Against the Letters of Petilian 3.9–3.30

Not only you whom the very truth of Christ pleases in us, however much and wherever it is preached through us, and who, because you willingly hear it through the ministry of our tongue, however small, think well and kindly of us too, are secure whatever we may be, because your hope is in him whom we preach to you by his mercy upon you; but also all of you who received the sacrament of holy baptism by our ministry, rejoice in the same security, because you were baptized not in us but in Christ. So you put on not us but Christ; and I did not ask you whether you were turning to me but to the living God, nor whether you believed in me but in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. If you answered with a truthful mind, what saved you was not the removal of the dirt of the flesh but the questioning of a good conscience; not a fellow servant but the Lord, not the herald but the judge. For it is not true, as Petilian said inconsiderately, that the conscience of the giver, or, as he added, the conscience of one who gives in holiness, is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver. For when what is God's is given, even an unholy conscience gives something holy. That conscience, whether holy or not, certainly cannot be inspected by the receiver; but plainly what is given can be, and once it is known to belong to him who is always holy, through whatever minister it is received, it is received with the greatest security. For unless the words from the chair of Moses were holy, the Truth would not say, “Do what they say.” But if those who gave the holy words were themselves holy, he would not say, “Do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” For a grape is in no way gathered from thorns, because it never springs from the roots of thorns; but when the branch of a vine has entangled itself in a thorny hedge, the fruit that hangs there is not therefore shunned; the thorn is avoided, the grape is picked.

So, as I have often said and strongly insist, whatever we may be, you are secure who have God as Father and his church as mother. For though goats are pastured together with sheep, they will not stand on the right; though chaff is threshed together with wheat, it will not enter the barn; though bad fish swim together with good within the Lord's nets, they will not be put into the vessels. Let no one glory even in a good man; let no one flee God's good things even in a bad man.

Let these things suffice for you, dearest brothers, Catholic Christians, for the present business. If you hold them with Catholic love, since you are one flock, secure under one shepherd, I do not care much that any enemy rails at me, your fellow member of the flock, or indeed your dog, provided he compels me to bark for your defence rather than for my own. Yet if my defence were needed for the case, I would use a very brief and easy one: namely, the whole time of my life before I received Christ's baptism, as regards my desires and errors, I disapprove and detest along with everyone, so that in defending that time I may not seem to seek my own glory rather than that of him who by his grace freed me even from myself. Hence when I hear that life of mine blamed, with whatever intention the one who does it does it, I am not so ungrateful as to grieve; for as much as he accuses my vice, so much do I praise my physician. Why, then, should I labour to defend those past and abolished evils of mine, about which Petilian said many false things but left unsaid more true ones? As for the time of my life after baptism, to those of you who know me I speak superfluously of the things that can be known to men; and those who do not know me ought not to be so unjust to me as to believe Petilian about me rather than you. For if a praising friend is not to be believed, neither is a detracting enemy. There remain the hidden things of a man, where conscience alone is witness, and it cannot be a witness before men. In these Petilian says I am a Manichee, speaking of another's conscience; I say I am not, speaking of my own. Choose whom you believe. However, since not even this short and easy defence of mine is needed, where the question concerns not the merit of one man of whatever kind, but the truth of the holy church, I must say more to you too, all of you in the party of Donatus who have read the curses that Petilian wrote against me; which I would not hear from him if I despised your perdition, if I had not the heart of Christian love.

What wonder, then, if, when I draw inward the grains shaken out of the Lord's threshing floor together with earth and chaff, I suffer the injury of rebounding dust, or, when I diligently seek my Lord's lost sheep, I am torn by the briars of thorny tongues? I beg you, set aside party zeal for a little while and judge between me and Petilian with some fairness. I want you to know the church's case, he wants you to know mine. For what other reason, except that he does not dare tell you not to believe my witnesses, whom I constantly bring forward in the church's case (for they are the prophets and apostles and the Lord of the prophets and apostles himself, Christ), whereas whatever he wishes to say about me you readily believe, a man against a man, your own man against a stranger? And if I bring forward any witnesses of my life, what great thing is it for him to say they are not to be believed and quickly persuade you of it, especially since whoever says a word for me will at once be counted an enemy of the party of Donatus and therefore of yours? So Petilian reigns; when he hurls any abuse at me, you all acclaim and applaud him. He has found himself a case he can win, but with you as judges; he needs neither witness nor proof, for whom the only proof of what he says is that he abundantly curses the man you hate most. For since, when the testimonies of divine Scripture for the Catholic Church are read so thick and clear, he remains mute, to your grief, he has chosen a subject where he may speak with your applause, though defeated. But if he says such things against me a thousand times over, or even more wicked ones, it is enough for me, for the matter I am now pursuing, that whatever I may be in it, the church for which I speak is unconquered.

