Let him command that this man — who chose that communion for no other reason than that in the catholic Church he had lost his clerical office on account of disobedience and ruined morals — be removed from his communion. For indeed I, if it please the Lord, keep this rule: that whoever among them has been degraded on account of discipline and wishes to transfer to the catholic Church be received in the humiliation of penitence, to which perhaps they too would compel him, had he wished to remain among them. But from them, consider, I beg you, how execrably it is done: that those whom, living evilly, we rebuke by ecclesiastical discipline, are persuaded to come to another washing, and, that they may merit to receive it, to answer that they are pagans — which word,
that it might not proceed from a Christian mouth, so great a stream of martyrs' blood was shed. Then, as if renewed and as if sanctified, made worse by the discipline which they could not bear, under the appearance of new grace they insult with the sacrilege of a new fury. But if I do ill to take care, through your benevolence, that these things be corrected, let no one complain of me if I cause them to be brought to his notice through public records, which, as I judge, cannot be denied me in the Roman state. For since God commands that we speak and preach the word, and refute those teaching what they ought not, and be instant in season and out of season — as I prove by the dominical and apostolic writings — let no man suppose that silence about these matters is to be urged upon me.
But if they think anything is to be dared violently or by brigandage, the Lord will not be lacking to protect His Church — He who has subjected all earthly kingdoms to His yoke, diffused through the whole world in her bosom. For when a certain tenant of the Church wished, with paternal severity, to recall to catholic communion his daughter, who had been a catechumen among us and was seduced away to them, that being baptized there she might also take up the form of a nun — her parents being unwilling — and I had refused that the woman of corrupted mind be received unless willing and choosing better things by free will, that rustic began to press even with blows, that his daughter should consent to him. Which I immediately forbade to be done in any way.
Yet as we were passing through Spania, his presbyter, standing in the middle of the estate of a catholic and praiseworthy woman, shouted after us with a most shameless voice that we were traitors and persecutors — a reproach he hurled also at that woman, who is of our communion, in the middle of whose estate he was standing. Hearing these cries, I not only restrained myself from strife, but also checked the multitude which accompanied me. And yet if I say, 'Let it be inquired who are or were the traitors or persecutors,' it is answered me: 'We do not wish to dispute, and we wish to rebaptize;
we plunder your sheep with treacherous bites after the manner of wolves; you, if you are good shepherds, be silent' — for what else did Proculeianus command, if indeed he himself commanded it? — 'if you are a Christian, keep this for the judgment of God, unless we do it; you, be silent.' The same presbyter also dared to threaten a rustic man, the tenant of the Church's estate. All these things too, I beg, let Proculeianus know through you; let him restrain the insanity of his clerics, concerning which, honorable Eusebius, I have not been silent before you. You will therefore deign to write back to me not what you yourself feel about all these things — lest you suppose the burden of a judge is imposed on you by me — but what they answer. May the mercy of God keep you unharmed, excellent lord, worthy to be received and most beloved brother.
XXXVI. To my most beloved and most longed-for brother and fellow-presbyter Casulanus, Augustine sends greeting in the Lord. I do not know how it came about that I made no reply to your first letter; yet I am aware that I did not do this out of any contempt for you, for I take delight both in your studies and in your very manner of speech, and I both desire and exhort you, in this youthful age of yours, to advance in the word of God and to abound unto the building up of the Church. But now, having received your second letter, in which by the right of that love in which we are one you demand, with brotherly and most equitable insistence, that I at last make you some answer, I judged that the longing of your affection should be deferred no further, and amid my most pressing occupations I have undertaken to discharge this debt I owe you.
As to your consulting me whether it is lawful to fast on the Sabbath, I answer: if it were in no way lawful, then surely neither Moses nor Elijah nor the Lord Himself would have fasted forty continuous days. Yet by this same reasoning it is concluded that fasting is not unlawful even on the Lord's Day. And nevertheless, whoever should think that this day ought to be appointed for fasting—as certain persons who fast observe the Sabbath—will be, and not undeservedly, no small scandal to the Church. For in those matters concerning which the divine Scripture has established nothing certain, the custom of the people of God, or the ordinances of our forefathers, are to be held as law. And if concerning these we should wish to dispute, and to condemn some men on the strength of the custom of others, an endless wrangling will arise.
Since such disputation, with the labor of much talk, brings forward no sure proofs of the truth, one must by all means take care lest by the storm of contention it becloud the serenity of love. This danger he neglected to avoid, whose lengthy dissertation you thought fit to send me together with your earlier letter, that I might answer it. But my spans of time are not so ample that I should spend them in refuting each of his sentences one by one, when I have need of them for expounding other works that press upon me more urgently.
