Against the Letters of Petilian 1.24–2.25

What if the holy and true church of Christ were to convict and overcome you even if we had no documents, or false ones, about the handing over of the books, and you had some true ones? What would remain for you then, except to love peace if you are willing, or, if you are not, at least to be silent? For whatever you might produce now, I could say very easily and very truly that you ought at that time to have proved it to the full and Catholic unity of the church, already spread and established through so many nations, so that you would remain inside and those you convicted would be driven out. If you tried to do this, you were beyond doubt unable to prove it, and, defeated or angry, you separated yourselves with monstrous sacrilege from the innocent, who could not condemn things uncertain. But if you did not even try, then with a most accursed and ungodly blindness you cut yourselves off from the wheat of Christ, which grows through the whole field, that is, the whole world, until the end, because you were offended by a few tares in Africa.

Lastly, the Testament is said to have been handed over to the flames by certain men in time of persecution. Now let it be read aloud, from wherever it has been brought out. Surely at the beginning of the testator's promises this is found said to Abraham: “In your seed all nations will be blessed,” and the truthful apostle interprets what this means: “In your seed,” he says, “which is Christ.” No one's handing over has made void the faithfulness of God. Be in communion with all nations, and then boast that you preserved the Testament from destruction by fire. But if you will not, which party is rather to be believed to have pressed for burning the Testament, if not the one that will not agree with it once it is brought out? For how much more surely, without any sacrilegious rashness, is he judged to have succeeded the traitors who now persecutes with his tongue the Testament which they are said to have persecuted with fire! You charge us with persecution: the Lord's grain answers you, either it was done justly, or our chaff did it. What do you say to this? You charge that we do not have baptism: the same grain of the Lord answers you that the form of the sacrament profits some nothing even inside, as it did not profit Simon Magus after his baptism, and much more profits nothing those who are outside; yet it is proved to be in them when they go away from here, because it is not given again when they return. Can you, then, except most shamelessly, cry out against this grain and call them false prophets clothed in sheepskins, but inwardly ravenous wolves, since they either do not know the wicked in Catholic unity or tolerate for the sake of unity those they know?

But if we consider your fruits, I pass over the tyrannical domination in the cities and especially on other people's estates; I pass over the fury of the Circumcellions, and the sacrilegious and profane cult of the corpses of those who threw themselves over cliffs, the drunken revels, and the ten years' groaning of all Africa under one Optatus the Gildonian. I pass over these things, because there are some among you who proclaim that these things displease them and always have. But they say that they tolerate them for the sake of peace, because they cannot suppress them; and in this they condemn themselves by their own judgment, for if they loved peace they would not tear unity apart. For what madness is it to want to abandon peace in peace itself and to want to keep it in dissension? So because of those who pretend not to see the evils of the same party of Donatus which everyone sees and blames, so much so that they even say of Optatus himself, “What did he do? Who accused him? Who convicted him? I do not know, I did not see, I did not hear”: because of these, then, who pretend not to know what is manifest, the Maximianists arose, in whose case their eyes may be opened and their mouths shut. Openly they separate, openly they set up altar against altar, openly in council they are called sacrilegious and vipers and swift to shed blood and comparable to Dathan and Abiram and Korah, and are condemned and cursed in harsh words; openly they are received back in their ranks together with those they baptized. These are the fruits of those who do these things for the peace of Donatus, so that they cover themselves with sheepskin, and who refuse the peace of Christ in the whole world, so that inwardly they are ravenous wolves.

I think I have passed over none of the things he set down in his letter, at least of those I could find in the part we obtained; let them bring out the remaining part too, in case there is something there that cannot be refuted. As for these answers we have given with the Lord's help, I urge you, beloved, not only to give them to those who ask, but to press them even on those who do not. Let them answer if they wish; and if they do not wish to answer us, let them at least send letters to their own people, but not order them to be hidden from us. If they do that, they very plainly display their fruits, by which they are shown to be ravenous wolves clothed in sheepskins, who secretly lie in wait for our sheep and are afraid to answer the shepherds openly. We charge them only with the crime of schism, in which all of them are wholly involved, not with the crimes of some of them, which some of them may answer displease them. But they, if they do not charge us with other people's crimes, have nothing to charge; and therefore they cannot defend themselves at all from the crime of schism, because, whether on account of false charges invented by themselves or even on account of true ones, but still the crimes of chaff, they separated themselves by an abominable rupture from the Lord's threshing floor and from the innocence of the grain growing through the whole world.

