Against the Letters of Petilian 2.51–2.75

Petilian said: “But if you say that we make baptism twice, it is rather you who do so, you who kill the baptized. We do not say this because you baptize, but because, in killing each one, you cause him to be baptized in his own blood. For when the martyr's blood is wrung out, the baptism of water or of the Spirit becomes, as it were, double. For the Saviour himself, first baptized by John, declared that he was to be baptized again, no longer with water or Spirit but with the baptism of blood, by the cross of his passion, as it is written: ‘Two disciples, the sons of Zebedee, came to him, saying: Lord, when you come into your kingdom, make us sit one at your right hand and the other at your left. Jesus answered them: You ask a hard thing. Can you drink the cup that I am to drink, and be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? They said to him: We can. And he said to them: The cup that I am to drink you can drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized you will be baptized,’ and so on. If these are two baptisms, by your spite you praise us, we confess it. For when you kill our bodies, we do not make baptism twice, but we are baptized with our baptism and with blood, like Christ. Blush, blush, persecutors: you make martyrs like Christ, whom, after the water of true baptism, blood bathes as a baptizer.”

Augustine answered: First we answer quickly that we do not kill you, but you kill yourselves with a true death when you cut yourselves off from the living root of unity. Next, if all who are killed are baptized in their own blood, then all robbers, the unjust, the ungodly, criminals who are executed after condemnation, are to be held martyrs, because they are baptized in their own blood. But if none are baptized in their own blood except those killed for righteousness' sake, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven, please see that one must first ask why you suffer, and only then what you suffer. Why, then, are the cheeks puffed out before the deeds are defended? Why does the tongue roar before the life is proved? If you made a schism, you are ungodly; if you are ungodly, you die as a sacrilegious man when you are punished for ungodliness; if you die as a sacrilegious man, how are you baptized in your own blood? Or do you say, “I did not make a schism”? Then let us examine that. Why do you cry out before you prove it?

Or do you say, “Even if I am sacrilegious, I ought not to be killed by you”? The question of the atrocity of my deed, which you never truly demonstrate, is one thing; the question of the baptism of your blood, of which you falsely boast, is another. For I do not kill you, nor do you prove that you are killed by anyone; and if you prove it, whoever killed you does not concern me, whether he acted justly according to an authority lawfully given him by the Lord, or, like the chaff of the Lord's harvest, committed a crime from some evil greed. In the same way the man does not concern you who in recent times, with intolerable power, attended even by soldiers, not because he feared anyone but so that he might be feared by all, oppressed widows, ruined orphans, betrayed others' patrimonies, broke up others' marriages, arranged the sale of the property of innocent people, and shared the proceeds of what was sold with its weeping owners. I might seem to be saying these things of my own invention, if it were not recognized, without naming him, whom I mean. If these things are true, then as they do not concern you, so whatever you say does not concern us, even if you spoke the truth. But if a false report has lied about that righteous and innocent colleague of yours, then no credence at all should be given to report sown about innocent men as traitors of the books or as killers of men. Add to this that I am recalling a man who lived with you, whose anniversary you used to throng with such celebration, to whom you joined the kiss of peace amid the sacraments, into whose hands you placed the Eucharist, to whom, when he in turn gave it, you held out your hands, whose deaf ears you were afraid to offend with a free voice amid such great groaning of Africa; one of you was greatly praised because he touched him, even obliquely and very wittily, by saying that he had God as companion. But you charge us with men with whom we did not live, whose faces we did not see, in whose time we were boys or perhaps not yet born. What great iniquity and perversity is this, to want to lay on us the loads of strangers, when you are unwilling to carry those of your friends? Divine Scripture cries out: “You saw a thief and ran along with him.” If the man you saw did not defile you, why do you charge me with one I could not see? Or do you say, “I did not run along with him, because his deeds displeased me”? But surely you approached the altar with him. Come now, to defend yourself, make a distinction and say that it is one thing to run together into sin, as the two elders ran together in lying in wait for Susanna's chastity, and another to receive the Lord's sacrament with a thief, as the apostles received even that first supper with Judas. I favour the defence; but why do you not notice how much more easily, by this defence of yours, you would acquit the nations and the ends of the earth, through which the inheritance of Christ is spread? For if you could see a thief and share the sacraments with the thief you saw and yet not share his sin, how much less could the most remote nations share evil deeds with African traitors or persecutors, even if you were telling the truth and proving it, although they held the sacraments in common with them! Or do you say, “I saw him as a bishop, but I did not see him as a thief”? Say what you like; I favour this defence too, and by it the world is acquitted of your charges. For if you were allowed not to know the life of a man you knew, why is the whole world not allowed not to know men it did not know? Unless perhaps Donatists may be ignorant of what they do not want to know, while the nations may not be ignorant of what they cannot know.

