Against the Letter of Parmenian 3.26–3.29

But Parmenian knows how to set down the words of the prophet saying: ‘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. I will wash my hands among the innocent and go around the altar of the Lord, to hear the voice of praise and to tell all your wonders. Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house and the place of the tabernacle of your glory. Do not destroy my soul together with sinners, nor my life with men of blood, in whose hands are offences, whose right hand is filled with bribes.’ Parmenian knows how to set these down, and does not care to notice how these words are served without any sacrilege of abominable division. For the beauty of the house and the place of the tabernacle of God’s glory is, as I said, in the vessels: not in all of them, though they are in one great house, but in those that are for honour, sanctified, useful to the Lord, always prepared for every good work. Among these, whoever has loved the beauty of God’s house and the place of the tabernacle of his glory tolerates those for dishonour, and does not leave the house because of them, lest he himself become not a vessel for dishonour, which is nevertheless tolerated in the house, but dung that is thrown out of the house; and because of that temporal gathering with the bad in one house, he prays, saying, ‘Do not destroy my soul together with sinners, nor my life with men of blood, in whose hands are offences, whose right hand is filled with bribes’, praying, of course, not to perish together with those with whom love commands him to live together; the sacrifice of which love he set down first, saying, ‘Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house and the place of the tabernacle of your glory.’ That is: because I have loved the beauty of your house, and because of that very love I tolerate the vessels for dishonour, since love tolerates all things, do not destroy my soul together with them. Does there not appear in these words the voice of those who were prophesied through Ezekiel to groan and grieve over the iniquities of the people that were done in their midst, and who, because they were vessels for honour, deserved to receive their own sign, so that, when all those began to be laid waste and destroyed, God would not destroy their souls with the sinners? But these unhappy men, who presume that they have been purified from the congregation of all the bad like wheat from the chaff, have by this vanity prejudged themselves, so that among the peoples over whom they preside they do not dare to rebuke the most wicked and shameful crowds so that they may be corrected, lest by this they be forced to confess that they are bad, and it be said to them: ‘Surely you are speaking to purified wheat: why do you confess by these words that so much chaff is mixed with it?’ And so, because they are not righteous, they do not correct and rebuke in mercy, but anoint with the oil of flattery the heads of those whose heads they themselves want to be, since they are unwilling to be under the one head who is in heaven, in the unity of the body that is through the whole earth; so that it is deservedly said to their peoples: ‘Those who call you happy lead you into error and confuse the paths of your feet.’

Let him, then, who does not want to sit in the assembly of vanity not vanish into the swelling of pride, seeking assemblies of the righteous separated from the unity of the whole world, which he cannot find. For through the whole city, which cannot be hidden because it is set on a mountain (I mean that mountain of Daniel into which the stone cut without hands grew and filled the whole earth), through this whole city, then, spread throughout the world, the righteous groan and grieve over the iniquities that are done in their midst. Let him not seek, then, the righteous separated, but rather let him groan in concord with them in the temporal mixture of the bad. For he will not sit in the assembly of vanity, because he will sit where his citizenship is, and he will hear the apostle saying, ‘Our citizenship is in heaven.’ There he will not be with criminals, there he will not suffer the gathering of the most wicked, there he will not sit with the impious. Let him dwell in such hope, so that he may deserve at some time to reach the thing of which he now has hope. For we have not yet risen as Christ has, nor do we already sit with him in the heavenly places; and yet, because he has given us such hope, and through that hope we already in a way have our citizenship there, the apostle says: ‘But if you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on things on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.’ In that life of ours which is hidden with Christ in God we do not sit in the assembly of vanity, because, as the same apostle says, he has raised us together and made us sit together in the heavenly places; but in hope, not yet in reality. ‘But hope that is seen is not hope. For what one sees, why does he hope for? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it through patience.’ This patience these wretched men have lost, and, hastening to separate themselves from the chaff before the time, as it were, have shown that they themselves are the lightest chaff, carried off the threshing floor by the wind. Let us hold, then, to what Wisdom says: ‘But he who hears me will dwell in hope and will rest without fear of any evil.’ While, then, we dwell in hope, thinking not of what we are but of what we shall be, since we are indeed sons of God, but it has not yet appeared what we shall be, for when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is: dwelling in such hope, because this dwelling of thought has no bad men, we suffer neither assemblies of vanity nor criminals nor the unjust nor the impious; and yet we suffer them, not in hope but in the reality that is seen, in the Catholic congregation spread throughout the world, until iniquity passes away, until at the time of harvest the weeds are gathered, until by the last winnowing fork the chaff is separated from the wheat, until the good fish are picked out on the shore from the bad fish with which they were gathered in the same nets, until the goats are segregated to the left at the last from the sheep with which they grazed so long under one shepherd in the same pastures.

