Letters 185.8–185.26

So, as the apostle says, let us not grow weary, but while we have time let us do good to all. Let all who can be called to salvation, and recalled from destruction, be called by the sermons of Catholic preachers and by the laws of Catholic princes: partly through those who obey divine admonitions, partly through those who obey imperial orders. For when emperors make bad laws for falsehood against truth, those who believe rightly are tested and those who persevere are crowned; but when they make good laws for truth against falsehood, the raging are frightened and the understanding are corrected. Whoever, then, refuses to obey the laws of emperors that are passed against the truth of God gains a great reward; but whoever refuses to obey the laws of emperors that are passed for the truth of God gains a great punishment. For in the times of the prophets too, all the kings who did not forbid and overthrow among the people of God what had been instituted against God's commandment are blamed, and those who did forbid and overthrow it are praised above the merits of others. And King Nebuchadnezzar, when he was a slave of idols, made a sacrilegious law that the image should be worshiped; but those who refused to obey his impious decree acted piously and faithfully. Yet the same king, corrected by a divine miracle, made a pious and praiseworthy law for the truth, that whoever spoke blasphemy against the true God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego should perish utterly with his house. If any despised this law and justly suffered what had been decreed, they ought to have said what these men say: that they were righteous because they suffered persecution by the king's law. And they certainly would have said it, if they had been as mad as these men are, who divide the members of Christ, exorcise the sacraments of Christ, and boast of persecution because they are prohibited from doing these things by the laws of the emperors, which these have made for the unity of Christ; and they falsely boast of their innocence, and seek from men the glory of martyrs, which they cannot receive from the Lord.

But the true martyrs are those of whom the Lord says, “Blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake.” Not, then, those who suffer persecution for iniquity and for the impious division of Christian unity, but those who suffer it for righteousness' sake, these are true martyrs. For Hagar too suffered persecution from Sarah; and she was holy who inflicted it, and she was wicked who suffered it. Is holy David, whom wicked Saul persecuted, to be compared with this persecution that Hagar suffered? There is certainly a great difference, not because he suffered, but because he suffered for righteousness' sake. And the Lord himself was crucified with robbers; but those whom the suffering joined, the cause separated. Therefore in the psalm that voice must be understood as that of the true martyrs, wishing to be distinguished from false martyrs: “Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from an unholy nation.” He did not say, “Distinguish my punishment,” but, “Distinguish my cause.” For the punishment of the ungodly can be similar, but the cause of the martyrs is dissimilar; theirs too is that voice: “They have persecuted me unjustly; help me.” He thought himself worthy to be helped justly because they were persecuting unjustly; for if they had been persecuting justly, he should not have been helped but corrected.

But if they think that no one can justly persecute anyone, as they said at the conference that the true church is the one that suffers persecution, not the one that inflicts it, I pass over what I mentioned above: that, if it is as they say, Caecilian belonged to the true church when their predecessors persecuted him by accusing him all the way to the emperor's judgment. For we say that he belonged to the true church not because he suffered persecution, but because he suffered it for righteousness' sake; and that they were estranged from the church not because they persecuted, but because they persecuted unjustly. This, then, is what we say. But if they do not look for the reasons why anyone inflicts or suffers persecution, but think that this is the mark of a true Christian, that he does not inflict persecution but suffers it, without doubt they place Caecilian within that definition, since he did not inflict but suffered; and they put their own predecessors outside that definition, since they inflicted and did not suffer.

But this, as I said, I pass over; this I say: if the true church is the one that suffers persecution, not the one that inflicts it, let them ask the apostle what church Sarah signified when she inflicted persecution on the slave woman. For he says that our free mother, the heavenly Jerusalem, that is, the true church of God, was prefigured in that woman who afflicted the slave. But if we examine it better, the slave rather persecuted Sarah by her pride than Sarah her by restraining her: for the one was doing wrong, the other imposing discipline on pride. Next I ask: if good and holy people persecute no one but only suffer persecution, whose voice do they think it is in the psalm, where we read, “I will pursue my enemies and overtake them, and I will not turn back until they fail”? If, then, we wish to speak or recognize the truth, there is an unjust persecution, which the ungodly inflict on the church of Christ, and there is a just persecution, which the churches of Christ inflict on the ungodly. So the church is blessed which suffers persecution for righteousness' sake, but they are wretched who suffer persecution for unrighteousness. Accordingly, the church persecutes by loving, they by raging; the church in order to correct, they in order to overthrow; the church to call back from error, they to cast headlong into error. Finally, the church pursues its enemies and overtakes them until they fail in vanity, that they may advance in truth; but they, returning evil for good, because we take thought for their eternal salvation, try to take away even our temporal safety, so loving murder that they commit it on themselves when they cannot perpetrate it on others. For just as the church's love labors to free them from that perdition so that none of them may die, so their fury labors either to kill us, to feed the lust of their cruelty, or even to kill themselves, so as not to seem to have lost the power of killing people.

