講道與書信 第 220 章 第 1/3 段

It was then the four hundred and forty-sixth or forty-seventh year of Christ, when Turribius, bishop of the Church of Astorga in Gallaecia, as a slight tranquillity was beginning to dawn, strove utterly to purge away the Priscillianist plague, and to proscribe, destroy, or consume entirely by fire the books of Dictinius and other apocryphal writings, which were either kept in private houses or openly read in the churches. And when he had all this most earnestly at heart, following the examples of the other Catholic Fathers, he judged forthwith that no other judge and master was to be appealed to than the holy Roman pontiff Leo, to whom he directed his writings.

And so Turribius himself entrusted to Pervincius, deacon of his Church of Astorga, the task of journeying to Rome and delivering to St. Leo writings of this kind. Now what sorts of writings he transmitted to the Apostolic See, Leo himself indicated in the opening of his fifteenth letter, saying that from the discourse of the letter, and the series of the memorandum, and from the text of the little book, he had learned that the most foul dregs of the Priscillianists had grown hot again in those regions. But such writings of Turribius, from which we might more easily have grasped the wretched state of the Churches of Gallaecia and the Spains, have long since perished. The most grievous loss of this misfortune we can in some measure repair, at least, by the letters to the bishops Idatius and Ceponius,

which are circulated under the name of Turribius of Astorga, and by that genuine and celebrated letter which in this cause Leo wrote back to Turribius. Upon both, then, it behooves us for the present to dwell, that we may bring to completion this history of the Priscillianists, which we have undertaken to set forth. And certainly Turribius himself, or he who plays the part of Turribius, described in that letter the deplorable state of those Churches, when, namely, discoursing of the burdensome and unpleasant pilgrimage which he had always undergone between two labors and tearful necessities.

Among these, he asserts, he had some assistance, since by approaching things unknown and by learning things not known before, we are increased with a certain advancement of mind, for the most part perceiving by a better reasoning that those things which among us seemed best have been rendered depraved and most base. But on what matters Turribius, made more instructed by his pilgrimage, so came out that he could easily recognize that things which had sometime seemed best to him had been rendered depraved and most base, he at once makes plain, commending above all that unity which he found in all the Churches of those provinces which he had traversed.

For in these, he says, with the highest agreement of minds and without any schism, all held communion with one another; and, all sects of errors being condemned, he found that one and the same sense of the Catholic faith was held, coming from the purest fountain of truth, which, split into no divisions by many-forked rivulets, does not dissolve the level plains into muddy pits that would hinder the straight path of faith. By which narration he wished to recall nothing else to the mind of those bishops than the zeal for procuring this Catholic unity and communion.

For this the pestiferous poison of the Priscillianist heresy had long since cast out and banished from the Churches of the Spains and of Gallaecia. Therefore, that he might kindle the minds of Idatius and Ceponius to zeal for religion, he sets before them the examples of the Churches which he had visited, whose pastors reform in the bosom of a pious mother those whom the poison of depraved doctrines had infected, if they are corrected; but the obstinate, like abortive births and no lawful offspring, they expel from fellowship with the holy inheritance. After long spans of years, then, Turribius, having returned to Astorga, was direly tormented, when he observed that traditions long since condemned by the Church, which he had supposed to be fully abolished in those regions, still more stubbornly flourished.

Nay, torments of this kind were increased in him, as he came to know that, according to each man's zeal and will, depraved doctrines were sprouting up like so many heads of a hydra. Of these, some were bringing the arguments of their blasphemies to the old error of the heretics; others were professing entirely the doctrine of Priscillian; others, finally, having in part only forsworn the more principal doctrines which plainly warred against Catholic truth, since they retained some still, seemed to adhere to the rest. All these things, I say, had grown up more freely here and there throughout the Spains and Gallaecia, the assemblies and decrees of synods having ceased, Turribius himself asserts.

