Commonitorium 1 part 5/6

I suspect that the faction grew thus, because within the space of a single century scarcely one or two—namely Optatus and Augustine—were found who by their writings might lay open their frauds and deceits and convict their snares, while in the meantime all the Donatists everywhere, in each place, kept clamoring with abusive voices, as Optatus says in Book 1, no. 4, to whom he himself, seizing some occasion, made reply. 'In what way,' says Optatus, 'satisfaction will also be given to the desires of some. For it has often been desired by many that, for the unearthing of the truth, a conflict of the parties should be held by certain defenders; and it could have been done.' Ambrose means the Bishops who lapsed at Ariminum in the year of Christ 359, whom Constantius compelled to abjure the faith on October 10,

of the same year, while he denied a return to their own homes to the Bishops, worn out as they were by poverty and age. What was the cause of so great evils, Severus Sulpicius reveals in Book 2 of the Sacred History, chapter 41, discoursing of the legates sent to the Emperor: 'On the part of our men,' says he, 'were chosen young men, too little learned and too little cautious; but those sent by the Arians were old men, crafty, and strong in talent, steeped in the sluggishness of perfidy, who easily proved superior before the King.'

But once the deceit was recognized, the Bishops of Ariminum bore witness, by the Body of the Lord and by whatever is holy in the Church, that they had suspected no evil, which things, weeping, they asserted, being ready to condemn both their former subscription and all the blasphemies of the Arians, as Jerome says in the Dialogue against the Luciferians. Thus indeed read the Royal Codices, whereas the editions had 'of Confessions.' Baluzius. The second of the prelates of Carthage, the memory of whom has come down even to us. Under him two Carthaginian Councils were celebrated: the first, concerning the baptizing of heretics, by the Bishops of Proconsular Africa and Numidia, at the beginning of the third century.

For Tertullian, who certainly, as is reported, lapsed concerning the baptism of heretics, says in the book On Baptism, published after the year of Christ 200: 'Concerning heretics indeed, what ought to be observed, who would worthily treat? for it has been published to us'; by which words the fair reader will grant that he had regard to the decree of Agrippinus. Hence the dating of such a Council in the year of Christ 215 was not quite rightly affixed by Father Harduinus, especially since Cyprian, in Letter 73, addressed to Jubaianus in the year of Christ 254, says:

'Among us it is no new or sudden matter that we judge they ought to be baptized who come from heretics to the Church, since now many years and a long age have passed, since under Agrippinus, a man of good memory, very many Bishops, meeting together into one, decreed this.' The other Council, in which the canon was sanctioned 'That no cleric should undertake a tutelage or guardianship,' was celebrated about the year of Christ 215. When the Third Carthaginian Council was celebrated by Cyprian on the cause of rebaptism in the year of Christ 255 or 256, on the Kalends of September, with 87 Bishops of the Proconsular Province, of Numidia, and of Mauretania, Stephen was gravely disturbed, who shortly before had succeeded Lucius.

Whence, a synod having been convened at Rome in the year 256, he issued sharp and stinging Apostolic letters to Africa, and to Firmilian, to Helenus of Tarsus, and to others, and—if we give credence to Dionysius of Alexandria in his letter to Xystus—he decreed 'that there should be no communion with those who rebaptize; but that the greatness of the matter must be considered, because not just any, but very great and noble Bishops are the men to whom this has seemed good.' The letter being lost, we have its opinion preserved in Letter 74 of Cyprian to Pompeianus. For being consulted by Pompeius, Bishop of Sabrata, he excerpted these things from Stephen's letter: 'If anyone, therefore, should come to us from any heresy whatsoever, let nothing be innovated except what has been handed down, that hands be laid upon him unto penance;

since the heretics themselves do not baptize those who come over to one or another of them, but only admit them to communion.' That the Pontiff did not err in the matter of rebaptism, the most learned Father Dom Constant Coustant proves with so great a light of arguments, in Volume 1 of the Letters of the Pontiffs, from page 2217, that whoever is not persuaded by them is either too slow or too malignant. He understands the third African universal Council, which Augustine, with singular modesty, refutes in Books 2 and 3 On Baptism against the Donatists. That the sons covered their father's privy parts being turned away, with a cloak thrown over their backs—as Gregory, in the 25th book of the Moralia, chapter 22, says—is that good subjects so dislike the evils of their superiors, that nevertheless they conceal these from others:

'They carry,' says he, 'the covering being turned away, because, judging the deed and yet venerating the teaching office, they are unwilling to see what they cover.' This prudent counsel of the excellent Pontiff and of Vincentius is most highly commended by the famous editor of Cyprian from the Protestant side, John Fell, Bishop of Oxford; but it pleases others to chastise the errors of the Fathers, among whom Le Clerc has gladly professed his name; for which cause, in his 6th Critical and Ecclesiastical Letter, he blames all dissimulations in Ecclesiastical history as illicit. But let us grant that the sins of great men are to be chastised, lest perchance the incautious follow them;

yet the manner in which this has been performed by certain persons befits a man not, I say, Christian, but not even ingenuous: namely, with bitterness, rage, and acerbity, deceitfully exaggerating slight errors with invidious voices, while passing over and dissimulating their immense merits. For such and so great iniquity Le Clerc himself was gravely called to account by men conspicuous for probity and learning, which it was necessary to point out, by giving him his due, lest anything worthy of notice be dissimulated in Ecclesiastical history. 2 Tim. 2. Gal. 1. Father Macedo suspects that Pope Gelasius had regard to this passage of Vincentius, when in his Letter

to the Bishops appointed throughout Picenum, he calls a certain crazed old Pelagian 'a fly about to die,' whereas the common reading, as he himself says, has 'flies that are dying'; whence in the Ecclesiastical-Polemical Commentary, chapter 11, he infers that the Lirinensian was not infected with the Pelagian plague. He could have added that he is also called a frog by Gelasius. 'There has been brought before us,' says he, 'a wretched old man named Seneca, in the mire of the Pelagian abyss, just as we read of certain ones in the Apocalypse, imprudently immersed as one of the frogs.' But that Vincentius's work was known to Gelasius, I do not believe: otherwise he would have repaid him his deserved honor in the review of books, and that testimony of Ecclesiasticus 10, v. 1, about dying flies he perhaps read in Optatus of Milevis, Book 7, no.

no. 4, or in Augustine, Book 2 against the Letter of Petilianus, chapter 10, where he says: 'On account of their numerousness I think they are compared to flies; but these exterminate the oil of sweetness, who look not to God's grace itself, but to the morals of men.' Deut. 13. This is the reading of the Royal Codex. Whence the conjecture of Bartholomew Petrus of Douai is confirmed, who in the margin of his edition noted that here should be read 'aestus' (heat) for that which the editions had, 'actus' (acts). Baluzius. I marvel that the most learned man Dionysius Petavius, in Volume 5 of the Dogmatic Theology, Book 1, chapter 6, no. 15, reads the opposite, as though indeed Vincentius had said 'and him in full soundness of faith,' against the editions and the very context:

especially since it did not escape that man, filled with every kind of erudition, that Apollinaris was reproved by Basil in Letter 293, and by Gregory of Nazianzus in Letter 1 to Cledonius, page 744, as inclining toward the error of Sabellius—of which matter the latter adduces as witnesses the man's own books. Hence Leontius is by no means to be heeded, in the book On Sects, Act 4, Volume 11 of the Library of the Fathers, when he affirms that the man did not err concerning the Trinity. 'Although,' says he, 'both the Gregories accuse him of error in this part also.' But besides the Gregories there is also Basil and the Lirinensian, to pass over others; whence I suspect that the books of Apollinaris, in which Nazianzen detected the error, did not reach Leontius:

unless perhaps one would rather say that the man published contradictory doctrines, which could have happened to him while 'in treating of Theology he sought arguments not from the Scriptures, but from human inventions,' as Basil says. Rom. 7. So that the Arians might more easily persuade the unwary that the Word was of another substance than the Father, they asserted that He suffered in the flesh; and they said that that divinity of the Word had been to the body as it were a secondary thing in the manner of a soul; whence, according to their mind, the divinity had been as it were converted into the humanity, while it took the place of the substantive form of the man in Christ. This error, destroying the faith of the assumed humanity, besides the Lirinensian, Leontius reproaches them with, in On Sects, Act 2, and Athanasius in the book

