Letter 12

Great themes are not borne by small talents, and in the very attempt, having dared beyond their strength, they sink down; and the greater the thing to be said, the more is he overwhelmed who cannot unfold the magnitude of the matter in words. My Nepotian, yours, ours — nay, Christ's, and because he is Christ's, therefore the more ours — has left behind old men, and, wounded by the dart of longing for him, has worn them out with intolerable grief. Him whom we thought our heir, we hold as a corpse. For whom now shall my talent sweat? Whom shall my little writings be eager to please? Where is that taskmaster of ours, and the voice sweeter than the swan's song? My mind is stunned, my hand trembles, my eyes grow dim, my tongue stammers. Whatever I say, since he will not hear it, seems mute. The very pen, as if feeling it, and the wax, somewhat sadder, are overspread with rust or mould. As often as I strive to burst forth into words and to scatter the flowers of this epitaph over his tomb, so often my eyes fill, and with renewed grief I am wholly at his funeral. It was once the custom that over the bodies of the dead the children should speak their praises in the assembly from the rostra, and, like mournful songs, should rouse the breasts of the hearers to weeping and groaning: behold, the order of things is changed for us, and to our calamity Nature has lost her rights: what a young man should have rendered to old men, this we old men render to a young man.

What, then, shall I do? Shall I join with you in tears? But the Apostle forbids it, calling the dead among Christians "those who sleep," and the Lord in the Gospel says: The girl is not dead, but sleeps. Lazarus too, because he had slept, was raised. Shall I be glad and rejoice that he was taken away, lest wickedness should change his mind, because his soul pleased God? But against my will and resistance the tears flow down my cheeks, and amid the precepts of virtue and the hope of the resurrection the feeling of longing breaks my believing mind. O Death, who dividest brothers and, cruel and hard, severest those joined in love! The Lord brought a burning wind, rising from the desert, which dried up your veins and made desolate your fountain. You devoured Jonah indeed, but even in your belly he was alive. You bore him as though dead, that the tempest of the world might be stilled and our Nineveh be saved by his proclaiming. He, he conquered you, he slew you — that fugitive prophet who left his house and gave his beloved soul into the hands of those who sought it. He who once threatened you sternly through Hosea: I will be your death, O Death; I will be your sting, O hell — by his death you have died, by his death we live. You devoured, and you were devoured; and while you are caught by the allurement of the assumed body and think it a prey for your greedy jaws, your inward parts were pierced through with a hooked tooth.

We give you thanks, Christ our Saviour — we, your creature — that, while you were slain, you slew so powerful an adversary of ours. Who before was more wretched than man, who, prostrate with the eternal terror of death, had received the sense of living only for this, that he might perish? For death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were in hell, who was in the kingdom of heaven? If your friends, under the penalty of Adam's offence, and even those who had not sinned, were held liable for the sins of others, what is to be believed of those who said in their hearts, "There is no God," who became corrupt and abominable in their desires, who turned aside, and together became unprofitable; there is none that does good, no, not one? But if Lazarus is seen in Abraham's bosom and in a place of refreshment, what likeness is there between hell and the kingdom of heaven? Before Christ, Abraham among the dead; after Christ, the thief in paradise. And therefore at his resurrection many bodies of those who slept arose, and were seen in the heavenly Jerusalem. And then was fulfilled that saying: Arise, you who sleep, and lift yourself up, and Christ shall enlighten you. John the Baptist cries aloud in the desert: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For from the days of John the Baptist the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. That flaming sword, the guardian of paradise, and the cherubim presiding at the gates, have been quenched and unbarred by the blood of Christ. Nor is it any wonder that this is promised to us at the resurrection, since all of us who live in the flesh but not according to the flesh have our citizenship in heaven, and to us, still placed on earth, it is said: The kingdom of God is within you.

