Against the Letter of Parmenian

I have discussed many things elsewhere against the Donatists, according to the strength the Lord supplies, partly in writing and partly also in preaching. But now, since there has come into our hands a certain letter of Parmenian, formerly their bishop, which he writes to Tyconius, a man indeed gifted with a keen mind and a rich eloquence, but nonetheless a Donatist, since he thought him in error in that very point which Tyconius had been compelled to confess as true, it has pleased the brothers who asked, or rather commanded, that I should answer this same letter of Parmenian here, chiefly because of certain testimonies from the Scriptures which he does not take as they ought to be taken. For Tyconius, beaten about by all the voices of the holy pages, woke up and saw the church of God spread throughout the whole world, as was foreseen and foretold of her so long before through the hearts and mouths of the saints. Having perceived this, he undertook to demonstrate and assert against his own people that no man’s sin, however wicked and monstrous, prejudices the promises of God, and that no impiety of any persons whatever placed within the church brings it about that God’s faithfulness concerning the church that was to be spread to the ends of the earth, a faithfulness held in the promises to the fathers and now displayed, is made void. When Tyconius was arguing this forcefully and abundantly, and was stopping the mouths of those who contradicted him with many great and plain testimonies of the holy Scriptures, he did not see what he ought to have seen as the consequence: namely, that those Christians in Africa belong to the church spread through the whole world who are joined by communion, not to these men who are cut off from the communion and unity of that same world, but to the world itself. But Parmenian and the other Donatists saw that this was the consequence, and they preferred to take up a most obstinate mind against the plainest truth, which Tyconius asserted, rather than, by conceding it, be overcome by the African churches that rejoiced in the communion of that unity which Tyconius asserted, from which these men had separated themselves. And Parmenian at first thought he should correct him by a letter; but afterwards, they report, he was even condemned by a council of theirs. So in this work we have decided to answer the letter of Parmenian which he wrote to Tyconius, rebuking him for preaching the church spread through the whole world and warning him not to dare to do so.

Let us first, then, see what sort of thing it is that he says the Gauls, Spaniards, and Italians and their associates, by whom he certainly wants the whole world to be understood, are like the African traitors in partnership of crimes and fellowship of guilt. For to a man who brings forward from the holy Scriptures so many and such weighty proofs, he himself speaks without proofs, and, proving nothing, wants to be believed, inviting him, it seems, to imitate him, since he too believed some of his fellow bishops, who did nothing but talk, against so many churches established through so great a breadth of all lands. What can be found more rash than this credulity? For he says that certain men, most faithful witnesses as he himself asserts, came to those same provinces on an embassy; then, by a second visit of most holy priests of the Lord, as he says, the things they charge were made public clearly, more fully, and more truly. O man who thinks he should be believed rather than God! Tyconius brings forward the thunders of the divine covenant, which was made in the promise to Abraham, the promise to Isaac, and the promise to Jacob, whose God he testifies that he is, saying: ‘I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob; this is my name for ever’; and this man sets against it the stories of his fellow priests. What was said to Abraham? ‘In your seed all nations shall be blessed.’ What was said to Isaac? ‘And in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham your father heard my voice.’ What was said to Jacob? ‘I am the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; do not fear. For the land on which you are sleeping I will give to you and to your seed. And your seed shall be as the sand of the earth, and it shall be spread abroad to the sea and to the south and to the north and to the east. And in you all the tribes of the earth shall be blessed, and in your seed.’ And lest they think this was said of the Jews, let the apostle explain what the seed of Abraham is, in which it was said that all nations would be blessed: ‘To Abraham’, he says, ‘were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He does not say, “And to seeds”, as of many, but as of one, “And to your seed”, which is Christ.’ So it was promised with such great authority, and displayed with such great truth, that all nations would have the blessing in Christ; and those who wish to be called Christians contradict it. And what do they set against these things? ‘Certain most faithful witnesses’, he says, ‘came on an embassy to those same provinces; then, by a second visit of most holy priests of the Lord, it was made public clearly, more fully, and more truly.’ What, I ask you, what was made public through these faithful witnesses, whom you want to be more faithful than God? Was it that, because of the African traitors, the seed of Abraham, which is Christ, was not permitted to reach all nations, and withered there where it had reached? Say now that your colleagues are to be believed rather than the covenant of God; and while saying this, you boast that you preserved from the flames the very covenant that you are trying to blot out with your tongue.

But let each choose what he likes, and if the smoke of earthly falsehood prevails at all against heavenly lightnings, let him leave heaven and vanish into the winds. For if Parmenian were not favouring his own chair, he would rather choose to believe the Scripture of God than his colleagues. For God says to Jacob: ‘I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.’ But it is much more credible of those men that, because they had already been rejected by a just judgment, they were not admitted to share communion in those regions where God was already fulfilling what he had promised to our fathers, and that for this reason they boasted such things about the holy priests of God, by whom they had not deserved to be received, in order to stir up with false rumours the weak minds of the peoples they had deceived, and to break away from the peace of the world minds rashly credulous and entangled by the pride of their name. What can be found more insane than this folly, or rather madness? In so many nations of the world God has fulfilled, and in large part is still fulfilling, until it comes altogether to all, what he promised, who said: ‘I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you’; and these men now believe those who report that what God promised is not fulfilled, and that therefore the seed of Abraham, which is Christ, has perished from the parts of the world in which it had already been fulfilled, and that God’s promises have been made void, because they themselves were not admitted to the communion of those among whom the world already held this fulfilled. And it is not said to them: ‘God alone is true, but every man is a liar. You say these things from your own, because he who speaks a lie speaks from his own. So you lie as men, because you are angry as men.’ This is not said to them; rather, they are believed when they say that Christ has perished from the world which he had already begun to possess. And those who believe this, while saying shamelessly, ‘We are Christians’, dare to say: ‘We alone are.’

Parmenian also says that the world is proved to have been made criminal by the crimes of handing over and other sacrileges because, though many such things were committed in the time of persecution, no separation of peoples took place afterwards in those provinces. As if it could not have happened that some of the bad remained hidden and were not accused, so that they could be condemned without any rashness, while others were exposed and condemned and, because they were convicted by evident facts, ceased from disturbing and dividing the churches; and that so it came about that, since some were not accused, and certain uncertain charges were left to God for the sake of a certain peace, while certain charges were so made plain and proved that they were condemned and no condemned man could deceive the peoples by feigned innocence, the bond of unity was in no way broken. Nor indeed would this so monstrous evil of cutting off have happened in Africa either, had not the faction of those who invent falsehoods prevailed over the true reasoning of those who convict.

Let those who wish read what Optatus, bishop of Milevis, of the Catholic communion and of venerable memory, relates, and with what documents he makes so many things convincing: whether about Lucilla, at that time a very wealthy and very factious woman, whom the holy Caecilian, then still a deacon, had offended for the sake of the church’s discipline; or about the other partners of her faction, whether thieves of the church’s silver or men grieved that they had not reached the episcopate and pursuing Caecilian, who had been preferred to them, with whatever plots they could; or about the Numidian bishops, whom this faction had summoned for Caecilian’s ruin, so that, he being deposed, another might be ordained for them. These came with their primate at that time, Secundus of Tigisis, and with others whose confessed crimes of handing over Secundus himself had pardoned, as if consulting for peace, as the church records testify; and without any delay for a more careful inquiry, with no place kept for a reply, they judged the absent Caecilian to be a traitor: so that, obviously, the crimes of handing over merely charged against him harmed him in his absence, while they, being present, pardoned to one another crimes confessed. So against a man seated in the chair, with whom the whole Christian world communicated in lands overseas and far distant, and among the Africans themselves in the weightier churches, stronger against deceits of this kind, they ordained another bishop, so that for their own deed they might contradict the promises of God, that in the seed of Abraham all nations should not be blessed, and might say that even those parts of the world were defiled by the African traitors which had either never heard the name of Caecilian or had at least heard of his life, of which these men convicted him of no crime, as of an innocent man’s. Moreover, against the world when it says, ‘What you charge against your fellow citizens I could neither find out nor ought I to condemn it unknown’, they bring forward the testimony of the apostle saying: ‘Not only those who do these things, but also those who consent to those who do them.’ For it was not enough for them to condemn so many great Christian peoples unheard, unless they also dared to bring out against the apostle himself his words indeed, but not his meaning. For if consenting to evildoers is being with them in the church, then the apostle himself consented to false brothers, among whom he testified that he was in danger, and whom he nonetheless allows to preach, though they preach the gospel not purely but out of envy, without love. But if consenting to evildoers is nothing other than approving and praising their evil deeds, then by the apostle’s example the world would not consent to the crimes of the Africans even if, knowing them, it tolerated them for the peace of the church; yet these men do not prove that the world knew them, even if they could have proved them true.

In vain therefore does Parmenian say that traitors condemned in Africa were received into the fellowship of holiness by the provinces overseas. For this is what we must not believe, lest by a sacrilegious rashness we condemn the whole world, founded in the unity of Christ, on these men’s false accusation, rather than love it on the true promise of God. For which is more to be believed: what God said, ‘In your seed all nations shall be blessed’, or what these men say, ‘In the seed of the African traitors all nations are cursed’, so that what iniquity committed is stronger than what truth promised? Why then do we not rather believe that those who were received into communion by the provinces overseas either were innocent and could not be crushed by their slanderers, which can be shown more probably by many documents, or at least, since they could not be convicted, even if they were bad, were received as innocent without any contamination of those who received them? What if, even through bad brothers, such as the apostle tolerated in the unity of the church, such as the martyr Cyprian groans over in his letter on the lapsed, if then through such brothers, placed even among the judges, some crookedness had brought it about that the traitors could not be excluded and convicted, and the Christian world were deceived by their feigned innocence, it would in no way have lost its own innocence.

As for what he said about Ossius, formerly Catholic bishop of Cordoba, they must be pressed to prove not only that he was such as they say, but also that it was evident that he was such to those with whom they assert he communicated. Unless they prove this, they say in vain that they knew what he was, since it could not harm those who did not know; and by separating themselves from these innocent men, these men cannot be innocent, because of the sacrilegious iniquity of separation itself. For this is more credible, if indeed Ossius, condemned by the Spaniards, was acquitted by the Gauls: that it could have happened that the Spaniards, taken in by false accusations and deceived by the cunning fraud of plots, gave sentence against an innocent man, and afterwards peaceably, in Christian humility, yielded to the sentence of their colleagues, by whom his innocence was established, lest by defending their earlier sentences with stubborn and spirited perversity they should rush, in the blindness of impiety, into the sacrilege of schism, which surpasses all crimes; as these wretched men have done, and, though so often divided and cut up, do not even late perceive what they have done.

So they declare plainly enough how they became incurable: namely, so that they would not be forced to condemn their earlier sentences, which they rashly pronounced against the absent Caecilian, if, at the overseas judgment, where they were defeated by Caecilian when he was present, they had acquiesced out of regard for truth and peace; though they would have carried off a greater victory if, at least after the judgment, they had overcome human animosity rather than a man in the judgment itself. For that victory is loftier, and fuller of a loftier triumph, than if it were reported over a whole subjugated city, not merely over one defeated man, as Scripture says: ‘Better is he who conquers anger than he who takes a city.’ So those whom anger was conquering desired to conquer a man; and since they could not conquer the man, they were overcome both by the man and by anger: by the man, because they were defeated in the judgment; by anger, because even when defeated they did not rest, hearing or reading with a most perverse heart the apostle’s sentence when he says: ‘For if I build again the very things that I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor.’ If the apostle himself had understood these words with so wrong a mind, he would have become neither a Christian nor an apostle, nor as a preacher would he have built up the churches which as a persecutor he had previously destroyed. Nowhere, then, have these men shown so openly why, even when overcome, they would not be corrected, as when they condemn the Spaniards because, after pronouncing their sentences otherwise, they yielded to the later examination and judgment of their colleagues. For as much as this was done from Christian gentleness, so much was that done from diabolical contention; and so it is no wonder that by this humility peace was kept, by that pride it was broken. Accordingly what they did is rightly paid back to them, for they taught such things to their descendants. For the Maximianists too would not yield to the council of three hundred and ten of their colleagues, by whom Primian, whom they themselves had first condemned, was judged innocent, for no other reason than that with lost obstinacy they set before the unlearned the apostle’s sentence, saying: ‘For if I build again the very things that I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor.’ For a hundred colleagues had destroyed Primian, and therefore they refused to build him up again with the three hundred. So while they pretend to be careful not to build up a man whom they had destroyed, they destroyed themselves by a greater sacrilege in another schism.

But if Parmenian were alive, he would not now dare to rebuke the Spaniards and call them transgressors because they changed their sentence to that of their colleagues, lest he offend his own colleagues, many of whom, after Primian had been condemned by them, were corrected for the better and went over to the council of the three hundred, choosing to go against their own over-hasty sentences rather than against the peace of unity, even in the party of Donatus. And Parmenian would especially spare Praetextatus of Assuras and Felicianus of Musti, who, though condemned by three hundred and ten of their fellow bishops, returned out of zeal for concord to the very men by whom they had been condemned, and were received by their condemners with the same zeal, for the sake of peace, without any loss of their rank; nor did anyone think that those whom they had baptized outside, in schism, should be rebaptized. Or perhaps, since those who correct their sentences greatly displease Parmenian, and he calls them transgressors, not understanding the apostle, he would condemn these men because they chose to return inside rather than remain outside, and, joining to himself some similar associates, would create Parmenianists as well, just as many pieces have already been made of this large piece throughout all Africa? So, so it must be: those who preferred the swelling of their own animosity to the most holy bond of Catholic peace perish cut up and cut down into little pieces. For what Parmenian charges is not so much to be feared as what he confesses is to be examined.

For when he said that through the Spaniard Ossius help was given to Caecilian, so that the number of the holy and undefiled might be forced into their communion, and that the unbroken faith of the servants of God resisted this impiety, he confessed of his own accord that his own people had even gone to Constantine, and that by his decision the case was heard by bishops as judges, over whom Miltiades, bishop of the city of Rome, presided. At that judgment, as the church records testify, because these men were defeated and Caecilian was found innocent, they accuse that same Miltiades of the crime of handing over. I ask when they found this out. For if before the judgment, they ought not to have prejudiced themselves by beginning to plead their case before such a judge and submitting to such a judgment on the command of the emperor, to whom they themselves had gone. But if they claim to have learned that he was a traitor after the case was pleaded and sentence pronounced, are men so mad as to believe defeated litigants against the judges before whom they were defeated? And yet in all these things, with great rashness, they accuse the Italians and the Gauls and the Spaniards, leaving aside the many other provinces and nations from which they are separated by an abominable sacrilege, which the crimes of the Italians, Spaniards, and Gauls could certainly not harm even if they were said truly. For they now blindly, or rather madly, accuse the other lands and are angry with them because, when there were two parties in Africa, one, as they say, of traitors and the other of innocent men, they preferred to join themselves to the traitors rather than to the innocent. This empty accusation is refuted most briefly and most truly thus: when the others heard that there were two parties in Africa, one of traitors and the other of innocent men, they believed that party to be innocent which had won its case before neighbouring church judges. Therefore those always remained innocent who, not knowing how these things were done in Africa, nonetheless believed what they ought to believe peaceably and religiously; and separation from these innocent men could in no way be innocent.

