Against Gaudentius, Bishop of the Donatists 2.7–2.14

Further, about baptism, which you think exists only in the church, and for which you charge us because we hold that those coming from heresies, if they are already baptized, are not to be baptized again: it is enough that you could by no means answer how Felician could baptize when condemned and set outside your church, whom you wished in vain to place among those to whom you gave a period of grace. Read the sentence of your council of Bagai, in which, after many most bitter things said to them, far heavier than were said against Caecilian when your forebears condemned him absent and innocent, their manifest and undoubted condemnation was added in these words: “Know therefore that, guilty of a notorious crime, Victorianus of Carcabia, Marcianus of Sullecthum, Beianus of Beia, Salvius of Ausafa, Theodorus of Usula, Donatus of Sabrata, Miggin of Elephantaria, Praetextatus of Assuras, Salvius of Membresa, Valerius of Melzi, Felicianus of Mustis, and Martialis of Pertusa, who by a deadly work of perdition glued together a filthy vessel from collected dregs, and also the clerics once of the church of Carthage who, while taking part in the crime, played pander to an unlawful incest, have been condemned by the judgment of God presiding, by the truthful mouth of the universal council.” And then the period of grace begins to be extended to the others in these words: “But those whom the shoots of the sacrilegious branch did not pollute, that is, who out of modest shame for the faith withdrew their own hands from the head of Maximian, we have allowed to return to mother church.” What needed to be said about these things has already been said sufficiently in my earlier letter to you. Anyone who reads it and pays a little attention cannot doubt that you could not answer this point at all.

So it seems to you in vain that the councils of Agrippinus and Cyprian are to be followed on this question, since you disregarded them when you received, without any repetition of baptism, those baptized outside your communion by condemned men against whom you were litigating to exclude them from the basilicas. As for the view of Cyprian and his colleagues, who then held that those coming from heretics ought to be baptized, it would take long to discuss it as it deserves. But solve for me, if you can, this short question. When Cyprian, bishop of the church of Carthage, was rebaptizing those coming from heretics, Stephen, then bishop of the church of Rome, was receiving heretics in the same baptism they had received outside; and both, doing these different things, remained in Catholic unity. Tell me whether at that time the church, when by your account it was receiving men guilty of all crimes without baptism through Stephen and his countless colleagues throughout the world who shared the same view, had perished by the contagion of the bad or had not. For you cannot call these bad people hidden, though you assert that even the hidden harm and kill. So whoever, a murderer or even a parricide, an adulterer, one guilty of incest, an idolater, finally a not timid betrayer of the holy books, or a cruel torturer and violent extorter to have them handed over, and the last burner of them by order or by hand, baptized among heretics, came to Stephen and his colleagues, was, by your account, received without baptism. You see, then, that all the crimes of men, if what you hold about baptism is true, were then gathered into the church without baptism. Answer whether Cyprian was stained by these crimes in that same unity; answer whether the church perished or did not perish. Choose what you think. If it had already perished then, what church gave birth to Donatus? But if it could not perish with so many added to it without baptism, answer, I ask you, what madness persuaded the party of Donatus to separate itself from it as though avoiding the communion of the bad.

But far be it that, because the most blessed Cyprian thought otherwise about baptism than the truth showed, earlier by custom and later by reasoning examined more carefully, any of us who understand this as he did not should dare to put himself above him. For his many other great merits, and his spirit full of preeminent love, by which he remained most peaceable with colleagues who thought differently, and his glorious martyrdom in the unity of the church, showed well enough that he was a fruitful branch in the root of Christ, which the Father pruned even of this fault, so that it might bear greater fruit. For so Jesus himself says: “The branch that bears fruit in me, my Father prunes, that it may bear greater fruit,” showing that even in fruitful branches the Farmer who is in heaven finds something to prune. For which of us can be compared with the apostle Peter, though we have never compelled the Gentiles to live like Jews, which he was doing when he was not walking rightly toward the truth of the gospel? Hence, corrected by the salutary admonition of Paul, the later apostle, he gave posterity a more useful example of humility than if there had been nothing in him to correct.

