Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 10 part 9/17

Which is the more credible from this, that the Eastern Catholic Church would never write to a bishop of Carthage, passing over the Roman one—where at least yours ought to have been written to, whom you are wont to send to Rome, a few of you, out of Africa. But thanks be to God that that conspiracy of the Eastern heretics with the African heretics, if indeed it was begun, did not avail to prevail. You have in your letter placed the Arians already among the heretics to be detested both by us and by you. Whence there is no necessity for me to contend with you even about this question. For as to the question which you set yourself, as though objected by us:

'If these things are so, how were the Easterns afterwards separated from the communion of your people?'—and you replied that, in receiving our people again, they could not preserve constancy in the condemned cause—is it any wonder that your bishops, from lands so far off, should with impunity narrate to you what they please? But if it were altogether so, what did so many peoples do, who, though they knew not these things, are nonetheless judged by you to be rebaptized? Or is it not credible that the peoples too could have been ignorant of these things, when you, somewhat more studious of these matters, would not have inquired what your Africans did in Africa with the Maximianists, had you not wished to reply to my letters? But that thing which I said:

that, even if the handing-over of some who died in our communion were proved—which by us is disapproved and displeases us—it would in no part touch us: how ridiculously you thought this ridiculous and less befitting my prudence! Accordingly, I now desire to know how your prudence has refuted it; or is it because you say you do not see how it is disapproved by us, or in what way it displeases, since we, being placed in their schism, never condemned an error we had come to know? See rather how briefly I reply to these things. I am in the Church, whose members are all those churches which we know, born and firmly established from the labours of the apostles, together in the canonical writings.

Their communion, as far as the Lord helps me, whether in Africa or wherever, I will not desert. In this communion, if there have been traditors whom I do not know, when you have shown them, I will detest them as dead both in flesh and in heart—yet I will by no means be estranged, on account of the dead, from the living who remain in the holy unity of the same Church. For not they founded this Church, but in it, if good, they were wheat, but if evil, they were chaff. But you, whom the tares or chaff of so manifest a Church could not stain, what cause was there of your division except a craving for sacrilegious schism? If it displeases you, you say, disapprove, flee, and leave the church of the traditors; do not follow the footsteps of your erring forebears. To this I reply:

If not even they were traditors, they are my forebears; if they were what I am not, they are not my forebears. I hold a Church full of wheat and chaff. I do not say if you showed me others who carry their own burden, but if you showed me my very self in it as a traditor, where it is permitted me to be changed for the better, there is no need for me to be separated thence. If I come to know any such persons in the communion of its sacraments, by the word and discipline of the Lord I amend those whom I can, I tolerate those whom I cannot amend. I flee the chaff, that I may not be this; not the threshing-floor, that I may not be nothing. Accordingly, do not be vainly tossed about in this maxim. For the apostolic precept which you yourself set forth admonishes me rather how I am to do this: do not communicate with the sins of others; keep yourself chaste.

For in order to show how each one might not communicate with the sins of others, he added to this: keep yourself chaste. For he who keeps himself chaste does not communicate with the sins of others, although he communicates—not their sins, but those sacraments of God which they take to their own judgment—with those from whom, by keeping himself chaste, he has made himself estranged. Otherwise Cyprian too—which be far from it!—would have communicated with the sins of his rapacious and usurious colleagues, with whom nevertheless he remained in the communion of the divine sacraments, concerning whom he says:

Very many bishops, who ought to have been both an encouragement and an example to the rest, neglecting the care of divine things became agents of worldly affairs; abandoning their episcopal seat and deserting their flock, they wandered through foreign provinces angling for the profitable fairs of trade. While their brethren went hungry in the church, they wished to hold silver in abundance, to seize estates by treacherous frauds, and to swell their profit by compounding interest. Did that man have communion in the sins of such as these? Did he follow their sect? And yet he stood with them in the communion of the same sacraments, because those sacraments they had not themselves instituted (men who did not hold them unto salvation), but by their evil ways they made them avail unto their own punishment.

But what is this that you say — that you had put forward in my own person the charge that I have never handed over the divine Testament? For you add: 'But he who handed you over created you'; and then you weave together phrases that seemed to you to have a fine ring: 'the stream is drawn from its source, and the members follow the head. If the head be sound, the whole body is sound; but if there be in it any disease or defect, it weakens all the members. Whatever grows up on a stem looks back to its own origin.' And after this you conclude, as if with a final flourish: 'He cannot be innocent who does not follow the sect of an innocent man.' In all these words of yours you have made my creator, my head, to be nothing but a traitor — one whom, indeed, you have only been able to accuse, not to convict.

