Against Gaudentius, Bishop of the Donatists 1.47–2.6

So by this too you confirm that the minutes are genuine which at the conference you contentiously refused to accept, in which Secundus of Tigisi, then bishop of the first see in Numidia, pardoned confessed betrayers; and those whose crimes of betrayal, manifest and confessed, he remitted when they were present at Cirta, with them he punished at Carthage, as betrayers, men unconvicted and absent. From this crime Secundus himself could not clear himself when Purpurius of Liniata charged him, when the same Purpurius said to him: “What did you do, you who were held by the curator and the council to give up the Scriptures? How did you free yourself from them, unless because you gave, or ordered to be given, something or other? For they did not let people go at random.” And Secundus, in his letter to Mensurius, which you yourselves produced and read, confessed without ambiguity, not that he handed over, but that the persecutors whom Purpurius of Liniata charged against him came to him, sent by the curator and the council, to make him hand over the Scriptures; and that when they asked him for them, he answered, “I am a Christian and a bishop, not a betrayer,” and would hand over nothing at all to them. This you want us to believe of him, though you yourselves see how incredible it is that, while that persecution was raging, a bishop detained or summoned to hand over the Lord’s Scriptures should have been let go when he had handed over nothing. Surely you were contending that bishops could not have met in the city of Cirta to ordain a bishop in time of persecution. How then was that persecution raging, if a bishop could be held to hand over the Scriptures and be let go unpunished when he had handed over nothing? And yet you cried out, describing the savagery of the persecution of that time, that not even twelve bishops could have been gathered in council to ordain a bishop and to draw up those minutes in which they forgave one another the crimes of betrayal and left them to the Lord to judge for the peace of the church; while you, saying that at this time you suffer such a persecution as never was, namely that places are lacking to you to flee to and hide in, nevertheless hold councils and ordain bishops, even in the place of those who have perished in their own fires, again men ready to perish in their own fires. And in a time of such great persecution, as you think and boast, you were able to gather in council even more than thirty, where Petilian too was present, who cried that in time of persecution not even twelve could have met.

Further, in that very council you decreed that those, whether bishops or presbyters, who entered communion with us unwillingly, provided they had not offered the sacrifice or preached among the people, should be eligible for pardon and be received back in their ranks; and so by this decree of yours you yourselves cut away entirely the whole strength of your slanders. For where now is your empty talk that even those who were not betrayers become betrayers through our communion, because, as you slander, those who at that time handed over the church’s books under pressure from impious authorities defiled us? Why then do you now acquit of crime those you know entered our communion unwillingly, if they have not offered the sacrifice or preached to the people? As if those first betrayers, under the terror and horror of savage tortures such as no one at all has now inflicted on you, handed over the holy books willingly, or offered the sacrifice there, or preached to the people. So you see that, just as you could pardon these, whom you most emptily accuse of becoming betrayers through our communion, if they did anything unwillingly, so your forebears too, in a much tighter necessity, could have pardoned by the same rule the true betrayers who handed things over. But they were driven by the faction of Caecilian’s enemies to condemn others absent and unheard, doing what the apostle says of such people: “For in judging another you condemn yourself; for you who judge do the same things.”

So since the Donatists have always loved to kill themselves and were themselves betrayers from the beginning, what wonder if they taught their descendants to love the betrayer’s death too? But to avoid this likeness they have never, or very rarely, killed themselves with a noose: quite in vain. For the one who drove Judas the betrayer to do it is the same who often threw that boy whom the Lord healed into water and fire, and plunged the herd of swine into the sea, and with audacious presumption suggested to the Lord himself a leap from the pinnacle of the temple. So, although you throw yourselves into a voluntary death in various ways, yet by killing yourselves at the instigation of the same devil you imitate the betrayer. Even if you are not betrayers, you have learned, by a wicked teaching from those who were and who made the schism in which you gladly are, to do to yourselves what the betrayer did to himself. See now with what righteousness you will stand against those who afflicted you, so that, if your deaths are avenged, they will most justly be avenged on none but yourselves.