For I am a man of Christ's threshing floor: chaff if bad, grain if good. Petilian's tongue is not the winnowing fork of this threshing floor; and so whatever evil he may say, even truly, against its chaff in no way prejudices its grain; and whatever curses and slanders he throws against the grain itself, their faith is exercised on earth and their reward increased in heaven. For to God's holy servants, who serve as soldiers of God in holiness, not against Petilian and such flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and rulers of such darkness (as all adversaries of the truth are, to whom would that we might say, “You were once darkness, but now light in the Lord”): to God's servants serving in this warfare, then, whatever slanderous abuse is spoken by enemies, which may create a bad reputation among the malicious and the rashly credulous, are weapons of the left hand; with these too the devil is defeated. For when we are tested by good reputation, whether we exalt ourselves in pride, and are tested by bad reputation, whether we love those very enemies by whom it is invented against us, we conquer the devil by the weapons of righteousness on the right hand and on the left. When the apostle had mentioned these, saying, “by the weapons of righteousness on the right and on the left,” he at once, as if explaining what he said, added, “through glory and dishonour, through ill repute and good repute,” and so on, counting glory and good repute among the weapons of the right hand, and dishonour and ill repute among those of the left.

If, then, I am a servant of God and a soldier not rejected, however eloquent a railer Petilian proves against me, ought I to take it ill that a most skilful smith of left-hand weapons has been procured for me? I must fight with these most skilfully, with the help of my Lord, and strike with them the one against whom I fight invisibly, who with most perverse and ancient cunning craftily aims and works so that I may hate Petilian because of these things and so be unable to fulfil Christ's command, “Love your enemies.” May his mercy turn this from me, who loved me and gave himself for me, so that hanging on the cross he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” and taught me to say of Petilian and such enemies of mine, “Lord, forgive them, for they do not know what they are saying.”

So if I obtain from you, as I have aimed, that, with all party zeal removed from your minds, you are fair judges between me and Petilian, I will show you that he has not answered my writings, so that you may understand that, compelled by lack of truth, he abandoned the case and threw what curses he could at the man who argued it in such a way that he could not answer. Yet what I am going to say is so plainly clear that, even if your minds are estranged from me by party zeal and hatred of me, provided only you read both, you will surely confess among yourselves in your hearts that I have spoken the truth.

For in answering the first part of his writings, which had then come into my hands, I passed over the abusive and sacrilegious wordiness in which he says, “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,” and I took up for examination and refutation what follows, where he says, “For it is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver”; and I asked from what source the one who receives baptism is to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it.

Read now the very copious curses which he poured out against me, puffed up and angry, and see whether he answered my question: from what source is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the receiver does not know it? I beg you, search attentively, shake out every page, count every line, turn over every word, pick apart every syllable, and tell me, if you find it, where he answered: when the giver's conscience is polluted, from what source is the conscience of the one who is to receive it, not knowing this, to be cleansed?

For what did it matter that he added a word which he said I had taken away, and contended that he had written thus: “For it is the conscience of one who gives in holiness that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver”? For, so that you may know that I did not take it away, the addition does nothing to hinder my inquiry and nothing to relieve his failure. On those very words I ask again, and inquire whether he has answered: if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source is the receiver's conscience cleansed when the giver's conscience is stained and the one about to receive does not know it? Demand that this be answered, and do not allow the man to abandon the case and wander off in abuse. If the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to (see that I did not say “the conscience of the giver,” but added “of one who gives in holiness”), if, I say, the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it?