Parmenian also confesses that both bishops as judges and the parties from Africa, that is, Caecilian and the Donatists, met at the town of Arles. There he believed his own people in everything, though, being defeated, they could do nothing but complain about the judges; nor does he deny that they came again to Constantine, and, because there too they were overcome in a final judgment, he charges that Constantine himself was corrupted by favour. Having considered all this, let one who judges without partisanship choose whom to believe: the judges who pronounced the sentences, or the litigants against whom they were pronounced and who refused to end the dispute. And certainly the world believed the judges. But those who agree with the Donatists and defend them confess that they believe men who, whatever their case was, could not win it in so many overseas hearings, and with credulous vanity they take up their murmurs and accusations against the judges. In this matter, if they call themselves innocent and are unwilling to believe rashly that those whom they see defeated were defeated by the truth, how much more innocent are those who are unwilling rashly to believe anything bad about the judges themselves, against whom those who have been defeated must complain! For not only does the man who lost a good case complain of an unjust or slow or negligent judge, but also the man who was most justly defeated murmurs against an innocent judge with the same blindness with which he contended against an innocent opponent. Therefore these men are not wicked because they are unwilling to believe anything rashly about the defeated, but because by the madness of schism they have cut themselves off from those innocent men who, much more reasonably, are unwilling to believe any such thing about the judges themselves.

Let one of the churches of those regions, most renowned in the name of Christ, come forward: one of the seven, and, if you please, above all Philadelphia, which by a mystical name signifies in the Greek tongue brotherly love. Let us hear her voice, and let not her chaff speak, but her wheat. Suppose she says to these men: ‘What do you charge in me, brothers, of what do you accuse me? How great a distance on the earth I am from Africa you could partly know and partly hear. What either traitors, or the accusers or condemners of traitors, or the slanderers or oppressors of the innocent did there at that time, I know nothing at all. But our Lord, who bought the whole world at the price of his blood, whose holy purchase the prophet sang so long before, saying: “They dug my hands and feet, they numbered all my bones. But they considered and looked at me, they divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots”, did not set between you and us spaces empty and bare of Christians; he filled all these with the sanctification of his name. For in that very psalm of the passion it is declared not only at what price, but also how much he bought. For there it is said a little later: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship in his sight, for the kingdom is his, and he shall rule the nations.” So I might perhaps be forced to judge your case then, if I were either a neighbour or so far away that no other Christians lived between us and you, marked with the same name, at peace in the same unity. Many families of the nations lie between, bought together with me by his blood, in whose sight they worship equally with me. Through them the report about you came across to me; they could examine your case from nearby. If this was not done, you neglected it; for had you been neglected by the others, you would surely have come even as far as us. But if something was judged, forgive me: I do not dare rashly to believe you, the defeated, and to condemn your judges with the same rashness. There is something else that moves me greatly: if you had been innocent and oppressed, you would at least love us, brothers who have done you no harm. But since you try to tear us with curses and pursue us with bitter hatreds, though we know well in our conscience that your case was entrusted by the right law of the church to your neighbours, who know before God how they judged, and even try to rebaptize us, as though because of you Christ had lost his inheritance among us, what good can we think of that case of yours? For in not at all hesitating to condemn your brothers far, far away by rash suspicions, you show how justly you were condemned by your neighbours. For why should I not believe that a man heard by a neighbouring judge could have been rightly condemned, when he does not hesitate to condemn me, his brother, so far away and unheard, charging me with this as the greatest crime: that I, who could not be present, believed the judges to whom the case was brought rather than the defeated litigants? If I had not rather believed these judges, even if those who were defeated were innocent, I could not be innocent. For we would be entangled in a great offence if, when we could not see human hearts, we neither kept church discipline nor were willing to believe them as judges, beyond whom the case could not pass and through whom the report could run to us. Do you, splitting yourself off from these innocent men by an impious separation, call yourself innocent? If you were, then, seeing in the holy Scriptures that the harvest of your Lord cannot be separated from weeds and chaff before the last sorting and winnowing, you would rather choose to be strong in tolerating the bad than impious in deserting the good.’ For how many such voices, and how very just ones, do we think there are from churches far away through the world, such as I have pictured in Philadelphia!

Indeed Parmenian even dares to complain that Constantine ordered to be led to the field, that is, to execution, those who, defeated before church judges, could not prove what they said before him either, and were still being carried by sacrilegious madness into cuttings-off of the holy church; and he charges him with having ordered this as a monstrous thing at the suggestion of the Spaniard Ossius, condemning men unheard, as always, by his own suspicions. As if another man would not more humanely and more probably have believed that it was rather done at the suggestion of Ossius, as a bishop, that the emperor should turn his sentence to a milder punishment of what was nonetheless a most monstrous crime, that is, sacrilegious schism. For what do these men not suffer justly, when they suffer by the most high judgment of God, who presides and warns by such scourges to avoid the eternal fire, both by the desert of their crimes and by the order of the powers? Let them first prove that they are not heretics or schismatics; then, and only then, let them raise a free voice about their undeserved punishments; then, and only then, let them dare to call themselves martyrs of the truth when they suffer something of this kind. Otherwise, if whoever pays a penalty at the hands of the emperor or of judges sent by him is at once a martyr, all prisons are full of martyrs, all the chains of the courts drag martyrs, in all the mines are suffering martyrs, martyrs are deported to all the islands, in all places of punishment martyrs are struck by the sword of justice, all are martyrs who are put to the beasts or by the judges’ orders are burned alive. But if, as the apostle says, ‘there is no power except from God’, and ‘the minister of God is an avenger in wrath on him who does evil; he does not bear the sword in vain. Do you want not to fear the power? Do good, and you will have praise from it.’ For when any good man suffers, praise comes to him from the power of the one who inflicts it; but let the bad man not impute to the cruelty of the power what he suffers deservedly for his iniquity.

And yet what do these men suffer such as they do, except that the multitude of people has its heart not in the heart but in the eyes? For if blood comes out of mortal flesh, whoever looks on shudders; but if souls cut off and separated from the peace of Christ die in the sacrilege of heresy or schism, because it is not seen it is not mourned; rather, that death, more hideous and more lamentable and, to speak plainly, more truly death, is even laughed at by the law of custom, when the authors of so many deaths insult us publicly and do not deign to discuss with us even for the sake of making the truth plain. And if they suffer any temporal trouble through the most certain and most correct order of the powers, while they themselves, with private bands of madmen, commit much heavier things everywhere and every day under no royal and no church law, they call us persecutors of bodies but do not call themselves killers of souls, though by private licence they do not spare bodies either. But because, through Christian gentleness, an eye torn out in a quarrel is punished much more severely than a mind blinded in schism, they speak out, and they speak against us, and they do not speak with us; and when the truth compels them to fall silent, iniquity does not allow them to be quiet.

Or perhaps it is not right for the emperor, or those whom the emperor has sent, to judge about religion? Why then did your envoys go to the emperor? Why did they make him judge of their case, when they were not going to follow what he judged? But to what purpose is this said? Even if they establish that it does not belong to the emperor to decree anything against those who follow crooked ways in religion, will they be martyrs on that account if he does so and punishes them? For in this way this plea will lie open to all heretics, against whom many very severe coercive measures have been decreed, by the hidden command of God through the open command of men; and not only to heretics, whitewashed in some way at least with the Christian name, but even to the pagans themselves. For certainly they too are impious by a false religion, whose images have been ordered by recent laws to be overthrown and broken, and their sacrifices also to be prohibited under threat of death. If then any of them is condemned for such a crime, is he to be held a martyr because he paid the penalty under the laws for a superstition that he thought a pious religion? Certainly no Christian of any kind dares to say this. So not everyone punished by the emperor in some question of religion becomes a martyr. Nor do those who think such things see that they are advancing to the point of maintaining that even the demons can claim for themselves the glory of martyrs, because they suffer this persecution through Christian emperors, so that through almost the whole world their temples are overthrown, their idols smashed, their sacrifices withdrawn, and those who honour them are punished if caught. If it is utter madness to say this, then it is not suffering that makes righteousness certain, but righteousness that makes suffering glorious. And so the Lord, lest anyone should spread fogs before the unlearned in this matter and seek the praise of martyrs in the condemnation of his own deserts, did not say generally, ‘Blessed are those who suffer persecution’, but added a great difference, by which piety is truly distinguished from sacrilege. For he says: ‘Blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness.’ But in no way do they suffer for the sake of righteousness who have divided the church of Christ, and, while with feigned righteousness they try, as it were, to separate her from the chaff before the time, and pursue her wheat with false accusations, have rather themselves been separated from her like the lightest chaff by the various winds of rumours. ‘But’, they say, ‘we did not do this.’ Let them see then that they must first free themselves from this question, and then dare, if they suffer any troubles or punishments from Christian emperors, either to lay them down as a complaint or to take them up as a glory. On this matter, that is, the question of the schism itself, even if I said nothing else, what was said above would suffice.

Or perhaps they will say that, even if they are convicted of sacrilegious dissension, so that they are not martyrs if they suffer anything for that madness, still the coercing or punishing of such things ought not to belong to the power of emperors? In this I ask what they mean: is it that such powers should take no care about vicious or false religion? But we have already said much about the pagans and about the demons themselves, that they suffer persecutions from the emperors. Or does this too displease them? Why then do they themselves overthrow temples where they can, and never cease to do or avenge such things through the madness of the circumcellions? Is private violence more just than royal diligence? But I pass over these things. This I ask: since the apostle enumerates the plain works of the flesh, ‘which are’, he says, ‘sexual immoralities, impurities, licentiousness, idolatry, sorceries, enmities, strifes, jealousies, animosities, dissensions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and things like these’, what do these men think? Do they hold that the crime of idolatry is justly punished by the emperors? Or, if they do not want even this, why do they admit that the force of the laws is justly brought to bear against sorcerers, but will not admit it against heretics and impious dissensions, when by the apostle’s authority these are numbered among the same fruits of iniquity? Or perhaps they do not allow these powers of human institution to take care even of such things? Why then does he bear the sword, who is called the minister of God, an avenger in wrath on those who do evil? Unless perhaps, as some of them, very unlearned indeed, usually understand it, this was said of church offices, so that the sword is understood as the spiritual punishment that excommunication works; though the most provident apostle shows clearly enough, in the following context of the reading, what he is talking about. For there he added: ‘For because of this you also pay taxes’, and then joined: ‘Render to all what is owed: tax to whom tax is owed, revenue to whom revenue, honour to whom honour, fear to whom fear.’ It remains, then, that by these arguments of theirs they forbid Christians to pay taxes, though the Lord, to the Pharisees who thought such things, and whom these men imitate, answered after looking at the coin: ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.’ But these men, disobedient and impious in both respects, render neither Christian love to God nor human fear to kings; so blind and insane that, though they have driven their own schismatics, the Maximianists, out of basilicas through authorities sent by Catholic emperors, and forced them by great pressure of orders and armed help to give way to them, they accuse the Catholic Church if Catholic princes have ordered anything of the kind to be done on its behalf. And let the Maximianists themselves, before they were Maximianists, that is, when they were still held together in the one fellowship of the Donatists, recall how savage and bitter were the things that the well-known Rogatus the Moor suffered from them through the barbarian king Firmus, and let them be silent and not dare to complain if they suffer anything of this kind, either from the Primianists because of their own schism or together with the Primianists because of the schism of the Donatists, not for sacred religion but for sacrilegious animosity.

For perhaps they say that they have suffered heavier things from Catholic emperors than these men did to the Rogatists through barbarian kings, or to the Maximianists through the judges of Catholic emperors, or are still doing through the madness of the circumcellions to whomever they can. As if the question were whether they suffer heavier things than they do, which in fact I would by no means grant. For many most savage and most bitter deeds of theirs are counted, or rather cannot be counted; and even if they were fewer, or afflicted less those against whom they are committed, they would certainly be heavier by this very fact, that they are not ordered by ordained powers but committed by extraordinary madness. For the things they did against the Maximianists through judges of human institution are not so many. Let them put in that class of actions, if they like, even the things done by them through the barbarian Firmus to persecute Rogatus the Moor, and let them count him, though a most monstrous enemy of the Romans, among lawful powers. But these are not so many as the things committed every day, against all order of laws and powers, by mad herds of drunken young men over whom they set leaders, who at first armed themselves only with clubs and now have begun to arm themselves with iron too, who wander and rage through all Africa under the well-known name of circumcellions. When their crimes are reported to them, they pretend not to know that kind of men, or with the most shameless face, contrary to what all people know, affirm that they do not belong to them at all; and they do not accept even this voice of the whole world, which says much more probably and truly that it does not know what was done in Africa, either by the party of Donatus or against the party of Donatus, if in Africa itself Donatist bishops may either not know the deeds of Donatist circumcellions or say that they do not belong to them.

But, as I had begun to say, the question now is not whether they suffer heavier things than they do, but whether it is permitted for anything of this kind to be done against heretics and schismatics. For if they say it is not permitted, why do they do it themselves? But if they admit that it is permitted, even if they show, as they by no means can, that they suffer heavier things from Catholic emperors than they themselves have done to their own schismatics through the emperors’ judges or through barbarian kings, or do to every kind of person through the insanity of the circumcellions, this too is no wonder, if princes can do more than judges sent by princes, if Roman emperors can do more than barbarian kings, and if a robber deservedly suffers heavier things under the laws than he himself commits against the laws. Hence the masters of the circumcellions deservedly suffer heavier things under just decrees than the circumcellions do. And yet so great is Christian gentleness that their deeds incomparably exceed their punishments. But see: three hundred and ten Donatist bishops condemned the Maximianists in their council, but these, by the obstinacy of their perversity, refused to give up the basilicas. The judges were approached; their council was entered in the proconsular records. Then it was ordered that those condemned by so great a number of bishops should give up the places. Those who readily gave them up did not suffer much; but who does not know how those who tried to resist were afflicted? Yet if the savagery of the resisters had been so great as to come to injuring the judges, would they not have suffered far bitterer things under Roman law? So also then, after the end of the case in which these men cut themselves off from the Catholic Church, when it began to be enforced, as a consequence, that they should not hold the basilicas, and they held them by resisting the imperial orders, and resisted in such a way that that well-known violence of the circumcellions prevailed, adding besides that they harried with most turbulent and savage riots those who were going through Africa with the gifts to the church that the emperor had sent, laws were issued against them such that they were not allowed to keep even those basilicas which did not belong to unity, but had been built by men separated and already established in their own schism. In this the royal power was now avenging injuries to itself. For what can enemies of justice justly possess?

Nor is anyone found to have issued anything in their favour except Julian the Apostate, to whom Christian peace and unity were most displeasing, since the very religion from which he had impiously fallen displeased him. To him these Donatists, as the records of the judges testify, before whom they produced what they had obtained, made their petition in such words that perhaps some who consented out of fear to the worship of idols did so more mildly than these men praised him in their madness. For they said that with him justice alone had a place. What else, then, are they found to have said than either that Christian holiness is not justice, since it had no place with him, or that the honouring of demons is justice, since it had the first place with him? But who does not know how severe were the laws of other emperors issued against them? Among them one general law against all who wish to be called Christians and do not communicate with the Catholic Church, but gather in their own separated conventicles, provides that both the one who ordains a cleric and the one ordained be fined ten pounds of gold each, and that the place itself where the impious separation gathers be confiscated to the treasury. There are also other general orders by which they are deprived of the power to make wills or to confer anything by gift, or to receive anything by gift or will. For in a certain case, when a man of rank petitioned the emperors that his sister, who was of the party of Donatus, had at her death conferred a great deal on some persons of her communion, and especially on a certain Augustine, their bishop, it was ordered on the basis of that general law that everything be restored to the brother; and there mention was also made of the circumcellions, with what kind of help and support they were to be repelled if, in their usual way, they resisted with violence. For so well known were they, so proved in many battles, that neither the petitioner to the emperor nor the emperor could be silent about them.

