That the author is Saint Maximus of Turin, the same Vallarsius writes in the place cited above: with no one now denying it, although Saint Agobard, a writer of the ninth century, in his book Against Felix, chapter 20, transcribing a passage from it which we shall note in its proper place below, does not doubt that it is Jerome's. He says: 'The reader has, on this same matter, an opinion of blessed Jerome sufficiently full and clearly worked out, when he treated of that passage of divine Scripture where it is said: I will set,' and so on. Erasmus, on the contrary, says: 'This letter was indeed the work of an eloquent and learned man, and carefully elaborated; but it so differs from Jerome's manner of speech that neither could this man have imitated Jerome's diction had he wished, nor Jerome this man's.'
In most codices it bore no name; in certain ones the name of Ctesiphon was added. Nor in the letter itself is any mention made of him to whom it was written. The author, moreover, mentions Saint Ambrose and the finding of the bodies of Saints Gervasius and Protasius. But how unworthy this letter too is of Marianus, we have shown in the preface to the appendix. The variant readings of this letter, which we have appended, have been excerpted from codex 9, Plut. XIX of the Laurentian Library at Florence, page 337. CHAPTER I. — Behold, again I write to you, and I find nothing worthy that it should befit your prudence to read.
And is it any wonder if, in your absence, my talent grows cold like a heart deprived of the sun, and my mind, an exile from the light, grows numb, smothered by the cloud of folly, and I am the less wise the more widely I am parted from you? But if for the present anything in my discourse has pleased you, it will be granted to me by your prayers. Finally, that you may more diligently take note of all my folly: even my stomach, after the wax-plaster I had applied, I then tended in your absence — from you I deserve to suffer worse; upon it, after your holy ministry and angelic service, I laid the hands of physicians, as though there were no prophet in Israel, whereas, if I suffered anything, it ought to have been easier for me to return to you than to think in a pagan fashion;
and it were better to endure the toil of even the most difficult journey than to be cheated of so precious a sight as your countenance, so that any recompense whatever should rather follow than that I should betake myself to the fly of the religion of Ekron. These things this world suggested to me in your absence — the world which, when you are present, has no counsel in me. For you had made me a court of the prophets, not a conventicle of sirens. But now, entering into me for the destruction of the holy work against me, the whole senate of folly deals with me in a fourfold manner. For it exacts usury from one absent, which in your presence it did not presume to do, that you may understand that if I had any savour of God about you, it was yours that I so savoured. Thus in Moses' absence the people of Israel commit fornication (Exod. XXXII);
thus in the ship, while the Lord slept, the apostles are tossed by the tempest (Matt. VIII). Thus in the porticoes of Bethesda the man who has no one to put him into the healing pool is unknown (John V). Here too I mark another kind of fault. I tended the little body while the soul languished; I cherished the outer man while the inner was sick; I came to the aid of things human while things divine were in labour, bent as I was by the vice of common custom, whereby we are all cautious in the least matters and negligent in the greatest. And this happens because we do not know where the true life lies. This sun deceives us, of course, this day beguiles us, this span of time circumvents us. The world leads us astray, while we suppose that there is nothing greater than ourselves, and reckon that to be light which we see with our eyes;
and we judge that to be man which we behold, and believe that the world makes life, ignorant of where man is, and what man is, and what the life of that man is. But if we understood this, we should not have been begotten for one thing and live for another. Thus, having forsaken the source of life, we have lost also the reason for living. And first let us hear where that man is of whom we speak. CHAPTER II. — Since the very division has generated for us a certain disputation: whom you are to understand to be contained within this body, which was formed by the hand of the divine Craftsman from the mud of the earth, as it were within a vessel, the Apostle saying: We have this treasure in earthen vessels (2 Cor. IV); who, poured everywhere throughout this body, has borrowed from the flesh a vital feeling which does not fail him.
He himself rules, and is not ruled; he possesses rather than is possessed, so that he does not receive life but administers it. For when the liquid spirit gave life to that earthy and sluggish matter, taken up for the use of ministry, he becomes lord of the body, not a man beneath the bodily. In short, this vessel of which I spoke lives while he is present, and dies when he departs. This visible and perishable thing, then, is either the dwelling, or the minister, or the sheath of that inner man. But he himself, who is truly man — since he is the second, he is the place of the division that has been made — as he is himself invisible, so all his belongings must of necessity be invisible. To him, if he is sick, the hand of physicians cannot reach; if he fails, he is not restored by the juices of herbs.
