Collected Works 24 part 4/5

'But now I write to you, if any man that is named a brother among you be a fornicator or an idolater' (for what is so closely joined?) 'or an extortioner' (for what is so near akin?) and the rest, 'with such a one not even to take food'—much less the Eucharist; since, forsooth, 'a little leaven spoils the whole lump.' Likewise to Timothy: 'Lay hands hastily on no one, neither be partaker of other men's sins.' Likewise to the Ephesians: 'Be not therefore partakers with them; for you were once darkness.' And still more pressingly: 'Have no communion with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. For the things that are done by them in secret it is shameful even to speak of.' What is more shameful than unchastities?

But if he directs the Thessalonians to withdraw even from a brother who walks disorderly, how much more from a fornicator? For these things have been deliberated by Christ, who loves the Church, who gave himself for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water in the word, and might present the Church to himself glorious, not having spot or wrinkle—after the washing, that is—but that she should be holy and without reproach: thereafter, that is, without the wrinkle of old age, like a virgin; without the spot of fornication, like a bride; without the reproach of vileness, like one cleansed.

What if here too you should conceive a reply—that communion is indeed taken away from sinners, and above all from those polluted in the flesh, but for the present only, being of course to be restored through the endeavor of repentance, according to that clemency of God which prefers the sinner's repentance to his death? For this foundation of your opinion must be battered down on every side. We say, therefore, that if it had been fitting for the divine clemency to repeat the demonstration of itself even for those who have lapsed after the faith, the apostle would have spoken thus: 'Have no communion with the works of darkness—unless they have repented'; and: 'With such a one not even to take food—unless afterward, by rolling in it, they have wiped off the mire from the brethren'; and:

'Whoever shall defile the temple of God, God shall defile him—unless he has shaken off the ashes of all the hearths in the church from his head.' For he ought to have likewise determined those things which he had condemned—up to what point and under what condition he had condemned—if he had condemned with a temporal and conditional and not a perpetual severity. But since in all his epistles he both forbids such a one to be admitted after the faith, and thrusts the one admitted out of communion, without hope of any condition or time, he stands rather by our opinion, showing that the Lord prefers that repentance which, before the faith, before baptism, is held more worthy than the death of the sinner—the sinner being once washed through Christ's grace, once dead for our sins. For this the apostle established even in his own person.

For affirming that Christ came for this, to save sinners, of whom he himself had been the chief, what does he add? 'And I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.' Thus that clemency of God, preferring the sinner's repentance to his death, looks to those still ignorant and still unbelieving, for the freeing of whom Christ has come—not to those who already know God and have learned the sacrament of the faith. But if God's clemency belongs to those still ignorant and unbelieving, then surely repentance too invites clemency to itself—that species of repentance being reserved which follows the faith, which either for the lighter offenses may obtain pardon from the bishop, or for the greater and irremissible ones from God alone. XIX.

But how far shall we go on about Paul, when even John seems somehow to applaud the opposing party? As though in the Apocalypse he had manifestly set the aid of repentance beside fornication, where the Spirit commands to the angel of the Thyatirans that he has something against him, in that he tolerated the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and teaches and seduces my servants to commit fornication and to eat of things sacrificed to idols. 'And I gave her a space of time, that she might enter upon repentance, and she is unwilling to enter upon it in the name of fornication. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and her adulterers with her into the greatest tribulation, unless they repent of her works.' But it is well that this agrees with the apostles and with the rules both of faith and of discipline.

For 'whether I,' he says, 'or they, so we preach.' It concerns the whole sacrament, therefore, to believe nothing to have been granted by John which was denied by Paul. Whoever observes this equality of the Holy Spirit will be led by Him into His meaning. For it was a heretical woman, who had undertaken to teach what she had learned from the Nicolaitans, that was secretly introducing herself into the Church, and deservedly He urged her to repentance. For who doubts that a heretic, deceived by instruction, once his lapse is afterward recognized and expiated by repentance, both obtains pardon and is brought back into the Church? Whence among us also, as an equal to the heathen—nay, even beyond the heathen—the heretic too, purged through the baptism of truth under both names, is admitted.

