This sermon, unearthed from a certain manuscript of Celles, was published by Jérôme Vignier in the second volume of the Supplement to Augustine (Paris, 1654); in the absence of manuscript copies I have repeated the received text (v), with the orthography corrected. A SERMON CONCERNING THE SUBDEACON RUSTICIANUS. Still mourning and grieving, brethren, I present myself to your Holiness; for I have not been able to digest the sorrow of the past misfortune — shall I call it mine, shall I call it yours? Three times I have tried to supply you with the word of which I am the debtor: as many times both my tears and yours have suppressed the voice of the one attempting it, nor could I unfold the cares by which I was pressed better than by an abundance of tears. What then shall be done? Shall no limit ever be set to my grief, nor ever to yours?
How often you see me entering, will you not cease to beat your breasts and to utter groans? How often I see you gathered together, shall I fall into tears and sighs? The divine words have circumscribed a time of mourning both for me and for you; nor did I grieve when I saw you weeping — for at the remembrance of Lazarus the Lord Jesus Christ wept, and the Jews who saw him weeping said: 'Behold how he loved him!' — nay rather, if there can be anything pleasant, anything welcome, in tears, that I gathered from yours. For I said within myself: 'Behold how they loved him!' Those who followed the father with such great affection will give the same also to the son who has become their father. They will make him the heir of the burden, the heir of love;
he who succeeds to the honour will succeed also to the charity. It is a good omen for one entering to see in the sheep the signs of their ancient love toward their shepherd. There will be a transferring of love to him upon whom the charge of cares has been conferred; nor, though the shepherd is changed, will they cease to love him who ought to feed the sheep, whose voice they will hear, and who — with God as witness and conscience as witness — is ready, with the Lord's help, to spend and to spend beyond his own soul for the least of the little sheep. If there is any reason for grieving, for weeping, it is wholly mine, not yours, not his for whom we are touched by longing. He is loosed, I am bound; he has traversed the course, I run; he is in the fatherland, from which I am a pilgrim; the cares which he laid down he has laid up in my bosom; he held the helm well — what will become of me I know not; he has reached harbour, I am tossed by the waves;
from the shore he sees the angry sea, the raging storms; I cry out amid the waves: 'Save us, we are perishing.' And truly we perish, and truly the danger presses, and truly it strikes upon my head — not my danger only, but yours also; for without you I cannot be saved: the loss of your souls is my loss. Whatever of you perishes from my Lord, perishes at my peril; I am to render an account, skin for skin. I have a merciful Lord, but a rigorous reckoner: he counts his little sheep daily, he has them recorded in his hands, he demands the number; and if I do not render it, an immense peril is created for my head. See, brethren, whether, considering my burden, I can restrain myself from tears, whether I ought not to grieve over my heavy load.
Lighten my weight. Your charity will make what is monstrous more gentle; and with the Lord's help both the shepherd and the little sheep will find pastures, and after they have lain down at noonday, they will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, where there will be neither sun nor any heat, but in the shade of the Lord peace and refreshment, when our mourning shall be turned into the harp, and the voices of those weeping into the songs of those exulting. But for the rest, most beloved, while we mourn over our shepherd who has been snatched away, an occasion for grieving arises over a brother who is lost. A member has been cut off from us, a part of us has become a part of Donatus; a soldier of the Lord has crossed over to the camp of the Philistines, and from a vessel of honour has become a vessel of dishonour. You understand what I mean.
That wretched man Rusticianus, deacon of Mutugenna, cast away the sacrament he owed to the Church and defiled his order by an unfaithful participation. What did I not do, what efforts did I not employ, to set upon level ground one who was rushing headlong into the abyss, and to snatch from danger a man who loved the very danger in which he has perished! He was my first and most pressing care, who is now my grief. I was unwilling to have taken from me, at the very outset of my burden, a man whom for a good long while I had seen, as it were, falling like lightning from heaven. And although he himself, his sins demanding it, deserved to be forsaken by the Lord, I grieve nonetheless that I cannot say of him to my Lord:
'Behold me with the children whom Thou hast given me.' I know it is known to you all, and I know it well, for I know that his lingering here displeased many of you. How often did our venerable Valerius, in my presence, say to him with fatherly tenderness of heart: 'What art thou doing here? Why dost thou desert thy post? Why dost thou not labour together with thy presbyter? Why dost thou prefer Hippo to Mutugenna, to which thou art bound?' And when he answered that he was by no means suited to solitude, that he had entered the clergy, not the monastic life, that he had none at Mutugenna with whom to keep company, the holy old man replied: Art thou bound to a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Thine is the church of Mutugenna, not ours; to it, not to Hippo, hast thou given thy name.
Hast thou not renounced the world, hast thou not renounced friends, hast thou not renounced kindred?' He heard the one who spoke, but heard ill, since he did not obey the speaker. What came of it? Since he was reckoned rather too impetuous and of a temper prone to buffoonery, amid the trifles of the world, amid banquets and drinking-bouts by day and often even by night, at last he gave way; the spirit of the fear of the Lord was quenched, and from mire he is rolled into mire.