Set in this church, then, which neither could nor can perish by the contagion of the bad, whether hidden or even manifest, we fear no slanders about any people. For if they are bad, the good either do not know them, without doubt; or, when they are made manifest by their own evidence, condemn them by the church’s laws; or else, if they know them and cannot condemn them because they have not been accused and convicted before them, they tolerate them for the peace of the church, not only blamelessly but even praiseworthily, and do not, by tearing the Lord’s nets because of bad fish, damnably separate themselves before the time of the shore. For if they should wish to do this, besides the countless testimonies of the divine Scriptures by which they are forbidden to do it, the most blessed Cyprian, whom you brought as a witness, certainly holds them back, crying out and solemnly declaring 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”; warning us not only by word but also by his own example, who for the bond of unity bore with colleagues of his who seized estates by treacherous frauds and increased their gain by multiplying usury, whose avarice he understood, according to the apostle, to be not some light vice but idolatry; and he was not made such by their contagion. He departed from them by unlikeness of conduct, not by division of the sacraments; and he did not touch the unclean, but by abhorring their deeds, not by gathering a people apart. But you, while you understand carnally what was said through the prophet Isaiah, “Depart, and go out from their midst, and be separate, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing,” and other things said similarly in the Scriptures, while, I say, you understand these things not spiritually but carnally, you appear exactly such as are condemned, as the same prophet proclaims, who say: “Do not touch me, for I am clean.” Finally, while you perversely judged that others’ sins must be avoided, you committed others of your own: dividing peoples by a sacrilegious schism, and holding with a wicked spirit a sacrilegious heresy against God’s manifest promises, fulfilled, about the church spread through the whole world. For if, as you think, criticizing us over a word, one and the same society of the lost could not be both schism and heresy at once, the most blessed Cyprian would not have said, in the very letter from which I set down this testimony about the weeds placed in the church, to those confessors whom he congratulated on being set free from the Novatianist division: “I grieved greatly and was gravely distressed that I could not be in communion with those whom I had once begun to love, after the schismatic and heretical error took you up as you came out of prison.” So do not, against the plainest truth, either deceitfully evade both or choose for yourself whichever of them seems milder to you, since you are both a schismatic by sacrilegious departure and a heretic by sacrilegious doctrine.

Nor flatter yourselves that we do not annul your baptism. It is not yours but the Catholic Church’s, which we hold; from it, when you departed, you took it with you, not indeed to your salvation, but to your ruin. For the Lord’s vessels remained holy even among foreigners, so that the king who dared to use them with contempt was punished by God’s anger; and the ark of the covenant, captured by enemies, by no means lost the power of its holiness. If, then, those holy things, which were then among strangers in such a way that they ceased to be among their own, could nevertheless by no means lose the force of holiness, how much more do the Christian sacraments not lose it, when they pass over to heretics in such a way that they also remain with us! This is what I said in writing to you, which we also said to you at the conference, and you thought it better to evade it, since you could not refute it: that, as the apostle says of certain people, “They hold the truth in unrighteousness,” so you too hold the truth of divine baptism in the unrighteousness of human error; and this truth, which is not yours, we certainly must not annul because of your unrighteousness. And since the apostle himself is understood to have said of the idolatrous Gentiles, “who hold the truth in unrighteousness,” you, as if answering me, demanded that I prove what, of the sacrilege of the Gentiles, the apostle does not annul, what of their profane rite he does not condemn; as if he could fail to annul and condemn what is sacrilegious and profane, as we do your schism and your heresy. Yet certain sayings of truth which some philosophers of the Gentiles hold about the unknown God the apostle not only did not destroy, but even used as testimony when there was need. For speaking to the Athenians he says of God: “For in him we live and move and are, as some of your own have said.” This truth of wisdom, which the most blessed Paul not only did not destroy but even used to instruct them, they held in the unrighteousness of their idolatry, which apostolic teaching overturned by apostolic devices. So we too do not annul, but recognize, the true things which your forebears received in the Catholic Church and handed down to you; but your sacrilege we either annul at your conversion or detest in your obstinacy.

And yet you have settled the whole question, and all that is at issue between us, by expounding quite carefully a single word of the tribune. For when I had said, “Nor is it read in the tribune’s letter that the name of God was invoked by you in truth,” since I had not read that very word there at all, you answered: “You are mistaken, or rather you mislead; for the tribune’s words are: ‘lest so great a work, the house of the Lord, where the name of God and of his Christ has been invoked by you so often, be said to have been burned through your religion established there.’ Understand that ‘religion’ is said in truth; in falsehood it is called ‘superstition.’” When would I have noticed this, when would I have reasoned so, when would I have proved one thing from another in this way? I confess, this escaped the edge of my wit, such as it is; and so believe me that I could have been mistaken there, not, as you said, that I wished to mislead about a word. So the tribune, as a military man, erred in saying “through your religion” to one whom he knows or believes to be a heretic, since heresy is not religion but superstition, and religion is properly said not in falsehood but in truth. Accordingly, by this exposition of yours, the true worship of God is called religion, but the false superstition. Listen, then, to yourself, obey yourself, and you will by no means refuse to follow us. For writing to the same tribune, at the very opening of your first letter, you set down and said, “To the honorable Dulcitius, tribune and notary, much to be longed for by us, if you so wish, Gaudentius, bishop,” and at once added, “I have received the writings of Your Religiousness.” Why, then, do you still hesitate to come to us? See, the tribune Dulcitius, though a man of our communion, is nevertheless, by your testimony, not superstitious but religious, and therefore, by your exposition, holds not a false but the true worship of God. So it is he rather than you who is in the Catholic Church, since you did not err in this word at all, so much so that you even expounded that religion differs from superstition as much as truth from falsehood. But that man, as I said, a military man and less learned in these proper meanings of words, did not know what religion was; for far be it that I should say he was misleading you by flattery. But you, who reproach those you argue against from the prophet and cry, “Woe to those who call bitter sweet and sweet bitter, who call light darkness and darkness light”: if what Dulcitius holds with us is superstition, why did you call it religion? But if you spoke the truth, why do you reject the Catholic religion by holding a heretical superstition? Follow, then, your own testimony, especially since your own people too, when they learn of it, will perhaps not be in communion with you, because by this word you entered communion with the tribune Dulcitius. Come, brother Gaudentius, do not lose the opportunity which the Lord has given you even through your own tongue. Or perhaps you are angry because I call you brother? For you rejected this name from us even at our conference, where you showed that we are those whom the Lord commanded through the prophet, “Say, You are our brothers, to those who hate you and who detest you,” and that you are among those who hate and detest those to whom the Lord says this. You certainly cannot deny that you called “religion” that in which the tribune Dulcitius is. He sent you that letter precisely so that you would not kill yourself and would enter communion with the church in which he is. If, then, his is religion, yours is superstition. For although you have both said this of each other, you choose rather that he should have spoken falsely than you.

