'Cry aloud with all your might, spare not, and write down with my pen their sins'—these true prophets who were sent to us fear and guard against nothing so much as that their cry should be heard by us; which, assuredly, they would not fear, if they were speaking the truth about us. Not without reason, as is written in the psalm, 'the mouth of those who speak iniquity has been stopped.' For if they refuse our baptism on the ground that we are a 'generation of vipers,' as this man put it in his letter, why did they receive the baptism of the Maximianists, of whom their own council speaks thus: that 'the womb of an envenomed belly long concealed the noxious offspring of viperous seed, and the moist clots of a conceived crime warmed themselves into the limbs of asps with sluggish heat'?
Was it not likewise said of these same men, consistently, in that same council, that 'the poison of asps is under their lips,' whose 'mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known'? And yet these very men they now hold within, in their full honour and baptized by them outside.
Wherefore all these things—about the 'generation of vipers,' about the 'poison of asps under their lips,' and the other things said against those who 'have not known the way of peace'—if these men truly wished to say them, they themselves are rather the ones to whom they apply; since, for the sake of the peace of Donatus, they received the baptism of those against whom by their council's sentence they said these things, while, to the sacrilegious injury of Christ's peace, they reject the baptism of the Church of Christ diffused throughout the whole world, whence that very peace came into Africa. Who then are rather the false prophets who 'come in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves'?
Is it those who either do not know the wicked in the Catholic Church and innocently commune with them, or who tolerate for the sake of unity's peace those whom they cannot separate from the Lord's threshing-floor before the winnower comes? Or is it those who do in schism the very things they blame in the Catholic Church, and who receive back—in their own manifest severance and self-condemned—those whom they pretend to flee while they profess that such things ought to be tolerated in unity as being uncertain? Finally, it was said thus, and this too he himself has quoted: 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' Let us therefore consider the fruits. You charge us with the surrender of the Scriptures: this very charge we cast back upon you with far greater probability.
And not to run through many instances: in that same city of Constantina your forebears, at the very outset of their schism, ordained Silvanus as bishop. This man, while he was still a subdeacon, was shown by the municipal records to be a most manifest traditor. If you too bring forward some documents against our forebears, a fair condition is demanded: that we believe either both to be true or both to be false. If both are true, you are beyond doubt guilty of schism, you who pretended to flee, in the communion of the whole world, crimes which you had in that very fragment of your severance. But if both are false, you are beyond doubt guilty of schism, you who by an immense crime of separation are stained on account of false charges of traitors.
But if some things are produced by us and none by you, or true things by us and false by you, there is no need to discuss how utterly your mouths are shut. What, if the holy and true Church of Christ were to convict and overcome you—even if we held no documents of surrender, or false ones, while you held some true ones—what would then remain for you, save that, if you will, you should love peace, or, if you will not, at least fall silent? For whatever you might produce, I would most easily and most truly say that you ought then to have proved those things to the full and Catholic unity, already diffused and established among so many nations, so that you might be within, and those whom you convicted might be driven out.
But if you attempted to do this, without doubt you could not prove it, and being vanquished or enraged you severed yourselves by an immense sacrilege from the innocent, who could not condemn what was uncertain. But if you did not even attempt to do so, then by an all-too-execrable and impious blindness you cut yourselves off from Christ's wheat—which grows throughout the whole field, that is, the whole world, until the end—offended by a few tares in Africa. Finally, the testament is said to have been surrendered to the flames by certain persons in the time of persecution: now let it be read out, produced from wherever it may be. Surely at the very beginning of the testator's promises this is found, said to Abraham: 'In thy seed shall all nations be blessed'; and what this means the Apostle truthfully interprets:
'In thy seed,' he says, 'which is Christ.' No one's surrender has made void the faithfulness of God. Commune with all nations, and then boast that you have preserved the testament from the destruction of the flames. But if you will not, which party is rather to be believed to have insisted on burning the testament, if not the one that refuses to consent to it once produced? For how much more surely, without any sacrilegious rashness, is he judged to have succeeded the traitors who now persecutes with his tongue the testament which they are said to have persecuted with the flame! You charge us with persecution: the Lord's wheat answers you, 'either it was justly done, or our chaff did it.' What do you say to this? You charge that we do not have baptism:
the same wheat of the Lord answers you that the form of the sacrament profits nothing even to certain persons within, just as it did not profit Simon Magus when baptized; much more does it profit nothing to those who are outside; yet that it is nevertheless present in them when they depart hence is proved by the fact that it is not restored to those who return. Can you then, except most shamelessly, cry out against this wheat and say that they are 'false prophets clothed in sheepskins, but inwardly ravening wolves,' seeing that they either do not know the wicked in Catholic unity, or, when they know them, tolerate them for the sake of unity?