But, according to that very talent by which you show yourself to me in your letters—a gift of God in you which I greatly love—do you yourself consider a little more carefully that same discourse of a certain townsman, as you write, and you will see that he has not feared to lacerate almost the whole Church of Christ, from the rising of the sun even unto its setting, with words most injurious. Nor would I say 'almost the whole,' but plainly 'the whole.' For not even to those very Romans, whose custom he seems to himself to be defending, is he found to have shown mercy; but he does not know how the onslaught of his revilings redounds upon them also, since he does not perceive it.
For when the arguments fail him by which he might prove that one ought to fast on the Sabbath, he inveighs with insulting derision against the luxuries of feasting, and drunken banquets, and the vilest intoxications—as though not to fast were the same as to be inebriated. But if this be so, what then does it profit the Romans to fast on the Sabbath, when in fact on other days, on which they do not fast, they must, according to this man's argument, be judged drunkards and gluttons?
Moreover, if it is one thing to weigh down the heart in surfeiting and drunkenness—which is always evil—but another thing to relax one's fast with modesty and temperance preserved (which, certainly, when it is done on the Lord's Day, has no Christian to reprove it), then let this man distinguish first the meals of the saints from the voracity and drunkenness of gluttons, lest he make the Romans themselves, when they do not fast, into gluttons; and then let him inquire, not whether it is lawful to be inebriated on the Sabbath—which is not lawful even on the Lord's Day—but whether one ought not to fast on the Sabbath, just as one is not wont to fast on the Lord's Day. And would that he asked it thus, or thus affirmed it, so as not most openly to blaspheme the Church spread throughout the whole world, except at Rome and among a few still in the West.
But as it now stands, who could endure that concerning so many and so great menservants and maidservants of Christ, throughout all the Eastern and even many of the Western Christian peoples, who dine on the Sabbath soberly and modestly, this man should say that they are in the flesh and cannot please God; and that of them is written, 'Depart from me, ye wicked; I will not to know your way'; and that they are gluttons, preferring Judaea to the Church, and preferring the sons of the bondwoman, and consulting by a law not just but voluptuary for the belly, not submitting to discipline; and that they are flesh and savor of death, and other things of this kind—which, if he said them of any one servant of God, who ought to hear him, who ought not to shun him?
But when with these reproaches and curses he persecutes the Church, which is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world and dining on the Sabbath day almost everywhere, I admonish him, whoever he is, to restrain himself. For, seeing you wished me not to know his name, surely you wished me not to pass judgment upon that man. 'The Son of Man,' he says, 'is Lord of the Sabbath, on which it is far more lawful to do well than to do ill.' If, then, we do ill when we dine, on no Lord's Day do we live well. And as for his admitting that the apostles ate on the Sabbath, and saying that the time had not yet come for fasting then, on account of which the Lord says:
'The days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall the sons of the bridegroom fast, for there is a time of joy and a time of mourning'—he ought first to have attended to the fact that there the Lord was speaking of fasting, not of Sabbath fasting. Then, since he wants mourning to be reckoned to fasting and joy to food, why does he not consider that whatever it is which God willed to signify by that which is written—that He rested on the seventh day from all His works—was there a mourning that was signified, and not rather a joy? Unless perchance he will say that in that rest of God and sanctification of the Sabbath a joy was signified to the Jews, but a mourning to Christians.
And yet, when God sanctified the seventh day because on it He rested from all His works, He expressed nothing about fasting or dining on the Sabbath; nor, when afterward He gave command to the Hebrew people concerning the observance of that very day, did He say anything about foods to be taken or not to be taken. Only a rest from a man's own or servile works is enjoined—a rest which the earlier people, receiving it in a shadow of things to come, so kept from works as we now behold the Jews to keep it; not, as is supposed, because the carnal Jews do not rightly understand what Christians rightly understand. For neither do we understand these things better than the prophets, who nevertheless, at
the time when it behooved it thus to be done, kept this Sabbath rest which the Jews think must still be kept. Whence comes it that God commanded a man to be stoned who had gathered wood on the Sabbath; but nowhere do we read of anyone being stoned or judged worthy of any punishment either for fasting on the Sabbath or for dining. Yet which of these two befits rest, and which befits labor, let that very man see who assigned joy to those who eat and mourning to those who fast, or understood it to be so assigned by the Lord, where, answering concerning fasting, He says: 'The sons of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them.'