But if you are certain that that woman, after the faith, living in heresy, afterwards expired in it, so that you claim pardon from repentance for her not as for a heretic but as for a faithful sinner—let her indeed do repentance, but unto the end of adultery, yet not to obtain restoration as well. For this will be that repentance which we too acknowledge to be owed, much more indeed, but which we reserve to God for its pardon. Finally, that same Apocalypse in its later parts decreed that the shameful and fornicators—like the fearful and unbelieving and murderers and sorcerers and idolaters, who were such a thing while in the faith—should be cast into the lake of fire, without any conditional condemnation. For it will not be seen to relish of the heathen, since it pronounced concerning the faithful:

'Those who overcome shall have these things by inheritance, and I will be their God, and they shall be to me for sons.' And thus he subjoined: 'But to the fearful and unbelieving and shameful and fornicators and murderers and sorcerers and idolaters, their portion shall be in the lake of fire and brimstone, which is the second death.' So too again: 'Blessed are they who do according to the commandments, that they may have power over the tree of life and over the gates for entering into the holy city. Dogs, sorcerers, the fornicator, the murderer, outside'—those, of course, who do not act according to the commandments. For it belongs to them to be put outside who have been within. 'For what have I to do with judging those who are without?'—he had said before. From the epistle of John, too, they cull something. It has been said at once: 'The blood of his Son cleanses us from every offense.'

Always, then, and in every way we shall be sinning, if He always cleanses us from every sin; or if not always, then not after faith either, and if not from every sin, then not from fornication either. But whence did he begin? He had first declared that God is light and that there is no darkness in Him, and that we lie if we say we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in darkness. But if, he says, we walk in the light, we shall have fellowship with Him, and the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord cleanses us from every sin. Do we then, walking in the light, sin, and being cleansed while sinning in the light? By no means. For he who sins is not in the light, but in darkness.

Hence too he shows in what manner we shall be cleansed from sin while walking in the light, in which sin cannot be committed. He says that we are so cleansed by God, not as though we do sin, but because we do not sin. For walking in the light, and having no fellowship with darkness, we shall act as cleansed, not by laying aside sin, but by not admitting it. For this is the power of the Lord's blood, that those whom it has already cleansed from sin, and thenceforth established in the light, should thenceforth remain clean, if they persevere in walking in the light. But he adds, you say: if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive them us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Surely not from uncleanness?

Or if it is so, then also from idolatry? But the sense is other. For lo, again he says: if we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us. The more, my little children, have I written these things to you, that you sin not; and if you shall have sinned, we have an advocate with God the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins. According to this, you say, it will be established both that we sin and that we have pardon. What then shall be done, when going on I find something else? For he denies that we sin at all, and on this he dwells most fully, that he may concede nothing of the sort, setting forth that sins have been once for all blotted out by Christ, not thereafter to have pardon; wherein he consigns these his meanings to an admonition of chastity.

Everyone, he says, who has this hope, purifies himself, because He also is pure. Everyone who commits sin commits iniquity also, and sin is iniquity. And you know that He was manifested to take away sins — surely such as are still to be admitted. Since he subjoins: Everyone who abides in Him sins not. Everyone who sins has neither seen Him nor known Him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous. He who commits sin is of the devil, since the devil sins from the beginning. For to this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil. For indeed He destroyed them, freeing man through the laver, the bond of death being given up to him.

And therefore everyone who is born of God does not commit sin, because the seed of God abides in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. In this the children of God and the children of the devil are made manifest. In what, unless in that the former by not sinning — from the time they were born of God — the latter by sinning, because they are of the devil, are as though they had never been born of God at all? But if he says, he who is not righteous is not of God, he who is not chaste, how shall he again become of God who has already ceased to be so?

It is close, then, to saying that John had slipped from himself, denying in the first part of his epistle that we are without sin, but now prescribing that we sin not at all; and there indeed flattering us somewhat with pardon, but here strictly denying that they are sons of God whoever shall have sinned. But far be it. For neither have we ourselves slipped from the distinction of sins from which we set out. For here too John commended it, namely that there are certain sins of daily incursion, to which we are all subject. For to whom will it not befall either to be angry unjustly and beyond the setting of the sun, or to raise his hand, or easily to curse, or rashly to swear, or to break the faith of a compact, or to lie out of shame or necessity?

