Letters 76.1–79.1

To you, Donatists, the Catholic Church says: ‘Sons of men, how long will you be heavy of heart? Why do you love vanity and seek after falsehood?’ Why have you divided yourselves from the unity of the whole world by the wicked sacrilege of schism? You give heed to the false things said to you about the handing over of the divine books by men who are either lying or mistaken, so that you may die in heretical separation; and you do not give heed to what the books themselves say to you, so that you may live in Catholic peace. Why do you open your ears to the talk of men saying what they have never been able to prove, and are deaf to the word of God, who says: ‘The Lord said to me, You are my Son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession’? ‘To Abraham the promises were spoken, and to his seed. He does not say, “And to seeds,” as of many, but as of one, “And to your seed,” which is Christ.’ ‘In your seed,’ he says, ‘shall all nations be blessed.’ Lift up the eyes of your heart and consider the whole world, how in the seed of Abraham all nations are blessed. Then what was not yet seen was believed by one man; you already see it, and still you begrudge it. The passion of the Lord is the price of the whole world. He redeemed the whole world, and you do not agree with the whole world to your own gain, but rather quarrel in a part to your own loss, so that you lose the whole. Hear in the psalm at what price we were redeemed: ‘They pierced my hands and feet,’ it says, ‘they numbered all my bones; they looked and stared at me; they divided my garments among them, and for my vesture they cast lots.’ Why do you wish to be dividers of the Lord’s garments, and are unwilling to hold with the whole world that tunic of love woven from above, which not even his persecutors divided? In the same psalm we read that the whole world holds it: ‘All the ends of the earth,’ it says, ‘shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before him. For the kingdom is his, and he shall rule over the nations.’ Open the ears of your heart and hear that ‘the God of gods, the Lord, has spoken and called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting; out of Zion is the beauty of his comeliness.’ If you will not understand this, hear the Gospel, where the Lord himself now speaks with his own mouth and says: ‘That all things must be fulfilled concerning Christ which are written of him in the law and the prophets and the psalms, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’ What he said in the psalm, ‘called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting,’ he says in the Gospel, ‘among all nations’; and what he said in the psalm, ‘out of Zion is the beauty of his comeliness,’ he says in the Gospel, ‘beginning from Jerusalem.’

You pretend that you are fleeing the tares mixed in before the time of harvest, because you alone are tares. For if you were wheat, you would bear with the tares mixed in and would not divide yourselves from Christ’s crop. Of the tares indeed it is said, ‘Because iniquity has abounded, the love of many will grow cold’; but of the wheat it is also said, ‘He who perseveres to the end shall be saved.’ Why do you believe that the tares have grown and filled the world, while the wheat has dwindled and remained in Africa alone? You call yourselves Christians and contradict Christ. He said, ‘Let both grow until the harvest’; he did not say, ‘Let the tares grow and the wheat dwindle.’ He said, ‘The field is this world’; he did not say, ‘The field is Africa.’ He said, ‘The harvest is the end of the age’; he did not say, ‘The harvest is the time of Donatus.’ He said, ‘The reapers are angels’; he did not say, ‘The reapers are the chiefs of the Circumcellions.’ But because you accused the wheat of being tares, you showed that you are tares, and, what is worse, you separated yourselves from the wheat before the time. For of your forefathers, in whose sacrilegious cutting-off you persist, some handed over the holy books and the church’s documents to the persecutors, as the municipal records show; others pardoned them when they confessed and remained in communion with them; and both met at Carthage in a furious faction, condemned unheard others on the charge of handing over, about which they had already come to terms among themselves, ordained bishop against bishop, and raised altar against altar. Afterwards they sent a letter to the emperor Constantine asking that bishops from overseas should judge between the Africans; when the judges they had asked for were given and judged at Rome, they did not obey them; they accused the bishops before the emperor of having judged badly; when other bishops were sent again to Arles, they appealed from them to the emperor himself; heard by him and found to be slanderers, they persisted in the same crime. Awake to salvation, love peace, return to unity. We will read out to you how all these things were done whenever you wish.