But as to his saying that the apostles ate on the Sabbath for this reason, that it was not yet the time for them to fast on the Sabbath—because, namely, the tradition of the ancients forbade it—was it then already the time for them not to keep Sabbath rest? Did not this too the tradition of the ancients forbid, and compel them to rest? And yet on that very Sabbath day, on which we read that Christ's disciples ate, they surely plucked the ears of grain—which was not lawful on the Sabbath, because the tradition of the ancients forbade it.
Let him therefore see whether perhaps a more fitting answer might be given him: that the Lord on that day willed these two things to be done by the disciples—one about plucking the ears, the other about taking food—so that the former might be against those who wish to keep Sabbath rest, but the latter against those who compel fasting on the Sabbath; since He had signified the former to be already superstitious once the time was changed, but had willed the latter to be free in either time. Nor would I say this by way of affirming it; but I would show what might be answered him far more aptly than are the things he says. 'How,' he says,
'shall we not be condemned along with the Pharisee, we who fast twice on the Sabbath?'—as though the Pharisee were condemned because he fasted twice in the week, and not rather because, puffed up, he exalted himself above the publican. But this man can say that even those who give the tithes of all their fruits to the poor are condemned along with the Pharisee, because he too proclaimed this among his works—a thing which we desire to be done by many Christians and scarcely find the very fewest doing it; or indeed that whoever has not been unjust, an adulterer, and a robber will be condemned along with the Pharisee, because he boasted that he was not such a man—which, whoever thinks it, is surely mad.
Furthermore, if these good things, which the Pharisee recounted as being in himself, are indeed without doubt good, they are not to be held with that proud boasting which appeared in him, but nevertheless are to be held with the humble piety which was not present in him; so likewise to fast twice in the week, in a man such as that Pharisee was, is unfruitful, but in a man humbly faithful, or faithfully humble, it is religious—although the evangelical Scripture did not say that the Pharisee was condemned, but rather said that the publican was justified. But if this man thought it should be understood in this way, that the Lord's saying:
'Unless your righteousness abound more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven'—so that, unless we fast more than twice in the week, we cannot fulfill this precept—well then: there are seven days, which by the rolling of the seasons are recalled along their own tracks. When, therefore, each man has subtracted two of these, so as not to fast on the Sabbath and the Lord's Day, there remain five days, in respect of which he can surpass the Pharisee who fasted twice in the week. For I think that if anyone fasts three times in the week, he already surpasses the Pharisee who fasted twice in the week.
But if one fasts even four times, or even five times in the week—so that no day is passed over except the Sabbath and the Lord's Day—which many do their whole life long, especially those established in a monastery, then not only the Pharisee who fasted twice in the week, but even the Christian who has been accustomed to fast on the fourth and sixth days and on the Sabbath itself (which the Roman people frequently do) will be surpassed in the labor of fasting. And yet, that this fellow—some townsman disputant or other, as you say—even...
if anyone should so fast on five continuous days, besides the Sabbath and the Lord's Day, that on no day does he refresh his body at all, he calls him carnal—as though food and drink on the other days did not pertain to the flesh—and he judges him a glutton, as though the dinner of the Sabbath alone went down into the belly. To this man, indeed, it does not suffice—that which already suffices for surpassing the Pharisee, namely, that one fast three times in the week—but he compels men, on the six other days except the Lord's Day, so to fast that he says:
'With the ancient stain removed, the two now abiding in one flesh of Christ, under discipline, ought not, with the sons who are without law, and with the princes of Sodom, and with the people of Gomorrah, to hold the voluptuous banquets of the Sabbaths; but rather, with the dwellers in holiness and those devoted to God, by solemn and ecclesiastical right, more and more to fast lawfully, so that the error—even a light one—of six days may be washed away by the fountains of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, whereby we may all, refreshed by the Lord's alogia, with equal heart worthily sing: Thou hast filled, O Lord, the empty soul, and Thou hast given drink to the thirsting soul.'
