Against the Letters of Petilian 2.26–2.50

Augustine answered: A little while ago you were saying nothing against us; now you have begun to say something even for us. For this proposition of yours binds you to this: unless you convict us, with whom you are dealing today, of being traitors and murderers and whatever else you charge, whatever such thing you show in those who preceded us in time cannot harm us at all; for we cannot be the sons of those whose deeds we do not share. And see what you have committed yourself to. Even if you should convict some man of our own time, living with us, of such guilt, it in no way prejudges all the nations that are blessed in the seed of Abraham, from which you are found sacrilegious by separating yourself. So, unless (which cannot be done) you know all who are everywhere, and not only learn the character and deeds of all but also show them to be as evil as you say, you have no ground for charging the world, which is among the saints, with some parents or other whom you prove them to resemble. Nor will it help you at all, even if you could show that those who are not such men share common sacraments with those who are; first, because you ought to look at yourselves, at those with whom you celebrate them, to whom you give them, from whom you receive them, though you do not want them charged against you. Next, if all who imitate the deeds of Judas, who was a devil among the apostles, are his sons, why should we not call sons of the apostles those who share with such men not their deeds but the Lord's sacraments, as the apostles received the Lord's supper with that traitor? They are thus far unlike you, because you charge men who keep unity with what you yourselves do after tearing unity apart.

Petilian said: “The Lord Christ says of himself to the Jews: ‘If I do not do the works of my Father, do not believe me.’”

Augustine answered: I have already answered above; this is both true and for us, against you.

Petilian said: “He likewise rebukes the false and lying thus: ‘You are sons of the devil; for he was an accuser from the beginning and did not stand in the truth.’”

Augustine answered: We do not usually read, “he was an accuser,” but, “he was a murderer.” And we ask how the devil was a murderer from the beginning, and we find that he killed the first man not by drawing a sword or using any bodily force, but by persuading him to sin and casting him out of the happiness of paradise. What paradise was then, the church is now. So they are sons of the devil who kill men by leading them astray from the church. And just as we know from God's words where paradise was planted, so we have learned from Christ's words where the church is: “through all nations,” he says, “beginning from Jerusalem.” Whoever separates a man from this whole into any part whatever is convicted as a son of the devil and a murderer. But see also to whom the phrase you yourself set down about the devil applies, “He was an accuser and did not stand in the truth.” For you accuse the world of the crimes of others, whom you have been able to accuse rather than convict, and you have not stood in the truth of Christ. For he speaks of the church through all nations beginning from Jerusalem, but you, in the party of Donatus.

Petilian said: “A third time also he likewise names the madness of persecutors with this name: ‘Brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill and crucify and scourge in your synagogues, until there comes upon you all the righteous blood that you have shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar.’ Are they truly sons of vipers in the flesh, and not rather serpents in mind, scourging with three-tongued malice, deadly touch, and breath of poison? Truly they have become vipers who have vomited deaths on innocent peoples with their bites.”

Augustine answered: If I say these things were said of people like you, you will answer, “Prove it.” Well then, have you proved it? Or if you think things are proved by being said, there is no need to repeat them: recite those very words to yourself, as said by us against you; look, I too have proved it, if that is proving. And yet learn what proving is. I do not look for evidence from outside to prove you vipers. Look: this itself is viperish, to have in one's mouth not the firmness of truth but the poison of cursing, as it is written, “The poison of asps is under their lips.” And since this can be said anywhere by anyone against anyone, as if it were asked whose lips, he added at once, “whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.” So when you say such things against men scattered through the whole world whom you do not know at all, many of whom have never heard the name of Caecilian or of Donatus, and you do not hear them answering in silence, “Whatever you say has nothing to do with us; we did not see, we did not do it; we have no idea what you are talking about”: you who want nothing else than to say what you cannot prove at all, what is your mouth but full of cursing and bitterness? Now see whether you can show that you are not vipers, unless you show that all the Christians of all nations are traitors and murderers and are not Christians. Indeed, even if you could know and show the lives and deeds of individual men spread through the whole world, still, before you do it, when you throw these charges about rashly, your mouth is viperish, your mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Show now, if you can, what prophet, what wise man, what scribe we have killed and crucified and scourged in our synagogues. Consider how, with all the labour you spend, you will never prove that Donatus and Marculus were prophets or wise men or scribes, because they were not. And even if you could, what would you do to show that men were killed by us whom we ourselves do not know, much less the world which you curse with a poisonous mouth? Or how can you show that we have a mind like that of their killers, when you cannot even show that they were killed by anyone? Consider all this; see whether you can prove any of it either about the world or to the world. Yet because you do not cease to curse it, you show to be true in yourselves what you falsely throw at it.