On the Saving Advent, and in another On the Incarnation of Christ; and most of all Hilary, throughout the whole Book 10 On the Trinity, whence at no. 9 he says: 'Very many of them, out of fear of the passion and the weakness of suffering, will have it that He was not in the nature of the impassible God... but that He was of a nature inferior to God the Father, and trembled with fear of human suffering, and groaned at the atrocity of bodily punishment.' Since these things are so, now without any ambiguity the whole controversy is easily resolved which Claudianus Mamertus, Berengarius, and a certain John, before Philip, Abbot of Bonne-Espérance, stirred up against Hilary, as though he denied human passions in Christ, at no. 23 of the same book, where he says:

«The Lord Jesus Christ truly suffered, while He was struck, while He was hung up, while He was crucified, while He died: yet the Passion, rushing upon the body of the Lord, was both not without a Passion, and yet did not draw forth the nature of the Passion, since on the one hand it raged with a penal office, and on the other the power of His body, without any sense of the penalty, received in itself the force of the penalty that was raging against it.» The meaning therefore is this: the Passion by which Christ was struck belonged on the part of the body, that is, of the humanity assumed by the Word, which was altered by sensation, pain, and endurance; but it was not real on the part of the Word, which lacked the effects of any alteration: and this is what Hilary says, that the Son of God received in Himself the force of the penalty raging against Him without any sense of the penalty. Let the reader consult the general preface.

prefixed to the Works of St. Hilary, edited by P. Coustant. § III. Baluzius judges that the word 'of the Manichaeans' was inserted into the parenthesis by some smatterer who, not understanding Vincent, supposed that the comparison was taken from the Manichaeans. Then, regarding the words 'a Priest,' he says that he fashions tragedians and comedians who openly put on the person of a bishop, no differently than that of other men. Although there were once, as there are now, so many and so great idle frauds of heretics against the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, nevertheless the integrity of the Catholic faith stands like a mighty rock, unmoved against all winds, rains, and torrents; because, says Hilary in Book 2 of On the Trinity, number 22:

«Just as there are certain kinds of medicines so compounded that they are not only useful for individual ailments, but heal all in common and possess within themselves the power of a general remedy; so too the Catholic faith bestows the help of a common cure not against single plagues, but against all diseases; it is not to be weakened by its kind, not overcome by number, not deceived by diversity; but one and the same it stands firm against each and all. For it is a great thing that there are in this one faith as many remedies as there are diseases; and that there are as many doctrines of truth as there shall be pursuits of falsehood. Let the names of the heretics be gathered into one, and let all their schools come forth:»

«let them hear that there is one unbegotten God the Father, and one only-begotten Son of God, the perfect offspring of the perfect Father,» and so forth, as follows. He lived sixty-nine years, when death, in the city of Tyre, carried off that exalted man, worn out by toil, in the year 254 after the birth of Christ, in which year Gallus and Volusianus were slain at Interamna. He was buried in the same city, and those who have surveyed those places report that traces of his tomb survive to this day, as found in Huet, Book 1 of Origeniana, chapter 4, numbers 7 and 9. Valesius, and after him Huet, infer from this testimony of Porphyry that there existed two Origens, both disciples of Ammonius:

our own, who is commonly called Adamantius, of whom Porphyry relates that he obtained much glory among posterity from his writings, and was very well known to him in his youth; but the other was the fellow-disciple of Herennius and Plotinus, of whom frequent mention is made in the Life of Plotinus written by the same Porphyry; and he left nothing to the memory of posterity except a little book on Demons, as is established from Longinus. Now this man was a fellow-disciple and contemporary of Porphyry at Rome, if Eunapius is to be believed. But, that the wide distinction between the two Origens may appear, it must be observed that Adamantius died, according to Eusebius, under the reign of Gallus and Volusianus; whereas the other, according to Porphyry in the Life of Plotinus, was alive under Gallienus, and composed a certain book.

