Against Gaudentius, Bishop of the Donatists 1.21–1.32

Free choice, then, was given to man when he was created, but so that, if he did evil, he would suffer. Finally, those first human beings, when they had sinned, were condemned to death; and before death, the last even of the body, was supplied them, they were sent into exile from paradise. The emperor has decreed milder things against you because of Christian gentleness: he wished to inflict exile on you, not death. But you learned men, considering what is due to desert and what is lacking in the punishment, add death, not from his judgment but from your own. Do not perish forever while you want free choice to offend God granted to you by men in this time. Hear the apostle and you will have a great shortcut by which royal power cannot harm you: “Do good, and you will have praise from it.” From it the righteous before us had praise too: not only those who faithfully obeyed religious kings, but also those who endured impious kings as adversaries for the truth of God; the former the praise of obedience, the latter the praise of suffering; both, however, from it, but by doing good, not by resisting the powers. But what you do is not only not good; it is a great evil: to tear apart the unity and peace of Christ, to rebel against the Gospel promises, and to carry Christian standards, as in a civil war, against him of whom it was said, “He will rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth,” that is, against the true and supreme king of Christians. So let it suffice you, as an occasion for correction, that for such great evils of yours you receive far milder and lesser penalties, if you do not, of your own accord, inflict on yourselves what the emperor has not decreed; and do not wish free choice for licentious impunity to be granted you by men, lest you fall more unhappily into the hands of God himself. For your forebears too judged that in insults of this kind against God, the free choice of man should not be left unpunished by kings, since, though they had a bad case, they nevertheless brought Bishop Caecilian, by persecuting him, all the way to the judgment of the emperor Constantine.

Words of the letter: “But our faith,” he says, “which the Lord Christ left to the apostles, only these persecutions make most pleasing to us. ‘Blessed will you be,’ he says, ‘when men persecute you and curse you and say every evil against you for the sake of the Son of Man. Rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers persecuted the prophets who were before you.’ If this was said only to the apostles, faith had its rewards only up to them; and what good would it be to those who would believe afterward? Hence it is clear it was said to all. Then the apostle Paul says: ‘Those who wish to live holily in Christ must suffer persecution.’ And the Lord said this in the Gospel: ‘The hour will come when everyone who kills you will think he is offering a victim to God. But they will do these things because they have not known the Father or me.’” Reply to this: These things would rightly be said by you, seeking the glory of martyrs, if you had the cause of martyrs. For the Lord does not call blessed those who suffer these evils, but those who suffer them for the sake of the Son of Man, who is Christ Jesus. But you suffer not for him but against him; for you suffer because you do not believe him, and you endure so as not to believe. How, then, do you boast that you hold the faith which the Lord Christ left to the apostles? Or do you want people to be so blind and deaf that they do not read or hear the Gospel, where they may know what faith about his church the Lord Christ left to the apostles? Divided and separated from it, you do nothing but rebel against the words of the Head and of the Body; and yet you boast that you endure persecution for the sake of the Son of Man and the faith he left to the apostles. Let us leave the rest and hear his last words on earth, where we may see what faith about the church he left to the apostles, what kind of testament, so to speak, he made, not about to end his life but to live without end, not to be laid in the tomb but to ascend into heaven. For rising from the dead, after he appeared to his disciples to be seen with eyes and handled with hands, he said: “It was necessary that what is written about me in the law and the prophets and the psalms be fulfilled.” Then he opened their mind to understand the Scriptures, and said to them: “For thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for Christ to suffer and rise on the third day, and for repentance and forgiveness of sins to be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” And likewise on the Mount of Olives, after which he said nothing more while on earth, he commended this as his last word, what was most necessary. For there would be many throughout all parts of the earth who would claim for themselves the name of the church, and who would bark, each from the corners of his own ruins, against the whole house which through the whole earth sings the new song, of which it is written: “Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.” For the apostles wanted to hear something else, and did not ask what was most necessary for them: “Tell us,” they say, “whether at this time you will restore the kingdom of Israel?” But he said: “It is not for you to know the times which the Father has set in his own power; but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” With these words a cloud took him up. He added nothing further to these words; he fixed this in the minds of his hearers the more firmly the later it came. This bride the bridegroom, departing, commended to his friends. This faith, then, about the holy church he left to the disciples. This faith, Donatists, you resist, and you contend that you endure persecution for the faith which the Lord Christ left to the apostles. This Son of Man, who commended with such care his church, beginning from Jerusalem and bearing fruit and growing through all nations, you contradict with an amazing shamelessness of blindness, and cry that you suffer evils for the sake of the Son of Man. Or perhaps you say this because you have found yourselves another son of man, by whose name you are called, of whose party you are said to be? You are wrong; it is not he. When he said that it is blessedness to suffer persecution for the sake of the Son of Man, the bridegroom was proclaiming himself, not an adulterer.