Or do you say, “Theft is one thing, handing over the books or persecution another”? I grant that it is another thing, and there is no need now to labour to show the difference. Consider the short way. If he did not make you a thief, because theft does not please you, who can make traitors or murderers of those who are displeased by handing over or by murder? So first confess that you are whatever evil Optatus was, whom you knew, and then charge me with whatever evil were those whom I did not know. Do not say to me, “But those are great things, these small.” You must first confess even the small things about yourself, not so that I may confess too, but so that I may even allow you to say some great things or other about me. Did Optatus, whom you knew, make you a thief because he was your colleague, or did he not? Answer one of the two. If you say, “He did not,” I ask why he did not: because he was not one himself, or because you do not know, or because it displeased you? If because he was not one himself, much more ought we not to believe that those of whom you accuse us were such as you say. For if one must not believe of Optatus what Christians and pagans and Jews, and finally both ours and yours, say, how much less must one believe what you say of anyone! If because you do not know, all nations answer you: “Much more do we not know whatever you charge against us about those men.” If because it displeased you, they answer you in the same words: “Though you have never proved them, such things displease us.” But if you say, “Look, Optatus, whom I knew, did make me a thief, because he was my colleague and I used to approach the altar with him while he committed these things; but I do not care, because it is a light sin, while those men made you a traitor and a murderer,” I answer that I do not grant that I too have been made a traitor and a murderer by others' sins because you have confessed that you were made a thief by another's sin; for you were made a thief not by our judgment but by your own mouth. We say that each carries his own load, as the apostle bears witness; but you, not because you committed theft or consented to theft, but because you supposed that what another did concerned you, have of your own accord put your shoulders under the load of Optatus. For as the apostle says, speaking about foods, “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean through him; but to him who thinks something unclean, to him it is unclean,” so by the same rule it can be said that others' sins do not concern those whom they displease, but if anyone thinks they concern him, they concern him. So you do not hold us as traitors or murderers, even if you prove something of the kind about those who share the sacraments with us; but we hold you a thief, even if whatever Optatus did displeases you, not by our slander but by your own verdict. And so that you do not think this light, read the apostle saying, “Nor will thieves possess the kingdom of God.” Those who will not possess the kingdom of God will certainly not be on the right among those to whom it will be said, “Come, blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” If they are not there, where will they be but on the left, among those to whom it will be said, “Go into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”? In vain, then, do you make yourself secure by thinking light a sin that separates from the kingdom of God and sends into eternal fire. How much better to take refuge in the true confession and say: “Each of us will carry his own load, and the last winnowing fork will separate the chaff from the wheat”!

But no doubt you fear that someone will say to you at once: “Why, then, while you try to lay others' loads on others, have you dared to separate yourselves from the Lord's harvest throughout the world before the last winnowing?” So you, who are displeased by the deeds of your people, while you guard against being charged with the schism that you all made, entangle yourselves even in sins you did not commit; and while the eloquent Petilian fears that I may be allowed to say that I am not such as he thinks Caecilian was, he is himself forced to say that he is such as he knows Optatus was. Or are you not such as all Africa cries out that he was? Then neither are we such as those whom you charge against us, as your error suspects or your fury defames or the truth proves them; much less is the Lord's grain through all nations, which has not even heard the names of these men, of that kind. There is, then, no reason why you should perish in so great a crime of separation and sacrilege of schism. And yet if you suffer anything by divine judgment for so great an impiety, you even say that you are baptized in your own blood; so that it is not enough that you feel no compunction at being divided, unless you also boast at being punished.

Petilian said: “But you persist in the same thing: ‘He who has once been washed has no need except to wash his feet.’ Once is what has an author; once is what truth confirms.”

Augustine answered: Baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit has Christ as its author, not any man; and Christ is the truth, not any man.

Petilian said: “For since you, being guilty, commit falsehoods, I do not make a second baptism of what you yourself do not make even once.”

