On the One Baptism, against Petilian 1–19

We are very often compelled, brother Constantine, to answer those who think differently and stray from the rule of truth, even about matters which we have treated repeatedly in one discourse after another. I think this is done usefully, both because of the slower wits of those who think something different is being said when they read the same thing said differently, and because of the very abundance of the discussions, so that the matter reaches not only the diligent as a rarity, but something out of many falls into the hands even of the more careless. Accordingly, see with what ease, with the Lord’s help, I refute the discourse on the one baptism composed by those by whom baptism is repeated. You gave it to me when we were together in the country, having received it from some Donatist presbyter or other, and you asked me earnestly to answer it; it is puffed up with nothing but a din of words and roughened with slanderous accusations.

The first complaint there is that a secret matter is aired in public. Then let those be silent who think this ought not to be done; or, if they say they are compelled to speak in order to answer those who think differently, this is our reason too: to answer not only those who think differently but also those who act differently. For what does harm in secret ought to be refuted openly, since it is also defended openly when it is urged, so as to do harm in secret when it is carried out. For who baptizes anyone in front of the uninitiated? And yet no uninitiated person is unaware that Christians are baptized, who hears in public what, if he believes, he may receive in secret.

Let us see, then, what they say about repeating baptism, those who are ashamed to say this openly; would that they feared to do it openly! “The question is,” he says, “where true baptism is.” Then he adds: “It is so much mine that what was given by me as one is not repeated even by the sacrilegious themselves.” To him we answer: the man is not sacrilegious who does not dare to repeat the one baptism, not because it is yours but because it is Christ’s. For the one consecration of a person in baptism is Christ’s; but the repetition of the one baptism is yours. I correct in you what is yours; I acknowledge what is Christ’s. For this is just, that when we reject the evil of people we approve whatever good of God we find in them. This, I say, is just, that even in a sacrilegious man I should not violate what I find to be a true sacrament, so that I do not amend the sacrilegious man in such a way as to commit sacrilege in him.

For these men are bad in a good baptism just as the Jews are bad in a good law. So, just as the Jews will be judged by the law itself, which their malice did not make bad, so these will be judged by the baptism itself, which, being bad, they held while it was good. So, just as when a Jew comes to us to become a Christian, we do not destroy in him the good things of God but his own evil things (for we amend his error in not believing that Christ has already come, been born, suffered, and risen; and, that unbelief destroyed, we build up the faith by which these things are believed; likewise we dissuade him from his error in clinging to the shadows of the old sacraments, and show that the time has already come when the prophets foretold that these would be taken away and changed; but his believing that the one God is to be worshiped, who made heaven and earth, his detesting all the idols and sacrileges of the nations, his awaiting the judgment to come, his hoping for eternal life, his not doubting the resurrection of the flesh, we praise, approve, acknowledge, and confirm, as he believed what is to be believed and held what is to be held): so too, when a schismatic or heretic comes to us to become a Catholic, we cut away his schism and heresy by dissuading and destroying them; but the Christian sacraments, if we find the same in him, and whatever else of truth he holds, far be it that we should violate them, far be it that we should repeat what we know is to be given once, lest, while we cure human vices, we condemn the divine remedies, or, by seeking to heal what is not wounded, wound the injured man where he is sound. Accordingly, if I find a heretic who dissents on some matter belonging to the Christian and Catholic faith, even on the very unity of the Trinity, and yet he was baptized by the Gospel and ecclesiastical rule, I correct the man’s understanding; I do not violate God’s sacrament. I speak of Jews, and of schismatics or heretics straying in any way under the name of Christ.

As for the Gentiles themselves and the worshipers of idols, who are far removed from us by many differences, the apostle shows us nothing else than that in them too we should so correct whatever is wrong as to approve whatever may be right. For he was certainly rebuking idolaters, and, what is worse, not only the worshipers but the very founders of images, when he says: “Who, knowing 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.” Such, we know, were the images of the Egyptians, where an idolatry more varied and much more shameful is said to have been instituted. Yet did he deny that knowledge of God had been in them, and not rather confirm it, saying, “Knowing God, they did not glorify him as God”? If, then, he had tried to refute and destroy that knowledge as a lie because he found it in the sacrilegious, would he not, far be it, have shown himself an enemy of the truth? And so what they changed into their lie (for here too he said, “They changed the glory of God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man,” that is, imagining God to be such as God is not, and not handing him on to men as they knew him; and a little later he says of such people, “who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever”; for the truth of the creature is from God; it is not God; and they turned it into a lie, worshiping as gods the sun and the moon and whatever things in heaven and on earth): what, then, they changed into their lie, he blames, detests, and overturns; but what true thing they kept in their teaching, though mixed and confused with many falsehoods, he approves, attests, and affirms. For here too he began the same passage by saying: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and injustice of those men who hold the truth in unrighteousness,” not denying the truth, though held in unrighteousness;

and in the Acts of the Apostles, when he was teaching the Athenians about the one true God, that “in him we live and move and are,” he at once added, “as some of your own have said.” This, then, that we live and move and are in God, is from that truth which those impious worshipers of images, too, hold in unrighteousness, who, knowing God, did not glorify him as God. Yet this truth, as we see, found among the impious and sacrilegious, the apostle does not destroy but confirms, and uses its testimony to teach those who did not know these things. A follower of this apostolic rule, Bishop Cyprian, arguing for the one true God against the worshipers of many false gods, brings forward many testimonies from the books of those whom they regard as distinguished authors, that is, from that truth which they hold in unrighteousness. Much more wonderful is what the apostle did, when, going round their shrines, he found among the altars of demons an altar on which was written, “To an unknown god,” and did not destroy this by denying and refuting it, but rather, by confirming it, found in it even a most fitting opening for his speech, saying: “What you worship unknowing, this I proclaim to you.”

Following this apostolic rule, then, handed down to us through our forebears, if we find anything right even in the perverse, we correct their perversity and by no means violate what is right, so that in one man the false things are amended by the true things he holds, not the true things destroyed when the false are refuted. In the times of the apostles, those who said, “I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas,” though by the names not of impious but of holy men, still made impious schisms; this was their own detestable vice. But their knowing that Christ was crucified for them and that they were baptized in his name was not of their error but of God’s gift among them; this truth of God they held in the unrighteousness of their schisms. Laying hold of this, the most blessed Paul did not, in destroying those vices, destroy it too, but by confirming it convicted those vices as needing amendment (“Was Paul crucified for you,” he says, “or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”), so that by the truth of God which they held they might blush at the falsehood of their own which they were doing. So, just as it is said to a Jew, “Hold the faith in the resurrection of the dead as you held it, but believe now that Christ has risen from the dead, which you did not believe; for you hold God’s truth about the resurrection of the dead in your unrighteousness, by which you do not believe that Christ has risen”; just as it is said to an idol-worshiper, “Hold, as you held, that the world was founded by the one true God, but do not believe that wood and stones and whatever parts of the world you worshiped are gods; for you hold the truth of God, by which you believe the world was founded by him, in your unrighteousness, by which you wish to be a worshiper of false gods”: so too it is said to a heretic who has changed the Christian sacraments, as they are handed on in the Catholic Church, by no falsehood of his own: “Hold the Christian baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit as you held it; but acknowledge the church of Christ growing through the whole world, as was prophesied, which you cursed with a sacrilegious voice; for you hold God’s truth about the oneness of baptism in the unrighteousness of your division. Correct the unrighteousness of your heretical fabrication, so that it may not destroy you, and do not be proud of the truth of the Christian sacrament, which is there to judge you. But far be it from me so to detest your unrighteousness as to deny the truth of Christ, which I find in you to your condemnation; far be it from me so to correct you as to destroy that by which I correct you”; unless perhaps I ought to destroy the truth I find in the soul of heretics, when the apostle did not destroy the truth he found on the stone of the pagans.

The one God is more than the one baptism (for baptism is not God, but it is something great because it is a sacrament of God); and yet the one God himself was worshiped even outside the church by those who did not know him. So too the one baptism is given even outside the church by those who do not know. Whoever says it could not have happened that the one true God was worshiped outside the church by those who did not know him, let him see what he can answer, not to me, but to the apostle himself, who says, “What you worship unknowing, this I proclaim to you.” Therefore, just as it profited nothing for salvation to those who worshiped the true God without knowing him, and indeed harmed them to ruin, because by worshiping false gods at the same time they did sacrilegious injury to the same true God; so it profits heretics nothing for salvation that they hand on and hold true baptism outside the church through ignorance, and indeed it harms them to condemnation, because in the sacrilegious unrighteousness of human error they hold the truth even of the divine sacrament, not to be cleansed by it but to be judged more severely by it. And just as the apostle, when he was correcting those sacrilegious men, acknowledged rather than denied the true God who was worshiped by them outside the church without knowing him, so we too, when we correct the errors of heretics in their sacrilegious separation, ought certainly to acknowledge, not deny, the true baptism which they hand on through ignorance outside the church.

But, they say, “Paul, when he came to Ephesus, ordered certain people who said they had been baptized with John’s baptism to be baptized in Christ.” Whoever thinks from this example that schismatics and heretics are to be baptized, let him dare to say, if he can, that John was a heretic or a schismatic. If it is wicked to say this, surely what was lacking was given to those people, not what was in them rejected; whether they lied in saying they had John’s baptism, as some think, or because John’s baptism was not the baptism of Christ, though it served Christ, just as the old sacraments of the law performed a kind of forerunning and prefiguring office. But they say: “If after John, the friend of the bridegroom, people were baptized, how much more must they be baptized after a heretic!” Another, moved as it were by a similarly just indignation, might say: “If after John, who drank no wine at all, people were baptized, how much more justly must they be baptized after a drunkard!” Let these men do this, then, if they can: let them baptize after their own drunkards, if the apostles baptized after sober John. What do they answer to this, but that they do not baptize after such men because those who were baptized by them received not their baptism but Christ’s? Let them believe, then, that people were baptized after John because they either had no baptism or did not yet have Christ’s baptism.

This indeed the man we are answering put to himself as an objection, and having put it did not resolve it. For he says: “Perhaps someone says: ‘But those whom Paul baptized again had been washed with John’s baptism, not with the baptism of Jesus Christ. Hence I say that those ought not to be rebaptized who, it is agreed, were baptized by betrayers, but yet in the name of Christ.’” When he had put this to himself, notice how vainly he tried to answer: “To this matter,” he says, “the Lord Christ answered in these words: ‘Whoever does not gather with me scatters’; and again: ‘Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. For many will say to me on that day: Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? And then I will say to them: I do not know you; depart from me, workers of iniquity.’ There is no doubt, then, that those have lost a false work who, though in the name of Jesus Christ, yet dared, being sacrilegious, to work. Like it or not, the betrayers therefore offend Christ the more with sacrilegious sacraments; and if they dare to say, ‘We prophesied in your name,’ he will say to them as to the others: ‘Depart from me, workers of iniquity; I do not know you.’ He will rightly say this to them, since in the unworthy the cases are not unlike: to baptize, to drive out demons, and to have done other wonderful mighty works.” See how much he said, and he could not at all resolve what he put to himself from the other side; and not only did he not resolve it, but he even reminded us of what we ought to say against them. For these Gospel testimonies not only do not help him at all, but even support our case very greatly.

The question was about John’s baptism; if the apostle baptized certain people baptized by John, he certainly did not give John’s baptism again to people who had John’s baptism, but ordered people who did not have Christ’s baptism to be baptized in Christ; and so he destroyed neither but distinguished both. The man we are arguing against saw this too, since, when he had raised against himself, as if from the opponent’s side, that those whom they call betrayers also baptize and are baptized with Christ’s baptism, not John’s, and that therefore baptism after them ought neither to be annulled nor repeated, he said that Christ answered this question when he said, “Whoever does not gather with me scatters”; as if Christ had said: in those who do not gather with me, even what is found true and mine is to be denied, blown away in exorcism, destroyed. He also says that, to some who say, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?”, he will answer, “I do not know you; depart from me, you who work iniquity.” Did he here also say: because of your iniquity I will deny even my truth held in your iniquity? For he will not receive into his kingdom all in whom he finds some truth, but those in whom he finds love in keeping with the truth; and if this is lacking, there will be iniquity. Yet the truth held in it is not to be denied, but the iniquity itself is to be condemned, the truth not destroyed. Hence the apostle too says: “And if I know all sacraments and all knowledge, and if I have all prophecy and all faith so that I move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” He said that he is nothing if he does not have love, not that the sacraments and knowledge and prophecy and faith are nothing. For those things are great, even if he is nothing who has them without love and holds their truth in his own iniquity. This we too say to these heretics: “We do not destroy the truth of baptism, which you hold in your iniquity; but when we correct you we destroy and overturn that iniquity, while we acknowledge and keep this truth.” So the further Gospel testimonies do not help him at all.

But notice how much they even support us. See, attend to his very words: “There is no doubt,” he says, “that those have lost a false work who, though in the name of Jesus Christ, yet dared, being sacrilegious, to work.” This is entirely true: those who, being sacrilegious, dared to work in the name of Jesus Christ have lost their own false work. Yet is the name of Jesus Christ itself therefore sacrilegious, even when the sacrilegious do something through it? Who, even the maddest, would dare to say this; what pagan, even, in our time would dare to affirm it? Hence Jesus Christ himself, though he said most truly, “Whoever does not gather with me scatters,” yet, when his disciples told him they had found someone casting out demons in his name and had forbidden him, because he did not follow the Lord with them, answered: “Do not forbid him; for no one does mighty works in my name and can speak evil of me.” In this man there was certainly his own iniquity, because he did not gather with the Lord nor follow the Shepherd with the disciples in the unity of his flock; and in that iniquity of his he held another’s truth, in that he cast out demons in the name of Jesus Christ and did not speak evil of him. So the Lord condemns this man’s iniquity in the words, “Whoever does not gather with me scatters,” yet does not deny or reject his own truth in him, when he says, “Do not forbid him; for no one does mighty works in my name and can speak evil of me.” Following this example of the Lord, we too, according to our strength, cannot deny the truth of baptism and whatever else true the heretics hold, nor dare to reject and destroy it; but their iniquity, by which they do not gather with Christ but scatter, we rightly detest, and, the truth that is in them remaining inviolate, we condemn it or, as far as we are allowed, amend it.

Let him see, then, in what error he said what he added next: “Like it or not, the betrayers therefore offend Christ the more with sacrilegious sacraments.” It is one rashness, though somehow tolerable, that he calls men betrayers whom he does not prove to be such; but who could bear his calling sacrilegious the sacraments of Christ, which are celebrated in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit by the Gospel rite, even if they were truly held by betrayers, as he slanders? Here perhaps he may say that what is given by the sacrilegious is no longer Christ’s sacrament. Why then does he not say that the name of Christ, which is spoken by the sacrilegious, is no longer Christ’s name either? This he did not dare to say at all. For he says: “There is no doubt, then, that those have lost a false work who, though in the name of Jesus Christ, yet dared, being sacrilegious, to work.” “Though,” he says, “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Did he say that it is not the name of Jesus Christ? So, just as it profits the sacrilegious nothing that they work in the name of Jesus Christ, so it profits heretics nothing that they baptize or are baptized with the baptism of Jesus Christ. But still, just as that name is the name of Jesus Christ, so this baptism is the baptism of Jesus Christ; and both are to be acknowledged and approved, not denied and destroyed, lest injury be done to such great gifts of God while the life of the sacrilegious who misuse these same goods is being corrected.

He says that the Lord will say to the sacrilegious, “Depart from me, you who work iniquity,” to those who outside the church baptize or cast out demons or work any mighty works in the name of Jesus Christ; but we say, or rather the truth itself says, that the Lord will say this to all, even to the bad fish who swim with the good within the very nets of unity until the shore. For what else will be said to them, when, the good having been gathered into vessels, those bad ones are separated and thrown out, but, “Depart from me, you who work iniquity”? And yet we do not destroy Christ’s sacraments in them, when we acknowledge such baptizers or such baptized within the same nets of unity. Nor do I think they themselves are so shameless as to dare to say that the Lord will not say, “Depart from me, you who work iniquity,” to so many bad and wicked people who are in their party, lost and defiled by manifest scandals and crimes, that is, to the greedy and robbers, or savage usurers, or bloody circumcellions; and yet they know, see, and hold that many such baptize and many are baptized by such, and even those whom their crimes displease do not violate Christ’s sacrament in them. So not only did he say nothing against us when he brought forward these Gospel testimonies, but he even reminded us of what we should say against them.

Accordingly, as for what follows, where he says exultantly, “I have resolved the question briefly”: he truly resolved it, but for us. For by saying that in the unworthy the cases are not unlike, to baptize, to drive out demons, and to have done other mighty works, to whom, when they say, “We did these things in your name,” he will say, “I do not know you; depart from me, workers of iniquity,” he made it plain that it is as true that those separated from the church baptize with the baptism of Jesus Christ as it is true that they drive out demons in the name of Jesus Christ, but that neither brings them to eternal life nor frees them from eternal punishments. And so, just as, if anyone came to the church from whom that man had driven out demons whom the disciples saw driving out demons in the name of Jesus Christ while separated from the flock of Jesus Christ, the mighty work done in him would by no means be denied, but what was lacking would be added to him: so whoever has been consecrated outside the church by heretics or schismatics, yet with Christ’s baptism, when he comes to the church, the sacrament of truth with which he was imbued is not to be denied, but the piety of unity from which he was separated is to be added, without which that sacrament could be in him but could not profit him. This we do; this we have received as handed down by our forebears; this we guard in the Catholic Church, which is spread through the whole world, against all the fogs of falsehood. What more, then, need we argue on this point, when he himself resolved the question briefly by citing Gospel testimonies, by which, if he did not wish to be contentious, he would surely both condemn his own error and recognize the truth of baptism?