We too confess, as you say, that it was not said only to the apostles: “Blessed will you be when men persecute you.” For it applies to all; not to those who after them have suffered, or suffer, or will suffer any persecution whatever, but to those who suffer it for righteousness’ sake, as the apostles themselves did. For a little above he had said, “Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”; then he added the words which you wished to cite and to claim for yourselves in vain. For in vain do you think that this blessedness belongs to you, when you do not show in yourselves the righteousness to which the reward is due. Rather, on the contrary, you suffer even for iniquity, less from others, more from yourselves, so that before the judgment of God which is to come you yourselves pay yourselves in part what you deserve. Hence, since you yourself said that this was said not only to the apostles but to all, so that faith would not seem to have had its rewards only up to them: just as this was said not only to the apostles but to all who after them would suffer any evils for righteousness’ sake, so that too was said to all: “If they persecute you in this city, flee to another.” Why do you not do this, if you belong to the fellowship of those to whom these things were said? Even if you did it, you would not therefore belong to them, since robbers too can do it, whom the public laws have ordered to be sought out. Yet since you will not do it, you show by a shortcut that you do not belong to those to whom these things were said. And so that your very excuse may show you much more plainly to be strangers to that number of true Christians, you say that places of refuge, which he promised would not be lacking until the end of the age, are already lacking to you; in no way convicting him of a false promise, but showing that you do not belong to the company of those to whom he promised it, and therefore that you are not truthful martyrs but deceitful heretics. What more should we say to you, when your own tongue defeats you?

And as for what you added, that the apostle said, “All who wish to live piously in Christ must suffer persecution”: he did not say “must,” but “All,” he says, “who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution.” But who doubts that you do not belong to these? For if you too are among those of whom the apostle said this, why do you not do what the apostle himself did? For if the gates were shut against you, you ought to have been let down through the wall so as to flee the hands of the persecutors. The gates are open, and you will not go out. What persecution do you suffer, except from yourselves? Your persecutor loves you, and your fury persecutes you: he desires you to flee, it drives you to perish. And you understand the apostle’s words, “All who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution,” in such a way that you must confess that your forebears under the apostate emperor Julian did not live piously. For whoever became a Donatist in that time, until the pious care of Christian emperors rose again against your error, if he died before, did not live piously, because he did not suffer persecution. But if the apostle said this because, as is written elsewhere, the life of man on earth is a trial, and the devil does not cease to tempt pious and true Christians not only with the assault of adversity but also with the seduction of prosperity, so that the human spirit either succumbs to affliction or vanishes in pride: then surely, as long as one lives here, all who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution, so that either, overcome, they are seized by the devil, or, proved, they overcome the devil. But those whom he already possesses as seized captives he does not persecute to obtain them; he uses them because he has them.

