Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 10 part 10/17

When he, moved by the reason of the truth, before he was commanded by those imperial laws, had crossed over to Catholic peace with a manifest will, he was seized from his own house by your clergy and Circumcellions, led openly in broad daylight to the nearest fortress, and, while a multitude looked on and no one dared to resist, beaten with clubs at the pleasure of the raging mob, rolled in a muddy pool, dishonoured with a rush covering; and after he had sufficiently tortured the eyes of the grieving and glutted the eyes of the laughing, he was led thence to another place, to which none of ours dared to approach, and scarcely on the twelfth day was he let go. Of this I myself complained to Proculianus, your bishop of Hippo, by the municipal records indeed, lest, if it were necessary to take any action,

— he should deny that this had been brought to his notice. What he answered, how he dissembled from inquiring into the case, and how he thought afterward, by not answering, that our purpose was to be more craftily eluded, those same records sufficiently bear witness. But now, as for the clergy who have crossed over to us from you, how many things they suffer from your people — when shall we be sufficient to tell it? Finally, it is not only that whoever come to us from thence abandon the truth under persecution; but many do not come to us from thence, precisely because they fear to endure persecution from your people for the truth.

Take away, therefore, from our midst the superfluous grievances about the troubles which you suffer for your error at the imperial command — troubles most slight and well-nigh nothing compared with the great fury of your people — while you impute even to us those things which are done by the earthly powers themselves, out of necessity and not of will, in order to drive back the assaults of your people from their own safety. For not even if those forty men who had conspired to kill the Apostle Paul had rushed upon the armed men by whom he was being conducted, and had suffered the penalties, would these things have been to be imputed to Paul. I pass over the fact that you transfer even the voluntary deaths, which they inflict upon themselves, onto us by lying. For concerning Marculus I have heard that he threw himself down.

— which is surely more credible than that any Roman power could have commanded this, a thing far too unusual for Roman laws, since this evil, among so many heresies that err under the Christian name, is peculiar to your heresy. Hence what does it profit that your bishops boast of having in their councils forbidden and condemned this, as you yourself have mentioned, when so many crags and precipices of rocks are daily made deadly by that Marculian schooling? I have said, therefore, what I have heard concerning Marculus, and whence it may seem the more credible; but what is the truth, God knows. As for the other three, whose deaths you have likewise cast up, what or how it was done, I confess that I have not inquired of those whom I think know it.

Yet to no good men in the Catholic Church does it please that anyone, even a heretic, should be raged against unto death. Nor indeed, if far short of anyone's death, out of a lust for vengeance one should requite evil for evil by inflicting troubles, do we approve it — detesting it far more if, on the occasion as it were of striving for unity, anyone should carry off another's coveted goods, not those which under the name of the Church ought not to be possessed by heretics, but whatever is private property. All these things displease good men, and they forbid and restrain them as much as they can; but as much as they cannot, they bear them, and, as I have said, for the sake of peace praiseworthily tolerate them,

— judging these things not praiseworthy but damnable; and neither on account of the tares do they forsake the crop of Christ, nor on account of the chaff the threshing-floor of Christ, nor on account of the vessels unto dishonour the great house of Christ, nor on account of the bad fishes the nets of Christ. Kings, when they are in error, make laws for that very error against the truth; when they are in the truth, they likewise decree against error for the truth itself: thus by evil laws the good are proved, and by good laws the evil are amended. King Nebuchadnezzar, when perverse, gave a savage law that an idol should be adored; the same man, when corrected, gave a stern law that the true God should not be blasphemed.

For in this the kings, as is divinely enjoined upon them, serve God in so far as they are kings, if in their kingdom they command good things and forbid evil — not only those that pertain to human society, but also those that pertain to divine religion. In vain you say: 'Let me be left to free will.' For why do you not proclaim that in murders and in defilements and in whatever other crimes and outrages you ought to be dismissed to your free will? Yet all these things it is most useful and most wholesome to restrain by just laws. God indeed gave man a free will, but He willed neither that a good will should be unfruitful, nor that an evil one should be unpunished. 'Whoever,' you say, 'persecutes a Christian is an enemy of Christ.'

You speak truly — provided that what he persecutes in the other is not something hostile to Christ. For a master over his servant, a father over his son, a husband over his wife, when both are Christians, ought indeed to persecute vices that are contrary to Christian truth. Or rather, if they were not to persecute them, would they not deservedly be held guilty of negligence? Yet in all things a measure must be kept, one suited to humanity and befitting charity, so that neither is the whole of one's power exercised, nor, in what is exercised, is love lost, while in what is not exercised, gentleness is shown. But where no power is granted by either divine or human laws, let nothing be attempted wickedly or imprudently.

