? They say, "If the former, how can this correspond with the resurrection of those who have been born by ordinary generations, seeing that He was not thus born? 3 If, on the other hand, the resurrection of Lazarus is said to correspond to ours, here also there seems to be a discrepancy, since the resurrection of Lazarus was accomplished in the case of a body not yet dissolved, but the same body in which he 1. In choosing to refer to me questions which was known by the name of Lazarus; whereas were submitted to yourself for solution, you have ours is to be rescued after many centuries from not done so, I suppose, from indolence, but be- the mass in which it has ceased to be distinguishcause, loving me more than I deserve, you pre-able from other things. Again, if our state after fer to hear through me even those things which the resurrection is one of blessedness, in which you already know quite well. I would rather, the body shall be exempt from every kind of however, that the answers were given by yourself, because the friend who proposed the questions seems to be shy of following advice from me, if I may judge from the fact that he has written no reply to a letter of mine, for what reason he knows best. I suspect this, however, and there is neither ill-will nor absurdity in the suspicion; for you also know very well how much I love him, and how great is my grief that he is not yet a Christian; and it is not unreasonable to think that one whom I see unwilling to answer my letters is not willing to have anything written by me to him. I therefore implore you to comply with a request of mine, seeing that I have been obedient to you, and, notwithstanding most engrossing duties, have feared to disappoint the wish of one so dear to me by declining to comply with your request. What I ask is this, that you do not refuse yourself to give an answer to all his questions, see wound, and from the pain of hunger, what is meant by the statement that Christ took food, and showed his wounds after His resurrection? For if He did it to convince the doubting, when the wounds were not real, He practised on them a deception; whereas, if He showed them what was real, it follows that wounds received by the body shall remain in the state which is to ensue after resurrection." 3. To this I answer, that the resurrection of Christ and not of Lazarus corresponds to that which is promised, because Lazarus was so raised that he died a second time, whereas of Christ it is written: "Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him."4 The same is promised to those who shall rise at the end of the world, and shall reign for ever with Christ. As to the difference in the manner of Christ's generation and that of other men, this has no bearing upon the nature 3 Qui nulla seminis conditione natus est. |