But if we wanted to prove you killers of prophets, we would not go far afield to gather, place by place, the slaughters which your raging chiefs of the Circumcellions and the very bands of drunken madmen have not only committed since the beginning of your schism but do not cease to commit. I argue from what is close at hand. Let the divine words be brought out which are in both our hands and yours: let us hold as killers of the prophets those whom we find contradicting the tongues of the prophets. What can be said more quickly, what shown more readily? You would act more mildly if you drove a sword through the bowels of the prophets than in trying to kill the words of the prophets with your tongue. The prophet says, “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord.” Look, it is being done; look, it is being fulfilled; but you not only shut unbelieving ears against what is said, you also thrust out raging tongues against what is already being done. Abraham heard it said, “In your seed all nations will be blessed,” and he believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. You see it done and you cry out against it, and you do not want it reckoned to you as unrighteousness, which would rightly be reckoned to you even if you were refusing to believe something not yet done but only said. Indeed you not only do not want it reckoned to you as unrighteousness, but if you suffer anything for this impiety you want it reckoned to you as righteousness. Or if these are not persecutions of the prophets because they are done not with the sword but with the word, why was it divinely said, “Sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword”? But when shall I gather from all the prophets all the testimonies to the church spread through the whole world, all of which you try to kill and extinguish by contradicting them? But you are bound, because “their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” Still, I will recall that one saying from the mouth of the Lord, who is the witness of witnesses: “Everything,” he says, “must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms.” What these things are, let him point out himself. “Then he opened their minds,” it says, “to understand the Scriptures, and said to them: ‘For thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins be preached in his name through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’” See what is written in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms about the Lord; see what the Lord himself disclosed about himself and about the church, showing himself and promising her. But you, who resist such manifest testimonies and, since you cannot delete them, try to distort them, what would you do if you found the limbs of the prophets, you who rage so against the words of the prophets that you do not even hear the Lord, who fulfils, makes manifest, and expounds the prophets? For as far as you can, you strike even him, when you yourselves do not yield.

Petilian said: “Of you persecutors David also says this: ‘Their throat is an open grave; with their tongues they have dealt deceitfully; the poison of asps is under their lips; their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known; there is no fear of God before their eyes. Will not all who work iniquity know, who devour my people as they eat bread?’”

Augustine answered: “Their throat is an open grave,” from which the deaths of lies breathe out; for “the mouth that lies kills the soul.” But if nothing is truer than what Christ said, that his church is through all nations beginning from Jerusalem, nothing is more false than what you say, that it is in the party of Donatus. And the tongues are deceitful of those who, though they know their own deeds, say not only that they are righteous men but also that they justify men, which was said of the one who justifies the ungodly, that he may be righteous and the one who justifies. We have said enough already about the poison of asps and the mouth full of cursing and bitterness. As for feet swift to shed blood, you said the Maximianists had them too; witness the sentence of your plenary council, cited so often in proconsular and municipal proceedings. Yet they, as far as we hear, killed no one bodily. So you understood that blood is shed also by the spiritual slaughter of souls with the sword of schism, which you condemned in Maximian. See, then, whether your feet are not swift to shed blood, when you cut men off from the unity of the world, if you were right to say this of the Maximianists because they cut some off from the party of Donatus. Have we, then, not known the way of peace, who are eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and do you know it, who so resist the word of Christ which he spoke with his disciples after the resurrection, so full of peace that he began it by saying, “Peace be with you,” that you are convicted of saying nothing else to him than this: “What you said about the unity of all nations is false; what we say about the crime of all nations is true”? Who would say such things if the fear of God were before their eyes? So see whether, by saying these things daily, you are not trying to finish off with your teeth, like a meal of bread, the people of God spread through the whole world.

Petilian said: “The Lord Christ also warns: ‘Beware of false prophets; they come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruits you will know them.’”