Further, if only he is to be called a persecutor who torments with some pain or wishes to hold someone in order to torment him, do not think that the tormentor of the heart is lighter than the tormentor of the body, and consider what persecution he suffered who said in the psalm: “I saw the senseless and I wasted away.” This persecution righteous Lot suffered in Sodom even before the angels, his guests, thought to be men, were sought by the Sodomites for sexual immorality in his house. For a righteous man could not see them so publicly shameful, even before the outrage to his own house, without great torment of heart. Hence the apostle Paul too mentions such things among his persecutions, saying: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?” Accordingly, the greater the love of Christ in us, the greater the pain of mind with which we see you having the sacraments of Christ, and being separated from the members of Christ, and rebelling against the peace of Christ. But as long as you live in this body, some hope of you is given us; but when you die in that dissension, we grieve for you much more bitterly. And further, when you kill yourselves, either by rushing on others’ weapons or by your own leaps from heights, drownings, and fires, it cannot be said enough with what sorrow you torment us. For the impious Absalom afflicted his holy father David more when he was killed than when he rebelled. For David wanted him taken alive, so that he who was raging in malice might be healed by repentance. So he was a persecutor of his father not only by dividing the people of God, nor only by bearing arms and making war against the law of God and against his father’s lawful kingship, but he persecuted his father’s heart much more by dying in that impiety. Finally, the best of fathers wept for the worst of sons, slain, when hope was ended, whom while alive he had not wept for because he did not despair of him. Learn, then, what the apostle means when he says: “All who wish to live piously in Christ will suffer persecution.” If the Donatists had not plundered the houses of Catholics, if they had not burned Catholic churches, if they had not thrown the holy books of Catholics into those very fires, if they had not afflicted the bodies of Catholics with the most savage beatings, if they had not cut off the limbs of Catholics, if they had not put out their eyes, if, finally, they had not cruelly killed Catholics, we would still say most truly that we suffer from you this one most grievous persecution: that we see you senseless and waste away, weak and are weak, made to stumble and burn, lost and mourn. These evils of yours, which send you into eternal ruin, persecute us more bitterly than those which are inflicted by you on our bodies or property or houses or basilicas. You persecute us less when you rage against us than when you perish. Finally, in that persecution in which you rage against us, we rejoice with praise; but in this, in which you perish, if we rejoiced, we would perish with you. But as long as you live in this flesh, we cannot despair of you; but when you die in this impiety, above all when you kill yourselves in the horrible blindness of fury, our most bitter sadness is consoled only by what consoled holy David: the people of God gathered in unity, which had been divided by the tyranny of his wicked son. For it is far more tolerable that a much smaller number of your most stubborn people should perish by their own leaps, drownings, or fires, than that innumerable peoples, while those men hinder their salvation, should burn with them in the fire of eternal burning. So the church of Christ has never lacked, nor will lack, grounds on which, according to the apostle, those who wish to live piously in Christ suffer persecution: either by bearing the malice of the impious while they live in harmful ways, or by grieving over them when they perish.

So do not be deceived into thinking that it was said to you: “The hour will come when those who kill you will think they are doing a service to God,” or, as you set down this testimony, “will think they are offering a victim to God.” It is plain that this was not said of the persecutions which the Gentiles inflicted on the church. For the Gentiles thought they were doing a service to their many gods, who surely do not exist, when they did this to the one God. Hence what the Lord foretold to his own was either fulfilled through the Jews, who killed holy Stephen and many others while they thought they were doing a service to God, since they seemed to worship the one true God; or else it was said to us too, that is, to Catholics, about the various heretics raging everywhere, who, wherever, whenever, and however they can, think they are doing a service to God by killing Catholics; and above all about you, who have made a special name for yourselves in Africa from such victims. For if it had been said to you, you would certainly not kill yourselves, but would rather wait to be killed by us, who, as you say, think we are doing a service to God when we do it. But as it is, when you hasten to death so as not to be held by our people, you are afraid to live, not to be killed, because you are ashamed to be corrected or convicted of your error. Or perhaps you are the ones to whom both apply, because when you are killed, and that by yourselves, you think you are doing a service to God and giving him these victims of yourselves? To you, then, applies what follows, which you also cited. For the Lord at once added and said: “But they will do these things to you because they have not known the Father or me.” So when you kill yourselves, thinking you are doing a service to God, you have neither known the Father, whom you have not heard saying, “You shall not kill,” nor known the Son, whom you have not heard saying, “Flee.”

