Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 10 part 12/17

Why do you so rashly conclude from this that I confirmed 'you plausibly,' because I said 'we more plausibly'? And yet not even according to the grammarians would you reprove me for having erred in a word, if only you had been willing either attentively to read or from memory to recall the very authors of those words. For childish are the letters, yet not spoken by an unskilled boy: 'May the gods grant better things to the pious, and that error to their foes!' — 'they tore the limbs asunder with bared teeth.' How, then, 'better things' to the pious, as though those were good and not rather great evils — men who tore asunder the severed limbs with bared teeth? Now you surely see that, just as that poet could wish better things for the pious, although those things in comparison with which he wished were not good, so I too could say:

'We cast tradition at you more plausibly, although you cast it at us not plausibly.' But I will let that pass, since even 'probable,' when it is spoken, is not consequently true. For those things are called probable which can happen and are wont to happen, and therefore are approved — that is, are accepted and believed — even if they have not been done; but that which is true, when it is shown, is necessarily probable, and assuredly more probable than that. Recall the book where you learned the words: assuredly you will find that I do not deceive you. Wherefore even if I should grant that your side plausibly cast tradition at ours,

— I would not on that account contend that you had cast a true thing, and I would rightly say that we cast it more plausibly, since we are wont only to hear traditors named by you, but not recited or shown to have confessed by any records, whether ecclesiastical or public; whereas by us are brought forward both the public records, where your men handed over, and the ecclesiastical, where, having confessed, they were left to God the judge. But I do not pass over so manifest a help of yours, by which you, even unknowingly, greatly favor us in teaching the rules of the comparative degree — that it augments what was set before it, does not disprove what was previously said. For according to this rule of yours, according to certain of your own words in your letter, we have without any difficulty obtained our cause.

For you said, in the first part of your letter, as though incriminating our obstinacy, that so many legal documents cannot persuade us of that which is 'better and truer.' Here I conclude, according to your own technicalities, that we already hold the true and the good, if that which is 'truer and better' cannot be persuaded to us. Since, then, we do not rescind — to speak according to you — your 'truer and better' baptism, why do you rescind our 'true and good' one? Likewise, when you had said: 'This too we wish, that Christ be the origin and root and head of the Christian,' you immediately added: 'but we ask through whom this may better be done.' By saying which you certainly conceded that it is done well even through a bad minister, but better through a good one.

Since, therefore, we do not rescind the baptism which you say is given through your minister as through a good one, why do you rescind the baptism which you contend was given through ours as through a bad one? For you said: 'We ask through whom it may better be done,' and your rule is that 'this degree augments what was set before it.' Whence, if through your man, as you suppose, it is done better, then through ours it is done well; and by this, when you rebaptize one baptized by us, that which, by this rule of yours, you concede was done well, you rescind by sacrilegious presumption.

I fear lest I press too hard upon your modesty, if I should show how frivolously and buffoonishly you thought fit to harry, as though a witty and sharp-tongued fellow, certain words of mine too which I set down figuratively — 'brow' for shame, 'mouth' for speech, 'the three-pronged weapon' for a three-part discourse, 'the three-headed beast' for an error raging with three calumnies against the innocence of so many peoples. Rather keep childish things for children. For it does not move me that you say a 'weapon of Neptune,' on account of its trident, does not befit a bishop, since it is also a fisherman's, and thereby apostolic, because the Lord made his apostles fishers of men. For Scripture also says that our God has both wings and arrows, and yet we do not worship Cupid.

You even reproach me for not having kept the gentleness I promised at the outset, on the ground that, moved by the mention of the Manichees, I said: 'Just as Satan cannot, as the Lord declares, cast out Satan, so the error of the Manichees cannot overturn the error of the Donatists' — as though I had compared Petilian to Satan, and not rather his error, from whose snares I long to see him set free. It is well that the Apostle fortified us against such calumnies in that very passage where he admonishes us to be meek, patient, and modest when we rebuke someone who dissents. For when he had said, 'A servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but be gentle toward all, apt to teach, patient, in meekness correcting those who think differently,' he at once added:

'that God perhaps may grant them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth, and that they may recover themselves out of the snares of the devil, who are held captive by him according to his will.' Behold the gentleness of the Apostle! Those with whom he bids us deal calmly, patiently, and modestly, these same men he says are held captive by the devil; and yet he did not thereby lose the gentleness he was commending, because he refused to keep silent about the truth he was teaching. But do you see for yourself whose part you are playing, you who, by charging my words as though abusive and savage, strive to stir up to quarreling those men whom you are unwilling to bring together for debate — for I do not wish to say that you too take delight in quarreling. For sparingly indeed and rather bashfully, yet as if obliquely, you throw at me things that in no way concern me.

