Summary of the Collation with the Donatists 3.20–3.32

To this the Catholics answered that the Donatists themselves had already admitted that there are at least hidden bad people in the church, and asked them in turn how the devil sowed these in the church, which the Donatists were asking about the weeds as if it could not happen. The Catholics also repeated the testimony of Cyprian, who understood the same Gospel likeness in no other way than to say that there are weeds in the church, and that they are not hidden but seen. Against this testimony the Donatists had dared to answer nothing at all, though they hold Cyprian’s authority in such esteem that they try to defend by it what they wrongly think and do about repeating baptism. The Catholics also refuted their slander about two churches, showing again more explicitly what they had said: that they had not said that the church which now has the bad mixed in is alien to the kingdom of God, where there will be no bad mixed in; but that the same one holy church is now one way, and will be another way then; now it has the bad mixed in, then it will not; just as now it is mortal, because it consists of mortal people, but then immortal, because in it no one will die even in body; just as there are not two Christs because he who first died will afterward not die. It was also said of the outer and the inner man that, though they are different, they are not called two men: how much less are there said to be two churches, when the very same people who now, being good, tolerate the bad mixed in and die to rise again, will then neither have the bad mixed in nor die at all! On the number too, since the Donatists, with the testimony of the Scriptures, had commended one church as if against the two which they boasted the Catholics had affirmed, the Catholics answered that the Scriptures speak of many churches as well, and of seven, to which John writes, which are yet understood to be members of that one church; so that it appeared that much less should two be charged against them, when they had said that the same one church is not now as it will be at the resurrection, since many churches, of which the one church consists, are not charged against the apostolic writings. To this the Donatists did not stop unrolling the same things again, adding besides and boasting spitefully that the Catholics had called the church mortal, and therefore denying that it is mortal, because the Trinity, by whose grace the church is consecrated, is immortal, and because Christ died for her in order to make her immortal; as if the Catholics had said that she is not made immortal by the grace of God and the Savior’s blood poured out for her. But the Catholics said that the times must be distinguished: the present, in which all the saints die, as Christ himself died, and the future, in which they will rise and live with him who has already risen, with no one to die.

While these things were being argued between them, and, though plain and clear, were needlessly unrolled again by the Donatists in their contention, the commissioner promised that he would judge on these matters, which he had heard enough, in his final sentence, and ordered that the question be dealt with instead from which the first cause of the division arose. Then the Donatists began to press him to judge first on what he had heard. When the Catholics also demanded this, and he held to what he had said and ordered that the other matter be dealt with instead, so that the cause of the first division might be shown, the Catholics asked that what they were offering be read. When he had ordered this done, the Donatists began to resist more stubbornly and to press him to judge now on what he had heard, repeating the same things that had been settled and adding that he ought not to judge at all on the case which he wanted dealt with by reading what the Catholics had offered to be read, saying that Christ ought to be judge of this case, and stirring up ill will against the Catholics because they had asked for a human judge, and saying their usual things about the persecutions they appeared to suffer. To this the Catholics answered that they ought not to stir up ill will about asking for a human judge, they who both judged the case of the Maximianists and did not reserve it for Christ as judge, and who first sent the very case of Caecilian, as accusers, to a man, that is, to the emperor Constantine; nor about persecutions, because the Catholics asked something of the emperors for the church, when their circumcellions, led by clerics, were committing such horrible evils. Here they answered in vain that this had nothing to do with priests, since it was asserted that the circumcellions had done such things under the leadership of clerics.

