Against Parmenian the Donatist 4.1–5.2

It has been shown openly and clearly, brother Parmenian, that the slander you made against us about the request for soldiers was in vain. Learn this too: that what you said about the oil and the sacrifice of the sinner applies rather to you. For the sinner is not to be whoever you wish. For we too could imitate your presumption and say that you are sinners. But let presumption cease on both sides: let none of us condemn another by human judgment. It is God's part to know the guilty, his to pass sentence. Let all of us men be silent; let God alone point out the sinner, whose sacrifice is a dog's victim and whose oil strikes fear into one who wishes to be anointed.

Recognize, brother Parmenian, the most open truth of this matter, if indeed you deign to hear gladly this name of brotherhood so often spoken by me. Suppose it is distasteful to you; still it is necessary for us, lest perhaps, as this name is proved, we should seem guilty by keeping silent. For if you do not wish to be a brother, I begin to be impious if I keep silent about this name. For you are our brothers and we yours, as the prophet says: "Has not one God created you and one father begotten you?" For you cannot fail to be brothers, since it was said to all, "You are gods and all sons of the Most High." Both we and you have received one precept, in which it was said, "Call no one on earth your father, for one is your Father in heaven." Our Savior Christ alone was born Son of God; but both we and you were made sons of God in one way, as it is written in the gospel: "The Son of God came: as many as received him, he gave them power to become sons of God, who believe in his name." We have both been made so and are called so; you have been made so and are not called so, because you will not be peacemakers or hear the Son of God himself saying, "Happy are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Christ, coming, called God and man back into peace, "and he made both one, taking away the middle hedge of the wall." You will not have peace with us, that is, with your brothers. For you cannot fail to be brothers, whom one mother church begot from the same womb of the sacraments, whom God the Father received in the same way as adopted sons. Hence Christ, foreknowing this time, since it was going to happen that you would today be at variance with us, gave such commands for prayer that unity might remain at least in prayer, so that those whose parties would disagree might join their prayers. We pray for you because we wish to, and you for us even when you do not wish to. Or else let each of you say, "My Father, who are in heaven," and "Give me today my daily bread," and "Forgive me my sins, as I also forgive my debtor." So, if what has been commanded cannot be changed, you see that we are not wholly separated from each other, since we pray for you willingly and you pray for us even unwillingly. You see, brother Parmenian, that the bonds of holy brotherhood between us and you cannot be wholly broken.

Now we must look for the sinner whose oil could be feared or whose sacrifice rejected. Let human suspicion cease; let the presumption of both parties be silent; let God alone point out who the sinner is. We read in the forty-ninth psalm, after the second pause, that the Holy Spirit said, "But to the sinner God said." Here the whole attention of the mind must be turned, and we must see who the sinner is. For if after what is read, "But to the sinner God said," there followed words such as these: "You took up arms, you threw yourself into the camp, you stood against the enemy in the battle line," the soldier would have to fear, because he himself could seem the sinner. Or if it said, "You bought goods, you traveled abroad, you traded at markets, you sold for gain what you had bought," the merchant would have to fear, because he himself could seem the sinner. Or if it said, "You built a ship, fitted it with ropes, adorned it with sails, caught favorable winds to sail," the sailor would have to fear, because he himself could seem the sinner. Or if after what is read, "But to the sinner God said," these words followed: "Dissension and schism displeased you, you agreed with your brother and with the one church that is in the whole world, you communicated with the seven churches and the shrines of the apostles, you embraced unity," if the following reading contained this, we would have to fear; we could be the sinners. But when God says, "Why do you set forth my righteous decrees and take my covenant in your mouth? But you have despised discipline and cast my words behind you; sitting, you spoke against your brother, and you set a stumbling block against your mother's son. You saw a thief and ran with him, and you put your portion with adulterers": all these things are said to you. Clear yourselves of all these, if you can.

For discipline has been despised by you. Why do you recite the covenant, who do not keep the covenant in which the discipline is written that you will not keep? For you cannot say that you keep what you fight against. God says, "Seek peace and you will obtain it"; you have rejected peace: is that not despising discipline? In the gospel we read, "Peace on earth to men of good will"; you will have neither good will nor peace: is that not despising discipline? Likewise in the hundred and thirty-second psalm we read, "Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity"; you will not dwell in unity with your brothers: is that not despising discipline? Christ says in the gospel, "He who has been washed once has no need to be washed again"; you wash again by rebaptizing: is that not despising discipline? God says, "Do not touch my anointed ones, and do not lay your hand on my prophets"; you have stripped so many priests of God of their honors: is that not despising discipline? Christ says, "By this I know that you are my disciples, if you love one another"; you hate us, who are certainly your brothers, nor would you imitate the apostles, by whom even Peter who denied was loved: is that not despising discipline? You set forth the righteous decrees of God and take his covenant in your mouth. How do you argue "Seek peace" when you do not have peace? How do you recite the covenant and not keep the covenant in which discipline is written?