For what should I judge concerning the most pestilent vanity of the Manichees — a thing to be anathematized by all Christians — even if I were merely accustomed to say so and did not also testify against it in many and manifold books that I have written? Not even so would there be any room for your calumny against me. For the Catholic Church would not be astonished that I am falsely accused by you, when by you the whole Christian world, together with so many churches — even those first ones propagated by apostolic labor — is charged with false crimes. But since anyone who wishes may read the writings, so great in number, that I have composed against the Manichees, who once deceived me while I was a mere youth, no one is so foolish as to believe your words about me rather than his own eyes and senses.

But 'a letter of your chief,' you say, 'in which he wrote I know not what about you, when he was unwilling to have you ordained, is held by not a few of our people.' That letter I should care for not at all — not even if there were read out from him by whom it is said to have been written some plain opinion in our favor, condemning that calumny and falsehood. How much less does the Catholic Church care for it, whose cause we plead against you — the Church which, relying upon so many divine testimonies, has no human testimonies about any man, whether true or false, that could take away the truth in which she rejoices! Have done with such things: I am one man. It is the cause of the Church that is at issue between us, not my own — the cause, I say, of the Church, which has learned from her Redeemer to place her hope in no man.

And yet, concerning myself, even if you knew my manner of life, it would not be right that credence should be given to you, my enemies. For establishing men's estimation of me there is a great supply of witnesses who know me; but in the sight of God there is my conscience alone, which, though I bear it undaunted against your accusations, I nevertheless do not dare to justify myself under the eyes of the Almighty; and I look rather for an abundant bounty of mercy from Him than for the supreme scrutiny of judgment, mindful of what is written: 'When the righteous king shall sit upon the throne, who shall boast that he has a chaste heart, or who shall boast that he is clean from sin?' But what does it matter to the matter in question between us what sort of man I myself am, since on the Lord's threshing-floor I am chaff if bad, grain if good?

Yet you, if you were grains, would not flee from the chaff mixed in with you before the time of winnowing, as even Cyprian himself admonishes. Therefore we, if we have found among us some known wicked man, rightly cast him in your teeth; for there your whole defense stands, since you separated yourselves for this reason — that you might not perish by contagion from the sins of others. Whence you boast that you have made a new kind of threshing-floor, one that either has only wheat or in which only wheat appears, for which no winnower is needful, but a scrutinizer. For even your own Parmenian dared to interpose the saying of the prophet Jeremiah, comparing your splendid cleanness with our supposed uncleanness by way of contrast, where he says: 'What has the chaff to do with the wheat?'

What he said — as the reading itself indicates — was against those who put their own dreams on a level with the divine oracles. Yet your arrogance and dreadful pride is declared by Parmenian's writings, where, contrary to the divine Scriptures and contrary to the warnings of Cyprian, he proclaimed you, before the final winnowing which the world awaits, to be wheat as it were purged of chaff. What, then, could be provided against you more worthy to meet this most deceitful boasting than the case of the Maximianists? Whatever things you are wont to say against us as against traitors, you said graver things against the Maximianists — whom you received after they were condemned — at the time they were condemned; you stir up ill-will against us over the emperors, as though they were persecutors:

you before the judges whom the emperors themselves sent, made persecution against the Maximianists. You contend that the baptism of the Church cannot be given outside the Church: yet the baptism which the Maximianists gave in the crime of schism, you did not annul in those whom, having given it, you received back. If these things ought to have been done for the peace of unity, you find no ground on which to accuse us; but if they ought not to have been done, do not accuse us, unless you condemn your own selves. I do not wish you to spread yourself over many things; for I too could briefly recall to mind the things that have been said against you. But from this alone reflect: set the case of the Maximianists before your eyes. If you can answer us concerning this, proceed to the rest;

but if you cannot, you would do better to be still than to kick against the goad. BOOK FOUR. Although I have already replied carefully and fully enough in three not-small volumes to your letter, Cresconius — the letter by which you thought Petilian's writings should be defended against my rejoinders, in which they were refuted — nevertheless I have determined, in this shorter work also, to deal with you concerning the single case of the Maximianists, and from this one case to show how vainly, how emptily you spoke everything you set down in that letter. For the benefit of God is not to be despised, which He has deigned to grant both for the compendious dispatch of our task and for the help of your correction, if you are wise.