There too, when it had been said that they had attacked people’s eyes with lime and vinegar, a crime in which they outdid the devil in cruelty, who did not do this to the flesh of a holy man which he had received power to afflict, the Donatists asked here whether those who do such things are sons of the devil or those who suffer them; as if the Catholics had spoken of anything other than their own most savage sufferings at the hands of the Donatists’ clerics and circumcellions. Nevertheless, here too the Catholics, given the opportunity, did not omit to charge the Maximianists against them, and said that by the Donatists’ own judgment the Maximianists were the better, whom they had persecuted before three or more proconsuls; for if the Maximianists suffered, the Donatists did it. And the Catholics pressed them to answer whether they had not received Felician from among those whom they had condemned and persecuted, and whether they did not have him in their college. To this charge, as always, they fell wholly silent and went on to something else, charging the Catholics with having defended the devil, because they had said that he spared holy Job’s eyes, so that in this the Donatists had outdone him in cruelty. And they undertook to accuse the devil as though defended by the Catholics, saying that he spared Job’s eyes in his flesh all the more cruelly, so that they might remain to look at the wound he had inflicted on his whole body. It is very strange why they wished to say this as something great, unless perhaps to be understood to have acted piously, those who attacked men’s eyes, so that they would not be tormented by seeing the wounds they had received from them all over their bodies.

But when the Donatists, again magnifying the persecutions they suffer, recalled certain deaths of their own people in the town of Bagai, the Catholics answered that they had suffered this while their violence was being resisted, violence they had even tried to inflict on the judge. In that town, the Catholics recalled, horrible things had been committed by them, so that even a basilica was burned and the holy books thrown into the fire; and their deaths came rather from their habit of throwing themselves down headlong. And when the Donatists, answering this, again magnified the persecutions they suffered, boasting that by these fruits their opponents were a bad tree, and asking again and again that judgment be given about the field and the weeds and the one and immortal church, while the Catholics on the other hand recalled their fruits, schisms and rebaptisms, and that it was they who first accused their forebears before the emperor; and when the conflict turned for a long time on mutual charges of this kind, the commissioner preferred to check all these things, promising judgment on them in his later sentence, and ordered that what the Catholics had offered, which had already begun to be read and had been interrupted, be read. So the case of the church was concluded, which the Catholics had taken great care to distinguish from the case of Caecilian, since it could not be prejudiced by anyone’s crimes, having earned so many divine testimonies against all human accusations. From this point the case of Caecilian also began to be argued.

Fifth, then, these things were done. Two reports of the proconsul Anullinus to the emperor Constantine were read: one which had already been read above, in which he showed that the forebears of the Donatists, that is, those of the party of Majorinus, had given him documents of charges against Caecilian and asked that they be sent to Constantine, and that he had sent them to the said emperor; the other, in which he showed that, by order of the same emperor, he had met them so that each side might send ten men to plead the case, and that they had promised to do so. Then there was also read the letter of the said emperor to the bishops, in which he entrusted to them the hearing of Caecilian’s case. And then the episcopal judgment of Miltiades, bishop of Rome, and of the bishops of Gaul and Italy with him, held in the same city of Rome, began to be read in order. Its first part was read, that is, the minutes of the first day: in which the accusers of Caecilian who had been sent said they had nothing to say against him; in which Donatus of Casae Nigrae, in person, was also convicted of having made a schism at Carthage while Caecilian was still a deacon (for it was from the schism of Carthage that the party of Donatus arose against the Catholic Church); in which the same opponents of Caecilian also promised to produce on another day those necessary to the case whom they were charged with having withdrawn, and, having lied in this, refused to come to the judgment any further. When, then, this part of the judgment had been read and the reading began of what was done on another day, the Donatists interrupted and began to ask most insistently that what they were offering be read first, asserting that it was not in order that the acquittal of Caecilian be read first, when they had not yet accused him. On this they fought for a somewhat longer time, the Catholics saying that what had already begun to be read should not be interrupted until all the minutes of that judgment had been finished, and the Donatists on the contrary asserting that what was being interrupted ought not even to have begun to be read, since it was not proper for a man to be defended before he was accused. To this the Catholics answered that, when the cause of the schism was being asked by the commissioner, they had asked that the documents be read which had been offered for reading when the person of the plaintiff was being discussed. They had wanted them read, then, for two reasons: so that it would appear that the Donatists, who were stirring up ill will against the Catholics because a man sat as commissioner at this conference, had themselves first asked for a human judge in this case; and so that the person of the plaintiff might be established; and since they had begun to be read, they ought not to be interrupted but carried through to the end. Meanwhile the commissioner, though at first he had wanted what the Catholics asked, that what had begun to be read be finished, afterward the Donatists wrung it from him that those documents be put off and what they were offering be allowed to be read.