Augustine answered: If I ask you by what fruits you know us to be ravenous wolves, you will name other men's crimes, never proved even in those to whom they are ascribed. But if you ask me by what fruits we know that you rather are ravenous wolves, I charge you with the crime of schism, which you will deny and I will prove at once: for you are not in communion with all nations and with those churches founded by apostolic labour. Here you will say, “I am not in communion with traitors and murderers.” The seed of Abraham answers you: “Those crimes are either not true or not mine.” But I set this aside for the moment; show the church. At once I will hear that voice which the Lord warned us to shun in false prophets who point to parts and try to estrange men from the whole: “Look, here is the Christ; look, there.” But do you really think the true sheep of Christ, to whom it was said, “Do not believe it,” have so little sense that they would hear the wolf saying, “Look, here is the Christ,” and not hear the shepherd saying, “through all nations, beginning from Jerusalem”?

Petilian said: “So, so, wicked persecutor: whatever veil of goodness you cover yourself with, whatever name of peace you wage war with kisses under, with whatever word of unity you entice the human race, you who deceive and mislead to this day are truly the son of the devil, since you show your father by your conduct.”

Augustine answered: Consider these things said by us against you; and to learn to whom they rather apply, recall what I said above.

Petilian said: “Nor is it so surprising that you unlawfully take to yourself the name of bishop. This is the devil's true habit: to deceive in such a way as to claim for himself the name of holiness; as the apostle proclaims: ‘Nor is it surprising,’ he says, ‘if Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light, and his ministers as ministers of righteousness.’ So it is not surprising that you falsely call yourself bishop. For those lost angels too, lovers of worldly virgins, who were corrupted by corrupting flesh, though stripped of divine powers they ceased to be angels, still keep the name of angels and always think themselves angels; released from the divine service, they passed like the rest into the devil's army, while the great God cried, ‘My spirit shall not remain in these men forever, because they are flesh.’ To these guilty ones and to you the Lord Christ will say, ‘Go into the eternal fire, which my Father prepared for the devil and his angels.’ If there were no evil angels, the devil would not have angels; and the holy apostle says they are to be condemned by holy men in that judgment of the resurrection: ‘Do you not know that we shall judge angels?’ If they were true angels, men would have no judgment over God's angels. So also the sixty apostles who, with the Lord Christ's twelve left behind, fell away from the faith as apostates, are still thought apostles by wretched men, to such an extent that from among them Manichaeus and the others entangle many souls in many devilish sects, having come forth to catch them. For certainly the lost Manichaeus, if indeed he was one, must be placed among those sixty, if his name as apostle is not contained among the twelve. But in the place of Judas the traitor Matthias was substituted, and by the voice of Christ Paul was ordained as the thirteenth, who calls himself the last of the apostles, so that no one later should be believed an apostle. For he said, ‘For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.’ And do not flatter yourselves on this point: the Jew had done these things, though you too destroy us like pagans. For you wage war unlawfully, you against whom it is not lawful to fight back. For you desire to live with us killed; but for us victory is to flee or to be killed.”

Augustine answered: How you have set down the testimonies of the Scriptures, or how you have understood them, is your affair; it has nothing to do with the matter now in hand. For you certainly said all this to prove that there are false bishops, as there are false angels and false apostles. We too know that there are false angels and false apostles and false bishops and, as the true apostle says, false brothers. But since each side can throw these things at the other, there is need to prove something, not to talk emptily. To whom the charge of deceit applies, recall what we said above, and you will find it; we will not weary readers by repeating the same things too often. And yet what has this to do with the church spread through the whole world, whether it is something you could say about its chaff, which is with it through the whole world, or what you said about Manichaeus or the other devilish sects? For if whatever is said even about the chaff that is still with it does not concern the wheat, how much less do monstrosities so long ago and so openly separated concern the members of Christ spread through the whole world!

Petilian said: “The Lord Christ commands us: ‘When men persecute you in this city, flee to another; and if they persecute you in that, flee to another. For truly I say to you, you will not finish the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes.’ If he forewarns us about Jews and pagans, you who call yourself a Christian ought not to imitate the dreadful deeds of the Gentiles. Or do you serve God by our being killed by your hands? You are wrong, you are wrong, wretched men, if you believe this; for God does not have executioners for priests.”