Those who do not know their custom think that they are killing themselves only now, when so many peoples are being freed from their insane domination on the occasion of these laws made for unity. But those who know what they used to do even before these laws are not surprised at their deaths, but remember their ways. Above all, when the worship of idols still existed, huge columns of crowds used to come to the most crowded festivals of the pagans, not to break the idols, but to be killed by the worshipers of idols. For if they had wished to do that with lawful authority, then, if anything had happened to them, they might have had some shadow of the name of martyrs; but they came only to be killed themselves while the idols remained intact. For the strongest young men among the idol worshipers each used to vow to the idols themselves as many as he might kill. Some even thrust themselves on armed travelers to be slaughtered, threatening terribly to strike them if they were not killed by them. Sometimes they violently extorted from passing judges that they be struck by executioners or by court officers. Hence one judge is said to have tricked them by ordering them to be bound as if to be executed and then let go, and so he escaped their onslaught unbloodied and unharmed. And indeed, killing themselves by steep precipices, by water and flames was a daily sport for them. The devil taught them these three kinds of death, so that, wishing to die, when they could find no one to frighten into striking them with his sword, they threw themselves over rocks or gave themselves to fires and whirlpools. Who must be believed to have taught them this, possessing their hearts, but he who also suggested to our Savior, as if from the law, that he throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple? They would surely drive his suggestion away from themselves if they carried Christ as teacher in their hearts. But because they have rather given place to the devil in themselves, either they perish like that herd of swine which the crowd of demons cast down from the mountain into the sea, or, snatched from those deaths and gathered into the loving bosom of the Catholic mother, they are freed as was the boy whom his father brought to the Lord to be healed of a demon, saying that he used to fall sometimes into water, sometimes into fire.

Hence great mercy is shown to them when, by these laws of the emperors, they are first snatched, unwilling, from that sect where they learned these evils through the doctrines of lying demons, so that afterward in the Catholic Church they may be healed by growing accustomed to good precepts and ways. For many of them, whose godly fervor of faith and love we now admire in the unity of Christ, give thanks to God with great joy that they are free of that error in which they thought those evils good; thanks which they would not now give willingly, had they not first, even unwillingly, left that wicked society. What shall we say of those who confess to us daily that they had long wanted to be Catholics, but lived among people among whom, through the weakness of fear, they could not be what they wanted, where, if they said one word for the Catholic Church, both they and their houses would be utterly destroyed? Who is so mad as to deny that help ought to have been given them by imperial decrees, so that they might be rescued from so great an evil, while those whom they feared are forced to fear, and by that same fear are either themselves corrected, or at least, while they pretend to be corrected, spare those who are corrected, by whom they were formerly feared?

But if they choose to kill themselves so that those who are to be freed may not be freed, and in this way to frighten the piety of those who free them, so that, while it is feared that certain lost men may perish, those may not be rescued from perdition who either already did not wish to perish or, if restrained, could avoid perishing: what does Christian love do here, especially since those who threaten their voluntary and frenzied deaths are very few in comparison with the peoples to be freed? What then does brotherly love do? Does it, while fearing for a few the passing fires of furnaces, abandon all to the eternal fires of hell, and leave so many, who either already wish or afterward would not be able to come to eternal life through Catholic peace, to everlasting destruction, by taking care that certain men do not die a voluntary death, men who live to hinder the salvation of others, whom they do not allow to live according to Christ's teaching, so that they may teach them, at any time, according to the custom of diabolical doctrine, to hasten to those voluntary deaths which are now feared in them? Or does it rather save those it can, even if those it cannot save perish of their own accord? For it ardently desires that all may live, but labors more that all may not perish. Thanks be to the Lord that among us, not indeed in all but in very many places, and through other parts of Africa, Catholic peace runs and has run without any deaths of these madmen. Those deadly things happen where there is a kind of people so frenzied and useless that they used to do the same things at other times too.