Unless perhaps you expect me also to refute what he put in about Manichaeus. In this matter nothing displeases us except that he blamed a most pestilential and pernicious error, that is, the heresy of the Manichees, with a very light and almost nonexistent reproof, an error which the Catholic Church defeats with the strongest proofs of truth. For the inheritance of Christ, established in all nations, is safe against all disinherited heresies. But as the Lord says, “How can Satan cast out Satan?”, so how can the error of the Donatists overthrow the error of the Manichees?

Therefore, dearest friends, although this error is overcome by being refuted in many ways, and dares to resist the truth not with any assertions of any kind of reason but only with obstinate impudence, still, so that a multitude of proofs may not burden your memory, hold on to this one act concerning the Maximianists; nail it to their foreheads; force it into their mouths to check their deceitful tongues; with it, as with a three-pronged weapon, slaughter their slander as a three-headed beast. They charge us with handing over the books, they charge us with persecution, they charge us with false baptism: answer everything from the Maximianists alone. They think it is hidden that their forebears handed the holy books over to the flames; but since the sacrilege of schism exceeds the crime of handing over, they received in their ranks the Maximianists, defiled by the sacrilege of schism. This at least they cannot hide. Again, they think the most violent persecutions which they carry out against anyone they can, wherever they can, are hidden; but since spiritual persecution exceeds bodily persecution, they received in their ranks the Maximianists, whom they persecuted bodily and of whom they themselves said, “Their feet are swift to shed blood.” This at least they cannot hide. Lastly, they think the question of baptism, by which they deceive the wretched, is hidden; but while they say that all who are baptized outside the communion of the one church do not have baptism, they received in their ranks the Maximianists together with those whom they had baptized in schism outside these men's communion. This at least they cannot hide.

“But these things,” they say, “do not stain when done for peace, and it is good to bend the rigour of severity to mercy, so that broken branches may be grafted in again.” So the whole case is concluded, lost for them and won for us: for if the name of peace is taken up as some shadow of defence for tolerating the wicked in schism, then beyond doubt true peace itself is violated, with a horrible crime and without any defence, through the unity of the whole world. Hold on to these things, brothers, to be pursued and preached with unwearied gentleness: love men, kill errors; be confident of the truth without pride; contend for the truth without cruelty; pray for those whom you refute and convict. For the prophet prays to God for such people, saying, “Fill their faces with shame, and they will seek your name, O Lord.” The Lord has indeed already done this, filling their faces most plainly with the shame of the Maximianists; it remains for them to learn to blush to their salvation. For so they will be able to seek the name of the Lord, from whom they have turned away most ruinously while exalting their own name in its place. May you live and persevere in Christ, and be multiplied and abound in the love of God, toward one another and toward all, dearest brothers.

Those who were able to read or hear it remember that we answered adequately the first parts of Petilian's letter, which were all we had found. But since afterwards the whole letter was found by the brothers, copied, and sent to us so that we might answer all of it, this duty of our pen was not to be shirked: not because he says anything new that has not already been answered often and in many ways, but for the sake of slower brothers, who cannot apply what they have read somewhere to every parallel case. So I will humour those who insist that I answer every point, so that we may argue as if in alternating speeches face to face. I will set down the words from his letter under his name and give the answer under my own, as though they had been taken down by stenographers while we were debating. In this way no one will be able to complain that I have passed over anything, or that he could not understand because the speakers were not distinguished; and at the same time the Donatists themselves, who refuse to argue with us in person, will not escape, through the letters they have published to their own people, the truth that answers them point by point, just as if they were speaking with us face to face.

At the very beginning of his letter Petilian said: “Petilian, bishop, to his dearly beloved brothers, fellow presbyters and deacons, ministers appointed with us throughout the diocese in the holy gospel: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Augustine answered: I recognize the apostolic greeting. Consider what you are saying; but notice where you learned what you say. So Paul greets the Romans, so the Corinthians, so the Galatians, so the Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Thessalonians. What madness is it, then, to refuse to share the greeting of peace with those churches in whose letters you learned the peaceable greeting?

Petilian said: “They charge us with a double baptism, those who under the name of baptism have polluted their souls with a guilty washing; than whom, filthy as they are, all dirt is cleaner, who through a perverse cleanness have come to be defiled by their own water.”

Augustine answered: We are neither defiled by our water nor cleansed by yours; but the water of baptism, when it is given to anyone in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, is neither ours nor yours, but his of whom it was said to John: “He on whom you see the Spirit descending like a dove and remaining on him, this is he who baptizes in the Holy Spirit.”