Saying these things, and excepting only the Lord's Day from the frequency of fasting, he, improvident and incautious, accuses not only the Christian peoples of the East and West, among whom no one fasts on the Sabbath, but even the Roman Church itself. For when he says that those abiding under the discipline of Christ ought not, with the sons who are without law, with the princes of Sodom, with the people of Gomorrah, to hold the voluptuous banquets of the Sabbaths, but rather, with the dwellers in holiness and those devoted to God, by solemn and ecclesiastical right, more and more to fast lawfully, and then, defining what it is to fast lawfully,
he adds and says, 'so that the error—even a light one—of six days may be washed away by the fountains of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.' Surely, then, those who fast fewer than six days in the week he does not think to be lawfully exercising fasting, nor to be devoted to God, nor to be washing away the stains of error which are contracted from this mortal state. Let the Romans therefore see what they are doing, since they too are treated all too abusively by this man's argument; for among them, throughout all these six days, except for the very few clergy or monks, how rarely is anyone found who keeps up daily fasts, especially since fasting on the fifth day of the week does not seem proper there? Then I ask: if the error—even a light one—of each single day is loosed or washed away by the fasting of that same day (for so he says:
'so that the error—even a light one—of six days may be washed away also by the fountains of fasting'—what shall we do about that error which may have crept in on the Lord's Day, on which it is a scandal to fast? Or if on that very day no error steals upon Christians, see, O man, you who accuse gluttons as though you were a great faster, how much honor and profit you attribute to bellies, if there is no erring then, when one dines. Or perhaps he has set up so great a good in the fasting of the Sabbath, that the fasting of the Sabbath alone can abolish the error—even a light one, as he says—of the other six days, that is, even of the Lord's Day itself, and on that one day alone there is no erring, on which of course one fasts the whole day through? What is it, then, that he sets the Lord's Day before the Sabbath, as it were by Christian right?
Behold, according to him the Sabbath day is found to be much more holy, on which both there is no erring—since one fasts through its whole span—and by that same fasting the error of the other six days, and through this even of the Lord's Day itself, is washed away. I think this presumption cannot please you. But now, since he wishes to seem a spiritual man, and accuses those who dine on the Sabbath as carnal, mark how on the Lord's Day he is refreshed not by a frugal meal, but delights in alogia. And what is alogia—a word borrowed from the Greek tongue—but when one indulges in feasting so as to be turned aside from the path of reason? Whence animals lacking reason are called aloga, to whom those given over to the belly are like.
On which account an immoderate banquet, in which the mind, wherein reason holds sway, is in a certain manner overwhelmed by the engorgement of eating and drinking, is called alogia. Moreover, on account of food and drink not of the mind but of the belly, he says that on the Lord's Day alogia must be sung: 'Thou hast filled, O Lord, the empty soul, and Thou hast given drink to the thirsting soul.' O spiritual man! O great faster! O reprover of the carnal, and no belly-worshiper! Behold, this is the man who admonishes us not to corrupt the law of the Lord by the law of the belly, not to sell the bread of heaven for earthly food, and adds: 'For by food Adam perished from paradise, by food Esau lost his birthright.' Behold, this is the man who says: 'For the temptation of the belly is Satan's accustomed calumny, to which he persuades a little that he may take away the whole.'
'And the interpretation of these precepts,' he says, 'bends gluttons down the less.' Does he not seem by these very words of his to be aiming at this, that one should fast even on the Lord's Day? Otherwise the Sabbath day, on which the Lord rested in the tomb, will be holier than the Lord's Day, on which He rose from the dead. For assuredly the Sabbath is holier, if, according to this man's words, on the Sabbath every sin is avoided through fasting, and what has been contracted on other days is abolished, but on the Lord's Day, through the food of the belly, the temptation is not guarded against, and place is given to diabolical calumny, and paradise is lost, and the birthright is forfeited. What is it, then, that once more, contrary to himself, he admonishes us,
that we should be refreshed on the Lord's Day not by a moderate, sober, Christian meal, but, rejoicing and applauding in alogia, should sing: 'Thou hast filled, O Lord, the empty soul, and Thou hast given drink to the thirsting soul'? For surely, if we do not err then, when we fast, and we then wash away the errors of the other six days when we fast on the Sabbath, there will be none worse than the Lord's Day, none better than the Sabbath. Believe me, most beloved brother, no one understands the law as this man does, except one who does not understand it.
For if Adam was ruined not by food but by forbidden food, and Esau, grandson of holy Abraham, was condemned not by food but by food coveted even to the point of contempt for the sacrament which he held in his birthright, then just as the sacrilegious and unbelieving fast impiously, so the holy and faithful dine piously. Now the Lord's Day is set before the Sabbath by faith in the resurrection, not by the custom of refreshment, nor even by the license of wine-soaked song. 'Moses,' he says, 'for forty days ate no bread nor drank water.' But why he said this he subjoined, saying: 'Behold Moses, the friend of God, the lodger of the cloud, the reporter of the law and leader of the people, celebrating six Sabbaths with fasting, gained not offense but merit.'
