Letter 14

The blessed apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians and instructing the untrained Church of Christ in sacred discipline, among his other commands set down this one too, saying: If any woman has an unbelieving husband, and he consents to dwell with her, let her not put away her husband. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified in the believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified in the brother. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy. If to anyone the bonds of discipline have hitherto seemed too loosely relaxed and the indulgence of the teacher headlong, let him consider the house of your father — a most distinguished and learned man indeed, but still walking in darkness — and he will understand that the Apostle's counsel has so far prevailed that the sweetness of the fruits has compensated for the bitterness of the root, and the shoots of the vine have sweated precious balsams. You are born of an unequal marriage; from you and my Toxotius Paula was begotten. Who would have believed that the granddaughter of the pontiff Albinus should be born from the promise of her mother, that, with the grandfather present and rejoicing, the little one, her tongue still stammering, should sing alleluia, and that the old man should cherish in his bosom a virgin of Christ? We have waited well and happily. A holy and faithful house sanctifies the one unbeliever. He is a candidate of the faith whom the throng of his believing children and grandchildren surrounds. I think that even Jove himself, had he had such a family, might have been able to believe in Christ. Let him spit upon and laugh at my letter, and cry out that I am either a fool or a madman; this her son-in-law too used to do before he believed. Christians are made, not born. The gilded Capitol grows filthy; soot and spiders' webs have covered all the temples of Rome; the city is moved from its foundations, and the overflowing people, before the half-ruined shrines, run to the tombs of the martyrs. If prudence does not wring out faith, let shame at least wring it out.

Let this be said, Laeta, most religious daughter in Christ, that you may not despair of your father's salvation, and may, with the same faith by which you deserved a daughter, receive your father too, and enjoy the blessedness of your whole house, knowing that promised by the Lord: The things that are impossible with men are possible with God. Conversion is never too late. The thief passed over from the cross to paradise; Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, after the wildness of both heart and body, and after living among the beasts in the desert, recovered the mind of a man. And, to pass over old things, lest among unbelievers they seem too fabulous, a few years ago, did not your kinsman Gracchus, whose name sounds of patrician nobility, while he governed the prefecture of the city, overturn, break, and shatter the cave of Mithras and all the monstrous images by which the raven, the bridegroom, the soldier, the lion, the Persian, the runner of the sun, and the father are initiated, and, having sent these forward as it were as hostages, obtain the baptism of Christ? Heathenism suffers solitude even in the city. The gods of the nations of old remain with the owls and the night-birds on the lonely roofs; the standards of the soldiers bear the emblems of the cross; the kings' purples and the burning gems of the diadems the painting of the saving gibbet adorns. Now even the Egyptian Serapis has become a Christian; Marnas of Gaza mourns shut up, and continually trembles at the overthrow of his temple. From India, Persia, and Ethiopia we daily receive throngs of monks; the Armenian has laid down his quiver, the Huns learn the psalter, the Scythians glow with the heat of faith; the ruddy and fair army of the Getae carries about the tents of churches, and perhaps for that reason fights against us on an equal line of battle, because they trust in a like religion.

I have almost slipped to another subject, and, while, the wheel running, I think to make a jug, my hand has fashioned an amphora. For my purpose was, invited by the prayers of the holy Marcella and your own, to direct my discourse to the mother — that is, to you — and to teach how you ought to instruct our little Paula, who was consecrated to Christ before she was born, whom you received by vows before you conceived her in the womb. We have seen something in our own times out of the prophetic books: Anna exchanged the barrenness of her womb for fruitfulness; you have exchanged a sorrowful fruitfulness for living children. I speak confidently that you will receive sons, you who have rendered your first offspring to the Lord. These are the firstborn that are offered under the law. So was Samuel born, so Samson came forth, so John the prophet leapt and played at the entrance of Mary. For he heard through the mouth of the virgin the words of the Lord thundering, and from his mother's womb was eager to burst forth to meet him. Therefore, let her who was born from the promise have an upbringing from her parents worthy of her birth. Samuel is nourished in the temple, John is prepared in the wilderness. The one is venerable for his sacred hair, drinks no wine or strong drink, while still a little one converses with God; the other flees the cities, is girded with a leathern belt, is fed on locusts and wild honey, and, as a type of penitence, preaches clothed in the spoils of the most winding of animals.