Now hear concerning the Maximianists what a little earlier I had postponed, so that you may recognize that your own bishops have lied to you, and that not only in what pertains to the question of baptism, or to the toleration in the Church of the sins of others without one's own contamination, but also in what pertains to the odium of persecution — in which indeed your party outdid against us all the laws and protections of Rome — in this one case of the Maximianists you may see the matter settled.

For if you did not shrink from reading that memorable verdict of the Council of Bagai, of your three hundred and ten bishops — the verdict from which I inserted above what seemed sufficient — since those words most plainly show that the twelve were condemned together with Maximian, by whose hands, being present, he was ordained, and that a delay of returning to your communion was granted to those who, though they had been in Maximian's communion and had condemned Primian, nevertheless, when Maximian was ordained,

were not present — for indeed not all could or ought to have been present — I greatly marvel how you allowed yourself to be deceived by I know not what liar, since you were able to read out to him those very words which are not obscure, and which demand not a keen wit to sift them but only a mind to attend to them, lest by him you should be deceived. But since it may be that you did not read it, and out of a simple disposition readily believed a bishop, or bishops, insinuating something else to you, receive it, read it, and mark how truly the matter is told to you by me.

For they cannot, in order to cover their lie, amend it — nay, falsify it — as they please, seeing that they alleged it in a public trial before the proconsul, and so many times took care that it be entered into the municipal records for the need of their cause, when they were acting against those men in order that they might be driven from the basilicas. Thus assuredly does that verdict begin: 'When by the will of Almighty God and of His Christ we were holding a council in the church of Bagai — Gamalius, Primianus, Pontius, Secundianus, Ianuarianus, Saturninus, Felix, Pegasius, Rufinus, Fortunius, Crispinus, Florentius, Optatus, Donatus, Donatianus, and the rest, three hundred and ten in number — it pleased the Holy Spirit who is in us to establish a lasting peace, to cut away the sacrilegious schisms.'

Then, when it had spewed out many horrible things against them, a little later it says: 'It hurled the thunderbolt of its sentence out of the bosom of peace against Maximian, the rival of the faith, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of Mother Church, the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram.' You see, I think, that Maximian was condemned without any doubt. Then, after a few things — but plainly of the gravest sort — which it pleased them to declaim against him, adding his ordainers and condemning them along with him without delay: 'And not this man alone,' it says, 'does a just death condemn for his own crime; the chain of sacrilege also drags many others into partnership in the offence.' Then, when it had also poured out what it thought worth declaiming to magnify their crime, it named them and thus concluded them condemned:

'Therefore,' it says, 'know that these men, guilty of an infamous crime — Victorianus of Carcabia, Marcianus of Sullectum, Beianus of Beiana, Salvius of Ausafa, Theodorus of Usula, Donatus of Sabrata, Miggen of Elefantaria, Praetextatus of Assuras, Salvius of Membressa, Valerius of Melzi, Felicianus of Musti, and Martialis of Pertusa, who by the deadly work of perdition cemented together a filthy vessel out of gathered dregs — and also certain clerics of the church of Carthage, who, while they took part in the crime, offered pandering to unlawful incest — have been condemned, by the judgment of God presiding, through the truthful mouth of the universal council.' What can be said more plainly, more manifestly, more expressly?

Hear now to whom a delay of time was granted, that you may see they are those who were not present when hands were laid on Maximian at his ordination. 'But those,' it says, 'whom the sacrilegious shoots did not defile as saplings — that is, those who out of the reverent modesty of the faith drew back their own hands from Maximian's head — we have permitted to return to Mother Church.' You see how they do not say that these were condemned, but that they are then to be held under the same sentence of condemnation if, when the appointed day has passed, they refuse to return; and they appoint the day thus: 'And lest the pressure of a narrowed span,' it says, 'take away from those returning the hope of salvation,'

'to all those to whom it is permitted, the previous decrees remaining in force, we open, up to the eighth day before the Kalends of the coming January, the door of acknowledgment, so that, having returned, they may have the foundations of unimpaired honour and faith. But if anyone, by sluggish idleness, shall have been unable to enter it, let him know that the way to all avenues of pardon has been withdrawn from him by his own will. For the aforesaid sentence shall remain upon them, and for those returning after the appointed day the penance is fixed.' Surely by now you perceive, most eloquent man, that you ought rather to turn back upon those from whom you heard the lie all that you thought should be said against us, as if we had lied about this matter.

