His Excuses for Not Coming to Rome

First he says that he is replying to insinuations made at Rome against his orthodoxy, though he is a man most fully approved both in faith toward God and in love. He says he would have liked to come himself, except that he had lately returned to his parents after thirty years away, and it would have seemed harsh and unfeeling to leave them after taking so long to come back to them. Besides, he had grown somewhat less robust through his long and toilsome journey, and was too weak to begin his labors again. Since he could not come himself, he had sent his apology as a kind of literary club, which the bishop might hold in his hand to drive away the dogs that were raging against him. [a]

If he is a man approved by everyone for his faith in God and his love, and especially by the bishop to whom he writes, how is it that at Rome he is attacked and abused, and that the reports of attacks on his reputation keep growing thicker? And besides, what kind of humility is this, that a man speaks of himself as approved for his faith in God and his love? The apostles prayed, “Lord, increase our faith,” and received the answer, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed.” And even to Peter it is said, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” Why should I speak of love, which is greater than either faith or hope, and which Paul says he hopes for rather than assumes he has? Without it even the blood shed in martyrdom and the body given up to the flames have no reward to crown them. Yet our friend claims both of these as his own; in such a way, however, that there are still creatures who bark at him, and who will go on barking unless the illustrious pontiff drives them off with his stick.

But how absurd is this excuse he puts forward, that he had returned to his parents after thirty years! Why, he has neither father nor mother. He left them alive when he was a young man, and now that he is old he longs for them when they are dead. But perhaps by “parents” he means what soldiers and common people mean by the word, his kinsfolk and relatives. Well, he says he does not want to be thought so harsh and unfeeling as to desert them; and so he leaves his home and goes to live at Aquileia! That most approved faith of his is in great danger at Rome, and yet he lies on his back, a little tired after thirty years, and cannot make that very easy journey in a carriage along the Flaminian Way. He pleads his weariness after his long journey, as if he had done nothing but travel about for thirty years; or as if, after resting at Aquileia for two years, he were still worn out from the labor of his past travels.