Sermons & Letters 191

1. From a man barbarous in life and manners, who had a sharp intellect and the utmost familiarity with demons, and who also, through the abuse of dialectic, deceived his hearers by his discourses, none but evil shoots of wickedness could arise; which burst forth into the Christian world when St. Felix already held the helm of the Roman See. This Eusebius among others wrote, in the place cited above (Ecclesiastical History, book VII, ch. 27). In which matter we judge the chronology of William Cave to be not sufficiently accurate, who asserts that the beginnings of this heresy are to be dated from the year 277.

For Felix was proclaimed pontiff in the year 270, reigned only five years, and died while Aurelian was emperor, as both Dionysius Petavius and the most illustrious man Francesco Bianchini have exactly proved from the tables and catalogues of the Roman pontiffs. But that this heresy burst forth much later can by no means be indicated by a certain celebrated testimony of St. Leo the Great, in which, while preaching, he affirmed: that Manes became known as one to be condemned at that time when, after the Resurrection of the Lord, the two hundred and sixtieth year was completed, in the consulship of Probus and Paulinus, when already the eighth persecution against the Christians was raging. To which testimony Paschasius Quesnel, giving attention (Vol. I, in the notes to Sermon

2 on Pentecost, notes 1, 2, 3), that he might make of it a great deal of trouble, remarked especially three things. First, namely, that a corruption is suspected to lie hidden there by Dionysius Petavius, in his annotations to Epiphanius, page 227, and that instead of the number CCLX (260), one number having been transposed, CCXLVI should be read. The reason is that the consulship of Probus and Paulinus falls upon nearly the year of Christ 277 in the Dionysian era, from which number, he says, 31 years being deducted, 246 years remain from the Ascension of the Lord. Thus from Petavius does Quesnel reason, relying on the authority of the Oxford codex, which exhibits the following Roman numeral CCXLVI. The cause of which error is to be laid upon the typographers or upon the copyists, as already very many Vatican manuscripts

the copies, which we shall note in the margin, make this plainly evident. For the manuscripts which we have used in correcting the works of St. Leo do not express the said sum of years by the letters of the alphabet, but designate them by the numeral marks which the Romans always employed in their reckonings and calculations. Indeed, if that number of years, as it stands expressed in the common editions of St. Leo's sermons, were to hold good, then the whole chronology of Christian and civil affairs would utterly collapse. For Manes could not have become known as one to be condemned before the close of the third century of the Church, that is, in the two hundred and ninety-first year from the birth of Christ; at which time it was no longer Probus and Paulinus, but C. Junius Tiberianus and Cassius Dio who held the consulship.

But who can be unaware that at that time Manes had already been put to death by decree of the king of the Persians? 2. The second point which Quesnel noted is plain to every barber and blear-eyed man. For there is no learned person who does not know that Probus and Paulinus did not obtain the honor and office of the consulship until after the murder of the emperor Aurelian; and that this must be assigned to the year 277 of Christ, as the tables of Petavius declare, and as Beausobre also admits in the earlier part of his history of the Manichaeans—as we shall see in the following fourth chapter, when we are to have our encounter with him.

Yet I do not know on what ground Quesnel added that the Consular Fasti of Cassiodorus, or the Ecclesiastical Annals, ought to be corrected—those which place the consulship of Probus in the year 277 of Christ together with the seventh year of the emperor Aurelian. For Aurelian, as both sacred and profane monuments record, after spending only five years in the empire, was slain in the year 275 of Christ; namely by the treachery of Mnestheus, the notary of his secretaries, at Coenophrusium, between Byzantium and Heraclea. Then, Aurelian being removed, after an interregnum of about seven months, Tacitus is proclaimed Caesar by the senate, who on the two-hundredth day thereafter closed his days at Tarsus by a fever.

When his brother Florianus had been substituted for him, Probus was set up as emperor by the greater part of the army. Bearing this thing too indignantly, Florianus, driven by despair, having of his own accord cut his veins, dies after a space of sixty days, in the year 276 of Christ. Therefore the Ecclesiastical Annals could not place the consulship of Probus together with the seventh year of the emperor Aurelian, since he administered the Roman empire only for five years. And I judge this to have been the cause of the error: namely, that Probus was also called Aurelius. Since therefore in the tables of the Roman consuls, in the year 277, these names come to be read: Aurelius Probus;

therefore some perhaps suspected that Aurelian's reign ought to be extended by two years, so that, he being still alive, Probus might have been able to obtain the consulship. But from these things let no one flatter himself that Cave's opinion concerning the beginnings of the Manichaeans can come out any firmer. For St. Leo the Great, in the testimony cited, by no means discoursed about the beginnings of this sect, but about that time in which it had become known as one deserving condemnation.

As though he there meant to hint that the errors of the Manichaeans had long since come forth into the world, and had been disseminated hither and thither through the various regions of the East, chiefly by the ministry and preaching of the disciples of Manes, so that such falsehoods of the devil, and obscene superstitions, already published abroad in many places, became known to the very bishops of the Churches. But who will think that these things could happen in an instant? Especially since so great a distance of places lies between Persia and Rome, that this heresy, scarcely arisen, could hardly have been at once betrayed and made known to the Roman See.