Add that before the resurrection of Christ God was known only in Judaea, in Israel his name was great, and even those who knew him were nevertheless dragged down to hell. Where then were the men of the whole world, from India to Britain, from the rigid region of the north to the heats of the Atlantic ocean — so innumerable peoples and the multitudes of so many nations, as various in tongue as in dress and arms? Like fishes and locusts, like flies and gnats, they were ground down; for without the knowledge of his Creator, every man is a beast. But now the passion of Christ and his resurrection are sounded by the voices and the writings of all nations. I say nothing of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins, which nations the Lord consecrated to his faith in the title of the cross. The soul immortal and subsisting after the dissolution of the body — which Pythagoras dreamed of, which Democritus did not believe, which Socrates discoursed of in prison for the consolation of his condemnation — the Indian, the Persian, the Goth, the Egyptian now philosophize about. The fierceness of the Bessi and the throng of skin-clad peoples, who once sacrificed men at the funeral rites of the dead, have broken their harsh cry into the sweet melody of the cross, and the one voice of the whole world is Christ.

What are we doing, O my soul? Whither do we turn? What do we take up first? What do we pass over in silence? The precepts of the rhetoricians have slipped from you, and, taken up with mourning, oppressed with tears, hindered by sobs, you do not keep the order of speaking! Where is that study of letters from infancy, and the ever-praised maxim of Anaxagoras and Telamon: "I knew that I had begotten a mortal"? We have read Crantor, whose volume Cicero followed to console his own grief; we have run through the little works of Plato, Diogenes, Clitomachus, Carneades, Posidonius, written to assuage mourning — men who in various ages, in books or letters, strove to lessen the laments of various people, so that, even if our own talent were dry, it might be watered from their fountains. They set forth innumerable men, and especially Pericles and Xenophon the Socratic, of whom the one, having lost two sons, discoursed crowned in the assembly, the other, when while sacrificing he had heard that his son was killed in war, is said to have laid down his crown and to have set it again on his head, after he found that the youth had fallen fighting bravely in the line of battle. Why should I mention the Roman generals, by whose virtues, like so many stars, the Latin histories shine? Pulvillus, while dedicating the Capitol, on hearing — so it was reported — of the sudden death of his son, ordered him to be buried in his absence; Lucius Paulus, within seven days, between the funerals of two sons, entered the city in triumph. I pass over the Maximi, the Catos, the Galli, the Pisos, the Bruti, the Scaevolae, the Metelli, the Scauri, the Marii, the Crassi, the Marcelli, and the Aufidii, whose virtue in mourning was no less than in war, and whose bereavements Tullius set forth in his book On Consolation — lest I seem to have sought what belongs to others rather than what is our own; although these things too have been briefly said to our reproach, if faith does not furnish what unbelief has shown.

Let us come, then, to our own. I will not lament with Jacob and David their sons who die under the Law, but with Christ in the Gospel I will receive those who rise again. The mourning of the Jews is the joy of Christians. In the evening weeping shall linger, and in the morning gladness. The night has gone before, but the day has drawn near. Hence too Moses, dying, is mourned, while Joshua is buried on the mountain without funeral and tears. Whatever can be said from the Scriptures about lamentation, we set forth briefly in that book in which we consoled Paula at Rome. Now we must come to the same place by another path, lest we seem to tread footsteps once past and worn.

We know indeed that our Nepotian is with Christ and mingled among the choirs of the saints, and that what among us he searched out from afar on earth and sought by reasoning, there, seeing it close at hand, he says: As we have heard, so also we have seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God. But the longing for his absence we cannot bear, grieving not for his lot but for our own. The happier he is, the more are we in grief, that we lack so great a good. The sisters too wept for Lazarus, whom they knew would rise again; and, to express the true feelings of a man, the Saviour himself wept for him whom he was about to raise. His Apostle too, who had said, I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ, and elsewhere, To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain, gives thanks that Epaphras was restored to him from the nearness of death, lest he should have sorrow upon sorrow — not from the fear of unbelief, but from the longing of love. How much more do you — both uncle and bishop, that is, a father in the flesh and in the spirit — long for your own heart, and sigh for it as if torn away from you! But I beseech you to set a measure to your grief, mindful of that maxim: Nothing in excess; and, your wound bound up a little, hear the praises of him whose virtue ever gladdened you, and grieve not that you have lost such a one, but rejoice that you have had such a one; and, as those who paint the regions of the earth on a small tablet, so in this little volume may you discern the marks of his virtues sketched, not fully drawn, and receive from us not strength but goodwill.