By turns both inviting others and invited by others, both a guest and a host, since he was unable to pay the debt he had contracted and was being pressed by his creditors, and was entangling himself in daily wrongdoings and creating scandal for very many, at last, excommunicated by his own presbyter, he fled over to the Donatist, and by their bishop he was not only received—which is against the law of the churches—not only rebaptized—which is impious—but was even, most lamentably of all, made a deacon. When I first heard these things, our venerable old man Valerius was away, but my stirred heart could by no means endure delay. I groaned, I grieved, for him I poured out my soul in the sight of my Lord.
And because it had been reported to me by many that Macrobius, the Donatist bishop to whom he had fled, was a peaceable man, not far from the kingdom of God and from concord with the brethren, and that if he rebaptized any he did so unwillingly, I resolved to approach him by letter and to plead with him through friends with the most urgent entreaties, that upon our subdeacon he should not blow away the baptism of Christ nor baptize again a man whom he could not fail to know had been both baptized and sealed in the name of God. He admitted our letter with difficulty, but at last, driven by the pleas of Maximus and Theodorus, to whom we had entrusted that business, he allowed it to be read aloud and even read it himself. To it he answered nothing else but:
I cannot but receive those who come to me and give them the faith which they have requested. And when they pressed him concerning Primianus's deed, he said it was not for a son to inquire into his father. And because, in the letter which I sent to Macrobius, I asked that he answer in such a way that his reply might be read before our people, but that if he refused, I would read our own letters as soon as the soldiers were gone: today, brethren, I discharge my pledge. There is none present who could stir up crowds; I know you all to be more disposed to concord and to embracing outsiders than that I should need to rouse you. I bring forth the letter to Macrobius, that none of the proceedings may lie hidden from your conscience, but that it may be made known before God and men with how sincere a heart, with how peaceable an affection, under the Lord's inspiration, I have handled the matter.
But if hereafter our brother perishes, he will perish by his own conscience, not by ours. The Lord will come who will judge both them and me; He will surely come to claim the wheat and to scatter the chaff. Our waters, which they so greatly dread, He Himself will examine, and before all He will most manifestly judge whether He too has such waters as they have called polluted. Surely they shall look upon Him whom they have pierced. For what else is it to rebaptize a Christian than to pierce the Lord again? He received the sign of the King, he admitted the cross, he was dipped into the death of Christ. What else dost thou do, thou who baptizest such a one twice, who blowest away the sign of the King, who blottest out the cross, than to render vain and empty the death of the Lord, and to hold up to mockery the whole dispensation of our salvation?
Our water is not alien; it is a virgin and holy. Into our font the Spirit descended, and those whom it besprinkles are holy. Let them see with what rashness they allege those to be polluted whom they know to have been sprinkled with such waves. O sacrilegious novelty, O impious utterance! God sanctified the waters at the beginning of the world by the brooding of the Spirit. From them proceeded so many and so great miracles, which should instruct us concerning the holiness of our waters, and inform us of the truth whose shadows they were, and make us certain concerning the regeneration which we draw in the waters; and yet they call these waters alien, and abstain from them, and call them lying, and deny them all faith.
And so, will the water of Primianus be truthful—Primianus, whom you struck with so monstrous an anathema, whom in your own assembly you judged guilty of such great crimes, yet whose baptized ones you did not dip again—while for the Catholic Church, our dove, the spotless bride, the waters be unfaithful, impure, and lying in their eyes? Perhaps they will say: 'They were liars who condemned the innocent Primianus, and therefore his waters were not lying.' But what will they say of Felicianus and Praetextatus, who condemned Primianus and had departed from him in so great a schism? Did they beget for their church, by a new and recent dipping, those whom they had baptized? By no means.
Are the waters of Felicianus and Praetextatus faithful—men who afterwards came together and conspired against the Catholic Church in the communion of an insane league—while our waters, forsooth, are unfaithful and profane? O insane and perverse thought! They add also: he who is baptized by a dead man, what is his washing? You err, wretched ones, not understanding the Scriptures. We do not say that the baptism by which those baptize whom, as it were dead, we separate from the communion of the living, is nothing, but that it profits nothing, so long as one lives among the dead. Take away what hinders, and now it profits; what thou hast received outside will avail when thou art within. Amend the baptized one—that suffices.
The power lying hidden in the seed will take on its increase, will put on the Spirit of God from on high, and he who had been buried with Christ through baptism, albeit outside, after he has been admitted into the bosom of the Church and has left the dead to bury their own dead, will perceive the water to be faithful and not polluted by the contagions of heretics, and will hear the Father's voice unto his heart: Behold, my son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found. My son, whom I had begotten by the midwifery of the waters, was dead, because he did not live by my Spirit, and is alive again, because, having cast off the fellowship of the dead, he has returned to the place of life; he was lost, because he had been swept away in the same shipwreck with the impious; he is found,
because through the plank of salvation—that is, penance—he has at last been restored to the harbour, that is, to the Church. That this may come to pass for them, brethren, let us as earnestly as we can entreat the Lord, that, even as there is one baptism, one water, one faith, so also there may be one profession of charity, and that nothing more may be heard among us than the emulation of the better gifts.