Against the Letter of Parmenian 3.14–3.25

For this the apostle himself says, ‘If anyone named a brother’. For in saying ‘if anyone’ he seems to have meant nothing else than that such a person can be corrected salutarily in this way when he sins among those unlike him, that is, among those whom the plague of similar sins does not corrupt. And in saying ‘named’ he certainly wished it to be understood that it is not enough that someone be such, unless he is also named, that is, appears notorious, so that the sentence of anathema pronounced against him may seem to all entirely deserved. For so he is both corrected with peace kept, and struck not fatally but cauterized medicinally. That is why he also said of the man whom he wished to be healed by such medicine: ‘Sufficient for such a one is this rebuke by the many.’ For a rebuke by the many cannot be salutary except when the one rebuked has no allied multitude. But when the same disease has seized very many, nothing remains for the good but grief and groaning, so that by that sign which was revealed to holy Ezekiel they may deserve to escape unharmed from their devastation (for they cry to him who cannot err, ‘Do not destroy my soul with the impious, nor my life with men of blood’); lest, wanting to gather the weeds, they root up the wheat as well, and, instead of cleaning the Lord’s crop by diligence, are rather themselves counted among the refuse by their rashness. And so the same apostle, when he had found that many were defiled with unclean licentiousness and immorality, did not, writing to the same Corinthians in the second letter, again command that they not eat with such men; for they were many, and it could not be said of them, ‘If anyone named a brother is sexually immoral or greedy or anything of the kind, not even to eat with such a one’; but he says: ‘Lest when I come again my God humble me before you, and I mourn many of those who sinned before and have not repented of the impurity and licentiousness and sexual immorality that they practised.’ He threatens that they will be restrained by the divine scourge through his mourning, rather than by that rebuke by which the others would abstain from association with them. For he says next: ‘See, this is the third time I am coming to you. By the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall stand. I said before and I say beforehand, as when present the second time, and now absent, to those who sinned before and to all the others, that if I come again I will not spare, since you seek proof of Christ who speaks in me.’ What else did he say here with ‘I will not spare’ than what he said above, ‘and I mourn’, so that his mourning might obtain from the Lord a scourge by which those might be corrected who, because of their number, could no longer be corrected in such a way that the others would abstain from association with them and make them ashamed, as must be done if anyone named a brother is guilty of some crime unlike the rest? And indeed, when the contagion of sinning has invaded a multitude, the severe mercy of divine discipline is necessary. For plans of separation are both empty and ruinous and sacrilegious, because they arise from impious pride and disturb the weak good more than they correct the spirited bad. So that most faithful witness to the greed of his colleagues, when he attributed the evils of tribulation which the church was suffering at that time to divine censure and discipline, after recalling the very bad morals of the bishops he knew, who, while brothers were starving, wanted to have silver in abundance, seized estates by treacherous frauds, increased their gains by multiplying interest, said: ‘What should we not deserve to suffer for sins of this kind?’ And then he adds a testimony from the Psalms, saying: ‘Since the divine censure long ago warned beforehand and said: If his sons forsake my law and do not walk in my judgments, if they profane my statutes and do not keep my commandments, I will visit their crimes with a rod and their offences with scourges. But my mercy I will not scatter from them.’

Let a man, then, correct mercifully what he can, and what he cannot, let him bear patiently and groan or mourn with love, until either he from above amends and corrects it, or postpones until the harvest the rooting up of the weeds and the winnowing of the chaff. Yet, so that Christians of good hope may live in unity among the desperate, whom they cannot correct, secure about their own salvation, let them remove the evil from themselves, that is, let there not be found in them what displeases them in the morals of others. For when the apostle had said, ‘For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But God will judge those outside’, as if they answered, ‘What are we to do when we are so pressed by the multitude of the wicked that we cannot exercise our judgment in any coercion?’, he says, ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’; that is, if you cannot remove the bad from your midst, remove the evil itself from yourselves. But if anyone wants to understand ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’ to mean that every bad man is to be removed from the congregation of the brothers by the rebuke of separation, no one would doubt that it must be done with zeal for healing, not hatred for destroying. And what measure is to be applied and what times observed, lest the peace of the church be violated, in which above all the wheat must be spared lest it be rooted up with the weeds, we have discussed as seemed necessary for the present. Whoever considers these things diligently and peaceably neither neglects the severity of discipline in preserving unity nor breaks the bond of fellowship by immoderate coercion.

