Against Cresconius, a Donatist Grammarian 3.37–3.54

“In this matter,” you say, “the knowledge of almost the whole world is witness.” The answer to you is: in this matter the whole world has no knowledge at all. “Our forefathers,” you say, “received this from their parents.” The answer is: but erring men from erring men or from slanderers; for the forefathers of the Jews too received from their forefathers that the body of Christ was stolen from the tomb. “Those are not long dead,” you say, “who knew by whom and in what places this crime of handing over was committed.” The answer is: our people say this too for their side. “There exist also books,” you say, “in which the order of events is faithfully and carefully recorded; there are proceedings, there are letters; the plain confession of many is also held.” The answer to you is that these are not lacking to our people either for their side. Either, then, let us believe those who were able to persuade of their case those churches which we read of as written in the divine and canonical books; or, as you said of Optatus, let us neither acquit nor condemn doubtful things, and let us hold with brotherly love the peace of Christ, whose good is not doubtful.

But the Easterners, whom you now grant are ours, you say did not fail to know of this crime; and to prove it you insert the opening of a letter of the council of Serdica, where the name of Donatus, your bishop of Carthage, is found written. You think and affirm that this was done because the Easterners who sent this writing from their council were displeased by the crime of the traitors, had withdrawn from their communion, and therefore communicated with your Donatus. Learn, then, what you do not know: the council of Serdica was a council of Arians, as has long been known and as we have in our hands, gathered chiefly against Athanasius, the Catholic bishop of Alexandria, who above others sharply refuted and confuted their error, which arose in that very city. It is no wonder, then, if those heretics, whom the Catholic church was condemning throughout the world, tried to take Donatus to themselves as one of their own; although we have the bishops to whom this letter was addressed without the names of their cities. Either, then, there was some Donatus who was a bishop not in Africa, to whose name “Carthage” was added by your people, or, as I said, the Eastern heresy tried to join the African heresy to itself. This is most credible from the fact that the Eastern Catholic church would never write to the bishop of Carthage while passing over the bishop of Rome; where at least your bishop ought to have been written to, whom you are accustomed to send to Rome from Africa for a few of your people. But thanks be to God that this conspiracy of the Eastern heretics with the African heretics, if indeed it was begun, could not prevail. You yourself have placed the Arians in your letter among heretics to be detested by both us and you; hence I have no need to contend with you on this question as well. For as to the question you put to yourself as though raised by us, “If this is so, how were the Easterners afterwards separated from the communion of your people?”, and you answered that in receiving our people again they could not keep firm in a condemned case: is it surprising that your bishops tell you with impunity what they like about such distant lands? But if it were altogether so, what have so many peoples done, who, though they did not know these things, are nevertheless judged by you to need rebaptism? Or is it not credible that peoples could be ignorant of these things too, when you, somewhat more interested in such matters, would not have inquired what your Africans did in Africa with the Maximianensians, had you not wished to answer my letter?

As for what I said, “Nor, if the handing over by some who died in our communion were proved, which we reject and disapprove, would it stain us in any part,” how ridiculously you thought this ridiculous and ill befitting my prudence! I therefore now wish to know how your prudence refuted it. Is it because you say you do not see how we reject it or how far we disapprove of what we have never condemned, the error having been recognized, while placed in their schism? See rather how briefly I answer this. I am in the church whose members are all those churches which we know from the canonical writings to have been born and established by the labors of the apostles. Their communion, as far as the Lord helps me, I will not desert, whether in Africa or anywhere. If there were in this communion traitors whom I do not know, when you show them to me I shall abhor them as dead in flesh and heart, yet I shall by no means be estranged, on account of the dead, from the living who remain in the holy unity of the same church. For they did not found this church; but in it they were wheat if good, chaff if bad. But you, whom the tares or chaff of so manifest a church could not stain, what cause was there for your division except the desire for sacrilegious schism? “If it displeases you,” you say, “reject it, flee and leave the church of the traitors; do not follow in the footsteps of your erring forefathers.” To this I answer: if they were not traitors, they are my forefathers; if they were what I am not, they are not my forefathers. I hold the church full of wheat and chaff. If you showed me, I do not say others, who carry their own burden, but myself as a traitor in it, where I may be changed for the better, I have no need to be separated from it. If I come to know such people in the communion of its sacraments, I correct whom I can by the word and discipline of the Lord, and tolerate whom I cannot correct. I flee the chaff, lest I be chaff; not the threshing floor, lest I be nothing.

