Letters 83.1–87.10

The sadness of the church of Thiave does not let my heart rest until I hear that they have been restored with you to their former good will, which must be done quickly. For if the apostle took such pains over a single man, saying, ‘Lest such a one be swallowed up by excessive sorrow,’ where he also says, ‘That we may not be taken advantage of by Satan, for we are not ignorant of his designs,’ how much more must we act watchfully, so as not to have to lament this in a whole flock, and especially in those who have now come over to Catholic peace and whom I can in no way abandon. But since the shortness of time did not allow us to work out a carefully considered decision together there, let your Holiness hear what has seemed best to me after long thought since we parted; and, if you also agree, let the letter which I have written to them in our joint name be sent without delay.

You said that they should have half, and that the other half should be provided for them by me from some source or other. But I think that if the whole were taken from them, there would be grounds for saying that we had laboured so hard not over money but over justice. But when we grant them half and in that way make peace with them at last, it will be quite apparent that our concern was nothing but money; and you see what harm follows. For we shall seem to them to have taken half of what belonged to another, and they will seem to us to have suffered dishonestly and unjustly being helped with half of what had wholly belonged to the poor. For what you said, ‘We must take care that, in wishing to put right a doubtful matter, we do not make greater wounds,’ will apply equally if half is granted to them. For because of that very half, those whose conversion we wish to provide for, so that they may be dealt with by this precedent, will put off the sale of their property by those excusing delays. And then, is it any wonder if there is so great an offence to a whole congregation over a doubtful matter, when they think their bishops, whom they regard highly, are stained with sordid avarice, while the appearance of evil is not avoided?

For when anyone turns to the monastery, if he turns with a truthful heart, he does not think of that, especially when warned how great an evil it is. But if he is deceitful and seeks his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ, he certainly does not have love, and what does it profit him if he gives all his goods to the poor and hands over his body to be burned? Besides, as we have already discussed, that can be avoided in future, and it can be arranged with one who turns to the monastery that he may not be admitted to the fellowship of the brothers until he has stripped himself of all those encumbrances and rests at leisure, when his property has ceased to be his. But this death of the weak and this great obstacle to the salvation of those for whom we labour so hard to win them to Catholic peace cannot be avoided otherwise than by their understanding most plainly that we are in no way concerned about money in such cases; and they will in no way understand this unless we leave to their use that property which they always thought belonged to the presbyter, because, even if it was not his, they ought to have known this from the beginning.

It seems to me, therefore, that in matters of this kind this rule should be kept: whatever belonged, by the right by which such things are owned, to one who is ordained a cleric somewhere, should belong to the church in which he is ordained. And the property in question belongs to the presbyter Honoratus by that same right to such an extent that, not only if he had been ordained elsewhere but even if he were still living in the monastery of Thagaste, should he die without having sold his property or transferred it to anyone by a manifest gift, none but his heirs would succeed to it, as brother Aemilianus succeeded brother Privatus in those thirty solidi. These things, then, must be guarded against beforehand; but if they have not been guarded against, we must preserve for them those rights which are established by civil society for owning or not owning such things, so that we may abstain, as far as we can, not only from every evil thing but also from every appearance of evil, and keep a good reputation, which is very necessary for our stewardship. And how evil the appearance is, let your holy Prudence consider. Apart from their sadness, which we have experienced, lest I should perhaps be mistaken, as often happens when I err through being too inclined to my own opinion, I told the case to our brother and colleague Samsucius, not yet saying what seems right to me now, but rather adding what had seemed right to us both when we resisted them. He was greatly shocked and wondered that we had thought this, moved by nothing else than the foul appearance itself, most unworthy not of our life and character only, but of anyone’s.

I beseech you, therefore, not to delay signing and sending the letter which I wrote to them in our joint name. And even if you perhaps see most keenly that there is justice on that side, let the weak not be forced now to learn what I do not yet understand, so that what the Lord said may be observed toward them in this case: ‘I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.’ Sparing such weakness, he also said about paying the tax, ‘Then the sons are free; but lest we offend them,’ and so on, when he sent Peter to pay the two-drachma tax that was then being demanded. For he knew another right, by which he owed no such thing; but he paid the tax by that right by which, as we said, the heir of the presbyter Honoratus would have succeeded if he had died before giving away or selling his property. And yet even in the church’s own right the apostle Paul spares the weak and does not demand the wages due to him, though certain in conscience that he would demand them most rightly, but simply avoiding a suspicion that would disturb the good fragrance of Christ, and abstaining from that appearance of evil in those regions where he knew it was needful, and perhaps before he had experienced people’s sadness. But let us, slower as we are, at least correct after experience what we ought to have foreseen.