Before these laws were sent by the Catholic emperors, the teaching of the peace and unity of Christ was gradually growing, and each person, as he learned and was willing and able, crossed over to it from that party; yet among them the most insane bands of lost men were disturbing the peace of the innocent in various matters. What master was not compelled to fear his own slave, if the slave had fled to their protection? Who dared even to threaten a destroyer of property or the instigator? Who could demand payment from a wasteful steward, or from any debtor whatever, who asked for their help and defense? For fear of clubs and fires and immediate death, the records of the worst slaves were broken so that they might go free; bonds extorted from creditors were returned to debtors. Whoever had despised their harsh words was forced by harsher blows to do what they ordered. The houses of innocent people who had offended them were either razed to the ground or burned. Certain heads of families, born of honorable rank and brought up with a gentleman's education, were carried away barely alive after their beatings, or were tied to a millstone and forced by blows to turn it round like contemptible beasts of burden. For what help from the laws by the civil authorities availed anything against them? What official dared so much as breathe in their presence? What tax collector exacted what they did not wish? Who tried to avenge those killed by their violence, except that their own madness exacted punishment on them, when some, by provoking against themselves the swords of men whom they terrified with death so as to be struck by them, others over various precipices, others into water, others into fire, threw themselves everywhere into voluntary deaths and cast out their savage souls by punishments they inflicted on themselves?

Very many of those who were in that heretical superstition shuddered at these things, and when they thought it enough for their innocence that such things displeased them, the Catholics said to them: “If these evils do not pollute your innocence, how can you say that the Christian world is polluted by the sins of Caecilian, which are either false or at any rate unknown? How can you separate yourselves by a wicked crime from Catholic unity as from the Lord's threshing floor, which until the time of winnowing must have both the wheat to be stored in the barn and the chaff to be burned with fire?” And so a reason was given to some, so that a number crossed over to Catholic unity, ready to bear even the enmity of the lost; but more, though they wished it, did not dare to make enemies of men who had such license to rage; and some indeed suffered most cruel treatment from them when they had crossed over to us.

It also happened at Carthage that some of the bishops of that same party created a schism and ordained a deacon of theirs named Maximian, who was proud against his own bishop, as bishop against bishop, dividing the party of Donatus among the people of Carthage. Since this displeased most of them, they condemned this Maximian along with twelve others who were present at his ordination, but gave the rest belonging to that same schismatic society the opportunity to return by a fixed day. But afterward, for the sake of their own peace, they received back in their offices some of the twelve and some of those who had been granted a delay, who returned after the appointed day; and they did not dare [to rebaptize] those whom the condemned men had baptized outside their communion. This action of theirs began to be of great value for the Catholic Church against them, so that their mouths were completely shut. When this was spread abroad more urgently, as was right, for healing people's minds from schism, and was shown wherever possible in Catholic sermons and discussions that, for the peace of Donatus, they had received even their condemned men in full honor, and had not dared to annul the baptism which the condemned, or even those merely granted delay, had given outside their church, while they charged the whole world with the contamination of the sins of some unknown persons, against the peace of Christ, and emptied the baptism given even in those churches from which the Gospel itself came to Africa: very many were confounded and, blushing at the manifest truth, were corrected more often than usual, and much more so wherever any freedom to breathe from their cruelty existed.

Then indeed they so blazed up and were spurred on by such goads of hatred that hardly any churches of our communion could be safe from their ambushes, violence, and open robberies, and hardly any road was safe for travel for those who preached Catholic peace against their rage and refuted their madness with clear truth. A hard choice was thus put, so to speak, not only before laymen or any clerics, but even before the Catholic bishops themselves: either the truth had to be kept silent, or their savagery endured. But if the truth were kept silent, not only would no one be freed by its silence, but many would be lost by their seduction; and if by preaching the truth their fury was provoked to rage, though some were freed and our people strengthened, fear would again keep the weak from following the truth. So, when the church was afflicted by these straits, whoever thinks that everything should have been endured rather than asking that God's help be brought through Christian emperors pays too little attention to the fact that no good account could have been given of such negligence.

As for what those say who do not want just laws to be made against their impieties, that the apostles did not ask such things from the kings of the earth, they do not consider that the time was different then, and that everything is done in its own time. For what emperor had then believed in Christ, to serve him by making laws for piety against impiety, when that prophecy was still being fulfilled: “Why have the nations raged, and the peoples devised vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ”? What is said a little later in the same psalm was not yet being done: “And now, kings, understand; be instructed, you who judge the earth; serve the Lord in fear, and rejoice in him with trembling.” How then do kings serve the Lord in fear, except by forbidding and punishing with religious severity what is done against the Lord's commands? For a king serves in one way because he is a man, in another because he is also a king. Because he is a man, he serves by living faithfully; but because he is also a king, he serves by enacting with fitting vigor laws that command what is just and forbid the contrary: as Hezekiah served by destroying the groves and temples of idols and those high places which had been built against God's commands; as Josiah served by doing the same things himself; as the king of the Ninevites served by compelling the whole city to appease the Lord; as Darius served by giving the idol into Daniel's power to be broken and throwing his enemies to the lions; as Nebuchadnezzar served, of whom we have already spoken, by forbidding by a terrible law all in his kingdom to blaspheme God. In this, then, kings serve the Lord as kings, when they do for his service what only kings can do.

