Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 5 part 40/118

for this is the meaning of 'washes not': because, if he did not call himself righteous but were truly and lawfully righteous, he would not most impiously desert the good on account of the evil, but would most patiently endure the evil on account of the good, until the Lord Himself, whether through Himself or through His angels, should separate — in the end of the age — the tares from the wheat, the chaff from the grain, the vessels of wrath from the vessels of mercy, the goats from the sheep, the bad fishes from the good. But if you attempt to receive those testimonies of the Scriptures, which your forefathers believed were to be understood or brought forth for dividing the people of God, otherwise than the sense of the divine oracles demands, now cease;

attend to that mirror which God, by a most merciful provision (if you will be wise), has set up for your admonishment. I mean the case of Felicianus — 'the rival of the faith, the adulterer of truth, the enemy of mother Church,' as was proclaimed aloud in the council of Bagai, 'the minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram' — concerning whom they added further that, since the open earth did not swallow him up, it had reserved him for a greater punishment for these things; 'for having been snatched away,' they say, 'he had gained his penalty by the shortcut of a funeral; now he collects the usury of a heavier funeral, since being dead he is present among the living.' For I ask: did those who, conspiring with him, condemned the innocence of Primianus, then touch that unclean dead man?

For if they touched him, assuredly by touching the polluted they were polluted. Why then, to those established in his communion and separated from yours, is a delay for returning not granted, as though to innocent men,

'that, having returned, they might have the foundations of honour and faith intact'; and those who merely were not present at the ordination of Maximianus deserve to hear that 'the sacrilegious twig did not pollute the young plants' — those set in the same party, bound together in the same schism, divided from you, associated with him, established together in Africa, most notorious, most friendly, most closely joined, who, even if not present ordained him, nevertheless on his account condemned even the absent Primianus — while the twig of Caecilianus is said to have defiled the most numerous, most remote, most unknown Christian peoples of the whole world, whose cause I do not say, but many could not even know his name?

They do not communicate in the sins of others — those who not only knew the sin of Maximianus but even raised him up against Primianus; and they do communicate in the sins of others — those who either did not know, in far-off nations, that Caecilianus had been made bishop, or in nearer places only heard of it, or in Africa itself knew of it simply and peacefully, or in Carthage itself, against no one ... he had already been, raised him up!

Nor were they running with a thief, who communicated with him of whom the advocate Nummasius says, speaking on behalf of your bishop Restitutus, who was present, that 'through the hidden theft, well-nigh sacrilege, he invaded the principate of the episcopal name'; nor were they placing their portion with an adulterer, who communicated with an adulterer of truth; nor was their whole lump corrupted by a little leaven, when they favoured him, when they did not remain cut off from you in his party as though not knowing, but took care that he should be cut off by you against you and raised up;

then you yourselves — because you thus invited them to return, so that you declared those joined to Maximianus by so great a fellowship to be unpolluted by the sacrilegious twig; because you received Praetextatus and Felicianus too with their honours intact; because you are at peace and in concord with them; because even today you see Felicianus sitting together with you — you are defiled by no communion in the sins of others, stained by no contact with uncleanness, corrupted by the leaven of no man's malignity; and yet to the Christian world, through these testimonies, an alien crime is objected, the division of unity is defended from a deadly separation, and by the cut-off branch, as though it were an unclean branch, the branch that has remained in the root of the true mother is accused!

What of that in which you are wont to glory, concerning the persecutions you have endured? If it is not the cause but the penalty that makes martyrs, then, when it was said, 'Blessed are they who suffer persecution,' it was added in vain: 'for righteousness' sake.' Do not the Maximianists most easily vanquish you even in this title of glory, who endured persecution not only afterwards with you, but earlier and from you? Of the advocate accusing Maximianus, in the presence of your colleague Restitutus — who, into the place of Salvius of Membressa, having been condemned without delay along with those other eleven, before the very day of the delay had passed, had already been ordained — these are the words which I recalled a little before.

Titianus too, once the very day of postponement had passed, accused Felicianus and Praetextatus, and that whole conspiracy against Primianus, with the gravest words. The Council of Bagai as well was cited more than once, in proconsular proceedings and afterward in municipal ones; tribunals were stirred up, the most menacing orders were obtained, it was demanded and decreed that those who resisted be brought to correction by force; official service was assigned, the aid of the cities was granted, by which what had been adjudged might be carried out. Why then do you clash with us about persecution endured, when it is you who did not share these matters with us on equal terms?