Since this is so, since they are thus condemned by both divine and human laws, yet so great is Christian gentleness that they not only keep the basilicas they built after they were cut off, but have not even returned to unity all those that unity held from the beginning. And though they themselves urgently drove the Maximianists out of basilicas belonging to the party of Donatus through judges sent by Catholic emperors, yet they are not driven out of many places which Catholic unity formerly held, not even by the laws of those Catholic emperors. Finally, if perhaps something was at some time done against them too immoderately, so that it went beyond Christian mildness, it displeases all the wheat of the Lord’s harvest, that is, Christians praiseworthy in Christ, who grow up in the Catholic Church through the whole world with fruit of a hundredfold, sixtyfold, or thirtyfold.

Therefore let them accuse with us, as abundantly as they like, the weeds or chaff of the Catholic crop, but let them not refuse to bear it with us most patiently. For he who did not want the weeds rooted up before the time and separated from their mingling with the wheat said: ‘Let both grow until the harvest.’ And when he explained the covering of that same parable to the disciples who asked, he did not say, ‘The field is Africa’, but said: ‘The field is this world.’ So this crop has been sown through the whole world, through the whole world the weeds have been sown over it, through the whole world both grow until the harvest. Was Donatus the greatest of the reapers, or had the time of harvest come at the time when these men separated themselves from the world, when the same Lord, so that no one should be free to interpret as he liked, said most plainly: ‘The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels’? For such reapers cannot err so as to gather wheat in place of weeds or store up weeds in place of wheat. But these men, while they flee the weeds, as it were, have shown that they themselves are the weeds, preaching in most manifest sacrilege against the Lord’s sentence: so that, though he says, ‘Let both grow until the harvest’, they contend that throughout so great a field, that is, the whole world, only the weeds grow, while the wheat has dwindled and remained in Africa alone, doing sacrilegious injury to Christ our king and prince. For it is written: ‘In a numerous nation is the king’s glory, but in the dwindling of the people is the prince’s ruin.’ But now it is time, I think, to attend carefully to the very testimonies of the Scriptures by which, misinterpreting them, they deceive the unlearned, and, as far as the Lord grants, to open them according to the understanding of Catholic truth.

What force, then, except blindness and vanity of mind, compels men, with their eyes shut, as the saying goes, to throw something at another, as it were, which at once comes back on the thrower and strikes him with a return blow, leaving untouched the one he wanted to wound? This is what these Donatists do with almost all the testimonies of the Scriptures: when they think they are bringing them forward against us, they seem rather to be reminding us what sort of men the Scripture itself convicts them of being. For what else does the text that Parmenian thinks is either for himself or against us do, where it is written: ‘Woe to those who say that what is wicked is good and what is good is wicked, who put light for darkness and darkness for light, who put what is bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter’? O most foolish blindness! For what is so good and so pleasant as brothers dwelling in one? This they call wicked and put for bitter, who have separated themselves from all their brothers because they were unwilling either not to stir up their empty suspicions, not to say their factious slanders, or, once stirred up, to tolerate them. If they hated the true chaff and were not chaff themselves, they would not, on its account, cut themselves off from the Lord’s wheat sown and growing throughout the whole field, that is, this world.

Let them cry out, then, as loudly as they can: ‘Woe to those who say that what is wicked is good and what is good is wicked.’ We answer: this is true; and we add another: ‘Woe to those who have lost endurance’, since they put light for darkness and darkness for light. For what is brighter than the promises of God, who in our times has shown what he foretold thousands of years before, that all nations would have the blessing in the seed of Abraham, which is Christ? And what is darker than the presumptions of men who, because of charges against traitors rashly made and never proved, which, even if they were true, would never prejudice God from fulfilling what he promised, say that the Christian name has perished from so many nations in the world and has remained in Africa alone? And this presumption of theirs they call light, while they strive to cover with the darkness of lies the promises of God, now lit up by the very outcome of events; and on top of that they cry out their own deeds against us, saying: ‘Woe to those who put light for darkness and darkness for light.’ Was Optatus light, then, and did the whole of Africa call him darkness? Or did the whole of Africa rather perceive that he was darkness, and these men called him light, they who do not put light for darkness and darkness for light? ‘But’, they say, ‘Optatus displeased all good men in our communion.’ So you did not call him light, and yet you communicated with him. Choose, then, what you want: either that in one communion darkness does not harm light, but it is enough for the light to disapprove of the darkness and, if it cannot expel it, to tolerate it for the sake of unity, and so there was no reason why you should be disjoined by the dark sacrilege of schism from innocent brothers, to whom you certainly could not show the bad men even if you say they were known to you; or, if it is not enough for the light to disapprove of the darkness it cannot expel, that is, if it is not enough for the good to disapprove of the bad whom they cannot exclude or correct, then one Optatus, most notorious and most evident in Africa alone, stained the party of Donatus more easily than any African traitor stained so many nations throughout the world, being, if I may not say accused on false charges, at any rate (which is most shamelessly denied) unknown to them.

Taking the Scriptures with a perverse heart, then, they make them harm not us but themselves, when they think that ‘Woe to those who say that what is wicked is good and what is good is wicked’ was written so that the grain should not tolerate the chaff among itself until the time of winnowing; so that, while they misunderstand ‘Woe to those who say that what is wicked is good and what is good is wicked’, there is fulfilled in them: ‘Woe to those who have lost endurance.’ But if they understood that this was said against those who, thinking that what is evil is good, commit evil, or those who consent to such men by praising and approving them (two kinds that Scripture mentions in one place, saying: ‘For the sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, and he who does unjust things will be blessed’), they would understand rightly and would not be troubled when bad men are found among themselves too; except that they tolerate for the party of Donatus those whom they ought to have tolerated for the unity of Christ, and through this obstinacy of their animosity the wretches are forced in their schism to bear those they know, and in the world to accuse those they do not know. Whoever, therefore, either corrects by rebuke what he can, or excludes, keeping the bond of peace, what he cannot correct, or, what he cannot exclude keeping the bond of peace, disapproves with fairness and bears with firmness, he is a peacemaker, and from that curse by which Scripture says, ‘Woe to those who say that what is wicked is good and what is good is wicked, who put light for darkness and darkness for light, who put what is bitter for sweet and what is sweet for bitter’, he is altogether free, entirely safe, completely removed.

Again, with their usual blindness, they throw something similar at us. ‘Of you’, they say, ‘Scripture says: He who judges the righteous unrighteous and the unrighteous righteous is accursed before God.’ Why does this curse not fall rather on those who dared to condemn unheard the whole Christian world, in which, among so huge a number of people, there were and are without any doubt men innocent of their crimes? In this way, then, they judged what is righteous unrighteous, and what is unrighteous they judged righteous, when they kept in their communion Optatus the Gildonian, the ten-year groan of all Africa, honouring him as a bishop and colleague. Or if they disapproved of him in their heart but tolerated him for the sake of peace, let them learn that the patience of no peacemaker who does not consent to evil can be stained by any bad men; and so let them perceive in what perdition those lie who, because of crimes of Africans, false or true (for that is not now the question), do not keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace with the world. If they said, ‘We do not know whether there are good Christians throughout so many nations of the lands overseas’, they would say it most shamelessly. For God bears witness to his wheat, which he sowed through the whole field and foretold would grow until the harvest, though with weeds sown over it by the devil; so that, even if we know the people themselves less, yet we know that they exist, because we hold with most certain faith that God could not lie. Since, then, they would be saying with sacrilegious shamelessness, ‘We do not know whether there are good Christians in the rest of the world’, let them see with what madness they dare to say (for every day they do not hesitate to say it): ‘We know that there are no Christians there.’ For it is one thing to say, ‘We do not know whether there are’, another, ‘We know that there are not’: both are unbelieving and impious. But if the man is to be detested who says, ‘I do not know whether God spoke the truth’, what is the man who says, ‘I know that God did not speak the truth’?

Surely, I think, I ought not to offend any of these men if I put God before Donatus. For however much they love Donatus, they fear God more; and in the end, however much they love Donatus, we know that ‘God alone is true, but every man a liar’. Christ, then, who is God over all, blessed for ever, and who said most truly of himself, ‘I am the truth’, when his servants asked him whether he wanted them to go and gather the weeds, said, ‘Let both grow until the harvest’; but Donatus says that the weeds have indeed grown, but the wheat has dwindled. Let these men choose whom to believe. Christ, that is, the truth, says, ‘The field is this world’; but Donatus says that only Africa has remained as God’s field. Let them choose whom to believe. Christ, that is, the truth, says, ‘At the time of harvest I will say to the reapers: Gather first the weeds’, and explains, saying, ‘The harvest is the end of the age’; but Donatus says that by the cutting off of his party the weeds were separated from the wheat before the harvest. Let them choose whom to believe. Christ, that is, the truth, says, ‘The reapers are the angels’; but Donatus says that he and his colleagues did before the harvest what Christ said the angels would do at the harvest. Let them choose whom to believe. Certainly they call themselves Christians: we set before them Christ and Donatus. If they give words to Christ but their heart to Donatus, let them consider what they are. I spare them, I do not inveigh, I do not exaggerate; I better press down my grief than express it. But if they say that they give their heart to Christ, then let them believe Christ when he says that through the whole world both the sons of the kingdom grow and the sons of the evil one, not Donatus when he says that through the world only the sons of the evil one have grown, while the good sons have dwindled to Africa alone. And if they believe Christ, we no longer say ‘with the churches of the world’, but let them have peace with the gospel itself, which they lyingly boast that they kept from the fire, since they do not prove it by their deeds.

Now what is the point of what the same Parmenian thought he should charge against us from the prophet Isaiah: ‘Is the hand of the Lord not strong to save, or has he made his ear heavy so as not to hear? But your offences make a division between you and God, and because of your sins he has turned his face from you, so as not to have mercy. For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with sins; and your lips have spoken iniquity, and your tongue meditates injustice. No one speaks just things, nor is there true judgment. They trust in vain things and speak empty things, for they conceive pain and bring forth iniquity. They have hatched asps’ eggs and weave a spider’s web, and whoever was going to eat of those eggs, crushing one, found it rotten and a basilisk in it. Their web will not serve for clothing, nor will they cover themselves with their works. For their works are works of iniquity, and their feet run to wickedness, swift to shed blood, and their thoughts are the thoughts of fools. Ruin and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known’? Those whom Scripture describes in this place, wherever they are, even among the good, do not harm the good, just as the chaff does not harm the wheat, until the Lord of the threshing floor comes with the winnowing fork in his hand and cleans his threshing floor, stores the wheat in the barn, but burns the chaff with unquenchable fire; just as so great a multitude of the wicked did not harm the good, as we have learned through the prophet Ezekiel, namely those who groaned and grieved over the crimes of the people that were done in their midst. Hence, because they could not correct them and ought in no way to separate themselves from the unity of God’s people, they deserved, for the merit of their most innocent tolerance, to be sealed and delivered in the devastation and destruction of those lost men. But why do these men who throw these things at Catholics not look at themselves, whose troops of mad herds fly here and there armed with iron and clubs, and are never sated in such savagery with the frequent massacres they commit where they can; where, at the tombs of their corpses, with women who, mixed with them everywhere against the order of things divine and human, wander about day and night, such drunkenness seethes that from it they conceive a daily madness not only of attacking others but even of throwing themselves headlong? Do their feet not run to malice, and are they not swift to shed blood? Does judgment not depart from these men, who usurp for themselves even the most unjust licences of a lawless power? Does darkness not come upon these men, while they await the light in a false martyrdom? Do they not walk in the middle of the night even by day, since the apostle says, ‘Those who get drunk are drunk at night’? Do these men not fall at noon as if at midnight? This indeed belongs to all heretics, who cannot see a thing most evident, set in the light of all nations, outside whose unity whatever they do, though it seems to be done with great skill and diligence, profits them as little against the wrath of God as spiders’ webs can protect from cold.

What then do they set down from this prophetic chapter that cannot be turned back on themselves? Unless perhaps the asps’ eggs, which the drafter of the sentence of the plenary council of the three hundred and ten, when they met from all the provinces of Africa, remembered so well. Certainly, if Parmenian were alive now, he would not say this or set it against us from the prophet Isaiah: ‘They have hatched asps’ eggs.’ For he would look at Felicianus of Musti and Praetextatus of Assuras, joined to his college, whom, out of the number of the condemned, they received back as if unblemished for the good of peace, though the peace of Donatus, not of Christ; and these were both asps’ eggs and had hatched. For so the three hundred and ten of the plenary council describe them with truthful mouth, as their proceedings, also entered in the proconsular records, testify. For these are certainly the words of their council: ‘For although the hollow of a poisoned womb long covered the harmful offspring of viperous seed, and the moist curds of conceived crime were slowly warmed with heat into the limbs of asps, yet the conceived venom could not be concealed by a vanishing shade. For, though late, the wishes pregnant with crimes brought forth their public crime and parricide.’ These asps’ eggs had already hatched, and already, horrible and foul-smelling, with their venomous offspring, they had been cast out of their communion; but inside there was Optatus, the basilisk, who with a kind of royal nod, by which it is said to excel among serpents, could call back even the asps that had been cast out. Or if these things do no harm for the sake of peace, why do they charge Catholics, whom they could not convict, when they themselves received back those whom they condemned with their own mouth? If these things do no harm for the sake of peace, still they do harm for the peace of Donatus, which is greatly favoured to the injury of the peace of Christ; and for this sacrilege, whatever they suffer in bodily troubles is God’s warning to avoid eternal damnation. For they truly shed blood, not only bodily through the frenzies of the circumcellions but also spiritually, who try, if they could, to rebaptize the world. Or if only he sheds blood who wounds mortal flesh or kills with a wound, but he does not who kills seduced souls by the sacrilege of schism, why did they say such things against their own schismatics, the Maximianists, in the same sentence of their plenary council: ‘Their feet are swift to shed blood’, when it is agreed that no one was bodily killed by them, no one wounded, but rather that they suffered much at the hands of these men when they were being driven out of the basilicas by judicial authorities? Such things they did to many before the separation of the Maximianists, when they were together in one, to those who had made earlier schisms from the party of Donatus. For what schismatic of theirs did they ever spare, they who most shamelessly want to be spared by the world, whose schismatics they themselves are, though schisms are most justly punished only by the true unity itself, if they are to be punished in that way?

And the text, ‘As is the ruler of the people, so also are his ministers; and as is the governor of the city, so are its inhabitants’, if they understood what it refers to, they would neither throw at us nor themselves be proud with empty boasting. For we, so as not to place in men the hope of men, which is safe and rightly secure in God alone, since we remember that it is written, ‘Cursed is he who puts his hope in man’, do not understand that the bishop is meant in this place by ‘the ruler of the people’ and ‘the governor of the city’. Not because we cannot see countless holy bishops in the Catholic Church, but so that, as I said, no one’s hope should be placed in a man, and so that, if it should happen to someone to live in a city where there is not a good bishop, he should not think he becomes bad with impunity, taking for his defence this Scripture understood as perversely as these men understand it, and saying that he cannot be good because ‘as is the ruler of the people, so also are his ministers; and as is the governor of the city, so are its inhabitants’. For this error is contradicted by the mouth of the Truth, saying: ‘What they say, do; but what they do, do not do. For they say and do not do.’ So when peoples have such bishops, who say good things from the chair of Moses and do not do what they say, out of their own pestilence, if those peoples do the good things the bishops say and do not do the evil things they do, as the Lord commanded, do they not show clearly enough that ‘ruler of the people’ and ‘governor of the city’ are not to be understood as these men understand them, since there can be good peoples even where there are bad bishops, just as there could be a bad people where Moses was a good ruler and governor? For, erring in the words of the holy Scriptures, and, as the apostle says, ‘understanding neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions’, they themselves rather suffer great straits through the perversity of their understanding, when it is said to them: ‘Then as Optatus was, so was the people of Thamugadi; and if, as you say, through communion in the sacraments even those are contaminated who disapprove of evil deeds, even those they tolerate for the peace of unity, then such are all of you also, who communicated both with that colleague of yours and with that people, when all Africa with open groaning declared him a henchman of Gildo.’ I name him often for this reason, that he appeared so evident that wherever he is named no one answers that he does not know him.