He shares with the wicked who consents to the deeds of the wicked, not he who bears with the tares in the Lord’s field until the harvest, or with the chaff until the final winnowing. If you hate the wicked, change yourselves from the crime of schism; if you feared being mixed with the wicked, you would not have kept among you for so many years Optatus, living in the most open iniquity. Since you now call him a martyr, it remains for you to call him for whose sake he died Christ. In short, how has the Christian world offended you, from which you have cut yourselves off in wicked fury? And how did the Maximianists deserve well of you, whom you condemned and drove out of the basilicas by public judgments, and then received back in their honour? How has the peace of Christ offended you, against which you divide yourselves from those whom you defame? And how did the peace of Donatus deserve well of you, for whose sake you receive those whom you condemn? Felicianus of Musti is now with you. We read that he was first condemned in your council, afterwards accused by you in the proconsul’s court, and attacked in the municipal records of the city of Musti.

If the handing over of the books is a crime, because God punished with death in war the king who burned the book of Jeremiah, how much more criminal is the sacrilege of schism, whose authors, to whom you compared the Maximianists, the opened earth swallowed alive! How, then, do you charge us with the crime of handing over, which you do not prove, and both condemn and accept your own schismatics? If you are righteous because you suffered persecution through the emperors, the Maximianists themselves are more righteous than you, for you yourselves persecuted them through judges sent by Catholic emperors. If you alone have baptism, what is the baptism of the Maximianists doing among you in those whom the condemned Felicianus baptized, and with whom he was afterwards recalled to you? Let your bishops answer these questions to you, the laity, if they will not speak with us; and consider, for your own salvation, what this very thing means, that they will not speak with us. If the wolves have held a council not to answer the shepherds, why have the sheep lost their counsel, so as to go to the dens of the wolves?

I do not wonder that Satan troubles the minds of the faithful. Resist him, persevering in the hope of the promises of God, who cannot deceive, who has deigned not only to promise eternal rewards to us who believe and hope in him and persevere in his love to the end, but has also foretold that temporal offences would not be lacking, by which our faith must be exercised and tested. For he says, ‘Because iniquity has abounded, the love of many will grow cold’; but at once he added, ‘But he who perseveres to the end shall be saved.’ What wonder is it, then, if men disparage the servants of God, and, because they cannot pervert their life, try to stain their reputation, when they do not cease daily to blaspheme God himself, their Lord, since whatever he does against their will by his just and hidden judgment displeases them? Therefore I exhort your Prudence, my most beloved lords and brothers, deservedly honoured, to consider with most Christian hearts, against the slanderous empty talk and rash suspicions of men, the Scripture of God, who foretold to us that all these things would happen and warned us beforehand that we must be firm against them.

So I tell your Charity briefly that the presbyter Boniface has not been found guilty of any crime before me, and that I have in no way believed, nor do I believe, any such thing of him. How then could I order his name to be removed from the list of presbyters, when the Gospel strikes such terror, where the Lord says, ‘With what judgment you judge, you shall be judged’? For since the case that has arisen between him and Spes is pending before the divine examination, according to their agreement, which can be read to you if you wish, who am I to dare anticipate God’s sentence by deleting or suppressing the name of one of whom, as a bishop, I ought not rashly to suspect anything evil, and of whom, as a man, I could not clearly judge in matters hidden in men? For even in secular cases, when the decision of judgment is referred to a higher authority, all things are left as they were while that sentence is awaited from which there can be no further appeal, lest injury be done to the higher judge if anything is changed while his judgment is pending. And surely there is a great difference between the divine power and any human power, however exalted. May the mercy of the Lord our God never forsake you, my most beloved and honoured lords and brothers.