Surely you perceive that those two men of whom we are speaking are of the number of those who, together with Maximian, being twelve, were condemned without delay — not of those to whom time for returning was granted. Surely it is clear, it is plain, it stands out; it can in no way be obscured, darkened, or covered over — the very thing which he by whom that sentence was pronounced distinguished, illustrated, and expressed with such eloquence. Why are words still being bandied? Why is a contest being waged against the most lucid truth on behalf of a manifest error? Why do men deceive themselves? If they entangle and enfold themselves more tightly in the snares of the devil, which they ought to loose and break, then receive further grounds on which — more vehemently, and would that with some fruit of correction — they may blush.

In the aforementioned Council of Bagai the day and consul were recorded, not only of when the council's decree was drawn up, but also of the delay itself. Therefore, from the eighth day before the Kalends of May, after the third consulship of Theodosius Augustus and that of Abundantius — which is the day of the Council of Bagai — up to the eighth day before the Kalends of January — which is the day of the delay — nearly eight months are counted. But there is found a petition before Herodes the proconsul — see how long afterward — concerning Felicianus and Praetextatus, who were to be excluded from the places of Musti and Assuras, of which I have appended a few words: 'After the consulship of our lords Arcadius, for the third time, and Honorius, for the second time, Augusti, on the sixth day before the Nones of March, at Carthage in the secretarium of the praetorium, Titianus said:'

'Peregrinus the presbyter and the elders of the church of Musti and of the region of Assuras present the following desire: When Donatus, a man of venerable memory, was asserting the holiness of the Catholic Church against the error of perfidy, into his name and worship the devotion of nearly the whole world was nourished and grew together. But when the poisons of a certain Maximian were defiling the praiseworthy and admirable purpose of his religion, a gathering of many bishops, assembled into one with God working in concert, condemned the man — or rather the pestilence, which displeased the majesty on high — even by the very restraint of a pure mind.'

'Those too whom the error of another's presumption had drawn to it, it restrained with an admonition of equal vigour, a harbour of penitence being first set forth, if they should wish to return within the appointed time to the path of religion. But iniquity delights in its own devices and does not desert itself, once it has fallen headlong. For that same Maximian nourishes the boldness he had begun and associates others with himself unto madness. Among these was also a certain Felicianus, who, having at first followed the right course, is darkened by the pollution of this depravation, and, established in the city of Musti, thought that the walls consecrated to Almighty God and the venerable church must be held as it were by a kind of siege. Him too Praetextatus imitates in the region of Assuras.'

'But when the fellowship of the priests became known to your equitable power, you commanded, as the records testify, that — every effect of contradiction being exploded — the churches must be vindicated from profane minds and restored to the most sacred priests.' You see indeed that, up to the day of this petition, from that day of the appointed delay, a space of nearly three months had elapsed. But this conflict is drawn out, as far as we have been able to trace from the proconsular and municipal records, right up

to Theodorus the proconsul — that is, up to the eleventh day before the Kalends of January of the following year — on which day the clerics and elders, acting under bishop Rogatus, who had been substituted into the place of the condemned Praetextatus of Assuras, alleged the aforesaid proconsul's order. At that time they were outside your communion and were being arraigned in public courts as enemies of that same communion of yours, and were being demanded, as sacrilegious men, to be expelled from places consecrated to the most high God. From whatever number, therefore, they may have been — although it is quite apparent from which — those who within the appointed day of delay did not restore themselves to your communion, how, throughout all that time, being estranged from you, could they baptize? How, together with those

whom they baptized outside your communion, how did they return without being purified by another baptism? In which fact we do not reproach you, that you acknowledged the baptism of Christ to be in no way sacrilegious even in a sacrilegious schism; that, the perversity of men being corrected, you approved that which had been right even in perverse men; that you did not confound human vices with divine seals; that the gifts of the Church — which even outside the Church could be had and given, to the punishment of those having and receiving them — you judged neither to be condemned in the condemned nor to be changed in those received.

Nor do we reproach this, that those very same men, guilty of an infamous crime — even after the sentence of their condemnation and after the day of delay appointed for others — you nevertheless believed, on account of the weak peoples who clung to them (mindful, I suppose, of the householder's solicitude, lest the wheat be uprooted together with the tares), were to be gathered in without any degradation and purified by the very abundance of charity. Nor do we reproach this, that, while they were still held by the infamous sacrilege of schism, you persecuted them even through earthly powers.