And what are your labors which you boast are taken away from you? Or is it unjust that the churches which were yours, when they pass over into Catholic peace, should pass over with their property? For when they pass over to us, if you want to keep their property, you without doubt want to take away others’ property. But the Catholic mother says to you what the blessed apostle said to some: “For I do not seek what is yours, but you.” Yet how are you not contrary to yourselves, when you charge us with both: that we desire to possess your property and that we forcibly compel you to be with us? You do not see how contrary these two are to each other. For if we seek and hold you, unwilling, to our communion, how do we desire your property, which we certainly cannot have if you are in communion with us? But if we desire to obtain that, how do we seek you, so as to lose it if you are in communion with us? But we confess to you: our desire is called love. It seeks you in us; it desires to find you, correct you, and join you in the unity of Christ. So that we fear you will burn in your furnaces, we glow with its fire; it kindles us not only not to covet your property but to wish you to possess ours too, with us. Recognize it, and come, and do not choose to perish. Or if you are ashamed to come of your own accord, we serve your weakness, so that nothing may be lost to love. See, we want to hold you: why do you hasten to burn? We hold you for life, we hold you for salvation, we hold you for the unity, truth, and sweetness of Christ, and if you will not enter of your own will the supper of so great a householder, we compel you.

The contest is about righteousness, not money. So beware lest, while you think that what is written applies to you, “Then the just will stand with great boldness against those who afflicted them and took away their labors,” there happen to you about your labors not this but rather what is written in another place: “The just will eat the labors of the impious.” For the Maximianists will not stand against you, whose basilicas you took away when you could; nor will the pagans stand against you, whose temples you certainly overthrew and whose shrines you destroyed where you could, as we too did; nor will the musicians of demons stand against you, whose pipes and clappers you broke, as we too did. So neither will you stand against us. For in all such deeds plunder is not coveted, but error is overthrown. So, just as the Canaanites will not stand against the Israelites, though the Israelites took away their labors, but Naboth will stand against Ahab, because a sin was committed, not a command obeyed, when the unjust man took away the labors of the just; so heretics will not stand against Catholics when the orders of the Christian empire are carried out on the property of heretics, and their property is not taken away by Catholics but rather sought out and, as far as possible, much of it kept to be returned to them when corrected. But Catholics will stand not only against the Gentiles by whom the true martyrs were despoiled, but also against the circumcellions of the Donatists, because they too took away their labors. But about these monetary labors the case is easier, since even those to whom they belonged are passing over to Catholic peace. See, daily, if anyone makes the passage to us, we return to your people money, clothing, crops, vessels, farms, and houses: how will you return to us the limbs of our people?

Surely you will wake up at some point and see that neither are you those of whom it will be said, nor we those by whom it will be said, “These are those whom we once held in derision,” when rather we hold you in tears; nor will you be counted among the sons of God unless, leaving the party of Donatus, you hold this church which the Son of God displays as he foretold; nor is your lot among the saints, but among the heretics. For as to your thinking that others will say of you, “We fools thought their life madness,” I wonder that you are so foolish as not to say such things to yourselves now. The unclean and the unbelieving will indeed say these things then to the true and faithful saints, to those, certainly, whom they now think mad, because they will not enjoy the luxuries they see, while they believe what they do not see. But you, if you do not think your life madness, then certainly if you do not think this death which you want to make for yourselves madness, you are mad more desperately. But those words, “So we strayed from the way of truth,” and the rest, will indeed not be yours alone, but very much yours too. For you stray, as is plain, from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness does not shine on you; you weary yourselves in the way of iniquity and destruction, and walk through hard deserts, but the way of the Lord you do not know. As for what follows, “What did pride profit us, or what did the boasting of riches bring us? All those things have passed like a shadow,” I do not know whether anyone among the rest could say it more aptly and fittingly than your predecessor Optatus. So do not think yourselves what you are not and perish as what you are, since it is not this faith but your evil error that exhorts you, not to die gladly for God in this persecution, as you say, but to suffer wickedly for Donatus the persecution made by your deeds.

Words of the letter (in another hand): “I wish you well,” he says, “that, having perceived the truth, you may soften your mind and refrain from the destruction of the innocent.” Reply to this: You rather, having perceived the truth, soften your mind, so that it does not rage so as not to spare even yourselves. For what can easily be found gentler than the man to whom you wrote this, who both invited you to life and, if you would not live it with us, left you free to flee? You are harsh toward yourselves, you are pitiless, you are cruel without any regard for humanity, who do to yourselves what lovers of errors and persecutors of people are accustomed to do to their enemies, so that persecutors of errors and lovers of people may have cause to grieve most bitterly. And what do you mean by wishing him to refrain from the destruction of the innocent? You are not innocent; yet he gave you a way out, but you want to give yourselves destruction. For I think ignorance of the word deceived you, so that, wishing to say “destructions” (exitia), you said “exits” (exitus). So when you exhort him with your wish that the executor of the imperial laws refrain from the destruction of the innocent, you are working for him to spare deceivers and allow the innocent to be deceived with impunity. What else, then, but that the man for whom you think you wish well should keep faith neither with God nor with his emperor? Because, no doubt, by a justice not true but your own, cases of this kind ought not to belong to the emperors’ care so that a slanderous division might be healed, but ought to when it was being made, so that it might be confirmed. If this doctrine, which you have learned not from the holy Scriptures but from I know not where, seems just to you, that these things do not belong to imperial power, it should have come into your forebears’ minds when they sent the case of Caecilian, as accusers, to the judgment of the emperor Constantine. But as it is, since the lions did not harm Daniel because of his innocence, you want them to spare those who, by slandering him, threw him to the lions. But God does not judge as man does, in whose hand is the king’s heart, and he turns it where he wills. When the king’s heart is unbelieving, the good are either exercised or proved; but when it is believing, the bad are either corrected or punished. Which of these two applies in your case we have already said enough, and we have answered your letter sufficiently, passing over no point; and we trust, by the Lord’s mercy, that this will profit some of you, would that it might you too!