And at last he lamented one crime, most grievous and most impious, worse than all the rest: namely, that men of diverse senses of faith would gather at one and the same altar. But when Turribius recounted all these things, he was moved by love of his fatherland alone, not by rash presumption, from which he was utterly a stranger. And therefore, earnestly pursuing Catholic truth, he likened the native heretics to thieves and adulterers, who, withdrawn by their untruth from the sacred doctrines, execrated the authority of the divine word; and that they might the more easily corrupt it with adultery, having rejected the canonical and evangelical Scriptures, they applied themselves only to the reading of apocryphal books. But lest to the bishops to whom he was writing

he should become grave and burdensome, or should seem to exercise a mastership over them, serving both prudence and zeal, he professes to employ toward them no exhortation of authority at all, but only the instruction of a suggestion; reckoning it before God a matter of graver crime had he kept silence. Such, I say, was Turribius's moderation of mind toward his fellow bishops, such his zeal in describing the perfidy of the heretical men; whose doctrines and mastership, if any of the Catholics rebuked with a little more constancy, straightway they would elude the disputations of the encounters, going in circles, and would strive to hide perfidy with perfidy;

and lest they should do this any further, he describes and lays bare their crafty and cunning arts, whereby they either prefer the apocryphal Scriptures to the canonical books, or venerate secret and hidden traditions, expressed in no books, not even apocryphal ones, through which they falsely claimed that the apostles themselves had spoken; or finally, they perhaps kept certain other books more secretly among themselves alone, open, as they themselves say, only to the perfect. But with what apocryphal books the Priscillianists especially made use, he indicated a little later, discoursing specially of the Acts which were circulated under the name of St. Thomas. In these he noted one thing before

all others to be marked and execrated, namely, that it says he does not baptize with water, as the Lord's proclamation has it, but with oil, which depraved custom the Manichaeans, together with the same standard-bearer Manes, pursued. This offspring, therefore, execrable to all and condemned in all parts of the earth, received only apocryphal books, or made use of certain other things stuffed with apocryphal fables, as had become known by their own confession. But other books of the same kind were handled by the hands of the Priscillianists, namely those Acts which are called of St. Andrew, or others which were said to be of St.

John, which Lucius had once written with sacrilegious mouth; or finally that volume, the monster of all blasphemies, which was falsely inscribed 'The Memorial of the Apostles.' For in it false apostles and false prophets, to gain great authority for their perversity, falsified the doctrine of the Lord; the whole law of the Old Testament was destroyed, and all things which were divinely revealed to St. Moses concerning the diverse natures of the creature and of the Creator. When Turribius, therefore, had found Gallaecia especially and the Spains undermined by so many and so great miseries and by nefarious and sacrilegious errors, he was rousing the minds of the other bishops to procure and then apply that remedy which should be more consonant with the divine and ecclesiastical laws.

Wherefore, that he might more easily attain this, he composed a certain work, in which he set out those testimonies full of blasphemies which were found in the writings of the Priscillianists, and to these, as he was able, according to the quality of his own understanding, he replied. This work, elaborated by himself, they think he took care first to scatter abroad among the people, so that no one (he himself says) might thereafter, as though ignorant of the matter, claim that he simply had or read books of this kind. Then next he submitted it to the judgment, censure, and estimation of Idatius and Ceponius, that they, namely, might weigh the whole, and that whatever seemed contrary to truth and faith without ambiguity, they might take care, together with other brethren joined to them, to cut away and abolish.

But there occurs to us a learned and erudite man, Stephen Baluze, inquiring, namely, and doubting concerning the trustworthiness and authority of this letter of Turribius. For the observations with which he adorned the Council of Astorga, held (as they say) in the year of Christ 446, disclose that several marks of forgery had made themselves felt to him. And he confesses that he draws the whole suspicion of fabrication from the words of St. Leo. For the supreme pontiff, writing back to Turribius of Astorga, ordered that at least the bishops of Gallaecia should assemble, for whose gathering our brethren Idatius and Ceponius were to press. And, observing this, Baluze adds:

'There is a grave suspicion that that letter, namely of Leo, put into the mind of some impostor the thought of fabricating the one which is said to have been written by Turribius to Idatius and Ceponius; and therefore I abstain from it.' But, opposing himself to Baluze, the most learned cardinal de Aguirre contends that the praised letter is to be adjudged to Turribius of Astorga; and, to snatch away what is objected by that learned collector of the Councils, he first excuses him, as being aware of the innumerable fables extant in the ancient pseudo-chronicles, and moved by these, as having rejected whatever is narrated in them, so long as they are not elsewhere supported or confirmed by some certain and firm testimony.

Secondly, he says that the letter of Turribius of which we are treating was not devised and feigned by those old cheats who so disfigured Spanish history with so many fictions and absurdities, but is found in a manuscript codex of about six hundred years' antiquity, and so forth. But between these two contrary opinions my mind long remained suspended, uncertain which to subscribe to. For the antiquity of the codex, which Cardinal Aguirre valued so highly, does not remove all suspicion that the praised letter was not fabricated by some ancient impostor. It settles nothing at all that King Philip II, in the time of Ambrosio Morales, transferred that codex from the most ancient library of the distinguished monastery of St. Emilian into another more recent one, that of St.