For since one who undergoes persecution does not always arrive at martyrdom, your clergy and Circumcellions have so arranged matters between us that you underwent the persecution while we underwent the suffering. But, as I have said, contend for that praise with the Maximianists, who read out against you the forensic proceedings in which you harried them with persecutions through the judges — yet clearly, after some of them had been corrected by such coercion, you afterward came to concord with them; whence our concord too is not to be despaired of, if God should deign to help and to breathe a peaceable mind into you as well. For as to that charge which your party is wont to hurl against us with a mouth more slanderous than truthful:

'Their feet are swift to shed blood' — we rather have experienced this in the great brigandage of your Circumcellions and clergy, who, mangling human bodies with the most atrocious slaughter, have stained so many of our places with blood. When these men's leaders escorted you as you entered this land with their bands, they shouted forth 'Praises to God!' amid their songs — cries which in all their robberies they used as trumpets of battle!

Yet on another day, shaken and stung by the barbs of your words — which you hurled against them through a Punic interpreter with an honest and noble indignation for liberty, being provoked by their deeds rather than delighted by their compliance — they, as we were able to hear from those present who told of it, snatched themselves away from the midst of the assembly in furious agitation; nor after their feet swift to shed blood did you wash any salted pavements with water, as your clergy thought must be done after ours. But, as I had begun to say, this testimony from the Scriptures which you are accustomed to fling against us by railing rather than proving: 'Their feet are swift to shed blood.'

That grandiloquent sentence of the Council of Bagai vomited forth against Felicianus and Praetextatus too with a violent onslaught. For when they had said what seemed fitting to be said about Maximianus, they add: 'Nor does a just death condemn this man alone for his crime; the chain of sacrilege also drags many into fellowship of the crime — of whom it is written: The poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood,' and the rest. And when they had said this, in order then to show who they were whom the chain of sacrilege was dragging into fellowship of the crime, and to condemn them with Maximianus with like severity:

'Therefore,' they say, 'as men guilty of a notorious crime, Victorianus of Carcabia' — to whom they join eleven others, among whom Felicianus of Musti and Praetextatus of Assuras. After these things had been said against them, so great a concord was made with them that none of them was diminished in his honours, and no one who had been washed by them was afterward judged to require washing again — after washing the feet swift to shed blood. Why then must we despair of our own concord?

May God turn away the envy of the devil, and may the peace of Christ live in our hearts; and, as the same Apostle says, let us forgive one another, if any has a complaint against another, even as God in Christ has forgiven us — so that, as I have already said and must often say, charity may cover a multitude of sins.

But you, brother — with whom I now am dealing and in whom, as He Himself knows, I desire to rejoice in Christ — if you wish, according to the resources of your talent and eloquence, to undertake the defence of Donatus's party in this Maximianus affair, and not to act mendaciously (since the memory is recent among the very men against whom these deeds were done, who are still living in the body, and since all things are attested by so many proconsular and municipal proceedings): will you not take refuge in those defences of the truth by which the Catholic Church has always been forewarned against you — so that you will confess that neither that saying about strange water and the water of falsehood and the washing (concerning which I have admonished) nor any other passages of this kind are to be understood as you are wont to understand them, but rather in this way: that the baptism of Christ, given to the Church for participation in eternal salvation,

is not to be judged a stranger outside the Church, nor to be reckoned alien among aliens, but avails to destruction for strangers and aliens, and to salvation for its own and its proper members; and in them, when they are converted to the peace of the Church, the error is corrected, without the sacrament that punishes the error being destroyed; and that what harmed the perverse man outside may begin to profit the corrected man within. Nor again are you to receive, as you are wont, those passages about not communicating in other men's sins, about separation from the wicked, about not touching the unclean and polluted thing, about avoiding the corruption of a little leaven, and other such things — lest in the Maximianus affair you entangle yourselves inextricably — but you will so wisely assert and hold this which sound doctrine commends, which the true rule proves by prophetic and apostolic examples: that the wicked are rather to be tolerated, lest the good be destroyed, than the good to be forsaken, so that the wicked may be separated — only so far that the reprobate be sundered from imitation, from consent, from likeness of life and morals, while they grow together, are mingled together in tribulation, are gathered together within the nets, until the time of harvest, of winnowing, and of the shore?