For let them look at themselves and remember how many like him they have among them, whose malice is equal though their notoriety is unequal; and let them at last come to the true meaning of these words, and understand that the one ruler of the people is our Lord Jesus Christ, whose ministers are good, and that he is the governor of that city Jerusalem which is our eternal mother in heaven. To the dignity of this governor the inhabitants conform, not to equality but in their own measure, since it was said to them, ‘You shall be holy, because I too am holy’, that is, according to a certain likeness of image into which we are transformed from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord, by the gift of him who makes us conformed to the image of his Son. There is also the ruler of another, bad people, the devil, and the governor of that city which is mystically called Babylon, since the apostle Paul calls him and his angels the rulers and governors of this darkness, that is, of sins; and his ministers are like him, for they transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, as he does into an angel of light; and the inhabitants conform in like deeds to their most wicked governor. But the separation of these peoples and cities will be made plain when this harvest has been winnowed; until that happens, the love of the wheat tolerates all things, lest, while the grains flee the chaff too hastily, they be impiously separated from their fellow grains.

What force, then, does it now have for the case that these men throw at us what the Lord says through Isaiah about bad sacrificers: ‘The criminal who sacrifices a calf to me is like one who kills a dog, and he who sets out fine flour is like one who offers swine’s blood, and he who offers incense as a memorial is like a blasphemer’? All these things are said much more fittingly of those who have raised the altar of their schism against the church of God, spread through the whole world as it was promised; this sacrilege involves them all. And whoever, wherever, offers sacrifice with such a heart or such deeds that he deserves to hear these things brings ruin on himself, not on those good men who, according to the prophet Ezekiel, groan and grieve over the sins and iniquities that are done in their midst, even though they do not separate themselves bodily from there; for the Lord renders to each according to his heart. For if in earlier times bad priests did not harm either good colleagues, as Zechariah was, or good laymen, as Nathanael was, in whom there was no guile, how much more does a bad bishop in Christian unity do no harm either to good fellow bishops or to good laymen, now that that priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedek, our high priest, sitting at the right hand of the Father, intercedes for us, who was handed over for our offences and rose again for our justification. So this too, which is said most truly, harms not the good but the bad who offer: ‘The Most High does not approve the gifts of the wicked.’ For he did not say, ‘The Most High does not approve the gifts of those who tolerate the wicked for the sake of peace’; and yet these men could not even prove what they charged at the time when they made the schism. Otherwise, with those excluded, the inheritance of Christ spread through the whole world would keep these men in Catholic communion.

‘The sacrifices of the impious’, he says, ‘are an abomination to the Lord; for they offer them unjustly.’ It has already been answered above that Christ is not unjust, who offered himself for us and is our mediator in heaven; while he governs his church, the bad will not harm the good, whether they are unknown or tolerated for the sake of peace, until he himself comes and, sending the reapers ahead, separates the weeds from the harvest and, with the winnowing fork, the chaff from the wheat. Although these men (as must often be said) have made false charges, which, even if they were true, would do no harm to the love of the good, tolerating all things in unity for the sake of unity, if perhaps, even when the charges were known, they could not convince church judges of them. So the sacrifices of the impious will harm those very men who offer impiously. For one and the same sacrifice, because of the name of God which is invoked there and is always holy, becomes to each such as the heart with which he approaches to receive it. For ‘whoever eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself’. He does not say ‘to others’, but ‘to himself’. So whoever eats and drinks worthily eats and drinks grace to himself. Let those men see, then, whether they eat worthily who by an abominable schism have divided so many parents and children, husbands and wives, and, what is most important, so many heirs of God and co-heirs of Christ spread through the whole world; when, if they were good and truly rebuked the bad, they could certainly tolerate fruitfully for the peace of Christ what they tolerate ruinously for the party of Donatus.

‘In Exodus’, he says, ‘it is written: But let the priests who approach the Lord God be sanctified, lest perhaps the Lord forsake them; and again: And when the ministers approach the holy altar, let them not bring sin upon themselves, lest they die; and that text in Leviticus: The man who has a blemish and a defect shall not approach to offer gifts to God.’ It is well that they put forward these testimonies from the old books. Let them tell me, then, which holy man, whether placed among the priests or among the people, was harmed in his spiritual salvation by a bad or blemished priest. Where Moses and Aaron were, there were sacrilegious murmurers, whom God was always threatening to destroy from his presence; where Caiaphas and others like him were, there were Zechariah, Simeon, and other good men; where Saul was, there was David; where Jeremiah, where Isaiah, where Daniel, where Ezekiel were, there were bad priests and bad peoples; but each carried his own load.

I omit to say with what wicked pride it is said that none of their colleagues, or they themselves, are without some blemish and defect, not of limbs but, what is worse, of morals. When we begin to deal with them about this, they answer that it matters what kind of blemish and what kind of defect it is; as if Scripture had made a distinction when it says: ‘The man who has a blemish and a defect shall not approach to offer gifts to God.’ Had no blemish and defect, I do not say Optatus, but Parmenian himself, or Donatus himself? But these men are so blinded by love of men, and with an unchaste heart do not hesitate to make the adulterers of their mind equal to the one lawful husband, that they contend that what could be said of the Lord Jesus Christ alone was perfected even in Donatus. Who will give my eyes a fountain of tears? What groan fit for this crime is uttered from a stricken breast? But meanwhile let them consider whether at least Optatus had some blemish or some defect; they are not so blind as to answer that his life too was altogether unblemished and free of every defect. Why then did he approach to offer gifts to God, and why did the others receive from him with joined hands what a blemished and defective man had offered? Let them consider among the rest of their men whether drunkenness is no blemish; but let them first read with what criminals the apostle Paul joined the drunkards; whether greed is no blemish, which the same apostle so detests that he compares it to the service of idols.

But those who think most rightly understand that any man whatever, though it may not absurdly be said, with regard to the fellowship of human society, that he lives most righteously, cannot yet be without some defect, so long as the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh; and that ‘he who is born of God does not sin’, and ‘if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’. For though, in so far as we are born of God, we do not sin, there is still in us also what we are from Adam, since death has not yet been swallowed up in victory, which is promised also in the resurrection of bodies, so that we who are already sons of God by faith may be in every way blessed and unblemished and incorrupt; but by sight ‘it has not yet appeared what we shall be’. For we have been saved not yet in reality but in hope. ‘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.’ But so long as we wait through patience for the redemption of our body, let us not dare to say that we lack every defect, lest that very pride be a most monstrous defect; and let us at last wake up and see that in the priests of that time, when bodily defects were avoided, he was prefigured who, being God, was made man for us, the only truly unblemished lamb and the priest without defect. And so then too the priest alone entered the holy of holies, while the people stood outside, just as now that priest after his resurrection has entered the secret places of heaven, to intercede for us at the right hand of the Father, while the people whose priest he is still groan outside. For the people are within with the bishop, and pray with him, and, as if signing to his words, answer Amen. So far, then, when the bodies of priests were required to be without any blemish and without any defect, because their souls could not be, he alone was prefigured, not these proud and impious men who, when the soul commits fornication, are not jealous for the bridegroom, but dare to show themselves off instead of the bridegroom.

‘In the gospel’, he says, ‘it is written: God will not hear sinners; but if anyone worships the Lord and does his will, him he will hear.’ Here too the answer is unconditional. For if two pray together, one a sinner and the other one who worships the Lord and does his will, he surely hears the one and does not hear the other. What then is the point of this testimony, or how do they think it should be brought forward on their own behalf, when by these words the good among the bad are made most secure, and there is no cause at all for bodily separation such that people should be separated even from the good, by spiritual discord, through an abominable schism, since both the bad among the good can go unheard because of their unbelief and the good among the bad can be heard because of their faith? For God, who searches the heart, does not make mistakes so as either to hear or to reject one person in place of another. Or do they say this so that it may be understood that a bad bishop is not heard when he prays for the people? Even if this were so, the people, if they are good and faithful, ought not on that account to be anxious. For that Scripture makes them secure which says: ‘Brothers, I write these things to you so that you may not sin; and if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins.’ Let them hear with what truthful and pious humility this was said, if they have ears with which to hear. For John had said: ‘I have written these things to you so that you may not sin.’ If he had gone on to say, ‘And if anyone does sin, you have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for your sins’, he would seem to have set himself apart from sinners, as it were, so that he no longer needed the propitiation that is made through the mediator who sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for us. That would certainly be said not only proudly but also falsely. But if he had even said, ‘I have written these things to you so that you may not sin; and if anyone does sin, you have me as mediator with the Father; I obtain pardon for your sins’, as Parmenian in one place made the bishop mediator between the people and God, which of the good and faithful Christians would tolerate him, who would look on him as an apostle of Christ and not as an antichrist? And yet these broken cisterns bear the smoky pride of these men, and cannot contain the Holy Spirit, so as to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace and to be secure, in all their prayers, about the one mediator.

For all Christian people commend one another in their prayers. But he for whom no one intercedes, while he intercedes for all, is the one true mediator; and since his type was prefigured in the priest of the old covenant, no one is found there either to have prayed for the priest. The apostle Paul, however, though a chief member under the head, yet because he is a member of the body of Christ and knew that the greatest and truest priest had entered for us, not through a figure into the inner part of the veil, into the holy of holies, but through the expressed and fulfilled truth into the inner part of heaven, into a holiness not imaginary but eternal, himself also commends himself to the prayers of the church; and he does not make himself mediator between the people and God, but asks that all the members of the body of Christ pray for one another, since the members are anxious for one another, and if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it, and if one member is glorified, all the members rejoice with it. And so the prayer of all the members for one another, while they still labour on earth, will ascend to the head who has gone before into heaven, in whom is the propitiation for our sins. For if Paul were mediator, so certainly would his fellow apostles be, and so there would be many mediators, and Paul’s own reasoning would not hold when he said: ‘For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.’ In him we too are one, if we keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace and do not desert the good because of the bad, but bear with the bad because of the good, lest, while we want to defend what we abandon by rash presumption, unknown, we are forced by a greater crime to condemn men unheard.

What of the fact that in the Scriptures we also find the prophet Balaam, not of the people of Israel but a foreigner hired by the enemy to curse the people of God, turned by the Lord to blessing? We hear and read all his words as he called down good, and though he had something else in his wish, yet the words of his prayer are good and are heard by the Lord for the people. So it is no wonder that good words spoken in prayers for the people, even if they are spoken by bad bishops, are nevertheless heard, not because of the perversity of those set over them but because of the devotion of the peoples. But the text written in the gospel, ‘God does not hear a sinner; but if anyone worships the Lord and does his will, him he will hear’, was not said by the Lord, but by the man who now indeed had the eyes of his body restored, but whose eyes of the heart were not yet open, so that he still thought the Lord himself a prophet. For afterwards, when he knew him as the Son of God, he worshipped him as a suppliant. But the Lord himself, when the tax collector and the Pharisee were praying in the one temple, says that the sinner who confessed his sins was justified rather than the Pharisee who boasted of his merits, whom these men resemble. For although, once justified, he ceased to be a sinner, yet he prayed as a sinner to be justified and confessed his sins, and, being heard, was justified, so that he ceased to be a sinner. So he would not cease to be a sinner unless he were first heard as a sinner. Therefore the truth testifies, not that every sinner is heard, but that not every sinner goes unheard.

They also throw at us what is said in the Psalms: ‘But to the sinner God says: Why do you expound my statutes and take my covenant in your mouth? But you have hated discipline and cast my words behind you. If you saw a thief, you ran with him, and you put your portion with adulterers. Sitting, you spoke against your brother, and you put a stumbling block against your mother’s son.’ But let them at last open the ears of the heart and stop ‘understanding neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions’. For they attend to what was said to the sinner, ‘Why do you expound my statutes and take my covenant in your mouth?’, and do not understand that it was said so that he may know that the words of God which he pronounces with his mouth do him no good if he does not himself do what he says, but that they do good to others who hear them even through bad men and do them. That this is what the Lord commands, the Lord himself teaches in the gospel, saying of the Pharisees: ‘They sit on Moses’ seat. What they say, do; but what they do, do not do. For they say and do not do.’

And would that they were willing to look at themselves in these words, which they quote from the psalm, as in a mirror: how they cast God’s words behind them who proclaim peace to the peoples and do not love peace; how they hate discipline who dare to condemn the world unheard, and, because they suffer temporal troubles according to the discipline of divine mercy, deservedly, or rather far less than they deserve for the audacity of so great a frenzy, do not confess that their sins are being punished but boast that their merits are being crowned. I do not say that they have run with a thief, for a robber is worse than a thief, and that is what Optatus was everywhere cried out to be. Or do they perhaps not put their portion with adulterers, who allow the drunken herds of their nuns, mixed day and night with the drunken herds of circumcellions, to wander about shamefully? Or do they not sit and speak against their brothers, who, because of certain men whom they could not convict, contend that there are no Christians in the inheritance of Christ spread through the whole world, and so put a most ruinous stumbling block against their mother’s son, that is, one still a little child in the faith who must be nourished on the milk of the sacraments, while, not yet knowing how to follow God the Father, he weakly follows a man, and, lured by a feigned and shadowy appearance of truth, is torn away from the framework of unity by a cruel laceration? But if those in that same party who do not do evil are displeased by the evil deeds of the others and believe that others’ crimes, which they groan and grieve to see done in their midst, do not harm them, why do they ruinously tolerate in the common sacrilege of schism what they could have tolerated fruitfully in the wholeness of unity? For they can say, if they ever wake up, having learned by the facts themselves, they can say that the evils of individuals do not harm the others who neither do nor approve such things; but that the sacrilege of schism is not the evil of individuals but belongs to all who do not communicate with Catholic unity: of this they can very easily be convinced, though they would very hardly confess it. For the very reason why, in their communion, the crimes of some do not belong to others is the reason why schism is the crime of all: because when they say that among their own people they cannot be stained by the crimes of others, they must at the same time confess that they had no reason to depart from unity, where others’ crimes could not stain them; and therefore they are all bound together equally by the most evident crime of schism, as by one deadly chain.