Augustine answered: Fleeing from city to city before persecution was commanded or permitted not to heretics or schismatics, which is what you are, but to preachers of the gospel, which you resist. To prove this easily: you are certainly in your cities now, and no one persecutes you. So you must come forward and give an account of your separation. For truth ought not to yield to falsehood in the way that the weakness of the flesh is excused when it gives way to the violence of persecution. So if you suffer persecution, why do you not leave the cities you are in, to fulfil what you cite from the gospel? But if you do not suffer persecution, why are you unwilling to answer us? Or if you perhaps fear that you will suffer persecution if you answer, how then do you imitate those preachers to whom it was said, “Look, I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves,” to whom it was also said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul”? And how are you not acting against the command of the apostle Peter, who says, “Always ready with an answer for everyone who asks you a reason for your faith and hope”? Lastly, why do you even, unprovoked, attack the Catholic churches with most violent mobs wherever you can, as the facts themselves show in countless examples? But you say that you defend your places, and resist with clubs and slaughter by whatever means you can. Why did you not hear there the voice of the Lord saying, “But I say to you, do not resist evil”? Or if it can happen that the violent are sometimes rightly resisted by bodily force, and that the command we hear from the Lord, “But I say to you, do not resist evil,” is not thereby violated, why can it not also happen that, through ordered and lawful authorities, the godly should expel the ungodly and the just the unjust from sees that are unlawfully seized or held to God's injury? For the false prophets did not suffer persecution from Elijah in the same way as Elijah himself from a most wicked king; nor, because the Lord was scourged by persecutors, are those whom he himself scourged and drove out of the temple to be compared with his sufferings. It remains, then, that you admit that nothing else needs to be examined except whether you separated yourselves from the communion of the world justly or impiously. For if it is found that you did it impiously, do not be surprised if God does not lack ministers through whom you are scourged, because you suffer persecution not from us but, as it is written, from your own deeds.

Petilian said: “Again the Lord Christ cries from heaven to Paul: ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad.’ He was then called Saul, so that baptism might afterwards give him his name. For you, then, it is not hard to persecute Christ so often in his priests, though the Lord himself cries, ‘Do not touch my anointed ones.’ Count up the many deaths of the saints, and you have killed the living Christ that many times. In short, even if you were not sacrilegious, as a murderer you cannot be holy.”

Augustine answered: Defend yourselves against the persecution suffered at the hands of your people by those who separated from you with Maximian, and there you will find our defence. For if you say you did not do it, we read out the proconsular and municipal records. If you say you did right to them, why are you unwilling to suffer such things yourselves? If you say, “But we did not make a schism,” then let that be investigated, and until it is settled whether it is so, let no one accuse persecutors. If you say that even schismatics ought not to have suffered persecution, I ask whether they ought not even to be expelled by the established authorities from the basilicas in which they lie in wait to lead the weak astray. If you say they ought not even to be expelled, first give the basilicas back to the Maximianists, and then deal with us. If you say they ought, then consider what those deserve to suffer from the established authorities who, by resisting them, resist God's ordinance; as the apostle says plainly, “For he does not bear the sword in vain; he is an avenger, for wrath, on the one who does evil.” But if, after the truth has been examined with full care, it is found that schismatics ought not to suffer anything through public courts nor be driven from the places of their snares and deceits, and you say that you are displeased that the Maximianists suffered these things at the hands of some of your people, why should not the Lord's grain cry out more freely from the whole field of the Lord, that is, from the whole world: “What the tares or our chaff commit has nothing to do with us, because it displeases us”? If you admit that it suffices for your cleansing that whatever evil is done by your people displeases you, why then did you separate yourselves? Here your very defence accuses you. For if you do not separate yourselves from the wicked of the party of Donatus because each will carry his own load, why did you separate yourselves from the wicked of the world, whom you suppose or pretend to exist? Was it so that you might all alike carry the load of schism?

And yet we ask you which of yours you can prove were killed by ours. I recall no law given by the emperors that you should be killed. As for those about whom you usually stir up the greatest odium, Marculus and Donatus, it is uncertain, to put it mildly, whether they threw themselves down, as your teaching does not cease to do by daily examples, or were thrown down by order of some authority. For if it is incredible that the teachers of the Circumcellions inflicted on themselves their customary kind of death, how much more incredible that Roman authorities could have ordered an unaccustomed punishment! So on this matter, which you think so invidious, if what you say is true, what does it have to do with the Lord's wheat? Let the chaff that has flown outside accuse the chaff that has stayed inside; for it cannot all be separated except by the last winnowing fork. But if it is false, what wonder if the chaff, carried off as by a light breath of dissension, attacks even the Lord's wheat with false charges? So on all such invidious charges this grain of Christ, which was ordered to grow with the tares through the field, that is, through the whole world, answers you with free and secure voice: “If you do not prove what you say, it concerns no one; if you prove it, it does not concern me.” From this it follows that whoever has separated himself from this unity of the grain on account of the crimes of the tares or the chaff cannot, because of the very evil of dissension and schism, defend himself even from the crime of murder, since Scripture says, “Whoever hates his brother is a murderer.”

