Since these things are so, bear with me a little, holy brother — for the Lord gives me through you great confidence — to address those very sons and brethren of ours, whom I know with how great love you travail, until the apostolic discipline be formed in them. O servants of God, soldiers of Christ, do you thus dissemble the snares of that most crafty enemy, who, in order to obscure your good name, so good an odour of Christ — lest good souls should say, 'After the odour of your ointments we will run,' and so escape his snares — desiring in every way to darken it with his own stenches, has everywhere scattered so many hypocrites under the habit of monks, going about the provinces, nowhere sent, nowhere fixed, nowhere standing, nowhere sitting?
Some peddle limbs of martyrs — if indeed of martyrs; others magnify their fringes and phylacteries; others lyingly claim that they have heard their parents or kinsmen to be living in this or that region and are going to them. And all beg, all demand either the costs of their lucrative beggary or the price of their feigned holiness, while meanwhile, in their evil deeds, wherever they be caught or in whatever way they become known, under the general name of monks your purpose is blasphemed — a purpose so good, so holy, which in the name of Christ we desire, as through other lands, so through all Africa, to spring up and multiply. Are you not, then, inflamed with the zeal of God?
Does not your heart grow warm within you, and in your meditation a fire blaze up, so that you may pursue the evil works of these men with good works, that you may cut off from them the occasion of that base trafficking by which your reputation is injured and a stumbling-block is set before the weak? Have pity, therefore, and be compassionate, and show men that you seek the kingdom of God not by an easy livelihood in idleness, but through the narrow and strait life of this purpose. You have the same cause that the Apostle had, to cut off the occasion from these men who seek occasion, so that those who are choked by their stenches may be refreshed in your good odour. We do not bind heavy burdens and lay them on your shoulders, which we are unwilling to touch with a finger.
Inquire and take knowledge of the labours of our occupations, and in some of us also the infirmities of our very bodies, and of the churches which we serve such an established custom, that they do not permit us to be at leisure for those works to which we exhort you. For although we can say: 'Who ever serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat of its fruit? Who feeds a flock and does not partake of the milk of the flock?'
yet the Lord Jesus, in whose name I say these things securely, I invoke as witness upon my soul, that, as far as pertains to my own advantage, I would much rather do some manual work at fixed hours each day, as much as has been appointed in well-regulated monasteries, and have the remaining hours free for reading and prayer or for some occupation with the divine letters, than to endure the most tumultuous perplexities of other men's causes concerning secular affairs, either to be settled by judging or cut short by intervening — with which vexations that same Apostle bound us, not indeed by his own judgment, but by the judgment of him who spoke through him, though we do not read that he himself endured them. For the courses of his apostolate were otherwise ordered.
Nor did he say: 'If, therefore, you have secular judgments, bring them to us, or appoint us to judge,' but 'those who are contemptible in the church, these,' he says, 'set to judge. I say it to your shame. Is it so that there is not among you any wise man, who is able to judge between his brother? But brother goes to law with brother, and this before unbelievers?' Therefore the faithful and holy wise men who dwelt fixed in their places, not those who ran about hither and thither for the sake of the Gospel, he wished to be the examiners of such affairs.
Whence it was never written of him that he was ever at leisure for such matters, from which we cannot excuse ourselves, even if we be contemptible, because he wished even these to be appointed, if wise men were lacking, rather than that the affairs of Christians should be carried into the forum. This labour, however, we undertake not without the consolation of the Lord, for the hope of eternal life, that we may bear fruit with endurance. For we are servants of his Church, and especially of its weaker members, whatever kind of members we ourselves may be in the same body. I pass over the other innumerable ecclesiastical cares, which perhaps no one believes except one who has experienced them.
We do not, therefore, bind heavy burdens and lay them on your shoulders, which we do not touch with a finger, seeing that, if with the safe reckoning of our office we could — he sees it, who tries our hearts — we would rather do these things which we exhort you to do, than those which we are compelled to do. Truly, for all of us — both for us who labour according to our rank and office, and for you — the way is strait, amid labour and hardship; and yet, for those who rejoice in hope, his yoke is easy and his burden light, who called us to rest, who first made the passage from the valley of weeping, where not even he himself was without pressures.