Does he not attend to what might consequently be objected against this? For assuredly, if he sets forth the example of the fasting Moses on this ground, that in those forty days he fasted, as he says, six Sabbaths, and from this he wishes to persuade that one should fast on the Sabbath—then from this let him persuade also that one should fast on the Lord's Day, since in those forty days Moses no less fasted six Lord's Days. But he adds and says: 'And still, together with Christ, the Lord's Day was being reserved by God for the impending Church.' Why he said this, I do not know: for if it be because much more must one fast after the Lord's Day came together with Christ, then—God forbid—let there be fasting even on the Lord's Day itself;
but if he feared lest, on account of the forty days' fast, it should be objected that one must fast even on the Lord's Day, and therefore added that 'still, together with Christ, the Lord's Day was being reserved for the impending Church,' so that, namely, it might be understood that Moses fasted for this reason even on the day which follows the Sabbath, because Christ had not yet come, through whom that very Lord's Day was made—on which it is not expedient to fast—why then did Christ Himself likewise fast forty days? Why did He not, on those days within the forty, which were six Lord's Days following the Sabbath, break His fast, so as to commend the Lord's Day dinner even before His own resurrection, just as He gave His blood to be drunk before His passion?
You see clearly that the forty days' fast, which this man recalls, is as little to the point for our fasting on the Sabbath as it is little to the point for our fasting on the Lord's Day. Altogether he does not attend to what might be objected to him concerning the Lord's Day, when, just as drunken banquets and every voracious and intoxicated luxury are to be accused, so he accuses the meals of the Sabbaths, though these too may be the meals of the modest and sober. And therefore he need not be answered point by point, since, in reproving the vices of luxury in place of the Sabbath meal, he says the same and the same things over and over, finding nothing else to say except what he says emptily and beside the point.
The question is whether one ought not to fast on the Sabbath, not whether one ought not to indulge in luxury on the Sabbath—which even on the Lord's Day those who fear God do not do, although on that day they certainly do not fast. But who would say what this man has dared to say? 'How,' he says, 'shall those things be ratified as pleasing or worthy to God, which, on a day sanctified to us, drive us to sin?' He confesses the Sabbath day to be sanctified, and says that men are driven to sin, because one dines; and thereby, according to him, either the Lord's Day is not sanctified, and the Sabbath begins to be better, or, if the Lord's Day too is sanctified, we are driven to sin, because we dine.
And he tries to prove by divine testimonies that one must fast on the Sabbath, but whence he might prove this he does not find at all. 'Jacob ate,' he says, 'and drank wine, and was filled, and withdrew from God his Savior, and there fell in one day twenty-three thousand'—as though it had been said: 'Jacob dined on the Sabbath and withdrew from God his Savior.' And the Apostle, when he recalled that so many thousands fell, did not say, 'Let us not dine on the Sabbath, as they dined,' but said, 'Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed fornication, and there fell in one day twenty-three thousand.' What too does he mean by that which he says: 'And the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play'?
The Apostle indeed adduced this testimony too, but in order to forbid them from the servitude of idols, not from a Sabbath dinner. But that this happened on the Sabbath this man does not prove, but, as it pleased him, surmises. And just as it can happen that one fasts and, when the fast is broken, if anyone is a drunkard, he then gets drunk, so it can happen that one does not fast and, if men are temperate, they dine most modestly. What is it, then, that, wishing to persuade the fasting of the Sabbath, he brings forward the Apostle as witness, saying: 'Be not drunk with wine, wherein is all excess'—as though he had said: 'Do not dine on the Sabbath, because therein is all excess'?
But just as this apostolic precept—that they be not drunk with wine, wherein is all excess—is observed by God-fearing Christians when they dine on the Lord's Day, so it is observed when they dine also on the Sabbath. 'That I may more expressly contradict those who err,' he says, 'no one will offend God by fasting, even if he does not earn merit; and moreover, not to offend is to earn merit.' Who would say this, unless one who did not wish to consider what he was saying? Then the pagans, when they fast, do they not for that reason the more offend God? Or, if he wished what he said to be understood of Christians, who does not offend God, if he should wish, with scandal to the whole Church which is everywhere spread abroad, to fast on the Lord's Day?
Then he subjoined testimonies from the Scriptures which avail nothing for the cause he undertook. 'By fasting,' he says, 'Elijah, granted paradise, reigns in the body'—as though those who do not fast on the Sabbath do not preach fasting, just as they preach it who nevertheless do not fast on the Lord's Day; or as though Elijah fasted at that time when the people of God fasted even on the Sabbath. And what we answered concerning Moses' forty days of fasting, this I reckon must be answered also concerning Elijah's forty days. 'By fasting,' he says, 'Daniel escaped unharmed from the dry rage of the lions'—as though he had read that he fasted on the Sabbath, or was even with the lions themselves on the Sabbath, where nevertheless we read that they also dine.