What these chapters of the Scriptures were, Epiphanius sets forth in the Anchoratus, numbers 54 and 62, namely the openings of Genesis: «Very many,» he says, «dispute allegorically about Paradise, and among the rest the frenzied Origen introduced into the world some shadowy notion or other in place of the truth.» And in the latter number, «again: I return to Origen (may God forgive him): he set forth another most absurd fable and allegory for deceiving men, etc.» See the holy man in the passage cited.

Yet here it must be observed that, although Origen sinned on account of his frequent allegories, nevertheless among the ancients no one expounded even the literal sense of Scripture more accurately than he, as is well known to those who have perused his lucubrations. Hence it is indeed to be wished that even some among the ancients had been a little fairer toward Origen; who, after having vigorously made use of the man's labors, afterward stirred up grave quarrels against him. Hilary on Matthew, chapter 5. He understands Priscilla and Maximilla, noble and wealthy women, who corrupted many Churches first with gold, then with wicked doctrines. Concerning these and Montanus, Prosper in his Chronicle, at the consulate of Cethegus and Clarus, which fell in the year of Christ 170:

«At this season the false prophecy which is called Cataphrygian took its beginning, with Montanus as its author and Prisca and Maximilla as its raving prophetesses. The province of Phrygia gave its name to the error, because its inventors first arose there and there lived, and even now have their followers in those same parts. They assert that the coming of the Holy Spirit promised by the Lord took place in themselves rather than in the Apostles: they regard second marriages as fornications; and therefore they say that the Apostle Paul permitted them because he knew in part and prophesied in part; for that which is perfect had not yet come. But they rave that this perfect thing came in Montanus and in his prophetesses.»

Tertullian lived as a presbyter of the Church until middle age; «afterward,» says Jerome in his Catalogue of Ecclesiastical Writers, chapter 53, «through the envy and insults of the clergy of the Roman Church, he lapsed into the teaching of Montanus, and in many books made mention of the new prophecy: but specifically he composed volumes against the Church: on Modesty, on Persecution, on Fasts, on Monogamy, six books on Ecstasy, and a seventh which he composed against Apollonius.» The man's fall is indeed to be lamented, since by the same Jerome's testimony in his Letter to Magnus, among the Latins nothing is more learned or more acute than Tertullian; seeing that his Apologeticus and his books Against the Gentiles comprise the whole learning of the age.

He is said to have lived to extreme old age. It pleased the Church and all good men that no deceit should be wrought against the truth by desperate men; so that the ancient sense of the faith might at last be marked by the propriety of a new appellation; but some were indignant, among whom John Le Clerc, in the first volume of his Ars Critica, where he censures the words consecrated by the Church, namely Transubstantiation, Consubstantial, and the like, as though they were words of no value: but the rebuke is unjust, and that man so conducts himself as though one were to say, as Hilary speaks in his book Against the Emperor Constantius, number 16:

«I do not wish, against new poisons, for new compoundings of medicines; I do not wish, against new enemies, for new wars; I do not wish, against new ambushes, for recent counsels.... The Apostle bids us avoid novelties of words, but profane ones: why dost thou exclude the pious ones? especially since it was said by him: All Scripture inspired by God is profitable. 'Unbegettable'—thou nowhere readest it written: is it therefore to be denied because it is new? Thou decreest the Son like to the Father. The Gospels do not preach it: why is it that thou dost not flee this word? In the one thing novelty is chosen, in the other it is removed. Where there is occasion for impiety, novelty is admitted: but where there is the GREATEST AND ONLY SAFEGUARD OF RELIGION, it is excluded.»