As for the persecution, whatever was done by your people through the judges to expel and drive the Maximianists from their seats — how will you defend it, unless by saying that your more prudent men did this with the intention of correcting, not of harming, with a moderated terror; and that if any exceeded the human measure — as in those things which the city itself testifies Salvius of Membressa endured — this must not be laid down as a rule for the rest, who, like chaff with the wheat, are set in one communion of the sacraments, but separated by dissimilarity of life? Since these things are so, I embrace this defence of yours. For it will be such, if it be truthful, and it will be overcome by the truth if it be not such. I embrace, I say, your defence — but you perceive that it is mine also.

Why then should we not labour to be, in the unity of the Lord's threshing-floor, wheat together, and together tolerate the chaff? Why not — I beseech you — what is the reason, to whose benefit, for what advantage? Tell me. Unity is fled from, so that peoples ransomed by the blood of the one Lamb are inflamed against one another with opposing zeal, and the sheep — as if ours — are divided among us who belong to that Father of the household who said to His servant, 'Feed My sheep,' not 'Feed thy sheep'; and of whom it is said, 'That there may be one flock and one shepherd'; who cries out in the Gospel, 'By this shall all know that you are My disciples, if you have true love among yourselves,' and, 'Let both grow together until the harvest, lest perhaps, while you wish to gather the tares, you root up the wheat as well.'

Unity is fled from, so that the husband gathers on this side and the wife on that; that he says, 'Hold unity with me, for I am your husband,' and she answers, 'I abide there where my father is' — so that in one bed they divide Christ, whom we should abhor if they divided the bed. Unity is fled from, so that kinsmen and fellow citizens and friends and guests, and whoever are bound to each other by human ties, both being Christians, may be concordant in entering banquets, in giving and receiving in marriage, in buying and selling, in pacts and agreements, in greetings, in agreements, in conversations, in all their affairs and business — and discordant at the altar of God;

for those who ought there to end any discord conceived elsewhere, and according to the Lord's precept first be reconciled to their brethren and then offer the gift of the altar, are concordant elsewhere but discordant there. Unity is fled from, so that against the wickednesses of your people — for I will not call them yours — we seek public laws; and against those very laws the Circumcellions are armed, laws which they scorn with that same frenzy with which, when they raged, they stirred them up against you.

Unity is fled from, so that peasant boldness is raised up against its own masters, and runaway slaves, contrary to apostolic discipline, are not only estranged from their masters but even threaten their masters — and not only threaten, but plunder them in most violent assaults, under the guidance of leaders and captains, and in the very crime the chiefs are your 'agonistic confessors,' who at the cry 'Praises to God!' adorn your honour, and at 'Praises to God!' pour out another man's blood; so that you, for fear of men's ill-will, when your people are assembled and dispersed, promise that you will restore the plunder to those from whom it was taken — and yet you are unwilling even to be able to fulfil this, lest you be compelled too greatly to offend the boldness of those men which your presbyters have deemed necessary for themselves;

for they boast their previous services toward you, pointing out and enumerating how many places and basilicas, before this law by which you rejoice that liberty has been restored to you, your presbyters held through them, when those places had been laid waste and our men put to flight — so that, if you should wish to be severe toward them, you would appear ungrateful for their benefits.

Unity is fled from, so that whoever among us refuse to bear discipline flee to those men to be defended, that they may be offered to you to be rebaptized — like this Rusticianus, a subdeacon from the country, for whose case I have been driven to write these things to you with great grief and fear: excommunicated by his presbyter on account of his reprobate and perverse morals, having also become debtor to many in that region, he sought no other refuge, against ecclesiastical discipline and against his creditors, than to be smitten again by you and to be loved by those men as though most pure.

Even so, such a deacon of ours, himself likewise excommunicated by his presbyter, your predecessor rebaptized and made your deacon — who, not many days later, mingled (as he had desired) with the boldness of those same lost men, was killed in a nocturnal assault, in the midst of brigandage and arson, by the onrush of a crowd coming to his aid. These are the fruits of this division, which you are unwilling to heal by thus fleeing from unity, in the very way in which the division itself ought to have been fled from — a division which is by itself foul and damnable before God, even if on its account these and such horrible and wicked things did not occur.

Let us therefore acknowledge, brother, the peace of Christ, and hold it equally; and, as far as God grants, let us together strive to be good, and together, with unity preserved, correct the wicked with as much discipline as we can, and for the sake of that very unity tolerate them with as much patience as we can — lest, as Christ warned, when we wish to gather the tares before the time (which the blessed Cyprian testified are to be seen and discerned not outside but within the Church), we root up the wheat as well. For in truth you do not have any special privileges of holiness, such that our wicked defile us and your wicked do not defile you — such that the ancient timidity of the traditors (which we do not know) contaminates us, and the present boldness of the lost (which you see) does not contaminate you.