There is finally this to add: that already in the year 277, in which Aurelius Probus and Paulinus held the consulship, Archelaus, bishop of Caschar in Mesopotamia, flourishing in holiness and learning, had strenuously and constantly set himself against the frenzy of Manes, as Epiphanius (heresy 66) and Cyril of Jerusalem (catechesis 6) relate. 3. Finally, the third point which Quesnel brings forward is to be referred to those words of Leo: When the eighth persecution against the Christians was raging fiercely. The annotator therefore observes: If Leo there speaks of the persecution of Aurelian, as seems entirely the case, this was not the eighth, but the ninth, as Augustine numbers it, in the City of God, book XVIII, chapter 52.

But that Leo, in enumerating the eighth of the tyrants and persecutions of the Church, followed Augustine—whence does Quesnel contrive this? Or does he persuade himself that ancient and more recent writers agree entirely in enumerating the persecutions of the Church, and that Aurelian must necessarily be reckoned among the tyrants of the Christians? A false inference. For the Fathers set before themselves one manner of writing and another, one aim and another, in describing these same persecutions. For Eusebius, discoursing about Aurelian, affirms that he was never hostile to the Christians in the first years of his reign.

Indeed, when the case of Paul of Samosata was then being tried, Eusebius teaches that Aurelian showed himself so much a vindicator of ecclesiastical rights that he himself ordered Paul to be expelled from the Church by the public authority. But if afterwards, in the course of time, he corrupted the gentle purpose of his mind by the evil counsels of others, so that he even wished to plan a persecution against the Churches of God—to the point that it is said that, when the letters and writings had already been dictated and only the signature remained, this depraved will nevertheless obtained no effect at all. For God, who was passing judgment on the death of the pious, condemned the signature by a sudden [stroke].

With difficulty, therefore, shall I grant that Aurelian, on the authority of Eusebius, is there enumerated among the tyrants of the Church, since he departed [this life] with the impious edicts not yet signed. Lactantius also agrees with Eusebius (in his book On the Deaths of the Persecutors), writing that Aurelian was not permitted to accomplish what he had conceived, but was immediately extinguished amid the very beginnings of his fury. But who will deny that the holy pontiff followed this same manner of writing? For he, in reckoning up the persecutions of the tyrants, intended to enumerate only those in which countless thousands of martyrs proved by their very victories that the Holy Spirit had been given to them. But under Aurelian, where are the martyrs? By which writers are they reckoned?

How many thousands are counted? Let our adversaries bring forth into the open the consular acts in which both the kinds of punishments and of death and the confessions of the martyrs were described. Let Quesnel himself point out the names of the consuls and prefects who, obeying the imperial decrees of Aurelian, sought out the Christians in order to punish them with death. Of records of this kind, assuredly, neither Eusebius, nor Lactantius, nor anyone else brought forward any, such that we might truly be able to affirm that countless thousands of martyrs proved by their very victories that there was fulfilled what the Lord had promised, saying: But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what you shall speak. For it shall be given you in that hour what you shall speak.

For it is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaks in you. 4. But that the aim of the holy pontiff's speech, which Quesnel by no means grasped, may plainly stand forth—what he wished to prove by this kind of argument, or what he wished to persuade the people while preaching—let us diligently weigh. St. Leo the Great therefore proposes to himself there to overthrow the chief dogma of Manes, by which that blasphemous and sacrilegious architect of falsehoods professed himself to be the Paraclete promised by the Lord, who (he claimed) had not come before that deceiver of the wretched should arise; in whom the Holy Spirit so remained that Manes himself was nothing other than the divine Spirit.

In order therefore to overthrow the invention of so great an impiety, upon which the whole artifice of the entire Manichaean sect was built, he first appeals to those testimonies of the New Testament by which it is customarily shown that the Holy Spirit was promised and given while the apostles were still existing in the flesh, and to the other disciples and faithful. Enumerating indeed some of the causes of the Spirit's mission and coming and some of the effects of His admirable power, he first asserts that novelty of doctrine, and the preaching of profane matters, are utterly foreign to that Holy Spirit. Because neither was any other truth to be insinuated, nor any other doctrine to be preached, besides that which Christ the Son of God had taught.

But it was needful (he says) that the capacity of those who were being taught should be increased and multiplied, [and] the constancy of that charity which casts out all fear and does not dread the fury of persecutors. And St. Leo undertakes to prove from the records of the Church that the world and the demons themselves and the tyrants had always beheld these admirable effects of the Holy Spirit already in the apostles and disciples of Christ—when these, under no storm now trembling at the endurance of sufferings, trampled underfoot the waves of the age and the risings of the world, with faith overpassing them, and, death being despised, brought the Gospel of truth to all nations.