Finally, since I fear everything, and I remember what you proposed when we parted, that the brothers of Thagaste should hold me their debtor for half of that sum: if you see clearly that this is just, I do not refuse, but only on this condition, that I pay it when I have it, that is, when so much comes to the monastery of Hippo that it can be done there without hardship, so that, when so great a sum has been taken away there, no less than an equal share, in proportion to the number of those living together, may come to ours.

I too feel how hard I seem, and I can scarcely bear myself, in that I do not send and give up to your Holiness my son the deacon Lucillus, your brother. But when you yourself begin to give up some of those you have brought up, very dear and very sweet to you, to the needs of churches far away from you, then you will feel with what goads of longing I am pierced because some who are joined to me in the greatest and sweetest intimacy are not with me in body too. For, to set aside your kinship, however strong the brotherhood of your blood, it does not surpass the bond of friendship by which brother Severus and I cling to each other; and yet you know how rarely I have the chance to see him. And neither his will nor mine brought this about, but our putting the needs of our mother the church, for the sake of the world to come, in which we shall live together inseparably, before the needs of our own time. How much more fair is it, then, that you should bear, for the benefit of that same mother church, the absence of your brother, with whom you have not chewed the Lord’s food so long as I have with my sweetest fellow citizen Severus, who nevertheless now speaks with me scarcely, and sometimes only through tiny notes, and those mostly filled with other cares and business rather than bearing anything from our meadows in the sweetness of Christ!

Here perhaps you may say: ‘What then? Will my brother not be useful to the church with us too, or do I desire to have him with me for some other reason?’ Certainly, if his presence there seemed as useful for winning or governing the Lord’s sheep as it seems to me here, everyone would rightly blame, I do not say my hardness, but my injustice. But since the Latin language, for lack of which the preaching of the gospel labours greatly in our regions, is in full use there, do you think that we ought to provide for the salvation of the Lord’s peoples by sending this ability there and taking it from here, where we seek it with great anxiety of heart? Forgive me, then, for doing, not only against your desire but also against my own feeling, what the care of our burden compels me to do. The Lord, in whom you have set your heart, will grant that your labours be such that you are rewarded for this kindness; for so you will rather have given up the deacon Lucillus to the most burning thirst of our regions. And you will do me no small service if you burden me with no further request on this matter, so that I may not appear merely harsh to your venerable and holy kindness.

You would not call me so inexorable unless you thought me a liar too. For what else do you believe of my mind when you write such things to me, except that I hold against you a blemish of discord and detestable hatred, as if in a plain matter I did not take care lest, preaching to others, I myself should be found reprobate, or as if I wished to cast the mote out of your eye while nourishing the beam in my own? It is not as you think. See, I say again, and I call God to witness: if you wished for yourself what I wish for you, you would long ago be living securely in Christ and gladdening his whole church in the glory of his name. See, I have already written that you are not only my brother but my colleague; for it cannot be that any bishop of the Catholic Church, whatever he may be, who has been condemned by no church judgment, is not my colleague. But there is no reason for my not being in communion with you except that I cannot flatter you. For I owe you most of all, since in Christ Jesus through the gospel I begot you, by truly rebuking you with the wholesome sharpness of love. And while I rejoice that many have been gathered into the Catholic Church through you, with the Lord’s help, I must not cease to lament that more are being scattered from it. For you have so wounded the church of Hippo that, unless the Lord frees you from all worldly cares and burdens and calls you back to a true episcopal life and way of living, such a wound cannot be healed.

But since you do not cease to entangle yourself more and more, so that you have even involved yourself, after renouncing them, in affairs which you renounced, which cannot be defended in any way even by human laws, and you are said to live in a manner which the frugal means of your church cannot support, why do you seek my communion, when you have never been willing to hear my admonition? Is it so that men, whose complaints I cannot bear, may blame me for whatever you do? You suspect in vain that those who have always opposed you, even in your former life, are your detractors. It is not so; nor is it surprising that many things escape you. But even if this were true, they ought to have found nothing in your conduct that they could rightly blame and by which they could blaspheme the church. Perhaps you still think I say these things because I have not accepted your apology. On the contrary, I say them so that I myself may not be unable to make satisfaction to God for my sins, if I keep silent to you about these things. I know that you have a heart; but even a slow heart is secure when it is in heaven, and a sharp heart is nothing when it is on earth. The episcopate is not a craft for living a deceitful life. The Lord God will teach you what I say, he who has closed to you all the ways by which you wished to use it, that he may direct you, if you understand, into that way for the sake of walking in which so holy a burden was laid upon you.

