Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 82/87

Men untrained in the liberal disciplines and altogether unpolished, as far as the learning of these philosophers is concerned, not skilled in grammar, not armed with dialectic, not inflated with rhetoric—fishermen—Christ sent, very few of them, with the nets of faith into the sea of this world, and so caught fish of every kind, and so many of them, and the more wonderful the rarer they were; he caught even the philosophers themselves. To those two incredible things, if you please—nay rather, because it ought to please—let us add this third. Now therefore there are three incredible things, which nevertheless have come to pass. It is incredible that Christ rose in the flesh and ascended into heaven with the flesh; it is incredible that the world believed a thing so incredible;

it is incredible that men so obscure, so lowly, so few, so unskilled, could persuade the world, and in it even the learned, of a thing so incredible so effectively. Of these three incredible things, the first these men with whom we are dealing refuse to believe; the second they are compelled even to behold—and they cannot find how it came to pass unless they believe the third. The resurrection of Christ, certainly, and his ascension into heaven with the flesh in which he rose, is now preached and believed throughout the whole world; if it is not credible, how is it that throughout the whole earth it has now been believed? If many noble, exalted, learned men said that they had seen it and took care to spread abroad what they had seen, it is no wonder that the world believed them—but that these men still refuse to believe is exceedingly hard;

if, however—as is the truth—the world believed few, obscure, very humble, unlearned men who said and wrote that they had seen it, why is it that the few most obstinate men who remain still do not believe even the world that now believes? The world believed a tiny number of ignoble, lowly, unskilled men, precisely because divinity persuaded the world of itself far more wondrously through such contemptible witnesses. For the words of those who persuaded, the things they spoke, were marvelous deeds, not mere words. For those who had not seen Christ risen in the flesh and ascended with it into heaven believed those who narrated that they had seen it—men not merely speaking, but also working marvelous signs.

For men whom they had known to have been of one tongue, or at most two, they wondrously heard suddenly speaking in the tongues of all nations;

a man lame from his mother's womb stood up whole at their word in the name of Christ after forty years; handkerchiefs taken from their bodies were of benefit for healing the sick; in the road by which they were to pass, countless people afflicted with various diseases were laid in a row, so that the shadow of those walking might pass over them, and they were wont at once to recover health; and many other astonishing things were done through them in the name of Christ; finally they even saw the dead raised again. If they grant that these things were done, as they are read, behold, we add so many incredible things to those three incredible ones; and that the one incredible thing—which is said concerning the resurrection of the flesh and the ascension into heaven—may be believed, we heap up so many testimonies of many incredible things, and yet by their dreadful hardness we cannot bend the unbelievers to belief.

But if they do not believe that these miracles too were done through the apostles of Christ, in order that they might be believed when they preached the resurrection and ascension of Christ, then this one great miracle suffices for us: that the whole world believed it without any miracles. CHAPTER VI. That Rome by loving made its founder Romulus a god, but the Church by believing loved Christ as God. Let us here also recall what Tullius marvels at concerning the believed divinity of Romulus. I will insert his words just as they are written. 'It is more to be wondered at in Romulus,' he says, 'that the others who are said to have been made gods out of men lived in less cultivated ages of mankind, so that there was a ready disposition for inventing,

since the unlearned were easily driven to belief; but we observe that the age of Romulus was less than six hundred years ago, when literature and learning were already long established, and all that ancient error arising from the uncultivated life of mankind had been done away with.' And a little later he speaks thus concerning the same Romulus, in words pertaining to this same point: 'From which it can be understood,' he says, 'that Homer lived many years before Romulus, so that, men and the times themselves being now learned and cultivated, there was scarcely any room left for inventing. For antiquity admitted fables, sometimes even clumsily fashioned;

but this age, now refined, especially as it derides everything that cannot happen, rejects them.' One of the number of the most learned men, and at the same time the most eloquent of all, Marcus Tullius Cicero, says for this reason that the divinity of Romulus was wondrously believed: because the times were already learned, such as would not admit the falsehood of fables. But who believed Romulus to be a god except Rome, and that when she was small and just beginning?

Then afterward it became necessary for posterity to preserve what they had received from their forefathers, so that the city, growing up with this superstition imbibed as it were with its mother's milk, might attain to so great an empire that from its summit, as from some loftier place, it might pour out upon other nations also, over which it ruled, this opinion of its own—so that they would not indeed believe, but would nevertheless call Romulus a god, lest they should offend, concerning its founder, the city they served, by naming him otherwise than Rome did, which had believed it not indeed out of love for this error, but yet through an error of love.