But why, in discoursing on words that signify nothing, Le Clerc should adduce as an example those words consecrated by the Church—what prudent person can understand, when by the sense and will of the Church a legitimate meaning has already been attached to those words? which was always lawful and ever will be, though fiercer and perhaps mad critics gnash their teeth, as the Poet says: «It has been lawful, and ever will be lawful, to coin a word stamped with the present mark.» He was noble by birth, but by a defect of nature a eunuch, brought forth from his mother's womb. Whether for this cause he is called 'prodigious' by the Lerinensian is uncertain; yet the Fathers of St. Maur, following Garnier, think it likely.

Certainly in the Commonitory of Marius Mercator, presented to the Church of Constantinople and to Theodosius, these words are read at its opening: 'Coelestius indeed, a eunuch brought forth from his mother's womb.' Let no one infer from these words of Vincent that Novatian said no indulgence or remission was reserved for sinners. For his error was the following, which Tertullian had previously defended: he denied that power had been granted to the Church to remit of itself those more atrocious sins, namely apostasy from the faith, homicide, and fornication, since pardon for such offenses was reserved to God alone. Whence he laid down that perpetual penance must be done for them.

But for lesser sins he acknowledged in the Church the faculty of forgiving. See Petavius, Volume IV of Dogmatic Theology, Book 3, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, chapter 12, number 6. The impure and abominable doctrines of Simon, which are described at length by Irenaeus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, obtained many disciples and defenders, such as Saturninus, Basilides, and his sons Epiphanes and Isidore. Of these the unhappy heirs were Cerdo and Marcion, and in the third century of the Church the Manichaeans; these were succeeded by the Priscillianists, whom St. Leo calls kinsmen of the Manichaeans in his epistle formerly 93, now 15, chapter 4. Whence Prosper in his Chronicle, at the consulate of Ausonius and Olybrius:

At that season Priscillian, a bishop of Galicia, founded a heresy bearing his own name, out of the doctrine of the Manichaeans and Gnostics. That the Gnostics took their beginnings from Simon, Irenaeus is witness. That Simon wished to be glorified by all as God, and was held as such by many, Irenaeus is witness, Book 1 Against Heresies, chapter 20, in the edition of Erasmus; hence it cannot be very easily explained how he said that men are driven to evil by the impulse and necessity of the Creator God. But from Irenaeus we have these things. Since the impious man professed himself the most sublime power, and a certain Helen, the first conception of his mind, through her he said that angels and archangels were created;

by whom the world was fashioned and perversely governed, and they compelled him to come for the amendment of things. Hence he added, as Irenaeus says, «that the prophets had uttered their prophecies as inspired by the world-making angels; wherefore he admonished those who had their hope in him and in his Helen no longer to give heed to them, but to act freely as they pleased. For according to his grace men are saved, but not according to just works. For just works are not such by nature, but by accident, even as the angels who made the world appointed, leading men into bondage by precepts of this kind.» On account of these things, perhaps, the Lerinensian said that according to his (Simon's) mind men are driven to evil by necessity.

What the Lerinensian says at length here and in the following numbers, concerning the abuse of Scripture among heretics, is excerpted from Tertullian's book On Prescription, especially chapters 38, 39, and 40. See below. Whether he excerpted these things about little children incautiously gulping down austere cups from Book 4 of Lucretius On the Nature of Things, I do not dare to determine; yet they are similar to those things which that poet sings, while he extols himself beyond his desert: «...As physicians, when they try to give foul wormwood to children, first touch the rims around the cup with the sweet and golden liquid of honey: that the unwary age of the children may be beguiled as far as the lips, and meanwhile may drink down the bitter draught of wormwood, and though deceived may not be caught, but rather, restored by such a deed, may grow strong.»