Then the Donatists made a somewhat long preface, that Mensurius, who had been bishop of the church of Carthage before Caecilian, had handed over the holy Scriptures to the persecutors in the time of persecution; and to prove this they read his letter to Secundus of Tigisi, who then held the primacy of the bishops of Numidia. In that letter Mensurius seemed as it were to confess his crime; yet he had not written that he had handed over the holy books, but rather that he had taken them away and kept them so that the persecutors would not find them, and had left in the basilica of the Novae whatever rejected writings of the heretics there were; and when the persecutors found and took these away, they asked nothing more of him. Nevertheless, some men of the council of Carthage afterward suggested to the proconsul that those sent to take away and burn the Christians’ Scriptures had been tricked, because they had found only some things or other that had nothing to do with them, while the Scriptures themselves were kept in the bishop’s house, from where they ought to be brought out and burned; but the proconsul refused to agree to this. In the same letter it was also read that those who offered themselves to persecutions without being arrested, and declared of their own accord that they had Scriptures which they would not hand over, though no one had asked them for this, displeased Mensurius, and that he forbade Christians to honor them. Some in the same letter were also charged with being criminals and debtors to the treasury, who on the occasion of persecution wished either to be rid of a life burdened with many debts, or thought to purge themselves and as it were wash away their crimes, or at any rate to gain money and enjoy luxuries in prison from the attentions of Christians. Yet the Donatists brought no charge against Mensurius except about handing over the books; they said he had lied, that those were not holy books, and had wanted to cover his sin, though they also accused the pretense itself. They also read the peaceable reply of Secundus of Tigisi to the same Mensurius, in which he too related what the persecutors had done in Numidia, and who had been arrested and, refusing to hand over the holy Scriptures, had suffered many evils, been tortured with the heaviest punishments, and been killed; and he commended them as to be honored for the merit of their martyrdom, praising them for not handing over the holy Scriptures, after the example of that woman who refused to hand over to the persecutors the two spies in Jericho, in whom were figured the two testaments, the old and the new. If that example is to be understood under this figure, it rather helped Mensurius. For in his letter Mensurius found fault with those who, though they did not hand over the holy Scriptures, yet admitted that they had them, which that woman did not do; for she did not confess that the spies who were being sought were with her, but denied it. Secundus also wrote that a centurion and a police officer had been sent to him too by the curator and the town council, to ask for the divine books to be burned, and that he had answered them, “I am a Christian and a bishop, not a betrayer”; and when they wanted to receive from him some castoffs or anything at all, he did not give them even this, after the example of Eleazar of the Maccabees, who would not even pretend to eat pork, so as not to give others an example of transgression. Until these letters of Mensurius and Secundus were finished being read, the Catholics listened patiently, though they declared that they were private letters and had nothing to do with the case of the church.

So the commissioner, urging the Donatists to repay the Catholics’ patience in kind, ordered that the documents offered by the Catholics, which had already been partly read, be read through. Here the Donatists demanded that what they were offering about the case of Caecilian also be read first. When the Catholics allowed this too without any difficulty and pointed out how patiently they allowed it, so that the Donatists might repay them in kind, the commissioner ordered what was being offered to be read. And the Donatists read the council of about seventy bishops held at Carthage against Caecilian, in which they condemned him in his absence, because he would not come to them, as one ordained by betrayers, and because, when he was a deacon, he was said to have forbidden food to be brought to the martyrs held in prison. Certain colleagues of Caecilian were also named, who were asserted to be betrayers on the basis of public records, though these records were not read. Among them Felix of Abthugni was accused most bitterly, so that he was called the source of all evils. Then the judgments were pronounced one by one, first by Secundus of Tigisi, who was their leader, then by the rest, in which they declared that they were not in communion with Caecilian and his colleagues. When this council had been read, the Catholics answered that the letters of Mensurius and Secundus exchanged with each other showed well enough that they were at peace, and that nothing criminal about Mensurius’s conduct was afterward either charged or judged; but that the council they had read, held against Caecilian, did indeed have no consul and day, though they did not make a crime of this, since it could have come from negligence rather than fraud.

