Against Cresconius, a Donatist Grammarian 4.56–4.71

But it is too little for me to show for the present by this example of Maximian that one who suffers persecution under the cover and shadow of Christ's name is not therefore righteous, since Maximian too, a sacrilegious man, suffered it; unless I compel you to admit that the devout too persecute the sacrilegious and the righteous the ungodly, not indeed with the aim of harming but rather from the necessity of taking measures. Nor do I bring examples from the Old Testament, although you said you wished to be taught even by prophetic examples. Those, I say, too ancient, I do not bring forward; for they belonged to another dispensation and time. But now, after gentleness was revealed and commended at the fitting time, your bishops (which indeed we call just, but which, as long as you defend such a case, you are compelled to say), your bishops, I say, persecuted your schismatics.

So now I do not say, “Maximian suffered persecution; Optatus carried it out,” since you answer that we do not know this, and he did it in such a way that I can read out no records about it (although, in so recent a memory, the cities themselves, if asked, cannot deny it). This, then, I do not say; but I say: “Maximian suffered persecution; Primian carried it out”; and I read out records by which I show that Primian, through a mandated agent, under the name of a church exorcistery, with the legate Sacerdos favoring him, as the records themselves show, took away a house which Maximian was defending as his own. But suppose the judge acted from justice and not favor (I do not deny it, I do not refute it): why then did Primian, among other things he ordered to be put forward insultingly about us in the records of the magistrate of Carthage, say, “They take away what belongs to others; we let go what has been taken,” when he himself had taken away what belonged to another, if the house was Maximian's; and, if Maximian had rather usurped it, he had not let go what was taken? But if you will not have this either count as persecution, I say that your bishops and your clergy carried out persecutions against the Maximianensians who remained in those sees in which they had long been ordained, accused them before proconsuls, obtained orders, and gained, for executing those orders, the pressure of the officials and the help of the cities; so that those who had already been condemned by the severity of the sentence of Bagai and cut off from the body of your communion with brief pain, lest the pestilent poison creep through all the limbs, and who were no longer causing you any danger by the morbid contagion of their communion, but frequented their own meetings with their congregations cut off together with them, and kept by perpetual possession, with the peoples cleaving to them, places and basilicas which they had not invaded, should be terrified, thrown into confusion, expelled, and, if they resisted, brought into court.

Read what was said about them or against them by the advocates who pleaded; what crimes of sacrilege were charged; with what force of accusation the authorities were stirred up. Ask what was done to Salvius of Membresa, since the harassments of that persecution could not force him to return from partnership in the crime; and he preferred to submit to examination and to answer his persecutors in the proconsular court, trusting, I suppose, that he knew his adversaries could not use the laws promulgated against heretics before the judge without entangling themselves in them equally. But that thought deceived him. For before Seranus, then proconsul, either influence prevailed more, or perhaps rather the council of Bagai, which was read there too against the same Salvius. Indeed, by a certain interlocutory remark he showed what was being pressed through him, namely, that he should either restore Salvius to the choir of bishops of Primian's communion or drive him from his seat, so that Restitutus, whom Primian had ordained against him, might possess without an adversary all the places held by Salvius; and yet in the same remark he expressed that Salvius was suffering persecution. For thus it is read in the same records: “Seranus, proconsul, said: ‘A dispute of bishops must, according to the law, be heard by bishops: the bishops have judged. Why do you not either return with satisfaction to the choir of antiquity, or, as you have it written, turn your back on your persecutors?’” What do you think here? Will you call this Salvius righteous, to whom the proconsul, before whom he was being accused with Restitutus, your bishop, standing against him, even gives advice from holy Scripture, to turn his back on his persecutors, since it is written in the gospel, “If they persecute you, flee”? You surely see what appearance of martyr or confessor Salvius presents among his own, who, while Restitutus persecuted him, deserved to hear this from the proconsul; and yet not only according to us but also according to you he is judged ungodly and sacrilegious.

And after the proconsul's sentence was presented to the people of Abitina, the neighboring city, through which your people had obtained that the judgment be carried out, since nearly all the people of Membresa loved Salvius, what those same Abitinians did to a man so venerable in age I am loath to say, since they did not do it in recorded proceedings; but since, in so recent a memory, the testimony of the cities themselves is clearer than all documents, I shall touch briefly on what I learned there when I was traveling. For since Salvius, trusting in the crowd favoring him, had tried to resist them in defending his seat in whatever part he could even after the proconsul's judgment, he was at last overcome and seized, not to be led to a judge, since sentence had been pronounced between the parties, but to be paraded in a pitiable triumph. For they tied dead dogs to the old man's neck and so danced with him as much as they pleased. If I wished to exaggerate this in speaking, would I not perhaps show that this punishment could scarcely be compared with the tortures of the Etruscan kings, who joined dead bodies to living ones? Would not an old man, who wished to be held a bishop, deserve in everyone's judgment to be banished from the society of the living and the dead, if, offered two punishments of which one had to be undergone, he did not choose to be fastened to human corpses rather than to dance with canine ones?