But Christ, although he is the founder of the heavenly and everlasting city, was not believed to be God because the city was founded by him; rather, the city is to be founded for this reason, that it has believed. Rome, when already built and dedicated, worshiped its founder as a god in a temple; but this Jerusalem laid its founder, Christ, who is God, in the foundation of faith, that it might be built and dedicated. The former believed its founder to be a god by loving him; the latter loved this one by believing him to be God. As therefore the former had a prior ground from which to love and, of one already loved, would gladly believe even a false good: so the latter had a prior ground from which to believe, that by right faith it might love not rashly what was false, but what was true.

For besides so many and so great miracles, which persuaded that Christ is God, divine prophecies also, most worthy of faith, went before—prophecies which in him are not, as by the fathers, still believed yet to be fulfilled, but are now shown to be fulfilled. Concerning Romulus, however, because he founded Rome and reigned in it, what was done is heard or read—not what was prophesied before it came to pass; but that he was received among the gods, the writings hold as believed, they do not teach as a fact. For by no signs of marvelous things is it shown that this truly happened to him. Indeed that wolf, his nurse—which seems to have appeared as something like a great portent—what or how great is it for demonstrating a god? For surely, even if that wolf was not a harlot but a beast,

since it was common to both, his brother nevertheless is not held to be a god. Moreover, who was forbidden to call either Romulus or Hercules or other such men gods, and chose to die rather than not call them so? Or would any of the nations have worshiped Romulus among their gods, had not fear of the Roman name compelled them? Who, on the other hand, could count how many men, with whatever savagery of cruelty, chose to be slain rather than deny that Christ is God? Accordingly, the fear of even the slightest indignation, which it was thought might arise in the minds of the Romans if it were not done, drove certain cities placed under Roman law to worship Romulus as a god;

but from worshiping Christ as God—nay, even from confessing him—the fear, not of slight offense, but of immense and varied punishments and of death itself, which is dreaded above all else, could not call back so great a multitude of martyrs throughout the peoples of the whole earth. Nor did the city of Christ, although it was still sojourning on earth and yet had multitudes of great peoples, fight against its impious persecutors for temporal welfare; but rather, that it might obtain the eternal, it did not fight back. They were bound, imprisoned, beaten, tortured, burned, torn to pieces, butchered—and they were multiplied. It was not theirs to fight for safety except by despising safety for the sake of the Savior.

I know that in Cicero's third book, unless I am mistaken, On the Republic, it is argued that no war is undertaken by the best state except either for good faith or for safety. But what he means by 'for safety,' or what kind of safety he wishes to be understood, he shows in another place: 'But from these penalties,' he says, 'which even the most foolish feel—poverty, exile, chains, scourgings—private men often escape by the swiftly offered means of death; but for states, death itself is a penalty, which seems to deliver individuals from penalty. For a state ought to be so constituted as to be eternal. And so there is no natural extinction of a commonwealth, as there is of a man, in whom death is not only necessary but often even to be desired. But when a state is removed, destroyed, extinguished,

it is in a certain manner similar—if we may compare small things with great—as if this whole world should perish and collapse.' Cicero said this for the reason that he holds, with the Platonists, that the world will not perish. It is established, therefore, that he wished war to be undertaken by a state for that safety by which it comes about that the state remains here, as he says, eternal—although individuals die and are born—just as the shade of the olive or laurel and other trees of this kind is perennial, despite the falling and springing up of individual leaves. For death, as he says, is the penalty not of individual men but of the whole state, which for the most part delivers individuals from penalty.

Hence it is rightly asked whether the Saguntines acted rightly when they chose that their whole city should perish rather than break the faith by which they were bound together with the Roman commonwealth itself; in which deed of theirs they are praised by all citizens of an earthly commonwealth. But how they could obey this argument, I do not see—where it is said that no war is to be undertaken except either for good faith or for safety, and it is not said what should rather be chosen if these two should so coincide in one and the same peril that the one cannot be kept without the loss of the other. For surely, if the Saguntines had chosen safety, their good faith would have had to be abandoned; if good faith was to be kept, safety would assuredly have to be lost, as in fact happened.