But as for me, I do not set up even his innocence as my creator, my source, or my head. You however return to that point in which Petilianus erred, refusing to admit that, when anyone is born in the sanctification of baptism, Christ is the origin and head of the one thus born, and that I do not fall under the curse of which it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man' — since it is from no other source that you entangle yourself, nor, when you have rebounded, do you fall back into anything else. But you also warn me by a testimony from the Scriptures, as to what I should still answer you concerning these things. For you say it is on this account written: 'Walk not in the legal ordinances of your fathers.' Yet you do not observe that it was said to the Jews that they should not imitate the evil deeds of their fathers, not that they should be torn away from that people of God.

If then it was permitted to King David, to Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and to the rest of God's holy men and prophets, to keep the commandments of God amid the despisers of God's law, and to hurl many worthy and true words against those very transgressors of the commandment; and also not to imitate, not to follow, but to detest and flee those sins of the fathers by which they so offended God under Moses that not one of them was worthy to enter the land of promise, and to rebuke in those who committed such things the likeness of such fathers, and yet not to set up for themselves another people, as though purified and refined, by a sacrilegious separation — how is it not permitted to us neither to imitate the deeds of I know not whom, which you rather cast up than prove, nor yet to be separated from that holy Church which, as the Apostle says, bears fruit and grows in all the world?

Did the traitors institute any sacraments in which I might be baptized? Did they compose for posterity any books about committing or imitating the surrender of the Scriptures, whose teaching we hold and follow? For if they had done this, and would not allow any to have communion with them except those who read and approved those writings, they would thereby have cut themselves off from the unity of the Church; and if you saw me in their schism, then indeed you would have a right to say that I am in the church of traitors. But if they wrote down their most wicked precepts about committing this betrayal, and yet were not gathered outside the Church in a congregation and communion of their own, they would for that reason be reckoned as tares, on whose account the wheat is not rightly abandoned. Behold, I say again what you forbid me to say any further:

You bring charges before me against men long since dead, over whom my knowledge has passed no judgment. You say in reply: 'It is lawful for you to judge even today, and judgment can be held not only concerning the living but also concerning the dead. For though the man who sinned be dead, that which he committed never dies.' What if, while he yet lived, he corrected himself and appeased God — has not that which he committed died and been blotted out, just as Felicianus and Praetextatus, ordainers of Maximianus, corrected themselves from so great a crime after a respite granted, as you say? But it is a marvel, if a man's own sins do not harm those who have corrected the deeds they did, and yet do harm others who never did those deeds at all; and if the case concerns us, add: 'those who never even knew the deeds.'

But you say it is lawful for me to judge even today, because judgment can be made not only concerning the living but also concerning the dead. Behold, I am willing to judge; but you are unwilling to plead the case itself — nay rather, when we demonstrate that it was pleaded then, and then too without doubt concluded, you are unwilling to acknowledge it. But let us grant rather that you have some whom you can instruct. Why do you contend that those whom you have not yet instructed must now be rebaptized, seeing that those who had been baptized by traitors whom they did not know you ought not to baptize even after you have instructed them — just as those who, in ignorance, have been baptized by adulterers are not baptized, even after those adulterers have been exposed and convicted? Here perhaps you will say: 'But concerning Caecilianus judgment has already been passed.' The answer to you is this:

Judgment had already been passed also concerning Primianus by a hundred of your bishops, to whom Maximianus had made him out to be most wicked, before you held the Council of Bagai. But in the first judgment he was condemned in his absence; in the second he was acquitted when present. If after the first those whom he baptized cannot be rebaptized, how much more after the second! So too Caecilianus was in the first judgment, before Secundus of Tigisis at Carthage, condemned in his absence; in the second judgment, before Miltiades of Rome, he was acquitted when present. Still you will not have us be certain concerning him: at least allow us to doubt. For the one who knows Caecilianus to be innocent overcomes you, and so also does the one who does not know him to be guilty. But you —

— you however hold that both classes must be rebaptized: both those who say 'we know' and those who say 'we do not know what sort of man Caecilianus was.' Those whom Primianus baptized after the first judgment, in which he was condemned in his absence, are not to be baptized; and those whom Caecilianus may baptize after the second judgment, in which he was acquitted when present, are to be baptized! It was not lawful to condemn the man condemned; concerning the man acquitted let it at least be lawful to doubt. Even if his crimes were certain to us, so long as we were set within the Church — which the Holy Spirit foretold as a threshing-floor together with its chaff — the sins of others, not imitated by us, would in no way stain us. And yet even though these things are said to be uncertain to us, we are not only made defendants but are even adjudged to be rebaptized.

Is this how you act? Is it thus you overturn everything? Do you truly suppose that so much is permitted to us, that whatever you please shall be holy, and whatever you please shall be unclean? Restrain yourselves; make no progress in evil, lest you perish away from good. Now that saying of mine: 'But if you argue about the persecutions, I answer at once, that if you have suffered anything unjustly, it does not pertain to those who — though those who did such things acted wickedly — nevertheless tolerate them praiseworthily for the sake of the peace of unity' — how deceitfully you tried to refute this, plainly not considering that your letters would have a reader of sound head! For you answer as though I had said that persecution ought to be inflicted upon you for the sake of the peace of unity. That indeed I did not say in that passage; but I said:

'If you have suffered anything unjustly, it does not pertain to those by whom such deeds are tolerated praiseworthily for the peace of unity, but rather concerns those who do such things against you, however wickedly they act.' Since this was said most plainly, let those at least whom you wished to deceive attend to the explanation; for I do not suppose that you failed to understand a thing so plain, but you thought that by the brevity of my sentence you could easily cast it into a fog, where, whatever else you might say, you would seem to have answered it.

But why I said that the evil men of our communion — that is, the chaff of the Lord's threshing-floor — are, when they act unjustly against you, praiseworthily tolerated by the good among us, what need is there that I myself should show it, that I myself should defend it, when on my behalf the blessed Cyprian most plainly and most candidly declares that, even when evil men are discerned in the Church, the Church is not on their account to be forsaken? This is precisely what I said, that they are to be tolerated for the peace of unity. For those who unjustly persecute you do not persecute you more than we do — men who, by unjustly persecuting you, give you, for the deceiving of the ignorant, a false semblance of glory indeed, but to you a grievous wound of sorrow.

Next, calling to mind also I know not what dead men, whom you say were slain by our people, you enlarge the topic most expansively, as though set in the field of your own eloquence, wherein we seemed to you like the martyrs — while daily we suffer the incredible deeds of your clergy and Circumcellions, far worse than those of any robbers or brigands whatever. For, terribly armed with weapons of every kind and roaming about in terror, they disturb not to say ecclesiastical, but even ordinary human quiet and peace; by nocturnal assaults they leave the invaded houses of Catholic clergy bare and empty, and cast down the men themselves, seized and beaten with clubs and gashed with iron, half-dead.

Moreover, with a new and hitherto unheard-of kind of wickedness, pouring lime mixed with vinegar into their eyes and stuffing it in, they choose rather to torture at greater length those whom they might have gouged out at a stroke, than to blind them the sooner. For at first they used lime only for this crime; but after they learned that those to whom they had done this had quickly recovered their sight, they added vinegar. I pass over how many things they had committed before, by which they forced us to establish these very laws against your error — laws tempered more by Christian gentleness than exerted with fitting vigour against such great crimes.

A Catholic bishop from Thubursicum, Servus by name, while he was reclaiming a place that had been seized by your people, and while the agents of both parties were awaiting the proconsular hearing, when your armed men suddenly rushed upon him in the said town, barely escaped alive. By these same men his father, a presbyter grave in years and character, after a few days departed from life, so severely afflicted was he by that violence. Maximianus, the Catholic bishop of Bagai, after a judicial sentence had been pronounced between the parties, had recovered the basilica of the estate of Calvianum, which your people had at some time unlawfully usurped.

While he was holding it by a clear right, in that very basilica, beneath the altar to which he had fled for refuge, that same altar being broken above him, and with its timbers and other clubs, and cruelly cut also with iron, he filled that whole place with his blood. He had received too a great wound in the groin, from which, as the gore flowed forth more abundantly, he would have died at once, had not their greater cruelty, through the hidden mercy of God, proved a benefit. For when, with his limbs bared on that side, half-dead and face downward, he was being dragged along, dust secretly stopped up the overflowing veins. Then, as he was being carried in the hands of our people,

they again rushed upon him, tore him away by force, mauled him yet more grievously, and hurled him down by night from a lofty tower. He lay caught softly beneath a heap of dung-ash, his senses gone, scarcely holding his last breath. There a certain poor man, passing by, found him, when he had turned aside to that spot to relieve his bowels. He recognized him, and, terrified, summoned his wife, whom modesty had moved off some distance, to bring a lamp. Then the two together carried him home, whether out of pity, or in the hope of some little gain, that whether alive or dead, once recovered he might yet be shown to our people. What need of more words? By a marvellous cure he was healed; he lives; more scars are numbered on his body than limbs.

