Letter 11

You implore me in a letter, and entreat me as a suppliant, to write to you — or rather to write back — how you ought to live and to preserve the crown of widowhood with the name of chastity unimpaired. My mind rejoices, my heart leaps, my affection exults that you desire to be, after your husband, what your mother Titiana of holy memory was for a long time while her husband lived. Her prayers and supplications have been heard. She has obtained in her only daughter what she possessed while alive. You have, besides, the great distinction of your family: that from Camillus onward it is written that none — or hardly any — of your house has known a second marriage, so that you are not so much to be praised if you persevere as a widow, as to be cursed if, as a Christian, you do not keep what for so many ages heathen women have preserved.

I say nothing of Paula and Eustochium, the flowers of your stock, lest I seem, on the occasion of exhorting you, to be praising them; and I pass over Blesilla, who, following her husband, your kinsman, in a brief span of life fulfilled many seasons of virtue. And would that men imitated the renown of women, and that wrinkled old age rendered what youth offers of its own accord! Knowingly and seeing it, I put my hand into the flame: eyebrows will be drawn up, an arm will be stretched out, and an angry Chremes will rage with swollen mouth. The nobles rise up, and against my letter the patrician throng will thunder, crying out that I am a magician, a seducer, to be carried off to the ends of the earth. Let them add, if they wish, "Samaritan" too, that I may recognize the title of my Lord. Certainly I do not divide a daughter from a parent, nor do I quote that saying of the Gospel: "Let the dead bury their dead." For he lives who believes in Christ, and he who believes in him ought himself to walk as he walked.

Let envy depart — that envy which the inborn malice of slanderers ever fastens upon the Christian name, so that, while men fear reproaches, they may not be roused to the virtues. Apart from letters we do not know one another, and there is no cause but that of piety where there is no acquaintance of the flesh. Honour your father, but only so long as he does not separate you from your true Father. Know the bond of blood only so long as he himself acknowledges his Creator; otherwise David will straightway sing to you: Hear, O daughter, and see, and incline your ear, and forget your own people and your father's house; and the King shall desire your beauty, for he is the Lord your God. Great is the reward of the parent forgotten: The King shall desire your beauty. Because you have heard, because you have seen, because you have inclined your ear and forgotten your people and your father's house, therefore the King shall desire your beauty and shall say to you: You are all fair, my nearest, and there is no spot in you. What is more beautiful than the soul which is called the daughter of God and seeks no outward ornaments? She believes in Christ and, enriched by this ambition, goes forth to her Bridegroom, having the same one as Lord whom she has as husband.

What straits marriage holds you learned in your very marriage, and you were sated to the point of nausea, as if with the flesh of quails. Your throat has tasted the bitterest gall; you have vomited up the sour and sickening food and relieved your seething stomach: why do you wish to take in again what was harmful to you? A dog returning to its vomit, and a sow to its wallowing in the mire. Even the brute beasts and the wandering birds do not fall twice into the same snares and nets. Or do you fear that the offspring of the Furian line should fail, and that your father should have from you no little child to crawl on his breast and smear his neck with filth? Why not? All who have had marriages have children, and all to whom children are born answer to the worth of their kind! Did Cicero's son show his father's image in eloquence? Did your Cornelia, that pattern of chastity and fruitfulness alike, rejoice that she had borne her Gracchi? It is ridiculous to hope as a certainty for what you see that many do not have, and, when they have had it, have lost it. To whom do you bequeath such great riches? To Christ, who cannot die. Whom will you have as heir? Him whom you have also as Lord. Your father will be saddened, but Christ will rejoice; your household will mourn, but the angels will give thanks. Let your father do as he wishes with his own: you belong not to him to whom you were born, but to him to whom you were reborn, and who redeemed you at a great price, with his own blood.

Beware of nurses and bearers and wine-loving creatures of that kind, who long to fill their bellies from your skin. They counsel not what profits you but what profits themselves, and often they whine out that verse: "Will you alone, mourning, waste your perpetual youth, and never know sweet children nor the rewards of love?" Where there is chastity and holiness, there is frugality; where frugality, there is loss to the servants. Whatever they have not received, they think taken from themselves, nor do they consider how much someone has, but how much they themselves receive; wherever they see a Christian, at once comes that street-cry: "The Greek, the impostor!" These men sow the foulest rumours and pretend to have heard from others what has gone out from themselves, being at once the authors and the magnifiers of it. Thence comes a report born of a lie, which, when it has reached the matrons and has been fanned by their tongues, penetrates the provinces. You may see very many raging with rabid mouth and painted face, with viperish eyes and pumice-smoothed teeth, carping at Christians. Here is some woman, who has a hyacinth-coloured cloak about her shoulders, mumbling something rancid through her stammering nostrils, and tripping up her words with her dainty palate. The whole chorus chimes in, and all the benches bark. Men of our own order are joined to them, who are both gnawed at and gnaw — talkative against us, mute on their own behalf — as though they themselves were something other than monks, and as though whatever is said against monks did not redound upon clerics too, who are the fathers of monks. The loss of the flock is the shepherd's disgrace, just as, on the other hand, that monk's life is praised who holds the priests of Christ in veneration and does not disparage the rank by which he was made a Christian.