Let us acknowledge that ark which prefigured the Church; let us together be clean animals therein, nor refuse that even unclean ones be carried along with us in it until the end of the flood. Together they were in the ark, but they did not together please the Lord as a savour of sacrifice; for after the flood Noah offered a sacrifice to God of the clean animals, not of the unclean. Nor for that reason, however, was the ark deserted before the time by any of the clean because of the unclean; yet the raven deserted it and separated itself before the time from the fellowship of that ark — but it was from the pair of unclean, not from the seven of the clean. Let us detest the uncleanness of this separation.

For whoever are praiseworthy by such morals, this separation alone makes them damnable, because the evil son calls himself righteous, yet does not wash away his own going-out — although, insolently exalted and blinded by his own swelling, he dares to say what the prophet, foreseeing it, detested: 'Touch me not, for I am clean.' Whoever, then, before the time, as though on account of the uncleanness of certain persons, deserts the congregation of this unity — like an ark in the flood carrying clean and unclean — shows himself rather to be that which he flees. This the Lord willed, that even in this city your people, through the mouth of a certain... (CIX.) TO THE VENERABLE AND LONGED-FOR BISHOP AUGUSTINE, TO BE EMBRACED IN THE WHOLE BOSOM OF CHARITY, SEVERUS.

Thanks be to God, brother Augustine, whose gift is whatever of good joys is in us. I confess, it is well with me in your company; I read you much. I will say something wondrous, yet plainly true: as much as your presence is wont to be to me when absent, so much your absence has become present to me. No turbulent transactions of temporal affairs interpose themselves upon us. I do as much as I can, though I cannot do as much as I wish. Why then should I say 'as much as I wish'? You know full well how greedy I am for you; and yet I do not murmur that I do not do as much as I wish, since again I do no less than as much as I can.

Thanks be to God, therefore, sweetest brother; it is well with me in your company. I rejoice, joined to you more closely and, so to speak, most unitedly, cleaving to you as much as I can, receiving the overflow of your breasts, and I gather strength — if I may be made fit to shake out and press forth those things, so that whatever more secret and inward matters they keep enclosed, the skins removed (which they set for me, still a suckling, to suck), your very inmost parts may deign, if it be possible, to pour out to me.

Your inmost parts, I say, I desire to be poured back to me — your inmost parts, inmost parts made rich with heavenly fatness and seasoned with every spiritual sweetness; your inmost parts, pure inmost parts, simple inmost parts, save that they are bound about with the double bond of a twofold charity; your inmost parts, inmost parts suffused with the light of truth and reflecting the truth. To the emanation or rebounding of these I submit myself, that my night may fail in your light, that we may be able to walk together in the brightness of the day. O truly skilful bee of God, constructing honeycombs full of divine nectar, dripping mercy and truth, through which my soul, coursing about, is delighted, and by a life-giving pasture strives to repair and prop up whatever it finds lacking in itself or feels to be feeble.

The Lord is blessed through the heralding of your mouth and your faithful ministry, whereby you make us so chime in and respond to the Lord who sings to you, that whatever overflows from His fullness even to us is rendered more delightful and more pleasing through your elegant service and your girded cleanliness and your faithful and chaste and simple ministry — which you make to shine forth so through your acuteness and your vigilance that it dazzles the eyes and snatches them to itself, unless you yourself point to the Lord, so that, referring back to Him whatever shines delightfully in you, we may acknowledge it to be His, of whose goodness you are so good, and of whose purity and simplicity and beauty you are pure, simple, and beautiful; and giving thanks to Him for your good, may He deign, by His gift, to join us to you, or in whatever way to subjoin us, that we may more fully be made subject to Him, by whose leading and governance we rejoice that you are such, so that it may fall to you also to rejoice over us.

I do not distrust that this will be, if you aid me with your prayers — by whose imitation I have already profited not a little, so that I desire to be such. You see what you do, in that you are so good: how you snatch us into the love of our neighbour, which is for us the first step toward the love of God and the last, and, as it were, the boundary by which each is knit to itself — of God and of neighbour — on which, as I have said, standing as on a boundary, we are touched by the warmth of both and burn with the love of both. But as much as this fire shall have burned and purged us of neighbour, so much does it compel us to go on into that purer love of God, in which now no measure of loving is imposed on us, since there the very measure is to love without measure. It is not therefore to be feared that we may love our Lord too much, but to be dreaded that we may love Him too little.