Rumour had reported to the lands beyond the sea that this man had been slain by your people; and the monstrousness of that outrage, together with grievous indignation, had, wherever it could be heard, stirred up everything with dreadful grief. When afterward he himself followed thither, the very freshest of his scars gave the lie to that rumour; for the man whom they, looking upon him, could scarcely believe alive, did not seem to have been rashly reported slain.

When here he had found his colleague from Thubursicum, whom I mentioned a little before, and some others who had suffered like things or not much less, and no means of returning to their own homes seemed open to them, and because the notorious fury of your Circumcellions, affording your clergy a horrible retinue, had become everywhere most odiously known, a vast odium blazed up against you; and thence it came about that all the past laws against you were revived and these new ones were framed. Yet if the severity of all these together be compared with the disorderly cruelty of your people raging without any law, it must be called a wondrous mildness.

For by these laws Catholic gentleness, having received so great a power, is rather commended than heretical monstrousness is punished; nay rather, against us it rages the more boldly and madly, devising, threatening, and executing slaughters, plunderings, burnings, blindings. For I wished to recount these things, through which it has come about that in these our times these imperial decrees were issued against you — nay, against your error. For what, if you were wise, could be more in your favour? But as for all the savage deeds of your people, which I have either learned from the letters of earlier men or have myself come to know, by which from the beginning of your division down to this time they have persecuted the Catholic Church — if I should wish to unfold them, what tongue, what pen, what length of time and leisure would suffice?

When I was dealing with the case of Optatus, and you had wished rather to excuse this than had been able to clear it away, you said that your people cannot be held guilty on this score, because no one has come forward to prosecute them. So many protests of our people concerning the most furious violence of your people have filled the public archives sooner than those deeds ever earned any punishment among you. But perhaps here too it may be said that the protests were indeed lodged, but that none were brought forward for prosecuting the guilty. Hear then certain things which I myself have experienced.

When we had taken up the case of the Maximianists, whom your people had received back after having condemned them, and were spreading it abroad with fervent insistence wherever we could, they — finding nothing they could answer to matters so recent and made clear by so great a manifestation — began, with their wonted frequency and boldness, by the violences and raging mobs of the Circumcellions, to deter us from preaching the Catholic truth and from convicting their falsehood.

And because many, entangled in the snares of their error — with whom we were treating so that they might be freed from it — answered us that we ought to treat of this with their bishops, and that they earnestly desired a conference of ours, where they might see, from the assertions of both sides, which truth would overcome falsehood: it pleased us, in a council of the whole of Africa at Carthage, that with the testimony of public records also brought to bear (so that we might prove to those who kept demanding this that we had in no way failed their desire), your bishops should be peaceably approached, each by that one of ours who was established in the same place where he too resided — so that, through a conference of ours, error being removed, we might enjoy Christian and brotherly fellowship, unity, charity, and peace; keeping this in view: that, if they were willing for this to be done, then by the help of God's mercy whatever was involved in our cause could most easily be recognized; but if they refused, then at least their mistrust might not appear in vain to those who had asked this of us.

It was done; they were approached; they refused. With what words — words full of what guile, what cursing, what bitterness — it would now be long to show. Meanwhile Crispinus of Calama, your bishop, being approached by my colleague Possidius in that same city before the public records, had at first put the matter off to your council, promising that there, with his colleagues, he would see what he ought to answer. Then, after no small time, the approach being renewed, he again answered before the records: 'Fear not the words of a sinful man,' and again: 'Beware of saying anything into the ears of a fool, lest, when he has heard it, he mock your sensible words.' Finally I define this my answer in patriarchal speech:

'Let the ungodly depart from me; I will not know their ways.' When both the learned and the unlearned laughed at this answer of his — since here was a man saying that he did not fear the words of a sinful man, to whom he would by no means dare to answer; and saying that he was unwilling to say anything into the ears of a fool, as though he were about to commit some secret rashly to a fool's ears, when what he was to say many prudent men could hear (for the sake of such, our Lord Christ too spoke so many things to the Pharisees, however imprudent they were); and saying that he was unwilling to know the ways of the ungodly, as though those whom he thought ungodly wished to teach him their ways, and not rather he himself, if he held the ways of God, ought even to teach the ungodly — as it is written: 'I will teach the wicked your ways, and the ungodly shall be converted unto you' —