But the same Catholics offered another council held under the same Secundus of Tigisi in the city of Cirta. When its consul and day were read, the Donatists said that such decrees do not usually have either consul or day. Here the Catholics answered that this was perhaps the custom of those who did not want their councils convicted of any falsehood, but that the councils of the Catholics had always had consuls and days. Then the council that the Catholics had brought began to be read in its turn, in which Secundus questioned one by one certain men of whose betrayal he had heard, and removed from the assembly those who confessed. It was read in such a way that, when the confession of the betrayers had been read from the council of Cirta, the name of the same man was also read from the council of Carthage, as condemning betrayers in the case of Caecilian. Then they came to the charge brought against Secundus of Tigisi himself by Purpurius of Liniata. Secundus had charged this Purpurius with having killed his sister’s sons in prison at Milevis; and Purpurius in turn charged him with the crime of betrayal, saying that he had been detained by the curator and the council to hand over the Scriptures, and could not have been let go unless he had handed something over. Now what Purpurius charged him with, that he had been detained by the curator and the council to hand over the Scriptures, the same Secundus almost confessed in the letter he wrote back to Mensurius, where he says that a centurion and a police officer had been sent to him by the curator and the council and that Scriptures or any castoffs had been asked of him, which indeed he said he did not hand over. But since he himself recalled there so many martyrs who, refusing to hand over, were tortured and killed, how he himself, detained and convicted and unwilling to hand over anything, could suffer nothing and be let go, he neither wrote to Mensurius nor answered Purpurius. For he did not tell the centurion and the police officer that he had no Scriptures, but answered that he would not hand them over at all. How they, having heard this, could report it after letting him go without ruin to themselves does not appear, especially since the same Secundus said that not just any of the lowest people, but even heads of families, when they had given the persecutors this same answer, were killed by the cruelest deaths. But on this matter the Catholics brought no charge against Secundus; they only wished to have read what Purpurius charged against him, and why he made peace with the betrayers to prevent a schism, leaving all that to God, so that it might appear what kind of men they were who pronounced sentences against the absent Caecilian.

When this had been read, the Catholics asked that the documents that had been put off also be read, asserting that from them it could be shown what was done about Caecilian and what ought to be thought of him, in connection with the council of Carthage, in which it had been read that Caecilian in his absence had been condemned by many bishops. Against this the Donatists pressed the Catholics to admit that that council was genuine, since the Catholics had read the reports of the proconsul Anullinus, by which it appeared that documents of charges against Caecilian had been sent to the emperor Constantine; by pleading this, the Catholics had certainly confirmed that Caecilian had been accused before the emperor by the Donatists’ forebears. The Catholics answered that that council of Carthage no more prejudiced the absent Caecilian than the council of those by whom Primian was condemned in the case of Maximian prejudiced the absent Primian; since the party of Donatus held rather to what was done afterward for Primian than to the authority of the council by which he had earlier been condemned; so in the case of Caecilian too, attention ought to be paid to what was done afterward. Here the Donatists, hemmed in by the case of Maximian, said that neither does one case prejudice another case nor one person another person. This is the very maxim that all Catholics are accustomed to have on their lips, when the Donatists, charging the crimes of some against others, defended their separation and accused the Christian world of some African crimes or other. For in this conference too, everything the Catholics had done to distinguish the case of the church from the case of Caecilian, asserting that the bad mixed in the church do not harm the good nor stain them with their sins, they had done precisely so that neither one case should prejudice another case nor one person another person. And this was confirmed by their opponents, while dealing with something else, in the plainest words. But when the commissioner asked what the Catholics answered about the council of Carthage, they answered again that the parallel of Primian’s case should not be despised, since the Lord Christ too, convicting the Jews from their own deeds, led them to the truth.