Nothing bodily can enter into him; only the likeness of his own substance descends to him; he is cured by the word, he regains strength by obedience. In short, when in the church of Laodicea he seemed, according to the outer man, both blessed and rich, and well-eyed and well-clothed, he is rebuked by the Lord, and it is said to him: Do you not know that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked (Rev. III)? He who, as I have said, was reckoned neither without clothing, nor without eyes, nor without riches. But that invisible God of ours saw that invisible man to be in poverty, in blindness, in nakedness; and to him He deigns even to give counsel, that
he should buy from Him gold refined by fire, and a white garment with which he may be most gloriously clothed, and eye-salve by which he may recover sight. He has therefore his own eyes besides these carnal ones, which he can either lose or heal; and beside himself he is naked, so much so that he needs clothing: but in a wondrous manner the Lord speaks to the physician, as He himself says, and bids him procure riches from Him. With what wares, if he is both naked and poor, will he buy either that most noble garment or that gold now purged by fire? Whence can the outlay for such commerce come? Namely, if either he warms into life the emoluments of the outer man, or by not using the very things by which he outwardly seemed rich, he grows wealthy;
and let him blind the eyes of the body, by which he was carried away with desire for worldly things, through contempt of the corrupt universe. Thus that invisible man, who truly, as we have said, is man, is both exalted in the contempt of this outer man, and clothed with nakedness, and enlightened with blindness. So Jacob discerned, by a bodily blindness, not only the places but also the merits of Ephraim and Manasseh, his grandsons (Gen. XLVIII). For when his son Joseph, who was presenting the aforesaid little ones, judged that he could not see them before his feet, he perceived in the father's answer that he foresaw even the things that were to be. But just as that inner man makes this outer one live by his own life, and gives it life by irrigating it from the fount of his own nature:
so, on the other hand, the outer man, through the corruption of his own death-bearing matter, kills the inner man, if he has bound him with unlawful desires. And since each seems of a nature different from the other, each passes into the substance of the victor, so that either the spiritual man renders the carnal also spiritual by his own virtues, or the conquering flesh makes his soul carnal. Finally, when the Lord in wrath resolved to blot out the human race, He said: My Spirit shall not remain in men, because they are flesh (Gen. VI). And since indeed we are all clothed with flesh, and yet without doubt we who do not walk according to the flesh are not in the flesh, it comes about from this too that man is not always reckoned by this name of appellation.
For according to his virtues or vices he takes on both forms and names. Thus the prophet says: Do not become like the horse and the mule (Ps. XXXI). There are therefore men who in the Lord's sight are horses and mules. And the Lord says: Do not cast your pearls before swine (Matt. VII). There are therefore men who are also swine. And again the Lord Himself: Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves (Matt. X). There are therefore men who are also wolves; and on the contrary there are men who are also sheep. And the Lord still says to Peter: Feed my sheep (John XXI); and He said before: Come after me, and I will make you a fisher of men (Matt. IV). There are therefore men who are also fish. But these appear to be forms of actions, not of bodies.
For the condition of our body is fixed, as of all living creatures; but since before God we are judged not by the condition of our body but by the merits of our life, it appears that every man forms for himself, by his own mind, his condition and name. And this indeed is furnished either by the fault or by the virtue of that invisible man whom we are describing. For it is his very vice, if, being made subject, he suffers himself to be subject; if, contrary to the divine disposition, there is servitude in ruling, and lordship in servitude.
But lest I seem — since, having as it were pulled down a bit of the wall, I have arrived by discussion at that invisible man — to be destroying the body altogether, which is of so great a sacrament that in this very body, that is, in our frail and infirm one, the Lord came, I have not done this, nor am I doing it; but I have attempted to show that the life of this outer man consists in the life of that inner man; that again the death of the inner descends from the death of this one; that where poison has been administered through vices, this outer man has nothing of life; that unless he has been irrigated by the inner, he holds nothing; and that the one passes into the nature of the other, as I have said, either infected by vices or cleansed by virtue.
Therefore, since I have now shown, so far as is permitted, both where man is and what man is, let us see what the life of that man now is. For if that worldly life, which holds evils for goods and goods for evils, which the whole world follows and cultivates — this life is not in the affluence of riches, not in the height of power, not in the cunning of jurisdiction, not in the pomp of eloquence, not in strength glorious in battles, not in merchandise increasing by the exchange of provinces and by its own travels, not in the allurement of beauties, not in the canvassing for offices, not, in short, in all these things which we see; since all these things pass away, and even according to the world a blessed life is wont to be lived without them.
