Letter 2

The page ought not to divide those whom mutual love has joined together, nor should the courtesies of my speech be parcelled out to each of you one by one, since you so love one another that love unites three of you no less than nature has bound two. Indeed, if the nature of the case allowed it, I would shut you all under one stroke of the pen, an undivided name, since your letters too summon me in such a way that I count three in one and one in three. For after the holy Evagrius forwarded them and they were brought to me in that part of the desert which draws its vast frontier between the Syrians and the Saracens, I so rejoiced that I outdid that day of Roman happiness on which, in the battle of Marcellus at Nola, the first since the field of Cannae, the proud columns of Hannibal were cut down. And although the brother named above often visits me and cherishes me as his own heart in Christ, yet, parted from me by a long stretch of road, in going away he has left me no less longing than in coming he had brought me joy.

Now I converse with your letters, I embrace them, they speak with me, they alone here know Latin. For here one must either learn a barbarous tongue in one's old age, or keep silent. And as often as the familiar hand brings back to me your faces, so dear to me, the impressed footprints of the script, so often either I am not here or you are here. Believe love when it tells the truth: even as I was writing this, I saw you. With this complaint I begin: why, with so many stretches of sea and land lying between, did you send so short a letter — unless it is that I deserved it, who, as you write, did not write to you first? I do not suppose paper was lacking, since Egypt furnishes the trade. And if some Ptolemy had closed the seas, still King Attalus sent parchments from Pergamum, so that the want of paper was made up with skins; from which the name 'parchment' has been kept to this very day, posterity handing it down to one another. What then? Am I to think the messenger was in a hurry? Even for a long letter a single night is enough. Or that you were held back by some occupation? No necessity is greater than love. Two possibilities remain: that either you were too lazy or I did not deserve it. Of these I prefer to charge you with slowness than to condemn myself with not deserving it. For negligence can be more easily corrected than love can be born.

Bonosus, as you write, like a son of the Fish seeks the watery places, while we, still soiled with the old infection, like serpents and scorpions make for whatever is dry and parched. He already treads upon the head of the snake; we are still food for the serpent who by the divine sentence eats the earth. He can climb to the topmost of the gradual psalms; for us, still on the first step of our ascent, I do not know whether it will ever fall to us to say: "I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from where my help shall come." He, amid the threatening floods of the world, sits in the safe bosom of the island — that is, of the Church — and perhaps already, after the example of John, devours the book; while I, lying in the tomb of my crimes and bound with the chains of my sins, await the Lord's cry from the Gospel: "Jerome, come forth." Bonosus, I say — since, according to the prophet, all the strength of the devil is in the loins — carried his girdle across the Euphrates, hid it there in the cleft of the rock, and afterwards, finding it rent, sang: "Lord, you have possessed my reins; you have broken my bonds; to you I will sacrifice a victim of praise." As for me, the true Nebuchadnezzar led me away in chains to Babylon — that is, to the confusion of my mind; there he laid the yoke of captivity upon me, there, binding on the iron ring, he commanded me to sing from the songs of Sion. To him I said: "The Lord looses the prisoners, the Lord gives light to the blind." And, to make a brief end of the contrast I have begun: I am begging for pardon, he is awaiting his crown.

My sister is the fruit in Christ of holy Julian: he planted, you are to water, the Lord will give the increase. Jesus has granted her to me in place of that wound which the devil had inflicted, giving her back alive in place of the dead. For her, as the pagan poet says, I fear all things, even the safe ones. You yourselves know the slippery road of youth, on which I too have fallen, and which you do not pass without fear. And as she, above all, now sets out upon it, she must be propped up with everyone's counsels, must be sustained with everyone's comfort — that is, must be strengthened by the frequent letters of your holiness; and because love bears all things, I beg you to obtain even from Pope Valerianus a letter to comfort her. You know that girls' minds are for the most part steadied by such things, if they perceive that they are a care to their elders.

For in my native land, where rusticity is the homegrown speech, the belly is god, and people live for the day: the holier man is the richer one. To this dish, according to the people's worn proverb, a fitting lid has been added — the priest Lupicinus — in line too with that saying about which Lucilius says Crassus laughed but once in his life: "Like lips have like lettuce, when an ass eats a thistle." That is to say, a crippled helmsman steers a leaking ship, and the blind lead the blind into the pit, and the ruler is such as those whom he rules.

Our common mother — who, though joined to you in holiness, surpasses you in this, that she gave birth to such children, and whose womb may truly be called golden — we greet with that honour you know of; and likewise her sisters, to be looked up to by all, who have conquered their sex along with the world, who, with oil abundantly prepared for their lamps, await the coming of the Bridegroom. O blessed house, in which dwell Anna the widow, virgin prophetesses, a twofold Samuel reared in the temple! O happy dwellings, in which we behold a martyr mother girt with the crowns of the Maccabean martyrs! For although you confess Christ daily, while you keep his commandments, yet to this private glory there has come to you a public and open confession — that through you the poison of the Arian doctrine was once driven out from your city. And perhaps you wonder that, at the very end of my letter, I have begun again. What am I to do? I have no power to deny my heart its voice. The brevity of a letter compels me to be silent, longing for you forces me to speak. My speech runs ahead of itself; my discourse is thrown into confusion; love knows no order.