Then the Donatists argued in a long statement that Caecilian’s condemnation was confirmed by the authority of that council of Carthage, because he refused to come to so many priests (as if Primian too, with a similar will, had not refused to come to those by whom he was condemned, when he knew their faction), and because Caecilian did not wait for the primate to be ordained by a primate; although the custom of the Catholic Church is otherwise, that not the bishops of Numidia but nearer bishops ordain the bishop of the church of Carthage, just as no metropolitan bishop ordains the bishop of the Roman church either, but the neighboring bishop of Ostia. In saying this about their own custom, which they instituted I know not when, they tried to prejudice the Catholic Church; but if that custom were ancient, they would have charged this very thing against Caecilian when they condemned him in his absence. They also said that Optatus had written that Caecilian said, “If those who ordained me are betrayers, let them come and ordain me themselves.” If this was said, it could have been said to mock those to whom he is reported to have sent this message, since he was sure that his ordainers were not betrayers. For he does not say “since they are betrayers” but “if they are betrayers,” so that their innocence remained to be proved where it could rightly be proved.

To this and whatever else they said in a long statement, the Catholics answered briefly that the council of Carthage was not enough for Caecilian’s case even in the judgment of the Donatists themselves, who sent the case to the emperor as accusers; and so they showed that the thing to look at was rather that the matter came all the way to the sentence of the emperor, to whom they thought fit to send the same case. For this is what the Catholics were urging: that, all shady devices of delay being cut away, those documents should rather be read, by whose reading the case long ago finished and Caecilian’s innocence would appear clearer than daylight. The Donatists, wholly unwilling that these be read, hindered it by interposing anything else at all. For when the commissioner asked whether the council of Carthage had been held first and the case of Caecilian sent to the emperor afterward, the Catholics said that, since that council had no consul and day, they would answer for both possibilities: if the case was sent to the emperor first, one should look at its outcome; but if afterward, then nonetheless it was not the Donatists’ judgment but the emperor’s that was to be sought, to whom they thought it should be sent after their own judgment. But when the Donatists put in much about the consul and day, why they were not read in their forebears’ council, so as not to be charged with falsehood on this ground, and asserted that it was the custom of the church that days and consuls were not written on the decrees of bishops, wishing even the council of Cyprian to be read to prove this, since nothing but delays was being sought (for the Catholics had not rested their case on this when they had answered for both possibilities, whether that council which the Donatists had held against Caecilian at Carthage was earlier or later), the commissioner, at the Catholics’ urging, ordered that the documents that had been put off be read instead.

Then the Donatists brought in another question, full of delays, but one in which they really wished to labor on their own behalf, if they could show what they wanted: namely, that the council of Cirta was false, in which had been read the confessions of betrayers pardoning one another so that there would be no schism, because they were read as being among those who had pronounced sentences against the absent Caecilian. Trying to show it false, then, they said many things; but judging the others light themselves, they pressed two points especially in this question and dwelt on them at length: one, that the council of Cirta had a day and consul, contrary to the custom of the church; the other, that a council could not be assembled in time of persecution. So the Donatists demanded of the Catholics that they either produce other ancient councils of bishops in which they could show consuls and days written down as well, or read something of the kind from the holy Scriptures themselves. Here the Catholics saw that amazing and endless delays were being introduced about a most empty matter. For who would believe that they would charge falsehood on this ground, where a dating of the time was read, written at the head for greater care, in case an inquiry into the truth should some day need it? Who, then, would believe they would charge this, so that one should prepare ancient councils by which to demonstrate this custom? Or who would go then and turn over the old archives of the church? Seeing this, the Catholics both showed the day and consul in the council of Miltiades and recalled from the holy Scriptures themselves that the prophets wrote at the head of their writings indications of the most ancient times: in what year of what king, in what month of the year, on what day of the month the word of the Lord came upon them. The commissioner, judging that objection about the day and consul to be disregarded and set aside, ordered the rest of the minutes held before Miltiades to be read, and they were read. From them it appeared that by the sentences of all the bishops then sitting, and of Miltiades himself, Caecilian was acquitted and cleared, and Donatus condemned, who had been convicted in person in the first session, that Donatus, the one of Casae Nigrae, who was established to have been present then.