You were chosen to sit and teach the people, and you speak against us, who are surely your brothers, since, as I said above, one mother church begot us, one God the Father received us; and yet you set stumbling blocks against us by commanding individuals not to greet us, not to receive courtesy from us. Consider the words of your pride, consider your sermons, consider your commands; go over your acts too, and you will find that he who asked feared your oil. There is none of you who does not mix insults against us into his sermons, who does not begin with one thing and end with another. You begin the Lord's readings and develop your sermons into injuries against us; you bring forth the gospel and insult an absent brother; you pour hatreds into the minds of the hearers; by teaching you urge enmities; by saying all these things you set stumbling blocks against us. So it was said to each of you, "Sitting, you spoke against your brother, and you set a stumbling block against your mother's son." Since God rebukes the sinner and reproves the one who sits, it is plain that it was said specially to you, not to the people, who have no permission to sit in the church. You see, then, that it must without doubt be charged to you, when God says, "Sitting, you set stumbling blocks against your mother's son." That we have one mother I have proved so often already, nor can you deny it, you who set stumbling blocks against us, while some of you bring forth readings not understood, so as to take away even what is usually common among all, namely the duty of greeting. For some of you yourselves, in a perfunctory greeting, refuse the customary kisses, and many are taught not to say "Hail" to any of us, and they think this is commanded them from a reading, but one not understood, not knowing of whom the apostle said this: "With such do not even eat; do not say Hail to him; for their word creeps like a canker." He said this of heretics, whose teaching had begun in those times to be faulty, who by a subtle seduction of words corrupted the soundness of the faith with diseases creeping in secret: such as Marcion, who, from a bishop become an apostate, brought in two gods and two Christs; such as Praxeas, who argued that the Father suffered, not the Son; such as Valentinus, who tried to take the flesh away from Christ. Theirs is the word that had a canker to plague the members of the faith. Such too is the word of the Scorpian heretic, who denied that there ought to be martyrdoms. But let them keep their poisons to themselves, and let not the telling of them trouble even slightly the simple understanding of the hearers. It is his word, then, that must be avoided, lest it creep like a canker. This was said also of Arius, who tried to teach that the Son of God was made from no substance, not born of God; whose teaching, had it not been scattered at the council of Nicaea by three hundred and eighteen bishops, had entered the breasts of many like a canker. This was said of Photinus, a heretic of the present time, who dared to say that the Son of God was only a man, not God. It could be said of you too, because your word has brought no slight canker into the minds and ears of some. For yours is the word you have for the sons of peace, when you say: "You are lost; look behind you; your soul will perish; how long will you hold out?" Thus you have made penitents of the faithful, thus you have put to death the honors in priests. Behold, yours too is the word that creeps like a canker today, so that greeting and table fellowship are forbidden. What of this kind could our word do, who keep the sons of peace with simple teaching, do not lead strangers astray, and exterminate no one? It is plain, then, that you set stumbling blocks against us daily; and it would take long to run through all the ways in which you speak against us and all the kinds of stumbling blocks you set.