Now look at those words of mine which you thought you refuted, or rather now not those, but instead of them these which I shall say. For see, I do not say, “If it is not lawful to persecute, Optatus persecuted,” but I say, “If it is not lawful to persecute, Restitutus persecuted”; nor do I say, “If one who suffers persecution is to be held innocent, Maximian suffered it,” but I say, “If one who suffers persecution is to be held innocent, Salvius suffered it.” I read the records; I repeat the words you do not want: Restitutus carried it out, Salvius suffered it. Which of these two will you answer me is the Christian, if not Restitutus, which the sacrilegious, if not Salvius? Let both, then, lie fallen and be rejected as disproved: both what you said, that no persecution is just, and what you said, “Who will not agree with the Testament set forth, he who suffers persecution or he who carries it out?”, since there is also a just persecution, which Salvius suffered and Restitutus carried out. Salvius suffered, and for you Restitutus is praiseworthy, Salvius damnable. For you will not say it was done in secret, or that it could be hidden from Primian, since it was done in the city where he himself presided as bishop, and in so great a city, before so great a judge, that it could not be hidden from other cities either. Or if this too is to be counted among hidden things, why will you not have the world ignorant if Caecilian did anything evil in the time of persecution (God forbid that he did), if Primian could be ignorant of the persecution which Salvius suffered from him whom Primian himself ordained against him, and in that city where he holds primacy over his colleagues? You will confess, then, whether you will or not, so as not to be compelled to condemn Restitutus, Primian, and the party of Donatus, that not only can the unjust suffer persecution, but the just can also carry it out. Or if you think that what is done justly is not to be called persecution, you will be able to prove neither that you suffered persecution from us nor that your people suffered it from ours; and we shall rather show that we suffer it from your clergy and Circumcellions, who, with a hard and senseless heart, neither understanding nor bearing that we are taking measures for their salvation, rage against us with such fury that I cannot suffice to number, mention, or fittingly set out in words what they do to us.

Accordingly, when a madman harasses his physician and the physician binds the madman, either both persecute each other, or, if only what is done wrongly is persecution, the physician certainly does not persecute the madman, but the madman the physician. Your savagery, then, and your most violent audacity, through your Circumcellions, the bodyguards of your clergy, known to all, had to be restrained by the laws passed against you and, in a way, bound; at the same time so that, admonished at least by the very terror, you might be willing to reflect in what error you were and by what sacrilege you were divided against the unity and peace of Christ, and to amend it; just as Felicianus and Praetextatus, harassed by your terrors through the orders of secular powers, corrected the schism they had made from you (which Salvius, with an excessively hard and most perverse heart, would not do) and returned to your communion and fellowship. But the whole would be corrected if all of you returned to the Catholic root. Whatever was done against you that exceeded the moderation of Christian love is no more to be imputed to the Catholic church than I would impute what the Abitinians did to Salvius to Primian or Restitutus.

As for your adding, after exaggerating the persecutions which you said the party of Donatus suffered, keeping silent about all that your people did first and saying many unproven things about ours, a testimony from the Psalms, and saying, “Is it not of those who do such things that it was said, ‘Their feet are swift to shed blood, and the way of peace they have not known’?”: these very things, and many others far graver, your bishops said in that council of Bagai against Felicianus and Praetextatus. And certainly they shed no one's bodily blood, they made no attack of bodily violence on you; but those who said these things against them judged that by the sacrilege of schism they shed spiritual blood, far more wickedly. Hence, if you made peace with them after things said so gravely and sharply against them, without tarnishing their honor, without cancelling their baptism, there is no reason to despair that you can come to concord with us too. For the whole Christian world ought to attract you to making peace much more than Praetextatus and Felicianus; since, if those whom you condemned with such atrocity of accusation did not defile you, much less does the unity of so many Christian nations defile you, to whom you have not proved the crimes of I know not what Africans; and the crime greatly defiles you by which you separated your fellowship from the fellowship of that church for which so many and such great divine testimonies are read; which divine testimonies you dared with human rashness to contradict, though you yourself, somehow compelled by the same force of truth, confessed that the whole world is daily turning to the Christian name.