Petilian said: “For it is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver.”

Augustine answered: Then we are secure about the conscience of Christ. For if you put any man in that place, the cleansing of the receiver will be uncertain, because the conscience of the one who washes is uncertain.

Petilian said: “For he who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt.”

Augustine answered: Christ is not faithless, from whom a faithful man receives faith, not guilt. For he believes in him who justifies the ungodly, so that his faith is reckoned as righteousness.

Petilian said: “For everything consists by its origin and root, and if it does not have something as its head, it is nothing; nor does anything regenerate well unless it is regenerated by good seed.”

Augustine answered: Why do you want to set yourself up in place of Christ, under whom you do not want to place yourself? He is the origin and root and head of the one being born; about him we have no fear, as we might about any man, that perhaps he is a hypocrite and very wicked, and that we spring from a very wicked origin, rise from a very wicked root, are conformed to a very wicked head. For what man can be secure about a man, when it is written, “Cursed is everyone who puts his hope in man”? The seed by which we are regenerated is the word of God, that is, the gospel; hence the apostle says, “For in Christ Jesus I begot you through the gospel.” Yet he allows even those who proclaim the gospel impurely to proclaim it, and rejoices in this, because, although they proclaimed it impurely, seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, what they proclaimed was pure. And the Lord had said of some such people, “Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” So if what is pure is proclaimed purely, the proclaimer himself too, because he is joined with the word, begets the believer along with it; but if he himself is not regenerated, yet what he proclaims is pure, the believer is born not from the minister's barrenness but from the fruitfulness of the truth.

Petilian said: “Since these things are so, brothers, what perversity can it be that one guilty of his own crimes should make another innocent, when the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘A good tree bears good fruit, a bad tree bears bad fruit; do they gather grapes from thorns?’ and again, ‘Every good man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and every evil man out of the treasure of his heart brings forth evil things’?”

Augustine answered: No man, even if he is not guilty of his own crimes, makes another innocent, because he is not God. Otherwise, if the innocence of the baptized is expected to come from the innocence of the baptizer, each person will be the more innocent the more innocent the man he finds to baptize him, and he himself will be just as much less innocent as the one by whom he is baptized; and if perhaps the one who baptizes holds a hatred against someone, that too will be charged to the one baptized. Why, then, does the wretch run to baptism? To have his own sins forgiven, or to have another's laid on him? Or, like a merchant's ship, to unload some goods and take on others? But we usually understand the good tree and its good fruit, and the bad tree and its bad fruit, as men and their works, as is shown next in the words which you too quoted: “The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and the evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil things.” But when a man preaches God's word or administers God's sacrament, he does not, if he is evil, preach or administer from what is his own; he will be counted among those of whom it was said, “Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” They say what is God's, but they do what is their own. For if it is as you say, that the baptized themselves are reckoned the fruit of those who baptize, you are announcing a great evil for Africa, if as many Optatuses have sprouted up as Optatus baptized.

Petilian said: “And again, ‘He who is baptized by a dead man, his washing does not profit him.’ He did not declare the baptizer to be a lifeless dead body or a man's corpse stiffly laid out, but one not having the Spirit of God, who is compared to a dead man, as he shows in another place to a disciple. The gospel testifies that his disciple said, ‘Lord, let me bury my father’; Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.’ The disciple's father was not baptized: he consigned a pagan to pagans. Unless he said this of unbelievers, a dead man cannot bury a dead man. So he is dead, not by any death, but struck by his own life; for one who lives so as to be guilty is tormented by a dead life. To be baptized by a dead man, then, is to have taken up death, not life. We must consider and say how far a traitor, though living, is to be held dead. That man is dead who did not deserve to be born by true baptism; that man is likewise dead who, though begotten by a lawful baptism, has mixed himself with a traitor. Both lack the life of baptism, both the one who never had it at all and the one who had it and lost it. For the Lord Jesus Christ says, ‘Seven spirits more wicked will come upon him, and that man will be worse than before.’”

Augustine answered: Inquire more carefully how the testimony you cited from Scripture was said and how it is to be understood. That all the wicked are customarily called dead in a mystical sense is clear. But Christ, whose baptism is true, the baptism you call false because of men's vices, lives, sitting at the right hand of the Father; he will no longer die even by the weakness of the flesh, and death will no longer have dominion over him. Whoever is baptized with his baptism is not baptized by a dead man; and even if the ministers are deceitful workers, seeking their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, proclaiming the gospel impurely and preaching Christ out of contention and envy, and are to be called dead because of their iniquities, still the sacrament of the living God does not die even in a dead man. For that Simon, baptized by Philip in Samaria, who wanted to buy the gift of God with money, was dead; but the baptism he had was alive, to his punishment.