But if we consider your fruits—I pass over the tyrannical dominations in the cities and especially on other men's estates; I pass over the frenzy of the Circumcellions and the sacrilegious and profane cults of the corpses of those who cast themselves down of their own accord, the bacchanals of drunkenness, and the ten-year groaning of all Africa under one Optatus the Gildonian; I pass over these things, because there are among you certain men who proclaim that these displease them and have always displeased them. But they say that they tolerate these things for the sake of peace, because they cannot suppress them; wherein they condemn themselves by their own judgement, for if they loved peace, they would not have torn asunder unity. For what great madness is it, to want to leave peace in peace itself, and to want to retain it in dissension?
And so, on account of those who pretend not to see the evils of that same party of Donatus—evils which all see and blame—to such a degree that even of Optatus himself they say, 'What did he do? Who accused him? Who convicted him? I know not, I did not see, I did not hear'—on account of these men, then, who feign ignorance of manifest things, the Maximianists arose, in whom their eyes may be opened and their mouths shut: openly they separate themselves, openly they set up altar against altar, openly in council they are called sacrilegious and vipers and swift to shed blood and to be compared with Dathan and Abiram and Korah, and are cursed with harsh words and condemned; and openly they are received back again in their honours together with those they baptized.
These are the fruits of those who do such things for the peace of Donatus, so as to cover themselves with sheep's skin, and who refuse the peace of Christ throughout the whole world, so as to be inwardly ravening wolves. I think I have passed over nothing of what this man put in his letter—at least of what I could find in that part which we reached; let them produce the remaining part too, lest perchance there be in it something that cannot be refuted. But these things, which by the Lord's help we have answered, I admonish your charity that you give them not only to those who ask, but also press them upon those who do not ask. Let them answer if they wish anything; and if they will not answer us, let them at least send letters to their own people—letters which, however, they must not order to be hidden from us.
But if they do so, they most openly betray their own fruits, whereby the ravening wolves clothed in sheep's clothing are shown to be those who secretly lie in wait for our sheep and openly dread to answer the shepherds. We charge them only with the crime of schism, in which they are all utterly involved—not with the crimes of certain of them, which some of them may answer displease them. But they, if they do not charge us with the crimes of others, have nothing to charge us with, and therefore they cannot at all defend themselves from the wickedness of schism; because whether on account of false crimes fabricated by themselves, or even on account of true, yet chaff-crimes, they have by a wicked severance separated themselves from the Lord's threshing-floor and from the innocence of the wheat growing throughout the whole world.
Unless perhaps you expect from me that the things he inserted about Mani should also be refuted. In this matter nothing displeases me except that he blamed a most pestilential and most pernicious error—that is, the heresy of the Manichaeans—with an altogether trifling and almost non-existent censure, an error which the Catholic Church assails with the strongest proofs of truth. For the inheritance of Christ, established among all nations, is safe against all the disinherited heresies. But as the Lord says, 'How can Satan cast out Satan?'—so how can the error of the Donatists overthrow the error of the Manichaeans?
Wherefore, dearly beloved, although this error, convicted in many ways, is overcome, and dares to resist the truth by no assertions of any kind of reasoning, but by stubborn shamelessness alone, nevertheless, lest a multitude of documents burden your memory, hold fast this one deed of the Maximianists, fix this upon their forehead, wedge this into their mouths to suppress their deceitful tongues, slaughter their calumny with this as with a trident, or as though it were a three-headed beast. They charge surrender, they charge persecution, they charge false baptism: to all these things reply from the Maximianists alone. For they think it is hidden that their forebears surrendered the holy books to the flames:
but since the sacrilege of schism exceeds the crime of surrender, they received back the Maximianists—stained with the sacrilege of schism—in their honours. This assuredly they cannot hide. Likewise the most violent persecutions, which they inflict on any they can wherever they can, they think are hidden: but since spiritual persecution exceeds bodily persecution, they received back in their honours the Maximianists, whom they themselves persecuted bodily and of whom they themselves said, 'their feet are swift to shed blood.' This assuredly they cannot hide. Finally, the question of baptism, by which they deceive the wretched, they think is hidden:
but although they say that all who are baptized outside the communion of the one Church do not have baptism, they received back the Maximianists in their honours together with those whom the Maximianists baptized outside their communion in schism. This assuredly they cannot hide. 'But these things,' they say, 'do not defile for the sake of peace, and it is good to bend the rigour of severity toward mercy, so that the broken branches may be grafted in anew.' Thus, then, the whole case is concluded, vanquished in them, unvanquished on our side; because, if the name of peace is taken up as some shadow of a defence for tolerating the wicked in schism, then without doubt, by a horrible crime and with no defence, the true peace itself is violated through the unity of the whole world.