Since, then, in the times of the apostles kings did not yet serve the Lord, but were still devising vain things against him and against his Christ, so that all the predictions of the prophets might be fulfilled, they certainly could not then forbid impieties by laws, but rather practiced them. For the order of the times was so unrolling that the Jews killed the preachers of Christ, thinking they were doing God a service, as Christ had foretold, and the nations raged against the Christians, and the patience of the martyrs overcame all. But after what is written began to be fulfilled, “And all the kings of the earth shall worship him; all nations shall serve him,” what sober-minded person would say to kings: “Do not care in your kingdom by whom the church of your Lord is held or attacked; let it not concern you who wishes to be religious or sacrilegious in your kingdom”? It cannot be said to them, “Let it not concern you who in your kingdom wishes to be chaste or unchaste.” For why, since free choice has been given by God to man, should adulteries be punished by laws and sacrileges permitted? Or is it a lighter thing for the soul not to keep faith with God than for a woman not to keep it with her husband? Or, if offenses committed not from contempt but from ignorance of religion should be punished more mildly, are they therefore to be neglected?

Who would doubt that it is better for people to be led to worship God by teaching than to be compelled by fear of punishment or by pain? But it does not follow that, because the former are better, the latter, who are not such, are to be neglected. For it has benefited many, as we have proved and are proving by experience, to be compelled first by fear or pain, so that afterward they could be taught, or follow in deed what they had already learned in words. Some put before us the saying of a certain secular author, who said, “I believe it better to hold children by a sense of shame and by generosity than by fear.” This is indeed true; but just as those whom love directs are better, so those whom fear corrects are more numerous. For, to answer them from that same author, they also read in him: “You do not know how to do right unless compelled by trouble.” Moreover, divine Scripture said for the sake of those better ones, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear”; and for the sake of these lower ones, who are more numerous, it says, “A hard slave will not be corrected by words; for even if he understands, he will not obey.” When it said that he is not corrected by words, it did not order him to be abandoned, but tacitly suggested how he should be corrected; otherwise it would not say, “He will not be corrected by words,” but only, “He will not be corrected.” For in another place it says that not only a slave but also an undisciplined son is to be restrained with blows, and with great profit: for “you strike him with the rod,” it says, “but you will deliver his soul from death”; and elsewhere it says, “Whoever spares his rod hates his son.” Give me someone who with faith and true understanding can say with all the strength of his soul, “My soul has thirsted for the living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God?” For such a person not only the fear of temporal punishments or of imperial laws is unnecessary, but even the fear of hell, since to cling to God is so desirable a good to him that he not only dreads being estranged from that happiness as a great punishment, but bears even its delay with distress. But before the good sons say, “We have the desire to depart and be with Christ,” many are first called back to their Lord, like bad slaves and in a way wicked runaways, by the lash of temporal scourges.

For who can love us more than Christ, who laid down his life for his sheep? And yet, though he had called Peter and the other apostles by word alone, Paul, formerly Saul, afterward the great builder of his church but before that its dreadful ravager, he did not restrain by voice alone, but even struck down by his power; and to drive him, raging in the darkness of unbelief, to desire the light of the heart, he first struck him with blindness of body. If that had not been a punishment, he would not afterward have been healed of it; and if, when he saw nothing with his eyes open, his eyes had been sound, Scripture would not tell how, at the laying on of Ananias's hand, so that his sight might be opened, something like scales, by which it had been closed, fell from them. Where is what these men are accustomed to cry out: “One is free to believe or not believe. On whom did Christ use force? Whom did he compel?” See, they have the apostle Paul: let them recognize in him Christ first compelling and afterward teaching, first striking and afterward consoling. And it is wonderful how he who entered the Gospel compelled by bodily punishment labored more in the Gospel than all those who were called by word alone; and he whom a greater fear drove to love, his perfect love casts out fear.