It is a precept of the rhetoricians that the forefathers of him who is to be praised, and their deeds, should be recalled from far back, and that the discourse should thus come to the man himself by degrees, so that, of course, he may be made more illustrious by ancestral and paternal virtues, and may seem either not to have degenerated from good men, or himself to have adorned mediocre ones. But I will not look, in praising the soul, for the goods of the flesh, which he himself always despised, nor will I boast of his birth — that is, of goods belonging to others — since both Abraham and Isaac, holy men, begot sinners, Ishmael and Esau, and, on the other hand, Jephthah, numbered in the catalogue of the just by the Apostle's voice, was born of a harlot. The soul, he says, that sins, shall itself die; therefore the soul that has not sinned shall itself live. Neither the virtues nor the vices of parents are imputed to their children; we are reckoned from the time when we are born again in Christ. Paul, the persecutor of the Church, in the morning a ravening wolf of Benjamin, in the evening gave food to Ananias, bowing his head as a sheep. Therefore let our Nepotian too, like a wailing little infant and an untaught boy, be suddenly born to us from the Jordan.

Another, perhaps, would write that for his salvation you left the East and the desert, and lured me, your dearest companion, with the hope of returning, that first, if it could be done, you might preserve your widowed sister with her little one, and then, if she should reject the plan, at least preserve your sweetest nephew. For this is he of whom I once prophesied to you: "Though a little nephew hang upon your neck." Another, I say, would report that in the service of the palace, beneath the cloak and the gleaming linen, his body was worn by a hair-shirt; that, standing before the powers of the world, he wore a face pale with fastings; that, still under the garments of another, he served another, and had his belt for this, that he might come to the aid of widows, orphans, the oppressed, the wretched: but these delays of an imperfect service of God do not please me, and the centurion Cornelius, whom I read to have been just, I hear at once baptized.