Petilian said: “So, as we said, the Lord Christ cried to Paul: ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goad.’ And Paul said, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he was answered, ‘I am Christ of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting.’ And he, trembling and astonished, said, ‘Lord, what do you want me to do?’ And the Lord said to him, ‘Rise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.’ And after some words: ‘Saul rose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened he saw nothing.’ O blindness of the eyes, avenger of fury, you darken the light of the persecutor, to depart by baptism alone! Let us see, then, what he did in the city. ‘Ananias,’ it says, ‘went in to Saul, and when he had laid his hands on him, he said: Brother Saul, the Lord has sent me, Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came, that you may see and be filled with the Holy Spirit. At once something like scales fell from his eyes, and he received his sight, and rising he was baptized.’ Since, then, Paul, freed by baptism from the crime of persecuting, received innocent eyes, why are you, persecutor and traitor, blinded by a false baptism, unwilling to be baptized by those whom you pursue?”

Augustine answered: You prove neither persecutor nor traitor the man you want to baptize again. And even if you prove someone so, a persecutor and traitor is still not to be baptized again if he has already been baptized with Christ's baptism. Paul had to be baptized because he had never been dipped in such baptism. So what you chose to bring in about Paul has nothing in common with the case you are pleading against us. But had you not brought it in, you would have found no room for the childish declamation in which you said, “O blindness, avenger of fury, to depart by baptism alone!” How much more forcefully must one cry out against you: “O blindness, avenger of fury, which, being compared not to Paul but to Simon, does not depart from you even when baptism has been received!” For if persecutors are to be baptized by those they persecute, let Primian be baptized by the Maximianists, whom he persecuted most vigorously.

Petilian said: “But you persistently object that Christ said to the apostles, ‘He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet, but is wholly clean.’ If you examine these words fully, you are held by what follows. For he spoke thus: ‘He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet, but is wholly clean; and you are clean, but not all.’ He said this because of Judas, who was going to betray him. So whoever has become a traitor has lost baptism. Then, after the apostle who betrayed Christ had himself been condemned, he confirmed the eleven more fully thus: ‘You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you; abide in me, and I in you.’ And again he said to these eleven: ‘My peace I give to you, my peace I leave with you.’ Since, then, these things were said to the eleven apostles after the traitor had been condemned, as we said, you traitors likewise have neither peace nor baptism.”

Augustine answered: If, then, a traitor has lost baptism, let anyone baptized by you who afterwards becomes a traitor be baptized again if he wants to return to you. If you do not do that, you yourselves show us clearly that the saying is false, “Whoever has become a traitor has lost baptism.” For if he lost it, let him return and receive it; but if he returns and does not receive it, he had not lost it. Next, if it was said to the apostles, “You are already clean,” and, “My peace I give to you,” because the traitor had already gone away, then that supper of so great a sacrament, which he gave to all before Judas went out, was not clean and peaceful. If you dare to say that with your eyes shut, what can we do but rather cry out ourselves: “O blindness, avenger of the fury of those who want to be teachers of the law, as the apostle says, understanding neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions”? Yet if the blindness of obstinacy did not hinder you, it was not hard to understand: you would see that the Lord did not say in Judas's presence, “You are not yet clean,” but, “You are already clean.” He added, “but not all,” because one was there who was not clean. Yet if Judas polluted the rest by his presence, it would not have been said to them, “You are already clean,” but, as I said, “You are not yet clean.” After he went away, he said to them, “You are already clean,” and did not add, “but not all,” because the one had already left; even in his presence, as was said to them, they were clean, but not all, because there was one unclean man there. So by these words the Lord rather declared that in one company of men receiving the same sacraments, the uncleanness of some cannot harm the clean. Surely, if you think there are men like Judas among us, say these words to us: “You are clean, but not all.” But you do not say this; because of some unclean men you say, “You are all unclean.” The Lord did not say this to the disciples in Judas's presence; so whoever says it did not learn what he says from the good Teacher.