Would that, attending with careful minds to the Scriptures of God, you did not need the help of our words in every offence, and that rather he might console you who consoles us too, who foretold not only the good things which he will render to his saints and faithful, but also the evils with which this world was to abound, and had them written down beforehand, so that we might await with greater certainty the good things that will follow after the end of the world, when we experience the evils, likewise foretold, that come before the end of the world. Hence the apostle too says: ‘For whatever was written beforehand was written for our learning, that through patience and the comfort of the Scriptures we might have hope in God.’ What need was there that the Lord Jesus himself should not only say, ‘Then the righteous shall shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father,’ which is to happen after the end of the world, but also cry out, ‘Woe to the world because of offences,’ except that we should not flatter ourselves that we can come to the seats of eternal happiness unless, exercised by temporal evils, we do not fail? What need was there for him to say, ‘Because iniquity has abounded, the love of many will grow cold,’ except that those of whom he spoke when he at once added, ‘He who perseveres to the end shall be saved,’ should not be troubled, nor terrified, nor fail through grief as at things unhoped for and unexpected, when they saw love growing cold through this abundance of iniquity, but rather, seeing those things happen which were foretold to come before the end, should persevere patiently to the end, so that they might deserve to reign securely after the end in that life which has no end?

Accordingly, dearly beloved, in this offence by which some are troubled concerning the presbyter Boniface, I do not tell you not to grieve (for those who do not grieve at such things do not have the love of Christ in them, and those who even rejoice at such things abound in the malice of the devil); not because anything has appeared in the said presbyter that should be judged worthy of condemnation, but because two of our household have such a case that one of them must without doubt be regarded as lost, and the other’s reputation is bad with some and doubtful with others, even if his conscience is not stained. Grieve at these things, because they are to be grieved at; yet not so that by this grief your love grows cold from good living, but rather that it is kindled to pray to the Lord that, if your presbyter is innocent, as I rather believe (for when he perceived the other’s shameless and unclean impulse he would neither consent nor keep silent), God may quickly make this plain by his divine sentence and restore him to his ministry; but if, conscious of guilt (which I dare not suspect), he sought to injure the other’s reputation because he could not corrupt his chastity, as the man with whom he has the case says, that God may not allow him to hide his wickedness, so that what men cannot discover may be revealed by divine judgment concerning whichever of them it may be.

For when this case had long tormented me, and I could not find how one of the two could be convicted, although I was more inclined to believe the presbyter, I had at first thought of leaving both to God until something should come to light in the one I suspected, by which he could be expelled from our dwelling with just and manifest cause. But when he tried most vehemently to be promoted in the clergy, either here by me or elsewhere through my letters, and I could in no way be brought to lay the hands of ordination on a man of whom I thought so much evil, or to introduce him to any brother of mine by my recommendation, he began to act more turbulently, so that, if he himself was not promoted in the clergy, neither should the presbyter Boniface be allowed to remain in his rank. When, at this challenge of his, I saw that Boniface did not wish an offence to arise for any of the weak and those prone to suspicion through doubt about his life, and was ready to suffer the loss of his honour among men rather than go on vainly, to the disturbance of the church, in a contest in which he could not demonstrate his conscience to those who did not know, those who doubted, or those more inclined to suspect evil, I chose a middle course: that both should bind themselves by a definite agreement to go to a holy place, where the more awe-inspiring works of God might much more easily lay bare the unsound conscience of either and drive him to confession by punishment or fear. God is everywhere indeed, and he who made all things is contained or enclosed by no place, and he must be worshipped by true worshippers in spirit and in truth, so that, hearing in secret, he may also justify and crown in secret. Yet as to those things which are visibly known to men, who can search out his counsel, why these miracles happen in some places and not in others? For the holiness of the place where the body of blessed Felix of Nola is buried is very well known to many, and there I wished them to go, because from there whatever is divinely revealed in either of them can be written to us more easily and reliably. For we too know that at Milan, at the shrine of the saints, where demons confess in a marvellous and terrible way, a certain thief who had come to that place to deceive by swearing falsely was compelled to confess the theft and restore what he had taken. Is not Africa too full of the bodies of holy martyrs? And yet nowhere here do we know such things to happen. For just as, as the apostle says, not all the saints have gifts of healing, nor do all have the discernment of spirits, so he who distributes to each as he wills did not will that these things should happen at all the shrines of the saints.

