Fulgentius of Ruspe, Letters

He Himself by His predestination prepared, for those to whom He willed to give them, both the gift of illumination for believing, and the gift of perseverance for advancing and remaining, and the gift of glorification for reigning; and He accomplishes in deed nothing other than what He holds disposed in His everlasting and unchangeable will. If anyone refuses to receive with the belief of the heart, or to bring forth with the confession of the mouth, the truth of this predestination, by which the Apostle testifies that we were predestined in Christ before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4), then, if before the last day of the present life he has not cast off the obstinacy of his impiety, by which he stands in rebellion against the living and true God, it is manifest that he does not belong to the number of those whom God in Christ, before the foundation of the world, freely chose and predestined to the kingdom. Yet for such people neither ought the prayer of the faithful to cease, nor charity ever to grow sluggish, that God may give them the grace of His illumination, through which the seed of the divine word may bear fruit in them, the word which sounds in vain in the outward ears unless God by a spiritual gift opens the hearing of the inner man.

LETTER XVIII.

Fulgentius to Count Reginus, answering the first question he had put to him: Whether the flesh of Christ was corruptible or incorruptible. To the second, which he could not answer because death overtook him, Ferrandus answered in his letter to the same man on the seven Rules of innocence.

CHAPTER I. — On receiving your letter, dearest son Reginus, and recognizing the anxiety of your heart, I praised the Lord, Who is able to do both: to confer a good to be kept, and to keep what He has conferred. For both pertain to the healing of our souls, so that we may rejoice in the benefits which the ineffable kindness of our Physician does not cease to work for us who are sick, that by spiritual progress health may both be increased in us and sickness diminished. Now the measure of our sickness consists in a twofold quality: if either through ignorance we know something less in the faith, or we have something in our works which does not accord with the rule of truth. Since, therefore, the body which is corrupted weighs down the soul (Wis. 9:15), both kinds of sickness trouble us. But He Who made us, and commanded us to rejoice because He has overcome the world (John 16:33), will, we hope, perfect us in the faith which works through charity.

2. You say, then, that recently in the regions of the East a new inquiry has arisen, some asserting that the body of Christ was incorruptible from the very beginning of His conception, others professing the contrary, that it was corruptible before the passion but incorruptible after the resurrection. You, however, greatly hesitating between the two sides, and not knowing how to answer, urge me to advise what we ought to hold. These are the things you ask. Earlier, moreover, by the token of your thanks, you intimate that you were refreshed by my letter. Since, then, your question has kept to the path of an upright heart, by which it has taken up first what pertains to faith, then what pertains to works, because

the apostle commends the faith which works through charity, namely on the ground of that necessity, that faith without works is dead in itself (Jas. 2:17, 26).

CHAPTER II. — 3. I wish, then, dearest one, that you should know that corruption is spoken of not in one way but in two, just as we speak of sickness, and likewise of death. For the Lord, He says, calls death both the committing of crime and the death in which the requital of vengeance is no less understood. Sickness, too, is said of a man: both of him who renders service to sin and of him who bears the punishment of sin. Both belong to the sickness of the sinner: delight in sins and affliction for sins. So too we speak of corruption in a twofold way: one part of it is found in man's guilt alone, the other in punishment. To guilt belongs that part of corruption which the Apostle shows where he says: Men corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith (2 Tim. 3:8). To this part of corruption belongs what he says in another place: Evil conversations corrupt good morals (1 Cor. 15:33). This part of corruption first seizes the soul, and through the soul drags the flesh into sin. This part of corruption first invaded the mind of the angel who grew proud, and then the first man, and afterwards the whole human race.

4. The first part of corruption, then, which consists in the desire or the committing of sin, was followed by that part which stands in the requital of punishment, which holds in two ways the soul and the body of the sinful man. In this requital itself, too, there are some things in which the punishment of sin is at the same time sin itself; and there are others in which there is only the punishment of sin. In those, then, in which punishment and guilt are found together, by the very working by which guilt is punished in the sinner, it is increased, God forsaking and man transgressing. This is that part of corruption through which sins are so punished in man that they do not cease but grow: such is the lust of heart and body, which, though it comes about from the punishment of sin, multiplies sin, and takes captive by harmful delight the soul made subject to punishment. A third punishment too, requited upon this second, the Apostle speaks of: For which cause God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do the things that are not fitting (Rom. 1:28). Not only, then, that they may suffer, but that they may do things whereby sins are multiplied, they are delivered by divine condemnation to a reprobate sense. Yet this delivering up consists not in God's working but in His forsaking. For some God delivers up and does not let go; but others, in delivering them up, He lets go. The good He so delivers up with fatherly kindness that He does not forsake them of His fatherly help. And therefore He delivers them up to suffer evils by which they themselves are perfected, not to do things by which they become worse. But the wicked the Lord delivers up and lets go to this end, that, He forsaking them, while they follow not God's will but their own, they may take delight in their own baseness, and may not bear their punishment unwillingly, but follow it enticed.

