Sermons & Letters 175 part 4/4

Response. Those women joined to men by a father's decision are without fault, if the women who were kept by men were not in matrimony. Response. Since a wife is one thing and a concubine another, to cast the handmaid from the bed and to receive a wife of assured free birth is not a doubling of marriage but an advance of honor. Response. The negligence of such persons is to be blamed, but not utterly abandoned: so that, roused by frequent exhortations, they may faithfully carry out what they have of necessity sought. For no one is to be despaired of while he is set in this body: because sometimes what the diffidence of age postpones is accomplished by more mature counsel. Response. The cause of these is to be reserved to the judgment of God, in whose hand it lay that the death of such should be deferred even to the remedy of communion.

But with those dead we cannot commune, with whom while living we did not commune. Response. This dissembling can be not from contempt of the remedy, but from fear of offending more gravely. Hence the penance which has been deferred, when it shall have been more earnestly sought, let it not be denied, so that in whatever way the wounded soul may attain to the medicine of indulgence. Response. It is one thing indeed to demand back just debts, another to disregard them out of love of one's own perfection. But he who asks pardon for unlawful things ought to abstain even from many lawful things, since the Apostle says, 'All things are lawful to me, but not all things are expedient' (1 Cor. 6:12). Hence if a penitent has a cause which perhaps he ought not to neglect, he better seeks an ecclesiastical than a secular judgment.

The quality of the gain either excuses or accuses the trader, for there is both an honorable profit and a base one. Nevertheless it is more profitable for a penitent to suffer losses than to be bound by the perils of trade, because it is difficult that sin not intervene in the commerce between buyer and seller. Response. It is altogether contrary to the ecclesiastical rules, after the performance of penance, to return to secular soldiery, since the Apostle says, 'No one warring for God entangles himself in secular affairs' (2 Tim. 2:4). Hence he is not free from the snares of the devil who has wished to entangle himself in worldly soldiery.

Response. One set in adolescence, if under the urging either of the fear of death or the danger of captivity he performed penance, and afterward, fearing a lapse of youthful incontinence, chose the union of a wife lest he incur the crime of fornication, seems to have done a pardonable thing, if besides his spouse he has known no one at all. In this, however, we do not establish a rule, but estimate what is more tolerable. For according to true understanding nothing better befits him who has performed penance than persevering chastity both of mind and of body. Response. The purpose of a monk, undertaken by his own decision or will, cannot be forsaken without sin. For what one has vowed to God, he ought also to render (Deut. 23; Ps. 49:14).

Hence he who, having left the profession of the solitary life, has slipped down to soldiery or to marriage, is to be purged by the satisfaction of public penance: because although the soldiery be innocent and the marriage can be honorable, to have deserted the choice of the better things is a transgression. Response. Maidens who, not compelled by a parent's command, but by their own spontaneous decision, have taken up the purpose and habit of virginity, if they afterward choose marriage, they prevaricate, even if consecration did not follow; of whose gift they would surely not be defrauded, if they remained in their purpose.

If no indications exist among relatives or household members, none among clerics or neighbors, by which those about whom inquiry is made may be shown to have been baptized, it must be arranged that they be reborn: lest they manifestly perish, in whom, since what was done is not shown, reason does not permit it to seem repeated. Response. Those who can remember that they came to church with their parents can recollect that they received what was given to their parents. But if this too is foreign to their own memory, it seems that what is not known to have been conferred should be conferred upon them, because no rashness of presumption intervenes where there is the diligence of piety.

These do not fail to know that they are baptized, but they profess that they do not know of what faith were those who baptized them: hence, since in whatever manner they received the form of baptism, they are not to be baptized; but by the laying on of hands, with the power of the Holy Spirit invoked (which they could not receive from heretics), they are to be joined to the catholics. Response. If they have used only the banquet of the gentiles and food offered to idols, they can be purged by fasts and the laying on of hands: so that, thenceforth abstaining from things sacrificed to idols, they may be able to be partakers of the sacraments of Christ. But if they have either adored idols, or been contaminated by homicides or fornications, they ought not to be admitted to communion except through public penance.

I. I am moved with great indignation and saddened with much sorrow, because I have found some of you so forgetful of apostolic tradition, and so bent upon the zeal of their own error, that besides the paschal festival, to which only the solemnity of Pentecost is compared, they dare to claim for themselves the right of baptism—not compelled by any necessity of human weakness, but by the sole license of undisciplined caprice—and to celebrate the mysteries of regeneration on the birthdays of the martyrs, whose end is to be honored otherwise than the day of the Lord's Passion, and, without any spiritual instructions of preparation, to hand over the sacrament to the rude and unskilled in such a way that concerning those to be renewed nothing of ecclesiastical doctrine, nothing in the exorcisms the laying on of hands, nothing the fasts themselves by which the old man is destroyed, may operate;

nor in so great a mystery of human salvation let any exception be made of that day on which the very gift of being reborn was instituted. We admonish therefore, and—not without peril to the state of those who do this—we solemnly protest, that this presumption be ceased from, and that you confer this highest and most powerful grace of God only on the Paschal and Pentecost day upon those who desire and believe: there remaining at any time the consideration of graver necessity and of dangers, according to which it may be needful to give aid; lest weakness, constrained by mortal condition, be defrauded of the necessary deliverance:

while, the reverence of only two festivals being preserved (as we have said before), it must be guarded, on account of many dangers, that regeneration through the priest of the Lord be not denied to anyone either in desperate sickness, or in the incursion of hostility, or in the fear of shipwreck. But if anyone, after this interdict, shall be detected in the same usurpation, he shall incur the punishment worthy of his obstinacy: since he shows that he has pursued base gain rather than the worship of religion. Chapter II. That presumption also, against the apostolic rule, which I have lately learned to be committed by some through unlawful usurpation, I decree by all means to be removed.

Namely, that in the penance which is required of the faithful, a written profession set down in a booklet concerning the kind of each single sin be not publicly recited, since it suffices that the guilt of consciences be disclosed to the priests alone by secret confession. For although the fullness of faith may seem laudable which, for the fear of God, does not fear to blush before men, yet, because not all men's sins are of such a kind that those who ask penance do not fear to publish them, let so objectionable a custom be removed, lest many be barred from the remedies of penance, while they either blush or fear to have their deeds disclosed to their enemies, by whom they might be struck down under the constitution of the laws.

For that confession suffices which is offered first to God, then also to the priest, who approaches as an intercessor for the offenses of penitents. For then at last more can be roused to penance, if the conscience of the one confessing is not made public to the ears of the people. Given the day before the Nones of March, Ricimer being consul.