Augustine answered: You do not prove us guilty; and if a guilty man baptizes with a false baptism, then all who are baptized by those who are already guilty among you, not only openly but secretly, do not have true baptism. For if the one who gives baptism gives something of God's, how does he give something of God's when he is already guilty before God, if a guilty man does not give true baptism? For you wait until he is guilty in our eyes too, as though what he is to give were yours.

Petilian said: “For if you mix false things with true, falsehood often imitates the truth in the same footsteps. So, so a painting imitates the nature of a man, and the false face of truth expresses the real with colours. So, so the brightness of a mirror seizes the face, so as to give it back, and imitates it to the eyes; so, so it offers to those who approach their own features, so that the face of the one approaching meets itself in turn; and so strong is the clean deceit that the eyes looking through recognize themselves as if in another. The image of a shadow too, when it stands, largely doubles things, dividing unity by a lie. Is it therefore true, because the figure lies? But it is one thing to paint a man, another to beget one. For who fashions false infants for a father who longs for sons, or who would expect true heirs from the lie of a painting? Surely it is the mark of a mad mind to abandon what is true and love a painting.”

Augustine answered: Are you not ashamed to say that the falsity of a man, even the most deceitful man, harms the baptism of Christ? God forbid that the Lord's grain, which was ordered to grow among the tares through the whole field, that is, this world, until the harvest, that is, until the end of the age, should be believed to have perished by your curses. But even in those very tares, which we are commanded not to gather up but to tolerate until the end, and in the very chaff, which will be wholly separated only by the last winnowing fork, does anyone dare to say that the baptism given and received in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is false? Those of your colleagues or presbyters whom you depose from office when convicted by the testimony of pregnant women (since such examples are not lacking anywhere): I ask whether, before they were convicted, they were deceitful or truthful. You will surely answer, “Deceitful.” Why, then, did they both have and give true baptism? Why did human deceit not corrupt the divine truth in them? Is it not most truly written, “For the holy Spirit of discipline will flee from deceit”? Since, then, the Holy Spirit fled from these deceitful men, why was the truth of baptism with them, unless because the Holy Spirit fled from the man's deceit, not from the truth of the sacrament? Further, if even the deceitful have true baptism, the one who has it, though he received it from a most deceitful baptizer, has the same thing that the truthful have. So you ought to see that it is rather your speech that is coloured with childish paints, and therefore whoever neglects the living word and delights in such cosmetics is the one who loves a painting instead of the truth.

Petilian said: “But the apostle Paul says, ‘One God, one faith, one baptism.’ We profess one; for it is certain that those who think there are two are mad.”

Augustine answered: You say these things against us, but in your madness you do not know it. For those speak of two baptisms who think that the righteous have one and the unrighteous another, whereas it belongs neither to the one nor to the other, but to Christ, one in both; although they themselves are not one, but the one thing which is one the former have for salvation, the latter for destruction.

Petilian said: “But to make a comparison: to the mad the sun seems double, although a dark cloud often runs against it, and its discoloured face, struck by the brightness, seems to send out rays of its own as the sun's rays come back from it. So, so in the faith of baptism it is one thing to seek images, another to recognize the truth.”

Augustine answered: What are you saying, I ask? When a dark cloud, struck by the sun's rays, reflects them, do two suns, as it were, appear to the mad and not to all who look? And when it seems so to the mad, it seems so to them alone. But let it not trouble you that I give this warning: see rather whether it is not mad to say such things and to talk like this. Still, what you meant to say is clearly this: that the righteous have the reality of baptism and the unrighteous an image. If so, I venture to say that there was an image in that man of yours to whom not God but a certain Count was god, and the reality either in you or in the one who elegantly aimed that saying at him, when he said to him, “to whom God is companion.” So distinguish those whom each of them baptized: approve the true baptism in the one group, and from the other shut out the image and bring in the reality.

Petilian said: “But to run through these lesser points: does he declare the law who is not a magistrate of the court? Or is what he says law, when a private person disturbs public laws? Is not the guilty man rather not only of no use, but held liable along with what he forges, as a forger?”

Augustine answered: What if this private person and forger gives someone a law of the emperor? When the man compares it with those who have it and finds it to be the same, does he not attend not to the one from whom he received it but to what he received? When a forger gives something from his own forgery, it is false; but when something true that belongs to another is given by someone, even if given by a forger, though he is not truthful, what is given is true.