If you are our brethren, if you are our sons, if we are your fellow-servants, or rather your servants in Christ, hear what we admonish, acknowledge what we enjoin, receive what we dispense. But if we are Pharisees, binding heavy burdens and laying them on your shoulders, do what we say, even if you disapprove of what we do. But for us it is a very small thing that we should be judged by you, or by any human day. With how genuine a charity our care for you is, let him behold who gave us that which we may offer to be beheld by his eyes. Finally, think what you will of us: Paul the Apostle enjoins and beseeches you in the Lord, that with silence — that is, quietly and obediently ordered, working — you may eat your own bread.
nor, as I judge, do you believe anything evil about him, and in him who speaks through him you have believed. These things, my dearest brother, to be venerated in the bowels of Christ, Aurelius, I have not delayed to write concerning the work of monks, so far as He granted that I could, who through you commanded me to do it, being especially concerned that good brethren, obedient to the apostolic precepts, should not be called transgressors of the Gospel by the lazy and disobedient; so that those who do not work may at least not doubt that those who do work are to be preferred to themselves.
But who could bear that stubborn men, resisting the most wholesome admonitions of the Apostle, should not be tolerated as the weaker, but even be proclaimed as the holier — so that monasteries founded upon sounder doctrine are corrupted by a twofold enticement, both by the dissolute licence of idleness and by a false name of holiness? Let the rest of our brethren and sons therefore also know — those who have been accustomed to favour such men and, through ignorance, to defend a presumption of this kind — that they themselves above all must be corrected, so that those others may be able to be corrected, and not that they should be weakened in doing good.
Indeed, in this — that they promptly and cheerfully supply the servants of God with necessities — we not only do not reprove them, but even most sweetly embrace it; yet let them beware lest by a perverse mercy they harm the future life of those men more than they help their present one. For less is sinned if the sinner is not praised in the desires of his soul and he who has done wickedly is not blessed. But what is more wicked than to wish to be obeyed by inferiors and to be unwilling to obey superiors? I speak of the Apostle, not of ourselves — to such a degree that they even let their hair grow long; concerning which he refused to dispute at all, saying: 'But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.' And this I command:
namely, that it is not the cleverness of one who argues that is to be sought, but the authority of one who commands that is to be heeded. For to what, I ask, does even this pertain — to grow one's hair so openly against the precepts of the Apostle? Or must one be so idle that not even the barbers work? Or is it because they say they imitate the birds of the Gospel, and, as if fearing to be plucked, lest they be unable to fly? I am afraid to say more against this fault on account of certain long-haired brethren, of whom, apart from this, we venerate many things and almost all. But the more we love them in Christ, the more anxiously we admonish them. For we do not fear that their humility will reject our admonition, since we too desire to be admonished by such men, wherever perhaps we stagger or go astray.
This, then, we admonish such holy men: that they be not moved by the foolish argumentations of vain persons, and that they not imitate in this perversity those from whom in all else they are far unlike. For those men, carrying about a saleable hypocrisy, fear lest a shorn holiness be esteemed cheaper than a long-haired one — namely, so that whoever sees them may think of those ancients whom we read of, Samuel and the rest, who did not cut their hair. Nor do they consider what difference there is between that prophetic veil and this revelation of the Gospel, of which the Apostle says: 'When thou shalt have passed over to Christ, the veil shall be taken away.' For what the veil interposed between the face of Moses and the sight of the people of Israel signifies, this the hair of the saints also signified in those times.
For the same Apostle also says that hair stands for a veil, by whose authority these men are pressed. For he plainly says: 'If a man indeed have long hair, it is a shame to him.' 'That very shame,' they say, 'we take upon ourselves as the desert of our sins' — thereby stretching out a little canopy of feigned humility, so that under it they may set forth a saleable pride; as though the Apostle taught pride when he says: 'Every man praying or prophesying with his head veiled dishonoureth his head,' and: 'A man indeed ought not to veil his head, since he is the image and glory of God.' He, then, who says 'ought not,' does not perhaps know how to teach humility.
But if in the time of the Gospel — which in the time of prophecy was a sacred sign — these men seek this shame for the sake of humility, let them shave their heads and veil them with sackcloth. But then there will not be that saleable show, because Samson was veiled not by sackcloth but by his hair. Now, that other point — if it can be told, how lamentably ridiculous it is — which they have again invented for the defence of their long hair! 'The Apostle,' they say, 'forbade a man to have long hair; but those who have castrated themselves for the kingdom of heaven are no longer men.' O singular madness! Deservedly does he who says this, against the manifest proclamations of Holy Scripture, arm himself with the counsel of unspeakable impiety, and persevere in a crooked path, and attempt to bring in a pestilential doctrine.