For this very thing that the apostle says, ‘not even to eat with such a one’, how many good Christians do with regard to those for whom they have a more familiar care, so that they do not hesitate to do it to those whom they can separate from their company: those whom they perceive can be corrected by such a rebuke, or those whom they altogether despair of correcting, lest they corrupt others by the contagion of bad conversations! But he does this well, that is, with humble love and kindly severity, who so presides over his brothers as to remember that he is their servant, as the Lord’s own precept and example have it. For then it is done both without the swelling of elation against the man and with the mourning of supplication toward God. But a multitude of the bad in any order of the church cannot be shut off and expelled from mingling with the good as easily as any individual is removed by the bishop from the rank of the clergy, or from the number of the poor whom the church feeds, or from the congregation of the laity itself, either by the bishop or by a cleric or any leader who has the power, so that the others to whom this can be commanded do not even eat with such a one. For in their own homes too, all good believers so regulate and direct the discipline of their households that there too they obey the apostle commanding ‘not even to eat with such a one’, when they do this, or order it to be done, with their sons and servants, when they see them living in such a way that the very love they have for them suggests that this must be done to them. But a crowd of the wicked, when there is opportunity to address the peoples, must be struck by a general rebuke, and especially if some scourge of the Lord from above has provided an occasion and opportunity in which it appears that they are being beaten for their deserts. For then the calamity of the hearers lends humble ears to the correcting sermon, and drives afflicted hearts more easily to the groan of confession than to the murmur of resistance; just as the blessed Cyprian perhaps would not have said those things about his colleagues then, had not the divine severity from above helped him. For he was saying those things at a time so troubled, so calamitous and mournful, that they not only did not dare to be angry with him, but felt that they could scarcely obtain pardon from those who were angry with them. Even when no calamity of tribulation presses, however, when the opportunity is given, a multitude is usefully rebuked in a multitude; for just as, separated, it is wont to rage, so, rebuked within the congregation itself, it is wont to groan. Therefore that precept of the apostle is in no way to be neglected when it can be done without danger of violating peace, since he himself did not want the bad man to be separated from the congregation of the good otherwise; and his other precept especially is to be held, that bearing with one another we should be eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Likewise we ought to obey the Lord speaking in the gospel, both in that place where he says, ‘If he will not hear even the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector’, and in that where he forbade the weeds to be gathered lest the wheat be rooted up with them. For both can be kept by those of whom it was said: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’

But now let us look at the other testimonies Parmenian set down. Among all the things in which their sacrilegious swelling appears, nowhere has it shown itself more than in this, that he dared even to set down that text from the prophet Jeremiah by which he would persuade blind men that the communion of the Donatists is not only the true church, but already at this time such as the holy church will be after the last winnowing. I do not know what could be added to this sacrilegious presumption and abominable elation. In many places in their discourses they are understood to presume nothing else, but sometimes they are ashamed, when the truth has begun to press them, when they are asked either whether they do not have sinners or whether they are not themselves sinners. But in this prophetic testimony they have most openly betrayed their impious vanity and excessive perversity. For when holy Jeremiah wished to show that the good and the bad, even if for a time there is one society of congregation, are yet far apart in the weight of their morals and in the end of their deserts, he said, ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’ But Parmenian, wishing to refute Tyconius, who said that the bad must be tolerated by the good in unity for the sake of peace meanwhile and separated at the end, at the last divine judgment, set down this testimony of Jeremiah, by which, perverse and erring, he inflames the perverse and erring to most turbulent and wicked seditions; so that whoever, with a mind puffed up by his flesh, seems to himself to be something when he is nothing, reckoning himself and those like him as the most purified grains, does not think that he should any longer come to the congregation of the church, in which it is necessary that those who belong to eternal life tolerate those who belong to eternal fire, until a certain end, as the wheat tolerates its chaff. No other wind has blown the lightest chaff off Christ’s threshing floor before the time of winnowing; no other presumption has made sacrilegious schisms, whatever and wherever they are.