Nevertheless, let us approve, as it were, certain cradles of his nascent faith, so that he who was a devoted soldier under another's standards may be granted the laurel after he has begun to serve his own King. His belt laid aside and his dress changed, whatever there was of his military savings he distributed to the poor. For he had read: He who wishes to be perfect, let him sell all that he has and give to the poor and follow me; and again: You cannot serve two masters, God and mammon. Apart from a cheap tunic and a covering to match, which excluded the cold by merely covering the body, he reserved nothing more for himself. His very dress, following the custom of the province, was remarkable neither for elegance nor for squalor. And though he burned daily either to go to the monasteries of Egypt, or to visit the choirs of Mesopotamia, or at least to occupy the solitudes of the islands of Dalmatia, which are separated from Altinum only by a strait, he did not dare to forsake his uncle the bishop, seeing in him all the examples of the virtues, and having at home the source from which he might learn. In one and the same man he both imitated the monk and venerated the bishop. Not, as is wont to happen in most cases, did constant nearness produce familiarity, and familiarity contempt for him; but he so revered him as a parent, and so admired him as though he beheld him new each day. Why say more? He becomes a cleric, and through the usual degrees is ordained presbyter. Good Jesus, what groans, what wailings, what refusal of food, what shunning of all eyes! Then for the first and only time he was angry with his uncle. He complained that he could not bear it, and pleaded that his youthful age was unsuited to the priesthood. But the more he resisted, the more he stirred up the zeal of all toward himself, and merited by refusing what he did not wish to be, and was the worthier for crying out that he was unworthy. We saw a Timothy of our own time, and gray hairs in wisdom, and a man chosen presbyter by Moses, whom Moses himself knew to be a presbyter. Therefore, understanding the clergy not as an honour but a burden, he made it his first care to overcome envy by humility, and then to give no tale of shameful rumour against himself, so that those who carped at his age might be astonished at his continence. To come to the aid of the poor, to visit the sick, to invite to hospitality, to soothe with kindness, to rejoice with those who rejoice, to weep with those who weep; he was the staff of the blind, the food of the hungry, the hope of the wretched, the solace of the mourning. Thus he was eminent in each single virtue, as though he had none of the rest. Among the presbyters and his equals, first in work, last in rank. Whatever good he had done, he ascribed to his uncle; if anything by chance had turned out otherwise than he thought, he said that his uncle did not know of it and that he himself had erred. In public he knew him as bishop, at home as father. He tempered the gravity of his manners with cheerfulness of countenance. You would understand his joy by a smile, not by loud laughter. He honoured the widows and virgins of Christ as mothers, and exhorted them as sisters, with all chastity. Now, after he had betaken himself home, and, leaving the cleric outside, had given himself to the hardness of the monks, frequent in prayers, watchful in supplication, he offered his tears to God, not to men; he moderated his fastings, charioteer-like, according to the weariness and strength of his body. He attended his uncle's table, and so tasted whatever was set before him that he both shunned superstition and preserved continence. His conversation, and every meal, was to propose something from the Scriptures, to listen gladly, to answer modestly, to take up what was right, not sharply to refute what was wrong, to instruct rather than to vanquish one disputing against him, and, with an ingenuous modesty that adorned his age, to confess simply whose each saying was; and in this way, by declining the glory of learning, he was held most learned. "That," he would say, "is Tertullian's, this Cyprian's, this Lactantius's, that Hilary's. So spoke Minucius Felix, so Victorinus, in this manner Arnobius." Me too, because he loved me for his uncle's fellowship, he sometimes brought forward into the open. By constant reading too and long meditation he had made his breast a library of Christ.

How often did he beg, in letters from across the sea, that I would write something to him! How often did he set before me the nocturnal petitioner of the Gospel, and the widow who importuned the harsh judge! And when I refused by silence rather than by letters, and put the modesty of one keeping silent to the blush of the one asking, he set up against me his uncle as a pleader, who might both ask more freely on another's behalf and obtain more easily out of reverence for his priesthood. I did, then, what he wished, and in a little book consecrated our friendship to eternal memory; on receiving which he boasted that he had surpassed the wealth of Croesus and the riches of Darius. He held it with his eyes, in his bosom, in his hands, in his mouth; and while he often unrolled it in his bed, the sweet page fell upon the breast of the sleeper. But if any of the strangers or friends came, he rejoiced over himself at my testimony, and whatever was lacking in the little work he made up by measured pauses and variety of delivery, so that in his reciting it he himself seemed daily either to please or to displease. Whence this fervour, save from the love of God? Whence the untiring meditation on the law of Christ, save from longing for him who gave the law? Let others add coin to coin and, choking their purse, hunt the wealth of matrons by their attentions; let them be richer monks than they had been worldlings, possessing under a poor Christ the wealth they had not had under a wealthy devil, and let the Church sigh over them as rich whom the world held beggars before: our Nepotian, trampling on gold, pursues sheets of writing; but, as he is a despiser of himself in the flesh and walks the more adorned for his poverty, so he searches out all the adornment of the Church.