‘But’, he says, ‘Jeremiah prophesied.’ What did Jeremiah prophesy? ‘That those who forsake God’, he says, ‘do not have true baptism.’ For he says: ‘Heaven was astonished at this and shuddered much more violently, says the Lord, because this people has done two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of life, and dug for themselves broken cisterns that cannot hold water’; and again: ‘It has become to me’, he says, ‘like lying water that has no faithfulness’; and the text that is written: ‘He who is baptized by a dead man, what does his washing profit?’; and that in the Psalms: ‘Let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head’; and again elsewhere: ‘Dying flies destroy the oil of sweetness’; and elsewhere: ‘For the holy Spirit of discipline will flee the deceitful and will withdraw from thoughts that are without understanding.’ If all these are to be understood in the way these men understand them, the reasoning of truth does not square either for us or for them. But if I show that they are to be understood in another way, they alone are troubled by their own perversity, and, so as not to be troubled, they take refuge in the Catholic understanding; and where they find a way out of the reply, there they are caught in the crime of schism. For certainly they too have (I will not say ‘such they are’, but I will say what they either confess or most insanely deny), they too, then, have men who forsake God, who is the fountain of living water, that is, who live wickedly; for God is forsaken not with the feet but with the heart. They also have liars and men without faithfulness, that is, men professing one thing and living otherwise. They certainly have dead men. For if the apostle does not allow luxury to the more delicate and weaker sex, saying of the widow, ‘But she who lives in pleasures is dead while she lives’, let them ask whether no men among them, and, what is more, no leaders or ministers, live in pleasures; and so, if they dare, let them declare that they have no dead men and are better than that church to whose angel, standing for its leaders or for its souls, it is said that it is not alive but dead, and yet it is counted among the seven churches, and commands of life are moreover given to it, not as divided from the framework of Christ’s body, but as persevering in unity. I pass over what they said in their council against the Maximianists: ‘Just as in the example of the Egyptians perishing, the shores are full of their corpses.’ Of that number of dead men Felicianus is now inside, who still baptizes while dead, or, if he has now come back to life, has with him those whom he baptized while dead in schism. They certainly have sinners. For if any who seem great among them are asked, they do not deny that they themselves are sinners. For they either do not beat their breasts, or when they do it, do it in pretence (and if so, they certainly sin wretchedly then at least, deceiving their peoples with feigned humility), or they do not say in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.’ This is certainly not said of the sins that were forgiven in the regeneration of baptism, but of those that the weakness of human life contracts every day from the most bitter waves of the world, for whose healing the medicines of almsgiving, fasting, and prayer are supplied, so that in prayer is said what is done in almsgiving. For to forgive the sin that another has committed against you, so that God may also forgive you, is a great work of mercy. But if they say this in prayer feignedly, not truly, thinking that they have nothing for God to forgive them, that very thing is an inexpiable sacrilege, that very thing is impious and insane pride, which is certainly a monstrous sin. As for the dying flies, what shall I say, when we have shown that among them are found, many times over, not men still about to die but men already dead, whether they confess it or are convicted of it? And as for the deceitful, whom the holy Spirit of discipline flees, and those who live ruinously without understanding, let them consider, from what has been said above, how many they have among them. For whatever bad men lie hidden there (which is certain from this, that men are often exposed, convicted, and condemned, not only for recent deeds but also for an old habit of shameful acts, who could long be concealed by most cunning pretence), these are surely the more deceitful, who deceive by pretending to be good.

If, then, these texts are to be understood as these men understand them, how can their reasoning stand? Why, among them, are those who forsake God by living badly, whether they are hidden or known, not broken cisterns that cannot hold water, if the sacrament of baptism is to be understood in this place? Why are their liars and unfaithful men believed to give or have not lying water but truthful? Why does washing profit those who are baptized by their dead men? Why do their sinners anoint the heads of others with oil? What have the dying or dead flies there deserved, that they do not destroy the oil of sweetness? With what privilege are the deceitful there protected, that is, those who cover a wolf with the skin of righteousness, so that the holy Spirit of discipline does not flee them? Or if the Holy Spirit flees them, how is he given through them to those they baptize? For here one cannot say what they usually say, most foolishly and shamelessly, that someone can be baptized by a bad man only if the baptizer’s badness is hidden. For the deceitful man is the more deceitful the more he is hidden. Since the Holy Spirit withdraws from him, then, what hope will the baptized person have, if the merit of the baptizing man is to be considered in that grace of God? Here they find nothing at all to answer, because they deny that they have open bad men; in which they are most clearly convicted. But what is that to us? It is enough for us, for the necessary point of the case, that they cannot deny that they have deceitful ‘good’ men, that is, hidden bad men. For they are refuted by the many who, living there with lost and wicked morals and long hidden through that very pretence, were at some point exposed and expelled. If, then, they do not want us to believe that there are still some such men there, certainly those who were cast out, when they were hiding there in that same pretence and the Holy Spirit was fleeing them, of whom it is written, ‘For the holy Spirit of discipline will flee the deceitful’, how could they baptize? Why are at least those they baptized who are still living not counted again, so as to receive baptism, which they certainly could not receive from deceitful men whom the Holy Spirit was deserting? But if they say, ‘The Holy Spirit was absent indeed from the pretending givers, to justify them, but present to the believing receivers, to wash them, by the ineffable efficacy of his power, easily able to do both: to flee the former and cherish the latter, to blame the former and cleanse the latter’, then, in solving the question for themselves, let them see at the same time that it is solved for us.

What is to be understood in this sentence of holy Scripture, which they, not understanding it and putting it forward as if for their side, thrust upon us to convict themselves, we advise is to be understood in almost all such questions: namely, that all the sacraments, while they harm those who handle them unworthily, nevertheless profit, through them, those who receive them worthily; just as with the word of God, of which it was said: ‘What they say, do; but what they do, do not do.’ For what prevents me from understanding the digging of broken cisterns that cannot hold water as turning to earthly pleasure and being unable to hold the Holy Spirit, whom every Christian of any kind knows is signified in the gospel by the name of water? Likewise ‘lying water that has no faithfulness’ can be understood not as a false baptism, but as a lying and unfaithful people, not counting the truthful and faithful, but only among those who are liars and unfaithful. For let them read the Apocalypse, that peoples are sometimes signified by the word ‘waters’, and not slander themselves sooner and more than us. For so it is said to John: ‘The waters that you saw, on which that harlot sits, are peoples and crowds and nations and tongues.’ And the text, ‘He who is baptized by a dead man, what does his washing profit him?’ (to put off for the present a more careful inquiry into these words), I most safely take to denote the baptisms of the pagans, because they worship men dead both to righteousness and to this life, in whose name they baptize. For although their priests too may be called dead through impiety, yet it is not understood thus because of them, but because of their dead gods, in contrast with whom it is said, ‘Our God is the living God.’ So even if among Christians there are some leaders or ministers dead through their iniquity and impiety, yet he lives of whom it was said in the gospel, ‘This is he who baptizes’; for, as the apostle says, ‘Christ, rising from the dead, dies no more, and death will no longer have dominion over him.’ As for the oil of the sinner, the psalm itself shows most plainly how it is to be understood. For it says: ‘The righteous will correct me in mercy and rebuke me; but the oil of the sinner shall not anoint my head.’ From this it is clear that the oil of the sinner signifies the flatteries of the flatterer; rejecting and detesting these, he chooses to be corrected and rebuked by the righteous, because the righteous man, doing this not with the deceitful gentleness of flattery but with the truthful harshness of reproof, does it much more mercifully. Hence also that in the Apocalypse, ‘Those whom I love I rebuke and chasten’, and that in Solomon, ‘Better are the wounds of a friend than the willing kisses of an enemy’, and many such are found. As for the oil of sweetness, that is, the good odour through the good reputation of Christians, those destroy it who, intending to live badly and to return to the death of their iniquities, rush in in great multitudes to have their sins forgiven through baptism and then go back to them again. For I think they are compared to flies because of their great number. But they destroy the oil of sweetness for those who look not at the grace of God itself but at men’s morals, and, since, just as grains are not seen among the chaff, so those who live piously do not easily appear among the crowds of the wicked, being offended in a carnal way, they are either slowed down or altogether recoil from receiving eternal salvation. That the good odour lies in the good reputation of Christians who live rightly, the apostle teaches when he says, ‘We are the good odour of Christ in every place.’ By contrast, those to whom it is said, ‘For the name of God is blasphemed among the nations because of you’, certainly destroy the oil of sweetness. So these texts have other, sounder meanings; if they follow them, they too are freed from the difficulties of these questions. But their meaning, if it is not confirmed by us, entangles them alone; if it is confirmed by us, it entangles both of us.

What need is there now to discuss more? Unless perhaps this will move someone: that when Parmenian wanted to prove that carnal men cannot beget spiritual sons, he added a testimony from the gospel: ‘What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.’ As if we said that any man whatever begets spiritual sons by himself, and not through the gospel, in whose preaching the Holy Spirit works to beget spiritual sons in baptism, even when he flees the deceitful minister, as we learned above. And so, when the apostle was speaking to such sons, if he had said, ‘I begot you’, and had not added, ‘in Christ Jesus through the gospel’, no believer would religiously confess that he was born of him. But even the thief Judas preached the gospel without harm to those who believed; and these men assert that through the ministry of their own deceitful men, that is, hidden bad men, as they too concede, spiritual sons are begotten, though the Holy Spirit flees them. For who would tolerate such madness as to call a man who begets sons by his wife carnal, but call an adulterer spiritual? ‘Far be it from me’, he says, ‘to think that.’ How then could a hidden adulterer, when he was a leader among them, propagate spiritual sons, if carnal men cannot do it? Or perhaps at that time Christ, or the Holy Spirit, or perhaps an angel baptized by his hands? If, then, a man baptizes when the baptizer is evidently good, but God or an angel baptizes when the baptizer is a hidden bad man, and each is born spiritually such as the one by whom he is baptized, let those who desire baptism wish that the men by whom they are baptized be not evidently good but hidden bad, so that, God or an angel baptizing, they may deserve to be reborn more holily. If they think to avoid this absurdity, let them confess that through any man whatever, when anyone is baptized with the baptism of Christ, it is Christ who baptizes, of whom alone it was said: ‘This is he who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.’

For that text from the gospel, ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them: Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, they will be forgiven, and if you retain anyone’s, they will be retained’, would be against us, forcing us to confess that this is done by men and not through men, if, after he said ‘So I send you’, he had at once added, ‘If you forgive anyone’s sins, they will be forgiven, and if you retain anyone’s, they will be retained.’ But since there is put in between, ‘When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them: Receive the Holy Spirit’, and then it is added that through them either the forgiveness or the retaining of sins takes place, it is shown clearly enough that they themselves do not do it, but the Holy Spirit through them, as he says in another place: ‘For it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit who is in you.’ But the Holy Spirit is present in a leader or minister of the church in such a way that, if he is not deceitful, the Spirit works through him both his reward for eternal salvation and the regeneration or upbuilding of those who are consecrated or evangelized through him; but if he is deceitful, since it is most truly written, ‘For the holy Spirit of discipline will flee the deceitful’, the Spirit is indeed absent from his salvation and withdraws from his thoughts that are without understanding, yet does not desert his ministry, through which he works the salvation of others. Because of this the apostle says: ‘For if I do this willingly, I have a reward; but if unwillingly, a stewardship has been entrusted to me’, that is, ‘it profits those to whom I dispense this, not me who am deceitful’. For he who does it unwillingly, for the sake of carnal advantages and joys, and would abandon it if he could have them otherwise, is certainly deceitful himself; and so he does not say, ‘If I do it unwillingly, I do no good to those for whom I do it’, but he only estranges himself from the reward of salvation, not those to whom even a bad servant distributes the Lord’s rations. But because the apostle was not such, but rather such as to do it willingly, that is, to pay out a free grace with the piety of a chaste heart, the Holy Spirit worked through him also his reward, which, as he himself says, the Lord, the righteous judge, will render to him on that day. But those who proclaimed the gospel not chastely, who proclaimed nothing other than the truth, that is, Christ, yet not with the truth of their heart but as an occasion for their own advantage, he allows to proclaim, and rejoices, not over them, of course, but over those who were being saved through them, holding to the precept of him who said: ‘What they say, do; but what they do, do not do. For they say and do not do.’ For so the apostle speaks to the Philippians: ‘Some indeed’, he says, ‘preach Christ through envy and strife, but some also through good will; some out of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel; but some proclaim Christ out of contentiousness, not chastely, thinking to stir up affliction for my chains. What then? So long as in every way, whether by occasion or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice, yes, and I will rejoice.’ Would he have allowed them to preach Christ, though they did not preach the truth of the gospel in the truthful chastity of their heart, would he have rejoiced at the preaching of such men, unless he knew that it was ruinous for them to proclaim a chaste thing unchastely, but healthful for those who, hearing good and true things through them, advanced to salvation? For where not Christ, who is the truth, but falsehood and lies are preached, he most plainly forbids it, saying to the Galatians, ‘If anyone preaches to you a gospel other than what you received, let him be anathema’, and likewise to Timothy: ‘As I urged you’, he says, ‘to remain at Ephesus when I was going to Macedonia, so that you might charge certain persons not to teach otherwise.’ But those envious, contentious, stubborn, unchaste men, seeking an occasion to satisfy their bad will, since the Holy Spirit fled their deceit in such a way that he did not desert their ministry through which Christ was preached by them, he not only allows to do it, but even rejoices that they do it.

We bring forward these proofs from the holy Scriptures so that it may appear that nothing can easily be graver than the sacrilege of schism, because there is no just necessity for cutting off unity, since the good tolerate the bad, who will in no way harm them spiritually, precisely so as not to be spiritually separated from the good, when consideration for keeping peace restrains or postpones the severity of discipline; yet security puts discipline into force when it appears that something can be punished by church judgment for salutary correction without the wound of schism. For rather we say, ‘The name of the Lord belongs to those who fear him’, even though they are mixed with crowds of those who do not fear him; and what the apostle says, ‘The Lord knows those who are his, and let everyone who calls on the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.’ For if, for the good of peace, lest the wheat be rooted up with the weeds before the time when they are gathered, someone is forced by necessity to be among the unjust, let him nonetheless depart from iniquity, and he calls on the name of the Lord securely. For at one and the same time he both departs from the unjust and goes out from them and is separated, meanwhile, in heart, so that at the end he may deserve to be separated from such men in body as well.

And as for what is written, ‘Praise is not beautiful in the mouth of a sinner’, in the mouth of the faithful it is certainly beautiful. But each has his own mouth just as each has his own load, and no one is wounded by another’s mouth without the consent of his own heart. But when the preaching of God comes from a sinner’s mouth, one must ask what kind of sinner Scripture meant in this place. For the tax collector too, who was justified rather than that Pharisee, was certainly a sinner. For if his sins were not real, his confession of sins was false; but if that confession was true, on account of which he even deserved to be justified, his sins were without doubt real. I would say this most truly also of the prayer of holy Daniel, who certainly said truthfully: ‘When I was praying and confessing my sins and the sins of my people.’ In the mouth of what sinner, then, is praise not beautiful, if not above all of the liar and the deceitful, whom the holy Spirit of discipline will flee? Yet when such a man speaks the truth, it is not beautiful in his mouth, because it is not attributed to him, since he has no share in it; just as prophecy was not beautiful in the mouth of Caiaphas, chief of the priests, who did not know what he said, but, being high priest, prophesied. Yet God’s praise is beautiful in itself in the ears of those who hear and in the heart of those who believe.

Indeed, Parmenian even dares, by misusing a sentence of the apostle, to taunt, as it were, those whom he denies to have baptism and whom he therefore says cannot give it. ‘For what have you’, he says, ‘that you did not receive?’ To pass over from what source and why the apostle says this, which the context of his letter makes plain: if he wants this to be understood of baptism, and if the man who does not have it cannot give it, and the man who has not received it does not have it, so that ‘For what have you that you did not receive?’ may in some way support him, I ask whether a man who received it among them does not have it. If they say, ‘He has it’, I ask whether he loses it if he leaves them. If they say, ‘He loses it’, then he must be baptized again if he returns, so that what he lost may be restored to him. But if this is not done, and no one says that it should be done, then he had not lost it. Further, if he received it and was not deprived of it, he certainly has what he received, and so it cannot be said to him, in their sense, ‘For what have you that you did not receive?’ Turn your mind now to the very origin of the schism. Whatever they think of Caecilian, whom we believe innocent, he had without doubt been baptized in unity; for this division had not yet taken place. Let us suppose, as they want, that he himself left unity; he certainly did not lose what he had received. For if he returned, he would not be baptized again in order to receive what he had lost. Further, if he had not been deprived of what he had received, he certainly had it. So not even to him could it be said, in their perverse sense, ‘For what have you that you did not receive?’ Much less can this be said to one who received from the Lord through Caecilian. For why could a man who is not joined to you not receive what he did not have through one who did not lose it when he withdrew from you? How much more shamelessly, then, is it said to the world, ‘For what have you that you did not receive?’, the world from which the connection of the sacrament itself came into Africa, and which could not lose, through the crime of any traitor, the promise of God, who said with the plainest pledge to Abraham, ‘In your seed all nations shall be blessed’, even if these men had been, not impious slanderers of their brothers, but true examiners of crimes.