Wherefore, according to this most true testimony and most true exposition of yours, since it is religion which the tribune Dulcitius holds, it is surely religion by which the emperor’s command drives you to our communion. From this it follows that it is religion too by which the Christian emperor judges that it belongs to his care that there be no sinning against divine things with impunity; though you do not want him to care for anything but what is contained in the earthly commonwealth. Hence too, forgetting what you had read, you said that the king of the Ninevites did not order the people to do penance. For these are your words to me: “Why do you deceive the wretched? God commanded Jonah; the Lord sent a prophet to the people; he ordered nothing of the kind to the king.” Notice, then, what is written, and be angry with none but yourself, who either do not recall the divine Scriptures or rather yourself deceive the wretched: “Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, as the Lord had spoken. Now Nineveh was a great city, about a three days’ journey. And Jonah began to enter the city about one day’s journey, and he preached and said: Yet three days, and Nineveh will be overthrown. And the men of Nineveh believed the Lord, and proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least. And when the word reached the king of the city of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his garments, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And it was proclaimed by the king and by the nobles, saying: Let men and beasts, sheep and oxen, taste nothing, nor graze, and let them not drink water. And men and beasts put on sackcloth; they cried earnestly to the Lord, and each turned from the way of his wickedness and from the iniquity that was in his hands.” Do you hear at last that a king took care of what it displeases you should belong to the care of kings? Certainly so that what was being done less than it ought should be done earnestly. Now the Ninevites were not forced to penance by the king’s command through confiscations and proscriptions or the terror of soldiers, because they obediently did what was ordered. So we do not show that the people suffered these things, because neither can you show that the king was disregarded. Accordingly, whoever obeys kings commanding with religious fear what is according to God, beginning from fear and advancing to love, receives peace from the Lord, not as the world gives peace; for the world gives peace for temporal advantage, but the Lord for eternal salvation. So, since it is religion in which the tribune Dulcitius is (for you will not deny your own words), the party of Donatus, from which his religion wishes you rescued, is superstition. It is superstition that you seek to kill yourself, which his religion strongly forbids; it is superstition that you blame the emperor’s care in these matters, which his religion has undertaken to carry out.

So since the case has been finished by your own word, I beg you by the God of religion, the God of truth, that your error too may at last be finished. That, brother, is the church of Christ which at this time is spreading by growing through the whole world, containing both bad and good, to be separated by the final winnowing. And to address you at the last rather in the words of him whom you wished to bring as a witness to the Catholic name: it is the church which, flooded with the Lord’s light, sends its rays through the whole world; it is the church which extends its branches over all the earth in the abundance of its fruitfulness. Accordingly, “even if there seem to be weeds in it, 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.” These are the words of the most blessed Cyprian, not mine; the words, that is, of him whom you set before us at the opening of your writings as a most choice witness to the Catholic name and commended most copiously at length; or rather, through him, since they are true and divine, they are the words of God. See what to hear, see what to beware of, so that with the help of the Savior’s mercy we may together hold Catholic love, together love Catholic peace, together grow everywhere with its wheat, together bear with the weeds until the end, together live without end in the barn. You surely see that, without any defense of Caecilian or of any people whom you think should be accused, the Catholic Church stands by its own strength and firmness; although our conference cleared Caecilian’s case, and as to the others whom you slander, either the accusation is doubtful or the condemnation unjust. But it is very foolish to set the case of the church, propped and fortified by divine testimonies, in the cases of men, with reasoning gone astray; since, even if we saw those men most plainly to be bad and could not separate them from the sacraments of the church, yet our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we saw these too among the weeds in the church, we ourselves should have to withdraw from the church. If you think of replying, do not abandon the case and wander about in superfluous things. Look at what has been said; answer what has been said, not by deceitful evasion but by reasoned argument. For what you achieved by that long reply, or rather how you achieved nothing, I will show more carefully in another work, if it seems necessary and the Lord grants it.