I have said these things, my daughter in Christ, not doubting of your purpose — for you would never have asked for a letter of exhortation if you wavered about the good of a single marriage — but that you might understand the wickedness of the servants who carry you about for sale, the snares of your kinsfolk, and the well-meaning error of your father, to whom, though I grant love toward you, I do not grant knowledge of love, saying with the Apostle: I confess, they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. Imitate rather — for I shall repeat it again and again — your holy mother, of whom, as often as I recall her, there comes to my mind her ardour for Christ, her pallor from fasting, her almsgiving to the poor, her service to the servants of God, her humility both of heart and of dress, and in all things her moderate speech. Let your father — whom I name for honour's sake, not because he is of consular and patrician rank, but because he is a Christian — fulfil his name and rejoice that he has begotten a daughter for Christ, not for the world; nay rather, let him grieve that you have both lost your virginity in vain and lost the fruit of your marriage. Where is the husband whom he gave you? Even had he been lovable, even had he been good, death would have ended everything, and destruction would have dissolved the bond of the flesh. Seize the occasion, I beg, and make a virtue of necessity. In Christians it is not the beginning that is sought, but the end: Paul began ill, but ended well; Judas's beginnings are praised, but his end is condemned for treachery. Read Ezekiel: The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him, in whatever day he shall sin, and the wickedness of the wicked shall not harm him, in whatever day he shall turn from his wickedness. This is the ladder of Jacob, by which the angels ascend and descend, on which the Lord leans, stretching out his hand to the fallen and sustaining the weary steps of those who climb by the contemplation of himself. But as he does not will the death of the sinner, but only that he should turn and live, so he hates the lukewarm and they quickly make him sick. To whom more is forgiven, he loves the more.

That harlot in the Gospel was saved by being baptized in her own tears and by the hair, which had deceived many before, with which she wiped the feet of the Lord. She had no curling caps nor creaking little shoes nor eyes blackened with antimony — the fouler, the fairer. What place have rouge and white lead on the face of a Christian woman? Of these the one counterfeits the redness of the cheeks and lips, the other the whiteness of the face and neck: fires for young men, fuel for lusts, signs of an unchaste mind. How can she weep for her sins who lays her skin bare with tears and draws furrows in her face? That adornment is not the Lord's; that veiling is Antichrist's. With what confidence does she lift up to heaven a face that her Maker would not recognize? In vain is youth alleged and the age of girlhood asserted: a widow who has ceased to please her husband and is, according to the Apostle, truly a widow, has need of nothing but perseverance. She remembers her former pleasure, she knows what she has lost, in what she delighted: the burning arrows of the devil must be quenched with the cold of fastings and vigils. Either we must speak as we are dressed, or be dressed as we speak. Why do we promise one thing and display another? The tongue rings out chastity, and the whole body proclaims unchastity.

So much for what pertains to dress and adornment. As for the rest, the widow "who lives in pleasures" — it is not my word, but the Apostle's — "though living, is dead." What does this mean, that she says: "though living, is dead"? She seems indeed to be living to those who do not know, and not to be dead to sin; but to Christ, whom secret things do not deceive, she is dead. For the soul that sins shall itself die. Some men's sins are manifest, going before to judgment; but some they also follow after. In like manner also the good deeds are manifest, and those that are otherwise cannot be hid. What he says is of this kind: some sin so freely and openly that, after you have seen them, you at once understand them to be sinners; but others, who cunningly conceal their vices, we recognize from their subsequent conduct. Likewise also the good are in some openly apparent, in others we learn of it by long acquaintance. Why, then, is it needful for us to boast of a chastity which, without its companions and appendages — continence and frugality — cannot make itself credible? The Apostle wears down his own body and subjects it to the command of the soul, lest he himself should not keep what he enjoins on others: and shall fervent youth, with the body fed, be secure about its chastity?

