(2) At all events most of the brethren through their love and brotherly
affection for us spared not themselves nor abandoned one another, but
without regard to their own peril visited those who fell sick, diligently
looking after and ministering to them and cheerfully shared their fate
with them, being infected with the disease from them and willingly
involving themselves in their troubles. Not a few also, after nursing
others back to recovery, died themselves, taking death over from them and
thus fulfilling in very deed the common saying, which is taken always as
a note of mere good feeling; for in their departure they became their
expiatory substitutes.[151] At all events, the very pick of our brethren
lost their lives in this way, both priests and deacons and some highly
praised ones from among the laity, so that this manner of dying does not
seem far removed from martyrdom, being the outcome of much piety and
stalwart faith. So, too, taking up the bodies of the saints on their arms
and breasts, closing their eyes and shutting their mouths, bearing them
on their shoulders and laying them out for burial, clinging to them,
embracing them, washing them, decking them out, they not long after had
the same services rendered to them; for many of the survivors followed in
their train. But the Gentiles behaved quite differently: those who were
beginning to fall sick they thrust away, and their dearest they fled
from, or cast them half dead into the roads: unburied bodies they treated
as vile refuse;[152] for they tried to avoid the spreading and
communication of the fatal disease, difficult as it was to escape for all
their scheming.
To Hierax an Egyptian Bishop
(Eus., _H. E._ vii. 21)
(_Part of another Easter Letter_)
But what is there surprising in its being difficult for me to correspond
even by letter with those who are sojourning at a distance, seeing that
it has proved impossible to talk even with myself and to take counsel
with my own soul? At all events, with my own kith and kin, with the
brethren of my own house and life, citizens of the same Church, I have to
communicate by letters and to get them through seems impracticable. For
it were easier for one to pass, I say not across the frontier, but even
from East to West, than to visit one part of Alexandria from another. For
that vast, pathless desert which it took Israel two generations to
traverse is not so impassable and hard to cross as the central street of
the city, nor is the sea, which they had for a carriage-road when the
waters were parted asunder to make a passage through. And our still and
waveless harbours[153] have become an image of those in the passing of
which the Egyptians were overwhelmed; for they have often appeared like
the Red Sea from the blood which was in them. And the river which flows
past the city at one time appeared drier than the waterless desert and
more parched than that which Israel crossed over when they were so
thirsty that Moses cried out and drink flowed out of the steep rock from
Him that worketh wonders:[154] and at another time it was so full as to
overflow the whole neighbourhood, both roads and fields, and to threaten
a return of the flood which occurred in the days of Noah. But in either
case it runs polluted with blood and slaughter and drowned corpses, as
under Moses it happened to Pharaoh, when the river turned to blood and
stank.[155] And what other water could cleanse all this but the water
which itself cleanseth all things?[156] How could the mighty ocean which
man cannot cross, overspread and sweep away this horrid flood? or how
could the great river that goeth out of Eden wash off the stain, though
it were to divert the four heads into which it is divided into the single
head of the Gihon?[157] or when would the air, reeking everywhere with
the evil exhalation, become pure? For such mist from the ground and
breezes from the sea, airs from the rivers and vapours from the harbours
are given off that for dew we have the impure fluids of corpses rotting
in all their component elements. After all this do men wonder, are they
at a loss, whence come the continual pestilences, whence the dire
diseases, whence the divers ravages, whence the wholesale destruction of
life, why the largest city no longer contains in it its former multitude
of inhabitants, from infant children to the most advanced in years, whom
it used to nourish in other days to a green old age,[158] as the saying
went, whereas these from forty up to seventy years of age were so much
more numerous then that their number is not now reached even when all
from fourteen to eighty are enrolled and put together for the public
distribution of food,[159] and thus those whose looks show them to be
quite young have become as it were of equal age with those who have long
been advanced in years. And though they see the race of man on earth thus
dwindling ever and being exhausted, they do not tremble,[160] as its
total extinction proceeds and draws near.
(_From another Easter Letter_)
[This fragment is given in the _Sacra Parallela Rupefucald._, fol. 70 and
71, where it is ascribed to Dionysius's "Fourth Easter Letter." It is by
no means clear which Letter is meant, but the main thought (of the
cunning devices by which Love wins its way) is quaintly beautiful and
well worthy of our author]
Love leaps out in utmost eagerness to confer some benefit even on an
unwilling object: yea, often on one who shrinks in shame and tries to
shun kind treatment from dislike of being burdensome to another, and
would fain put up with his annoyances alone, in order not to cause
trouble and inconvenience to any. He that is full of Love craves leave to
suffer and endure: to be in evil case, he thinks, gives opportunity for
being helped, and he will do the greatest favour to another, not himself,
if through that other the evil, which is his own, is made to cease.[161]