But that is the true life, the venerable life: to know God, to fear His power, to love His mercy, to marvel at the world in its Maker, to despise the tempter, to be content with modest fare according to nature's necessity, to be clad in cheap clothing whether for the sake of modesty or against the harshness of the season. Thus to touch the rest of creation not out of its abundance, nor for a vital reason, but for the support of this present light. For whatever is more than this is of evil:
to love every man as a brother, to injure no one, to serve all, to bear the form of a servant along with the Lord, who — besides the ministry which is contained within — daily serves us in the world by bringing forth the sun, sending out light, pouring down rains, varying the seasons, both begetting and ripening the crops. For He serves us in the face and abundance of all creation, since He generated all things for us. But, to return to man's duties: to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to give the thirsty drink, to visit the sick, to grieve with the sorrowful, to bury the dead, to keep nothing by him as his own, but to judge all his goods common with all, and then rather to live for himself
when he is deemed to live for others, and to lay up for himself when he is believed to give out along with others. And yet these things still touch upon the lineaments of the outer man. CHAPTER III. — But that life of the inner man consists in the knowledge of divine things: not by what part of the sky the earth is revolved, not by what contrary course the dry things are swept along, not whether in the Ocean the fullness of the sea begets increase, not whether the very roundness suspends the globe of the world, or binds it fast with four-formed projecting corners, not whether the world itself is one, or whether there are many. For these things do not tend to the soul's benefit, and before God are judged foolish; but in those sound thoughts, when at any time it dwells, then it lives and is nourished. But what are these sound thoughts?
Those, without doubt, when our mind remembers its Author; when it venerates and contemplates its Maker, as it were through a certain coming to itself; when it marvels at His works, about to see Him Himself in His works, as blessed Paul says: For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, being understood through the things that are made, are clearly seen, and His eternal power also and Godhead (Rom. I):
that is, when from the immense visible things of creation we are stretched out toward the universality of the invisible Creator, and while through these we learn Him to be inestimable, we do estimate Him; when, unrolling His height through the gift of the Holy Spirit (since He alone admits us into Himself, who is from Himself), we look upon all the beginnings of rising creation as though we were prior, cast forth from Him; and when we behold the things that God made as though He were still making them; and, running through the whole origin of the world, we become as it were more ancient than we are in age; and although the universe was made before we existed, yet we reckon the nature of all things as though begotten through us, while we are engrafted into the Author: into which we entered not that we might serve, but that we might rule:
separated therefore from worldly wisdom, which ascribes the universe either to chance or to atoms; uplifted by divine meditations, and separated by His own help from those who have said that matter always existed and would have God to be only the craftsman of things; or from those who have worshipped these very elements as gods; or from those who have introduced families of gods, by sexes, by ages, by regions, as it were like some populace subject to the senses — set apart by the Holy Spirit, and drawn up into higher things, living the true life, that is, being wise with true wisdom, of which this folly is destitute: let us remember that the world was made out of nothing by God, and that all living creatures came, called forth through God, the Word being craftsman, which were not from nature.
For to Him alone is it lawful to call the things that are not, as though they were; and man himself, for whom so great a possession was being prepared, He deigned to make in His own image — not some Prometheus out of a fable, but that Founder of the universe — with His own hand also, from the mud of the earth, lest any part of him be lacking in us: which thought, as I have said, is the life of the soul; since this is the first principle of living, that the soul should not be ignorant to whom it owes itself; lest, deceived, it venerate another besides Him; lest it adore the ministers of its life as though they were the authors of life; lest it marvel so greatly at the elements that it judge unworthy the things which are believed to be made, when He rather is to be admired who produced things so marvellous. O how august is this divine thought, and how full of life!
O how greatly it kindles man himself to every pursuit of uprightness! O how greatly it commends to him the majesty of his Author, when he considers that nothing else in all creation, besides himself, was formed by the hand of God; not the earth, not the sea, not heaven, not, in short, the stars so bright, so pure, so luminous; that man alone, formed of a certain mud, and of a heavier and baser element, was fashioned by that right hand whose palm measures out heaven by measure; whose fist encloses the spaces of the earth lying so boundless — of such worth was it that he once existed. Yet let us see how greatly, besides, the kindness of the Creator applauds him, in that He did not make him from the stars:
since, if he had been created from thence, he would have prevailed rather by the brightness of his material than by the graciousness of the Craftsman, seeing that he would himself seem lesser than the origin of his own body. If, made from heavenly things, he were led down to the tilling of the earth, to the lands — for whom it would soon be more glorious to be roused from the soil and set among the stars. His own, I say, our God willed to be His own in a special sense, this that we are, that we should owe nothing to matter, nothing to the elements, nothing to any principles whatever, whether great or small.
