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Letter XL.
(a.d. 397.)
To My Lord Much Beloved, and
Brother Worthy of Being Honoured and Embraced with the Most Sincere
Devotion of Charity, My Fellow-Presbyter Jerome, Augustin Sends
Greeting.
Chap. I.
1. I thank you that, instead of a mere formal
salutation, you wrote me a letter, though it was much shorter than
I would desire to have from you; since nothing that comes from you
is tedious, however much time it may demand. Wherefore, although I
am beset with great anxieties about the affairs of others, and
that, too, in regard to secular matters, I would find it difficult
to pardon the brevity of your letter, were it not that I consider
that it was written in reply to a yet shorter letter of my own.
Address yourself, therefore, I entreat you, to that exchange of
letters by which we may have fellowship, and may not permit the
distance which separates us to keep us wholly apart from each
other; though we are in the Lord bound together by the unity of the
Spirit, even when our pens rest and we are silent. The books in
which you have laboured to bring treasures from the Lord’s
storehouse give me almost a complete knowledge of you. For if I may
not say, “I know you,” because I have not seen your face, it
may with equal truth be said that you do not know yourself, for you
cannot see your own face. If, however, it is this alone which
constitutes your acquaintance with yourself, that you know your own
mind, we also have no small knowledge of it through your writings,
in studying which we bless God that to yourself, to us, to all who
read your works, He has given you as you are.
Chap. II.
2. It is not long since, among other things, a
certain book of yours came into my hands, the name of which I do
not yet know, for the manuscript itself had not the title written,
as is customary, on the first page. The brother with whom it was
found said that its title is Epitaphium,—a name which we
might believe you to have approved, if we found in the work a
notice of the lives or writings of those only who are deceased.
Inasmuch, however, as mention is there made of the works of some
who were at the time when it was written, or are even now, alive,
we wonder why you either gave this title to it, or permitted others
to believe that you had done so. The book itself has our complete
approval as a useful work.
Chap. III.
3. In your exposition of the Epistle of Paul
to the Galatians I have found one thing which causes me much
concern. For if it be the case that statements untrue in
themselves, but made, as it were, out of a sense of duty in the
interest of religion,1605
| 1605 [Velut officiosa mendacia.] | have been admitted into the Holy
Scriptures, what authority will be left to them? If this be
conceded, what sentence can be produced from these Scriptures, by
the weight of which the wicked obstinacy of error can be broken
down? For as soon as you have produced it, if it be disliked by him
who contends with you, he will reply that, in the passage alleged,
the writer was uttering a falsehood under the pressure of some
honourable sense of duty. And where will any one find this way of
escape impossible, if it be possible for men to say and believe
that, after introducing his narrative with these words, “The
things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not,”1606
the
apostle lied when he said of Peter and Barnabas, “I saw that they
walked not uprightly, according to the truth of the gospel ”?1607
For if
they did walk uprightly, Paul wrote what was false; and if he wrote
what was false here, when did he say what was true? Shall he
be supposed to say what is true when his teaching corresponds with
the predilection of his reader, and shall everything which runs
counter to the impressions of the reader be reckoned a falsehood
uttered by him under a sense of duty? It will be impossible to
prevent men from finding reasons for thinking that he not only
might have uttered a falsehood, but was bound to do so, if we admit
this canon of interpretation. There is no need for many words in
pursuing this argument, especially in writing to you, for whose
wisdom and prudence enough has already been said. I would by no
means be so arrogant as to attempt to enrich by my small coppers1608
your mind,
which by the divine gift is golden; and none is more able than
yourself to revise and correct that work to which I have
referred.
Chap. IV.
4. You do not require me to teach you in what
sense the apostle says, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I
might gain the Jews,”1609
and other such things in the same
passage, which are to be ascribed to the compassion of pitying
love, not the artifices of intentional deceit. For he that
ministers to the sick becomes as if he were sick himself; not,
indeed, falsely pretending to be under the fever, but considering,
with the mind of one truly sympathizing, what he would wish done
for himself if he were in the sick man’s place. Paul was indeed a
Jew; and when he had become a Christian, he had not abandoned those
Jewish sacraments which that people had received in the right way,
and for a certain appointed time. Therefore, even although he was
an apostle of Christ, he took part in observing these; but with
this view, that he might show that they were in no wise hurtful to
those who, even after they had believed in Christ, desired to
retain the ceremonies which by the law they had learned from their
fathers; provided only that they did not build on these their hope
of salvation, since the salvation which was foreshadowed in these
has now been brought in by the Lord Jesus. For the same reason, he
judged that these ceremonies should by no means be made binding on
the Gentile converts, because, by imposing a heavy and superfluous
burden, they might turn aside from the faith those who were
unaccustomed to them.
5. The thing, therefore, which he rebuked in
Peter was not his observing the customs handed down from his
fathers—which Peter, if he wished, might do without being
chargeable with deceit or inconsistency, for, though now
superfluous, these customs were not hurtful to one who had been
accustomed to them—but his compelling the Gentiles to observe
Jewish ceremonies,1610
which he could not do otherwise
than by so acting in regard to them as if their observance was,
even after the Lord’s coming, still necessary to salvation,
against which truth protested through the apostolic office of Paul.
Nor was the Apostle Peter ignorant of this, but he did it through
fear of those who were of the circumcision. Manifestly, therefore,
Peter was truly corrected, and Paul has given a true narrative of
the event, unless, by the admission of a falsehood here, the
authority of the Holy Scriptures given for the faith of all coming
generations is to be made wholly uncertain and wavering. For it is
neither possible nor suitable to state within the compass of a
letter how great and how unutterably evil must be the consequences
of such a concession. It might, however, be shown seasonably, and
with less hazard, if we were conversing together.