For what some of them, overcome by the truth, have begun to say, ‘He who withdraws from the church does not indeed lose baptism, but he does lose the right to give it’, appears in many ways to be said vainly and emptily. First, because no reason is shown why one who cannot lose baptism itself can lose the right to give it. For each is a sacrament, and each is given to a man by a certain consecration, the one when he is baptized, the other when he is ordained; and so in the Catholic Church neither may be repeated. For if at any time leaders coming from that party have been received, for the good of peace, after the error of schism has been corrected, even if it seemed necessary that they should exercise the same offices they exercised before, they have not been ordained again; but just as baptism, so ordination remained whole in them, because the fault had been in the cutting off, which was corrected by the peace of unity, not in the sacraments, which are the same wherever they are. And when it is judged expedient for the church that their leaders, coming into Catholic fellowship, should not exercise their offices there, the sacraments of ordination themselves are still not taken from them, but remain upon them. And so hands are not laid on them among the people, lest injury be done not to the man but to the sacrament itself. And if this is ever done in ignorance, and the deed is not stubbornly defended but piously corrected once known, pardon is easily obtained. For our God is not a God of dissension but of peace; and it is not the sacraments of the church that are enemies in those who have withdrawn from the church, but those who have withdrawn. Just as they have in baptism what can be given through them, so in ordination they have the right to give it; both, indeed, to their own ruin, so long as they do not have the love of unity. But it is one thing not to have, another to have ruinously, another to have healthfully. What is not had must be given when there is need to give it; but what is had ruinously must, by correction, with the ruin driven away, be brought to be had healthfully.

Even if a layman, compelled by the need of someone dying, has given what he learned how to give when he himself received it, I do not know whether anyone could piously say that it must be repeated. For if it is done with no necessity compelling, it is a usurpation of another’s office; but if necessity presses, it is either no fault or a pardonable one. But even if it is usurped with no necessity and given by anyone to anyone, what has been given cannot be said not to have been given, although it can rightly be said to have been given unlawfully. The unlawful usurpation, then, is corrected by a disposition that remembers and repents. But if he does not correct it, what has been given will remain for the punishment of the usurper, whether of him who gave it unlawfully or of him who received it unlawfully; yet it will not be held as not given. Nor in any way will the royal stamp that has been usurped by private persons be violated by a loyal soldier. For if some persons, secretly and irregularly, not in the public mints, mark gold or silver or bronze by striking it, when this has been detected, will not the royal stamp, once recognized, be gathered into the royal treasuries, while they are punished or freed by pardon? Or if someone, either a deserter or one who never served at all, marks some private person with the military brand, will not the man so marked, when detected, be punished as a deserter, and the more heavily the more he can prove that he never served at all, while the most audacious marker is punished with him if he betrays him? But if perhaps the man, not serving, takes fright at that military mark on his body and flees to the emperor’s clemency, and, having poured out his prayer and obtained pardon, now begins to serve, is that mark repeated when the man is freed and corrected, and not rather recognized and approved? Or do the Christian sacraments perhaps cling less than this bodily mark, when we see that not even apostates lack baptism, to whom, when they return through repentance, it is not given back, and so it is judged that it could not be lost? Or should an illustration not have been drawn from military service, when the apostle draws one even from athletic contests and openly cries out: ‘No one serving as a soldier to God entangles himself in worldly affairs, so as to please him who enlisted him’?

This, indeed, is another question: whether baptism can be given even by those who were never Christians; and nothing should be rashly affirmed on this without the authority of a council as great as so great a matter requires. But about those who have been separated from the unity of the Catholic Church there is no longer any question that they both have it and can give it, and that they have it to their ruin and hand it on to ruin outside the bond of peace. For this has already been discussed, considered, examined, and confirmed in the very unity of the whole world. But if we do wrong, let them explain how the sacrament of the baptized cannot be lost while the sacrament of the ordained can be lost, since they say: ‘One who withdraws from the church does not indeed lose baptism, but he does lose the right to give it.’ For if each is a sacrament, which no one doubts, why is the one not lost and the other lost? Injury must be done to neither sacrament. If holy things flee the bad, let both flee; if holy things remain inviolably in the bad, let both remain. If they say, ‘Baptism is rightly given only in the true church’, the answer to them is: ‘Baptism is rightly had only in the true church.’ Why can it not be given where it is not rightly given, when it can be had where it is not rightly had? Is it because not to have is one thing, and not to have rightly another? So also not to give is one thing, and not to give rightly another. Just as he who departs from unity does not have it rightly, but still has it, and so it is not given back to him when he returns, so also he who departs from unity does not give it rightly, but still gives it, and so what one received from him is not repeated when he comes to unity. But they contend that what is not rightly given has not been given. What if someone else contended that what is not rightly had cannot be had: would we not both cry out against him and say that he who has left unity has it indeed, but does not have it rightly? If, then, they want him to hear what we both cry out together, let them hear us crying out that he who departs from unity gives it indeed, but does not give it rightly. Therefore, just as what he had even outside is not given back to one who returns, so what he had received even outside is not to be repeated for one who comes. From this it is understood as a consequence that the perversity of men is to be corrected, but the holiness of the sacraments is not to be violated in any perverse man; for it is agreed that in perverse and wicked men, whether those inside or those outside, it remains unpolluted and inviolable. And when the bad are said to pollute them, they are said to do so as far as lies in them, while the sacraments themselves remain unpolluted. But in the good they remain for reward, in the bad they remain for judgment. For of the Spirit too, who can in no way be extinguished, it is nevertheless said: ‘Do not extinguish the Spirit’, that is, as far as lies in you, do not act as though you were trying to extinguish the Spirit or as though you counted the Spirit extinguished. And the name of God can in no way be polluted, and yet it is said: ‘The son and the father went in to one girl, so as to pollute the name of the Lord their God.’

Nor can these men extricate themselves in any way when it is put to them why the holiness of the sacrament can be both had and given by a man whom God has already condemned as wicked within, and begins to be impossible for him to give only when he has been condemned by men, though not even then can he lose it. Finally, why did Felicianus, whom the three hundred and ten condemned with Maximian, and who was long outside in a sacrilegious schism, as they themselves declared in their council, lose not only not baptism itself but not even the right to give it? For he was received in his rank, just as he had gone out, with all those whom he baptized while placed outside, none of them rebaptized; because if they judged that any of those he had baptized outside must be rebaptized, they would judge that he had lost the right to give it while he was outside, and the consequence would be that they should also ordain him again, if they baptized those again. But when they are called back to the peace of Christ, they are slanderers; when they consult for the peace of Donatus, they are dissemblers. What is this but what their own Tyconius says of them: ‘What we want is holy’?

Why, then, does Parmenian exult with empty boasting and say: ‘The judgment of the divine law will never allow that a dead man can give life to anyone, a wounded man heal, a blind man enlighten, a naked man clothe, a polluted man cleanse’? For the Lord raises the dead, the Lord heals the wounded, the Lord enlightens the blind, the Lord clothes the naked, the Lord cleanses the polluted. Why does he claim for himself what is not man’s? Are those among them who do not sin so alive that they are said to be able even to give life, when they cannot give growth? ‘I planted’, he says, ‘Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants is anything nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth.’ How does he give life to the dead who cannot give growth to the living? ‘For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will.’ Are they so healthy among them that they can even heal the unhealthy? What else do these men do than set themselves up to be blessed in place of the Lord? But in no way are those seduced by them who, hoping not in man but in God, sing: ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits, who is merciful to all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases.’ If he himself heals all diseases, he leaves none that Parmenian may say he heals. Are there such great lights among them that they can even enlighten? This John the Evangelist does not grant even to John the Baptist, than whom no greater has arisen among those born of women; of him he says: ‘He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light. That was the true light, which enlightens every man coming into this world.’ If that light enlightens every man, it leaves none that Parmenian may say he enlightens; because, although holy men are called lights in a certain way, yet enlightened lights are one thing, the enlightening light another, which is that light alone of which the same John the Baptist says: ‘We have all received from his fullness.’ And who clothes the naked but he who says, ‘Bring out the best robe for him’, and ‘This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality’? And is any man said to clothe someone with a divine garment, for whom it is a great thing if he himself deserves to be clothed? Next, let him dare to say that he cleanses the polluted, if he first dares to say that he is not polluted. We have indeed been cleansed through the grace of God. But not even then shall we cleanse anyone, when our cleansing has been made perfect; how much less now, when ‘the body that is corrupted weighs down the soul’! ‘For who will boast that he has a chaste heart, or boast that he is clean from sin?’ For in spiritual things to cleanse and to heal mean the same. But as we have been saved in hope, so we have been cleansed in hope, with a view to perfect salvation and perfect cleanness. How then can we heal and cleanse now, when we will not be able to even then, when we are in every way clean and saved? ‘But God’, he says, ‘does these things through a man.’ He does indeed; but he did them also through Judas, whom he sent with the others to preach the gospel; he did them also through the Pharisees, in those who themselves did the good things they heard through them, though the Pharisees did not do what they said. Finally, why do their own unjust and wicked men, whether they are hidden or tolerated for the party of Donatus, give life, heal, enlighten, cleanse? Or are they not themselves dead, wounded, blind, polluted? Or is the reason that among them the blind leading the blind do not fall together into the pit that people follow, by hearing and obeying, not those men but the God whom they preach? Just so. But they preach God when they gather with Christ; when they scatter what they do not gather with him, preaching Donatus, not God, the blind, following the blind, fall together into the pit. But on the question of baptism we will treat more fully, with the Lord’s help, when we have answered all the testimonies of the holy Scriptures which Parmenian thought should be thrown at us; who truly gives his neighbours drink with the overthrow of iniquity, who has poured out for them so bad an error that he not only speaks himself, not for peace but for division and splitting, but also persuades people that the divine books speak so.

But among many things I wonder at the man that, when he was arguing that baptism cannot be had unless received and cannot be received without someone giving it, he inserted a testimony from the gospel: ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from heaven.’ For someone unacquainted with these words, when this man had begun to say, ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him’, before he said ‘from heaven’, might think that he was going to say ‘by Donatus’, or ‘by Parmenian’, or ‘by someone of the party of Donatus’, or simply ‘by the party of Donatus itself’. I recognize the gospel and acknowledge that it is written there: ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from heaven.’ But is Donatus heaven? Is Parmenian heaven? Is the party of Donatus itself? It would not be heaven even if it were in heaven. For he who said, ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from heaven’, would never have said, ‘unless it has been given him from the sun or the moon or the stars’, though these are in heaven; how much less would he have said, ‘unless it has been given him from the party of Donatus’, which not only is not heaven nor in heaven, but does not even want to be in the kingdom of heaven! Nor, without doubt, would he have said, ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from the church’; for the church itself receives from heaven. But if he had said, ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him by a righteous man’, these brazen men would indeed rush in and proclaim that they are righteous, so that whoever wished to receive might receive from them; and we would not raise the question whether they were righteous or not, but would easily show from certain men who were exposed and expelled that there are, or were, hidden unrighteous men among them, and that they nevertheless did not reject them or say that what had been given and received from such men was not given or not received. But even this would be said falsely, if it were said: ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him by a righteous man.’ For I ask from whom that righteous man himself, from whom another receives, received it. If he too received it from a righteous man, I ask the same about him, until I come, from the very head of the human line, to someone who did not receive from a man; and so I show that it is false that a man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him by a man.

What, then, do these men do, unknowingly, by means of this gospel testimony, but admonish people at last to wake up and notice that, truly, when a man desires to receive something holy, it is not men who are to be looked to, but him alone who gives this to man from heaven, because ‘a man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from heaven’? But if they say, ‘He receives it indeed from heaven, not from a man, but still through a man’, I ask: through what kind of man? If only through a righteous man, then those do not have it who among them received it through most wicked hidden men. If also through an unrighteous man, what reason is there, then, for them to rebaptize anyone? If through an unrighteous man only when he is hidden, then those do not have it whom Optatus, the evident henchman of Gildo, baptized. If through an unrighteous man even when evident, provided he has not yet been condemned and cast out of the church’s communion, then those do not have it whom Felicianus of Musti baptized in the schism of Maximian while he was outside their communion; yet now, since they have returned with him, no one rebaptizes them. Finally, if a man, though from heaven, can nevertheless receive anything only through a man, I ask through what man John the Baptist himself, who was saying these things, had received what he had certainly received from heaven; and none is found. And so the bad cause is refuted by the testimonies it brings forward. For although the Son says that he has received from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit receives from what is his, not as if by stages, but as he himself explained, saying, ‘Because all that the Father has is mine, therefore I said: He will receive from what is mine’, yet that a man can receive something from God without any man in between, John himself attests by his own example, and so many saints before the Son of God became man; and, after he rose and ascended into heaven, the hundred and twenty people who were gathered together, whom the Holy Spirit coming from heaven filled with no man on earth laying on a hand; and, when the order of the church was already established, Peter himself marvelled that the centurion Cornelius, with those who were with him, was filled with the same Holy Spirit before baptism itself, before the laying on of hands. So no one receives without a giver; but as regards the holiness of baptism, God is present to give and a man to receive, whether God gives through himself, or through an angel, or through a holy man, or through a wicked man, as through so many either hidden or evident men, whom the servants of the householder are forbidden to gather out of the harvest before the time, and whom the Lord’s wheat, like chaff, does not rashly desert bodily, but piously bears spiritually, while meanwhile separated in heart, until the time of winnowing.

‘He who has believed wrongly’, he says, ‘cannot obtain the sacrament of baptism, because it is written: What is crooked cannot be adorned.’ What then? Suppose someone baptized among them who, for example, had thought that Christ began to exist from the time he was born of the virgin Mary according to the flesh; and afterwards, moved by the word of truth, when he learned that he is the one of whom John says, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, of whom he consequently says, ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’, he confessed to them his former error and anxiously informed them that he had been in it when he was baptized: would they order him to be baptized again? They would certainly never do it, but would congratulate the man’s unlearned simplicity, at first crooked through a carnal opinion, afterwards corrected by the reasoning of truth. Or if he even thought such a perversity must be stubbornly defended, and, having long resisted and not been corrected, was even driven out of the church, and afterwards, having come to know the truth, returned, they would certainly judge that he must be healed by repentance, not wounded by the repetition of baptism, even if he confessed that he had held this in his heart also at the time when he was baptized among them. ‘What is crooked cannot be adorned’, therefore, because the sacrament he had received would not serve him as an adornment if he persisted in a crooked faith, but rather for punishment; while yet the sacrament itself, in itself, would remain whole even in the crooked man, whom it did not adorn but judged; and so in no way should the holiness of that sacrament be violated, even when that man’s crookedness had to be corrected.

