Letters

⁴ We read that the wife of Phinehas the priest, on hearing that the ark of the Lord had been taken, was seized suddenly with the pains of travail and that she brought forth a son Ichabod and died a mother in the hands of the women who nursed her. Rachel's son is called Benjamin, that is 'son of excellence' or 'of the right hand'; but the son of the other, afterwards to be a distinguished priest of God, derives his name from the ark. The same thing has come to pass in our own day, for since Paulina fell asleep the Church has posthumously borne the monk Pammachius, a patrician by his parentage and marriage, rich in alms, and lofty in lowliness.

The apostle writes to the Corinthians, “You see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men, not many noble are called.” The conditions of the nascent church required this to be so that the grain of mustard seed might grow up little by little into a tree, and that the leaven of the gospel might gradually raise more and more the whole lump of the church. In our day Rome possesses what the world in days gone by knew not of. Then few of the wise or mighty or noble were Christians; now many wise powerful and noble are not Christians only but even monks.

And among them all my Pammachius is the wisest, the mightiest, and the noblest; great among the great, a leader among leaders, he is the commander in chief of all monks. He and others like him are the offspring which Paulina desired to have in her life time and which she has given us in her death. “Sing, O barren, you that did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you that did not travail with child”; for in a moment you have brought forth as many sons as there are poor men in Rome.