CHAPTER III. — 5. This is the corruption of the wicked, which is so the punishment of sin that it is itself also sin. There is another part of corruption which neither defiles the soul nor the body of the faithful man, but afflicts it: because it serves not to defile the man, but to humble the sinner. Keeping hold, then, of this distinction, while we distinguish voluntary corruption from penal corruption, and find that of penal corruption itself one part is present in men with sin and the other without sin, and that such corruption of the heart is nothing other than the privation of health, since no iniquity is contracted from this corruption, though weakness is present in it: we very easily find which part of corruption Christ took up in His body. For although He took flesh for us, yet He received it immune from all sin, original and actual. Yet that same flesh He is known to have truly received not only weak but also mortal. Beyond doubt, in so far as the mortality He had taken up was in His body, so far could the weakness of corruption be in it; that is, of that corruption which is free from all sin.

6. To such corruption belong hunger and thirst. For the mortal body is easily corrupted by hungering and thirsting, since through these one comes even to the end of death itself. Through which death one comes to corruption, when, the soul departing, the body is corrupted so far as to be reduced to rottenness and dust. This corruption the flesh of Christ did not see, which rose again on the third day. Yet He truly felt hunger, thirst, weariness of body and pain: all of which belong to that part of penal corruption which we so draw as a penalty from the punishment of sin that from it we contract no punishment of sin. That Christ hungered, thirsted and felt weariness the Gospel teaches (Mark 11:13): it is manifest that He hungered when He came to the fig tree and found no fruit on it. Wearied too from the journey, He sat down by the well (John 4:6). On the cross also He said, I thirst (John 19:28). He also endured pain, as Isaiah says: He was wounded for our iniquities, He was made weak for our crimes (Isa. 53:5). That this weakness in the Lord was not apparent but real the Apostle teaches: For although He was crucified, he says, out of weakness, yet He lives by the power of God (2 Cor. 13:4). By weakness he means nothing other than corruptibility.

CHAPTER IV. — 7. It remains, then, that we learn through sacred Scripture both that Christ was in some corruption to which He did not return, and that He was not in that which He did not see. To the corruption of the animal body belong both death, which precedes rottenness, and rottenness, which follows death. Accordingly it must be said that the body of Christ, which truly died and was raised on the third day without any rottenness, saw one part of corruption and did not see the other. For He was in the corruption of death, but not in the corruption of rottenness, since the flesh of Christ so died that no rottenness or dissolution of the members followed. Christ therefore will not return to corruption, because, rising from the dead, He dies now no more, and death shall no longer have dominion over Him

(Rom. 6:9). Christ therefore did not see corruption, because His flesh felt no rottenness. This, however, was brought about not by any incorruptibility of that flesh but by the swiftness of the resurrection. In all these matters, in which with the apostle's words he shows the most certain character of our sowing and resurrection, Saint Augustine says: It is established, then, and in no way to be doubted, that the body of Christ, which, though it did not feel the corruption of rottenness in the tomb, because it is written, "Thou wilt not give Thy holy one to see corruption" (Ps. 15:10), yet could be corrupted by the nails and the lance, now abides wholly in incorruption; and that what was sown in the dishonour of passion and death is now in the glory of eternal life; and that what could be crucified out of weakness now reigns in power; and that what was an animal body, since it was taken from Adam, is now spiritual, since it is now inseparably joined to the spirit (Letter to Consentius, formerly 146, now 205).

8. With these words Augustine shows what the body of Christ is after the resurrection, and what it was before the passion. He plainly affirms that the body of Christ now abides wholly in incorruption, is now also in the glory of eternal life, now reigns in power, is now spiritual. But a body which can feel pain through wounds is not wholly incorruptible. Hence it is clear that Christ before the passion, indeed right up to the passion and death, had a mortal and animal body, and in that same body for our sake felt real hunger, real thirst and weariness, received real wounds of the nails and the lance; and from this felt real pain, not by necessity but by will, and by accepting a real death for us laid down His life by His own power. It follows that the same Christ, having died out of weakness but been raised by the power of God, is found to have given an example to our bodies. For Christ humbled Himself even to taking up the whole of our weakness, so that, as the Apostle says, the body of our lowliness may be reformed, made like to the body of His glory (Phil. 3:21).

9. From this, then, it appears most manifestly what every Christian ought to hold with firm belief about the character of the animal and mortal body: it is impossible that corruptibility should be denied where the mortality of an animal body is found. Christ therefore bore our corruption in His flesh alone, in which He truly bore our death as well. But in His soul He kept so perfect an incorruptibility that He neither drew sin by descent nor contracted it by contagion. Hence also the weaknesses of our souls which Christ bore in His rational soul He bore without any corruption. For there could be no failure of virtue where, in the taking up of weakness, the perfection of charity remained unwearied, which made the Only-begotten God go even to death for us, and, despising the shame, endure the reproach of the cross.

10. For this reason sadness, grief, or whatever weaknesses of our souls Christ had, He had them real indeed, but voluntary. Real, that is,

that He might show in Himself the evident affection of a rational soul; voluntary, that He might show the help of His power to be present to our weaknesses, so that we might recognize that, He aiding us, we are to be upheld in the weaknesses which we suffer by necessity. He took our weaknesses by His will for this reason: that He might both bring help in this life to those troubled by the necessity of weaknesses, and after this life mercifully take away from us all necessity of weakness. And so

every believer, recognizing Christ as sharer in human weakness, would most surely hope that he himself would be a sharer in divine power, and would not doubt that he was to be strengthened by the power of Him whom he had come to know as troubled for his sake not by necessity but by will; that he would have eternal joy in Him in whom he saw sorrow present by [His own] will; Who, as He remained tranquil in tribulation, secure in death, so [was] strongest in weakness and loftiest in humility.