You dared, I say, to struggle against the testament of God, though the apostle says, “Even a man's testament, once ratified, no one annuls or adds to. The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed.” You were not at all afraid to annul this testament and to set the party of Donatus over this testament; and when God says in the same testament to Abraham, “So shall your seed be, as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the sea,” you, annulling this and setting over it the party of Donatus, for which you read no testimony, say, “Truth is often among few; to err is the mark of many”; not understanding how the Lord said that few enter by the narrow gate, when he also said that many would recline from east and west with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and in the Apocalypse thousands clothed in white are shown from every nation and tribe and tongue, which no one could number. These are certainly both many in themselves and the same are few in comparison with the far more numerous who are to be punished with the devil. Yet this wheat, destined for the divine barns forever, joined through the whole world in the unity of love, endures the heat and threshing of this age, whether from the scandals and violence of heretics or from its own inner chaff, the many who do not live rightly, to be purged by the last winnowing. But to all this nothing answers you more easily than the case of the Maximianensians. For if truth is often among few and to err is the mark of many, allow the Maximianensians to surpass you in truth as much as they are unequal to you in fewness. You do not: then do not boast of your fewness in comparison with the multitude of the Catholic nations, just as you do not want the Maximianensians to boast of their fewness in comparison with your multitude.

As for what you narrate about African traitors, do you really not know, or do you not feel in the heart of a man of any kind, how empty and inept narration is in a contest where truth is sought, when proof does not follow? I would not spend effort refuting it even if I did not have in the case of the Maximianensians so easy a shortcut without any detour. The writings are sacred: “The God of gods, the Lord, has spoken and called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting; out of Zion the beauty of his glory.” With this prophetic testimony the gospel harmonizes, where the same Lord says of himself: “It was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” For what is said there, “He called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting,” is said here, “to all nations”; and what is said there, “Out of Zion the beauty of his glory,” is said here, “beginning from Jerusalem.” For not only did Christ suffer there, but there he also rose again, from there he ascended into heaven, there on the day of Pentecost he filled a hundred and twenty men gathered together with the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, there on one day three thousand, on another five thousand believers were converted and received into his body; from there into all Judea and Samaria and into the other nations of the world the church spread itself and spreads itself by bearing fruit. This he foretold to his disciples when about to ascend into heaven: “You will be my witnesses,” he said, “in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” This church, then, beginning from Jerusalem and spreading itself through all nations with so evident a fruitfulness that it compels you yourself to confess that by God's providence the whole world is daily turning to the Christian name; this church, I say, which is called from the rising of the sun to its setting by the Lord God of gods speaking, could in no way be polluted by African traitors whom it knew nothing of at all, if the shoots of Maximian's sacrilegious branch did not pollute so many of his colleagues merely because they did not lay hands on him in ordaining him, though they praised him when condemned by Primian and condemned Primian, though, placed in his schism, they received an extension within which to return.

Moreover, because I said, “We charge you with handing over much more probably,” you answer that in this way I confessed that you charged us with it probably; teaching also the rule of speech by which the comparative degree increases what is placed before and does not disprove what was said before, and adding that, as with “well” and “better,” “badly” and “worse,” “horribly” and “more horribly,” so it is with “probably” and “more probably.” From this you seem to yourself to gather and say: “If you more probably, then we probably.” I answered you on this in its place in that longer work of three books, sufficiently or perhaps more than sufficiently, and showed from those writings in which we learned our words how the comparative degree does not always increase what it compares, but sometimes disproves that with which it is compared. Hence comes “May the gods grant better things to the pious”; hence “I wish you under better auspices.” Read carefully; you will find more yourself. But do you not wonder, I ask you, that in this case of the Maximianensians, from which I have now decided to answer you on everything, an example of this usage was not lacking to me either? For in that most brilliant and most eloquent sentence of the council of Bagai they say, “A more salutary course has been found, lest the pestilent poison creep through all the limbs: that the wound that has arisen should be cut away with brief pain.” Surely, according to your rule, they ought to have said “salutary,” not “more salutary”; for it was not salutary but destructive that the pestilent poison should creep through all the limbs. The course was therefore “more salutary,” that the wound that had arisen should be cut away with brief pain, although it was not salutary, but on the contrary deadly, that the pestilent poison should creep through all the limbs. So we charge you with handing over more probably, although you do not charge us with it probably.