How false your statement is, “Both lack the life of baptism, both the one who never had it at all and the one who had it and lost it,” you may see from this: those who apostatize after baptism and return through repentance are not given baptism again; it would be given again if they had lost it. And how, by your reckoning, do your own dead baptize? Or are drunkards not dead (to say nothing of other things and mention only what is known to all and seen daily), since the apostle says of a widow, “She who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives”? Next, have you forgotten how eloquently you said in that council of yours in which you condemned Maximian with his sponsors and ministers: “Quite after the example of the perishing Egyptians, the shores are full of corpses, for whom in death itself the greater punishment is that, after their life has been wrung out by the avenging waters, they do not even find burial”? And yet whether one of them, Felicianus, has come back to life is your affair; but he has with him inside among you those whom he baptized outside while dead. So, just as he is baptized by the living who is clothed with the baptism of the living Christ, so he is baptized by the dead who is wrapped in the baptism of the dead Saturn or of anyone else; to say briefly for the moment how the words you cited can be understood without difficulty for any of us. For as you take them, you are not freeing yourselves but trying to entangle us with you.

Petilian said: “We must consider, I say, and declare how far a faithless traitor, though living, is to be held dead. Judas was an apostle when he betrayed Christ; and the same man, having lost the rank of apostle, died spiritually, to die afterwards by his own noose, as it is written: ‘I repent,’ he said, ‘because I have betrayed innocent blood,’ and he went away and hanged himself with a noose. The traitor perished by a noose, and left a noose for such men; of whom the Lord Christ cried to the Father, ‘Father, those whom you gave me I have kept all, and none of them perished except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.’ For long before, David had pronounced this sentence on the one who was to betray Christ to the faithless: ‘Let another take his bishopric; let his wife be a widow and his children orphans.’ See how great the spirit of the prophets is, that it saw all future things as present, so that the traitor was condemned many ages before he was born. Finally, so that the sentence pronounced might be fulfilled, the holy Matthias received the bishopric of the lost apostle. Let no fool, no faithless man, argue from this: Matthias carried off a triumph, not an injury, he who carried off the spoil of the traitor from the victory of the Lord Christ. With this done, then, why do you claim a bishopric for yourself, heir of a more wicked traitor? Judas betrayed Christ in the flesh; you, raging in the spirit, handed the holy gospel over to sacrilegious flames. Judas handed the lawgiver over to the faithless; you handed the law of God, as if its remains, over to men to be destroyed. If you loved the law, you would be put to death for the laws of God like the young Maccabees, if death can be the word for men whom, by dying for the Lord, it makes immortal. One of those brothers answered the sacrilegious tyrant with this voice of faith: ‘You indeed, wicked and ungodly man, destroy us out of this present life; but the King of the world, who reigns forever and of whose kingdom there will be no end, will raise us, who have died for his holy laws, to the life of eternal life.’ If you burned the will of a dead man, would you not be punished as a forger? What will become of you, then, who have burned the most holy law of God the Judge? Judas repented of his deed at least in death; you not only do not repent, but you have even come forth, most wicked traitor, as a persecutor and executioner of us who keep the law.”

Augustine answered: See the difference between your abusive words and our truthful assertions. Pay attention a little. Look, you have heaped up the crime of handing over the books, and with most invidious words, like a fluent inventor, you have compared us to the lost Judas. When I answer you very briefly, “I did not do what you say; I did not hand over; you make false charges; you will never prove it,” does not all this smoke of grand words vanish at once? Or perhaps you will try to prove it? Then you should have done that first, and afterwards risen against us, as against men convicted, with whatever mass of invective you liked. There is one vanity; hear another.

When you yourself were speaking of the foretold condemnation of Judas, you said, “See how great the spirit of the prophets is, that it saw all future things as present, so that the traitor was condemned many ages before he was born”; and you did not see that the same prophecy, with steadfast, certain, and unshaken truth, by which it was foretold that one disciple would betray Christ, also foretold that the whole world would believe in Christ. Why did you notice in the prophecy the man who betrayed Christ, and not notice there the world for which Christ was betrayed? Who betrayed Christ? Judas. To whom did he betray him? To the Jews. What did the Jews do to him? “They pierced,” he says, “my hands and feet; they counted all my bones. They looked and stared at me; they divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” Read a little further in the same psalm how great is what was bought at so great a price: “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before him; for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he will rule over the nations.” But who could suffice to recall the other countless prophetic testimonies about the world that was to believe? Yet you praise the prophecy because you see in it the man who sold Christ, and do not see in it the possession that Christ, when sold, bought. There is a second vanity; hear a third.