In business, in duties, in trade, in food, in sight, in hearing, by how much are we tempted? So that, if there were no pardon for these, salvation would fall to no one. For these, then, there will be pardon through Christ the Intercessor of the Father. But there are also others contrary to these, as heavier and deadly, which do not receive pardon: murder, idolatry, fraud, denial, blasphemy, and surely adultery and fornication, and any other violation of the temple of God. For these Christ will no longer be the Intercessor; these he who has been born of God will not admit at all, being about not to be a son of God if he shall have admitted them. Thus John's reasoning of the diversity will hold good, disposing the distinction of sins, when now he affirms, now denies that the sons of God sin.

For he was looking ahead to the conclusion of his letter, and was laying up beforehand these meanings for it, being about to speak more plainly at the end: If anyone knows his brother to commit a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and the Lord will give him life, even to him who does not sin unto death. For there is a sin unto death; I do not say of that, that anyone should ask concerning it. He himself too remembered that Jeremiah was forbidden by God to intercede for a people sinning mortal sins. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin unto death. But we know that everyone who is born of God does not sin — namely the sin which is unto death. Thus nothing now remains but either that you deny adultery and fornication to be mortal sins, or that you confess them irremissible, for which one is not even permitted to intercede.

XX. The teaching of the apostles, then, properly indeed instructs and determines, chiefly, the mystery of all sanctity toward the temple of God, and everywhere it uproots from the church every sacrilege of unchastity, without any mention of restoration. Yet I wish, out of superabundance, to bring in also the testimony of some companion of the apostles, suited to confirm from the nearest source the teaching of the masters. For there stands also a heading, the Epistle of Barnabas to the Hebrews, of a man sufficiently authorized by God, as one whom Paul set beside himself in the tenor of abstinence: Or is it I alone and Barnabas who have not the power of working? And certainly the Epistle of Barnabas is more widely received among the churches than that apocryphal Shepherd of adulterers.

And so, admonishing his disciples to leave behind all beginnings and rather to press on to perfection, and not again to lay foundations of repentance from dead works: for it is impossible, he says, that those who were once enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and have partaken of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the sweet word of God, when their age is now declining, if they have fallen away, should again be recalled to repentance, crucifying afresh in themselves the Son of God and putting Him to shame. For the earth which drinks in the moisture often coming down upon it, and has brought forth grass fit for those for whose sake it is also tilled, obtains the blessing of God; but when it brings forth thorns, it is rejected and nigh to a curse, whose end is for burning.

He who learned this from the apostles and taught it with the apostles never knew of a second repentance promised by the apostles to the adulterer and fornicator. For he interpreted the law most excellently and preserved its figures now in the very truth. To this aspect of discipline, in fine, provision was made concerning the leper: But if the eruption break out in the skin and cover the whole skin from head to foot throughout all the view, and the priest, when he has seen it, shall pronounce him clean, since it has turned to white, he is clean. But on whatever day there appears in him living flesh of such a color, he is defiled.

For he willed it to be understood that a man converted from the former habit of the flesh into the whiteness of faith — which is reckoned a fault and blemish in the world — and wholly renewed, is clean, one who is now not spotted, not sprinkled with the old and the new. But if, after abolition, anything of that old should revive into oldness, then that which was held dead by sin is again to be judged unclean in his flesh, and no longer to be expiated by the priest. Thus adultery, relapsing from the former state and staining the unity of the new color from which it had been excluded, is an uncleansable fault. Likewise concerning the house:

If any spots and hollows should have been reported to the priest in the walls, before he entered to inspect it, he commands that all things which are in the house be removed, that so what belonged to the house should not become unclean. Then, having entered, if the priest should have found the hollows greenish or reddish, and their appearance lower than the surface of the wall, he was to go out to the door and set that house apart for seven days. Then on the seventh day, having returned, if he had observed that touch spread in the walls, he was to command that those stones in which the touch of leprosy had been should be dug out and cast outside the city into an unclean place, and that other stones, polished and solid, should be taken and set in the place of the former, and that the house should be plastered over with other dust.

For it behooves, when one comes to the high priest of the Father, Christ, that all impediments first be removed from the house of our man in the time of the week, so that the house which remains, flesh and soul, may be clean; so that where the word of God has entered it and found spots of redness and greenness, the deadly and bloody senses may at once be drawn out and cast forth (for the Apocalypse too set death upon the green horse, but the warrior upon the red one), and that in their place polished stones, fitted into the joint and firm, be laid beneath, such as become the sons of Abraham, so that thus the man may be fit for God.