For 'blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, and hath not stood in the way of sinners, and hath not sat in the seat of pestilence.' For if he would meditate in the law of God day and night, there he would find the very Apostle Paul, who, having certainly professed the highest chastity, says: 'I would that all men were even as myself,' and yet shows himself to be a man not only by so living but also by so speaking. For he says: 'When I was a little child, I spoke as a little child, I understood as a little child, I thought as a little child; but when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.' But why should I mention the Apostle, when concerning our very Lord and Saviour those who say these things know not what to think? For of whom else is it said:
'until we all meet in the unity of faith, and in the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ; that henceforth we be no more little children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, in the deception of men, in craftiness unto the machination of error.' By which deception these men deceive the unlearned, by which craft and machinations the enemies are themselves carried about, and, cohering to themselves in their own being carried about, they attempt in a certain way to whirl the minds of the weak, so that they equally know not where they are. For they have heard, or read, what is written:
'As many of you as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female' — and they do not understand that this was said with regard to the concupiscence of the carnal sex, because in the inner man, where we are renewed in the newness of our mind, there is no sex of this kind. Let them not therefore on that account deny themselves to be men, because in the masculine sex they do nothing. For married Christians also, who do this, are not Christians by virtue of this at all — namely, in that which they have in common with the other, non-Christians, and with the very cattle. For one thing is that which is either conceded to weakness or paid to mortal propagation;
but another is that which is sealed by a faithful profession for the attaining of an incorrupt and eternal life. That precept, then, which is given to men concerning not veiling the head, is indeed figured in the body, but is enacted in the mind, where is the image and glory of God. The very words indicate it. 'A man indeed,' he says, 'ought not to veil his head, since he is the image and glory of God.' But where this image is, he himself declares, when he says: 'Lie not one to another, stripping yourselves of the old man with his deeds, and putting on the new, who is renewed in the knowledge of God according to the image of him that created him.' Who could doubt that this renewal takes place in the mind? But even he who doubts, let him hear a plainer statement. For, admonishing the same thing, he thus says in another place:
'As the truth is in Jesus, that you put off, according to your former manner of life, the old man, who is corrupted according to the desires of deceit; but be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, who is created according to God.' What then? Have women not this renewal of mind, where the image of God is? Who could say this? But by the sex of their body they do not signify it; therefore they are commanded to be veiled. For by that very fact — that they are women — they signify that part which may be called concupiscential, over which the mind rules, being itself also subject to its God, when life is lived most rightly and most orderly. What, therefore, in one man is mind and concupiscence — the former rules, the latter is ruled;
the former dominates, the latter is subjected — this, in two persons, man and woman, is figured according to the sex of the body. Speaking of which sacred mystery, the Apostle says that the man ought not to be veiled, but the woman ought. For the mind is advanced to higher things all the more gloriously, the more diligently concupiscence is restrained from lower things, until the whole man — with even his now mortal and fragile body — shall in the last resurrection be clothed with incorruption and immortality, and death be swallowed up in victory. Wherefore let those who are unwilling to do right at least cease to teach the perverse. But there are others whom we rebuke with this discourse:
those, namely, who by this one fault of hair let down against the apostolic precept give offence and disturb the church — because, when some, unwilling to think anything evil of them, are compelled to twist the plain words of the Apostle into a perverse sense, while others prefer to defend the sound understanding of the Scriptures rather than to flatter any men whatsoever, there arise among the brethren, the weaker and the firmer, most bitter and most dangerous contentions.
which they perhaps, if they knew it, would without doubt also correct — they whose other things we admire and love. Those, therefore, we do not rebuke, but we ask and beseech them, by the divinity and humanity of Christ and by the charity of the Holy Spirit, that they no longer set this stumbling-block before the weak, for whom Christ died, and that they not aggravate the sorrow and torment of our heart, when we consider how much more easily the wicked can imitate this evil for the deceiving of men, when they see it in those whom, for other so great goods, we honour with the due offices of Christian love. But if, after this admonition — or rather our beseeching — they should think that they must persevere in it, we shall do nothing else but grieve and groan.
Let them know this — it is enough: if they are servants of God, they will have mercy; if they will not have mercy, I do not wish to say anything more grievous. All these things, therefore, in which I have perhaps been more talkative than both your occupations and mine would wish, if you approve, make known to our brethren and sons, on whose account you have deigned to lay this burden upon me; but if anything seems to be withdrawn or amended, let me know by the written replies of your Beatitude.