Nor in saying this do I condemn the foods which God created to be used with thanksgiving, but I assert that to young men and girls they are incentives to pleasures. Not the fires of Etna, not the land of Vulcan, not Vesuvius and Olympus seethe with such heat as the youthful marrow, filled with wine, inflamed with feasting. Avarice is trampled down by most, and is laid aside along with the purse; a slanderous tongue is corrected by enjoined silence; the care of the body and the fashion of dress is changed in the space of a single hour; all the other sins are external, and what is on the outside is easily cast off: lust alone, implanted by God for the procreation of children, if it has gone beyond its bounds, overflows into vice, and by a certain law of nature strains to burst forth into union. It is therefore a great virtue and one of anxious diligence to overcome what you are born in the flesh, not to live carnally, to fight with yourself daily and to watch the enclosed enemy with a hundred eyes, like Argus, as the fables tell. This is what the Apostle said in other words: Every sin that a man does is outside the body; but he who fornicates sins against his own body. The physicians, and those who have written on the nature of human bodies, and especially Galen in the books entitled On Healthful Things, say that the bodies of boys and young men, and of men and women in the perfect age, glow with an implanted heat, and that to these ages those foods are harmful which increase heat, and that it conduces to health to take cool things in food and drink — just as, on the contrary, hot foods and old wines profit the old, who suffer from phlegm and cold. Hence the Saviour too says: Take heed to yourselves, lest perhaps your hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares of this life. And the Apostle: Wine, in which is luxury. Nor is it any wonder that the potter felt this about the little vessel which he himself fashioned, when even the comic poet, whose end is to know and describe human manners, said: Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus grows cold.

First, therefore, if the firmness of your stomach allows it, take water as your drink until you pass the years of girlhood, since by nature it is most cold; or, if weakness forbids this, hear with Timothy: Use a little wine for your stomach and your frequent infirmities. Then, in the foods themselves, avoid whatever is hot — I speak not only of flesh, concerning which the vessel of election gives his sentence: It is good not to drink wine and not to eat flesh — but even among the pulses themselves whatever is flatulent and heavy is to be shunned; and know that nothing so conduces to the good of young Christians as the eating of herbs, whence he also says in another place: He who is weak, let him eat herbs — and the heat of the body must be tempered with cooler fare. But if the three children and Daniel fed on pulses, they were children, and had not yet come to the frying-pan in which the king of Babylon fried the elders, the judges. We do not seek the care of the body, which in them — apart from the privilege of the grace of God — had shone forth from food of this kind, but the vigour of the soul, which is made stronger by the weakness of the flesh. Hence it is that not a few of those who aim at a chaste life collapse in the middle of the journey, while they think abstinence consists in flesh alone, and load their stomachs with pulses, which, taken moderately and sparingly, are harmless. And to say what I think: nothing so inflames the body and titillates the genital members as undigested food and disordered belching. I would rather, my daughter, that you risked your modesty for a little while than your case. Whatever is a seed-bed of pleasures, I count as poison. Let sparing food and a belly always hungry be preferred to three-day fasts, and it is far better to take a little daily than to take enough rarely. That rain is best which descends gently upon the earth; a sudden and excessive downpour overturns the fields headlong.

When you eat, think that you must at once pray, at once read. Have a fixed number of verses from the Holy Scriptures; render this task to your Lord, and do not yield your limbs to rest before you have filled the basket of your breast with this weft. After the Holy Scriptures, read the treatises of learned men — those only whose faith is known. You have no need to seek gold in mire: with many pearls buy the one pearl. Stand with Jeremiah in the many ways, that you may come to that way which leads to the Father. Transfer the love of necklaces and gems and silken garments to the knowledge of the Scriptures. Enter the land of promise flowing with milk and honey; eat fine flour and oil; be clothed with Joseph in many-coloured garments; let your ears be pierced with Jerusalem by the word of God, that the precious grains of the new harvests may hang from them. You have the holy Exuperius, of approved age and faith, who may frequently instruct you with his admonitions.

Make to yourself friends of the unrighteous mammon, who may receive you into the everlasting tabernacles. Bestow your riches on those who buy not Phasian birds but common bread, who drive out hunger, who do not increase luxury. Understand the needy and the poor. Give to everyone who asks you, but most of all to those of the household of faith: clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick; as often as you stretch out your hand, think of Christ, and take care lest, while your Lord begs, you increase the riches of strangers.