But if, after recovery and reformation, the priest should again observe in the same house something of the former hollows and spots, he pronounced it unclean, and commanded the materials and stones and all its structure to be taken down and cast into an unclean place. This will be the man, flesh and soul, who, after baptism and the entrance of the priests, having been reformed, once more takes on the scabs and spots of the flesh, and is cast outside the city into an unclean place, delivered indeed to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, and no longer rebuilt in the church after his ruin. So too concerning the union with a bondmaid, who had been reserved for a man, not yet redeemed, not yet freed: Provision shall be made for her, he says, and she shall not die, because she was not yet manumitted, for whom she was being kept.

For the flesh not yet manumitted by Christ, for whom it was being kept, was being defiled with impunity; but so, once manumitted, it has no pardon. XXI. If the apostles knew these things better, they surely cared for them better. But let me now run down even to this rank, distinguishing between the teaching of the apostles and their power. Discipline governs man, power assigns. But again, what is power? The Spirit. And the Spirit is God. But what did it teach? That there is to be no fellowship with the works of darkness. Observe what it commands. But who could grant sins? This belongs to Him alone. For who forgives sins but God alone? And surely mortal sins, which shall have been committed against Him and against His temple?

For as to those things which hold a guilt against you in your own case, you are bidden to forgive even seventy times seven, in the person of Peter. And so, if it were established that even the blessed apostles themselves had forgiven any such thing, whose pardon was competent from God, not from man, they would have done it not from discipline but from power. For they even raised the dead, which God alone does, and restored the disabled, which no one but Christ, nay even inflicted plagues, which Christ would not. For it did not befit Him to rage, who had come to suffer. Ananias was struck, and Elymas — Ananias with death, Elymas with blindness — so that by this very thing it might be proved that Christ could do these things also. So too the prophets had pardoned to penitents both slaughter and, along with it, adultery, because they had also given proofs of severity.

Show me, then, even now, O apostolic man, prophetic examples, that I may recognize your divinity, and claim for yourself the power of remitting sins of this kind. But if you have been allotted the offices of discipline alone, and are to preside not over command but over ministry, who or how great are you to forgive, who, exhibiting neither prophet nor apostle, lack that virtue whose it is to forgive? «But the church,» you say, «has the power of forgiving sins.» This I both acknowledge and dispose of the more, I who have the Paraclete Himself in the new prophets saying: «The church can forgive a sin, but I will not do it, lest they sin in other respects also.» What if a pseudo-prophetic spirit has pronounced it?

And yet it would rather have belonged to a subverter both to commend himself by clemency and to relax the rest toward sinning. Or if he desired to aim at this too according to the Spirit of truth, then the Spirit of truth can indeed grant pardon to fornicators, but with the harm of the many He will not. Now I ask concerning your own opinion, whence you usurp this right for the church. If it be because the Lord said to Peter: Upon this rock I will build my church, to you I have given the keys of the kingdom of heaven, or:

Whatsoever you shall bind or loose on earth shall be bound or loosed in the heavens — do you therefore presume that the power of loosing and binding has been derived to you also, that is, to every church akin to Peter, such as you are, overturning and changing the Lord's manifest intention, conferring this personally upon Peter? Upon you, He said, I will build my church, and: I will give you the keys, not to the church, and: Whatsoever you shall loose or bind, not what they shall loose or bind. For so too the outcome teaches. In him the church was constructed, that is, through him; he himself first put the key to use — you see how: Men of Israel, give ear to what I say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man appointed to you by God, and the rest.

He himself, in fine, was the first to unbar in the baptism of Christ the entrance of the heavenly kingdom, whereby the sins formerly bound are loosed and those are bound which have not been loosed, according to true salvation; and he bound Ananias with the bond of death and loosed the man weak in his feet from the fault of his ill health. But also in that dispute as to whether the law was to be kept or not, Peter first of all, moved by the Spirit and having spoken beforehand about the calling of the nations, said: And now, why do you tempt the Lord about imposing a yoke on the brethren which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear? But rather through the grace of Jesus we believe that we shall obtain salvation, even as they. This sentence both loosed the things of the law that had been omitted and bound the things that had been reserved.

To such a degree was the power of loosing and binding, entrusted to Peter, nothing as regards the capital sins of the faithful. For if the Lord had bidden him forgive a brother sinning against him even seventy times seven, surely He would afterward have enjoined nothing to be bound, that is, retained, unless perhaps such things as one may have committed against the Lord, not against a brother. For it is prejudged that sins against God are not to be remitted, when those committed against man are pardoned. What now has this even to do with the church, and indeed your church, O psychic? For according to Peter's person this power will befit spiritual men, either an apostle or a prophet. For the church itself, properly and principally, is the Spirit Himself, in whom is the Trinity of one Divinity, Father and Son and Holy Spirit.