Petilian said: “Or if someone knows a priest's prayers by heart, is he therefore a priest because with sacrilegious mouth he publishes the priest's prayer?”

Augustine answered: You say this as though we were now asking who is a true priest, and not what is true baptism. For a man to be a true priest, he must be clothed not with the sacrament alone but also with righteousness, as it is written, “Let your priests be clothed with righteousness.” But one who is a priest by the sacrament alone, as the high priest Caiaphas was, the persecutor of the one and truest Priest, though he himself is not truthful, still what he gives is true, if he gives not what is his but what is God's; as was said of Caiaphas himself: “He did not say this of himself, but being high priest he prophesied.” And yet, to use the comparison you yourself put forward, if you hear from someone, even a profane man, a priest's prayer formed from the words and mysteries of the gospel, can you say to him, “It is not true,” though he himself is not only not truthful but no priest at all? For the apostle Paul said that a certain testimony of some prophet or other of the Cretans, who was not counted among God's prophets, was true. He says: “One of them, their own prophet, said: Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies. This testimony is true.” If, then, the apostle himself attested the testimony of some foreigner or other because he found it true, why should we not, wherever we find what is Christ's and true, even if the one with whom it is found is perverse and deceitful, distinguish the vice that the man has from the truth that he has, not as his own but as God's, and say, “This sacrament is true,” as Paul said, “This testimony is true”? Do we therefore say, “The man himself is truthful,” because we say, “This sacrament is true”? Did the apostle count that prophet among the prophets of God because he confirmed as true what he found true in him? Likewise the same apostle, when he was at Athens, noticed among the altars of demons a certain altar on which was written, “To an unknown god,” and he took up this testimony to build them up in Christ, mentioning it in his speech and adding, “What you worship in ignorance, this we proclaim to you.” Because he found that altar among the altars of idols, or set up by sacrilegious men, did he therefore condemn or reject what was true in it? Or, because of the true thing he had read on it, did he persuade them to follow the sacrileges of the pagans as well? Then, when he wanted to make known the Lord himself, unknown to them but known to him, in a way suited to their understanding, as he judged fitting, he said among other things: “And indeed he is not far from each one of us; for in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own have said.” Here too, because he found testimonies of the truth among sacrilegious men, did he either approve them because of these, or condemn these because of them? But you must always be in error, as long as you violate God's sacraments because of men's vices, or think that we, because of God's sacraments, which we will not violate in you, take on also the sacrilege of your schism.

Petilian said: “For all power is from God, not in the man who has power; as the Lord Jesus Christ answered Pontius Pilate: ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above’; and again, as John says: ‘A man can do nothing unless it has been given him from heaven.’ Show us, then, traitor, when you received power to counterfeit the mysteries.”

Augustine answered: You rather show when the whole world, through which Christ's inheritance is spread, and that great multitude of nations where the apostles founded churches, lost the power to baptize. You will never show it; not only because you slander them and do not show them to be traitors, but because, even if you showed it, the crime of any wicked men whatever, whether unknown, or deceitful, or to be tolerated like tares or chaff, cannot overturn the promises of God, so that all nations should not be blessed in the seed of Abraham; and from these promises you make yourselves strangers, since you refuse to have the communion of unity with all nations.

Petilian said: “For although baptism is one, it is consecrated in three stages. John gave water without the name of the Trinity, as he himself declared, saying: ‘I baptize you in the water of repentance; another will come who is stronger than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he baptizes you in the Holy Spirit and fire.’ Christ gave the Holy Spirit, as it is written: ‘He breathed in their face and said: Receive the Holy Spirit.’ And the Paraclete himself, fire blazing with crackling flames, came upon the apostles. O true divinity, which was seen to set alight, not to burn! As it is written: ‘Suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of a mighty wind rushing, and it filled the whole house where the apostles were sitting. And there appeared to them divided tongues as of fire, and it sat upon each of them; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in various tongues, as the Holy Spirit gave them utterance.’ You, then, persecutor, do not have even the water of repentance, since you hold the power not of John who was killed but of Herod who killed him. You, then, traitor, do not have Christ's Holy Spirit; for Christ was handed over to death, Christ did not hand over to death. For you the fire in the Spirit is alive in the underworld, able, raging with hungry tips, to blow on your limbs forever, not to finish them, as it is written of the infernal punishment of the guilty: ‘Their fire will not be quenched.’”