— so when this answer was understood by many, and was shown to many how empty it was as regarded the cause, but how bitter and slanderous, which did not pertain to the cause, and thus his (as it is reckoned among you) most learned old age was seen and laughed at as able to prove nothing against the truth, though a raw recruit stood opposite him only yesterday: suddenly, after a few days, as Possidius was making a journey, another Crispinus, his presbyter and, as is reported, his kinsman, laid an ambush of armed men, into which our man had almost already fallen, had he not, when they were espied and reported, turned aside in flight to a certain estate, where that man would dare nothing, or would not prevail, or, if he even did anything, could not deny it.

When this was discovered, he was at once seized with such blind madness; and now, thinking it shameful to lie hidden, he began with armed men to hedge in the house in which Possidius had shut himself up with his own people, to pelt it round with stones, to encircle it with flames, to force an entrance from every side. But the crowd of inhabitants who were there, mindful of their own peril should so great a crime be accomplished in that place, partly kept beseeching him to spare — him whom by resisting they dared not offend — and partly kept quenching the fires set beneath. But as he, no whit the more sluggish, pressed on hot and inexorable in what he had begun, the door at length gave way to the blows, they entered, and the beasts of burden were wounded and slain.

What they had caught sight of in the lower part of the house they took down from the upper storeys — the bishop — assailing him with blows and insults. That they might not rage more grievously, Crispinus himself intervened, as though bent by the entreaties of others; men who seemed to care not so much for the entreaty against his wrath, as to dread the witness in the deed. After these things had become known in the town of Calama, it was awaited how Crispinus your bishop would take vengeance upon his own presbyter. There came too a protest set forth in the municipal records, by fear or shame of which he might be compelled to exercise ecclesiastical vengeance. But when he utterly despised this, and so great a tumult of your people arose that, for the truth to be preached,

— to which they could make no answer — the roads were thought likely to be barred, nay rather were already even seen to be so — the laws, which were not lacking but were as it were resting idle in our hands as if they were lacking, were set in motion against Crispinus your bishop: rather that our gentleness might be displayed than that their audacity might be punished. For otherwise it could not be made known what, with Christ's help, the Catholic Church could do against her enemies, and yet would not do — not according to heretical presumption, by private fury, with Circumcellions raging, but according to prophetic truth, with kings subject to the yoke of the Lord God. Crispinus therefore was brought forward, and, since he had denied to the proconsul, on his questioning, that he was one,

— being most easily convicted as a heretic — nevertheless was not compelled to pay out the ten pounds of gold, the fine which the elder emperor Theodosius had appointed against all heretics, Possidius interceding for him. Not content with this most lenient sentence, by I know not what counsel — which was said to have displeased all your people — he thought fit to appeal to the sons of that same Theodosius. It was accepted; a rescript was issued — what else but that the party of Donatus should now know that it belonged, along with the other heretics, to that penalty of gold, with whom, on account of communion in such persecution, it should either reckon that it possessed common justice, or, if it does not so reckon,

— let it not therefore boast itself just because it is coerced by that penalty, by which it sees those heresies coerced too which it grants to be unjust; and let it at length understand that it is not the penalty but the cause that makes a martyr of Christ. But let it charge us with being persecutors so savage that not even after the imperial rescript did Crispinus pay out that gold to the treasury — the Catholic bishops obtaining pardon for him — and now, even amid these very latest laws that threaten proscription to your bishops, he sits secure in his own possessions, while Catholic clergy, amid the hands of your Circumcellions and clergy, pay out their homes, their sustenance, their safety, and the light of their bodies.

Those who do these things — to whom shall I call them equal? To robbers, pirates, to some savage race of barbarians? — when not even these are to be compared with the master of all cruelties, the devil. He smote the holy man Job, all his goods being taken away, with a most grievous wound from head to foot; and yet there was there, amid the sound parts, a sound place — he did not put out the eyes of the man whose whole body he had received into his power.

But these things, forsooth, are not carried to your people, since Crispinus preferred to proceed to Carthage, to be overcome by his own obstinacy, to refuse the most lenient sentence pronounced against him through the intercession of episcopal gentleness, to appeal to the sons of him by whose law he saw himself ensnared, to stir up the whole party of Donatus over what he alone neither wished nor was compelled to endure, rather than to punish by mere degradation the most audacious and most odious crime of a single presbyter of his own. There was in the region of Hippo a certain Restitutus, your presbyter.