He gathers that church which the Lord placed in three. And thus thereafter also every number which shall have conspired into this faith is reckoned as the church by its Author and Consecrator. And therefore the church indeed will forgive sins, but the church of the Spirit, through a spiritual man, not the church as a number of bishops. For the right and the arbitration belong to the Lord, not to the servant; to God Himself, not to the priest. XXII. But you now pour out this power even upon your martyrs.

As soon as anyone by consent has put on the still soft chains under the new name of custody, at once the adulterers court him, at once the fornicators approach, already prayers resound around him, already the tears of every defiled person stand in pools around him; nor do any more redeem access to the prison than those who have lost the church. Men and women are violated in the darkness, plainly known from their use of lusts, and they seek peace from those who are in peril concerning their own. Others flee to the mines and return thence as communicants, where now another martyrdom is necessary for the new sins after the martyrdom. For who on earth and in the flesh is without fault? What martyr, an inhabitant of the world, a suppliant for pence, subject to the physician and the money-lender?

Suppose now under the sword, the head already poised for the stroke; suppose on the gibbet, the body already stretched out; suppose on the stake, the lion already let loose; suppose on the axle, the fire already piled up — in the very security, I say, and possession of martyrdom, who permits a man to grant what is to be reserved for God, by whom those things have been condemned without excuse, which not even the apostles, so far as I know, being themselves martyrs, judged to be grantable? In fine, Paul had already fought with beasts at Ephesus when he decreed destruction for the incestuous man. Let it suffice the martyr to have purged his own sins. It is the mark of an ungrateful or proud man to scatter upon others also what he obtained as a great thing. Who has loosed another's death by his own, save the Son of God alone? For even in His very passion He freed the robber.

For to this end He had come, that He Himself, pure from sin and wholly holy, might meet death for sinners. Accordingly you who rival Him in forgiving sins — if you yourself have committed nothing, plainly suffer for me. But if you are a sinner, how will the oil of your little torch be able to suffice both for you and for me? Even now I have something whereby to test Christ. If for this reason Christ is in the martyr, that the martyr may absolve adulterers and fornicators, let him declare the secrets of the heart, that so he may grant sins, and he is Christ. For thus did the Lord Jesus Christ show forth His power: Why do you think evil in your hearts? For which is easier, to say to the paralytic: your sins are forgiven you, or: rise and walk?

Therefore, that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, I say to you, paralytic: rise and walk. If the Lord took such care over the proof of His power, so as to expose men's thoughts and thus command health, lest it should not be believed that He could forgive sins, it is not lawful for me to believe the same power to be in anyone without the same proofs. Yet when you demand pardon from a martyr for adulterers and fornicators, you yourself confess that crimes of this kind are to be washed away by nothing but one's own martyrdom, you who presume upon another's. So far as I know, martyrdom too will be another baptism. For I have, He says, another baptism as well. Whence also from the wound of the Lord's side flowed water and blood, the material for both lavers.

I ought, then, to free another by the first laver too, if I can by the second. It is necessary that I press on to the end: whatever authority, whatever reasoning restores ecclesiastical peace to the adulterer and fornicator, the same ought also to come to the aid of the penitent murderer and idolater, certainly of the denier, and surely of him whom, wrestling with torments in the battle of confession, cruelty has cast down. But it is unworthy of God and of His mercy, of Him who anticipates the sinner's repentance before death, that those should more easily return into the church who fell by wantoning than those who fell by fighting. Our indignation urges us to say: will you recall defiled bodies rather than bloodied ones? Which repentance is more pitiable — that which lays low the flesh that was tickled, or truly the flesh that was torn?

Which pardon in all cases is more just — that which the voluntary sinner implores, or that which the unwilling one implores? No one is compelled to deny against his will, no one is a fornicator against his will. There is no force toward lust except lust itself; it knows not how to be constrained wherever it pleases. But denial — how many devices of the executioner and kinds of penalties compel it? Who has more denied — he who lost Christ when tormented, or he who lost Him when delighted? He who grieved while he lost, or he who sported while he lost?