6. Paul had forsaken everything peculiar to
the Jews that was evil, especially this: “That, being ignorant of
God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own
righteousness, they had not submitted themselves unto the
righteousness of God.”1611
In this, moreover, he differed
from them: that after the passion and resurrection of Christ, in
whom had been given and made manifest the mystery of grace,
according to the order of Melchizedek, they still considered it
binding on them to celebrate, not out of mere reverence for old
customs, but as necessary to salvation, the sacraments of the old
economy,
which were indeed at one time necessary, else had it been
unprofitable and vain for the Maccabees to suffer martyrdom, as
they did, for their adherence to them.1612
Lastly, in this also Paul differed
from the Jews: that they persecuted the Christian preachers of
grace as enemies of the law. These and all similar errors and sins
he declares that he “counted but loss and dung that he might win
Christ;”1613
but he
does not, in so saying, disparage the ceremonies of the Jewish law,
if only they were observed after the custom of their fathers, in
the way in which he himself observed them, without regarding them
as necessary to salvation, and not in the way in which the Jews
affirmed that they must be observed, nor in the exercise of
deceptive dissimulation such as he had rebuked in Peter. For if
Paul observed these sacraments in order, by pretending to be a Jew,
to gain the Jews, why did he not also take part with the Gentiles
in heathen sacrifices, when to them that were without law he became
as without law, that he might gain them also? The explanation is
found in this, that he took part in the Jewish sacrifices, as being
himself by birth a Jew; and that when he said all this which I have
quoted, he meant, not that he pretended to be what he was not, but
that he felt with true compassion that he must bring such help to
them as would be needful for himself if he were involved in their
error. Herein he exercised not the subtlety of a deceiver, but the
sympathy of a compassionate deliverer. In the same passage the
apostle has stated the principle more generally: “To the weak
became I as weak, that I might gain the weak; I am made all things
to all men, that I might by all means save some,”1614
—the
latter clause of which guides us to understand the former as
meaning that he showed himself one who pitied the weakness of
another as much as if it had been his own. For when he said, “Who
is weak, and I am not weak?”1615
he did not wish it to be supposed
that he pretended to suffer the infirmity of another, but rather
that he showed it by sympathy.
7. Wherefore I beseech you, apply to the correction
and emendation of that book a frank and truly Christian severity,
and chant what the Greeks call
παλινῴδια. For incomparably more lovely than the
Grecian Helen is Christian truth: In her defence, our martyrs have
fought against Sodom with more courage than the heroes of Greece
displayed against Troy for Helen’s sake. I do not say this in
order that you may recover the faculty of spiritual sight,1616
| 1616 The reference here is to the story of the poet
Stesichorus, who, having lost his sight as a judgment for writing
an attack on Helen, was miraculously healed when he wrote a poem in
retractation. | —far be
it from me to say that you have lost it!—but that, having eyes
both clear and quick in discernment, you may turn them towards that
from which, in unaccountable dissimulation, you have turned them
away, refusing to see the calamitous consequences which would
follow on our once admitting that a writer of the divine books
could in any part of his work honourably and piously utter a
falsehood.
Chap. V.
8. I had written some time ago a letter to you
on this subject,1617
which was not delivered to you,
because the bearer to whom it was entrusted did not finish his
journey to you. From it I may quote a thought which occurred to me
while I was dictating it, and which I ought not to omit in this
letter, in order that, if your opinion is still different from
mine, and is better, you may readily forgive the anxiety which has
moved me to write. It is this: If your opinion is different, and is
according to truth (for only in that case can it be better than
mine), you will grant that “a mistake of mine, which is in the
interest of truth, cannot deserve great blame, if indeed it
deserves blame at all, when it is possible for you to use truth in
the interest of falsehood without doing wrong.”1618
| 1618 See Letter XXVIII. sec. 5. |
9. As to the reply which you were pleased to give me
concerning Origen, I did not need to be told that we should, not
only in ecclesiastical writers, but in all others, approve and
commend what we find right and true, but reject and condemn what we
find false and mischievous. What I craved from your wisdom and
learning (and I still crave it), was that you should acquaint us
definitely with the points in which that remarkable man is proved
to have departed from the belief of the truth. Moreover, in that
book in which you have mentioned all the ecclesiastical writers
whom you could remember, and their works, it would, I think, be a
more convenient arrangement if, after naming those whom you know to
be heretics (since you have chosen not to pass them without
notice), you would add in what respect their doctrine is to be
avoided. Some of these heretics also you have omitted, and I would
fain know on what grounds. If, however, perchance it has been from
a desire not to enlarge that volume unduly that you refrained from
adding to a notice of heretics, the statement of the things in
which the Catholic Church has authoritatively condemned them, I beg
you not to grudge bestowing on this subject, to which with humility
and brotherly love I direct your attention, a portion of that
literary labour by which already, by the grace of the Lord our God,
you have in no small measure stimulated and assisted the saints in
the study of the Latin tongue, and publish in one small book (if
your other occupations
permit you) a digest of the perverse dogmas of all the heretics who
up to this time have, through arrogance, or ignorance, or
self-will, attempted to subvert the simplicity of the Christian
faith; a work most necessary for the information of those who are
prevented, either by lack of leisure or by their not knowing the
Greek language, from reading and understanding so many things. I
would urge my request at greater length, were it not that this is
commonly a sign of misgivings as to the benevolence of the party
from whom a favour is sought. Meanwhile I cordially recommend to
your goodwill in Christ our brother Paulus, to whose high standing
in these regions I bear before God willing testimony.
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