31. These things, brethren, retain, to be done and proclaimed with tireless gentleness: love men, slay errors; presume upon the truth without pride, contend for the truth without cruelty; pray for those whom you refute and convict. For the prophet beseeches God on behalf of such, saying: 'Fill their faces with shame, and they shall seek thy name, O Lord.' And indeed the Lord has already done this, that he has most openly filled their faces with the shame of the Maximianists; it remains that they should learn to blush for their salvation.
For thus they will be able to seek the name of the Lord, from whom they have most perniciously turned away, while for his sake they exalt their own name. May you live and persevere in Christ, and be multiplied and abound in the love of God and of one another and of all, most beloved brethren. SECOND BOOK. Those who were able to read or hear it remember that we have sufficiently answered the first parts of Petilian's letter, which alone we had found. But since afterwards the whole was found by the brethren, and copied out and sent to us, that we might reply to it in its entirety, this duty of our pen was not to be shunned—not because he says anything new, to which reply has not already been made in many ways and often;
but for the sake of the slower brethren, who cannot refer things they have read somewhere to all like cases, I will thus oblige those who altogether compel me to answer point by point, so that we may discourse in the present as though in alternating speeches. I will set down the words from his letter under his name, and render the reply under my own name, as though, while we were pleading, they had been taken down by notaries. Thus there will be no one to complain that I have passed over anything, or that he could not understand because of the indistinct persons; and at the same time, that these same Donatists, who are unwilling to discuss with us face to face, may not, by the letters they have published to their own people, thus escape the truth answering them point by point, as though they were conversing with us face to face.
From the very beginning of his letter Petilian said: 'Petilian, bishop, to his dearly beloved brethren, fellow-presbyters and deacons, ministers appointed with us throughout the diocese in the holy Gospel: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.' Augustine replied: I recognize the apostolic salutation. See what you say; yet consider whence you have learned what you say. Thus Paul salutes the Romans, thus the Corinthians, thus the Galatians, thus the Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, Thessalonians. What madness, then, is it to be unwilling to commune in the salvation of peace with those churches from whose letters you have learned the peaceful salutation? Petilian said:
'They cast baptism twice in our teeth, these men who under the name of baptism have polluted their own souls with a guilty washing—men beside whose obscenities all filth is cleaner, whom it has befallen to be defiled by their own water with a perverse cleanness.' Augustine replied: We are neither defiled by our water nor cleansed by yours; but the water of baptism, given to anyone in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, is neither ours nor yours, but his of whom it was said to John: 'Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending like a dove and remaining upon him, this is he that baptizes in the Holy Spirit.' Petilian said: 'For the conscience of the giver is what cleanses the conscience of the receiver.' Augustine replied: Of the conscience of Christ, therefore, we are secure.
For if you set up any man you please, the cleansing of the receiver will be uncertain, because the conscience of the one who washes is uncertain. Petilian said: 'For he who has received faith from one who is faithless receives not faith but guilt.' Augustine replied: Christ is not faithless, from whom the faithful man receives faith, not guilt. For he believes in him 'who justifies the ungodly, that his faith may be reckoned unto righteousness.' Petilian said: 'For everything consists of its origin and root, and if a thing has not a head it is nothing, nor does anything rightly regenerate, unless it be regenerated by good seed.' Augustine replied: Why do you wish to set yourself up in Christ's place, under whom you are unwilling to place yourself?
