LETTER II (A.D. 1126)
To the Monk Adam1
- If you remain yet in that spirit of charity which I either knew or believed to be with you formerly, you would certainly feel the condemnation with which charity must regard the scandal which you have given to the weak. For charity would not offend charity, nor scorn when it feels itself offended. For it cannot deny itself, nor be divided against itself. Its function is rather to draw together things divided; and it is far from dividing those that are joined. Now, if that remained in you, as I have said, it would not keep silent, it would not rest unconcerned, nor pretend indifference, but it would without doubt whisper, with groans and uneasiness at the bottom of your pious heart, that saying, Who is offended, and I burn not (2 Cor. xi. 29). If, then, it is kind, it loves peace, and rejoices in unity; it produces them, cements them, strengthens them, and wherever it reigns it makes the bond of peace. As, then, you are in opposition to that true
mother of peace and concord, on what ground, I ask you, do you presume that your sacrifice, whatever it may be, will be accepted by God, when without it even martyrdom profiteth nothing (1 Cor. xiii. 3)? Or, on what ground do you trust that you are not the enemy of charity when breaking unity, rending the bond of peace, you lacerate her bowels, treating with such cruelty their dear pledges, which you neither have borne nor do bear? You must lay down, then, the offering, whatever it may be, which you are preparing to lay on the altar, and hasten to go and reconcile yourself not with one of your brethren only, but with the entire body. The whole body of the fraternity, grievously wounded by your withdrawal, as by the stroke of a sword, utters its complaints against you and the few with you, saying: The sons of my mother have fought against me(Cant. i. 5). And rightly; for who is not with her, is against her. Can you think that a mother, as tender as charity, can hear without emotion the complaint, so just, of a community which is to her as a daughter? Therefore, joining her tears with ours, she says, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me (Isa. i. 2). Charity is God Himself. Christ is our peace, who hath made both one (Eph. ii. 14). Unity is the mystery even of the Holy Trinity. What place, then, in the kingdom of Christ and of God has he who is an enemy of charity, peace, and unity?
- My abbot, perhaps you will say, has obliged me to follow him—ought I then to have been disobedient? But you cannot have forgotten the conclusion to which we came one day after a long
discussion together upon that scandalous project which even then you were meditating. If you had remained in that conclusion, now it might have been not unfitly said of you, Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly (Ps. i. 1). But let it be so. Sons ought, no doubt, to obey a father; scholars a teacher. An abbot may lead his monks where he shall please, and teach them what he thinks proper; but this is only as long as he lives. Now that he is dead, whom you were bound to hear as a teacher and to follow as a guide, why are you still delaying to make amends for the grave scandal that you have occasioned? What hinders you now to give ear, I do not say to me when I recall you, but to our God, when He mercifully does so by the mouth of Jeremiah, Shall they fall and not arise? Shall he turn away and not return? (Jer. viii. 4.) Or has your abbot, when dying, forbidden you ever to rise again after your fall, or ever to speak of your return? Is it necessary for you to obey him even when dead—to obey him against charity and at the peril of your soul? You would allow, I suppose, that the bond between an abbot and his monks is by no means so strong or tenacious as that of married persons, whom God Himself and not man has bound with an inviolable sacrament—as the Saviour says: What God hath joined together let no man but asunder (S. Matt. xix. 6). But the Apostle asserts that when the husband is dead the wife is freed from the law of her husband (Rom. vii. 2), and do you consider yourself bound by the law of your dead abbot, and this against a law which is more binding still, that of charity?
- These things I say, yet I do not think that you ought to have yielded to him in this even when living, or that thus to have yielded ought to be called obedience. For it is of that kind of obedience that it is said in general: The Lord shall lead forth with the workers of iniquity those who deviate in their obedience (Ps. cxxv. 5, Vulg.). And that no one may contend that obedience to an abbot, even in things evil, is free from that penalty, there are words elsewhere still more precise: The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and the father shall not bear the iniquity of the son (Ezek. xviii. 20). From these, then, it appears clearly that those who command things evil are not to be obeyed, especially when in yielding to wrong commands, in which you appear to obey man, you show yourself plainly disobedient to God, who has forbidden everything that is evil. For it is altogether unreasonable to profess yourself obedient when you know that you are violating obedience due to the superior on account of the inferior, that is, to the Divine on account of the human. What then! God forbids what man orders; and shall I be deaf to the voice of God and listen to that of man? The Apostles did not understand the matter thus when they said, We must obey God rather than men (Acts v. 29). Does not the Lord in the Gospel blame the Pharisees: Ye transgress the commandment of God on account of your traditions (S. Matt. xv. 3). And by Isaiah: In vain they worship Me, he says, teaching the commands and doctrines of men (Is. xxix. 13). And also to our first father.2