Accordingly, do not toss about in vain over this statement. For the apostolic precept which you yourself set down instructs me rather how to do this: “Do not share in others' sins; keep yourself pure.” For to show how anyone should not share in others' sins, he added this: “Keep yourself pure.” For one who keeps himself pure does not share in others' sins, even though he shares, not their sins, but those sacraments of God which they take to their judgment, with those from whom, by keeping himself pure, he has made himself a stranger. Otherwise even Cyprian (God forbid!) shared in the sins of his rapacious and usurious colleagues, with whom he nevertheless remained in the communion of the divine sacraments; of whom he says: “Very many bishops, who ought to be an encouragement and example to others, neglecting their divine stewardship, became stewards of worldly affairs, leaving their see, deserting their people, wandering through other provinces to hunt the markets of profitable trade; while brothers were hungry in the church, they wished to have money in abundance, to seize estates by treacherous frauds, to increase their gain by multiplying usury.” Did he share in the sins of such men? Did he follow their sect? And yet he stood with them in the communion of the same sacraments, because they had not instituted those sacraments; not having them for salvation by holy morals, they made them avail for their own punishment by evil morals.

What do you mean when you say that you put to yourself, as from my person, that I never handed over the divine Testament? For you add: “But he who handed it over created you.” Then you weave together what seemed to you to sound well: “The stream is drawn from the source, and the members follow the head. When the head is sound, the whole body is sound; and if there is any disease or fault in it, it weakens all the members. Whatever grows in a stock looks back to its origin.” And after this, as in a final conclusion: “One cannot be innocent who does not follow the sect of an innocent man.” In all these words of yours you have made my creator, my head, nothing but a traitor, whom you could only accuse, not convict. But I do not make even his innocence my creator or source or head. But you return to that point where Petilian erred, so that, when anyone is born in the sanctification of baptism, Christ is not the origin and head of the one born; and so that I may not fall under the curse of which it is written, “Cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man,” since you do not entangle yourself from any other quarter, nor, when you have sprung back, do you fall into anything else.

But you also admonish me with a testimony from the Scriptures, what further I should answer you on this. For you say that it was written for this reason: “Do not walk in the statutes of your fathers”; and you do not notice that it was said to the Jews that they should not imitate the evil deeds of their fathers, not that they should cut themselves off from that people of God. If, then, King David, Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and the other saints and prophets of God were permitted, among despisers of the law, to keep God's commandments and to hurl many fitting and true words against those very transgressors of the commandment; not to imitate nor follow, but to detest and flee those sins of the fathers by which, under Moses, they so offended God that none of them was worthy to enter the land of promise, and to rebuke those who committed them for their likeness to such fathers; and yet not to set up for themselves another people as if purged and refined by a sacrilegious separation: how is it not permitted to us neither to imitate the deeds of I know not whom, which you rather charge than prove, nor yet to be separated from that holy church which, as the apostle says, bears fruit and grows in the whole world? Did the traitors institute any sacraments in which I was baptized? Did they compose any books for posterity about committing or imitating the handing over, and do we hold and follow their teaching? If they had done this, and allowed none to communicate with them except those who approved what they read, they themselves would divide themselves from the unity of the church; and if you saw me in their division, then you ought to say that I was in the church of the traitors. But if they wrote their most wicked precepts about committing handing over, and yet were not gathered outside the church in their own congregation and communion, they would be counted tares on that account, because of which the wheat would not rightly be deserted.