Let him go now and, with panting lungs and swollen throat, accuse me as a dialectician; or rather, not me, but let him summon dialectic itself before the popular court as a defendant, as if it were the craft of lying, and open wide against it the mouth of a forensic advocate with as crashing a din as he likes. Let him say what he wants before the unlearned, at which the learned may be disgusted and the unlearned deceived. Let him brand me, for my rhetoric, with the name of Tertullus the orator, by whom Paul was accused; let him give himself, for his advocacy, in which he boasts of his former power, the name of Paraclete, and rave that for this reason he was once, not now, a namesake of the Holy Spirit. Let him exaggerate with great relish the impurities of the Manichees and try to twist them against me by barking. Let him read out the proceedings against condemned men, some unknown to me and some known, and, because a former friend of mine named me there in my absence rather for his own defence, let him turn it, by some new law of his own, into the slander of a crime prejudged. Let him read the titles of my letters, inscribed by himself or his people as they pleased, and exult as if he had caught me confessing in them. Let him defame the blessed bread, given simply and cheerfully, with the ridiculous name of poisonous filth and madness, and think so badly of your hearts as to presume that he can be believed that love-charms were given to a woman with her husband not only aware but even approving. Let him want to count against me what the man who was to ordain me to the episcopate wrote about me in anger when I was still a presbyter, and not want to count for me that he asked and obtained pardon from a holy council for having so sinned against us; so ignorant or forgetful of Christian gentleness and of the gospel command that he even accuses what was mercifully forgiven to a brother humbly asking pardon for himself.

Let him go on also in wordy but plainly empty speech into matters he is wholly ignorant of, or rather in which he abuses the ignorance of very many; and from the confession of a certain woman, who had been a dedicated virgin in the Catholic Church and said she was a catechumen of the Manichees, let him say and write what he likes about their baptism, not knowing, or pretending not to know, that among them catechumens are not so called because baptism is due to them at some time, but that those are so called who are also called hearers, because they cannot keep the precepts, as better and greater, which are kept by those whom they think should be distinguished and honoured with the name of the elect. Let him contend with amazing rashness, either mistaken or deceiving, that I was even a presbyter of the Manichees; let him set out the words of the fourth book of my Confessions, which are perfectly clear in themselves to readers and from much that is said before and after, in whatever sense he likes, and argue from them; and finally, let him exult as victor at having put back two words of his which I, as a thief of his words, had taken away.

In all these things, certainly, as you will be able to learn or recognize by reading, he exercised the force of his tongue with whatever range of boasting he pleased; yet nowhere did he say from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed when he does not know the giver's to be stained. But I, amid his noise or after his great and, as he thinks, very terrible noise, repeat this very thing slowly, as they say, and well, so that he may at least answer it; I demand: if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source is the one to be cleansed who does not know the giver's conscience to be stained? And in his whole letter I find nothing said to this.

Perhaps one of you will now say to me: “All these things he said against you he meant to serve to disfigure you, and through you those with whom you are in communion, so that neither they themselves nor those whom you are trying to bring over to your communion would think you of any further weight. For the rest, one must consider from the point where he set out the words of your letter whether he answered nothing to them.” Let us do so, then: let us consider his writings from that very point. Excepting the preface, in which I wished to prepare the reader's mind and to pass over a few first words of his, insulting rather than relevant, I said: “For it is the conscience of the giver that is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver. What if the giver's conscience is hidden, and perhaps stained? How will it be able to cleanse the receiver's conscience, if, as he says, the conscience of the giver is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver? For if he says that whatever evil lies hidden in the giver's conscience does not concern the receiver, that ignorance will perhaps avail so far as this, that the receiver, not knowing, cannot be stained by the conscience of his baptizer. Let it be granted, then, that another's stained conscience, when it is unknown, does not stain; but can it also cleanse? From what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it, especially since he adds and says: For he who has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt?”

All these words of my letter Petilian set out to refute. Let us see, then, whether he refuted them, whether he answered at all. For I add the words which he slanderously says I took away, and I repeat the same thing so, or even more briefly (for by adding these two words he has greatly helped the brevity of this proposition): if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt, from what source is the receiver's conscience cleansed when he does not know the giver's to be stained, and when he unknowingly receives faith from a faithless man? I ask from what source he is cleansed. Let him tell us; let him not go off onto something else, not spread fogs before the unlearned; at least, after many winding detours have been put in and gone through, let him at last some time tell us from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed when the stained conscience of the faithless baptizer is hidden, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt. For he unknowingly receives from a faithless man who has not the conscience of one who gives in holiness, but a stained and hidden one. From what source, then, is he cleansed, from what source does he receive faith? For if he is not cleansed then, nor receives faith then, when the faithless and stained baptizer is hidden, why, when the baptizer is afterwards exposed and condemned, is he not baptized again, so as to be cleansed and receive faith? But if, while that faithless and stained man is hidden, he is cleansed and receives faith, from what source is he cleansed, from what source does he receive, where there is no conscience of one who gives in holiness to cleanse that of the receiver? Let him say this, let him answer this: from what source is he cleansed, from what source does he receive, if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and it is not there when the baptizer, stained and faithless, lay hidden? Nothing at all has been answered to this.