Lawrence in the Escorial, about twenty years before the fictions of Dexter, Maximus, and Julian—this settles nothing. What of it? Were there not more ancient impostors, who for several centuries might have been able to touch it? For that, once the apostles had already departed this life, many volumes were fabricated by impostors even under the name of the sacred Scriptures, all the monuments of the Church and this very letter of which we are treating plainly disclose. The antiquity of that codex, therefore, would establish nothing, unless that a more ancient impostor, most excellently instructed concerning the affairs of Spain and Gallaecia, already in the waning of the eleventh century, or the beginning of the twelfth, forged this one letter of Turribius.

To this opinion of Baluze, however, I do not so easily subscribe, but I hold that Cardinal Aguirre's reasons are utterly weak. For if I were here to undertake to treat of the arguments for forgery to be discovered in that letter, I could indeed confess that many things in reading it offended me, which were noted neither by Stephen Baluze, nor by the Spanish collector of the Councils himself, nor by any other. Of what kind, for instance, does that exordium appear, in which Turribius discoursed of himself, as of one coming from a distant pilgrimage, in which he had spent a long span of years? Whether these things can be true of a bishop most exceedingly zealous for the safeguarding of ecclesiastical discipline, who could suspect?

For shall we suppose that, with so many calamities pressing hard, under the indignation of God and the Church, this excellent pastor wished or was able to desert his flock? No one will be able to trifle with me on this point, especially since St. Leo, to whom Turribius set forth the most wretched state of those Churches, adorns him with the highest praises, because, ever vigilantly and solicitously, he had devoted the devotion of the pastoral office to the Lord's flock. Assuredly, if Turribius had gone on pilgrimage merely led by his own choice, the holy pontiff ought rather to have carped at and rebuked him, because he had fled from the Lord's flock, subjecting the sheep entrusted to him to be torn to pieces by the fury of wolves.

For only on a twofold ground could rebukes such as these have undeservedly escaped him: on the one hand, that of exile, into which the bishop Turribius had been driven by the doing of the Arian princes; on the other, that, not yet raised to the episcopate, he had made a long journey abroad over a span of years. But both grounds waver. For if, the fury of the Arian princes blazing against him, he had undergone exile, he would not have exaggerated the labors and inconveniences of a pilgrimage, but of exile; and besides, after sentence had been passed against him, another would already have been intruded onto the throne of Astorga, just as in the fourth preceding century of the Church the Arians themselves were wont to do. What of it? If Turribius in this letter to his

two fellow-bishops of Gallaecia omits to mention this penalty of exile, as being most well known to them, would he perhaps have omitted to narrate it in the letter to Leo? Or would Leo himself in his rescript not have indicated it as a sign of fatherly compassion? What more? Would Idatius in his Chronicle, who described the other disasters of the bishops, have kept silent about this one alone concerning Turribius's exile? Finally, why would all the other writers of Spain and Gallaecia have labored under such silence in a matter of the greatest moment? Not to this evasion, therefore, must recourse be had. Nor indeed could Turribius have accomplished so long a pilgrimage of many years before he was raised to the episcopate.

For after the death of Dictinius, which occurred before the year of Christ 420, as we have seen from Augustine, Turribius had already attained the Church of Astorga. But then not Leo the Great, but Zosimus, or Boniface, presided over the Catholic Church. Wherefore, since in the opening of the second chapter of that letter Turribius speaks of himself as of a man just now arriving from a pilgrimage, it follows that what Baluze and Aguirre narrate from Idatius's Chronicle concerning the Council of Astorga can in no wise be thrown back into Leo's age, namely into the year 446.

But if at last we should feign that Turribius did not write to Idatius and Ceponius immediately after obtaining the episcopate, nor appeal to Leo as supreme master and judge, but that the whole span of twenty-seven years or so had elapsed, then Turribius would at once be blameworthy, because so late, when those most grievous evils were breaking out afresh, he had put off seeking and bringing a remedy, and, against the statutes of the sacred canons, had wished, leaving his own Church, to go on pilgrimage. It must be confessed, therefore, that in that letter there are contained at least such obscurities as can in no way cohere and be reconciled with Turribius's piety and holiness, with the discipline of the Church, with the sacred canons, and with Christian affairs.

Thus indeed I reasoned with myself, after I had more often read the letter through. In it I met with other things too which savor at least of the writer's manifest drowsiness. Of this kind, indeed, seemed to me either those things which are read in chapter 4, 'that they should no longer do this,' down to the end, in which by no means can a genuine sense be argued according to the rules of grammatical syntax; or what is observed in the following chapter 5, where the same narration concerning the apocryphal Acts of St. Thomas is repeated, and other things of that sort, which surely either prove the writer's carelessness, or greatly diminish the excellence of that codex in which that letter was found under the name of Turribius and faithfully brought forth.

But although in that letter many things shine forth which greatly disagree from truth, or at least from likelihood, yet I am afraid to judge that it is to be rejected or held as spurious. Nay, I myself, in collecting and adorning the works of St. Leo the Great—just as Quesnel transferred it into his own edition, so too in another new one which, after these Dissertations, I have resolved to make—deem it necessary that it be preserved. For that reason I have taken care, so far as I could, to adorn it with various annotations drawn from the most approved writers, so that the friendly reader might be able to guard against the equivocations and obscure senses with which it teems.

But meanwhile, before I remove my hand from the tablet, I judge that what is there described concerning the state of those Churches of Gallaecia and Spain is amply to be approved. For most abundantly it corresponds with those things which are seen in the fifteenth letter of St. Leo the Great, concerning whose trustworthiness and authority even to suspect would be the greatest crime. For both old and ancient manuscript copies contain it as the genuine offspring of the holy pontiff; the Fathers of the Council of Braga and the fourth general synod adjudged it to St. Leo; all writers, none gainsaying, since they attested this same truth, opened a most ample field to the editors, that, every scruple removed, they might print it in all the vulgate copies.

We, therefore, supported by so many and so great preceding testimonies, since we could in no wise doubt concerning the truth and authority of the fifteenth letter of St. Leo the Great, took care only to purge it of the errors, if any had crept into it. For accomplishing which labor the more happily, the necessary aids were not lacking to us; for, besides various most ancient Vatican codices, which we surveyed with our own eyes;

besides the Grimani archetype preserved at Paris, according to whose readings Paschasius Quesnel greatly glories in having adorned his edition, which we ourselves, aided by the help of friends, took care faithfully to transcribe, we compared that same letter both with the Vallicellan and with two Florentine copies, so that, God's Deity at length aiding, all the works of Leo might come forth in new type purer, brighter, and enlarged. But let us now return to our undertaking. The praised letter, then, of the holy pontiff to the bishop of Astorga has sixteen chapters appended, because just so many did Turribius propose to Leo for discussion and definition. These words intimate it:

'Since therefore thy love, with faithful diligence as much as it could, comprehended in sixteen chapters the opinions long ago condemned.' But we prove that in a very ancient Vatican copy, together with the Grimani codex, it is to be read as seventeen. This the very division of the chapters more confirms, which in the last place exhibits this Roman numeral with the following title: 'Chapter XVII. Whether the flesh of Christ truly rested in the tomb.' Let those who are wont to commend beyond measure Quesnel's zeal, labor, and diligence in adorning and correcting the works of St. Leo take note, I pray, into what drowsiness he has fallen. Let them see whether these things are an argument that he took the Grimani codex as a touchstone in religiously testing the readings of the Leonine text.

Let them say whether he diligently surveyed the works of the holy pontiff, who in a badly composed synopsis subjoins the titles of only sixteen chapters, the last being passed over, though the letter itself is now divided into seventeen, of which the last has its own title, wholly wanting in the preceding synopsis. But of this matter it will be more diligently disputed in its own place, just as of that most ancient Vatican Palatine copy of this letter, which presents to us a certain hitherto unpublished fragment concerning the canonical Scriptures.

Whether this is to be adjudged to Leo or not, we shall likewise pursue elsewhere, since they see that it pertains chiefly only to the rite and order which the Roman Church of St. Peter was wont to observe through the seasons of the year in the reading of the divine and canonical Scriptures. Let it now be permitted to our discourse only to range through the most ample field of this Leonine letter, as it hitherto stands in all the vulgate copies; for since that letter is crammed with most certain and most abundant testimonies on every side, we shall the more easily both gather from it the sources and errors of the Priscillianist heresy, and at the same time more clearly behold the authority and irreformable judgment of the Apostolic See in refuting them.