Among the many words of your invective you said: “If you burned the will of a dead man, would you not be punished as a forger? What will become of you, then, who have burned the most holy law of God?” In saying this you did not consider what surely ought to have moved you: how it could happen that we burned the Testament and yet stand in the inheritance that is written down in that Testament, while you, strangely, kept the Testament and lost the inheritance. Is it not written in that Testament, “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession”? Join in communion with this inheritance, and charge me with whatever you like about the Testament. For what madness is it that you refused to hand the Testament over to the flames only in order to argue against the testator's words? We, though we have in our hands the ecclesiastical and municipal records in which we read that it was rather those who ordained another bishop against Caecilian who were traitors of the divine books, still do not insult you; we do not inveigh against you, nor lament the ashes of the holy pages in your hands, nor set the burning tortures of the Maccabees against the sacrilege of your pride, saying, “You should rather have handed your own limbs to the fire than God's words.” For we do not want to be vain, stirring up an empty din against you with other men's misdeeds, which you either do not know of or disapprove. But that we see you separated from the communion of the whole world, a crime that is very great, manifest, and belongs to all of you: if I wanted to heap it up, time would fail me sooner than words. And if you want to defend this, you will charge the whole world with things which, if they are to be charged, show further grounds for accusing you, and if they are not to be charged, do not defend you. Why, then, do you swell against me about handing over the books, which is neither mine nor yours if the agreement stands that we do not charge each other with others' deeds, and if it does not stand, is yours rather than mine? Yet even with that agreement standing, I think I say with full justice that he should be judged the associate of the one who betrayed Christ who, with the whole world, has not given himself up to Christ. “Therefore,” says the apostle, “you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise”; and again he says, “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ”; and he shows that the same seed of Abraham extends to all nations from what was said to Abraham: “In your seed all nations will be blessed.” So I think what I ask is just: that we pay some attention to the Testament of God, which has long been opened, and judge that the one we do not find to be a fellow heir of the betrayed is himself the heir of the betrayer; let him belong to the seller of Christ who denies Christ as the buyer of the world. Indeed, when after the resurrection he showed himself to the disciples and offered his limbs to be touched by the doubters, he said to them, “For thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” See from what inheritance you are estranging yourselves, see what heir you are resisting! Would he really have spared Christ as he walked on earth, who contradicts him as he sits in heaven? Do you still not understand that whatever you charge against us, you charge against his word? A Christian world is promised and believed; it is fulfilled and contradicted. Consider, I beg you, what you deserved to suffer for so great an impiety; and yet if you suffered anything, I do not know, I did not see, I did not do it. You, who today do not suffer the force of my persecution, give me an account of your separation. But again and often you will say things which, if you do not prove them, concern no one, and if you prove them, do not concern me.

Petilian said: “Fenced about by these crimes, you cannot be a true bishop.”

Augustine answered: By what crimes? What have you proved, what have you shown? Even if you had shown the crimes of some people or other, what does that have to do with the seed of Abraham, in which all nations are blessed?

Petilian said: “Did the apostles persecute anyone, or did Christ hand anyone over?”

Augustine answered: I could indeed say that Satan himself is worse than all evil men, and yet the apostle handed a man over to him for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus; and likewise others, of whom he says, “whom I handed over to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme.” And the Lord Christ scourged the dishonest traders and drove them out of the temple, where the testimony of Scripture is also attached: “Zeal for your house has consumed me.” Look, we find the apostle a hander-over and Christ a persecutor. I could say this and throw you into no small turmoil, so that you would be forced to examine not the complaints of those who suffer but the intention of those who act. But do not trouble yourself about it; I do not say these things. I say that if anything was done wrongly to you, perhaps by the chaff of the Lord's harvest, which is likewise in all nations, it has nothing to do with the seed of Abraham, which is in all nations. So give an account of your separation; but first consider what sort of people you have whom you do not want charged against you, and see how unjustly you act in charging us with others' deeds, even if you proved what you say. So there will be no reason for your separation.

Petilian said: “But some will say, ‘We are not sons of a traitor.’ A man is the son of the one whose deeds he follows. For they are most certainly sons, and like their parents too, whom not this flesh and blood but character and deeds like their parents' have begotten.”