In comparison indeed with what was said above, the things we are about to say are slight, but even in small things the same spirit is shown. For just as we admire the Creator not only in heaven and earth, in the sun and ocean, in elephants, camels, horses, oxen, leopards, bears, lions, but also in the tiniest animals — the ant, the gnat, flies, little worms, and that kind of creature whose bodies we know better than their names — and venerate the same skill in all, so the mind devoted to Christ is equally intent on greater things and on lesser, knowing that an account must be rendered even for an idle word. He was anxious, therefore, whether the altar gleamed, whether the walls were free of soot, whether the floors were wiped clean, whether there was a doorkeeper frequent at the gate, the curtains always at the doorways, whether the sanctuary was clean, the vessels shining; and his pious solicitude, disposed over all the ceremonies, neglected no duty, lesser or greater. Wherever in the church you sought him, you would find him. Antiquity admires the noble man Quintus Fabius, who is also a writer of Roman history, but who got his name more from painting than from letters; and Scripture testifies that our Bezalel was full of wisdom and the spirit of God, and Hiram too, the son of a Tyrian woman, in that the one fashioned the furniture of the tabernacle, the other of the temple. For just as glad crops and rich fields sometimes luxuriate in stalks and ears, so distinguished talents and a mind full of virtues overflow into the elegance of various arts. Hence among the Greeks that philosopher is praised who boasted that everything he used, even to his cloak and ring, was made by his own hand. This same thing we can say of him too, who would overshade the basilicas of the church and the chapels of the martyrs with various flowers and the foliage of trees and the tendrils of vines, so that whatever pleased in the church, both in arrangement and in appearance, bore witness to the labour and zeal of the presbyter.

Well done, in virtue. Of one whose beginnings are such, what will the end be? O wretched human condition, and vain is all our living without Christ. Why do you withdraw, why do you turn aside, O speech? For as though we could put off his death and make his life longer, so we fear to come to the end. All flesh is grass, and all its glory as the flower of grass. Where now is that comely face, where the dignity of the whole body, with which, as with a beautiful garment, the beauty of the soul was clothed? It withered, alas, as the lily under the blowing south wind, and the purple of the violet gradually passed into pallor. And when he burned with fevers and the heat drained the fountains of his veins, with weary breath he consoled his sorrowing uncle. His face was glad, and while all around were weeping, he alone smiled. To cast off his cloak, to stretch out his hands, to see what others did not see, and, as if rising to meet them, to greet those who came: you would understand that he was not dying but migrating, and changing his friends, not leaving them. The tears roll down my face, and with hardened mind I cannot disguise the grief I suffer. Who would believe that at such a time he remembered our intimacy, and that, with his soul struggling, he knew the sweetness of our studies? Taking his uncle's hand: "This tunic," he said, "which I used in the ministry of Christ, send to him who is most beloved by me, in age my father, in fellowship my brother, and whatever of affection was owed by you to your nephew, transfer it to him whom you loved equally with me." And with such words he failed, holding his uncle by the hand, touching me in remembrance.

I know that you would not have wished thus to prove the love of your fellow-citizens toward you, and that you would rather have sought the affection of your country in prosperity. But a duty of this kind is more pleasant in good fortune, more welcome in ill. The whole city mourned him, all Italy mourned him. The earth received his body, his soul was rendered to Christ. You sought a nephew, the Church a priest. Your successor has gone before you. What you were, he, after you, deserved to be by the judgment of all. And so from one house a double dignity of the episcopate came forth: while in the one there is congratulation that he held it, in the other grief that he was snatched away, that he might not hold it. It is the maxim of Plato that all the life of the wise man is a meditation upon death. The philosophers praise this and bear it to the skies, but far more strongly the Apostle: I die daily, he says, by your glory. It is one thing to attempt, another to do; one thing to live as one about to die, another to die as one about to live. The former is to die from glory; the latter dies ever toward glory. We too, therefore, ought to premeditate in our minds that one day we shall be what — willing or unwilling — cannot be far off. For if we exceeded nine hundred years of life, as the human race lived before the flood, and the times of Methuselah were granted us, yet the past length would be nothing, since it would have ceased to be. For between him who lived ten years and him who lived a thousand, after the same end of life has come and the unrefusable necessity of death, all that has passed is just as much — except that the older man sets out the more laden with the burden of his sins. For wretched mortals, the best day of life flies first; diseases come on, and sad old age, and toil, and the harshness of unrelenting death snatches them away. The poet Naevius says: A mortal must of necessity suffer many ills. Hence antiquity feigned that Niobe, who wept much, was turned into stone, and others into various beasts, and Hecuba into a dog; and Hesiod, lamenting the births of men, rejoices at their funerals; and Ennius prudently says: The common people, he says, in this surpass the king's estate: the people may weep, the king honourably may not. As with a king, so with a bishop — nay, less with a king than with a bishop. For the king rules over the unwilling, the bishop over the willing; the one subjects by terror, the other lords it by service; the one guards bodies unto death, the other preserves souls unto life. Upon you the eyes of all are turned; your house and conduct, set as it were on a watchtower, are the mistress of public discipline. Whatever you do, all think they must do for themselves. Take care that you commit nothing which either those who wish to find fault may seem worthily to have torn apart, or those who wish to imitate you may be compelled to transgress. Conquer as far as you can — nay, more than you can — the softness of your mind, and check the abundantly flowing tears, lest a great affection for a nephew be reckoned, among unbelieving minds, as despair toward God. He is to be longed for by you as one absent, not as one dead, so that you may seem to await him, not to have lost him.