See, I say again what you forbid me to say further: you accuse before me men long since dead, whom my cognizance did not judge. You say in reply: “You may judge even today, and judgment can be held not only about the living but also about the dead. For though he who sinned is dead, what he committed never dies.” What if, while he lived, he corrected himself and appeased God: is not what he committed dead and blotted out, just as Felicianus and Praetextatus, Maximian's ordainers, corrected themselves from so great a crime when, as you say, an extension was granted? But it is strange if one's own sins do not harm men who have corrected the deeds, and harm others who did not commit them at all; and, if we are concerned, add: who did not even know of the deeds. But you say I may judge even today, because judgment can be held not only about the living but also about the dead. See, I am willing to judge, but you will not plead the case itself; rather, you will not recognize it as pleaded then and also then without doubt concluded, though we show it to you. But let us rather suppose you have people you can teach. Why do you already contend that those whom you have not yet taught must be rebaptized, since you ought not to baptize those who were baptized by traitors of whom they were ignorant, even when you have taught them; just as you do not baptize those who were unknowingly baptized by adulterers, even when these have been exposed and convicted?

Here perhaps you may say: “But the matter of Caecilian has already been judged.” The answer to you is: the matter of Primian too had already been judged by a hundred of your bishops, whom Maximian had persuaded that he was most wicked, before you held the council of Bagai. But in the first judgment he was condemned in his absence, in the second acquitted in his presence. If those whom he baptized after the first cannot be rebaptized, how much more after the second! So too Caecilian was first condemned in his absence at Carthage by the judgment of Secundus of Tigisi, and in a second judgment, that of Miltiades of Rome, acquitted in his presence. You still will not have us certain about him; at least allow us to doubt. For not only he who knows Caecilian was innocent defeats you, but also he who does not know he was guilty. But you judge that both must be rebaptized, both those who say, “We know,” and those who say, “We do not know what kind of man Caecilian was.” Those whom Primian baptized after the first judgment, in which he was condemned in his absence, are not to be baptized; and those whom Caecilian baptized after the second judgment, in which he was acquitted in his presence, are to be baptized! It was not lawful to condemn him when condemned; let it at least be lawful to doubt about this one when acquitted. Even if his crimes were certain to us, placed as we are in the church which the Holy Spirit foretold as a threshing floor with chaff, others' sins, not imitated, would in no way stain us. And yet, even when they are said to be uncertain to us, we are not only made guilty but even judged to need rebaptism. Is this how you act? Do you so pervert everything? Do you really think so much is permitted to you, that what you will is holy and what you will is unclean? Restrain yourselves; do not advance in evil, lest you perish from the good.

Next, as to what I said, “But if you speak of persecutions, I answer quickly: if you have suffered anything unjustly, it does not concern those who, though they disapprove of men doing such things, yet praiseworthily tolerate them for the peace of unity,” how deceitfully you wished to refute it, not reflecting at all that your letter would have a reader of sound mind! For you answer as if I had said that persecution ought to be carried out against you for the peace of unity. I did not say this in that place, but I said: “if you have suffered anything unjustly, it does not concern those by whom the men who do such things to you, however wrongly, are praiseworthily tolerated for the peace of unity.” Since this was said most plainly, let those whom you wished to deceive at least attend to it when set out. For I do not think you failed to understand what is so plain, but you thought that by the brevity of my statement it could easily be cast into darkness, where, whatever else you said, you would seem to have answered it. And why I said that the wicked of our communion, that is, the chaff of the Lord's threshing floor, when they act unjustly against you, are praiseworthily tolerated by our good people for the sake of peace, what need is there for me to show or defend, when blessed Cyprian says for me most plainly and candidly that, even when the wicked are seen in the church, the church is not to be deserted on their account, which is what I said: that they are to be tolerated for the peace of unity? For those who persecute you unjustly do not persecute you more than us; they give you, for deceiving the unskilled, a likeness of glory, though false, but to us a great wound of sorrow.

Then, mentioning I know not what dead men whom you say were killed by our people, you expand the theme at great length, as if placed in the field of your eloquence, in which you seem to yourselves like martyrs; while we daily suffer the incredible deeds of your clergy and Circumcellions, far worse than those of any robbers and bandits. For, armed with dreadful weapons of every kind, roaming about terrifyingly, they disturb not only the quiet and peace of the church but of human life itself. By night attacks they leave the houses of Catholic clergy they have invaded bare and empty; the clergy themselves they seize, beat with clubs, cut with swords, and throw away half alive. Moreover, by a new and hitherto unheard-of kind of crime, pouring and stuffing into their eyes lime mixed with vinegar, they choose to torture at length the eyes they could have torn out at once, rather than to blind them quickly. For at first they used only lime for this crime, but after they learned that those to whom they had done it quickly recovered, they added vinegar.