So must the soul be trained which is to be the temple of the Lord. Let it learn to hear nothing else, to speak nothing else, except what pertains to the fear of God. Let her not understand foul words, let her be ignorant of the songs of the world, let her tongue, while still tender, be steeped in sweet psalms. Far off be the wanton company of boys; let the very girls and attendants be kept from the society of worldlings, lest, what they have learned of evil, they teach worse. Let her be given letters of boxwood or ivory, and let them be called by their names. Let her play with them, so that her play too may be instruction; and let her not only keep the order of the letters, so that the memory of their names may pass into a song, but let the order itself be frequently disarranged among them, and the last be mixed with the middle, the middle with the first, that she may know them not only by their sound but by their sight. But when she begins to draw the pen over the wax with trembling hand, let either another's hand be placed over hers and the little fingers guided, or let the letters be carved into the tablet, so that her tracings, enclosed within the margins, may be drawn along the same furrows and may not be able to wander outside. Let her join syllables for a reward, and let her be enticed by such little gifts as that age can delight in. Let her have companions too in learning, whom she may envy, by whose praises she may be stung. She is not to be chided if she is rather slow, but her talent is to be excited by praises; let her rejoice when she has won, and grieve when she is beaten. Above all it must be guarded against that she should hate her studies, lest the bitterness of them, perceived in infancy, pass beyond the untaught years. The very names through which she will grow accustomed to weave words together should not be casual, but fixed and heaped up of set purpose — those of the prophets, namely, and the apostles, and let the whole series of the patriarchs from Adam descend from Matthew and Luke, so that, while she does another thing, she may be prepared for a future memory. A teacher of approved age and life and learning is to be chosen, nor, I think, does a learned man blush to do, for a kinswoman or a noble virgin, what Aristotle did for the son of Philip, that he himself, with the lowliness of the booksellers, should impart to her the beginnings of letters. Things are not to be despised as small, without which great things cannot stand. The very sound of the elements and the first instruction of the teacher come forth differently from a learned mouth than from a rustic one. Hence you too must take care that you do not, by the foolish blandishments of women, accustom your daughter to say words by halves, and to play in gold and purple, of which the one is harmful to the tongue, the other to the manners, lest she learn in her tender years what she must afterward unlearn. The eloquence of the Gracchi is written to have owed much to the speech of their mother from infancy; the oratory of Hortensius grew strong in his father's bosom. With difficulty is that uprooted which untrained minds have drunk in. Who could call back the purple of wools to its first whiteness? A new jar long retains both the taste and the odour with which it was first steeped. Greek history relates that Alexander, a most powerful king and the conqueror of the world, could not, in his manners and in his gait, be free of the vices with which, while still a little one, he had been infected by Leonides his tutor. For the imitation of evil is downhill, and you quickly imitate the vices of those whose virtue you cannot attain. Let the nurse herself be neither drunken, nor wanton, nor talkative; let her have a modest bearer, a grave foster-father. When the child sees her grandfather, let her leap onto his breast, hang from his neck, sing alleluia to him whether he will or no. Let her grandmother snatch her up, let her recognize her father with smiles, let her be lovable to all, and let the whole kindred rejoice in the rose born from itself. Let her learn at once what other grandmother, what aunt she has, for what Commander, for what army the little recruit is being reared. Let her long for them, let her threaten you that she will go off to them.