But what am I doing, healing a grief which I think is already assuaged both by time and by reason, instead of rather setting before you the recent miseries of kings and the calamities of our own time, so that he who has been deprived of this light is not so much to be mourned as to be congratulated, that he has escaped from such great evils? Constantius, the patron of the Arian heresy, while preparing against an enemy and being borne in haste to battle, dying in the little village of Mopsus, left the empire, to his great grief, to his foe. Julian, the destroyer of his own soul and the butcher of a Christian army, felt Christ in Media, whom he had first denied in Gaul; and while he wished to extend the bounds of the Romans, he lost those already extended. Jovian, having only tasted the goods of royalty, perished, suffocated by the fumes of coals, showing all what human power is. Valentinian, his native soil laid waste and his country left unavenged, was extinguished by a vomiting of blood. His brother Valens, conquered in the Gothic war in Thrace, had there the same place for his death and his sepulchre. Gratian, betrayed by his own army and not received by the cities he came to, was a mockery to his enemy, and the walls of your city, Lyons, bear witness to the traces of the bloody hand. The young Valentinian, almost a boy, after flight, after exile, after recovering the empire with much blood, was slain not far from the city, the conscious witness of his brother's death, and his lifeless corpse was dishonoured by hanging. What shall I say of Procopius, Maximus, Eugenius, who certainly, while they held power, were a terror to nations? All stood captive before the faces of their conquerors, and — what is most wretched for those once most powerful — were pierced first by the ignominy of slavery before the enemy's sword.

Someone may say: "Such is the condition of kings, and lightnings strike the highest mountains." Let me come to private dignities, and I will not speak of those who do not last two years; and, to pass over the rest, it is enough for us to write of the various ends of three recent consulars. Abundantius, in need, is in exile at Pityus; the head of Rufinus was carried on a pike to Constantinople, and his severed right hand, to the disgrace of his insatiable avarice, begged alms from door to door; Timasius, cast down suddenly from the highest step of dignity, thinks himself to have escaped because he lives, inglorious, at Assa. I tell not the calamities of the wretched but the frail state of the human condition — my mind shudders to follow the ruins of our times. It is twenty years and more that between Constantinople and the Julian Alps Roman blood is daily shed. Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, Dardania, Dacia, Epirus, Dalmatia, and all the Pannonias the Goth, the Sarmatian, the Quadian, the Alan, the Huns, the Vandals, the Marcomanni lay waste, drag off, and plunder. How many matrons, how many virgins of God, and free and noble bodies, have been a sport to these beasts! Bishops taken captive, presbyters slain and clerics of various offices, churches overthrown, horses stabled at the altars of Christ, the relics of martyrs dug up: everywhere mourning, everywhere groaning, and the image of death on every side. The Roman world is falling, and yet our neck, held erect, is not bent. What spirit do you think the Corinthians now have, the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, the Arcadians, and all Greece, over whom the barbarians rule? And indeed I have named but a few cities, in which there were once no small kingdoms. The East seemed exempt from these evils, and was only dismayed by the reports: behold, last year, from the farthest cliffs of the Caucasus, there were let loose upon us not the wolves of Arabia, but of the north, who in a short time overran so many provinces. How many monasteries were taken, how many waters of rivers were changed by human blood! Antioch was besieged, and the rest of the cities past which flow the Halys, the Cydnus, the Orontes, and the Euphrates. Flocks of captives were dragged off; Arabia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt were captives in their fear. "Not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths, a voice of iron, could I run through all the names of the punishments." For I have not proposed to write a history, but briefly to weep our own miseries. Otherwise, to set forth these things worthily, even Thucydides and Sallust are mute.