Parmenian even dares to set before us divine examples by which he thinks he shows that one should look for a holy man from whom to receive the sacrament. ‘The Son of God himself’, he says, ‘the Lord Jesus Christ himself, from whom the beginning of spiritual baptism arose, when he was to be baptized according to the Father’s will, is he shown to have come to the faithless and profane Pharisees, or to the most holy John?’ But if we are invited by this example to receive baptism, we ought to look for someone inferior to us to be baptized by, since the Lord was baptized by one who had said beforehand that he ought to be baptized by the Lord himself, and who testified that he was unworthy to untie the strap of his sandal. Indeed, to leave aside a more careful inquiry into why our Saviour himself wished to be baptized, since he wished it for some certain reason, perhaps for this reason, though he who could even baptize his own baptizer could have dipped himself, the Lord willed to be baptized by a servant, and he through whom all things were made willed to be baptized by one who was made among all things, both to teach humility and to show that it does not matter who is baptized by whom, so long as he is baptized with the baptism with which he is to be baptized. Nor would he have disdained to be baptized by the Pharisees, if the Pharisees had had such a baptism as that with which he willed to be baptized for the sake of a definite sacrament. For when he had also to be circumcised, was John sought out, since this was already customarily done by the Jews? And when the sacrifice of the law had to be offered for him, was that temple avoided which he calls a den of robbers? Into it certainly both the good and the bad entered, and the bad did not harm the good, since the Lord, who says, ‘Be holy, because I too am holy’, makes his saints live among the bad so inviolably, if they keep the holiness they receive, just as the Lord Jesus himself was polluted by no contagion of malignity in the Jewish nation, neither when, made under the law in the perfect way of humility, he received those first sacraments, nor when afterwards he lived with his chosen disciples, together with his betrayer, right up to the last kiss. For by his example, who not only did not do evil but consented to no malice, the grains are safe among the chaff, because they neither do such things nor consent to those who do them, even if the good tolerate the bad in the same crop until the harvest, on the same threshing floor until the winnowing, within the same nets until the separation that will take place on the shore. But these men are truly blind leaders of the blind, who see so many bad men in the number of their own and do not see the way of peace, and persuade people to follow them, not to bear with one another for the bond of unity, but to divide from one another for the sacrilege of schism.

‘But’, he says, ‘it was said through the prophet to King Jehoshaphat: O King Jehoshaphat, do you help a sinner, or do you love one whom the Lord hates? Therefore the wrath of the Lord has been upon you.’ For which of us says that a sinner should be helped in that in which he wants to sin, as Ahab himself was, whom Jehoshaphat helped by going with him into battle when Ahab despised the truthful words of the prophet Micaiah? And yet not even so did the very bad desert of King Ahab harm the innocence of King Jehoshaphat, for the Lord delivered him from the danger of battle when he cried out to him, but allowed the other, a sacrilegious despiser, to come into the hands of the enemy. And if Jehoshaphat experienced any danger, which the prophet tells him came from the wrath of the Lord, he had deserved it not by another’s sin but by his own, because, as was said to him, he was helping one who sinned. But before God his other good deeds prevailed. For so it is said to him: ‘Have you helped that sinner, and are you a friend to those who hate the Lord? For this there is wrath upon you from the face of the Lord. But good words of God are with you in all things, because you have removed the groves from the land and have prepared your heart to seek God.’ But he who lives in the church of God, where there are also those who seek their own things, not those of Jesus Christ, who proclaim Christ not chastely, through envy and strife, and who says, ‘Whether by occasion or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice, yes, and I will rejoice’, remains unpolluted and whole among them, because he does not consent with them in seeking their own things, since he blames and rebukes this; and he does not help them to sin, but helps toward this: that Christ may be preached more widely, and that, by those who hear and do, through those who do not do what they say, Christ may be believed, hoped in, and loved. For to such the same apostle gave the command, saying: ‘Do not be yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with iniquity? What fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Beliar? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are temples of the living God. For he says: I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean. And I will receive you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.’ Understanding these words carnally, these men have cut themselves up into little pieces by so many divisions in Africa alone. For they do not understand that no one is yoked with unbelievers except one who commits the sins of the pagans or favours those who commit such things; nor does anyone become a partner of iniquity except one who either does or approves of unjust things. And who has fellowship with darkness except through the darkness of his own consent, when he leaves Christ and follows Beliar? Who puts his part with unbelievers except one who becomes a sharer in their unbelief? For so he ceases to be a temple of God, and in no other way joins himself to idols. But those who are temples of the living God, and shine like lights in the world in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, holding the word of life, are not infected by anything they tolerate for unity, nor are they straitened, because God dwells and walks in them; and they go out from the midst of the bad and are separated, meanwhile, in heart, lest perhaps, wanting to do it by the sedition of schism, they be separated spiritually from the good before they are separated bodily from the bad.

As for what is written that God said, ‘Those who glorify me I will glorify, and he who despises me shall be despised’, they least of all want to look at it. For how do they glorify God who say that his promises could not be fulfilled throughout the world, the promises he made to our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which, foretelling through the prophets so long before, he displayed through his only Son, who was made for him of the seed of David according to the flesh, so that in him, that is, in the seed of Abraham, all nations might be blessed; who say that the Son of God himself said in vain, ‘Let both grow until the harvest’, as if he were mistaken or had deceived, when only the weeds have grown through the world, while the wheat has failed in the whole world except for the party of Donatus? How do those who think such things glorify the Lord, when it is written, ‘In the breadth of a nation is the king’s glory, but in the dwindling of the people is the prince’s ruin’? Or how do they not despise the Lord, who with incredible rashness of impiety blow out his baptism in those whose case they have not heard and on whom they could in no way judge, and dare to claim for themselves what is God’s; who receive back men condemned by themselves, in their full rank, for the peace of Donatus, and detest men they have not heard, against the peace of the Lord; who contend that the baptism handed down through the apostles in those parts of the world has perished, and grant that the baptism handed down through Felicianus among the Maximianists has not perished? But now how do Catholics not glorify the Lord, who trust that his promises could not be prevented by any crimes of men from being fulfilled, who treat his sacraments with such due veneration that, even if they have been handled by the unworthy, they show that, while those men are condemned by their perversity, the sacraments remain in untouched holiness?

‘Again’, they say, ‘it is written: Do not take part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather even rebuke them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that are done by them in secret.’ We have already said how these very words are to be understood: that not to take part is not to consent; which, for the sake of the church’s discipline, is too little unless they are also rebuked, so that they can be corrected. But these things must be done with peace kept, and as far as the duty of preserving unity allows, lest the wheat be rooted up as well.

Again to Timothy the same apostle says: ‘Do not take part in the sins of others. Keep yourself chaste.’ He taught in what follows how what he said first is to be understood. For he who keeps himself chaste does not take part in the sins of others. For if he takes part, he consents; if he consents, he is corrupted; if he is corrupted, he does not keep himself chaste. But indeed at last Parmenian woke up and noticed what Tyconius was saying, but in vain; for at once, out of love for his own opinion, he shut his eyes against the truth. For he says: ‘Or is it, dearest brother, that the sins of others do not pollute others? And this is not taking part with criminals: though you meet with them, not doing their deeds.’ And yet he did not say the whole. For it is too little not to do their deeds unless they displease; it is too little that they displease unless they are rebuked. For not to do is one thing, not to take part, that is, not to consent to those who do, is another, and also to rebuke is another. Why, then, when he had begun to see, did he at once turn away and refuse to come to the end, and set down barely a third of the whole? Or did he think that, as they did with the people, the sentence of truth too should be cut off? We say that he who does not do evil, does not consent to one who does it, and rebukes one who does it, lives firm and whole among the wicked, like wheat among chaff; but he says only, ‘not doing their deeds’. And yet let us see how he refutes this third part of the whole sentence.

‘That this is against the divine law’, he says, ‘no one who reveres the law is unaware.’ So far these words can be said by either side. For another man too can say: ‘That this is in accordance with the divine law no one who reveres the law is unaware.’ But what is needed is to prove, not to say. Let us see, then, how he proves it. ‘For what does it profit’, he says, ‘to have kept innocence, if you are mixed with the guilty and liable with them?’ Certainly, if that is so, it is not that keeping innocence does not profit, but that innocence has not been kept. For no one can rightly be said to be mixed with the guilty and liable except through a consent that stains the conscience. But he who fulfils what is written, ‘Nothing unjust pleases the righteous man’, wherever any necessity compels him to live, cannot be mixed with iniquities. ‘Or how’, he says, ‘can you remain incorrupt, you who are associated with the corrupt?’ Plainly so, if he is associated, that is, if he commits something evil with them or favours those who commit it; but if he does neither, he is in no way associated. Further, if he adds a third thing, that he is not slack in punishing, but either the righteous man corrects in mercy and rebukes, or even, if he holds that office and the consideration of preserving peace allows, rebukes sinners before all, so that the rest may fear, and removes them either from some rank of honour or from communion in the sacraments itself, and does all this with the love of correcting, not the hatred of persecuting, he has fulfilled the fullest duty not only of the most chaste innocence but also of the most diligent severity. But where the other things are hindered, those two, always kept, guard him incorrupt and chaste: that he neither does evil nor approves it when done.

But still let us see from where he teaches what he affirms. ‘Since it is written’, he says, ‘A little leaven corrupts the whole lump.’ Parmenian said this and departed, and now it cannot be shown to him that in the party of Donatus there is not only a little leaven but much poison from those asps’ eggs that have hatched, and from the now very powerful serpents condemned on behalf of Primian and called back again to Primian. ‘But they have been corrected’, he says. Thanks be to God. If it is true, I do not begrudge it. And would that it were done perfectly! For if to return from the Maximianists to the party of Donatus is some degree of correction, how much truer and more perfect a correction it is to come back from the party of Donatus itself to Catholic unity! And Tyconius indeed said many things, by which, in those times and, as he knew from inside, how they would not confess that their whole lump had been corrupted by their own leaven, not a little but much, they who accused the whole world of being leavened by the sins of the Africans. But I wonder at these men, if they still like to understand these apostolic words in this way, that they want to defend Optatus the Gildonian so far as not to grant that he was even a little leaven. But if they grant even this, how great do they think their lump is, that the whole could not be corrupted? Or if it was corrupted only in those whom Optatus pleased, let them learn by experience to understand what they read: that the whole lump is in those to whom what is said as ‘whole’, whether good or bad, belongs. It belongs to those who consent; to those who do not consent it does not belong at all. And so it must be corrected by church discipline, lest by persuasion it reach many. Where the consideration of peace allows this to be done and it is not done, the negligence itself incurs guilt, and is in danger of consenting through sloth in correcting.

By this rule is also to be understood what he next sets against us, saying that it is written: ‘Let it be an eternal statute for you throughout your generations to distinguish between the holy and the irreligious and between the clean and the unclean.’ For the more one advances in the church, the better he does this. For when the blade had grown and borne fruit, then the weeds appeared. And although the servants of the householder were already dividing and distinguishing between the two by knowledge, they are nevertheless commanded to let them grow, and that until the harvest. But so much for this. For what remains must be considered and treated somewhat more carefully, from another beginning.

Since every pious reasoning and measure of church discipline ought above all to look to the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, which the apostle commanded to be kept by bearing with one another, and without which the medicine of punishment is shown to be not only superfluous but even harmful, and therefore no longer medicine at all; those bad sons, who, not from hatred of others’ iniquities but from zeal for their own contentions, aim either to drag off whole weak peoples, entangled by the boast of their name, or at least to divide them, swollen with pride, mad with obstinacy, insidious with slanders, turbulent with seditions, put forward the shadow of a rigid severity, lest they be shown to lack the light of truth; and the things that the holy Scriptures commanded to be done, with the sincerity of love kept safe and the unity of peace preserved, for correcting the faults of brothers by a sharper treatment, they misappropriate for the sacrilege of schism and as an occasion for cutting off, saying: ‘See, the apostle says: Remove the evil from among yourselves. And certainly’, they say, ‘if that evil did not harm the sound, it would not be commanded to be removed.’

Meanwhile let us see whether perhaps it is not for nothing that the apostle did not say, ‘Remove the bad from your congregation’, but ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’; because, even when someone is prevented from separating bad men from the congregation of the church, if he removes the evil from himself, he is not mixed with them in heart, and so he is spiritually not only joined to the good but also separated from the bad. For just as in that place to Timothy, when he had said, ‘Do not take part in the sins of others’, as if he were saying that it could happen that Timothy might be unable to separate some bad men from the congregation of the church and therefore be compelled to tolerate them, he said, as if giving advice on how not to take part in their sins, ‘Keep yourself chaste’ (for no one can be mixed with the bad except a bad man; the good man in no way, even though he lives with them in one congregation); so here too to the Corinthians, when he had said, ‘For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those who are inside?’, lest perhaps they be troubled by some number of the bad so mixed with the wheat that it could not be gathered and separated without harm to it, he said, ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’: so that, if perhaps they could not remove the bad from their congregation, by removing the evil from themselves, that is, by not sinning with them and not consenting to or favouring them in sinning, they might live among them wholly sound and incorrupt. For it is through his own evil that anyone consents to the bad; but if he removes the evil from himself, he has nothing by which to consent to another’s evil. Therefore, whoever has despised the church’s discipline so as to stop warning, correcting, and rebuking bad men with whom he does not sin and whom he does not favour, even if he holds such an office and the peace of the church permits him also to separate them from participation in the sacraments, sins not by another’s evil but by his own. For negligence in so great a matter is itself a grave evil. And so, as the apostle warns, if he removes the evil from himself, he will remove not only boldness in committing or the plague of consenting, but also laziness in correcting and negligence in punishing, using prudence and obedience in what the Lord commanded, lest the wheat be harmed. For whoever tolerates weeds among the wheat with this intention, removing the evil from himself, neither takes part with them, and distinguishes and judges them meanwhile, for the day. For he does not know what will be tomorrow. And so, with love kept, whatever a necessary severity compels to be punished must be punished not without hope of correction. That this may appear clearly enough, let us go over that whole passage of the apostle’s letter more carefully.

‘What do you want?’ he says. ‘Shall I come to you with a rod, or in love and a spirit of gentleness?’ Here already it appears that he is speaking of punishment, to signify which he named the rod. Yet is the rod also without love, because he put it so: ‘Shall I come to you with a rod, or in love?’ But what follows, ‘a spirit of gentleness’, reminds us to understand that the rod too has love. But the love of severity is one thing, the love of gentleness another. There is one love, but it works different things in different people. ‘It is actually reported’, he says, ‘that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife.’ Let us see how he commands them to deal severely with so monstrous a deed. ‘And you’, he says, ‘are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, so that he who has done this deed might be taken away from your midst.’ Why ‘mourned’ rather than ‘been angry’, unless because if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it? And not mourning because he was being taken away, but mourning, he says, ‘so that he might be taken away’; that is, so that the grief of those mourning might ascend to God, and God himself might take away from their midst the one who had done this deed, as he knew how, lest perhaps they, through human unskilfulness, root up the wheat as well. So when necessity compels such punishment, the humility of those who mourn ought to obtain the mercy that the pride of those who rage drives away. Nor ought the salvation of the very one who is taken away from the midst of the brothers to be neglected; but it must be done in such a way that such punishment is useful to him, and done with prayers and supplications, if he cannot be corrected by rebukes. And so he goes on to say: ‘For I, absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged, as if present, him who has done this, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus, to hand such a one over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.’ What, then, was the apostle doing, except providing for spiritual salvation through the destruction of the flesh, so that, whether by some punishment or even by bodily death, as Ananias and his wife fell at the feet of the apostle Peter, or through repentance, since he had been handed over to Satan, he might put to death in himself the wicked lust of the flesh? For he himself likewise says, ‘Put to death your members that are on earth’, among which he also mentions sexual immorality; and again: ‘For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live.’ Yet he does not separate from brotherly love the man whom he commanded to be separated from the brotherly congregation. For he says this more plainly to the Thessalonians: ‘If anyone does not obey our word through this letter, note that man and do not associate with him, so that he may be ashamed. And do not regard him as an enemy, but correct him as a brother.’ Let these men at last hear and understand how apostolic love labours that, bearing with one another, we should be eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. For here too, when he had said, ‘And do not regard him as an enemy, but correct him as a brother’, as if showing why he said this, he at once added: ‘Now may the God of peace himself give you peace always in every way.’ So also about this man who had his father’s wife he proclaims mourning rather, and everywhere commends peaceable love, as he also says of himself: ‘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.’ And a little later he says: ‘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.’ So he judged by mourning, so that the mercy of God, without breaking the bond of peace, in which all salvation consists, might crush and correct sinners, as he is understood to have done for this very man who had committed immorality with his father’s wife. For no one else is found whom he could mean in the second letter to the same Corinthians when he says: ‘For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears, not that you should be grieved, but that you might know the love that I have more abundantly for you. But if anyone has caused grief, he has grieved not me, but in part (not to burden you) all of you. Sufficient for such a one is this rebuke by the many, so that on the contrary you should rather forgive and comfort him, lest such a one be swallowed up by excessive grief. Therefore I beg you to confirm your love toward him. For to this end I also wrote, that I might know your proof, whether you are obedient in all things. Whom you forgive anything, I also forgive. For what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the person of Christ, so that we may not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.’ What could be done or said more moderately, more carefully, more fully of pious solicitude and fatherly and motherly love? Just as he applies correction to the sinner, so he wants consolation to be given back to the one corrected and crushing and humbling his heart in repentance, ‘lest’, he says, ‘he be swallowed up by excessive grief’. But what about the words with which he concluded this sentence: ‘So that we may not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs’? For it is he who, by the image of a seemingly just severity, urges cruel savagery, seeking nothing else with his most venomous cunning than to corrupt and break the bond of peace and love; while it is preserved among Christians, all his forces become powerless to harm, the traps of his snares are broken, and his plans of overthrow vanish.