‘The most holy Jeremiah’, he says, ‘admonishes and distinguishes the unfruitful and barren crowds of sinners from the honoured grain of the righteous, saying: What has chaff to do with wheat?’ O trumpet of madness, O voice of accursed pestilence! Is the human race perhaps so mistaken as not to recognize Parmenian as the winnower? Or does he too give place to Donatus, and boast that he has come to the lump purified through him? For whether Donatus deigns to recognize Majorinus before him I do not know. Or were these three like the three prongs of a winnowing fork in the Lord’s hand, through whom the harvest of the whole world was to be cleaned, and Africa was chosen where the purified lump should stand, while the separated chaff covered all the rest of the earth? Where, then, do such great herds of circumcellions come from? Where such great crowds of drunken banquets, and the innumerable debaucheries of women unmarried but not uncorrupted? Where such a crowd of robbers, misers, usurers? Where so many Optatuses, each very notorious in his own region, wanting as much but not able to do as much? What is the answer to this? That these things do not exist? Or is this wheat too? Woe to most shameless denial, if they answer that these things are not among them; woe to most wicked perversity, if they answer that they are wheat. Finally, why did Primian too dare to winnow again the lump of purified wheat after so authoritative a trident, that is, Majorinus, Donatus, Parmenian, so as to separate the Maximianists from his communion? Did he perhaps throw out wheat? What then is he, with his men who threw out such things? Or are these grains so purified that they do not recognize one another and try to winnow one another by mutual condemnation? Could chaff baptize grains? If it could, why do they say, ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’ But if it could not, why is it that, when Felicianus had flown outside among the chaff of the Maximianists, all those whom he baptized there have returned with him again to that most purified lump, and they now have them all inside, and do not say to themselves, ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’

Let them now at last wake up and understand how the prophet said, ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’ For let them first consider where it is said, if they have any human sense at all. Can it be said in the field, ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’, when they are carried on the same root? Can it on the threshing floor, where they are threshed together? But certainly in the barn: ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’ For the householder will come with the winnowing fork in his hand; he will clean his threshing floor, store the wheat in the barn, but burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. For in another likeness all the wheat is signified by the name of sheep and all the chaff by the name of goats, two kinds of animals that meanwhile graze mixed under one shepherd. ‘But’, he says, ‘the Son of Man will come with his angels, and all nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them from one another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will put the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. And he will say to those on the right: Come, blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. But to those on the left he will say: Go into the eternal fire, which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.’ Then, therefore, the prophecy will be fulfilled, ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’, when the goats and the sheep can no longer have a common pasture. If the good fish, within that net to which the Lord said the kingdom of heaven is like, can say to the bad fish, ‘Depart from us’, or ‘Let us depart from you’, before all are drawn out to the shore and by the angels the good are put into vessels and the bad thrown away, then what was said can be fulfilled at this time: ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’ But those who think their congregation already purified wheat have flown away from the mixture of wheat and chaff as pure chaff; and those who do not perceive that they are still grazing with the goats under one shepherd have been separated from the Lord’s flock by the snares of wolves; and those who do not think that they have been gathered together with bad fish are not only bad fish but have also broken the nets of unity. But if we understand that what Jeremiah says, ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’, is already happening at this time, we can rightly understand nothing else than that they are indeed in one congregation until they are separated bodily as well at the end of the winnowing, but that the wheat has its heart above, while the chaff has it below. For the chaff seeks its own things, not those of Jesus Christ, but the wheat lays up treasure in heaven, and where its treasure is, there is its heart also.

Just so are the words of the blessed Isaiah to be understood, which he likewise, not understanding them, tried to twist to the same opinion of his error. For what does Isaiah say? ‘Depart, depart, go out from there and do not touch what is unclean. Go out from her midst and be separate, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.’ Must the same things be repeated so often, how separation of the heart from the bad is made? For he does not touch what is unclean who consents to no one in sin. And he goes out from there, so that his case is safe before God, if he also does not neglect the discipline of correcting and rebuking with peace kept. For he who wants to desert the evidently bad bodily, as it were, deserts the hidden good spiritually, whom, untried and unknown, he is forced to accuse while he tries to defend his separation.