The integrity of your administration and the fame of your virtues, and also the praiseworthy diligence of your Christian piety and your faithful sincerity, divine gifts which you rejoice to have been bestowed on you by him from whom you hope, by his promise, for better things, have moved me to let your Excellency share, by this letter, in the anxiety of my concerns. For as much as we rejoice that throughout the other lands of Africa you have provided for Catholic unity with wonderful effectiveness, so much do we grieve that the region of Hippo Regius and the neighbouring parts bordering Numidia have not yet been worthy to be helped by the force of your edict as governor, my excellent lord and son, truly and deservedly honourable and to be revered in the love of Christ. Lest this be imputed rather to my negligence, who bear the burden of the episcopate at Hippo, I thought I should not keep silent before your Magnificence. How far heretical audacity presumes even in the district of Hippo, you will learn if you deign to hear it from my brothers and colleagues, who can tell your Sublimity of it, or from the presbyter whom I have sent with this letter; and with the help of the Lord our God you will doubtless provide that the swelling of sacrilegious vanity be healed by deterring it rather than cut off by punishing it.

When I hear of anyone endowed with good ability and educated in liberal learning holding, on a very easy question, a view other than the truth requires (although the salvation of the soul is not placed in such learning), the more I wonder at it, the more I burn to know the man and to talk with him; or, if I cannot, I desire at least to reach his mind by letters, which fly very far, and in turn to be reached by him. Such a man I hear that you are, and I grieve that you are torn away and shut off from the Catholic Church, which, as was foretold by the Holy Spirit, is spread throughout the whole world. For what reason, I do not know. For it is certain that to a great part of the Roman world, not to say also the barbarian nations, to whom too the apostle said he was a debtor, with whose communion in the Christian faith ours is joined, the party of Donatus is unknown, and that they do not know at all either when or for what reasons this dissension arose. All these Christians, unless you admit that they are innocent of what you charge against the Africans, you are forced to say are liable for the evil deeds of all; and, since among you the lost (to put it mildly) lie hidden, you must say that you are all defiled. For it is not that you expel no one from your communion, nor that you expel a man at the very moment he first does that for which he must be expelled. Do you not condemn one who lay hidden for some time and was afterwards exposed and convicted? I ask, then, whether he defiled you at the time when he lay hidden. You will answer, ‘By no means.’ Then he would never defile you, even if it always lay hidden; for some things done by the dead are often brought to light, and it does no harm to the Christians who communicated with them while they lived. Why, then, have you cut yourselves off by so rash and sacrilegious a severance from the communion of the countless churches of the East, from which what you either teach or invent was done in Africa has always been and is still hidden?

For it is another question whether what you say is true; we, indeed, show by much more convincing documents that it is false, and we declare that the very things you charge were then proved rather against your own side. But this, as I said, is another question, to be taken up and discussed when necessary. Let the watchfulness of your mind now attend to this: that no one can be defiled by the unknown crimes of unknown men. From which it is plain that you have separated yourselves by sacrilegious schism from the communion of the world, to which the crimes you charge against the Africans, whether false or true, are wholly unknown and always have been. Although this too must not be passed over, that even known wicked men do no harm to the good in the church, if either the power to exclude them from communion is lacking or some reason of preserving peace prevents it. For who are those in the prophet Ezekiel who were found worthy to be marked before the destruction of the lost, and to escape unharmed when they were destroyed, except, as is most plainly shown there, those who mourn and groan over the sins and iniquities of the people of God that are done in their midst? But who groans and mourns over what he does not know? For the same reason the apostle Paul also bears with false brethren; for he does not speak of unknown people when he says, ‘For all seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ,’ and yet he shows that they were with him. And of what kind are those who preferred to offer incense to idols or to hand over the divine books rather than die, if not of those who seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ?

I pass over many testimonies of the Scriptures so as not to make the letter longer than necessary, and leave more to your learning to consider for yourself. But this is enough: see, I beseech you, if so many wicked men among the one people of God did not make those who testified against them such as they themselves were, if that multitude of false brethren did not make the apostle Paul, set in one church with them, seek his own rather than the things of Jesus Christ, it is plain that a man is not made what any wicked man is with whom he approaches the altar of Christ, even if he is not unknown, provided only that he is not approved, and is separated from a good conscience by being disapproved. It is plain, therefore, that to run with a thief is nothing else than either to steal with him or to accept his theft with the consent of the heart. We say this so as to remove endless and superfluous questions about men’s deeds, which do not hinder our case at all.