For this was done — as the very outcome of the matter showed — out of a zeal for correcting, not for harming, so that, harassed by those troubles, they might be forced to reflect on their crime and, their furies of animosity being repressed, to amend it. But since we do not reproach these things, therefore we rightly blame the crime of your schism, deservedly detest it, and by every reasoning convict it — you who separate yourselves from us, nay, from the Catholic communion of the whole world, by casting at us such charges as, in the case of the Maximianists, you cannot, I think, deny that you yourselves have done.

For if the baptism of Christ it is, and therefore in no way to be destroyed, which was given through Felicianus and Praetextatus when, separated from you, they were joined to Maximian, condemned along with him by us for the crime of a wicked schism — how is it not the baptism of Christ, or how is it to be destroyed, which is given in the Church that stretches out her branches, to use Cyprian's words, over the whole earth with the plenty of her richness; which is given, finally, in those churches which you have never ceased to recite in the apostolic letters, which you have never in any council condemned as you condemned Felicianus and Praetextatus?

If it pleased you to restore the condemned to their full standing for the sake of repairing the party of Donatus, what has the unity of Christ, diffused throughout the whole world, done to offend you — a unity which either could not condemn men unheard, or at any rate neither condemned nor absolved men unknown, or believed to be innocent those whom it learned to be absolved? If, by pursuing with the judges' orders the Maximianists cut off from you, you drove them from their seats, why do you complain that you suffer unworthy things through the emperors who send those same judges — you who by a wicked schism have torn yourselves away from that Church of which it is written that 'all the kings of the earth shall adore Him, all nations shall serve Him,' and that 'He shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth'? Behold, now I do not say:

'If it is not lawful to make persecution, then Optatus made it' — lest you should still say that whatever Optatus did without their knowledge does not pertain to your party, since they themselves do not permit it to be said that the lands most remote from Africa (do not pertain to themselves for whatever Caecilianus did without their knowledge). Who the betrayers in Africa were, what evil the African bishops did, we do not know; but plainly I say: if it is not lawful to make persecution, your party made it against the Maximianists so that you cannot deny it. If those who suffer persecution are innocent, the Maximianists suffered it. Will you even now be going to say: the people, with no one of ours as author, destroyed the basilica or cave of Maximian?

And yet, if it be inquired of what communion that mob was — supposing they are not believed to have been sent by your people — they themselves will perhaps be found to be yours, or at any rate mingled with yours in giving aid. But what is that to us? For you answer: 'we did not do it, we did not send them in, who those men were we do not know.' Yet that he suffered persecution — the man whom you confess to be unjust — from whomsoever, since the thing is clear, the things you yourselves suffer cannot prove you to be just. But by whom the Maximianists too suffered persecution, the proconsular records testify.

Advocates were instructed, courts were approached and stirred up as against heretics; while they were demanding protection for themselves as possessors, your people alleged the Council of Bagai and clamoured that the condemned be driven from the sacred seats; pressure was applied, the case was pleaded, and when, in the presence of Salvius of Membressa, you showed them to be heretics, you prevailed and expelled them. That they, therefore, suffered persecution, and that you inflicted it, I see; you will maintain that the just are you; I conclude: therefore he who suffers it is not consequently just, nor is he who inflicts it consequently unjust. You will again accuse the dialectical arts:

but you will at least, though silent, approve that I speak the truth, and you will choose rather to correct your own maxim — by which you said that no persecution is just — than to call the persecutors of the Maximianists unjust, whom at last, by the proconsular records, you have acknowledged to be your own. Not without fruit, indeed, did you persecute the error of your schismatics; for you corrected Felicianus and Praetextatus by that very conflict and by those troubles. And Optatus of Gildo indeed, threatening graver destructions, the people of Musti and Assuras — as I also heard from them in person — are said to have feared, and to have compelled their bishops to return to the communion of Primian.

But since Optatus exacted this by no public records, why should I deal in such matters against you, who are ready to deny whatever you shall have been able to deny? There exist proconsular and municipal acts, by the reciting of which we have shown with how great a force the aforesaid men were pressed by your people to yield up the places. We do not blame it, we do not begrudge it: you did not labour in vain, you did not terrify to no purpose, you did not act ineffectually. Their own animosity displeased them when afflicted; they were broken, they were amended, they were corrected and received back after their own condemnation, after the delay granted to others, after your persecution.

And they were received back just as they had been in honour, with no humiliation of graver penance either purified or degraded — neither they themselves nor those with whom they were received, whom they had separated with themselves against you, whom they had baptized outside you, whom they had perhaps rebaptized after you. You now have no source from which to instil murky lies into men ignorant of things long past. That your people accused Caecilianus before Constantine, then emperor, the public monuments proclaim.