Let her very dress and clothing teach her to whom she has been promised. Take care that you do not pierce her ears, that you do not paint with white lead and rouge the face consecrated to Christ, that you do not weigh down her neck with pearls and gold, that you do not load her head with gems, that you do not redden her hair and foretell for her something of the fires of Gehenna. Let her have other pearls, by selling which afterward she may buy the most precious pearl. Praetextata, once a most noble woman, at the bidding of her husband Hymetius, who was the paternal uncle of the virgin Eustochium, changed her dress and adornment, and arranged her neglected hair into a waving headdress, desiring to overcome both the virgin's resolve and the mother's longing. And behold, that very night she sees in her sleep that an angel came to her, with terrible face threatening punishments and breaking forth into these words: "Have you dared to prefer your husband's command to Christ? To handle the head of God's virgin with sacrilegious hands? Those hands shall now this instant wither, that you may feel, tormented, what you have done, and at the end of the fifth month you shall be led to hell. But if you persist in your wickedness, you shall be bereaved at once of your husband and your children." All was fulfilled in order, and a swift death sealed the late penitence of the wretched woman. Thus does Christ avenge those who violate his temple, thus does he defend his gems and most precious ornaments. And I have related this not because I wish to insult the calamities of the unfortunate, but to warn you with how great fear and caution you ought to keep what you have promised to the Lord.

The priest Eli offended the Lord on account of the vices of his children; he cannot become a bishop who has had children luxurious and not subject. But on the contrary it is written of a woman that she shall be saved by the bearing of children, if she continue in faith and love and sanctification with modesty. If the perfect age, and one of legal responsibility, is imputed to the parents, how much more the suckling and frail child, who, according to the Lord's saying, does not know her right hand from her left — that is, knows not the difference between good and evil! You provide anxiously that your daughter may not be struck by a viper; why do you not provide with the same care that she may not be smitten by the hammer of the whole earth, that she may not drink from the golden cup of Babylon, that she may not go out with Dinah and wish to see the daughters of a strange land, that she may not play with her feet, that she may not drag her tunics? Poisons are not given except smeared round with honey, and vices do not deceive except under the appearance and shadow of virtues. And how, you will say, are the sins of the fathers not rendered to the children, nor those of the children to the parents, but the soul that sins shall itself die? This is said of those who can have understanding, of whom it is written in the Gospel: He is of age, let him speak for himself. But he who is a little one and has understanding as a little one, until he comes to the years of understanding and the letter of Pythagoras brings him to the fork in the road, his evils as well as his goods are imputed to his parents — unless perhaps you reckon that the children of Christians, if they have not received baptism, are themselves alone guilty of sin, and that the crime is not referred to those who refused to give it, especially at the time when those who were to receive it could not contradict; just as, on the other side, the salvation of children is the gain of their elders. Whether or not to offer your daughter was in your power — although your condition is different, who vowed her before you conceived her — but to neglect her, once offered, pertains to your peril. He who offers a lame and mutilated victim, or one stained with any defilement, is guilty of sacrilege; how much more shall he be punished who, having prepared a part of his own body and the purity of an undefiled soul for the royal embraces, has been negligent!

After she begins to be a little grown and to increase, after the example of her Bridegroom, in wisdom, in age, and in grace with God and men, let her go with her parents to the temple of the true Father, but let her not go out of the temple with them. Let them seek her on the road of the world, among the crowds and the throng of kinsfolk, and let them find her nowhere else but in the inner shrine of the Scriptures, inquiring of the prophets and apostles about the spiritual nuptials. Let her imitate Mary, whom Gabriel found alone in her chamber, and who therefore perhaps was terrified with fear, because she beheld a man whom she was not accustomed to see. Let her emulate her of whom it is said: All the glory of the king's daughter is from within; and let her too speak, wounded by the chosen dart of love: The king has brought me into his chamber. Let her never go out, lest those who go about the city find her, lest they strike and wound her, and, taking away the veil of her chastity, leave her naked in her blood; nay rather, when anyone knocks at her door, let her say: I am a wall, and my breasts are a tower. I have washed my feet; I cannot defile them.

Let her not eat in public — that is, at the banquet of her parents — nor let her see foods which she might desire. And although some think it of greater virtue to despise the pleasure that is present, yet I judge it the safer continence not to know what you might seek. As a boy I once read in the schools: You can hardly find fault with what you allow to become a habit. Let her learn even then not to drink wine, in which is luxury. Before the years of robust age, heavy abstinence is perilous for the tender. Up to that time, if necessity demands, let her even go to the baths, and use a little wine for her stomach, and be sustained by the eating of meat, lest the feet fail before they begin to run. And I say these things by way of indulgence, not of command, fearing weakness, not teaching luxury. Otherwise, what Jewish superstition does in part in the renouncing of certain animals and foods, what the Brahmans of the Indians and the gymnosophists of the Egyptians observe in the single food of barley-meal and rice and fruits, why should not a virgin of Christ do wholly? If glass is worth so much, why should not the pearl be of greater price? Let her who is born of the promise so live as those lived who were begotten of the promise. With equal grace let her have equal labour. Let her be deaf to musical instruments; let her not know why the flute, the lyre, and the cithara were made.