This benefit, without your knowing it and without our contriving it, so mastered the minds of your bishops that those who charged the Christian world with being defiled through the communion of the sacraments by others' sins — sins, moreover, that were themselves false and unproven — were, in the case of Maximian, compelled to confess that men had not been defiled by the sins of those whom they had condemned, even when established together in one communion of the sacraments — men to whom, as though to innocent persons, they granted a delay for returning, though these were not indeed the ordainers of Maximian, yet were established on his side as condemners of Primian;

and those who refused to acknowledge the baptism of Christ, nor that it was given in those churches which the labor of the apostles propagated and founded, contending that baptism cannot be given outside the one Church, and blaming us because we did not annul the baptism given through those whom we denied to be in the true Church — these same men received those baptized in the sacrilegious schism of Maximian, and did not dare to annul the baptism in them;

and those who accuse us as though with the crime of persecution because of the laws of Christian emperors, by which their perversity is commanded to be corrected — these went before the judges sent by those same emperors and gravely accused Maximian and his associates before them, alleged through the proconsular records the council by which they had condemned them, and obtained most effective orders by which those men should be driven from their seats. Though all these things have been done by them, they still try to spread mists over the ignorant, being most evidently vanquished not only by the holy Scriptures and by many sure documents of former events — those from the time when they separated from unity — but also by their own most recent deeds and examples.

From this point, then, I will deal only; from this I will reply, as far as the Lord helps me, to all parts of your letter without any difficulty — nay, with great ease. And first that point in which you, being eloquently self-contradictory, wished to disparage eloquence, as though it were the enemy of truth and rather the patroness of falsehood, so that in this way you might show me, as it were an eloquent man, to be avoided and fled from by the ignorant:

If indeed my eloquence were as great as you attribute to me, however accusingly, would you not, when the decree of the Council of Bagai was recited — by which, as it is written there, 'it struck out from the bosom of peace, by the thunderbolt of its sentence, Maximian the rival of the faith, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of mother Church, the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram' — be compelled to praise its eloquence? Furthermore, if that theme were set before me, when I could say: 'Although the belly of the venomous womb long concealed the harmful offspring of the viper's seed, and the moist curds of the conceived crime had steamed themselves out into the limbs of asps by a slow warmth, yet the conceived venom could not be hidden by its fading veil. For, though late, the pregnant vows of crimes brought forth their public villainy and their own parricide' —

when would I strain to search out these words, when would I roll them forth in the utterance? When, with such force, with such sound, would I rouse the mind of the reader or hearer to hatred of the guilty? Are these things, then, spoken less truthfully against those against whom they were spoken? Is the credibility of so great a council lessened, or its authority weakened, by this eloquence? Surely that saying which seemed the more eloquent was for that very reason chosen in preference, because all wished it to be their own — the one saying by which the silent mouths of three hundred and ten men rang out.

Behold the eloquence you have disparaged, which you warned should be detested and shunned as seditious and — even by its Greek name — maliciously artful: it so charmed all your bishops that in their plenary council no one wished to put forward his own sentence, but all made their own that single sentence which could be uttered more eloquently and more ornately by one man. Let it therefore be permitted us, without ill-will, to dispute not everywhere in an unpolished manner against the errors of men, if it was permitted to so many and so great bishops of yours to condemn the very men so eloquently and ornately.

That too — that you reproach with the vicious name of contentiousness and animosity my zeal for contending on behalf of the truth, because we have often wished to confer with your people, so that, error being removed, brotherly charity might rejoice in the bond of peace — is it not better, I beseech you, that the cause of truth and unity should be treated among bishops with peaceable words and in more peaceful places, than that it should be litigated in the forum by bishops through advocates? which was done by the party of your bishop Primian of Carthage against Maximian and against those who were condemned with him at the Council of Bagai, before the legate of Carthage and before four or more proconsuls.