There is, therefore, no security of unity except in the church made known by the promises of God, which, set on a mountain, as has been said, cannot be hidden, and therefore must be known in all parts of the earth. Let us hold unshaken and firm that no good men can divide themselves from it; that is, that no good men, even if they suffer bad men known to them wherever they live, separate themselves on their account from good men far away and unknown by a rash sacrilege of schism. So that, in whatever part of the earth such things have been done, are being done, or will be done, the other parts of the earth, far away and ignorant whether they were done or why, and yet remaining with the world in the bond of unity, may have this very thing as their firm security: that no one could have done this except men mad with the swelling of pride, or insane with the livid envy, or corrupted by worldly advantage, or perverted by carnal fear. By all these causes it comes about that either good men are defamed with false charges, or falsehoods are rashly believed about good men, or even the bad, who, tolerated for the bond of unity, do no harm to the good, are most perversely fled by breaking the peace of the good, when no mercy is shown in harassing the wheat, as men claim for themselves before the harvest what the angels will do at the harvest.

This being so, sacrilegious schisms or impious heresies even dare, if they are admonished by some scourge to correct themselves, to count the penalties of their madness among martyrdoms. Thinking so, Parmenian too, at the end of his letter, exhorts Tyconius to remain in the party of Donatus and to endure persecutions, saying that he ought not to join himself by his will to those with whom they were not joined when persecution compelled, and adding also the testimony of Scripture which says: ‘Woe to those who have lost endurance and turned aside into crooked ways! And what will they do when the Lord begins to inspect them?’ In his usual way he sets forth everything from the divine books against themselves. For who have lost endurance, if not those who refused to tolerate for the peace of Christ those whom they could not convict of the crimes they charged, so that afterwards, thinking too late that their own party should not be divided into many little pieces, they tolerated, for the false peace of Donatus, even men most manifestly sacrilegious to them, whom they themselves condemned and received back? And now at last let them recognize and correct what they learned they had done impiously, at least from what they suffered from Maximian. But of course they are ashamed to be corrected by the plainest reasons, because they resisted the orders of the emperors, lest, once corrected, they seem to have lost what they complain of having suffered. As if it were not better to lose those things than to perish! For if refusing to yield to an emperor who commands has some shadow, however false and deceptive, some image of fortitude, what allurement even of human praise is there in contradicting the plainest truth? Why do they with closed eyes bring forward so many testimonies from the Scriptures which, when understood and turned against them, they repudiate, and which, even if taken according to their understanding, nonetheless convict them of their perversity? Is it not written, ‘Do not contradict the truth in any way’? But whom does one contradict but the truth, when one resists even a king who commands something according to the truth? But what a human king threatens or punishes is troublesome for a time; not so that King who is also called the Truth, who now too cries to them through the prophet, ‘In vain have I struck your sons; they did not receive discipline’, and who therefore admonishes them mercifully now through human powers, lest at the end he punish them in such a way that the proud cannot boast of their condemnation. For under the punishment of kings, the obstinacy of men can want to be praised under the false name of virtue; but to be burned in eternal fires neither will be nor will be called fortitude. For on that day there will be none to anoint the head with the oil of flattery, or, deceived by empty illusion, to dream of crowns for the condemned, saying ‘Well done, well done’ and swearing by the grey hairs of those who did not have a sound head, and by the shoes of those who did not know the way of peace. Turning such crowds away from the unity of Christ and wanting to turn them to their own name, these men meanwhile dare to compare the temporal punishments of their schism to the sufferings of the martyrs, so that the birthdays of their punishments are celebrated with a great gathering of mad people, among whom are those who, even when no one persecutes them, throw themselves of their own accord over the cliffs of mountains, so as to end a bad life by a worse death. On that day there will be no foolish peoples to whom it may be said, ‘We are the righteous who suffer persecution’, and to whom, being blind, a reprobate stone is sold for a precious gem, that is, carnal hardness for spiritual patience. There will be none to recite at the altars the names of the leaders of their madness, or the names of the altars that they have divided from the unity of Christ or raised under the name of Christ against the church of Christ. For these