Happy Nepotian, who does not see these things; happy, who does not hear them. Wretched we, who either suffer them, or, suffering, behold our brethren in such great sufferings; and yet we wish to live, and we think those who lack these things rather to be wept for than blessed. We feel God offended long since, and we do not appease him. By our sins the barbarians are strong, by our vices the Roman army is overcome; and, as if this were not enough for disasters, civil wars have consumed almost more than the enemy's sword. Wretched the Israelites, in comparison with whom Nebuchadnezzar is called the servant of God; unhappy we, who so displease God that through the fury of the barbarians his anger rages against us. Hezekiah did penance, and a hundred and eighty-five thousand of the Assyrians were destroyed by one angel in one night; Jehoshaphat sang praises in concert to the Lord, and the Lord conquered for him as he praised; Moses fought against Amalek not with the sword but with prayer. If we wish to be lifted up, let us be cast down. For shame, and the mind stupid even to unbelief! The Roman army, conqueror and lord of the world, is conquered by these men, dreads these men, is terrified at the sight of these men, who cannot walk, who, if they touch the ground, think themselves dead; and we do not understand the words of the prophets: A thousand shall flee, one pursuing; nor do we cut off the causes of the disease, that the disease may likewise be taken away, and at once behold the arrows yielding to the javelins, the tiaras to the helmets, the nags to the war-horses.

We have exceeded the measure of consoling, and, while we forbid the mourning of one man's death, we have lamented the dead of the whole world. Xerxes, that most powerful king, who overturned mountains and bridged seas, when from a lofty place he had beheld an infinite multitude of men and an innumerable army, is said to have wept, because after a hundred years none of those whom he then beheld would survive. O if we could climb to such a watchtower, from which we might behold the whole earth beneath our feet! Then I would show you the ruins of the whole world, nations dashed against nations and kingdoms against kingdoms; some tortured, some slain, some overwhelmed by the waves, some dragged into slavery; here a wedding, there a wailing; some being born, others dying; some flowing with riches, others begging; and not the army of Xerxes only, but the men of the whole world, who now live, soon to be gone in a brief space. Speech is overcome by the magnitude of the matter, and all that we say is too little.

Let us return, then, to ourselves, and, as it were descending from heaven, let us for a little while look upon our own affairs. Do you perceive, I beg you, when you became an infant, when a boy, when a youth, when of robust age, when an old man? Daily we die, daily we are changed, and yet we believe ourselves to be eternal. This very thing that I dictate, that is written, that I read over, that I correct, is drawn from my life. As many as are the points of the scribe's pen, so many are the losses of my days. We write and write back, the letters cross the seas, and, as the keel cleaves its trusting furrows through every wave, the moments of our age are diminished. We have only this gain, that we are joined to one another by the love of Christ. Charity is patient, is kind; charity does not envy, does not act perversely, is not puffed up, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things; charity never fails. This always lives in the breast; through this our Nepotian, absent, is present, and embraces with both hands those divided by such great spaces of earth. We have a pledge of mutual love. Let us be joined in spirit, bound in affection, and let us imitate in his son the fortitude of mind which the blessed pope Chromatius showed at the death of his brother. Let our little page sing of him, let all our letters sound of him. Whom we cannot hold in body, let us hold in remembrance, and of him with whom we cannot speak, let us never cease to speak.