This preceding letter, which offers you a gladder me — as if grief had been wiped away by the ease of activities from the liberal leisure that it was granted me to spend with you in this rural retreat (for so it was able to be granted) — was written, before the truly venerable bishop deigned to visit us, as though a boundary-mark of those joys; and, what I truly wonder at, it came on the very day it was written. What is this, I pray, my soul, unless perhaps that what delights us, although it is honourable, is nevertheless not sufficiently useful, because it is in part? Meanwhile, though the whole belong to it, let us strive to fit this very part — that is, ourselves — as far as the material yields itself to us for our sins (that is, as far as we ourselves yield to ourselves), more polished and more capable of being joined together, if indeed you admit this word.

You have a letter longer not in proportion to your greatness but to my smallness, whereby I have also provoked that now a letter be sent to me not in proportion to my smallness but to your greatness. Yet however great it shall be, it will not be long to me, for whom all time is short for reading it. Write back to me when or where I ought to meet you concerning that matter for which you bade me to meet you. And if it is intact and perhaps nothing better has pleased you, then I will come; but if not, I ask you, do not call me back from my course; for that alone seemed to be the thing which I would prefer to myself. All the brethren who are our fellow-servants in the Lord I both greatly long for and greet. (CX.)

TO THE MOST BLESSED AND SWEETEST LORD, THE VENERABLE AND MOST LONGED-FOR BROTHER AND FELLOW-PRIEST SEVERUS, AND TO THE BRETHREN WHO ARE WITH YOU, AUGUSTINE AND THE BRETHREN WHO ARE WITH ME SEND GREETING IN THE LORD. My letter, which our dearest son and fellow-deacon Timotheus conveyed, was already prepared for the one about to depart, when our sons Quodvultdeus and Gaudentius came to us with your letter. Hence it came about that, setting out at once, he did not carry my reply, since after their arrival he tarried but a very little while with us and, being about to depart, seemed on the point of it at every hour. But even if I had replied through him, I would still be a debtor.

For even now, in that I seem to have replied, I am a debtor — I do not mean of charity, which we owe the more, the more we shall have expended it, and of which the Apostle shows us to be perpetual debtors, saying, 'Owe no one anything, save that you love one another' — but a debtor of your very letter; for when shall I suffice for your sweetness and for so great an avidity of your mind, which its reading announced to me? It insinuated to me indeed a matter in you most well known to me; yet nevertheless, although it was to me no insinuator of a new matter, it was still a new exactor of a written reply. You wonder perhaps why I call myself an unequal payer of this debt, since you think so much of me — you who know me as my own soul.

But this is the very thing that makes for me great difficulty in replying to your letter: because, both, how great you seem to me, I forbear to say, out of regard for your modesty — and by saying too little, when you have conferred so great a praise upon me, what shall I remain but a debtor? This I would not care about, if I knew that the things you have spoken about me to me were said out of most sincere charity, and not out of flattery hostile to friendship. For in that way I would not even become a debtor, because I would not owe to repay such things; but the more I know with how faithful a mind you speak, the more I see with how great a debt I am weighed down. See, moreover, what has befallen me: that I have in some way praised myself, in that I have said I was faithfully praised by you.

But what else should I say than that which I have admonished about you, which you know? Behold, I have made for myself a new question, which you did not propose, and which perhaps you expect me to solve. So it was too little for me that I was a debtor, unless I should also heap upon myself an ampler debt. Although this may be easy to show, and, even if I do not show it, easy for you to see — that both true things can be said unfaithfully, and untrue things faithfully. For he who so believes as he speaks, even if he speaks untrue things, speaks faithfully; but he who does not believe what he speaks, even if he speaks true things, speaks unfaithfully. Do I then doubt that you believe about me those things which you wrote? Which, since I do not recognize them in myself, you were able faithfully to say untrue things about me. But I do not wish you to be so deceived even by benevolence.

To which benevolence I am a debtor, because I too could, both so faithfully and so benevolently, say those things about you which are true, were it not that, as I said above, I would spare your modesty. But I, when I am praised by one most brotherly and most intimate to my soul, hold it as though I were praised by my very self. And you discern how burdensome this is, even if true things be said; how much more so, since, because you are another soul of mine — nay rather, since your soul and mine are one — you are so deceived in me, thinking that things are present to me which are lacking, in the very way that one man can be deceived about himself! This I do not wish, not only lest you, whom I love, be deceived, but also lest you pray less that I may be what you already believe me to be.