I pass over how much they committed earlier, by which they compelled those same laws to be enacted against your error, laws tempered rather by Christian gentleness than put forth with the force of a vigor fitting such great crimes. A Catholic bishop of Thubursicubure, named Servus, when he was reclaiming a place invaded by your people and the agents of both parties were awaiting the proconsul's hearing, barely escaped alive when your armed men suddenly rushed upon him in that town. By them his father, a presbyter venerable in age and character, died a few days later from the beating with which he was severely afflicted. Maximianus, the Catholic bishop of Bagai, when judicial sentence had been pronounced between the parties, had won the basilica of the Calvianensian estate, which your people had once unlawfully seized. While he held it by plain right, in that very basilica, under the altar where he had taken refuge, the altar being broken over him, he was cruelly beaten with its timbers and other clubs and even with steel, and filled that whole place with blood. He had also received a great wound in the groin, from which, as the blood flowed abundantly, he would have died at once, had not their greater cruelty, through the hidden mercy of God, done him good. For as he was dragged half alive and face down, with his limbs bared on that side, dust secretly stopped the overflowing veins. Then, when he was being carried away by our people's hands, they rushed in again, violently snatched him away, beat him more severely, and threw him by night from a high tower; he lay below, softly received on a heap of ash and dung, his senses lost, barely holding his last breath. There a poor man passing by found him, having turned aside to that place to relieve himself. He recognized him when, frightened, he called his wife, whom modesty had kept at a distance, and she brought a lamp. Then the two of them carried him home, either from pity or also hoping for some small reward, since, whether alive or dead, he would at least be shown to our people as recovered. What more? He was healed by a wonderful cure; he lives; more scars are counted on his body than limbs. Report had announced him overseas as killed by your people, and the monstrousness of that crime and grave indignation, wherever it could be heard, had stirred everything with dreadful grief. After he himself followed there, his very fresh scars defended that lie of report; for one whom those who then looked at him could scarcely believe alive did not seem to have been rashly proclaimed dead. When he found there the colleague from Thubursicu whom I mentioned a little before, and several others who had suffered similar things or not much less, and no means of returning to their own places seemed open to them; and since the notorious fury of your Circumcellions, providing a dreadful bodyguard for your clergy, had become known everywhere most odiously, a great ill will blazed up against you; and from this it came about that all the former laws against you were revived and these new ones enacted. Yet the severity of them all, if compared with the disorderly savagery of your people, raging without any law, must be called a wonderful mildness. For by them, having received such power, Catholic gentleness is commended rather than heretical monstrousness punished; indeed, it rages against us more boldly and madly, devising, threatening, and carrying out murders, robberies, burnings, blindings.

These things I wished to mention, by which it came about that in these our times these imperial statutes were passed against you, or rather against your error. For what, if you were wise, could be more for your good? As for all the other savage deeds of your people, which I have either learned from the writings of earlier men or come to know myself, by which from the beginning of your division until this time they have persecuted the Catholic church, if I wished to recount them, what tongue, what pen, how much time and leisure would suffice?

