Letter 2

From: Salvian of Marseille, priest and writer To: Eucherius, Bishop of Lyon Date: ~450 AD Context: Salvian writes to Bishop Eucherius of Lyon [himself a former monk of Lerins, and a significant theological writer] on spiritual matters and the question of how Christians should understand the catastrophes afflicting the Roman world. To the most holy and blessed Lord Eucherius, bishop of Lyon, from Salvian, greetings. The theme that runs through all my thinking in these years — the collapse of the Roman world and what it means for those who believed that Rome and Christianity had been providentially united — is one that I know you have also been wrestling with, and I want to share where I have gotten to. My central conviction, which I develop in the work I am now writing [On the Governance of God]: God has not abandoned the world. What looks like the collapse of civilization, from one angle, looks from another like the judgment of God on a civilization that had become corrupt in ways it refused to see or admit. The barbarians who are overwhelming Roman power are not God's enemies; they are sometimes, in their own rough way, more faithful to the natural law than the Roman aristocracy that laughed at Christian moral demands while calling itself Christian. This is a hard argument and I know it will make enemies. But I believe it is true. And I believe the appropriate response to the catastrophe is not lamentation but repentance — genuine conversion of life, the kind the prophets called for when Israel was in analogous circumstances. I would value your response. Salvian