But since he by no means grows strong who drinks down a bitter and foul error, however much overlaid with abundant color; therefore the holy man deliberately brings forward the example of those who pre-color noxious juices with the names of medicines, from which a certain and deadly death arises. From this passage Daillé, in his book On the True Use of the Fathers, infers that the Fathers were inconsistent in the doctrine of the faith. But this is the Lerinensian's meaning: because he had shown in several places above that it not rarely happens, by divine judgment and human weakness, that ecclesiastical men of great merit and learning slip and, contrary to the Apostle, announce new doctrines, which he had proven by the examples of Photinus, Apollinaris, Nestorius, Origen, and Tertullian;

lest anyone, under the pretext of the authority of these men, should follow perverse doctrines, as he says at the end of number 24: for this reason he here prudently warns that those are by no means to be heeded who did not teach consistently and live within the Church. Hence in number 45, speaking of the priests who had assembled at Ephesus, he says: «This was deemed best to do, that the opinions of the holy Fathers should be brought forward into the midst; some of whom it was established to have been Confessors, but all of them Catholic priests, and to have so remained, so that namely the ancient doctrine might be confirmed duly and solemnly by their consent and decree.» 1 Corinthians 1. The Lerinensian fittingly prescribes these things according to the sense of the Apostle. For he enjoins two things upon the Corinthians in the cited passage:

first, that the interpreter of the sacred letters should look back to those before him, from whom the Word of God proceeded to those after them. 'Or,' he says, 'did the Word of God proceed from you?' the other, that no one should defend his own opinion with stubborn contention, but should first consult the rest of the Church's Doctors; so that if he sees that what he holds is approved by all, he may now safely hold it; but if it is rejected, he may now safely abandon it; which he intimates when he says: 'Or did it come unto you only?' Let the reader consult that most learned man Melchior Cano, Book 7 of On Theological Topics, chapter 3. Among the heretics who attempted to trouble the Church and to vex the judgments of the faith with their pen, Julian was preeminent, especially from the time when, under Zosimus, in the year of Christ

418, he was deposed from the bishopric of Eclanum, indeed driven out of Italy, a wanderer and an exile having nowhere a fixed seat. For at first he fled to Constantinople, but in the year of Christ 431 or 432, after the Synod of Ephesus, being cast out, he migrated into Gaul. But in the year 439, while Pope Xystus was seated, whether by fraud or by show, he wished to vindicate himself from error, whose wiles the prudence and sagacity of Leo withstood, as Prosper testifies in his Chronicle: «At this season,» he says, «Julian of Eclanum, the most boastful asserter of the Pelagian error, whom the intemperate desire for the bishopric long since lost was agitating, contriving by manifold art of deception a show of correction, attempted to creep into the communion of the Church.

But Pope Sixtus, vigilantly meeting these snares at the urging of the deacon Leo, allowed no entrance to lie open to his pestilential attempts: and so he made all Catholics rejoice at the rejection of the deceitful beast, as though then for the first time the Apostolic sword had cut down that most proud heresy.» And since the deceitful heretic was already, under Leo now Pontiff, stirring up new disturbances around the year of Christ 444: therefore Leo moved his arms against the enemy of the faith, now wounded and weakened by many blows, as the other Prosper testifies in his work On the Promises and Predictions of God, chapter 6, part 4. Vignier adds, and after him the Fathers of St.

Maur, that this very unhappy heretic, after long wanderings hither and thither—on account of which he is called by Fulgentius another fugitive and exiled Cain—at length, as a place of final refuge, dwelt in a certain little village in Sicily; where, teaching the men of his sect, he became from a bishop a schoolmaster, an occupation which Augustine had long before destined for him as suited to his temperament and erudition, in Book 2 of the Unfinished Work, number 51: «You speak of homonyms and equivocals: how then are even the Pelagians themselves to understand you, unless they are first sent to the schools of the Dialecticians, wherever on earth they can be found, for the sake of these things to be said?

Or will you perhaps yourself, before they read your books, expound to them even the categories of Aristotle, and so be about to lecture? Why do you not do this also, most ingenious man, since you are fed in idleness by the deceived wretches?» Thus Jerome said of the pseudo-deacon Anianus of Celeda: «He is most abundantly fed, that he may furnish frivolous words for another's blasphemy.» These two lines, by which the Reader is warned of the loss of the second Commonitory, are extant in the ancient editions, and likewise in a more recent one from the Royal Codices, by whose authority Baluzius corrected the work of the Lerinensian; and it was thought best to retain them along with all the rest. A Synod was celebrated in the year of Christ 431, in the Church which is called Mary; concerning which Prosper thus speaks in his Chronicle: