Letters 98.1–101.4

You ask me whether parents harm their baptized little ones when they try to heal them by sacrifices to demons; and if they do not harm them, how the faith of the parents profits them when they are baptized, when their parents' faithlessness cannot hurt them. To this I answer that the power of that sacrament, that is, of saving baptism, in the holy structure of the body of Christ is so great that one who has once been begotten through the carnal pleasure of others, once he has been regenerated through the spiritual will of others, cannot thereafter be bound by the chain of another's iniquity to which he does not consent by any will of his own. “For the soul of the father is mine,” he says, “and the soul of the son is mine; the soul that sins, it shall die.” It does not itself sin when its parents, or anyone else, apply sacrileges of demons to it while it is wholly unaware. But it drew from Adam what would be loosed by the grace of that sacrament, because it was not yet a soul living separately, that is, another soul, of which it could be said, “Both the soul of the father is mine and the soul of the son is mine.” So now, when a man is in himself, made other than him who begot him, he is not held liable for another's sin without his own consent. He drew guilt, then, because he was one with him and in him from whom he drew it, when what he drew was committed; but one does not draw from another when each is already living his own life, so that it may be said: “The soul that sins, it shall die.”

But that he can be regenerated through the service of another's will, when he is offered to be consecrated, is the work of the one Spirit, from whom the one offered is regenerated. For it is not written, “Unless one is born again of the will of the parents or of the faith of those who offer or minister”, but, “Unless one is born again of water and the Spirit.” So the water, presenting outwardly the sacrament of grace, and the Spirit, working inwardly the benefit of grace, loosing the bond of guilt, reconciling the good of nature, regenerate in the one Christ the man begotten from the one Adam. The regenerating Spirit, then, is common to the older people who offer and to the little one offered and reborn; therefore, through this fellowship of one and the same Spirit, the will of those who offer profits the little one offered. But when older people sin against the little one by offering him and trying to bind him with sacrilegious bonds of demons, the soul of both is not common, so that they could also have guilt in common. For guilt is not shared through another's will in the way grace is shared through the unity of the Holy Spirit. For the one Holy Spirit can be in this man and in that one, even if they do not know each other, through whom grace is common to both; but the spirit of a man cannot be both this man's and that man's, so that, when one sins and the other does not, the guilt is nevertheless common. And so a little one once begotten from the flesh of his parents can be regenerated by the Spirit of God, so that the obligation contracted from them is loosed; but once regenerated by the Spirit of God he cannot be regenerated from the flesh of his parents, so that the obligation which has been loosed is contracted again. And therefore the little one does not lose the grace of Christ once received, except by his own ungodliness, if with the advance of age he turns out so evil. For then he will begin to have his own sins too, which are not taken away by regeneration but healed by another cure.

Nevertheless, parents or any older people who try to bind their baptized children or any little ones by sacrileges of demons are rightly called spiritual murderers. For they do not indeed commit murder in them, but, as far as lies in them, they become murderers. It is rightly said to them when they are forbidden this crime, “Do not kill your little ones”; for the apostle too says, “Do not quench the Spirit”, not because he can be quenched, but those are rightly called his quenchers, as far as lies in them, who act so as to wish him quenched. In this sense one can rightly understand what the most blessed Cyprian wrote in his letter on the lapsed, when, rebuking those who had sacrificed to idols in the time of persecution, he says: “And so that nothing might be lacking to the heap of crime, infants too, placed in or dragged by their parents' hands, lost as little ones what they had obtained at the very beginning of their birth.” “They lost,” he said, as far as concerned the crime of those by whom they were forced to lose it; they lost in the mind and will of those who committed so great a crime against them; for if they had lost it in themselves, they would surely have remained to be condemned by the divine sentence without any defence. If holy Cyprian had thought this, he would not have added their defence immediately, saying: “Will they not say, when the day of judgment comes: ‘We did nothing, nor did we leave the food and cup of the Lord and hasten of our own accord to profane contagion; another's faithlessness ruined us; we found our parents parricides; they denied us the church as mother and the Lord as father, so that, while small and unwary and ignorant of so great a crime, we were joined through others to a partnership in crime, we were caught by another's fraud’?” He would not have attached this defence unless he believed it most just and of profit to the little ones in God's judgment. For if it is truly said, “We did nothing; the soul that sins, it shall die”, neither will those perish under God's just judgment whom their parents, as far as concerns themselves, have destroyed by their crime.

As for what is related in the same letter, that a little girl, left with a nurse by her parents, who were in confusion as they fled, and forced by that same nurse into the sacrileges of demons, afterwards in church spat out the Eucharist brought to her with strange movements: this seems to me to have been done by God, so that older people should not think they commit no sin against little ones by that iniquity, but rather understand that through that significant movement of the body of those who could not speak they were being wonderfully warned what they themselves ought to do, who after so great a crime were rushing to the saving sacraments, from which they certainly ought to have abstained by doing penance. Nor, when divine providence does some such thing through little infants, is it to be believed that they do it by knowledge or reason. For because God willed to restrain the madness of a certain prophet even by a speaking ass, the wisdom of asses is not therefore to be admired. And if through an irrational animal there sounded something very like a man, which is to be attributed to a divine miracle and not to an ass's heart, so the Almighty could, through the soul of an infant, not where there was no reason but where it was still asleep, show by the movement of its body what those who had sinned both against themselves and their little ones ought to attend to. For the rest, since the infant does not return into the parent, so as to be one man with him and in him, but is altogether another, having his own flesh and his own soul, “the soul that sins, it shall die.”

Nor should it trouble you that some bring little ones to receive baptism not with the faith that they may be regenerated to eternal life by spiritual grace, but because they think that by this remedy they may keep or recover bodily health. For the little ones are not therefore not regenerated because they are not offered by these people with this intention. For through them the necessary ministries and words of the sacraments are celebrated, without which a little one cannot be consecrated. But that Holy Spirit who dwells in the saints, from whom that one silvered dove is fused together by the fire of love, does what he does even through the service, sometimes, not only of those who are simply ignorant but even of those damnably unworthy. For little ones are offered to receive spiritual grace not so much by those in whose hands they are carried (though by them too, if they too are good believers) as by the whole society of the saints and believers. For they are rightly understood to be offered by all who are pleased that they are offered and by whose holy and undivided love they are helped toward the communion of the Holy Spirit. This the whole mother church, which is in the saints, does, because the whole of her gives birth to all and the whole of her to each. For if the sacrament of Christian baptism, when it is one and the same, is valid even among heretics and suffices for consecration, though it does not suffice for participation in eternal life (a consecration that makes the heretic guilty, having the Lord's mark outside the Lord's flock, yet sound doctrine warns that he is to be corrected, not consecrated again in the same way), how much more in the Catholic Church is the wheat carried, to be cleansed, even by the service of straw, so that by means of the threshing floor it may be brought into the fellowship of the heap!

But I do not want you to be misled into thinking that the bond of guilt drawn from Adam cannot be broken unless little ones are offered by their parents to receive the grace of Christ; for you write: “so that, as the parents were the authors of their punishment, they may in turn be justified through the faith of the parents.” For you see that many are offered not by their parents but even by any strangers, as little slaves are sometimes offered by their masters. And sometimes, when their parents are dead, little ones are baptized when offered by those who were able to show them mercy of this kind. Sometimes too those whom their parents cruelly exposed are picked up to be reared by anyone, sometimes by holy virgins, and offered by them for baptism, though these certainly neither had any children of their own nor intend to have any. And so you see nothing else done here but what is written in the Gospel, when the Lord asked who had been neighbour to the man wounded by robbers and left half dead on the road; for the answer was: “He who showed mercy to him.”

At the end of your inquiry you thought you were putting to me a very difficult question, with that intention, namely, with which you are accustomed strongly to guard against lying. “If I set a little one before you,” you say, “and ask whether, when he grows up, he will be chaste or will not be a thief, you will no doubt answer, ‘I do not know’; and whether, at that same tender age, he is thinking anything good or bad, you will say, ‘I do not know.’ If, then, you dare promise nothing certain about his future conduct or about his present thought, what is it that, when they are offered for baptism, the parents answer for them as sponsors and say that they do what that age cannot think, or, if it can, it is hidden? For we ask those by whom they are offered and say, ‘Does he believe in God?’ of that age which does not know whether God exists; they answer, ‘He believes’; and so they answer to each of the other questions that are asked. So I am amazed that parents in these matters answer so confidently for the little one as to say that he does such great good things as the baptizer asks at the hour he is baptized; yet if at that same hour I were to add, ‘Will the one being baptized be chaste, or will he not be a thief?’, I do not know whether anyone dares to say that any of these will or will not be, as he answers me without hesitation that he believes in God and that he turns himself to God.” Then, concluding your letter, you add: “To these questions, then, I ask you to be so good as to answer briefly, in such a way that you do not cite custom to me but give a reason.”

Having read and reread this letter of yours and considered it as far as the shortness of time allowed, I remembered my friend Nebridius, who, being a most diligent and acute inquirer into obscure matters, especially those that pertain to the teaching of piety, greatly hated a short answer to a great question. And whoever demanded one, he took it very ill, and, if the person's standing allowed, he would check him with an indignant look and voice, thinking unworthy one who asked such things when he did not know how much could and should be said on so great a matter. But I am not angry with you as he used to be; for you are a bishop occupied with many cares, as I am, so that neither have you much leisure to read anything long nor I to write it. For he, then a young man, who did not want to hear such things briefly and asked me many things in our conversations, was asking at leisure of one at leisure; but you, considering now who is asking these things and of whom, bid me answer briefly on so great a matter. See, I do it as far as I can; may the Lord help me to be able to do what you ask.

We often speak in such a way that, as Easter approaches, we say that tomorrow or the day after is the Lord's passion, though he suffered so many years ago and that passion took place only once. On the Lord's day itself we say, “Today the Lord rose”, though so many years have passed since he rose. Why is no one so foolish as to accuse us of lying when we speak so, except that we name these days according to their likeness to those on which these things were done, so that a day is called that very day which is not that day but is like it by the revolution of time, and something is said to happen on that day because of the celebration of the sacrament which did not happen on that day but long ago? Was not Christ sacrificed once in himself, and yet in the sacrament he is sacrificed for the peoples not only on all the solemnities of Easter but every day; and he certainly does not lie who, when asked, answers that he is being sacrificed. For if sacraments did not have a certain likeness to those things of which they are sacraments, they would not be sacraments at all. And from this likeness they generally receive the names of the things themselves. As, then, in a certain way the sacrament of Christ's body is Christ's body, and the sacrament of Christ's blood is Christ's blood, so the sacrament of faith is faith. And to believe is nothing other than to have faith. And so, when it is answered that a little one believes who does not yet have the disposition of faith, it is answered that he has faith because of the sacrament of faith, and that he turns himself to God because of the sacrament of conversion; for the answer itself belongs to the celebration of the sacrament. So the apostle says of baptism itself: “We were buried together with Christ through baptism into death.” He does not say, “We signified burial”, but plainly says, “We were buried together.” He named the sacrament of so great a thing by no other word than that of the thing itself.

So, even if that faith which consists in the will of believers does not yet make a little one faithful, the sacrament of that faith does. For as they are answered for as believing, so too they are called faithful, not by assenting to the thing itself in their mind but by receiving the sacrament of the thing itself. But when a man begins to understand, he will not repeat that sacrament, but will understand it and conform himself to its truth by an agreeing will as well. As long as he cannot do this, the sacrament will avail for his protection against the opposing powers, and will avail so much that, if he departs this life before the use of reason, he will be freed by Christian help, through the sacrament itself, commended by the love of the church, from that condemnation which entered the world through one man. Whoever does not believe this and thinks it cannot be done is surely an unbeliever, even if he has the sacrament of faith; and far better is that little one who, even if he does not yet have faith in his thought, does not set against it the obstacle of a contrary thought, so that he receives its sacrament to his salvation. I have answered your questions, as I think, not sufficiently for the less capable and the contentious, but for the peaceable and intelligent perhaps more than sufficiently. Nor have I set against you in my excuse the very firm custom, but I have given, as well as I could, the reason for a most wholesome custom.

I had received three letters from your Kindness when I wrote this reply: one still asking for a letter from me, a second indicating that mine had already reached you, and a third containing your most kindly care for us concerning the house of the most distinguished and excellent young man Julian, which adjoins our walls. On receiving this I did not put off replying at once, because the agent of your Excellency wrote that he could send to Rome quickly. We were greatly saddened by his letter, because he took care to inform us of what is happening there in the City or around the City, so that what we were unwilling to believe on uncertain report has become certain to us. For in letters from the brothers sent earlier, things were reported that were distressing and hard, but much lighter. I was more amazed than can be said that, with so good an opportunity offered by your people, neither did the holy brother bishops write, nor did your letter tell us anything of your great tribulations, which, through the bowels of love, are certainly ours too; unless perhaps you thought it should not be done because you judged it would do no good, or did not wish to sadden us by your letter. It does some good, in my judgment, to know even these things: first, because it is unjust to wish to rejoice with those who rejoice and not to wish to weep with those who weep; second, because “tribulation works patience, patience proof, proof hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Far be it from us, then, to refuse to hear even bitter and sad things concerning our dearest ones. For somehow what one member suffers becomes less if the other members suffer with it. And this relief of the evil comes not through sharing the disaster but through the comfort of love, so that, though some suffer by bearing and others suffer with them by knowing, the tribulation is nevertheless common to those who have proof, hope, love and the Spirit in common. And the Lord consoles us all, who both foretold these temporal evils and promised eternal goods after them. Nor ought he who wishes to be crowned after the battle to be broken while he fights; he is strong when he who prepares unutterable gifts for the victors supplies strength to those who contend.

Do not let that reply of ours take away your confidence in writing to us, especially since you have soothed our fear with a not unreasonable defence. We return the greetings of your little ones and pray that they may grow up for you in Christ; already at this age they see how dangerous and harmful is the love of this world. And would that, when great and hard things are shaken, small and pliant things may be corrected! As for that house, what shall I say but give thanks for your most kindly care? For the house we can give they do not want, and the one they want we cannot give. For it was not, as they have falsely heard, left to the church by my predecessor; it is held among the church's ancient estates, and adjoins one ancient church just as the one in question adjoins the other.

I would not wish the African church to be placed in such afflictions that it needed the help of any earthly power. But since, as the apostle says, “there is no power except from God”, without doubt, when help is brought to it through you, most sincere sons of the Catholic mother, “our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” For who would not feel that in such great evils no small consolation has been sent us from God, when you, such a man and a most devoted lover of the name of Christ, have been raised to the insignia of proconsul, so that power joined to your good will might restrain the enemies of the church from their wicked and sacrilegious attempts, my excellent lord, deservedly honourable and notably praiseworthy son? In short, there is only one thing we fear in your justice: that perhaps, since whatever evil is committed by ungodly and ungrateful men against the Christian society is certainly graver and more atrocious than if such things were committed against others, you too may think it should be punished according to the monstrousness of the crimes, and not rather with regard to Christian gentleness. We beg you by Christ himself not to do this. For we do not seek vengeance on our enemies on this earth, nor ought what we suffer to narrow our minds so much that we forget what he commanded us for whose truth and name we suffer: we love our enemies and pray for them. Hence, through the occasion of terrible judges and laws, we wish them to be corrected, lest they fall into the penalties of the eternal judgment, not to be put to death; we wish neither that discipline toward them be neglected nor that the punishments they deserve be inflicted. So restrain their sins in such a way that there may be people to repent of having sinned.

We ask, therefore, that when you hear the church's cases, however nefarious the injuries with which you learn it has been attacked or afflicted, you forget that you have the power to put to death, but do not forget our petition. Do not think it a cheap or contemptible thing, my most beloved son, to be honoured, that we ask you that those should not be put to death for whom we ask the Lord that they may be corrected. Besides the fact that we must not depart from our constant purpose of overcoming evil with good, let your prudence consider this too: that no one but churchmen takes care to bring church cases before you. Therefore, if you think men should be put to death in these cases, you will deter us from letting any such case come before your court through our efforts; and when they learn this, they will rage for our destruction with more unbridled boldness, since the necessity will be laid on us of choosing even to be killed by them rather than to bring them before your courts to be killed. I beg you not to receive this admonition, petition and entreaty of mine with disdain. For I do not think you fail to remember that I could have had great confidence in approaching you, even had you been raised much higher than you now are, even if I were not a bishop. Meanwhile, let the Donatist heretics quickly learn through the edicts of your Excellency that the laws passed against their error remain in force, which they think and boast are now of no effect, lest even so they be unable to spare us at all. But you will greatly help our labours and dangers to bear fruit if you take care that their most vain sect, full of ungodly pride, is not so repressed by the imperial laws that they seem to themselves or to their people to be enduring some troubles or other for truth and righteousness; but, when this is asked, allow them to be convicted and instructed by the most manifest documents of definite facts in the records of your Excellency or of the lesser judges, so that those who are detained by your order may, if possible, bend their hard will for the better and read these things to the others for their good. For it is a diligence more burdensome than useful merely to compel men, and not to teach them, even though it be to abandon a great evil and hold to a great good.

I ought not to have sent any further letter to your holy Charity without those books which you demanded of me by the most forceful right of holy love, so that at least by this obedience I might answer your letters, with which you deigned rather to burden than to honour me. And yet where I sink because I am burdened, there too I am lifted because I am loved. For I am not loved, lifted, chosen by just anyone, but by such a man and priest of the Lord that I feel him to be so acceptable to God that, when you lift up your soul, so good, to the Lord, since you have me in it, you lift me too. I ought, then, to send now the books which I had promised to correct; and I have not sent them because I have not corrected them, not because I did not wish to, but because I could not, being occupied with many and very pressing cares. But it would have been too ungrateful and iron-hearted that this holy brother and colleague of ours, Possidius, in whom you will find no small presence of ours, should either not come to know you, who love us so much, or come to know you without a letter from us. For through our ministry he has been nourished, not on those letters which the slaves of various lusts call liberal, but on the Lord's bread, as much of it as could be dispensed to him through our narrow means.

For what else should be said to those who, though unjust and ungodly, think themselves liberally educated, but what we read in letters truly liberal: “If the Son sets you free, then you will be free indeed”? For it is through him that it is granted that even those disciplines which are called liberal by those who have not been called to freedom may be known for what they have in them that is liberal. For they have nothing suited to freedom except what they have suited to truth. Hence that Son himself says: “And the truth will set you free.” So those countless and ungodly fables with which the songs of vain poets are filled in no way accord with our freedom, nor the inflated and polished lies of orators, nor finally the chattering subtleties of the philosophers themselves, who either did not know God at all, or, “though they knew God, did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened; claiming to be wise they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed beasts and serpents”; or, if they were not given, or not much given, to these images, nevertheless worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. Far be it altogether that the vanities and lying madness, windy trifles and proud error of these men should rightly be called liberal letters, the men, that is, unhappy as they are, who did not know the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, by which alone we are freed from the body of this death, not even in those things that they perceived truly. History, indeed, whose writers profess that they owe good faith above all to their narratives, perhaps has something worthy of the knowledge of free men, since the deeds of men, good or bad, are at least truly narrated. Though how, in coming to know these things, those who were not helped by the Holy Spirit and were compelled by the very condition of human weakness to gather rumours could avoid being deceived in very many things, I do not at all see. Yet there is some nearness to freedom in them, if they have no will to lie and do not deceive men except when they are deceived by men through human weakness.

But since, in all the motions of things, what numbers can do is more easily considered in sounds, and this consideration strives by certain graded paths toward the inmost heights of truth, in which ways wisdom shows herself cheerfully and meets those who love her in all providence, at the beginning of our leisure, when my mind was free from greater and more necessary cares, I wished to make a prelude with these writings which you have asked of us, when I wrote six books on rhythm alone; and I was planning, I confess, to write perhaps six more on melody, when I hoped I would have leisure. But after the burden of church cares was laid on me, all those delights fled from my hands, so that I can scarcely find the volume itself now, since I cannot disregard your wish, or rather not your request but your command. If I can send that little work, I shall not indeed regret having obeyed you, but you will regret having demanded it of me so urgently. For five of its books are very hard to understand unless someone is present who can not only distinguish the persons of those disputing but also, in pronouncing, so sound the lengths of the syllables that the kinds of rhythm are expressed by them and strike the sense of hearing; especially since in some places measured intervals of silence are also mixed in, which cannot be perceived at all unless the reader instructs the hearer.

The sixth book, however, which I found corrected, and in which is all the fruit of the others, I did not delay sending to your Charity; perhaps it will not be altogether unsuited to your gravity. For the first five will seem scarcely worthy of being read or known by our son and fellow deacon Julian, since he too is now a fellow soldier with us. I do not dare say that I love him more than you, for I would not say it truly; but I do dare say that I long for him more than for you. It may seem strange how I can long more for one whom I love equally; but a greater hope of seeing him does this to me. For I think that if he comes to us at your bidding or sending, he will do what befits a young man, especially since he is not yet held back by greater cares, and he will bring you yourself to me more readily. In what rhythms the verses of David consist I have not written, because I do not know. For the translator from the Hebrew language, which I do not know, could not express the rhythms as well, lest by the necessity of metre he be forced to depart further from the truth of translation than the sense of the sentences allowed. Yet I believe that they consist of definite rhythms, as those who know that language well say. For that holy man loved sacred music, and he more than any other author has kindled us to these studies. May you all dwell for ever in the help of the Most High, you who dwell of one mind in one house, father and mother, brothers of your sons, and all sons of one Father; remember us.