Therefore, although I had not wished to bring this most grievous pain of my heart to your knowledge, lest I should trouble you by saddening you grievously and to no purpose, perhaps God did not wish it to be hidden from you so that you might join us in earnest prayer, that he may deign to make known to us too what he knows in this case and we cannot know. I did not dare to suppress or delete the presbyter’s name from the list of his colleagues, lest I should seem to do injury to the divine power, before whose examination the case is still pending, if I wished to forestall his judgment by my prejudgment. Not even judges in secular affairs do this, when a doubtful case is referred to a higher authority, daring to change anything while the reference is pending. And it was decreed in a council of bishops that no cleric who has not yet been convicted should be suspended from communion, unless he has failed to present himself for the examination of his case. Boniface, however, accepted this humility, that he would not receive letters with which to claim his honour while travelling, so that in the place where both are unknown, equality might be kept between them. And now, if you wish his name not to be read out, so that, as the apostle says, we may not give occasion to those seeking occasion, to those who do not wish to come to the church, this will not be our doing but theirs on whose account it is done. For what harm is it to a man that human ignorance does not wish him to be read out from that list, if a wicked conscience does not blot him out of the book of the living?

Therefore, my brothers who fear God, remember what the apostle Peter says: ‘Your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour.’ Whom he cannot devour by seducing him into wickedness, he tries to defile in reputation, so that, if possible, he may fail under the reproaches of men and the disparagement of evil tongues, and so fall into his jaws. But if he cannot stain the reputation of the innocent, he tries to persuade him to judge his brother by malicious suspicions, and so, entangled by him, to be swallowed up. And who can comprehend or enumerate all his snares and deceits? Yet against those three which concern the present case God speaks to you thus through the apostle: first, so that you may not be seduced into wickedness by imitating bad examples: ‘Do not be yoked with unbelievers; for what partnership has righteousness with iniquity, or what fellowship has light with darkness?’ Likewise in another place: ‘Do not be deceived,’ he says, ‘evil communications corrupt good manners. Be sober and righteous, and do not sin.’ So that you may not fail under the tongues of detractors, he says through the prophet: ‘Hear me, you who know judgment, my people, in whose heart is my law. Do not fear the reproaches of men, and do not be overcome by their disparagement, nor think it great that they despise you. For like a garment they shall be consumed in time, and like wool they shall be eaten by the moth; but my righteousness abides for ever.’ And so that you may not perish by maliciously suspecting false things of the servants of God, remember the apostle’s words: ‘Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the thoughts of the heart; and then each one will have praise from God.’ And likewise what is written: ‘The things that are revealed are for you; but the hidden things are for the Lord your God.’

It is plain, indeed, that these things do not happen in the church without grave sorrow to the saints and faithful; yet let him console us who foretold all things and warned us not to grow cold through the abundance of iniquity, but to persevere to the end, that we may be saved. For as far as I am concerned, if there is in me even a little of the love of Christ, ‘Who among you is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?’ Do not, then, increase my torments by failing either through false suspicions or through the sins of others; do not, I beseech you, lest I say of you, ‘And they added to the pain of my wounds.’ For those who rejoice at these sorrows of ours, of whom it was foretold so long before in the person of the body of Christ, ‘They who sat in the gate spoke against me, and they who drank wine made songs about me,’ are much more easily borne; and yet we have learned to pray even for them and to wish them well. For why else do they sit, and what else do they seek, except that, whenever a bishop or cleric or monk or nun has fallen, they may believe, boast, and maintain that all are such, but that not all can be exposed? And yet these same men, when some married woman is found to be an adulteress, do not cast off their wives or accuse their mothers; but when some crime, whether false, has been rumoured, or true, has come to light, concerning some who profess a holy name, they press on, busy themselves, and strive that it be believed of all. These men, then, who catch from our sorrows the sweetness of their evil tongues, we may easily compare to those dogs (if perhaps they are to be understood in a bad sense) which licked the sores of that poor man who lay before the rich man’s gate and bore all hardships and indignities until he came to the rest of Abraham’s bosom.

Do not torment me further, you who have any hope in God. Do not multiply the very wounds which they lick, you for whom we are in danger every hour, having ‘fightings without, fears within,’ ‘perils in the city, perils in the wilderness, perils from the Gentiles, perils among false brethren.’ I know that you grieve; but surely not more keenly than I? I know that you are troubled; but I fear lest, amid the tongues of the slanderers, the weak brother should fail and perish, for whom Christ died. Let not our sorrow increase because of you, since yours did not arise through our fault. For this is what I tried to guard against: that, if possible, this evil should neither be neglected when it ought to be avoided nor be brought to your knowledge, where the strong would be tormented to no purpose and the weak dangerously troubled. But may he who allowed you to be tried by learning of it give you strength to endure, and instruct you out of his law, teach you, and give you rest from the evil days, until a pit is dug for the sinner.