But if you are preparing any answer to this, read also the proceedings with Emeritus, which he himself could not answer, in case perhaps you can, as I advised you above to try. We also dealt with him about the case of the Maximianists, which we charged against you so often at the conference and to which you answered nothing, since about a matter most manifest and most recent you could find nothing to answer: how Maximian, whom you struck with a far heavier sentence than Caecilian, so as to call him a minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram, whom the earth swallowed alive for the crime of schism, did not pollute the partners of his schism to whom you gave a period of grace to return to your communion; an African did not pollute Africans, a living man the living, a known man the known, a partner his associates; and Caecilian polluted those overseas, polluted those far away, polluted the unknown, polluted those not yet born. Find, if you can, what to say: how you received back in their rank Felician of Mustis and Praetextatus of Assuras, whom you condemned with Maximian and ten others without any period of grace, against whom you litigated before two or, unless I am mistaken, three proconsuls to drive them from their basilicas, and, when you had already ordained another in Praetextatus’s place, after so long a time received them back in their ranks. By what justice, what reason, what face is a condemned Maximianist received back in his rank, and the Catholic world condemned unheard? By what justice, what reason, what face do you say one must beware lest Caecilian defile you, long dead and wholly unknown to you, once condemned by your forebears as judges and three times acquitted with your forebears as accusers, and did not think one must beware lest Felician defile you, condemned by the mouth of your universal council and received by all of you, especially by the favor of your predecessor? By what justice, what reason, what face do you annul the baptism given by the churches which the apostles planted by their labors, when you have accepted the baptism which Felician and Praetextatus administered outside your church for so long a time, while you were litigating against them as condemned men? For if what is written, “He who is baptized by a dead man, what does he gain by his washing?”, is to be understood as you are accustomed to misunderstand it and charge it against us, these men were lying among those dead, when they were baptizing, of whom your sentence of Bagai resounded with such a din: “The shores are full of the corpses of those perishing quite after the example of the Egyptians, for whom the greater punishment in death itself is that, after their soul has been wrung out by the avenging waters, they do not even find a burial.” What will you say to this? See, dead men baptize those whom you receive, and you do not die; and you slander us as dead, so that, refusing to be in communion with Catholic unity, you may truly die by your own fires. Answer this; you have time to think what to say. Let us at least confer on you this benefit, that while you think what to answer you think less about how to burn. But we do not want you, for lack of an answer, to think you must still say that worn-out and battered thing you are accustomed to say: “If we are such, why do you seek us?” For we answer: the Catholic Church ought rather to seek you, because you have perished, if you, lost men, sought out the lost Maximianists. For from your heart you say to us: “Why do you seek men guilty of so many and such great crimes?” But from the book of God we answer you: “Because love covers a multitude of sins.”

I have received your reply, Gaudentius, if indeed it should be called a reply, which you chose to send me so that, if you had kept silent, we would not say that you had been refuted. But to reply is not the same as not to keep silent. For if it is, you have plainly replied; but in such a way that even those who might hope something from you may know that you did not find what you ought to answer, and yet answered so as not to keep silent. So, while guarding against being called defeated, you brought it about that you were shown to be. To show this, your own writings suffice, if they are read by intelligent people and compared with mine by careful examination. But to teach it in other writings, so as to satisfy even slower minds, a somewhat longer discussion is needed, which indeed I will undertake if there is need and the Lord wills.