But let these men answer: if Felicianus is clean, why did he go out from their midst? But if he is unclean, why do they now touch what is unclean? And if he was unclean when he was outside, those whom he baptized there are unclean, because they touched what is unclean. Or were they all cleansed by returning with him? Can these men, then, cleanse those baptized outside, whom they did not baptize in their own communion? Why then do they rebaptize others? Or is it perhaps some distinction to be condemned by the three hundred and ten sitting at Bagai, and is that why whoever comes to them from the whole world is rebaptized, because the whole world has not deserved that distinction of being condemned by the Council of Bagai? What then? Those who come baptized by Maximian and the rest of his associates who are not returning to Primian’s communion: are they rebaptized or are they spared? If they are rebaptized, the Bagai distinction is violated, for in it the baptizers of these too were condemned. But if they are spared, these men must be asked to meet again at the town of Bagai and, if perhaps that number of three hundred and ten is now consecrated, let as many meet and there pronounce sentence against the whole world, as they did against the Maximianists; so that, when they want to rebaptize someone coming from some part of the world, he may defend himself with an equal privilege, asserting that he ought to be spared as the man baptized by a Maximianist is spared, since now not only the Maximianists but the whole world has deserved to be condemned by the Council of Bagai. Then they will free themselves from so great an odium: so that, when they begin no longer to rebaptize those baptized in the church established through all lands, if anyone raises the question with them why they no longer do what they did before, they may answer: ‘When we did those things, we had not yet condemned the whole world by the Council of Bagai; but now, being asked, we have mercifully granted that we should condemn them by such a council as that by which we condemned the Maximianists, whose baptism we do not repeat.’ What great thing, then, what difficult thing is it to grant all nations so great a distinction of condemnation? Or is it permitted to repeat the baptism of the world, but not to repeat the condemnation of the world? Even here let them be at ease: we do not find by what council they condemned so many nations and provinces. They condemned a few men in Africa, by whom they were overcome in the judgment of the whole world, and they did not afterwards dare to condemn the judges before whom they were overcome. For what would be more shameless, what more insane? Much less could they condemn those established in the other parts of the world too, who preferred to believe such church judges rather than defeated litigants. And yet the baptism of the Maximianists, whom three hundred and ten Donatists condemned at the Council of Bagai, is recognized, accepted, admitted; but the baptism of the world, through which Christ’s inheritance has been displayed as it was promised, in which they themselves were a few years ago, which they could condemn by no right and did not condemn even by any perverse council, is rejected, blown upon, and repeated. O holy condemnation, which the Maximianists deserved, and toilsome innocence of the nations, which among them lost the Christian name because it could not find such a place of condemnation!

But if only those coming from the Maximianists who return with their baptizers are not rebaptized, such as those who returned with Praetextatus and Felicianus, let them first see how they confirm in some and blow upon in others the baptism of the same schism, given equally outside, beyond their communion: honouring it in part, violating it in part. For so where they violate it they become guilty, but where they confirm it they are found witnesses to their own guilt. For if they confirmed it afterwards in such a way as to stop violating it, it would be called not inconsistency but correction; but since they reject in some what they approve in others, in the latter they are accused, in the former they bear witness against themselves. For I ask why you do not baptize those whom Felicianus baptized in the schism of Maximian: because they received the baptism of Christ, or because they received that of Felicianus? If because of Felicianus’s, he gave it as a condemned man among the Maximianists, he gave it outside, beyond your communion; it is the same baptism as that of Salvius of Membresa and others like him. But if because it is Christ’s, then Felicianus at Musti counts for more with you in favour of Christ’s baptism than Christ himself in all lands; he who sits at your side, after being condemned by you, counts for more with you in favour of Christ’s baptism than he who sits at the right hand of the Father, after being crucified for you. The baptism of Christ is spared in very few, so that Felicianus is not offended; and it is not spared, so that Christ himself is blown upon in so many thousands of nations.

But incredible is the blindness of these men, and I do not at all know how such perversity could be believed to be in men, unless it were made plain by the experience of their own words and deeds, that they keep the eyes of the heart so shut that, when they quote testimonies of holy Scripture, they do not observe in the deeds of the prophets how the words of the prophets are to be understood. Jeremiah said: ‘What has chaff to do with wheat?’ Did he himself withdraw from the chaff of his people, against which he said so many true things? Isaiah said: ‘Depart, depart, go out from there and do not touch what is unclean.’ Why did he himself, among that people, touch the uncleanness he so gravely rebuked, in one congregation with them? Let them read how much and how vehemently and truly he spoke against the bad of his people, from whom he nevertheless did not separate himself by any bodily division. David said: ‘I have not sat in the assembly of vanity, and I will not go in with criminals. I have hated the gathering of the most wicked, and I will not sit with the impious.’ Let them read what sort of people he tolerated among that people in his own times, he who paid such honour to the mystical sacrament of anointing that he did not despise it even in the most wicked Saul, but rather revered it so much that he could not have revered it more. If we set their words against their deeds, would they not answer us: ‘We plainly had no fellowship in heart with such men, nor did we touch the unclean where contact can defile, that is, by consent and approval of conscience; we withdrew and went out from them, because we not only did not do such things but did not keep silent toward those who did’? But these seditious and insane men, who seek defences for their cuttings-off from the oracles of the prophets, have nothing left but, with insane impiety, to use the prophetic words to reproach the morals of the prophets. Or will they say that in those times it was not permitted for the righteous to withdraw from a bad people, but in these times it is? What could be said more perversely than that at that time, when many sacraments were commanded to be observed bodily, the good ought not to be separated bodily from the bad, but that now bodily separation is necessary, when those things are observed spiritually?