Words of the letter: “But they boast,” he says, “that they are dwellers in a warlike peace and a bloody unity. Let them hear the Lord saying: ‘My peace I give to you, my peace I leave to you; not as the world gives do I give to you.’ For the peace of the world between nations at variance is concluded by arms and the outcome of war; the peace of the Lord Christ, calm in wholesome gentleness, invites the willing; it does not compel the unwilling.” Reply to this: It is you who desire to make a warlike peace and a bloody unity, either by our violent deaths or by your voluntary deaths, not charging to yourselves what you do to us and charging to us what you do to yourselves. But we are compelled both to bear what you do to us and to be able to do nothing but grieve over what you do to yourselves, so long as the peace and unity of Christ comes about for the salvation of many, as it does in very many, even if, because of the fury of a few, it does not in all. For if you were willing to look not with an envious but with a faithful eye, you would see how those who have come to us from you rejoice in the true peace and unity of Christ, columns of so many and such great peoples; among whom, even if there are still some troubled by the very novelty, they too are gradually being healed of this weakness. And if some persist as pretenders, those whom we see to be sincere were certainly not to be left ungathered on their account; some of whom in your regions have appeared greater even than some of ours, when, given that freedom to perish, they refused to return to you. So, so as not to lose these, we had to gather the pretenders too, since we read in the Gospel that the servants gathered to their lord’s wedding guests both good and bad; especially since the spirit of pride, like a wicked wind, blew you off the Lord’s threshing floor before the time of winnowing, and from there we are trying, as far as we can with God’s help, to call you back to it. And you surely know how, by the brooms of diligence, the grain is dragged along together with earth when it is swept back onto the threshing floor.

As for your view that the unwilling are not to be compelled to the truth, you are wrong, knowing neither the Scriptures nor the power of God, who makes them willing while they are compelled unwilling. Did the Ninevites do penance unwillingly because they did it at their king’s compulsion? For the prophet had already announced God’s wrath to the whole city, walking through it for three days. What need was there, then, of the king’s command that God, who looks not at faces but at hearts, should be humbly entreated, unless because there were some among them who would neither care about nor believe the divine predictions unless frightened by earthly power? So by this command of royal power, against which your death is self-chosen, occasion is given to many for the salvation which is in Christ; who, even if they are brought violently to the supper of so great a householder and compelled to come in, yet inside they find reason to rejoice that they came in. For the Lord himself foretold that both would happen, and fulfilled both. For when certain people had been rejected, who are surely understood to be the Jews, because they had earlier been invited through the prophets and at the hour chose to make excuses, the Lord said to his servant: “Go out into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in here the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame.” And the servant said: “Lord, it has been done as you commanded, and there is still room.” And the lord said to the servant: “Go out into the roads and hedges, and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled.” We understand the roads as heresies, the hedges as schisms; for roads here signify differing opinions, but hedges perverse opinions. Why then are you surprised if whoever enters this supper, neither brought in willingly nor driven in by force, dies of hunger not for bodily but for spiritual food?

Words of the letter: “We rejoice,” he says, “in the hatred of the world. In its pressures we do not succumb, but are glad. This world cannot love the servants of Christ, since it is known not to have loved Christ, as the Lord himself says: ‘If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too.’” Reply to this: How, rejoicing in the hatred of the world, do you not succumb to its pressures but are glad, when you want to kill yourselves so as not to suffer any troubles at all, and choose to die, not killed by others for the truth of Christ, but by yourselves for the party of Donatus? This is the madness of the circumcellions, not the glory of martyrs. Since, then, your deeds are plain, why do you claim others’ words for yourselves? “This world,” he says, “cannot love the servants of Christ, since it is known not to have loved Christ.” We then do not belong to this world, because we love you; but you are not servants of Christ, who, returning evil for good and turning your malice on yourselves when you cannot exercise it on us, neither love us nor spare yourselves from killing. But when the Lord said, “If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too,” he said it not to you but to those whom he commanded, if they were persecuted in this city, to flee to another, which you do not do. He said it to those for whom cities to flee to would not be lacking until the end of the age, cities which you complain are already lacking to you, and you will not confess that you are not those to whom these things were said.

Words of the letter: “But even if persecution ceases,” he says, “how is the number of martyrs to be filled up? For John says: ‘I saw the souls of those slain under the altar of God, crying out and saying: How long, O Lord, will you not judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth? And they each received white robes, and it was said to them that they should rest a little while longer, until the number of their brothers should be completed, who will begin to be killed as they were.’” Reply to this: If you wished to be martyrs under the altar of Christ, you would not offer a sacrifice to the devil by burning yourselves. For who rejoices at this fury of yours except the devil, who inspires it in you, and those who are of his party? It is he who threw that boy of whom we read in the Gospel sometimes into water, sometimes into fire; he too plunged that herd of swine headlong into the waves; he too, with most audacious temptation, suggested even to the Lord himself that he throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. You certainly belong to the devil, when you practise in your deaths the three kinds of death: water, fire, and the precipice. For if you did not lose your minds to madness, those very words which you cited from the holy book ought to call you back from this destruction which you bring on yourselves. For what do the souls of the martyrs say under the altar of God? “How long, O Lord, will you not judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” They ask that their blood be avenged, surely on those by whom it was shed: on others? And therefore your blood will be avenged on you.