Certainly in a conference of debate this must be guarded against — that one break out into a lawsuit; and by moderate and meek men it both can be and usually is guarded against. But when a controversy is turned into a matter of advocates struggling on both sides in the forum, then beyond all doubt there is litigation. Nor do I reprove this in your people, if they were driven to it not by love of litigating but by the necessity of taking counsel;

nevertheless I admonish you, a man endowed with a good disposition, to consider, to perceive, to understand that those who did not shrink from the forensic clamor and the judicial wranglings by which they might convict and expel the accused — men whom they had already condemned in council — but undertook and carried them through, could much more easily have conferred with us peaceably, had they not preferred to cover over a bad cause by excuse rather than to end it by debate.

Now, as to the point that, before you come to my discourse in which I refuted Petilian, you meanwhile ask me by whom it befits you to be baptized — whether rather by him whom even I affirm to have baptism, or by him of whom your own party contends that he does not have it — this question too has been removed by the case of Maximian from the empty talkativeness of the ignorant, at least as far as concerns you (for among the Maximianists themselves it still remains). For when your people had condemned Maximian for the sacrilege of schism — Maximian whom Primian had condemned as his own deacon, and by whom, when very many colleagues conspired against him, he had been condemned — they at once condemned by the same sentence, together with him, the twelve ordainers of that same Maximian.

Of these, two — Praetextatus of Assuras and Felicianus of Musti — when they had accused them in the proconsular court, when they had shown them by the same sentence, alleged through their advocates, to have been condemned along with the Council of Bagai, when they had, at the proconsul's command, tried but utterly failed to expel them from the places they held — these they afterward received in such a way that they held communion with them in their honors intact, and, the peoples being brought into peace together, of those whom they had baptized in the schism they rebaptized none.

There exists the decree of the Council of Bagai, alleged before the proconsul, with the advocate Nummasius prosecuting, when he was acting that the church of Membressa should be handed over to the communion of Primian, Salvius being expelled, who held it from of old, where he had earned his bishopric in the party of Donatus. But he was demanded to be expelled for this reason: because the advocate recited that he had been condemned by the Council of Bagai among the twelve ordainers of Maximian — whom the same Nummasius, erring in the number, says to be eleven. This petition of Nummasius was afterward recited by Titianus, expressly and by name acting before the same proconsul against Praetextatus and Felicianus. And the words of his advocate are these:

'But iniquity,' he says, 'delights in its own devices and does not forsake itself, when once, having plunged headlong, it has fallen. For that same Maximian nourishes the audacity he began, and associates others with himself for madness. Among whom also a certain Felicianus, who at first followed the right path, is darkened by the taint of this depravity, and, established in the city of Musti, believed that the walls consecrated to almighty God, the venerable church, must be held by a kind of blockade, as it were. This man Praetextatus also imitates in the region of Assuras.'

'But when the fellowship of the priests came to the knowledge of your equity's power, you commanded — as the records testify — that, every effect of contradiction being driven off, the churches vindicated from profane minds ought to be restored to the most sacred priests.' Then, a little later, that the same advocate may show what was commanded, he recites the petition of Nummasius which I mentioned above, in which, when Nummasius had said before the proconsul, 'Read the episcopal judgment,' that judgment of Bagai was recited, in which Maximian is condemned in these words: 'it struck out from the bosom of peace, by the thunderbolt of its sentence, Maximian the rival of the faith, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of mother Church, the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram.'

'And because the gaping earth has not yet swallowed him up, it has reserved him for the powers above for a greater punishment. For, snatched away, he had gained his penalty by the shortcut of death: now he collects the interest of a heavier usury, since, dead, he yet is present among the living.' Then against those twelve ordainers of his the Bagai sentence is thus pronounced: 'Not only,' they say, 'does a just death condemn this man for his crime; the chain of sacrilege also drags very many into fellowship of the crime, of whom it is written: The venom of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and calamity are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.'

'We would indeed not wish to be cut off as though from the joint of our own body. But since the pestilential rottenness of a festering wound has more of solace in amputation than in the relaxing of a remedy, a more wholesome course has been found — lest a pestilent poison creep through all the members — that the born wound should fall away by a compendious pain. Therefore the defendants of the notorious crime — Victorianus of Carcabia, Marcianus of Sullectum, Beianus of Beia, Salvius of Ausafa, Theodorus of Usula,

Donatus of Sabrata, Miggin of Elephantaria, Praetextatus of Assuras, Salvius of Membressa, Valerius of Melzi, Felicianus of Musti, and Martialis of Pertusa, who by the deadly work of perdition glued together the filthy vessel with collected dregs — and also the clerics of the church of Carthage at that time, who, while they took part in the villainy, furnished pandering to unlawful incest — know that they have been condemned by the truthful mouth of the universal council, at the arbitration of the presiding God.'