Flee the company of young men. Let the roof of your house not look upon the long-haired, the trim, the wanton. Let the singer be driven off as harmful; banish from your dwelling the lute-girls and harp-girls and that whole choir of the devil, like the death-bringing songs of the Sirens. Do not go out again and again into public, and be carried about with the liberty of widows, an army of eunuchs going before you. It is a most wretched custom when the frail sex and the weak age abuses its own discretion and thinks that whatever pleases it is permitted. All things indeed are lawful, but not all things are expedient. Let no curl-headed steward, nor handsome foster-brother, nor fair and ruddy attendant cleave to your side: sometimes the mind of mistresses is judged by the dress of their servants. Seek the society of holy virgins and widows, and, if the necessity of conversing with men presses upon you, do not avoid witnesses, and let there be such confidence in your conversation that, when another enters, you neither take fright nor blush. The face is the mirror of the mind, and the silent eyes confess the secrets of the heart. We have lately seen a scandal flit through the whole East: the age, the dress, the bearing, the gait, the indiscriminate company, the choice banquets, the royal apparel told of the nuptials of Nero and Sardanapalus. Let the wound of others be our caution; When the pestilent man is scourged, the fool will be the wiser. Holy love has no impatience; a false rumour is quickly suppressed, and a later life judges of an earlier. It cannot indeed be that anyone should pass through the courses of this life without the bite of men, and it is the consolation of the worse to carp at the good, while they think the fault of sinners is lessened by the multitude of those who sin; but nevertheless the fire of the stubble quickly subsides, and the overflowing flame, its nourishment failing, gradually dies away. If last year the report lied, or, if indeed it spoke the truth, the vice has ceased, the rumour too will cease. I say this not because I fear anything sinister of you, but because, with the affection of piety, I am fearful even for what is safe. O if you could see your sister, and if it fell to you to hear in person that eloquence of her sacred mouth, you would discern great spirits in a little body, you would hear the whole furniture of the Old and New Testament glowing forth from her heart! She holds fasting for sport, prayer for delight. She holds the timbrel after the example of Miriam, and, when Pharaoh was drowned, leads the choir of virgins, singing: Let us sing to the Lord, for he has been gloriously magnified; the horse and the rider he has thrown into the sea. Such are the psaltery-girls she teaches for Christ, such the lute-girls she trains for the Saviour. So the day, so the night is spent, and, with oil prepared for the lamps, the coming of the Bridegroom is awaited. Imitate therefore your kinswoman also: let Rome have what Bethlehem, narrower than the city of Rome, possesses.

You have wealth; it is easy for you to supply to the needy the means of sustenance. Let virtue spend what was being prepared for luxury; let no woman who is about to despise marriage fear poverty. Redeem virgins, whom you may lead into the Saviour's chamber; receive widows, whom, like certain violets, you may mingle among the lilies of virgins and the roses of martyrs; in place of the crown of thorns, in which Christ bore the sins of the world, weave such garlands. Let that most noble man, your father, rejoice and assist; let him learn from his daughter what he had learned from his wife. Already his head is white, his knees tremble, his teeth fall out, and he furrows his unseemly brow with wrinkles; death is near at the doors, the pyre is being marked out close by: willing or unwilling, we are old men. Let him prepare for himself the provision needful for a long journey. Let him carry with him what he must leave behind unwillingly; nay rather, let him send on before him to heaven what, if he does not part with it, the earth will take.

Young widows are wont — some of whom have already turned back after Satan, when they have wantoned against Christ — being in heat, to say: "My little patrimony perishes daily, the inheritance of my forefathers is squandered, a servant has spoken insolently, a maid has neglected my command. Who will go out into public? Who will answer for the tributes of the fields? Who will educate my little ones? Who will rear my home-born slaves?" And — oh, the wickedness! — they set this up as the reason for marriage, the very thing that alone ought to have hindered the marriage. A mother brings in over her sons not a stepfather but an enemy, not a parent but a tyrant. Inflamed with lust, she forgets her own womb, and amid her little ones, who know not her miseries, she who was lately a new bride is decked out, mourning. Why do you allege your patrimony, why the insolence of the servants? Confess the baseness. No woman takes a husband for this, that she may not sleep with her husband. Or, if indeed lust does not goad you, what so great madness is it to prostitute chastity after the manner of harlots, that riches may be increased, and that, for a cheap and perishable thing, chastity, which is both precious and eternal, should be defiled? If you have children, why do you seek marriage? If you have none, why do you not fear the barrenness you have proved, and prefer an uncertain thing to certain modesty? The marriage-tablets are now drawn up for you, so that after a little while you may be compelled to make a will. The husband's infirmity will be feigned, and what he will wish you, who are to die, to do, he, who is to live, will himself do. Or, if it should happen that you have children by a second husband, there is domestic strife, a war within the household. It will not be permitted you to love your children, nor to look with even eyes upon those whom you have borne. You will hold out food secretly; he will envy the dead, and unless you hate your sons, you will still seem to love their father. But if, having offspring by a former wife, he has brought you into his house, even if you are most gentle, all the comedies and the mime-writers and the common topics of the rhetoricians will declaim against the most cruel stepmother. If the stepson falls ill and his head aches, you will be defamed as a poisoner. If you do not give him food, you will be called cruel; if you give it, a worker of evil. I ask you, what so great good have second marriages that they can outweigh these evils?