Augustine answered: You are that abusive railer, not a truthful disputant. Will you never stop saying such things, which, if you do not prove them, concern no one, and if you do prove them, do not concern at all the unity of the world, which is in the saints as in the grain? If we too chose to repay curses with curses, perhaps we too could rail eloquently; we too could say “with crackling flames,” though what is said ineptly does not sound eloquent to me at all. We too could say “raging with hungry tips”; but we do not want the tips of our pens, when read by any sane person, to be judged hungry for the sap of seriousness, nor the reader himself, feeding on no useful thoughts in them, to labour under a pointless fast. Look, I say that your Circumcellions burn with flames of fury that are not crackling but precipitating. If you answer, “What has that to do with us?” why should you not in turn hear, when you have charged whomever you please, “We too do not know them”? If you answer, “You will not prove it,” why should the world not answer you in turn, “Nor do you prove it”? So let us agree, if you please, that you will not charge us with the wicked whom you think ours, nor I you with yours. So you will see that, with this pact so just, agreed and confirmed, you have nothing to charge against the seed of Abraham in all nations. But I plainly find a great thing to charge you with: why, then, did you impiously separate yourselves from the seed of Abraham that is in all nations? This you have no way of defending. For we each clear ourselves of others' crimes; but that you are not in communion with all the nations that are blessed in the seed of Abraham is both a great crime and the crime not of some of you but of all.

And yet you know and recall that the Holy Spirit came in such a way that those whom he had then filled spoke in all tongues. What did that sign and wonder mean? Why is the Holy Spirit now given in such a way that no one to whom he is given can speak in all tongues, unless because that miracle then foreshadowed that all nations would believe and so the gospel would be in all tongues? This too was foretold so long before in the psalm: “There are no speeches or words where their voices are not heard.” This was said because of those who, on receiving the Holy Spirit, were to speak in all tongues. But because it signified that the gospel would be in all the tongues of the nations and that the body of Christ would sound in all tongues through the whole world, it went on to say, “Their sound has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” That is why the true church is hidden from no one. Hence what he himself says in the gospel: “A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.” And so in the same psalm it is joined on: “He has set his tabernacle in the sun” (that is, in open view, as we read it said in the books of Kingdoms, “What you did in secret, you will suffer in the sun”), “and he, like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, has rejoiced as a giant to run his course; his going out is from the highest heaven” (there you have the Lord's coming in the flesh) “and his return to the height of it” (there you have the resurrection and ascension), “and there is none who can hide himself from his heat”: there you have the coming of the Holy Spirit, whom he sent in fiery tongues to show the fervour of love; which surely he does not have who does not keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace with the church that is in all tongues.

Now as for your saying that baptism is indeed one but consecrated in three stages, and your dividing these three among single persons, so that you assigned the water to John, the Holy Spirit to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fire third to the Paraclete sent from above: consider for a moment how great an error this is. You were led to think so because John says, “I indeed baptize in water, but he who comes after me is greater than I; he baptizes you in the Holy Spirit and fire.” You did not choose to consider that the three are not fitted singly to three, the water to John, the Spirit to Christ, the fire to the Paraclete, but rather that these three belong to two: one to John and the other two to the Lord. For it was not said, “I indeed baptize you in water, but he who comes after me is greater than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he baptizes you in the Holy Spirit; and the Paraclete who is to come after him, he baptizes you in fire,” but: “I indeed,” he says, “in water; but he who comes after me, in the Holy Spirit and fire.” He assigned one to himself, two to him. So you see how the number deceived you. Pay further attention. You said that one baptism was consecrated in three stages, by water, Holy Spirit, and fire, and you set three persons to the three, John to the water, Christ to the Spirit, the Paraclete to the fire. If, then, John's water belongs to the same baptism whose unity is commended, those whom the apostle Paul found baptized by John ought not to have been baptized at his command; for they already had water belonging, as you say, to the same baptism. It remained for them to receive the Spirit and the fire, which John lacked, so that the baptism consecrated, as you assert, in three stages might be completed. But since they were ordered by apostolic authority to be baptized, it is clearly declared that John's water did not belong to the baptism of Christ, but served for the time required by another dispensation.