But the safety of the City of God is such that it can be held together with faith and through faith—or rather, can be acquired; but with faith lost, no one can come to it. This consideration, of a most steadfast and most patient heart, made so many and so great martyrs as Romulus, when he was believed to be a god, neither had nor could have had even a single one of the same kind. CHAPTER VII. That it was of divine power, not of human persuasion, that the world believed in Christ. But it is exceedingly ridiculous to make mention of the false divinity of Romulus when we are speaking of Christ. Yet since Romulus lived nearly six hundred years before Cicero, and that age is said to have been already so cultivated by learning that it rejected everything which cannot happen:

how much more, six hundred years afterward, in Cicero's own time, and especially later under Augustus and Tiberius—times surely more learned—would the human mind have been unable to bear the resurrection of Christ's flesh and the ascension into heaven, as a thing that cannot happen, and would have derided and rejected it from ears and hearts, had not the divinity of Truth itself, or the truth of Divinity, and the corroborating signs of miracles, shown that it could have happened and had indeed happened;

so that, amid so many and so great persecutions terrifying and gainsaying, the resurrection and immortality of the flesh—first going before in Christ, then to follow in the rest unto the new age—might be both most faithfully believed and fearlessly preached, and, destined to sprout throughout the earth more fruitfully, might be sown with the blood of martyrs. For the heralding prophecies of the prophets, going before, were read; the portents of miracles concurred; and a new truth, not contrary to reason, was persuasively commended to custom—until the earth, which was persecuting with fury, should follow with faith. CHAPTER VIII. On the miracles which were done that the world might believe in Christ, and which do not cease to be done now that the world believes.

'Why,' they say, 'do not those miracles, which you proclaim were done, happen now?' I could indeed say that they were necessary before the world believed, to the end that the world might believe. Whoever still seeks portents in order to believe is himself a great portent, who does not believe when the world believes. But they say this with the purpose that not even then should those miracles be believed to have been done. Whence then is it that Christ is everywhere sung with such great faith to have been taken up into heaven with the flesh? Whence, in learned times which reject everything that cannot happen, did the world, without any miracles, all too marvelously believe incredible things? Or will they perhaps say that they were credible and therefore were believed? Why then do they themselves not believe? Brief, then, is our argument:

Either other incredible things, which nevertheless were done and seen, produced belief in an incredible thing which was not seen; or else a thing so credible that it needed no miracles by which to be made persuasive convicts the excessive unbelief of these men. This I would say to refute the most vain. For we cannot deny that many miracles were done to attest that one great and salutary miracle, by which Christ ascended into heaven with the flesh in which he rose. In those same most truthful books all things are written down, both what was done, and on account of what it was done that it ought to be believed. These became known in order to produce faith; and through the faith which they produced they become known far more clearly. For they are read among the peoples, that they may be believed;

yet they would not be read among the peoples unless they were believed. For even now miracles are done in his name, whether through his sacraments or through the prayers or memorials of his saints; but they are not illuminated with the same brightness, so as to be noised abroad with such glory as those. For the canon of the sacred Scriptures, which had to be defined, causes those to be recited everywhere and to cling to the memory of all peoples; but these, wherever they happen, are scarcely known there even by the whole city itself or whatever place of dwellers. For for the most part, even there, very few know them while the rest are ignorant, especially if the city is large; and when they are narrated elsewhere and to others, no authority so great commends them

that they should be believed without difficulty or doubt, even though they are reported by faithful Christians to the faithful. The miracle which was done at Milan when we were there, when a blind man was given sight, was able to come to the knowledge of many, because it is a great city, and the emperor was then there, and the deed was witnessed by an immense crowd that had gathered to the bodies of the martyrs Protasius and Gervasius; which, although they lay hidden and were utterly unknown, were revealed through a dream to the bishop Ambrose and found; whereupon that blind man, his old darkness driven away, saw the day.

But at Carthage, who knows, except a very few indeed, of the cure which was wrought upon Innocentius, formerly an advocate of the vicarial prefecture, where we were present and beheld it with our own eyes? For when my brother Alypius and I came from across the sea—not yet clerics indeed, but already serving God—he had received us, being himself, with his whole household, most devout, and we were then dwelling with him. He was being treated by physicians for fistulas, which he had, numerous and intricate, in the lower and innermost part of his body. They had already operated on him and were treating the rest by the medicaments of their art. He had suffered in that operation both long and bitter pains.