When I was dealing with Optatus, and you wished rather to excuse this than you were able to clear it, you said that your people cannot be guilty on this account, because no one brought the matter to them for punishment. So many protests of our people about the most furious violence of your people have filled the public archives sooner than those deeds have earned any punishment among you. But perhaps here too it will be said that protests were indeed lodged, but none was brought to them themselves for punishment. Hear, then, some things which I myself experienced. When we had learned the case of the Maximianensians, whom your people had condemned and then received back, and were spreading it abroad wherever we could with fervent persistence, they, finding nothing to answer to things so recent and shining with such plainness, began more often and more boldly than usual, by the violence and raging bands of the Circumcellions, to frighten us away from preaching the Catholic truth and refuting their deceit. And since many entangled in the snares of their error, with whom we were dealing to free them from it, answered us that we ought to do this with their bishops, and that they greatly desired a conference between us, where they might see by whose assertions truth overcame falsehood, it was decided by us in the council of all Africa at Carthage that, with the testimony of public records also brought in, so that we could prove to those who demanded it that we had by no means failed their desire, your bishops should be approached peaceably, each by that one of ours who was in the same place where he resided, so that, error being removed through our conference, we might enjoy Christian and brotherly fellowship, unity, love, and peace. We had this in view: that if they were willing to do this, by the help of God's mercy whatever there was in our case could very easily be recognized; but if they refused, at least their lack of confidence would not appear in vain to those who had asked this of us. It was done; they were approached; they refused; with what words, how full of deceit, cursing, and bitterness, it would take long to show now.

Meanwhile Crispinus, your bishop of Calama, approached in the same city by my colleague Possidius before the public records, had at first put it off to your council, promising to see there with his colleagues what he ought to answer. Then, after no short time, the approach being repeated, he again answered before the records: “Do not fear the words of a sinful man,” and again: “Do not say anything into the ears of a fool, lest when he hears he mock your sensible words.” And finally: “I conclude this answer of mine with a patriarch's saying: Let the ungodly depart from me; I do not wish to know their ways.” Learned and unlearned laughed at this answer; for here was a man saying that he did not fear the words of a sinful man, whom he did not dare to answer at all; and that he would not say anything into the ears of a fool, as though he were going to entrust rashly some secret to a fool's ears, when many prudent men could hear what he said, for whose sake the Lord Christ also spoke so much to the Pharisees, though they were fools; and that he did not wish to know the ways of the ungodly, as though those he thought ungodly wished to teach him their ways, and not rather that he himself, if he held the ways of God, ought to teach even the ungodly, as it is written, “I will teach the wicked your ways, and the ungodly will be turned to you.” When, therefore, this answer was understood by many, and it was also shown to many how empty it was as far as the case was concerned, but how bitter and abusive, which did not pertain to the case, and so his most learned age, as it is held among you, was proved and laughed at as able to do nothing against the truth, with a yesterday's recruit standing against him, suddenly, a few days later, as Possidius was traveling, another Crispinus, his presbyter and, as is said, his relative, set an ambush of armed men; into which our man had almost fallen, had he not, when they were seen and reported, fled and turned aside to a certain estate, where the other would dare nothing, or not prevail, or, if he did anything, could not deny it. Learning this, he at once followed him, blinded by such great madness that he now thought it shameful to lie hidden: he surrounded with armed men the house in which Possidius had shut himself with his companions, battered it round with stones, encircled it with flames, and attacked the entrance from every side. The multitude of tenants who were present, mindful of their own danger if so great a crime were attempted and completed in that place, partly begged him to spare, since they did not dare offend him by resisting, and partly put out the fires that were set, while he pressed on, no less ardent and unrelenting in what he had begun. At last the door gave way to the blows; they entered, and, having slaughtered the beasts of burden they saw in the lower part of the house, they brought the bishop down from the upper part, assailing him with blows and insults. There, so that they should not rage more severely, Crispinus himself intervened, as if moved by others' entreaties; he seemed to care not so much for their pleas in his anger as to fear witnesses to his crime.