He is the origin and root and head of the one being born—concerning whom we have no fear, as we do concerning any man whatever, lest perchance he be feigned and utterly wicked, and lest we spring from a wicked origin, rise up from a wicked root, be conformed to a wicked head. For what man is secure concerning a man, when it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man'? But the seed by which we are regenerated is the word of God, that is, the Gospel; whence the Apostle says: 'For in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel.' Yet he permits even those who do not chastely proclaim the Gospel to proclaim it, and in this he rejoices, because, although they proclaimed it unchastely, seeking their own things and not those of Jesus Christ, yet what they proclaimed was chaste. And the Lord had said of certain such men:
'Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not.' If, then, that which is chaste is chastely proclaimed, the proclaimer too, because he is joined to the word, begets a believer along with it; but if he himself is not regenerated, yet what he proclaims is chaste, the believer is born, not from the barrenness of the minister, but from the fecundity of the truth. Petilian said: 'Since these things are so, brethren, what perversity can there be, that one who is guilty by his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says: A good tree brings forth good fruits, a bad tree brings forth bad fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns? And again:'
'Every good man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and every evil man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth evil things?' Augustine replied: Every man, even if he is not guilty of his own crimes, does not make another innocent, because he is not God. Otherwise, if from the innocence of the baptizer it is expected that the innocence of the baptized should come to be, each will be the more innocent the more innocent a baptizer he finds, and each will himself be the less innocent the less innocent is he by whom he is baptized; and if perchance the one who baptizes holds a hatred against someone, this too will be imputed to the one who is baptized. Why then does the wretch run to baptism? That his sins may be remitted him, or that another's may be imposed upon him?
Or is it as a merchant's ship, that lays down some cargo and takes on other? But we are wont to understand the good tree and its good fruit, and the bad tree and its bad fruit, as men and their works, as is consistently shown in the words which you too have quoted: 'A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil things.' But when he preaches the word of God or ministers the sacrament of God, if he is evil, he does not preach or minister of his own, but it shall be reckoned among those things of which it was said: 'Do what they say, but do not do what they do'; for they say the things that are God's, but do the things that are their own.
For if it is as you say—that is, that the baptized themselves are esteemed to be the fruits of the baptizers—you announce a great evil to Africa, if as many Optatuses have sprung up as Optatus baptized. Petilian said: 'And again: He who is baptized by a dead man, his washing profits him not. He did not assert that a lifeless dead body or a man's corpse rigidly stretched out is the baptizer, but one not having the Spirit of God, who is compared to a dead man, as in another place he makes clear to a disciple. The Gospel bearing witness, his disciple says: Lord, permit me to bury my father; Jesus says to him: Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead. The disciple's father was not baptized; a pagan he consigned to pagans.'
'Unless he said this of the unbelieving, a dead man cannot bury a dead man. A dead man, then, indeed struck down not by any death, but by his own life. For he who so lives as to be guilty is tormented by a dead life. To be baptized, therefore, by a dead man is to have received death, not life. It must be discussed and stated by us in what sense a traitor is held to be dead in life: dead is he who did not merit to be born by true baptism; dead likewise is he who, begotten by just baptism, was mingled with a traitor. Both do not have the life of baptism—both he who never at all had it, and he who had it and lost it. For the Lord Jesus Christ says: There shall come upon that man seven worse spirits, and that man shall be worse than the former.' Augustine replied:
Inquire more diligently how the testimony which you have adduced from Scripture was said, and how it is to be understood. For it is manifest that all the wicked are wont to be mystically called dead; but Christ, whose is the true baptism which you call false on account of the vices of a man, lives, sitting at the right hand of the Father, and will not now die even by that infirmity of the flesh, and death shall no longer have dominion over him. Whoever is baptized with his baptism is not baptized by a dead man; and even if perchance the ministers, deceitful workmen seeking their own things and not those of Jesus Christ, and not chastely proclaiming the Gospel, and preaching Christ through strife and envy, are to be called dead on account of their iniquities, yet the sacrament of the living God does not die even in a dead man.
For that Simon, baptized by Philip in Samaria, was dead—he who wished to purchase the gift of God with money; yet the baptism which he had lived on, to his own punishment. But how false is what you say—'Both do not have the life of baptism, both he who never at all had it and he who had it and lost it'—you may perceive from this, that those who, being baptized, apostatize and return through penance, do not have baptism restored to them, which, if they had lost it, would be restored. But how do your dead men baptize, according to your understanding? Or are they not dead—to be silent about the rest and to say what is known to all and is of daily occurrence—the drunkards, since the Apostle says of the widow: 'She that lives in pleasures is dead while she lives'?