But see, hard pressed in the case, he again makes a cloudy and windy attack on me, so as to obscure the clear sky of truth, and becomes copious out of utter poverty, not by saying true things but by vomiting empty curses. Hold fast, most attentively and firmly, to what he ought to answer, that is, from what source the receiver's conscience is cleansed when the giver's stained conscience is hidden, so that his blast may not perhaps knock it out of your hands and you yourselves be swept away by the murky storm of his turbulent speech, so as not to know at all from where you have departed or where you should return; and see the man wander where he can, while he cannot stand by the business he has undertaken. See how much he says while having nothing to say. He says that I slip like something slippery but am held; that I neither build up nor confirm what I object; that I devise uncertain things for certain ones; that I do not let readers believe what is true, but make them suspect doubtful things more deeply. He says I have the damnable mind of the Academic Carneades; he even tries to suggest what the Academics think of the falsity or deceptiveness of human sense; and in this too, quite ignorant of what he is saying, he asserts that they say snow is black when it is white, and silver black, that a tower seems round or cylindrical when it is long, that an oar is broken in the water when it is whole. And all this because, when he had said, “The conscience of the giver, or of one who gives in holiness, is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver,” I said against it, “What if the giver's conscience is hidden, and perhaps stained?” Is this the black snow, the black silver, the round tower for a long one, the oar broken in the water for a whole one? For I said a thing that can be thought and cannot be, that the giver's conscience is hidden and perhaps stained?

And he goes on and cries: “What is ‘what if,’ what is ‘perhaps,’ but the uncertain and inconstant hesitation of one in doubt, of which that author of yours says: What if I now go back to those who say: What if the sky now falls?” Is what I said, “What if the giver's conscience is hidden, and perhaps stained?”, as if I had said, “What if the sky now falls?” “What if” was said, of course, because it can happen that it is hidden, and it can happen that it is not. For when what he thinks or what he has committed is not known, the giver's conscience is certainly hidden from the receiver; but when his sin is made manifest, it is not hidden. “And perhaps stained” was said, because it can happen that it is hidden and clean, and again it can happen that it is hidden and stained. That is why “what if,” that is why “perhaps.” Is this like “What if the sky now falls”? O how often have men been convicted and have confessed that they had stained and adulterous consciences when ignorant people were baptized by them, after they were degraded once their crime was made manifest; and yet the sky did not fall! What are Pilus and Furius doing here, who defended injustice against justice? What is the atheist Protagoras doing here, who denied that God exists, so that the prophet seems to have foretold of him, “The fool has said in his heart, There is no God”? What are these men doing here, why were they named, except to intervene for a man who has nothing to say, so that, while at least something is said about them, though to no purpose, the case may seem to be being pleaded, and what has not been answered may be believed to have been answered?

Finally, if these two or three words, “what if” and “perhaps,” are so intolerable that on their account the Academics, long asleep, are roused, and Carneades and Pilus and Furius and Protagoras and black snow and the falling sky and other such mad and absurd things, let them be removed from the midst. For in truth what we want to say can be said without them. See, it is enough what was put a little later and set out by him from my letter: “From what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, when the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it?” Surely here there is no “what if” and “perhaps.” So let it be answered. Pay attention, in case he answers it in what follows: “But I,” he says, “bind you, quibbler, to the faith of believing, so that you may wander no further. Why do you turn life aside by arguments of folly to errors? Why do you disturb the reason of faith about irrational things? With this one word I hold and convict you.” Petilian said this, not I. These are from Petilian's letter; but I have now added to it those two words which he accuses me of taking away, and nonetheless have shown that the sentence of my inquiry, which he does not answer, stands fixed much more briefly and clearly. These certainly are the two: “in holiness” and “knowingly,” so that it is not “the conscience of the giver” but “the conscience of one who gives in holiness,” and not “he who has received faith from the faithless” but “he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless.” These words I had not taken away; I had not found them in the copy that was given me. It may be that it was faulty; for this too is not incredible, unless Academic odium is to be stirred up against me even over this, and my saying that the copy was faulty is asserted to be like saying snow is black. For why should I repay him a rash suspicion and say that he added afterwards what he pretended I took away, when the copy, which does not get angry, can bear this mark of faultiness without any slanderous rashness of mine?

