St. Augustine
semper habet ad dominum, quoniam ipse evellet de laqueo pedes. Talis actio nec frigitur negotio nec frigida est otio nec turbulenta nec marcida est nec audax nec fugax nec praeceps nec iacens. Haec agite et deus pacis erit vobiscum.
4Nec importunum me existimet caritas vestra, quia vobiscum loqui vel per epistulam volui. Non enim hoc vos monui, quod vos non arbitror facere; sed credidi me non parum commendari deo a vobis, si ea quae munere illius facitis, cum adlocutionis nostrae memoria faciatis. Nam et ante iam fama et nunc fratres, qui venerunt a vobis, Eustasius et Andreas bonum Christi odorem de vestra sancta conversatione ad nos adtulerunt. Quorum Eustasius in eam requiem praecessit, quae nullis fluctibus sicut insula tunditur, nec Caprariam desiderat, quia nec cilicio iam quaerit indui.
Immanitatis vestrae famosissimum scelus et inopinata
Letters of St. Augustine
“whose eyes are ever upon the Lord, for He shall pluck their feet out of the net.”a Such behaviour is neither parched by business nor chilled by ease, neither boisterous nor enervated, neither reckless nor runaway, neither headstrong nor supine. “These things do, and the God of peace shall be with you.”b
Let your Charity not think me troublesome in4 wishing to have converse with you even by letter. I have given you these admonishments, not with the idea that you are failing to perform them, but in the belief that if what you do by His favour you do in remembrance of my exhortation, I have no slight commendation to God from you. For a good savour of Christ from your holy conduct had already reached me, first through rumour and now through the brethren, Eustasius and Andrew, who have come from you. Of these Eustasius has gone before us to that rest, which no waves beat upon as they do upon your island, nor does he long for Caprera, for in its hair-cloth he seeks no more his raiment.c
Earth quakes and the heavens shake at the most
- aPs. xxiv. 15.
- bPhil. iv. 9; 2 Cor. xiii. 11.
- cThe goat’s-hair garment, the chief article of manufacture on Capraria, “the goat-island.” It was a rough garment used by the poor, by penitents as a sign of grief, and by monks.
- dSufes, now Sbiba, is in Tunisia, near the Algerian border. It was a castellum under the early Empire, but became a colony about the time of Marcus Aurelius, as the name indicates (colonia Aurelia Sufetana). It had been a bishopric since at least a.d. 255, but Augustine’s language shows that the majority of its inhabitants were still pagan. In consequence, apparently, of the legislation of 399, by which Honorius ordered the closing of pagan temples and the destruction of idols (Cod. Theod. xvi. x. 16, 17, 18), the Sufetan statue of Hercules had been destroyed, and in retaliation the townspeople had massacred sixty Christians. The cult of Hercules at Sufes is attested by an inscription to that god found among the ruins (C.I.L. viii. no. 262). The martyred Christians are commemorated on August 30 (Martyrol. Rom. III. Kal. Sept.; Acta Sanctorum, Aug. vi. 553). The letter is unusually difficult and the style makes it doubtful that Augustine is actually the writer.