Now as to what I said against Silvanus of Cirta, your bishop, that he was a traitor, the municipal records testify, drawn up there at Cirta by the curator of the commonwealth, Munatius Felix. For, as we read written there, after the library was opened, empty cupboards were found there. There Silvanus brought out a silver box and a silver lamp, which he said he had found behind a chest. To him Victor son of Aufidius said: “You would have been dead if you had not found them.” And when Felix the curator had said to him, “Search more carefully, lest anything remain here,” Silvanus said: “Nothing remains here; we have thrown all this out.” When these records were read in the proceedings of the consular Zenophilus and inserted in them among many other proofs from witnesses, the consular asked: “What office did Silvanus hold then in the clergy?” Victor answered: “When persecution arose under Paul the bishop, Silvanus was a subdeacon.” Against this most evident proof from public records, so that it may not be believed, you seem to yourself to set something great, since you mention the sentence he pronounced against Caecilian as if punishing traitors, and you argue that it could not be that he was a traitor who appeared as so severe an avenger of handing over; as if anything seemed more severe to those most wicked elders when they raged with such persistence to kill Susanna, while their conscience was pierced by the very shameful deed they pretended they wished to punish in her. But let us leave such things. What of Felicianus? Does he not now condemn with Primian what he himself committed with Maximian, but plainly by a better judgment, more corrected, not more shameless? If Silvanus had been willing to do this, he would have condemned, by a salutary amendment, not a false handing over in Caecilian but a true one in himself, and, even if not as a bishop, would have passed over to Caecilian's innocence with his wickedness corrected; if Felicianus could pass over to Primian, whom he had likewise condemned when innocent, as Silvanus had Caecilian, without stain to Primian or himself, even with his episcopal honor.

Nor should you take what I said, that your forefathers ought to have convicted the traitors (whoever they were) whom they were accusing, if they accused them truly, as if they ought to have done this among themselves; for so you answer, that they did it and therefore judged that our people had lost baptism. First read carefully what you are writing against, and either understand what is said or do not turn what you understand into something else. I said that they ought to have been convicted, not among your people, but before the churches overseas, to whom those accused by your people seemed innocent. For the Maximianensians too think they condemned Primian convicted, but not before those who, placed farther off and more removed from favor or envy, could give such judgment of him as would readily be accepted by the whole party of Donatus. But now a hundred condemned him and left him to be acquitted by more than three hundred, before whom they themselves would incur the danger of condemnation. For they ought to have persuaded so many more of their sentence, so that they themselves would be inside with them and Primian outside, if, condemned, he refused penance. But if they could not persuade of this so much greater a number of colleagues and so many churches of their communion spread throughout Africa, either they should have cancelled their sentence by sounder counsel, since as men they could be mistaken about a man; or, if they had learned his crimes truly beyond any doubt, but could not persuade so many more others of them, they should have tolerated, knowing him guilty, more prudently and patiently, rather than separate themselves by impious schism from so many innocent men who did not know these things. For they would hold that statement of blessed Cyprian, most full of love and piety, in which he says: “For even if there seem to be tares in the church, our faith or love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are tares in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church.” This would indeed have profited them, if, purged in the bosom of the Catholic church, they tolerated the impurities which they could not separate before the time. But what we say they ought to have done in this fellowship of your error, which you think the true church, this your forefathers ought to have done in that plainly true church in whose unity they were, so as not to be separated from it. For just as any man of your party, wholly ignorant of Primian's case, yet simply believes him innocent, though condemned by a hundred Maximianensians, since he proved himself to so many more, so too in the Catholic communion one to whom Caecilian's case is unknown not undeservedly persuades himself that he was innocent who, not only throughout Africa but throughout the lands of so many Christian nations, could either become known as innocent or be hidden as guilty to so many more bishops; before whom he either deserved to be acquitted by one who knew, or did not deserve to be condemned by one who did not know, or, acquitted by a corrupt judge against his deserts, could not be shown to others who had not judged. You, then, separate yourselves by sacrilegious separation from the unity of so many and such great innocent peoples, who, since they could not be judges in this case, either did not know that there were any judges in it, or whether or what was judged, or believed the chosen judges rather than the defeated litigants.

From this it is shown also, in that you chose the last of my fourfold division (for you could choose nothing else), how easily you are overcome. For I said that, if documents of crimes of handing over have been brought from both sides, either both are true, or both false, or ours true and yours false, or ours false and yours true. And when I had shown our very easy victory in the first three, you either did not understand that you are defeated in the fourth as well, or (what I rather believe), so that it should not be understood by others, trying to cover it with I know not what shades, you thought you should dispute about the kind of argument; on which we shall perhaps deal with you elsewhere, if it is necessary, so as not to spend time now on things not necessary.