But one among the many sinuses had escaped the physicians and so lay hidden that they did not touch it, though they ought to have opened it with the knife. In short, when all those which they were treating by opening had been healed, this one alone remained, on which labor was being spent in vain. He, holding these delays suspect and greatly dreading lest he be cut again (which another physician, his own household one, had foretold to him—whom they had not admitted even to look on, when he was first cut, to see how they did it, and whom, in anger, he had cast out of the house and scarcely taken back), burst out and said: 'Are you going to cut me again? Am I to come to the words of the man whom you would not have present?' They mocked the unskilled physician and soothed the man's fear with good words and promises.

Many more days passed, and all that was being done availed nothing. Yet the physicians persisted in their promise that they would close that sinus not with the knife, but with medicaments. They also brought in another physician, now far advanced in age and sufficiently praised in that art (for he was still living), Ammonius, who, having inspected the place, promised the same as they had, out of their own diligence and skill. Made confident by his authority, the patient mocked, with witty good humor, as though now whole, his own household physician, who had foretold that there would be another operation. Why say more? After this so many days were uselessly spent and passed, that, wearied and confounded, they confessed that he could in no way be healed except by the knife.

He was terrified, he grew pale, troubled with excessive fear; and when he had collected himself and was able to speak, he ordered them to depart and not to approach him any more; nor did anything else occur to him, worn out with weeping and now bound by that necessity, except to summon a certain Alexandrian, who was then held to be a marvelous surgeon, that he might do what, in his anger, he did not wish to be done by them. But after that man came and, like a craftsman, saw their labor in the scars, he, fulfilling the office of a good man, persuaded the patient that those rather who had labored on him so much—as he himself marveled in inspecting—should enjoy the completion of their cure, adding that in truth he could not be made whole unless he were cut;

that it was utterly abhorrent to his own character that, from men whose most skillful work, industry, and diligence he marveled at as he saw it in the patient's scars, he should snatch away the palm of so great a labor on account of the small part that remained. They were restored to his good will, and it was agreed that, with that same Alexandrian assisting, they themselves should open with the knife that sinus, which by the consent of all was now thought otherwise incurable. The matter was deferred to the following day. But when they had departed, from the excessive grief of the master there arose in that house so great a sorrow that it could scarcely be restrained by us, like the wailing of a funeral. Holy men visited him daily: Saturninus, then bishop of Uzalis, of blessed memory, and the presbyter Gelosus, and deacons of the church of Carthage;

among whom was also Aurelius—he who alone of those is now in human affairs already a bishop, to be named by us with the honor due to him—with whom, recalling the marvelous works of God, we have often conversed about this matter, and we find that he remembers very well what we relate. When they visited him in the evening, as they were wont, he begged them with pitiable tears that they would deign on the morrow to be present at his funeral rather than at his pain. For so great a fear had seized him from his earlier sufferings that he did not doubt he would die amid the hands of the physicians. They consoled him and exhorted him to trust in God and to bear his will manfully. Then we entered upon prayer;

where, as we according to custom were bending our knees and bowing to the earth, he flung himself down as though he had been violently thrown prostrate by someone, and began to pray: in what manner, with what feeling, with what emotion of soul, with what flood of tears, with what groans and sobs that shook all his members and almost cut off his breath—who could unfold in any words? Whether the others were praying and their attention was not turned to these things, I knew not. I, however, could not pray at all; only this briefly in my heart I said: 'Lord, whose prayers of your own do you hear, if you do not hear these?' For nothing seemed to me could now be added, except that he should expire in praying. We rose, and, having received the blessing from the bishop, we departed,

he begging that they would be present in the morning, they exhorting him to be of even mind. The dreaded day dawned; the servants of God were present, as they had promised they would be; the physicians came in; all things that the hour demanded were prepared; the dreadful instruments were brought forth, while all looked on astonished and in suspense. As those whose authority was greater raised up by their consolation the failing of his spirit, his limbs were arranged on the little couch to the surgeon's hands, the knots of the bandages were loosened, the place was bared, the physician looked and, armed and intent, sought out that sinus to be cut. He scrutinized it with his eyes and felt it over with his fingers, and tried it at last in every way: he found a most firm scar.