But even if the apostle spoke of someone else in the second letter to the Corinthians, there too he showed with how much love church punishment ought to proceed against anyone. This is what these men, not understanding it, usually hold as chief among their slanders: ‘The righteous will correct me in mercy and rebuke me; but the oil of the sinner shall not anoint my head.’ But because these men do not know how to correct in mercy, they both pursued the innocence of Caecilian with savage suspicions and anointed the power of Optatus the Gildonian with the oil of deceitful flattery. For if, for the sake of the bond of peace, they had tolerated the iniquity of Optatus, groaning and mourning, they would certainly not break the true and Catholic peace in the holy unity of the world, or at least they would so grieve over it, broken by their forebears with abominable blindness, that, having learned at least among themselves how many bad men they are forced to bear for the peace of Donatus, they would extinguish those men’s unpeaceful slanders by the peace of their own correction.

But let us return to the sequence of that first letter to the Corinthians. When the apostle had said, ‘to hand such a one over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus’, again and again commending that this ought to be done with the humility of those who mourn, not the pride of those who rage, he at once adds: ‘Your boasting is not good’, or, by way of a reproachful utterance, ‘Your boasting is good!’ For so some, and especially the Latin, manuscripts have it, while the same meaning is kept in both. For there is no fear that anyone should understand that he said ‘your boasting is good’ in praise, since he also said above, ‘You are puffed up and have not rather mourned’, and here at once adds, ‘Do you not know that a little leaven corrupts the whole lump?’ This can more fittingly be referred to the very corruption of empty boasting. For pride, as if from the oldness of the first man, who fell through pride, makes the proud, as with a leavened and corrupted mind, into one lump, who agree with one another in it by a like vanity of boasting. And to boast, not of one’s own sins, but over another’s sins, as if from a comparison with one’s own innocence, seems a little leaven, since to boast even of one’s own iniquities is much leaven; but even that little corrupts the whole lump. For the proud man falls by the desert of his pride, and begins to want to boast even in defending his own sins. Foreseeing this, the same apostle says: ‘Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall’; and again: ‘If a man is overtaken in any fault, you who are spiritual instruct such a one in a spirit of gentleness, looking to yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ.’ What is the law of Christ but ‘A new commandment I give you, that you love one another’? What is the law of Christ but ‘My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you’? What he said here, then, ‘Bear one another’s burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ’, he says in another place: ‘Bearing with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.’ For in that Pharisee too there seemed to be a little leaven, because he not only did not grieve for the sinner, but exalted himself over the other’s sins on account of his own merits. But the man who confessed his sins went down justified rather than that Pharisee who boasted of his merits, since he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. So the apostle goes on and says: ‘Clean out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened.’ What does ‘that you may be’ mean, and what ‘as you are’, unless that there were some such there and some not such, whom he was urging by the example of such men to be such? Yet he admonishes all as one, as though they were the same, lest those who were such should despair of those who were not yet such and think they did not belong to the framework of their body; for he admonishes them as though they were the same when he says, ‘that you may be as you are’. For those who were already so knew, and with the apostle admonishing ought to have known more and more, how to bear with those who were not yet so, so that, bearing with one another in love, they might keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and, bearing one another’s burdens, might fulfil the law of Christ. And since our Lord Jesus Christ, to teach the way of humility, deigned to be humbled even to the death of the cross, and, like a physician bearing with the sick, so bore with love the sinners of whom he had said, ‘It is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick’, he at once set forth the chief example, saying: ‘For Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed’, so that by the example of such great humility they might learn to clean out the old leaven, that is, whatever of pride had remained in them from the old man. ‘Therefore’, he says, ‘let us celebrate the feast’, not one day but the whole of life, ‘not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.’ For it is malice and wickedness to boast, as it were, of another’s sin, as if each person should rejoice in his own righteousness only when he sees that another is not righteous. But it is sincerity and truth, even if one makes progress, to remember what one was, and much more to have pity on the fallen, since one has oneself been raised from one’s own fall through the mercy of Christ, who without any sin of his own humbled himself for sinners.

But lest the sins of others be left ruinously and neglected as if by connivance, which is no less cruel than that pride, he goes on and says: ‘I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with the sexually immoral, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy, or robbers, or idolaters; otherwise you would have had to go out of this world’; that is, if you keep yourselves from the sinners of this world who are outside the church, you would have had to go out of this world. For your work in this world is this, to win sinners to Christ for salvation; which cannot be done if you flee their conversation and company. ‘But now’, he says, ‘I have written to you not to associate with anyone who is named a brother if he is sexually immoral or an idolater or greedy or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber; not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But God will judge those outside. Remove the evil from among yourselves.’

See how the apostle came to this sentence, whose last little part Parmenian thought he should set down, saying that it is written, ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves. And certainly’, he says, ‘if it did not harm the good and sound, it would not be commanded to be removed.’ But he passed over what was said above, from which the apostle came to this, though by it he could certainly have been helped toward what he wanted to persuade, namely that separation from the bad ought to be made bodily, since the apostle says, ‘Not even to eat with such a one.’ Why, then, did he not mention what seemed most able to help his aim? For since he presses so hard to persuade that bodily separation must be made from those who live badly, why does he not use the testimony of the apostle saying, ‘If anyone named a brother is sexually immoral or an idolater or greedy or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber, not even to eat with such a one’, unless because he saw that, if he said this, he could be answered: ‘Is it so with you that, even if you either have no sexually immoral men and idolaters or do not know of them, you see and know no greedy man or reviler or drunkard or robber among you? Why then, against the apostle’s command, do you not only eat the food of your own table with such men, but even share the supper of the Lord’s table?’ This, I think, is what Parmenian tried to avoid, lest he be answered so: that he should not set down what seemed to sound most strongly for his cause. For if this chapter of the apostle’s letter had escaped him and had not occurred to him, he would not have set down from its last part: ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves.’

But now, since we have said this, perhaps these men will dare to deny that they have among them greedy men, revilers, drunkards, or robbers, and perhaps they will try to defend Optatus himself, who was most notorious to all Africa and whom they bore with so long. Let them say, then, if they can, that they now have a better and purer church than that very unity was in the times of the most blessed Cyprian, who severely rebuked his colleagues, from whom he was nonetheless not separated by any bodily division, naming none of them by name, but prudently and soberly applying the medicine of a most salutary sharpness, in these words: that while brothers in the church were starving, they wanted to have silver in abundance, seized estates by treacherous frauds, increased their gains by multiplying interest. And to show most plainly that he was speaking of those with whom he lived in the communion of one church, he added next: ‘What should we not deserve to suffer for sins of this kind?’ For he does not say ‘they would deserve’, but ‘we would deserve’; which he would in no way have said, since he himself was certainly not such, unless he wished to make plain that he groaned over the deeds of men who were joined to him not only in the unity of the church but also in the fellowship of the college of bishops, though he differed from them in life, morals, heart, and purpose. Let these men say, then, that their church is better now and that they do not have such colleagues as Cyprian had in that very unity. Let those who wish believe them, and shut their eyes against the evils that, from their morals, strike the face of those who pretend not to see. I will call them back to those earlier times of unity and ask them whether, when that great man Cyprian, bishop of the church of Carthage, groaned over so bad a college with the testimony of a free voice, even in writings that would be handed on to later generations, the church of Christ existed or not. If it existed, I ask how Cyprian and others like him fulfilled what the apostle commanded, ‘If anyone named a brother is sexually immoral or an idolater or greedy or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber, not even to eat with such a one’, when they ate the Lord’s bread and drank the Lord’s cup with those greedy men and robbers who, while brothers in the church were starving, wanted to have silver in abundance, seized estates by treacherous frauds, increased their gains by multiplying interest.

Or perhaps these crimes are small and to be reckoned small? For these men are accustomed to say even this, weighing them not in the fair balance of the divine Scriptures but in the deceitful balance of their own customs. For whatever crime and iniquity intoxicates the multitude loses the truth of the scale. But the oracles of the heavenly pages have been set before people like a perfectly clear mirror for this purpose, that there each may see how great any sin is, which perhaps is great and yet is despised through the blind custom of those who live badly. Could greed have been accused more gravely by the divine words than by being shown equal to idolatry and called by its name, as the apostle says, ‘and greed, which is idolatry’? Could it have been judged worthy of a greater punishment than by being placed among those crimes by which those possessed by them will not possess the kingdom of God? Let them open the eyes of the heart, so that the eyes of the body are not open in vain, and read the free preacher of the truth writing in that same first letter to the Corinthians: ‘Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor the effeminate nor men who lie with males nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor revilers nor robbers will possess the kingdom of God.’ How, then, did Cyprian and other such wheat of the Lord, in that church of unity at that time, eat the Lord’s bread and drink the Lord’s cup with the greedy and the robbers, with those who will not possess the kingdom of God, and these not laymen or clerics of any kind but bishops themselves, when the same apostle commands them not to associate with them and cries, ‘not even to eat with such a one’? Was it not because they could not be separated from them bodily, lest they root up the wheat as well, that it was enough for them to be disjoined from such men in heart and distinguished in life and morals, for the sake of the balance of keeping peace and unity, for the salvation of the weak and, as it were, the suckling wheat, so as not to tear the members of the body of Christ by sacrilegious schisms?

But see, I am not pressing any of them to understand it so; let them themselves explain how that church could then have been glorious, without spot or wrinkle, where, while brothers in the church were starving, men wanted to have silver in abundance, where they seized estates by treacherous frauds, where they increased their gains by multiplying interest, where they were involved in such iniquities that because of them they would not possess the kingdom of God. But if the glorious church without spot or wrinkle was reckoned in those alone who mourned and groaned over those iniquities that were done in their midst (whence, according to the prophecy of holy Ezekiel, such men deserved to be marked with their own sign, so as to escape most safely from the devastation and destruction of the wicked), let them stop slandering the good, who do not do evil out of diseased desire but tolerate it out of peaceable love, to whom it was said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’ For this is why the Holy Spirit, through the prophet Ezekiel just mentioned, described with such a word the bad whom the good tolerate in unity, saying that they were set in the midst of the good; because if he had said that the good were in the midst of the bad, the bad would seem to be, as it were, outside and external. ‘They groan’, he says, ‘and grieve over the iniquities of my people that are done in their midst’, so that we might think of those wicked men not only as not excluded but even as included.

But if the church did not exist even then, because Cyprian and whoever with him knew those greedy men and robbers to be what they themselves were not, though they accused them with the gravest groans and most illustrious words, yet, entering one church with them and handling the same sacraments in one congregation, were made of the same lot by this kind of communion, because they did not obey the apostle when he commanded, ‘not even to eat with such a one’, and ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’: why do we labour any more? Why do these men boast that they have any church at all, if it already ceased to exist in those times? Let them say from where Majorinus or Donatus was born, so that through them Parmenian and Primian might be born. For what use is it to them that they now falsely claim either not to have in their congregation the greedy and robbers, with whom the apostle forbids eating, or not to know them, since there were such men in that church of unity from which they boast that they arose, so as to try to persuade people that it remained only in their own society, that is, in the communion of Donatus? For if they say that the church perishes through communion with such men, why do they not say that it had already perished in Cyprian’s times? And so, not finding from where they themselves arose, let them stop saying that the church remained among them, which they say perished entirely in earlier times. But if the church always remained, remains, and will remain in the good, to whom such things are displeasing, let these men at last learn not to understand what the apostle says, ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’, in such a way that, trying through schisms to gather the weeds, they root up the wheat as well. We argue all this in such a way that those who read or hear it may remember that these men could never show, either at that time, when things were most recent, or now, when the whole world is joined in the Catholic Church in Christian peace with a much firmer consciousness of innocence, that Caecilian or the others who were united with him were weeds. But we say these things so that each person may remain securely in the unity of the holy church, and not follow the deserters of that unity, lest he perish with them: because, even if those men had been weeds, they ought to have been tolerated until the harvest rather than separated by the ruin of schism, with the wheat rooted up.

But someone will say: ‘How, then, shall we be able to obey the apostle when he commands, “not even to eat with such a one”? For if he commanded only a separation of the heart from them, he would not say, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with the sexually immoral, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world”, that is, those who were not Christians, of whom he says afterwards, “For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But God will judge those outside.” Since, then, he gives commands about a separation that is made not from those bad men who are not Christians but from those who are Christians, while separation of the heart must be made from all the bad, and therefore we must be separated in heart also from those bad men who are not Christians, what remains but to understand that we are commanded by the apostle not to be mixed with certain bad Christians, such as he describes, even by the kind of association by which we are mixed with pagans in the very fellowship of human life? And so in another place he says, “If one of the unbelievers invites you and you want to go, eat whatever is set before you, asking no questions”; but here he says, “not even to eat with such a one”. So he permits eating with unbelievers, that is, with those who have not yet believed in Christ, at whose houses he says one should eat what they set before you, since God will judge them because they are outside; but with those who are inside, that is, “if anyone named a brother is sexually immoral or an idolater or greedy or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber”, he forbids even eating. So he urges that the weeds be separated from the wheat before the time of harvest. And if we are unwilling to do this, because the Lord forbids it, we will tolerate them and persist only in separation of will and heart from them, and so we will even eat with such men, which the apostle forbids?’

In this strait, as it were, of the question I will say nothing new or unusual, but what the soundness of the church observes: that when any of the brothers, that is, of the Christians established inside in the fellowship of the church, has been detected in some such sin that he is held worthy of anathema, this should be done where there is no danger of schism, and with that love which the apostle himself commands elsewhere, saying, ‘Do not regard him as an enemy, but correct him as a brother.’ For it is done not for rooting up but for correcting. But if he does not acknowledge himself or correct himself by repenting, he will go out himself and be cut off from the communion of the church by his own will. For the Lord himself too, when the servants wanted to gather the weeds, said, ‘Let both grow until the harvest’, and gave the reason first, saying, ‘Lest perhaps, when you want to gather the weeds, you root up the wheat as well.’ By this he shows clearly enough that, when this fear is not present, but there remains a complete and certain security about the stability of the wheat, that is, when someone’s crime is so well known and appears so detestable to all that it has either no defenders at all or not such as could cause a schism, the severity of discipline should not sleep; and in it the emendation of crookedness is the more effective, the more diligent the preservation of love. But this can be done without stain to peace and unity and without injury to the wheat when the multitude of the church’s congregation is free of the crime that is anathematized. For then it helps the leader who rebukes rather than the criminal who resists; then it salutarily abstains from association with him, so that no one even eats with him, not out of hostile rage but out of brotherly restraint; then too the man is both struck with fear and healed by shame, when, seeing himself anathematized by the whole church, he can find no allied crowd with which to rejoice in his offence and insult the good.

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.

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.