But you too, unless you hold this, will all be such as Optatus was in your communion, with your knowledge; which far be it from the character of Emeritus and of others like him, who I do not doubt are among you, far removed from his deeds. For we charge you with nothing but the crime of schism, which by persisting in it wrongly you have also made a heresy. And how heavily this crime weighs in God’s judgment, read what I do not doubt you have read: you will find Dathan and Abiram swallowed up by the opening of the earth, and all the rest who consented with them consumed by fire that came forth from their midst. The Lord God marked that crime with present punishment as an example to be avoided, so as to show, while he spares such men most patiently, what he reserves for them at the last judgment. Nor do we find fault with your reasons, if, at the time when Optatus was boasted to be raging with mad power, when the groaning of all Africa was his accuser, and you groaned with it (if indeed you are such as report proclaims you, which God knows I both believe and wish), we do not find fault, I say, if at that time you refused to excommunicate him, lest he should drag many excommunicated with him and cut off your communion in the madness of schism. But this very thing convicts you in the judgment of God, brother Emeritus: that, seeing it to be so great an evil for the party of Donatus to be divided that Optatus was judged rather to be tolerated in communion than that this should be allowed, you persist in that evil which was committed by your forefathers in dividing the church of Christ.

Here perhaps, under pressure to answer, you will try to defend Optatus. Do not, brother, do not, I beseech you; it does not become you, and if it perhaps becomes anyone else (if anything becomes the wicked), it certainly does not become Emeritus to defend Optatus. But perhaps not to accuse him either. So be it. Take a middle position and say, ‘Each one bears his own burden. Who are you to judge another’s servant?’ If, then, on the testimony of all Africa, nay of all lands wherever the fame of Gildo spread (for he too was known along with him), you never dared to judge Optatus, lest you should judge rashly of the unknown, can we or ought we, at last, on your testimony alone, pass rash sentence about unknown men who lived before us, so that it is not enough that you accuse unknown things unless we too judge unknown things? For you are not defending Optatus, even if he is perhaps endangered by false odium, but yourself, when you say, ‘I do not know what he was like.’ How much more, then, does the Eastern world not know what the Africans were like, whom you accuse, who are even more unknown! And yet you are separated by wicked dissension from those churches, whose names you have in your books and read out. If his colleague of Sitifis, not to say of Caesarea, at the same time did not know about your most notorious and most ill-famed bishop of Thamugadi, how could the church of the Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, Thessalonians, Antiochenes, of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and the other parts of the world built up in Christ by the apostles, either know the African traitors, whoever they were, or deserve to be condemned by you because it could not? And yet you do not communicate with them, and you say they are not Christians, and you try to rebaptize them. What shall I say? What shall I complain? Or what shall I cry out? If I am speaking with a man of sense, I share with you the stings of this indignation; for you surely see what I would say if I wished to say it.

Or did your forefathers perhaps hold a council among themselves and condemn the whole Christian world apart from themselves? Has the estimate of things come to this, that the council of the Maximianists, who were cut off from your cutting-off, has no force against you because they are very few compared with you, while your council has force against the nations, the inheritance of Christ, and his possession, the ends of the earth? I wonder whether he who does not blush at this has blood in his body. Write back about these things, I beg you; for I have heard from some whom I could not but believe that you would write back if I wrote to you. I already sent one letter some time ago; whether you received it or answered it, and perhaps I did not receive yours, I do not know. Now, meanwhile, I ask you not to be reluctant to answer these points as you think fit. But do not carry yourself off into other questions; for here is the head of a well-ordered inquiry: why the schism was made.

For earthly powers too, when they persecute schismatics, defend themselves by that rule of which the apostle says: ‘He who resists the power resists the ordinance of God; and those who resist bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good work but to evil. Do you wish not to fear the power? Do good, and you will have praise from it; for it is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, fear; for it does not bear the sword in vain; for it is God’s minister, an avenger to bring wrath on him who does evil.’ The whole question, therefore, is whether schism is no evil, or whether you have not made a schism, so that you resist the powers for good work, not for evil, by which you would bring judgment on yourselves. Hence the Lord most providently did not say only, ‘Blessed are those who suffer persecution,’ but added, ‘for righteousness’ sake.’ If, then, it is righteousness that you have worked in that dissension in which you still persist, I desire to know it from you, in accordance with what I said above. But if it is iniquity to condemn the Christian world unheard, either because it has not heard what you have heard, or because what you rashly believed or accused without certain proof has not been proved to it, and therefore to wish to rebaptize so many churches founded by the preaching and labour of the Lord himself, while he was still here in the flesh, and of his apostles; because you may either not know your African colleagues to be wicked while living with them and handling the sacraments with them, or even know it but tolerate it lest the party of Donatus be divided, while those set in the most distant world may not be ignorant of what you know or believe or have heard or invent about the Africans: what great perversity it is to embrace one’s own iniquity and accuse the severity of the powers!