And the first of these, “in holiness,” does not hinder at all my inquiry, by which he is hard pressed, whether I say, “if the conscience of the giver is looked to,” or, “if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, from what source, then, is the one who receives baptism to be cleansed, if the giver's conscience is polluted and the one about to receive does not know it?” As for the other added word, “knowingly,” so that it is said not “for he who has received faith from the faithless” but “he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt,” I admit that, as though it were missing, I said some things whose loss I readily accept, since they rather delayed my ease than helped my ability. For how much more readily, how much more fully and briefly I ask thus: if the conscience of one who gives in holiness is looked to, to cleanse that of the receiver, and he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt, from what source is he cleansed from whom the stained conscience of one not giving in holiness is hidden, and from what source does he receive true faith who is unknowingly baptized by a faithless man? Let it be said from what source, and there the whole question of baptism will be clear, there all that is sought will shine out; but if it is said, not if the time is used up in cursing.

So whatever he slanders about these two words as taken away, or boasts about as added, you see that it does not hinder my question at all; and he, finding no answer to it, yet not to be silent, rushes again and again at my person, departing, I would say, from the case, if he had ever approached it. For as if the question were about me and not about the truth of the church or of baptism, he says that I argued with those two words removed so that it might not harm my conscience that I did not know the sacrilegious conscience of my defiler, as he calls him. If that were so, that word “knowingly,” as set down, would rather help me when added and harm me when removed. For if I had wanted to defend myself on the ground that I was thought not to have known my baptizer's conscience, I would take Petilian as speaking for me when he says, not in just any way, “he who has received faith from the faithless,” but, “he who knowingly has received faith from the faithless receives not faith but guilt”; so that I might boast from this that I received not guilt but faith, because I would say: “I did not receive knowingly from a faithless man; as a man, I did not know the conscience of the man who gave.” So see, and count if you can, how many superfluous things he says against that one “I did not know,” which he represents me as having said, though I did not say it at all; because neither was the question about me, so that I should say it, nor did any crime appear in the one who baptized me, so that I should be compelled to say for my defence that I did not know his conscience.

And yet this man, so as not to answer what I said, sets before himself what I did not say and distracts men from attending to his debt, so that what must be answered may not be demanded. He often interposes: “‘I did not know,’ you say,” and answers, “But even if you did not know,” and as it were convicts me, so that I may not be allowed to say, “I did not know.” He mentions Mensurius, Caecilian, Macarius, Taurinus, and Romanus, and asserts that they did things against the church of God which I could not be ignorant of, since I am an African and already almost an old man in age; whereas, as I hear, Mensurius died in the unity of communion before the party of Donatus split off, and as for Caecilian's case, I have read that they themselves brought it to Constantine, and that he was acquitted by the bishops whom that emperor gave as judges, once and again, and, when they appealed to him, by the emperor himself a third time. And whatever Macarius, Taurinus, and Romanus did, by judicial or executive power, against their obstinate fury for the sake of unity, it is established that they did it according to the laws which those same men, by taking Caecilian's case to the emperor's judgment, compelled to be enacted and enforced against themselves.

Among many things quite irrelevant he also says that I was struck by a sentence of the proconsul Messianus, so that I fled from Africa; and because of this falsehood, which, if he did not invent it himself, he certainly believed maliciously from malicious inventors, how many other false things in consequence he was not afraid, with amazing rashness, not only to say but even to write! Whereas I came to Milan before the consulship of Bauto, and on the Kalends of January recited a panegyric for that consul before so great an assembly and gathering of people, as my profession of rhetoric then required; and I returned to Africa from that sojourn after the death of the tyrant Maximus; whereas the proconsul Messianus heard the Manichees after the consulship of Bauto, as the date of the proceedings inserted by the same Petilian shows. If it were necessary to prove these things to those who doubt or believe the contrary, I could bring forward many men eminent in the world as most reliable witnesses of the whole of that period of my life.