But when this had been read and the Donatists were asked what they answered about the council of Cirta, they went back to trying to show it false, saying that a council could not have been assembled in time of persecution. The commissioner did not disregard this, but, thinking it weighty, demanded an answer from the Catholics, and meanwhile asked how it was proved that it was a time of persecution. Then the Donatists produced acts of martyrs in which they were heard and suffered for their confession. The commissioner also ordered the staff to calculate and report, considering both consuls and days, those read in the council of Cirta and those in the acts of the martyrs; because the Catholics had said that after the suffering of those martyrs, by which the time of persecution was proved, nearly a year followed until the consul and day of the council of Cirta. But the reply of the staff who calculated had suggested that a month lay between. So the Catholics wanted what they had said removed from the tablets, so that the minutes would keep only what the staff had answered (for they believed this was more accurate); but the Donatists would not have what the Catholics had said removed from the tablets, and the Catholics did not contend, so that the Donatists’ slanderous spirit in this might appear. In fact, what the Catholics had said was the more accurate, and the staff, erring in their calculation, had reported falsely, as the minutes, written out and more carefully considered afterward, showed, as anyone can prove who cares to read and does not mind calculating. For the acts of the martyrs by which the time of persecution was shown were made when Diocletian was consul for the ninth time and Maximian for the eighth, on the day before the Ides of February; but the episcopal minutes of the decree of Cirta after their consulship, on the third day before the Nones of March; and so thirteen months are found to lie between, more indeed than the eleven which the Catholics had first answered by calculating less carefully. But the staff, in order to be deceived and answer that a month lay between, took it as the same consulship, and did not notice “after the consulship,” when another year was already running. So the Catholics, as if from a true answer of the staff, were forced to show that in time of persecution those eleven or twelve bishops could have met in a private house, the Donatists pressing them to show this from other councils, if they could find councils of bishops held at any time of persecution. Since the Catholics could not then search for these and examine old papers in the church archives on the spot, they answered that twelve men could much more easily have met in a house at a time when even assemblies of the congregations were customarily held, though persecution was raging, as was shown by the very acts of the martyrs, who confessed in their sufferings that they had held the assembly and the Lord’s supper. The Catholics had said this even before the staff calculated and answered. The Catholics also said that those episcopal minutes of Cirta, which the care of their forebears had been able to preserve and find down to these times, should be treated just like those letters of Mensurius and Secundus which the Donatists had read. For the council of Carthage, in which seventy condemned the absent Caecilian, was recalled even in the council held by Miltiades, in which Caecilian was acquitted. But those letters of Mensurius and Secundus were said to be mentioned nowhere else, so that their truth was asserted by no other testimony; and yet the Catholics did not therefore say they were false. The Catholics also said this, that the Donatists should prove, if they could, that in time of persecution bishops wrote to each other as they alleged Mensurius and Secundus had written. The Catholics said this not to show from it that those letters of Mensurius and Secundus were false, which, true or false, did the case no harm, but so that the Donatists might understand from it with what empty evasion they were forcing the Catholics to produce other councils assembled in time of persecution. For if it were said to them with similar obstinacy, “You too produce other letters written and sent in this way in time of persecution” (letters which, if somehow detected, would allow the hidden books to be demanded, and would bring to peril of their lives the council, the curator, the centurion, and the police officer who were reported to have let Secundus go unpunished when he refused to hand them over), they would in no way find on the spot other letters given in a similar way in time of persecution by bishops to bishops in lands so far apart.