For now, meanwhile, since you tried to affirm by the testimony of the blessed Cyprian that you rather are the Catholics, consider a little what church he called Catholic when he was defending its unity. “The church of the Lord,” he says, “flooded with light, sends its rays through the whole world; yet it is one light that is spread everywhere, and the unity of the body is not divided. It extends its branches over all the earth in the abundance of its fruitfulness; it spreads wider its flowing streams: yet there is one head and one source, and one mother rich in the successes of her fruitfulness.” Why, then, do you both deceive yourselves and wish to deceive others with shameless lies? If by the testimony of this martyr your church is Catholic, show it sending its rays through the whole world; show it extending its branches over all the earth in the abundance of its fruitfulness. For hence it is named “catholic” by a Greek word: for what is called in Greek ὅλον is rendered in Latin “whole” or “universal.” So “through the whole” or “according to the whole” is καθ᾽ ὅλον, from which it is called catholic. If you know this, why do you pretend not to know it? But if you do not know it, why do you not ask those who know before you speak of what you do not know? And if Greek displeases you, find some language, not Greek, in which you can teach that καθ᾽ ὅλον does not signify “through the whole” or “according to the whole” or “according to the universal,” and then withdraw from the testimony of Cyprian. For he speaks against you, as you see from what he says. He says that the Catholic Church is sent and extended through the whole world and over all the earth, agreeing with its Greek name and definition. You are found to hold, think, and say something else, and while you lean on Cyprian as witness, you lie with Cyprian as witness.

So when you are asked what cause you had for leaving this true and genuine Catholic Church, which, flooded with the Lord’s light, sends its rays through the whole world and extends its branches over all the earth in the abundance of its fruitfulness, you find nothing just; you wash away your departure from this church by no cleansing of a credible excuse. For what do you say but, “Necessity compelled us, so that the just might leave the unjust”? Divine Scripture answers you: “A bad son calls himself just, but does not wash away his going out.” “His going out,” it says, that surely of which the apostle John says, “They went out from us,” he by no means washes away, does not defend, does not excuse, does not cleanse. For it belongs to the just in the Catholic Church only to tolerate most patiently the bad whom they cannot correct or condemn, and not, before the time, to go out from the Lord’s field because of the weeds, nor from the Lord’s threshing floor because of the chaff, nor from the Lord’s house because of the vessels for dishonor, nor from the Lord’s nets because of the bad fish, so that they do not try in vain to wash away their going out. If you wish to turn these Gospel sayings into another sense by any argument whatever, you contradict the same blessed Cyprian whose testimonies you use, as you did at our conference. For these are the words of the said martyr on this question, in the letter he wrote to Maximus and his fellow confessors: “Even if there seem to be weeds in the church,” he says, “our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are weeds in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church. We must labor only to be able to be wheat, so that, when the wheat begins to be stored in the Lord’s barns, we may receive fruit for our work and labor. The apostle says in his letter: ‘In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and of earthenware, and some for honor, some for dishonor.’ Let us strive and labor as much as we can to be a vessel of gold or silver. But to break the earthen vessels is granted to the Lord alone, to whom a rod of iron has also been given. The servant cannot be greater than his lord, nor may anyone claim for himself what the Father granted to the Son alone, so as to think he can already carry the shovel or winnowing fork to winnow and clean the threshing floor, or separate all the weeds from the wheat by human judgment. This is proud obstinacy and sacrilegious presumption which perverse fury takes upon itself. And while some always take on themselves more than gentle justice requires, they perish from the church, and while they insolently exalt themselves, blinded by their own swelling they lose the light of truth.”