Let her render to you daily a fixed task of the Scriptures. Let her learn by heart a number of verses of the Greeks. Let Latin learning follow at once; if it has not from the beginning composed the tender mouth, the tongue is corrupted into a foreign sound, and the native speech is defiled by outlandish faults. Let her have you as her teacher, let her untaught infancy admire you. Let her see nothing in you or in her father which, if she did it, she would sin. Remember that you are the parents of a virgin, and that you can teach her better by examples than by word. Flowers quickly perish; a pestilent breath quickly corrupts the violets and lilies and saffron. Let her never go out into public without you; let her not go to the basilicas of the martyrs and the churches without her mother. Let no young man, no curled fellow smile upon her. Let our little maiden so celebrate the days of vigils and the solemn night-watches that she does not depart even a nail's breadth from her mother. I would not have her love any one of her maids more than the rest, into whose ears she might often whisper. Whatever she says to one, let all know it. Let her companion please her not as one trim and beautiful, who modulates a sweet song with clear throat, but grave, pale, plainly clad, somewhat sad. Let there be set over her a virgin of approved faith and manners and chastity, advanced in years, who may teach her and accustom her by example to rise at night for prayer and psalms, in the morning to sing hymns, at the third, sixth, and ninth hour to stand in the line of battle like a warrior of Christ, and, the little lamp kindled, to render the evening sacrifice. So let the day pass, so let the night find her at work. Let reading succeed prayer, and prayer reading. The time will seem short which is occupied with such varieties of works.

Let her learn also to make wool, to hold the distaff, to set the basket in her lap, to turn the spindle, to draw the threads with her thumb. Let her despise the webs of silkworms, the fleeces of the Seres, and gold drawing out into threads. Let her prepare such garments as drive off the cold, not such as, when the bodies are clothed, leave them naked. Let her food be a little herb and fine flour, and rarely small fishes. And, that I may not draw out the precepts of the appetite at length, on which I have spoken more fully in another place, let her so eat that she is always hungry, that immediately after food she can read, pray, sing psalms. Long and immoderate fasts displease me in the tender, and especially the youngest, ages, by which weeks are joined together, and oil in food and fruits are avoided. By experiment I have learned that the little ass, when it is tired on the road, seeks the byways. Let the worshippers of Isis and Cybele do this, who, with a gluttonous abstinence, devour Phasian birds and smoking turtle-doves, lest, forsooth, they pollute the gifts of Ceres. Let this be the precept in perpetual fasting, that unbroken strength may be supplied for a long journey, lest, running in the first stage, we collapse in the middle. For the rest, as I wrote before, in Lent the sails of continence are to be spread, and all the charioteer's reins are to be loosened for the hastening horses — although the condition of worldlings is one thing, that of virgins and monks another. The worldly man in Lent boils down the gluttony of his belly, and, living on his own juice after the manner of snails, prepares his paunch for future feasts and fattening; the virgin and the monk so let loose their horses in Lent that they remember they must always be running. A finished labour is greater, an unending one more moderate; for there we take breath, here we walk on perpetually.

If ever you go out to the suburbs, do not leave your daughter at home; let her not know how, nor be able, to live without you; when she is alone, let her tremble. Let her have no conversations with worldlings, no companionship with evil virgins, let her not be present at the weddings of the servants, nor be mingled with the games of a noisy household. I know that some have given a precept that a virgin of Christ should not bathe with eunuchs, nor with married women, because the one do not lay aside the minds of men, the other display foulness with their swelling wombs. To me bathing displeases altogether in a grown virgin, who ought to blush at her own self and not be able to see herself naked. For if by vigils and fastings she wears down her body and reduces it to servitude, if she desires to extinguish the flame of lust and the incentives of her fervent age by the cold of continence, if by sought-out squalor she hastens to disfigure her natural beauty, why, on the contrary, should she rouse with the warmth of the baths the fires that have been lulled?