After these things became known in the town of Calama, it was awaited how Crispinus, your bishop, would punish his presbyter. A protest was also lodged, expressed in the municipal records, so that by fear or shame of it he would be compelled to exercise church discipline. When he wholly disregarded this, and the tumult of your people became so great that they were thought about to close, or rather were already seen closing, the roads to the preaching of the truth, which they could not answer, the laws, which were not lacking but lay idle in our hands as though lacking, were set in motion against Crispinus, your bishop; more to show our gentleness than to punish their audacity. For in no other way would it become known what the Catholic church, with the help of Christ, could do against her enemies and would not do; not according to heretical presumption, with the Circumcellions raging in private fury, but according to prophetic truth, with kings subject to the yoke of the Lord God. Crispinus, then, was brought forward, and, though he had denied to the proconsul's inquiry that he was a heretic, he was very easily convicted; yet, at the intercession of Possidius, he was not compelled to pay the ten pounds of gold which the elder emperor Theodosius had fixed as a fine on all heretics. Not content with this most lenient sentence, by I know not what counsel, which was said to have displeased all your people, he thought fit to appeal to the sons of that same Theodosius. The appeal was accepted. A rescript was issued, saying what else than that the party of Donatus should now know that it was liable, with the other heretics, to that penalty of gold; with whom, because of sharing such persecution, it must either reckon that it has a common righteousness, or, if it does not reckon so, let it not boast itself righteous because it is restrained by a penalty by which it sees those heresies also restrained which it grants are unrighteous; and let it understand at last that it is not the penalty but the cause that makes a martyr of Christ. And let it judge us to be such savage persecutors that not even after the imperial rescript did Crispinus pay that gold to the treasury, the Catholic bishops obtaining pardon for him; and now, amid the very newest laws threatening your bishops with confiscation, he sits secure in his own property, while Catholic clergy hang on the hands of your Circumcellions and clergy for their houses, their livelihood, their safety, and the light of their eyes.

To whom shall I liken those who do these things: to robbers, pirates, some ferocious kind of barbarians, when not even the devil himself, the master of all cruelties, can be compared to them? He took away all of the holy man Job's possessions and struck him with a most grievous sore from head to feet; and yet there remained a place there intact, with his eyes intact; he did not put out the eyes of one whose whole body he had received into his power. But of course these things are not reported to your people, when Crispinus preferred to go to Carthage, to be overcome by his own obstinacy, to refuse the most lenient sentence passed on him through the intercession of episcopal gentleness, to appeal to the sons of the one by whose law he saw himself ensnared, and to stir up against the whole party of Donatus what he alone neither wished nor was compelled to suffer, rather than to punish the most audacious and most odious crime of one presbyter of his with mere degradation.

There was a certain Restitutus, a presbyter of yours in the region of Hippo. When, moved by the reason of truth, he had passed over by his own manifest will to the Catholic peace, before it was ordered by these imperial laws, he was seized from his house by your clergy and Circumcellions, led in broad daylight to the nearest fort, and there, with a crowd looking on and no one daring to resist, beaten with clubs at the will of the raging men, rolled in a muddy pool, dishonored with a garment of rushes; and after he had sufficiently tormented the eyes of those who grieved and satisfied those who laughed, he was led from there to another place, where none of our people dared to approach, and was released barely on the twelfth day. I myself complained of this to your bishop of Hippo, Proculeianus, indeed in the municipal records, so that, if anything had to be done, he could not deny that it had been reported to him. What he answered, how he pretended not to see the need to inquire into the case, and how he thought afterwards to elude our purpose even more deceitfully by not answering, those same records sufficiently testify. But now, how can we suffice to relate how much the clergy who have passed over to us from you suffer from your people? In short, not all who come to us from there abandon the truth through persecution; but many do not come to us from there because they fear to suffer persecution from your people for the truth.

Take away, then, the superfluous odium of the troubles which you suffer by royal command for your error, very small and almost nothing in proportion to the great fury of your people; imputing to us even what is done by the earthly powers themselves out of necessity, not by our will, to drive off the attacks of your people from their own safety. For if those forty who had sworn to kill the apostle Paul had rushed upon the armed men by whom he was being escorted and been punished, these things would not have been imputed to Paul. I pass over the fact that you also transfer to us, by lying, the voluntary deaths which they inflict on themselves. For about Marculus I have heard that he threw himself down; which is certainly more credible than that any Roman authority could have ordered this, something very unusual for Roman laws, since this evil, among so many heresies wandering under the Christian name, is peculiar to your heresy. Hence what good is it that your bishops boast that they have forbidden and condemned this in their councils, as you yourself mentioned, when so many cliffs and precipices of rock are daily defiled with death from that Marculian school? I have said, then, what I have heard about Marculus and why it may seem more credible; but what is true God knows. As for the other three whose deaths you likewise charged against us, what was done or how, I confess I have not asked those whom I think know.