That the case was pleaded and brought to its due conclusion, right up to the acquittal of Felix of Aptunga, the ordainer of Caecilianus — whom in the Council of Carthage they called 'the fount of all evils,' and whom before that same Constantine, as he himself indicates in his writings, they accused with persistent appeals — the proconsular archives testify. You resist, protest, and fight back against the most manifest truth; you even say that the overseas judges were corrupted by Caecilianus, and that the emperor himself was perverted by some favour or other; for the vanquished accuser is the more shameless, the more he becomes also a slanderer of the judge.

Nevertheless, among all those lies of yours, by which you slander the overseas judges, we obtain at least this: that your first forebears brought this case before the emperor, that they first accused Caecilianus and his ordainer before the emperor, that they first persecuted Caecilianus and his associates before the emperor. Whence you stir up, as it seems to you, most grievous odium against us, because, being vanquished, you suffer what you, as victors, would certainly have done — just as if some wished to accuse Daniel, who, when he was set free innocent, were themselves consumed by those very lions by whom they had wished him, through slander, to be consumed.

We obtain also this: whatever you may hold, whether you truly think it or feign it, concerning the judges by whom Caecilianus was acquitted, being present, in the overseas trial; whatever concerning the very one before whom your forebears accused Caecilianus, whose judgment finally they chose to be preferred to the episcopal judgment — namely the emperor Constantine, as though corrupted by favour — nevertheless all who then existed, whether in neighbouring or in remote lands, Catholic Christians so far and wide diffused, to whom the report about Caecilianus and his colleagues could reach, ought not to have believed the vanquished accusers, but the ecclesiastical judges.

For where we cannot all be judges, we better believe those who were able to be so than that, by believing the vanquished litigants — of whom we could not be judges — we should dare to judge concerning the judges themselves. Accordingly, since those men, upon whose accusation Caecilianus, being present, was acquitted, attempted with most audacious wickedness to besmear with Caecilianus's crimes — whether fabricated or at any rate not proven — not only those by whom he was acquitted, but also all Catholic Christians established among whatever nations, who either were utterly ignorant of that dissension of the Africans, or in it, as it seemed good to them,

chose to believe those pronouncing at their own risk rather than the vanquished accusers — since these attempted also to deny that they are Christians at all; the cause of the Maximianists was at length sent to you, in which they themselves might condemn, they themselves might persecute the condemned, they themselves might receive back the persecuted in the same honour, they themselves might accept the baptism of the condemned; so that those who dared to accuse the innocent might be forced to absolve the guilty — not those whom they had believed to be innocent, but those whom, as they say, by the truthful judgment of God presiding they had condemned with the mouth of their plenary council. Who ever said to anyone:

'Because you believed the judge who absolved rather than me who accused, you are guilty together with those very ones whom I accused'? And yet this is said to the Christian world — which, if it were said to a single man, would seem, I do not say most iniquitous, but most insane. O thing marvellously unworthy! Africans accused Africans of the crime of betrayal; the overseas judges absolved the accused; and the peoples of the nations were made betrayers, because they believed the absolving judges rather than the accusing calumniators. Deservedly, party of Donatus, has the cause of the Maximianists been served up to you: drink the cup from the hand of the Lord who chastises and admonishes. If you understand and acquiesce, this is the mercy of one amending, lest you fall into the judgment of one punishing. To you it is said:

Proud and stiff-necked one, be reconciled to the Christian peoples everywhere, whom you have unjustly accused — you who are already reconciled at least to your own condemned. Why do you rescind the baptism of Christ in those, or from those, churches which the apostles founded? You have already accepted the baptism which your own condemned gave before they were reconciled to you. Why do you glory in the persecution you suffer? If it is a sign of righteousness, the party of Maximian is more righteous; for it has suffered both from you and suffers along with you. Hear the divine psalm: 'Be not like the horse and the mule, which have no understanding.'

For you call us your persecutors, whereas we, desiring you to be saved, are pursuing medicinally your wounds which we wish to heal — for which, while we are curing you, we are grievously afflicted by clerics and Circumcellions, as though by your teeth and heels. Be not ungrateful for such medicine as you yourselves have imitated; you too corrected Felicianus and Praetextatus by persecutions. And would that you would correct the whole, and that, as those returned to you, so both they and you might return to the Catholic Mother! Against her, brother Cresconius, you have been so puffed up with such boldness that you attempt to refute even those divine testimonies I have adduced, and to clamour against the voices of God.