So what need is there to go over all his words, in which he thinks he argues cleverly, and turns over with much talk, that true baptism is with them because it is also acknowledged and not denied by us? For whoever holds firm and unshaken what the most true and inviolable rule of truth shows, that in each person what is false and faulty is to be rejected or amended, but what is true and right acknowledged and accepted, sees at once both what we detest in the heresy of the Donatists and what we ought by no means to violate. For since they hold the truth of baptism in the iniquity of their separation, their iniquity is blamed by us, but the truth of baptism is everywhere acknowledged and approved.

For whoever says that the baptism of Christ must be destroyed when heretics baptize with it must, consequently, say that Christ himself must be denied when demons confess him. Hence Peter was praised when he said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and demons were driven out saying this very thing: “We know who you are, the Son of God.” So this confession, fruitful to Peter, ruinous to the demons, yet in both is not false but true, not to be denied but acknowledged, not to be detested but approved. So too the truth of baptism is given by upright Catholics as that confession was by Peter; it is given by perverse heretics as the very same confession was by the demons. It helps the former, condemns the latter; yet in both it is to be approved by acknowledging it, in neither violated by denying it. Hence the apostle James too, when he was rebuking certain people who said that true faith was enough for a person and did not join to it the works of love, refuted them from this comparison with the demons, so that they would not think they belonged to God because they believed what is true about God, even if they did not care to add good works to faith. “You believe,” he says, “that God is one? You do well; the demons also believe, and tremble.” So he compared to demons those who believe what is true about God and live wickedly; yet he did not destroy by denying it that very truth which the demons believe about God, out of hatred of the demons. Therefore, since this very man whom we are arguing against has set forth that the apostle says, “One God, one faith, one baptism,” see, we find the same God worshiped outside the church by those who do not know him; see, we find the same faith in the one God confessed outside the church not only by certain people but even by demons; but both were confirmed by the apostles rather than denied. Why, then, do we not likewise confirm rather than deny the one baptism in those we find set outside the church, so that we do not, from what is wrong in them, deprave what is right, but, from the right thing they hold, correct also that in which they are depraved?

What, then, does he mean by saying that there is true baptism where there is true faith? It is entirely possible that some have true baptism and do not have true faith, just as it is possible that they have the true gospel and, by not understanding it rightly, believe something false about God. Shall we think that, because of that falsity of faith, the gospel too, which is found true among them, is to be detested or emended? Nor do I think that those Corinthians whom he rebuked for having split into schisms had true faith in saying, “I am of Paul”; for this was false. Yet they had true baptism, from whose truth they hear from him, so as to correct this falsehood: “Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” There were also people there who did not believe that the dead rise, and in this they certainly did not hold and have true faith. Yet from what true thing they had, since they believed that Christ, in whom they had been baptized, had risen, the apostle works to cure also that in which their faith was not sound, saying: “If the dead do not rise, neither has Christ risen”; so that, since they had believed that Christ had risen and this was sound in them, that too might be healed in which by a most ruinous error they did not believe that the dead rise. Therefore, since in the holy canonical Scriptures neither do they find heretics coming to the Catholic Church baptized again, nor do we find them received in the same baptism which they had received in heresy, in this matter at least our case is equal: neither what they do, baptizing again heretics or those they think heretics, nor what we do, receiving the baptism of Christ even when given among heretics, is confirmed by any explicit example of apostolic times. But we, finding that the apostles, in any who erred or were sacrilegious by any impiety, confirmed rather than denied whatever truth they knew, and amended or condemned people’s error and impiety while keeping what was found true in them, follow this rule also in the truth of baptism: where we find it retained and kept as it is retained and kept in the Catholic Church, we do not deny or destroy it; but, it remaining, we cure, correct, and amend whatever is faulty, wrong, or false in each person, or, if we cannot, we detest and condemn it and avoid it.

Accordingly, when we receive them, we do not receive their iniquity, by which they have divided themselves from the church of Christ by a sacrilegious severance, by which they attack with slanderous and abusive accusations the Christian world, to which God bears so many testimonies through the Law, the Prophets, the Gospel, the Psalms, and the apostles; nor do we receive that error of theirs by which they refuse to acknowledge, dare to destroy, and do not hesitate to repeat the baptism of Christ kept even among heretics according to the church’s rule. Indeed, they make catechumens not only of laypeople but of clerics, and not just any clerics but presbyters and bishops, even if they were baptized in those churches which the apostles themselves founded by their own labor, if somehow they can lead them astray and bring them over to themselves. These detestable evils of theirs we by no means receive, since they cannot come over to us unless these are corrected.