I hear that some of you are saddened further by this: that, at the fall of those two deacons who had come over from the party of Donatus, you taunted the discipline of Proculeianus, as if boasting about us that nothing of the kind had arisen among the clergy from our discipline. Whoever of you did this, I confess to you, did not do well. See, God has taught you that ‘he who glories, let him glory in the Lord.’ And do not reproach heretics with anything except that they are not Catholics, lest you become like them, who, having nothing to defend in the cause of their division, aim only at collecting the crimes of men and noise abroad even these, and more, most falsely; so that, since they cannot accuse and obscure the very truth of the divine Scripture, by which the church of Christ spread everywhere is commended, they may bring into hatred the men through whom it is preached, about whom they can invent whatever comes into their minds. ‘But you did not so learn Christ, if indeed you have heard him and been taught in him.’ For he made his faithful secure even about bad stewards, who do their own evil and speak his good, where he says: ‘What they say, do; but what they do, do not do; for they say and do not do.’ Pray for me indeed, lest perhaps, having preached to others, I myself should be found reprobate; yet when you glory, glory not in me but in the Lord. For however watchful the discipline of my house may be, I am a man and live among men, and I do not dare to claim that my house is better than Noah’s ark, where yet among eight persons one was found reprobate; or better than the house of Abraham, where it was said, ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son’; or better than the house of Isaac, of whose two twins it was said, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated’; or better than the house of Jacob himself, where a son defiled his father’s bed; or better than the house of David, one of whose sons lay with his sister, and another rebelled against his father’s so holy gentleness; or better than the company of the apostle Paul, who, if he had lived among none but the good, would not have said what I mentioned above, ‘Fightings without, fears within,’ nor would he have said, when speaking of the holiness and faith of Timothy, ‘I have no one who is genuinely concerned for you; for all seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ’; or better than the company of the Lord Christ himself, in which eleven good men bore with the faithless thief Judas; or, finally, better than heaven, from which angels fell.

I confess simply to your Charity before the Lord our God, who is witness upon my soul, that from the time I began to serve God, just as I have hardly found better men than those who have made progress in monasteries, so I have not found worse men than those who have fallen in monasteries; so that I think this is why it is written in the Apocalypse, ‘Let the righteous be more righteous still, and let the filthy be filthy still.’ Therefore, though we are saddened by some refuse, we are consoled by many more ornaments. Do not, then, because of the dregs that offend your eyes, loathe the oil presses from which the Lord’s storehouses are filled with the produce of a brighter oil. May the mercy of the Lord our God keep you in his peace against all the snares of the enemy, most beloved brothers.

You shuffle in vain, since it is plain from afar what kind of man you are. The brothers have told me what they discussed with you. Well and good that you do not fear death; but you ought to fear that death which you bring on yourself by blaspheming God with such things. And your understanding that this visible death, which all men know, is the separation of the mind from the body is no great understanding; but as for what you add from your own teaching, that it is the separation of good from evil: if the mind is good and the body evil, he who mixed them is not good. But you say that the good God mixed them; therefore he is either evil or he feared evil. And do you boast that you do not fear man, when you imagine for yourself a God who feared the darkness, so that he mixed good and evil? Do not be puffed up in mind, as you wrote, because we make you out to be great by wishing to prevent your poisons, so that the plague may not creep in among men. For the apostle does not make great those whom he calls dogs when he says, ‘Beware of dogs,’ nor did he make great those whose talk he said spreads like a cancer. Therefore I charge you in the name of Christ … if you are ready, solve the question at which your predecessor Fortunatus failed, and so departed from here that he would not return unless, having conferred with his own people, he should find what answer he could make in a debate with the brothers. But if you are not ready for this, depart from here, and do not pervert the ways of the Lord, and ensnare and infect weak souls with poison, lest, with the help of the right hand of our Lord, you be put to shame in a way you had not expected.