And indeed, that the Priscillianist doctrines were more wicked than the errors of all preceding heretics, and drew from them every venomous contagion of impiety, St. Leo at once taught in the exordium of that letter, calling the sect of the Priscillianists the most foul dregs of all heresies. He adds that the Priscillianists had so immersed themselves in the darkness of paganism that, employing the vain lies of the astrologers and the profane secrets of the magic art, they placed the faith of religion and the reckoning of morals in the power of demons and in the influence of the stars. These and other similar doctrines of that most nefarious sect Leo recounted, and he recalls to mind the zeal of the ancient Fathers who flourished in the preceding century, who in

the councils all applied their efforts, that such an impious frenzy might be driven from the whole Church. He then relates how the princes of the age so greatly detested this sacrilegious madness (namely, the tyrant Maximus) that they laid low its author, together with most of his disciples, by the sword of the public laws. This first kind and example of bloody judgment, by which the princes and magistrates of the age have sometimes taken measures against obstinate heretics, has been able hitherto greatly to torment the mind of both ancient and more recent writers. 'I foresaw,' says Noel Alexandre, in his Ecclesiastical History, fourth century, chapter 3, article

17, 'that heretics could abuse this history, both against the office of the holy Inquisition, which hands over, or leaves, obstinate heretics to the secular magistrates to be punished with the extreme penalty; and against the very princes and magistrates, who by their own right take measures against them even with the penalty of death.' In the same place P. Noel intends to vindicate from all censure that proposition which had crept into the earlier edition of his work: 'No Catholic has said that emperors and kings cannot take measures against a heretic even with the penalty of death.' But in what sense he said it, he then explained in the last edition, and he labors in asserting this power of the princes of the age.

His annotator Constantine Roncaglia, in the latest Lucca edition, likewise wished to treat of this same authority of princes. He first, by the suffrage of the canonists, shows that in judging causes of heresy, the Church is powerful with authority both over those things which are of law and those which are of fact. Then he says: 'That it is not foreign to the power of princes, by laws and appointed penalties, to remove heresies, sacrileges, and the like, Bellarmine taught,' and so forth. Assuredly, if both these most illustrious men, and as many as have discoursed on this and similar causes, had turned their attention to our holy pontiff, they would not have labored so greatly, but would more easily and readily have snatched away whatever can be objected by the heterodox.

But as to why the princes of that age charged that bloody kind of judgment to be exercised against the Priscillianists, the holy pontiff Leo explains in the following words: 'For they saw' (namely the princes of the age) 'that every care for decency was being taken away, that the bond of marriage was being dissolved, and that at the same time divine and human law was being overthrown, if it were ever permitted for men of this sort to live under such a profession.'

Since, then, the crimes of the Priscillianists were such that they brought not only the gravest disgrace and most serious injury upon religion, but could also lead the very commonwealth to utter ruin, especially in those matters which violate the laws of nature, the princes of that age therefore did not hesitate to destroy and abolish the profession of that sect together with its authors, capital penalties being applied. Relying on these reasons, the holy pontiff confessed that a similar judgment had long profited the leniency of the Church. For he adds:

'This strictness has long profited the Church's leniency, which, though content with priestly judgment and shrinking from bloody vengeance, is nevertheless aided by the stern ordinances of Christian princes, since those who fear bodily punishment sometimes have recourse to a spiritual remedy.' Therefore, when the Church takes action against obstinate heretics, she does not decree capital punishments, nor inflict them, nor seek to have them inflicted. Always content with her own spiritual penalties, and lest she incur any lack of leniency, she shrinks from all bloody vengeances.

But if nevertheless these are established by the public decrees of secular princes and magistrates, they profit her greatly, and she is thereby aided, especially because offenders, terrified by the severity of bodily punishments, have grown accustomed to have recourse to a spiritual remedy—namely, to the abjuration of their crimes and to penance. Nor let anyone, from a similar manner of speaking in Leo, persuade himself that the obstinacy of Idatius and Ithacius—of which we treated above, and on account of which they were hateful to the Catholic bishops, and to Marinus especially, and that Ithacius himself was openly condemned by bishop Theognostus—is thereby excused. For by no excuse can a bishop be cleared who, indulging his own private zeal,

who has despised the judgments of his fellow brethren brought together in councils, and has been willing to press secular princes and magistrates with his own accusations by procuring the death of the guilty. That this manner of acting is repugnant to Catholic leniency is most evident. But most of all do the prelates of our Churches abhor it, as does that holy office of the Inquisition, against which Father Natalis Alexander foresaw that heretics might be able to devise slander.