After the condemnation of these men — among whom are read Praetextatus of Assuras and Felicianus of Musti, with whom, as I said before, after obtaining proconsular orders against them, they came to concord — for the rest established in the same schism of Maximian, who were also condemners of Primian, only because they had not taken part in the ordination of Maximian, they granted in the same Council of Bagai a delay defined by a fixed limit of days, which is contained in these words: 'But those,' they say, 'whom the plantings of the sacrilegious shoot did not pollute — that is, those who withdrew their own hands from the head of Maximian by a modest shame of faith — we have permitted to return to mother Church. For as much as we are cleansed by the death of the guilty, so much do we rejoice over the return of the innocent.'

'And lest the pressure of a straitened day should withdraw from those returning the hope of salvation by too narrow a time, to those acknowledging their fault, to whom it is allowed, the preceding statutes remaining in force, we open the door of recognition to all, up to the eighth day before the Kalends of January next to come, so that, restored to whole honor and faith, they may have the foundations thereof. But if anyone by sluggish sloth shall have been unable to enter it, let him know that by his own will the way to all avenues of pardon has been withdrawn from him. For the sentence already spoken shall remain concerning them, and for those returning after the appointed day a fixed penance.'

From all these things, therefore, since you yourselves do not deny that some have returned to your communion, and since in so recent a memory, while the men in question are still living, the notice of it is most widely known and clear — both those to whom the delay was given (since, as the words of that same council sufficiently indicate, they invite them to return to mother Church and rejoice over them as over the return of the innocent), and those whom they condemned along with Maximian with no delay interposed, baptized outside your church during all that time, whether up to the day of the delay, when they were in communion with Maximian and were established in his schism, or even after the day of the delay had passed, when the advocate Titianus by name demanded that Praetextatus and Felicianus be expelled from the basilicas — men with whom, their honor intact, Primian afterward came to concord:

how do you now dare to say that one baptism cannot be given except in the one Church, when you have without any controversy acknowledged the baptism given by those men in the sacrilegious schism, have received it, and have not dared to annul it? Nor yet can you say that you conferred nothing on those whom you received in that same baptism. If then I ask what you conferred, without doubt you will reply:

'Lest they perish by the very sacrilege of schism; lest they should have the baptism of Christ not unto reward but unto judgment, not unto salvation but unto destruction, as the military mark is in deserters — we conferred peace, we conferred unity, we conferred the fellowship of the Church, so that they might be counted worthy to receive the Holy Spirit, through whom charity is poured forth in our hearts, without whom no one attains to the kingdom of heaven, even though he be imbued with all the lawful sacraments.' These things you would answer truthfully, if you held the true Church.

But for your admonition it suffices that you understand you will receive this in the true Church — namely that which you believed you received in your communion when you received those whom they baptized in the sacrilegious schism of Maximian, who returned thence to you together with them; and thus that you too, even though you have received the baptism of Christ, are to be punished if you do not hold the unity of the Catholic Church, just as you would not doubt that those baptized in the schism of Maximian were without doubt to be punished, if they were not joined to your communion — those in whom, coming thence to you, you judged that baptism should not be annulled. You see therefore that this too, which was troubling you concerning the sacrament of baptism, is already resolved in the case of the Maximianists.

Now, then, let us look at those things by which you believed you were refuting my letter. And first, that you ask why I call your people Donatists, adding that Donatus was not the author and founder of a church that did not exist before, but one of the bishops of a church derived from Christ and ancient — you do not observe that Maximian says this same thing about himself, and yet from his name you call his whole communion Maximianists. Nor do you distinguish by any term the schism which he made, either from you or from other sects, except as Maximianists, or Maximianenses, or whatever else may be derived from the name of Maximian, or at least, more simply and without fear of the grammarians' rods, you would call it the party of Maximian.

Will you perhaps say anything to this, except that Maximian made a schism from your communion, but Donatus did not make one from the Catholic communion? But Maximian does not say this — he who rather affirms that Primian and all of you made a schism from the party of Donatus, in which he himself remained, and he recites the decrees of councils: first, that which was made at Carthage by forty-three, by which Primian was pre-condemned; the other, which a hundred or more of your bishops then established at Cebarsussa, by which he was more perfectly and fully condemned. To one bringing forward such documents, what will you reply, except that the Council of Bagai is of greater authority,