Surely now at least you see that at our conference you cried out against holy Cyprian and resisted him with contentions, asserting that the field of Christ, of which he says, “The field is the world,” is not the church but the world apart from the church, so that it could have weeds that are seen. For you said that there cannot be manifest weeds in the church, every time we set down this testimony of Cyprian; and you neither dared to resist him openly nor were willing to agree. Surely now at least you are waking up, hearing, and noticing that “even if there seem to be weeds in the church, our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are weeds in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church.” Why, then, do you depart from the unity of this church by a wicked schism and persist in that same split with heretical presumption? See, here is Cyprian for you: agree with him or answer him. You see how by these words, in which he says that weeds are in the church and are seen, and yet the church should not be left on that account, he wipes out all the slanders of your writings, in which you went so far over the edge and threw yourself down headlong in your usual fashion as to say that Christians of the whole world could have perished by others’ sins even without knowing who had sinned; because, of course, we read in the holy Scriptures that one man stole from what was under the ban, and for this sin another people, unknowing, was punished. You do not know that those punishments of mortal bodies, that is, the deaths of men who were going to die anyway, served for a useful terror to the people, yet others’ sins, especially those they did not know, did those who died no harm to the detriment of the life to come. Would you really say this? Would you really dare to believe and say that anyone perishes before God by others’ sins, even unknown ones? Did you not fear even your own colleagues, who at our conference, while you kept silent, and perhaps, though you already thought this, did not dare to say it, fought with such great efforts of argument that the bad fish in the Lord’s nets are unknown to the fishermen, so that, of course, they would not perish by their contagion, as they would if they knew? Did it not come to your mind that, when we were arguing about the chaff of the Lord’s threshing floor, that is, the church, to be tolerated in one mixture until the time of winnowing, and Emeritus was pressed, he denied it and said, “You do not read ‘threshing floor’”? And when he was reminded more privately by his own and more openly by us, who cited from the Gospel that the Lord will come with his winnowing fork in his hand, who will clean his threshing floor and store the grain in the barn but burn the chaff with unquenchable fire, he at once corrected the error of forgetfulness by which he had denied that it was written; yet he did not turn from the schismatic or heretical perversity by which he denied that the bad should be borne by the good for the unity of the church, and at once said that by the name of chaff the hidden bad were signified, so that you might keep this point for your case with special care, that unknown bad people could stain none of the good. See, the excellent advocate of your party has lost his labors through your opposition. For he, to safeguard the salvation of the good, asserts that the bad remaining in the church are entirely unknown to the good, so that they do not destroy them if known and tolerated; but you said that the good perish even by the contagion of the unknown bad, and you did not fear the so many hidden scandalous, criminal, and impious people of yours from the beginning, who by your view have surely destroyed you and all yours without your knowing. But even now you did not tremble with any fear lest perhaps one of your people should sin without your knowing and destroy you while you speak these things. Or perhaps, since you understand that you have perished by your own known deeds, you do not fear for this reason to perish by others’ unknown ones?

What should I wish for you, but that we may be allowed to find you, so that you may not wish to perish? For what hope will remain, if your opinion is true, by which you think that each perishes both by his own sins, who commits them, and by others’ sins, who does not know whether they were committed: not only for us, who agree with the Lord Christ, the prophets, the apostles, and holy Cyprian that even known bad people, if we can neither correct nor punish them, are to be borne for the bond of unity, but also for you, who are pleased by a bodily separation from the bad before the time of harvest, winnowing, and the shore? For if this is so, surely your forebears too, who, as you think, separated themselves from the known bad, perished by the unknown. And not only to you, who, when you say that a man perishes by others’ crimes whether he knows them or not, without doubt allow no one to remain innocent, but also to Emeritus himself, who, thinking far more tolerably, binds men in the communion of the sacraments only to others’ known sins and frees them from unknown ones, the venerable Cyprian answered with a much truer voice: that the grain growing together does not perish by the weeds set not outside the church but in the church, and not hidden and unknown but plainly known and visible. For I think that one is blinded not in the flesh but in the mind itself who contends that what is seen is hidden. And when that most blessed man warns that one should not withdraw from the church because of the weeds in it, he does not warn because of those that are hidden, but rather because of those that are seen. For these are the ones that can trouble those who see them, unless wisdom makes them patient. For how would we learn that we ought not to withdraw because of hidden ones, which we do not know exist at all? “Even if there seem to be weeds in the church,” he says. “Seem,” he says; they are not believed by suspicion. And so that no one might think “seem to be” was said as though they were not but seemed to be, he makes plain by the words that follow what he meant: “Our faith or our love,” he says, “ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are weeds in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church.” He does not say “we suspect, we think, we believe, we suppose,” but “we see.” For those too believed them not covered but saw them uncovered who said to the householder, “Do you want us to go and gather them?”, of which it had been said, “When the blade had grown and produced fruit, then the weeds appeared too.” To them he answered: “No, lest perhaps, while you wish to gather the weeds, you root up the wheat with them,” and, “Let both grow until the harvest.” And yet you say (in which what else do you do but contradict the Lord?) that only the weeds have grown through the world, and that the grain has dwindled and perished in almost the whole world; when the church, growing, has not yet reached some nations. But it is necessary that it reach them, and that the gospel be preached in the whole world, and then the end will come, which the Lord foretold, without any ambiguity, would happen.

You see that the church, by the testimony of Cyprian, is both called Catholic from “whole” and is not without manifest bad people, because of whom, however, he warns that it is not to be left. In it the good are many in themselves, but compared with the weeds or chaff certainly few. For not outside it but within it is fulfilled what the Lord himself says: “Because iniquity has abounded, the love of many will grow cold.” But there too is the people spread everywhere to whom it is said: “Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved.” Those, however, who have faith like a grain of mustard seed, by which even mountains are moved, are very rare indeed. It was of such faith that the Lord was speaking when he said, “Do you think the Son of Man will come and find faith on the earth?”, not of the apostasy of the whole world, as you most perversely understand.