And what is more foolish than your thinking that this prophecy about martyrs foretold to come was fulfilled only in the Donatists, as though after blessed John wrote this no martyrs were killed until the party of Donatus arose, who, when they cannot kill others, kill themselves, who do the works of robbers and demons and claim for themselves the glory of martyrs? But even if in so long an interval of time, that is, from John to these men, no true martyrs had been killed, we would say, if nothing else, that they would come in the times of Antichrist, in which that number of martyrs would be completed; and yet we would not believe that these men, guilty of others’ blood or their own, would be added to the number of the true martyrs to whom it was said that they should rest a little while until the number of their brothers should be completed, who would begin to be killed as they were: by others, of course, not by themselves as these men are, and therefore these are not “as they were.” We can also say most truly that the Catholics whom they kill in the times of the Donatists belong to the filling up of that number too. But since, after the apostle John, who wrote down those future things, such great slaughter of martyrs was made everywhere among so many nations by the impious killing them, what do these men, extorters of their own souls and torturers of others’, mean by boasting that what they read was foretold of the holy martyrs has been fulfilled in themselves? Prepare yourselves rather for your blood to be avenged not on those who desire either to take you or to have you flee so that you may live, but rather on yourselves. Or perhaps, so that this may not happen, you do not shed it, but either dash it on a precipice or choke it in a wave or turn it to ash? But you are wrong. It will be avenged on you in whatever way it is destroyed by you; for it would be avenged on you even if it were shed by others, not in the church of Christ but in the party of Donatus. Will you cry out to God to avenge your blood, and will he hear you except by condemning you? For how can it be avenged unless the one who dared to slaughter it is condemned? In this cry, then, you are nothing but your own accusers, because you are guilty of your own blood; and God will condemn none but you when he avenges your blood, dashed or choked or burned or slaughtered in any way, or, if you choose this, shed by you.

Words of the letter: “Is not this,” he says, “a persecution, which has driven so many thousands of innocent martyrs to death? For Christians, according to the Gospel willing in spirit but weak in flesh, finding a shortcut from the sacrilegious contamination of the furnaces, snatched away their own souls, imitating the example of the elder Razis in the books of the Maccabees, and not fearing in vain. For whoever has fallen into their hands has not escaped. But let them do as much as they like: what is certain is that those who act against God cannot be of God.” Reply to this: You confess most openly and most truly what persecution you suffer; for it is the one I have already mentioned, which is expressed clearly enough in the holy Scriptures about certain impious people, of whom it is said that they suffer persecution from their own deeds. This can indeed be said most fittingly of you, even if others’ hands were slaughtering you for your sacrileges. For robbers too, and any people guilty of capital crimes, when they are punished by just laws, are not to be said to suffer persecution except from their own deeds. But now, plainly, when Christian gentleness spares you, your madness so rages against you that, as you say, finding the shortcut of the furnaces, you snatch away your souls: it is excessive shamelessness if you deny that you suffer persecution in every way from yourselves, since you fulfill both, the reason for which you justly perish and the fact that you perish. And you speak of so many thousands of people who do this, as if this were not no small reason why Africa should be freed from this teaching of yours. For it is the kind of people whom you have been able to persuade to this evil, who used to do these things before too, especially when the license of idolatry was raging everywhere, when these men would rush on the weapons of pagans celebrating their festivals. For the pagan youths would vow to their idols how many each would kill. And these men, flocking from here and there, would thrust themselves on the hunting spears set against them, as in an amphitheater beasts on the hunters; they died raving, were buried rotting, and were venerated deceiving. Besides these there are huge rocks and the dreadful precipices of mountains made famous by the very frequent voluntary deaths of your people. They did it more rarely by water and fire; huge herds were consumed by precipices. I speak of things well known to the people of our age. For who does not know this kind of people, restless in horrible crimes, idle from useful works, most cruel in the deaths of others, most cheap in their own, terrorizing above all in the countryside, absent from farming, and for the sake of their food going round the rustic storehouses, from which they took the name circumcellions: the reproach of the African error, famous almost throughout the whole world?