Then, in that council of yours, in which you condemned Maximian together with his sponsors or his ministers, it slipped out from you how eloquently you said: 'After the manner of the Egyptians, the shores are full of the funerals of the perishing, whose punishment in their very death is the greater, because after the soul has been wrenched out by the avenging waters they do not find even burial itself.' And yet one of them, Felician—whether he has come back to life you may see to it—nevertheless has within, among you, those whom, dead, he baptized outside. As, therefore, one is baptized by a living man who is clothed with the baptism of the living Christ, so one is baptized by a dead man who is wrapped in the baptism of the dead Saturn or of any other whatever—that we may for the moment quickly state how the words which you have set down can be understood without distress to any of us.
For as they are taken by you, you strive not to disentangle yourselves, but to entangle us together with you. Petilian said: 'It must be discussed by us, I say, and stated, in what sense a faithless traitor is held to be dead in life. Judas was an apostle when he betrayed Christ, and having lost the honour of an apostle, he died spiritually, destined afterwards to die by his own noose, as it is written: I have sinned, he says, in that I betrayed innocent blood; and he departed and hanged himself with a noose. By a noose the traitor perished, a noose he left for such men; concerning whom the Lord Christ cried out to the Father:'
'Father, those whom thou gavest me, I have kept them all, and of them none has perished but the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.' For long ago David had thus pronounced sentence against him who was to betray Christ to the faithless: 'Let another take his bishopric; let his wife be a widow and his children orphans.' Behold how great is the spirit of the prophets, that he saw all future things as though present, so that the traitor, to be born after very many ages, was condemned beforehand; and finally, that the sentence once pronounced was fulfilled, holy Matthias received the bishopric of the lost apostle. Let no fool, no faithless man, dispute hereupon:
Matthias won a triumph, not an injury, since from the victory of Christ the Lord he carried off the spoil of the traitor. By this deed, then, why do you claim the episcopate for yourself, heir of a still more wicked traitor? Judas betrayed Christ in the flesh; you, raging in spirit, delivered the holy Gospel to sacrilegious flames. Judas handed over the Lawgiver to the treacherous; you, as though handing over his relics, delivered the law of God to men to be destroyed. If you loved the law, you ought, like the young Maccabees, to be slain for the laws of God — if indeed one can call it death when in dying for the Lord it makes men immortal. One of those brothers answered the sacrilegious tyrant with this voice of faith: 'You indeed, wicked and impious one, destroy us from this present life;'
but the King of the world, who reigns for ever and whose kingdom shall have no end, will raise us up, who die for his holy laws, into the fellowship of eternal life. If you were to burn a dead man's will with fire, would you not be punished as a forger? What then shall become of you, who have burned the most holy law of God the Judge? Judas at least repented of his deed even in death; but you not only do not repent — nay, most wicked traitor, you have moreover become a persecutor and executioner against us who keep the law. Augustine replied: See what difference there is between your slanderous words and our truthful assertions. Attend a little. Behold, you have exaggerated the crime of betrayal, and with most odious words, as though a rich inventor of a Judas, you have compared us, ruined, to him.
To this let me answer you most briefly: 'I did not do what you say; I did not betray. You charge me falsely; you will never prove it.' Does not all this smoke of towering words at once melt away? Or will you perhaps try to prove it? Then you ought first to have done this, and only afterwards to rise against us with whatever heap of invective you pleased, as against men convicted. Behold, one act of empty vanity; hear another. You yourself, when you were speaking of the aforesaid damnation of Judas, said:
'Behold how greatly the spirit of the prophets was sought out, that it might see all things future as though present, so that many ages before he was born the traitor was condemned.' Yet you did not see, by that same prophecy — settled, certain, and by an unshaken truth — by which it was foretold that one disciple would betray Christ, it was likewise foretold that the whole world would believe in Christ. Why did you attend in the prophecy to the man who betrayed Christ, and not attend there to the world for which Christ was betrayed? Who betrayed Christ? Judas. To whom did he betray him? To the Jews. What did the Jews do to him? 'They pierced,' he says, 'my hands and my feet; they numbered all my bones.'