Woe to the blind who lead and the blind who follow! Are they not afraid, saying these things, that perhaps through the great breadth of the world over which the faith and name of Christ was spread, before these men separated themselves, in some part of the world very far from the African regions, some righteous men had already done this, and these men were still living in the contagion of the uncleanness those others had fled? For who guards them, who makes them secure, if this kind of separation from the bad must be made, that before they made it, it had never been made so far away that the Africans were entirely ignorant of it, just as the party of Donatus is entirely unknown to the furthest lands of those parts? Perhaps they say that what they did not know could not harm them. So then, what was done in Africa, of which those lands are ignorant, cannot harm them either, even if these men told the truth about the crimes of the Africans, about which they lie. But if they say that it could not have been hidden from them if it had been done, let them now say how many schisms have been made throughout all parts of the world. I ask too much: in Africa itself let the Donatists of Carthage, or whoever are in the neighbourhood of Carthage, say how many parties have been made from the party of Donatus itself through Numidia and Mauretania. They ought certainly to know the causes of all of them, lest perhaps some righteous men in their regions avoided the fellowship and congregation of the bad and went out from there, so as not to touch the unclean, so as not to go in with criminals; lest perhaps these men, some years ago, in some corner of Numidia or Mauretania, remained chaff while the grains separated themselves, and do not know it. But from where are they secure, except that they hold it certain that those could not have been good who segregated themselves from the unity of the communion of Donatus, which is spread through all Africa; because, if they suffered some bad men in their neighbourhood whom they could not show to the others, they ought rather to have tolerated them than divide themselves from so many innocent people, whom they could not persuade of others’ sins, even if they knew them very well themselves? Why then is this innocence not granted to the world, in so great a multitude and breadth of nations wherever Christ’s inheritance extends, so that it may be certain and secure that those who call themselves good and disjoin themselves from the unity of the whole earth show by that very fact what they are? For they seem righteous to themselves and despise others, and so they do not sing a new song, because they are lifted up with the pride of the old man. For they are separated from that communion to which it was said, ‘Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.’ If they were truly righteous, they would also be humble; and if they were humble, even if they truly suffered bad men in the congregation of their neighbourhood whom they could not expel from the unity of Christ, they would choose to tolerate them with the love of Christ. But how can they have a just judgment about those very men whom they accuse as bad in their own neighbourhood, when with rash blindness they accuse completely unknown men placed so far away from them? For whether they know their fellow citizens or neighbours whom they accuse to be bad is uncertain to the world; but that they separate themselves with rash blindness from those whose life, being far away, they cannot know is certain to the world; and that known bad men are tolerated, with the praise of patience, lest unknown good men be condemned, is certain to the world. Therefore the world judges securely that those are not good who divide themselves from the world, in whatever part of the world.

Finally, if the prophets warned later generations to separate themselves bodily from the chaff before the time of the last winnowing, and by such separation to avoid touching the unclean and not to go in with criminals, why did the apostle Paul not do this? Or were they not chaff who proclaimed Christ not from truth but from envy? Or were they not unclean who preached the gospel not chastely, whom he testifies were in the church of that time, and whose most excellent love, tolerating all things, later men also imitated? Or is greed not uncleanness, which Cyprian did not touch in his heart, and yet he lived most peaceably among greedy colleagues? Had he, then, become deaf to the words of the psalms, so as to sit in the assembly of vanity and go in with criminals, not to hate the gathering of the malignant, and to sit with the impious? Was there not an assembly of vanity in those who, while brothers in the church were starving, desired to shine with abundant silver? Were they not criminals who seized estates by treacherous frauds? Were they not most wicked and impious who increased their gains by multiplying interest? But he washed his hands among the innocent and went around the altar of the Lord. For he tolerated the guilty precisely so as not to desert the innocent with whom he washed his hands, because he loved the beauty of the Lord’s house, a beauty that was in the vessels of honour. ‘But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; and some are for honour, but some for dishonour.’ And he cleansed himself from these, so that he too might be a vessel for honour, sanctified, useful to the Lord, prepared for every good work; and he did not separate himself from the great house because of the vessels for dishonour, but, rebuking them in the unity of that house, he tolerated those from whom he cleansed himself by not imitating them.