are the prices which these men, wanting to have something to sell, stir up the severity of the powers against themselves by spirited perversity, in order to receive; nor do those who are seduced by them, and think them righteous because they pay the penalties of iniquity, return to their heart and consider why they suffer what they boast of suffering. How small a thing it would have been for them to notice a little that Parmenian says to Tyconius about enduring persecutions and the glory of tolerance the same things that all heretics say, against whom similar orders of kings for their coercion or punishment are issued; such things as Salvius certainly now says to his people of Membresa, on whom the Abitinians inflicted such blows and insults, through whom these men had obtained that he be driven out of the church; so that they even tied the corpses of dead dogs to his neck, and finally danced with him to shameful songs and chants. What speech do we suppose he made, after suffering such things, to his people, the wretches he deceived, so that they would build another basilica for themselves? How much did he say of his righteousness, for which he deserved to suffer such things, persuading them that he was holy because he suffered, and that they were most wicked because they did it? The ancient cruelty of the Etruscan tyrants is recalled, that they joined dead bodies to living ones, but human to human; but I do not know whether anyone recalls ever having heard or read of dogs’ bodies joined to human limbs, and those a bishop’s. It is known to all that frivolous and shameful dancing is usually restrained by bishops; who ever remembers dancing being done with bishops by the men whom bishops had called in for help? Or perhaps Salvius was not then a bishop, because his condemnation is recited in the sentence of the Council of Bagai? What then? If he too were afterwards reconciled to Primian, as Felicianus, condemned by the truthful mouth of the same plenary council, as their words are recited there, was reconciled to him, would he then be a bishop? Or would he perhaps not be admitted, because the man whom the sacrilege of schism has defiled can be cleansed, as Felicianus could, but the man whom dead dogs hung from his neck have made unclean cannot be purified? I would like to know what those who throw their old slanders at us as if they were our crimes say to these things, so plain, so public, so recent. Whoever of them thinks I am boasting falsehoods: what great thing, what difficult thing is it, caring for his own soul, to go to Membresa, ask whether these things were done, and defend them if he can? For if he says that these things are rightly done to schismatics whom three hundred and ten Donatist bishops condemned, let them not murmur when they suffer something, though they have never suffered such things, whom we convict of having made a schism from the unity of Christ by the authority, not of three hundred and ten, but of the whole world. But if he says that what Salvius suffered is light, I ask whether, if the emperor forced some Donatist bishop to dance and threatened him with beasts and fire if he refused, he would not prefer to suffer those things rather than do that; and when he had suffered, whether these men would not recite him among the holy martyrs. So Salvius, with whom they danced, suffered heavier things than if he had been burned alive. For if these two choices were put to any of them, whether he would rather not dance himself but have others dance with him, or be burned alive, there is no doubt what they would answer he would choose. But if he says that the Primianists obtained nothing else from the proconsul than that Salvius be driven from the basilica by the Abitinians, and that these did of their own accord whatever cruel and shameful things they afterwards did to him, why does he not say to himself that the Catholics too can ask nothing else of the emperors than that these men be excluded from the basilicas which they hold in a sacrilegious name, while the emperors of their own accord, keeping royal power and decency, punish the sacrilegious much more mildly than the Abitinians, under no imperial law and no judicial order, punished Salvius of Membresa? Having considered these things, let them notice first what they do and afterwards what they suffer, lest, closing their eyes to their own deeds and opening their eyes to their penalties, they both suffer temporal things here in vain, and at the last judgment of God are punished with eternal punishment for this very thing, that he admonished them in vain by such troubles in order to amend them. I do not unroll old things, where they deceive whom they can; I speak briefly, I press present things, I point with the finger: the condemned Maximianists are received, unknown nations are accused; the baptism of the Maximianists is accepted, the baptism of the world is blown upon. See the people of Assuras, see the people of Musti; see Praetextatus, not long dead; see Felicianus, still alive; see their names, among those condemned at the Council of Bagai, entered in the proconsular records. By such recent and present deeds they show plainly enough what they were from the beginning. If they suffer anything for such perversities and iniquities, if they will not be corrected, let them at least not dare to boast.