Now that joy and praise and giving of thanks to the merciful and almighty God, which was poured forth from the mouth of all amid tears of gladness, is not to be entrusted to my words: let it rather be imagined than spoken. In the same Carthage, Innocentia, a most devout woman, of the foremost of that very city, had a cancer in her breast—a thing, as the physicians say, curable by no medicaments. Either, then, the member where it arises is wont to be cut away and separated from the body, or, that the person may live somewhat longer, yet with death thereby to come however more tardily, according to the opinion of Hippocrates, as they report, all treatment is to be foregone. This she had received from a skilled physician, most intimate with her household, and she had turned to God alone in prayer.

She was admonished in a dream, as Easter drew near, that, watching in the women's section at the baptistery, whatever woman first newly baptized should meet her should sign for her the place with the sign of Christ. She did so, and immediately health followed. The physician indeed, who had told her to apply no treatment if she wished to live a little longer, when he had afterward inspected her and found her perfectly sound, whom by such inspection he had previously known to have that disease, asked her vehemently what she had applied as treatment, desiring, as far as may be understood, to know the medicament by which the verdict of Hippocrates might be overcome.

And when he had heard from her what had been done, with a voice as of one despising and with a countenance such that she feared lest he might utter some insulting word against Christ, he is said to have replied with religious courtesy: 'I thought,' he said, 'you were going to tell me something great.' And when she now shuddered, he soon added: 'What great thing did Christ do in healing a cancer, who raised a man four days dead?' When I had heard this and was vehemently indignant that, in that city and in that person not at all obscure, so vast a miracle should thus lie hidden, I thought she ought hence to be both admonished and almost rebuked.

When she had answered me that she had not kept silent about the matter, I inquired of those women whom she happened then to have with her as her closest friends, whether they had known of this beforehand. They replied that they had been entirely unaware of it. 'Behold,' I said, 'how it is that you do not keep silent, if not even these women, who are joined to you by such great intimacy, have heard of it.' And because I had questioned her only briefly, I arranged that, with those women listening and greatly marvelling and glorifying God, she should set forth the whole thing in order, just as it had been done. We know that there was a certain physician in the same city, afflicted with gout;

who, when he had given in his name for baptism, and on the day before he was to be baptized had in a dream been forbidden to be baptized that same year by black curly-haired boys whom he understood to be demons, and when he had not yielded to them but, though they trampled upon his feet so as to bring on the sharpest pain such as he had never experienced, had been all the more inflamed against them, and had not deferred being washed in the laver of regeneration as he had vowed, did in the very act of baptism lose not only the pain by which he was being tormented beyond his wont, but also the gout itself, and never again, though he lived long afterward, suffered pain in his feet—who knows of this? We, however, know it, and a very few of the brethren to whom the report could reach.

A certain former actor of Curubis was made whole when he was baptized, not only of paralysis but also of a deformed swelling of the genitals, and, freed from both afflictions, came up from the font of regeneration as though he had had no ill in his body at all. Who knows of this besides the people of Curubis and a very few others who could hear of it anywhere? When we had learned of it, we arranged—the holy bishop Aurelius so commanding—that he should even come to Carthage, although we had first heard it from such persons of whose good faith we could not doubt. There is among us a man of tribunician rank, Hesperius; he has an estate in the territory of Fussala (it is called Zubedi);

and when, by the affliction of his beasts and slaves, he had found that his house was suffering the noxious power of malignant spirits, he asked our presbyters, in my absence, that one of them should go thither, by whose prayers they might yield. One went, offered there the sacrifice of the Body of Christ, praying with all his might that that vexation might cease: by God's mercy it ceased forthwith. Now he had received from a friend of his some holy earth brought from Jerusalem, where Christ, having been buried, rose again on the third day, and he had hung it up in his bedchamber, lest he himself also should suffer any ill. But when his house had been cleansed of that infestation, he was pondering what should be done with that earth, which out of reverence he was unwilling to keep any longer in his bedchamber.

It happened by chance that I and my colleague at that time, Maximinus, bishop of the church of Sinitum, were in the neighbourhood; he asked us to come, and we came. And when he had related everything to us, he also requested this: that the earth should be buried somewhere and that a place of prayer should be made there, where Christians too might be able to gather to celebrate the things that are God's. We did not refuse; it was done. There was there a young peasant who was a paralytic. On hearing this, he asked his parents that they should without delay carry him to that holy place. When he had been brought there, he prayed, and immediately departed thence sound upon his own feet. The estate is called Victoriana; it is less than thirty miles from Hippo Regius. There is there a shrine of the Milanese martyrs Protasius and Gervasius.