Do we wish to know what widows ought to be? Let us read the Gospel according to Luke: And there was, he says, Anna a prophetess, daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. Anna is interpreted "grace"; Phanuel in our tongue sounds "the face of God"; Asher is rendered either "into blessedness" or "into riches." Because, then, from her youth until eighty-four years she had borne the burden of widowhood and did not depart from the temple of God, persevering day and night in fastings and prayers, therefore she merited spiritual grace, and is called the daughter of the face of God, and is reckoned among her forefathers in blessedness and riches. Let us recall the widow of Sarepta, who preferred Elijah's hunger to her own safety and her sons', and, herself about to die that very night with her son, left her guest surviving, choosing rather to lose life than almsgiving, and in a handful of meal prepared for herself a seed-bed of the Lord's harvest. The meal is sown, and a cruse of oil springs up. In Judaea there was a scarcity of grain — for the grain of wheat had there died — and among the Gentiles streams of oil flowed for the widow. We read of Judith — if anyone, however, is willing to receive the volume — a widow worn out with fastings and squalid in mourning dress, who mourned not her dead husband but, in the squalor of her body, sought the coming of her Bridegroom. I see her hand armed with a sword, her right hand bloody; I recognize the head of Holofernes, carried back from the midst of the enemy. A woman conquers men, and chastity beheads lust; and, her dress suddenly changed, she returns to her victorious squalor, cleaner than all the adornments of the world.

Some, unskilfully, count Deborah too among the widows, and think the leader Barak the son of Deborah, though Scripture records otherwise. For us she shall be named for this: that she was a prophetess and is reckoned in the order of the judges. And because she could say, How sweet are your words to my throat, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb to my mouth, she received the name of "bee," fed on the flowers of the Scriptures, suffused with the fragrance of the Holy Spirit, and composing with prophetic mouth the sweet juices of ambrosia. Naomi, whose name sounds with us "comforted," whom we may interpret "the consoled," her husband and children having died abroad, brought back chastity to her native land, and, sustained by this provision, kept her Moabite daughter-in-law, that the prophecy of Isaiah might be fulfilled: Send forth a lamb, O Lord, the ruler of the earth, from the rock of the desert. I come to the widow in the Gospel, the poor little widow, richer than all the people of Israel, who, taking a grain of mustard seed and putting leaven into the three measures of meal, tempered by the grace of the Holy Spirit the confession of the Father and the Son, and cast two mites into the treasury — whatever she could have in her substance — and offered all her riches in both Testaments of her faith. These are the two seraphim glorifying the Trinity thrice, and laid up in the treasury of the church, whence too, with the tongs of both instruments, the burning coal is taken up that purges the lips of the sinner.

Why should I recall ancient things and bring forth the virtues of women from books, when you can set before your eyes many in the city in which you live, whose example you ought to imitate? And, that I may not seem to run through them one by one in flattery, the holy Marcella suffices for you, who, answering to her stock, told us something from the Gospel. Anna had lived seven years with her husband after her virginity, this woman seven months; the one awaited the coming of Christ, this one holds him whom the other received; the one sang of him as he wailed in the cradle, this one proclaims him triumphant; the one spoke of him to all who awaited the redemption of Jerusalem, this one cries out with the redeemed nations: A brother does not redeem; a man shall redeem, and from another psalm: A man is born in her, and the Most High himself has founded her. I know that about two years ago I published books against Jovinian, in which I crushed, by the authority of the Scriptures, the questions raised on the other side, where the Apostle allows second marriages. And it is not necessary to write the same things over again, since you can borrow from there what has been written. This only, that I may not exceed the measure of a letter, I would have you admonished of: think that you are to die every day, and you will never think of a second marriage.