In place of gems or silk, let her love the divine books, in which let her be pleased not by the variegated painting of gold and Babylonian skin, but by a corrected and learned punctuation according to the faith. Let her learn first the Psalter, let her divert herself with these songs, and in the Proverbs of Solomon let her be trained for life. In Ecclesiastes let her grow accustomed to trample upon the things of the world; in Job let her pursue the examples of virtue and patience. Let her pass to the Gospels, never thereafter to set them down from her hands; let her drink in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles with all the will of her heart. And when she has enriched the storehouse of her breast with these riches, let her commit to memory the Prophets and the Heptateuch and the books of Kings and Chronicles and the volumes of Ezra and Esther, that last of all she may learn without danger the Song of Songs, lest, if she read it at the outset, under the carnal words, not understanding the epithalamium of the spiritual nuptials, she be wounded. Let her beware of all apocrypha, and, if ever she should wish to read them, not for the truth of their doctrines but out of reverence for their signs, let her know that they are not of those by whose titles they are inscribed, that many faulty things are mixed in with them, and that it is a matter of great prudence to seek gold in mire. Let her always hold in hand the works of Cyprian; let her run with unstumbling foot through the letters of Athanasius and the books of Hilary. Let her delight in the treatises and the talents of those in whose books the piety of the faith does not waver; let her read the rest so as to judge rather than to follow.

You will answer: "How shall I, a woman of the world, in so great a throng of men at Rome, be able to keep all these things?" Do not, then, take up a burden which you cannot bear; but, after you have weaned her with Isaac and clothed her with Samuel, send her to her grandmother and her aunt. Render the most precious gem to the chamber of Mary, and lay it in the cradle of the wailing Jesus. Let her be nourished in a monastery, let her be among the choirs of virgins, let her not learn to swear, let her think lying sacrilege, let her be ignorant of the world, let her live angelically, let her be in the flesh without the flesh, let her think the whole race of men like herself; and, to be silent about the rest, let her at least free you from the difficulty of guarding and the peril of keeping watch. It is better for you to long for her when absent than to fear at every turn — with whom she speaks, what she says, to whom she nods, whom she gladly looks upon. Hand over the little one to Eustochium, whose very wailing is now a prayer for you, hand her over as a companion, as a future heir of her sanctity. Let her see her, let her love her, let her admire her from her earliest years, whose very speech and dress and gait is a teaching of the virtues. Let her be in the bosom of her grandmother, who may repeat in the granddaughter whatever she sent before in the daughter, who has learned by long use to nourish, to teach, to keep virgins, in whose crown the chastity of the hundredfold number is daily woven. Happy virgin, happy Paula daughter of Toxotius, who through the virtues of her grandmother and aunt is nobler in sanctity than in birth! O if it might fall to you to see your mother-in-law and your kinswoman, and to behold great spirits in little bodies! On account of the modesty implanted in you, I would not doubt that you would go before your daughter and exchange the first sentence of God for the second law of the Gospel. Would that you might count little the longing for other children, and offer yourself rather to God! But because there is a time of embracing and a time to be far from embraces, and the wife has not power over her own body, and let each one, in the calling in which he was called, in that abide with the Lord, and he who is under the yoke ought so to run that he does not leave his companion in the mire, render wholly in your offspring what for the present you have deferred in yourself. Anna, after she offered to the tabernacle the son she had vowed to God, never received him back, thinking it unseemly that a future prophet should grow up in the house of one who still desired to have other children. Finally, after she conceived and bore, she did not dare to approach the temple and appear empty before the Lord, unless she first rendered what she owed, and, such a sacrifice offered, returned home and begot for herself five children, because she had borne the firstborn to God. Do you marvel at the happiness of the holy woman? Imitate her faith. I myself, if you send me Paula, will, an old man, form her stammering words, far more glorious than the philosopher of the world — who instructed not a king of the Macedonians, doomed to perish by Babylonian poison, but a handmaid and bride of Christ, to be offered to the heavenly kingdoms.