All which things if the mind reconsider, and, turned in upon itself, ponder, they become more moderate and narrower than our first beginnings. But when, formed by the touch of God's hand, we ceased to be what we were, and, submitting to a new quality of matter, our nature was made glorious for its Craftsman through the transformation of the element, and there began to be a new element of our body among the elements — if it is lawful so to say — at once we were made more sublime than all the bodies of the world, not by the substance of our nature, but by the power of the Founder, through which there arose, from that which lay beneath the other creatures, that which should command all creatures.
In short, if you look upon the metal of our flesh and body, you will find nothing humbler, nothing baser, nothing more subject to every injury and suffering. Earth alone seems the handmaid of the other elements; alone it feels within itself the powers of all, not without harm to itself, whether when it is scattered dusty by the winds, or when, moistened, it is swallowed up by the floods, or when, baked by the fires of the stars, it is devoured: so that man cannot only not boast that he is from it, but can even blush. But truly, if we contemplate our condition, since it is more excellent than the other living creatures — inasmuch as God brings it in, formed after His own image — you will find that very earth to be the seed of our body.
If there were any feeling in it, it could have rejoiced that, for our sake — in whom it received the image and likeness of the Creator — it was made happier by being transformed than it was by being brought forth. For the hand of God touched it, whose touch, for its own sake, while it was coming to pass, it did not deserve. For what is more illustrious than this condition? What could we know more sublime? What so carefully digested into limbs? What so gracefully bent through the joints? What so loftily raised up into face and eyes? What so vocally modulated into words? What so vivaciously animated in the heart? What richer in sense? What more secret in thought? What more copious in speech? What stronger in genius? What better furnished in disposition? What more tenacious in memory?
What more soothing in affection? What more sublime in thought? So that it may evidently appear that He adorned into this body that first-formed man, already then graced with all dignities — nay rather, the condition of His Son, our God, who was to come at the end of the ages for our redemption; to whom, at that time also, He gave paradise under the law of death, as it were a most delightful estate, both beautified with city-charms and planted with rustic growths: which that fore-sower begrudged him, and, by deceiving the credulous newness of the first men, secretly plunged his own poison into our bodies, and, out of two substances, cut apart the single and perfect nature of man by a certain discord of division:
so that, whereas we had one mind — that is, the one which the kinship of soul and body begot — it might, through the corrupted nature, bring forth another will against the soul. Finally, the Apostle also says: I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and taking me captive in the law of sin which is in my members (Rom. VII). And elsewhere: The flesh lusts against the spirit, but the spirit against the flesh. These are contrary to one another, so that you may not do whatever things you will (Gal. V). CHAPTER IV. — Hence also this our Founder, who had made both us for ourselves and the world for us, offended by those first men, poured out curses upon each one, according as the greatness of the crime required.
And although angered, He nonetheless soon revealed, like a loving father, the mystery of our salvation. Nor would it have been fitting to think of the remedy of our salvation at any other time than that in which death had been discovered. Thus by the more prudent a physician is applied to death at the very first onset, so that, the seat of the sickness being detected, the saving remedy may more easily come to the rescue. Not then only, therefore, was the Lord and our Saviour promised, when Isaiah cries out: Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and shall bear a son (Isa. VII), and then when it was said to Abraham: At this time I will come, and Sarah shall have a son (Gen. XVIII).