Why then should the church not compel her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others to perish? Although even those whom they did not compel, but only seduced, if they are called back into her bosom through terrible but salutary laws, the loving mother embraces more tenderly and rejoices over them much more than over those she never lost. Does it not belong to pastoral diligence, when sheep have strayed from the flock, not violently snatched away but gently and softly seduced, and have begun to be possessed by strangers, to call them back, when found, to the Lord's fold, if they choose to resist, by the terrors or even the pains of scourges? Especially since, if they multiply by breeding among fugitive and robber slaves, there is the greater claim because the Lord's mark is recognized in them, which is in no way violated in those whom we receive without rebaptizing. For the error of the sheep must be corrected in such a way that the seal of the Redeemer is not destroyed in it. For if someone is marked with the royal mark by a deserter who bears that mark, and both receive pardon, and the one returns to service while the other begins to be in the service in which he was not yet, is that mark erased in either of them? Is it not rather recognized in both and approved with due honor, since it is the king's? Since, then, they cannot show that what they are compelled to is evil, they argue that they ought not to be compelled to good. But we have shown that Paul was compelled by Christ; so the church, in compelling these men, imitates her Lord, she who first waited before compelling anyone, so that the prophecy about the faith of kings and nations might be fulfilled.

From this too that apostolic saying is understood not absurdly, where blessed Paul says, “Ready to punish all disobedience, when your obedience is first complete.” Hence the Lord himself orders the guests to be brought to his great supper first, and afterward compelled; for when the servants had answered, “Lord, what you ordered has been done, and there is still room,” he said, “Go out into the roads and hedges, and whomever you find, compel them to come in.” In those, then, who were first brought gently, the former obedience was completed; but in these who are compelled, disobedience is restrained. For what does “compel them to come in” mean, when it had first been said, “Bring them in,” and the answer was, “What you ordered has been done, and there is still room”? If he had wished it to be understood that they were to be compelled by the terrors of miracles, many more divine miracles were done for those who were called first, especially for the Jews, of whom it was said, “The Jews ask for signs”; and among the Gentiles too, in the times of the apostles, such miracles commended the Gospel, so that, if people were ordered to be compelled by such things, it would rather be believed, as I said, that the first guests were compelled. Therefore, if by the power which the church received by divine gift, at the proper time, through the religion and faith of kings, those found in the roads and hedges, that is, in heresies and schisms, are compelled to come in, let them not find fault because they are compelled, but consider to what they are compelled. The Lord's banquet is the unity of the body of Christ, not only in the sacrament of the altar but also in the bond of peace. Of them we can most truly say that they compel no one to good; for whomever they compel, they compel only to evil.

Yet before these laws, by which they are compelled to come in to the holy banquet, were sent to Africa, it seemed to some of the brothers, and I was one of them, that, although the madness of the Donatists was raging everywhere, we should not ask the emperors to order that the heresy itself should not exist at all, by fixing a penalty for those who chose to remain in it; but rather that they should decree that those who proclaimed Catholic truth by speaking, or established it by reading, should not suffer their frenzied violence. We thought this could be done in some measure if the emperors confirmed the law of Theodosius of most pious memory, which he promulgated generally against all heretics (that any bishop or cleric of theirs found anywhere should be fined ten pounds of gold), more expressly against the Donatists, who denied they were heretics, in such a way that not all would be struck by that fine, but those in whose regions the Catholic Church suffered any violence from their clerics or Circumcellions or people; so that, after a protest by the Catholics who had suffered these things, the bishops or other ministers would then be held liable, through the care of the officials, to pay the fine. For we thought that, if they were frightened and dared do nothing of the kind, Catholic truth could be taught and held freely, so that no one would be compelled to it, but whoever wished might follow it without fear, so that we would not have false and pretended Catholics. And although other brothers thought otherwise, men of greater age or who considered the examples of many cities and places where we saw a firm and true Catholic Church, established and strengthened there by such benefits of God, when people were compelled to Catholic communion by the laws of earlier emperors, we nevertheless prevailed, so that rather what I have said should be asked of the emperors. It was decreed in our council, and envoys were sent to the court.

But the greater mercy of God, who knew how necessary the terror of these laws and a certain medicinal trouble were for the perverse or cold minds of many, and for that hardness which cannot be corrected by words but can be by a little severity of discipline, brought it about that our envoys could not obtain what they had undertaken. For some very grave complaints of bishops from other places had already reached the court before us, bishops who had suffered many evils from them and had been driven from their sees; above all, the horrible and incredible attack on Maximian, Catholic bishop of the church of Bagai, made it so that our embassy no longer had anything to do. For a law had already been promulgated that the heresy of the Donatists, of such savagery that to spare it seemed more cruel than it was itself in its raging, should not be allowed not only to be violent but to exist at all with impunity; yet not with capital punishment, in order to preserve Christian gentleness even toward the unworthy, but with financial penalties set out and exile decreed against their bishops or ministers.