Accordingly, notice whether I can show this too in that clear mirror of yours, that is, in the case of the Maximianensians. For when all are dead by whom and before whom these things were done, it may some day happen that a question of communion is raised between your posterity and theirs. They will say that Primian was condemned by their forefathers, nearly a hundred bishops or more, and will bring forward that sentence written against him first at Carthage, then another at Cabarsussa; your people will read out against them the council of Bagai. They will demand that the crimes of Primian contained in their forefathers' sentence be shown to have been washed away. Will not your people say much more justly: “These crimes which you charge against a man now dead, if they are true, prove that you brought them to our forefathers, that you showed them to be true. If you tried to do this and could not accomplish it, others' crimes, even if true, which had not been demonstrated to them, could not defile our forefathers themselves; how much less, if you did not even try to show them! How, then, could the guilt of that case pass to us, when, unknown and unproved, it did not involve even those who were living with Primian then? We therefore convict you by plain truth of being guilty of schism, since we see you separated from us, your brothers, because of others' crimes which were not then demonstrated to our forefathers when they ought to have been.” If the congregations and clergy of the places from which the three hundred and ten came, who drew up the council of Bagai against the Maximianensians, will say this most justly; if, I say, Africans will rightly say this to Africans, very many Numidians and Mauretanians to a few from Byzacena and the proconsular province, how much more justly does the world say this to Africans about the crimes, even if they were true, of I know not what traitors in Africa; especially since even in Africa itself the Catholic church is so great, joined to the other nations by the bond of unity. And it nonetheless cries out: “Even the documents of others' crimes, which you now try to show me, do not make guilty the peoples of the nations, to whom they were not demonstrated when they ought to have been, either because you could not or because you did not care. If I dissociate myself from these peoples, innocent in this case, on account of others' crimes, I cannot be innocent of the sacrilegious crime of schism. Accordingly, even if you prevail greatly and now teach me that these things are true: we condemn the dead traitors; we do not desert the living innocent.”

Since, then, I said, “But if your documents were at all true, you ought to have proved them to the church, that is, the Catholic church, so that you would be inside and those whom you convicted would be driven outside,” what is it that you chose to answer, that the separation was made because we were driven outside, while your people remained in the full and Catholic church? If the Maximianensians said this to you in so many words, what would you answer, except that they are not worth refuting but only laughing at, who dare to claim to be the full church with bishops now fewer than a hundred against so great a number and multitude, over which more than three hundred preside; since through all the regions of Africa where there are Maximianensians the communion of Primian is not lacking either, while through the other, far more numerous and wider parts of Africa no one would find a single Maximianensian, except perhaps barely one traveling? With what face, then, against the church promised from the rising of the sun to its setting by the voice of truth, and fulfilled, do you dare to call the party of Donatus the full church, when it is only of Africa, while the other is with so many nations and also of Africa? “But of course this one sent that one outside.” Please do not send this saying outside; a man's brow is in his face, not under his shoulder. Did this one, then, send that one outside? Do you not see that, if that church is sent outside of which God says to Abraham, “In your seed all nations will be blessed”; of which it is read foretold that in the last days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest and all nations will come to it; of which it is sung in prophecy, “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before him”; of which it is preached that it bears fruit and grows in the whole world; which the Lord himself says spreads through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem: do you not see, I say, that if this church is sent outside, it is sent outside with the law of God, with the prophets, with the psalms, with the apostles, with the gospel itself, finally with the whole testament and with the heir himself? If you attend to this wickedness, if you shudder at it, if you tremble, see where you are and come back in; for you did not send it out, but rather you went out. See what animosity's blindness does. It is said that Maximian sent Primian outside, and people laugh; it is said that the party of Donatus sent outside the labors of the apostles, bearing fruit and growing through the whole world, and people do not shudder.

So that you may not be deceived or deceive in anything, since, not noticing what I have mentioned so often, or pretending not to have noticed, you affirm that I said that the Catholic church which I asserted is not the Lord's wheat, in the way divine Scripture does not assert it: the wheat alone will be stored in the barn; now the church is threshed like a threshing floor with chaff. This is what presses and weighs on you and, unless you are corrected, extinguishes you: that you said you could not tolerate the chaff of this threshing floor, which you have shown yourselves to be, and shamelessly pretended that you are purged wheat; and so, turbulent with empty slanders, you went out from the threshing floor itself, like the lightest dust of the threshing carried up through the void, before the last time of winnowing. Finally, that most arrogant and most false saying is yours, not ours: “What has chaff to do with wheat?” Jeremiah said this of the dreams of the vain and the revelations of the prophets, and Parmenian writes it as though it were said of us and you. Ask Maximian too; he will say nothing else of himself. For there is no other swelling of ungodly pride among all who cut themselves off from the unity of Christ than to boast that they alone are Christians and to condemn the rest, not only those to whom their dispute is known, but also those who have not even heard their name.