For this was now almost late, and so many thousands of patriarchs seemed to have died without hope, for whom there could indeed have been no life, if they had not hoped that the Lord was to come, the Apostle saying: For by hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope; but that which is hoped for (Rom. VIII). And what hope could there be, if it had not been promised beforehand? Nay rather, as for the first man that beast, wiser than all the beasts, savoured death, so it behoved that Lord, the true Wisdom, even then at that time to savour the vital succour, which He also did. Nor did He cease to make it public, lest so great a work of His, driven back by the single battering-ram of the enemy, should seem to have been begotten for a fall rather than for glory, without any protection:
and at the same time lest he should be reckoned stronger, who could have overwhelmed so great a work of another's power, than He, if He had either been unable to preserve, or unwilling to repair, His own work, which He had ineffably made above all creatures. He defended Himself, I say, against this reproach. He, our Founder and Redeemer, defended Himself, and showed alike that He both could and would: since neither was the strength of power lacking, nor the graciousness to His mercy. These things are the more to be adored by us, in that under the very tempest of our error He did not halt, but, when provoked, broke forth even greater; in that where we deserved punishment, the hope of redemption is shown, and, while in the bitter peril of shipwreck, the harbour of salvation is opened;
so that, in a new manner, that which had been the matter of wrath began to be the source of clemency. If, by a hidden working, He was making manifest that He willed our infirmity to be the proof of His own power, and would show how greatly He loved us, even while we sinned against Him, whom He could not forget even after our errors — nay rather, whom He would redeem more preciously than He had made. Let human cruelty now seek out for the guilty either private punishments or public prisons, and, wrathful, sigh with iron manacles and hard fetters upon the rigid beam, and let loose its ingenuity in devising punishments of many kinds; and let every judge prove the chastity of his own mind by the peril of another's uplifted head — the more a friend to atrocity, the more he is a stranger to crime.
For those very men are wont to be more truculent toward the accused who are the purer from guilt. These, more zealously pursuing evildoings, or the contagion of criminals, have the less and the more negligently avoided fellowship with wicked deeds. O wretched men, endowed with every blindness, who adorn good with evil, who exalt continence under the guise of cruelty, and commend their own cruelty by another's misery — when by their own virtues they lend support to the destruction of the wretched, and, in the innocence of the judge, applaud the torments of the guilty. CHAPTER V.
— But our God, against all hope, against almost all belief, out of the riches of His mercy finding good in evil, begetting and confirming pity in wrath, willed the seed of sinning to issue in the fruit of compassion; and He who ought to have destroyed us on account of our transgression, promised, on account of His own mercy, that He would restore us. And at that very time when we deserved punishments, He showed the proof of salvation: that we might be able to understand how much He would avail to bestow when not praised, who bestowed so much upon those who were angered.
In the first man, therefore, as He spoke, He at once promised us judicial help, at once brought forth good things out of the good treasure, at once made public the sacrament, unknown even to the angels themselves, which was to be fulfilled in the last time, and to the earthly Adam He promised an Adam from heaven. For when He struck the serpent with a curse for its deserving, He bids it have the earth for food, and creep upon its belly; and since it had itself wrought that death, He added, saying: And I will put enmities between you and the woman, and between your seed and the seed of the woman. She shall tread upon your head, and you shall watch for her heel (Gen. III). Do you not consider, do you not perceive, what He then threatened against the same one in Christ?
For no seed of the woman do I at all understand except that of which the Apostle says: Made of a woman, made of flesh (Gal. IV); that of which, as the Evangelist says (Luke III), Joseph was thought to be the father, but was not — that, indeed, which was the Word made flesh (John I). For if we consider that common and natural manner of begetting, women do not have seeds; finally, none conceives without a man, and through this, since even then in Adam the seed of human generation was corrupted by transgression, a heavenly seed is promised, as the Apostle holds, not from the corruption of a man, but from God:
which, when it became flesh in the woman, would also naturally fit to itself those elements of bodily substance — that is, of moisture and blood — in that very vessel in which those very elements are placed. The Mother, therefore, of our Lord Jesus Christ was promised even then in that woman. She was set in enmity against the serpent: I will put, He says, enmities between you and the woman (Gen. III); certainly He does not say I put, lest it should seem to pertain to Eve. It is a word of promise, which is transmitted into things future. I will put, He says, enmities between you and the woman: that woman, assuredly, who should bring forth the Saviour, not who should beget a fratricide.
'I will put enmities,' He says, 'between thee and the woman' (Gen. 3) — a woman who, having renounced all readiness to believe too easily, would not so much as hearken to thee, even shouldest thou display the sweetness of the apples as a means of opening the eyes, or promise that she should become like unto the gods; nay, even when Gabriel himself bore the word to her, she would demand a reason for the newness of the promise, saying: 'How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?' (Luke 1). She indeed, whom at the vision of the angel a golden modesty set trembling, was yet by the ardor of faith and by a constancy that knows no falling made bold to seek out the reason; and she who by her silence rendered to the one arriving the tribute of modesty, did not, out of wonder, withhold from the one making the promise her inquiry. For she was anxious, and searched out that which was being announced.