That he might accomplish this more successfully, he appeals to those persecutions of the tyrants which, like fires or touchstones, [proved] both the constancy of the martyrs and [the truth] of the Gospel. In reckoning up the persecutions it was needful to enumerate only those which had occurred from the Resurrection of Christ down to the consulship of Probus and Paulinus; namely those in which countless thousands of martyrs demonstrated by their very crowns that the prophecies of Christ, in Matthew 10:19, had been fulfilled. Since therefore the merely contemplated persecution which Aurelian had reckoned within himself, by no means carried into execution, was not of this kind, it was by no means to be appealed to. Wrongly, therefore, does Quesnel altogether fabricate in writing that the holy pontiff had spoken of the persecution of Aurelian.

Of this he could by no means have spoken, since by Aurelian's decree no Christian suffered martyrdom. Whence he rightly wrote: When the eighth persecution was now raging fiercely against the Christians—thereafter taking no account of Aurelian's letters and decrees concerning the seeking out of Christians for death, since divine vengeance upon the emperors had rendered this depraved will void. Wherefore I am at present compelled to marvel that Quesnel alone, who surveyed Leo's writings only carelessly, should have wished to bring the holy pontiff here under the suspicion of sloth;

assuredly it is with too great an impudence of mind on the annotator's part that he assigns the mark of error to one whose virtue and supreme wisdom were always sufficiently manifest to the whole world, and to whom the affairs of his own Church could not be hidden. But if afterwards he did not fully side with Augustine and other writers in enumerating the persecutions of the Church, this ought to be attributed not to fault but to wisdom; for otherwise, if he had appealed to the ninth persecution, which they call Aurelian's, he would not have attained the aim he had set himself against the Manichaean, nor would his arguments have obtained full force. Meanwhile, however, let no one be angry with me, as though because I wished to depart from the opinion of Augustine and of others.

For I do not intend to bring these men into odium, or to assign to them the mark of error; but only to disclose the true and genuine meaning of Leo. For the rest, both Augustine and others rightly reckoned Aurelian among the persecutors of the Church—namely on account of his dire and monstrous disposition against the Christians, whom indeed he would have harassed with every kind of punishment, as he had decreed, had he not, by the disposing vengeance of almighty God, been slain amid the beginnings of his fury. But whether the things we have written thus far sufficiently demonstrate Quesnel's negligence, the reader himself will judge. We have had this one thing only in our wishes:

namely, to vindicate the testimony of Leo from every mark of error, and at the same time to show that it remains firm that, in the consulship of Probus and Paulinus, the errors of Manes came to be known as deserving condemnation, when the eighth persecution was raging fiercely against the Christians. 5. But what, finally, if it were objected to me that already many years before the consulship of Probus and Paulinus the eighth persecution, which is ascribed to Valerian, had ceased to rage? What, if this persecution were extended beyond its due limits, with no account whatever taken of Gallienus, Valerian's son, surviving in the empire; or of Claudius, who removed the tyrant Aureolus; of Quintillus, of Aurelian, of Tacitus, who, Valerian being dead, held the reins of the Roman empire?

Could those words of Leo, When the eighth persecution was now raging fiercely against the Christians, have been referred to the times of Valerian, who in the year 259 departed from this light? For from his death down to the said consulship of Probus and Paulinus eighteen years elapsed. Since therefore I was pondering these things with myself, and, led by zeal for truth—which I have always pursued in every kind of writing—I set before myself this difficult knot to be untied, it was necessary to inquire more diligently what that word raging fiercely (desaeviret) meant, and in what sense St. Leo employed it.

In this matter, since the ancient Latin writers do not agree, and have employed that word desaevio in various significations, I resolved to select and here set forth that meaning which was more conformable to Leo's context. For the ancients did not always employ the word desaevio to signify the fervor of cruelty which someone is wont to apply against others; nay rather, and with greater propriety, they transferred it to indicate one who, gradually desisting from cruelty, with all anger removed, makes peace with his enemies. And that Leo in truth spoke in this latter acceptation, the monuments of the Church make plain.

For Gallienus, who held the reins of the empire together with his father Valerian—although, while both were reigning together, that eighth persecution against the Christians had been stirred up by their decrees—yet, Valerian being dead, Gallienus himself surviving in the empire, moved by piety toward the Christians, checked all movements of cruelty, and, the earlier decrees being retracted, resolved to act more gently and more moderately toward our people. If matters were so, as Eusebius relates (Ecclesiastical History, book VII, chapter 13), discoursing about the peace restored to the Churches under Gallienus, who does not see that that difficult knot is now entirely untied, and that whole interval of time which was objected has been almost wholly removed from the midst?

That Gallienus's reign, moreover, is to be extended down to the year 269, both the tables of the Church and those of the Roman emperors make manifest. Therefore, if under Gallienus reigning alone matters were conducted more gently and more moderately with the Christians throughout the whole Roman world; if moreover Aurelian's decrees concerning the seeking out of Christians for death were not carried into execution; if finally under Aurelian himself no martyrs arose—who could ever suspect either that Leo spoke there less aptly, or that in those words, when the eighth persecution was now raging fiercely against the Christians, any error is contained?

But now it is time that, passing over Quesnel's cavils, we make our advance to those things which lay open the trifles and arguments of Beausobre, set against the preceding chapters.