‘But it is not lawful for Christians to persecute even the wicked.’ Granted, let it not be lawful; but is it right to charge this against the powers ordained for this very purpose? Shall we blot out the apostle? Or do your copies not contain what I mentioned a little while ago? ‘But you,’ you will say, ‘ought not to communicate with such men.’ What then? Did you not communicate with Flavianus, formerly vicar, a man of your party, because, serving the laws, he put to death the guilty whom he found? ‘But by you,’ you will say, ‘the Roman emperors are stirred up against us.’ No, rather by yourselves against yourselves, who have dared to tear by cutting off, and persistently dare to rebaptize, the church of which they are now members, as was foretold so long ago; for it was said of Christ, ‘And all the kings of the earth shall worship him.’ But our people, against the unlawful and private violence of yours, which you too, who do not do such things, lament and groan over there, seek protection from the ordained powers, not to persecute you but to defend themselves; as the apostle Paul, before the Roman empire was Christian, acted against the Jews who conspired to kill him, so that protection even by armed men was given him. But those emperors, learning on whatever occasion of the wickedness of your schism, decree against you what they will, out of their own concern and power. ‘For they do not bear the sword in vain; for they are God’s ministers, avengers to bring wrath on those who do evil.’ Finally, even if some of our people do these things without Christian moderation, it displeases us; but we do not on their account leave the Catholic Church, if we cannot purge it of chaff before the last time of winnowing; just as you did not leave the party of Donatus on account of Optatus, when you did not dare to expel him.

‘But why do you want us to be joined to you, if we are criminals?’ Because you are still living and can be corrected if you will. For when you are joined to us, that is, to the church of God, the inheritance of Christ, whose possession is the ends of the earth, you are corrected, so that you may live in the root. For of the broken branches the apostle says, ‘For God is able to graft them in again.’ You, then, must change in the respect in which you dissented, although the sacraments you had are holy, since they are the same in all. Therefore we wish you to be changed from your perversity, that is, that your cut-off branch be rooted again. For the sacraments, which you have not changed, are approved by us as you have them, lest perhaps, in wishing to correct your depravity, we should do sacrilegious injury to those mysteries of Christ which have not been depraved in your depravity. For neither had Saul depraved the anointing he had received, to which anointing King David, God’s devout servant, showed such honour. Therefore we do not rebaptize you, since we desire to restore you to the root; but we approve the form of the cut-off branch, if it has not been changed, which, though whole, is in no way fruitful without the root. It is another question about the persecutions which you say you suffer amid such great mildness and gentleness of our people, when yours, truly unlawfully and privately, do worse things; and another about baptism, where we ask not where it is, but where it profits. For wherever it is, it is the same; but he who receives it is not, wherever he is, the same. So we detest the private impiety of men in schism, but we venerate the baptism of Christ everywhere; for if deserters carry off the emperor’s standards with them, when they are either punished by condemnation or corrected by pardon, the standards are received back intact, if they have remained intact. And if anything about this needs to be examined more carefully, it is, as I said, another question. For in these matters we must observe what the church of God observes.

The question, then, is whether the church of God is yours or ours. Therefore we must inquire from the beginning why you made the schism. If you do not write back, I believe I have an easy case before God, because I sent peaceable letters to a man whom I heard to be good, apart from his schism, and liberally educated. You must see what answer you give to him whose patience is now to be praised, but whose sentence at the end is to be feared. But if you write back with the care with which you see you have been written to, the mercy of God will be present, so that at some time the error which divides us may perish, both through love of peace and through the reason of truth. Remember that I have said nothing of the Rogatists, who are said to call you Firmians, as you call us Macarians; nor of your bishop of Rusicade, who is reported to have made a pact with Firmus for the safety of his own people, on condition that the gates were opened to him and the Catholics given up to plunder; and innumerable other things. Stop, then, inflating with commonplaces the deeds of men, whether heard of or known. For you see what I keep silent about your people, so that the matter may be argued about the origin of the schism, where the whole case lies. May the Lord God inspire in you a peaceable thought, brother longed for and beloved. Amen.