For when he says, "You saw a thief and ran with him," about what do you think this was said? Was it about a garment taken away or a purse stolen, or about some things whose removal makes gains or losses among men? Those things too are indeed forbidden; but in this reading God rebukes the thefts done to himself. You ask what thefts are done to God? They are found among you. God's possession is the throng of the faithful, from which the thief, the devil, longs daily to steal something, who wishes to corrupt in some part the morals of a Christian man or woman, and, if not the whole man, to snatch whatever he can of the man. When you saw such a thief doing violence against us, you helped him with your works. For it escapes no one that every man who is born, even if he is born of Christian parents, cannot be without an unclean spirit, which must be shut out and separated from the man before the saving bath. Exorcism does this, by which the unclean spirit is driven out and put to flight into desert places. The house in the believer's breast is made empty; the house is made clean; God enters and dwells there, as the apostle says, "You are the temple of God, and God dwells in you." And since each one is full of God, from whom the thief, the devil, strives to steal something, you, by rebaptizing, exorcize a faithful man and say to God who dwells there, "Accursed one, go out," so that what was said by God through the prophet Ezekiel is fulfilled: "And they cursed me among my people for a handful of barley and a morsel, to kill souls that ought not to die, while they announce vain seductions to my people." God therefore hears insults not due to him and deserts such a dwelling; and the man who had entered the church full of God goes out an empty vessel. The devil, who wished like a thief to steal something, helped by your works, sees that the whole has become his, from which he wished to take a little. So God said of you, "You saw a thief and ran with him." In short, so it is written in the gospel: "But when God has deserted a man, the vessel remains empty, and the unclean spirit, wandering hungry through desert places, says, My house is empty" (that is to say, "He who had shut me out has been shut out"), "I will return there and dwell; and he brings with him seven others more savage and will dwell there, and the last state of that man will be worse than the first." This is: "You saw a thief and ran with him, and you put your little portion with adulterers." He calls heretics adulterers, and their churches adulteresses, which Christ scorns and rejects in the Song of Songs, as if he said, "Why do you gather to me those I do not need? One is my beloved, one is my bride, one is my dove," that is, the Catholic Church, in which, though you could be in it, you chose by rebaptizing to have your little portion among the adulterers. And since it has been most plainly proved by divine testimony that you are sinners, it has also been shown that your supports have fought against you; for you had added in support the prophet in whom we read, "The sacrifice of the sinner is like one who sacrifices a dog." Recognize now with sorrow, if you have any shame, that you are sinners.

Learn this too, whose voice this is: "Let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head." For you did not understand whose voice this is: surely Christ's, who had not yet been anointed when he asked that the oil of the sinner should not defile his head. Not understanding this, you said that the prophet David feared the oil of the sinner. He who sang it had long since been anointed by Samuel; there was no reason for him to be anointed again. So it is the voice of Christ saying, "Let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head." These are prayers, not commands; they are desires, not precepts. For if it were a command, it would say, "The oil of the sinner shall not anoint my head." It is, then, the voice of the Son of God, fearing even then to meet the oil of a sinner, that is, of any man, because no one is without sin except God alone. Therefore his Son feared man's oil, because it would have been unseemly for God to be anointed by a man. Therefore he entreats the Father that he be anointed not by a man but by God the Father himself. The Son, then, asks; let us see whether the Father consented. The Holy Spirit indicates and makes this plain in the forty-fourth psalm, where he says to the Son himself: "The Lord your God will anoint you with the oil of gladness, otherwise than your fellows." His fellows were the priests and kings of the Jews, each of whom, it is plain, was anointed by men. But since the Son was to be anointed by the Father, God by God, according to what the Son asked and the Spirit announced as promised, the Father fulfilled it in the Jordan. When the Son of God, our Savior, came there to John, he was pointed out with these words: "Behold the Lamb of God, this is he who takes away the sins of the world." He went down into the water, not because there was anything in God to be cleansed, but because water had to go before the oil that was to come upon him, to begin, order and fulfil the mysteries of baptism. When he had been washed, while he was held in John's hands, the order of the mystery followed, and the Father fulfilled what the Son had asked and what the Holy Spirit had announced. Heaven was opened as God the Father anointed; the spiritual oil at once came down in the likeness of a dove and settled on his head and poured over him; the oil was spread, from which he began to be called Christ, when he was anointed by God the Father; and lest a laying on of a hand should seem lacking to him, the voice of God was heard from the cloud, saying, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear him." This, then, is what is read: "Let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head." Learn, even late, brother Parmenian, the account of the truth, since now is the time to find learning.

And what you said is read in Solomon the prophet, that "the sons of adulterers are incomplete" and that "bastard shoots cannot put down deep roots," can be understood as said simply. Hence if you make it a figure, you have excused real adulterers. But suppose it was said figuratively: this was said of heretics, among whom are false marriages of the sacraments, in whose beds iniquity is found, where the seeds have been corrupted to the destruction of faith. When Valentinus contends that the Son of God was in a phantom, not in flesh, he corrupted his own faith and that of his followers. The seed of the birth of those has been destroyed who did not believe that the Son of God was born in the flesh of the virgin Mary and suffered in the flesh.

For that too which you recall reading in the prophet Jeremiah, that heaven shuddered because the people of God did two evils, forsaking the fountain of living water and digging for themselves worn-out cisterns that could not hold water: you read it indeed, but would not understand it as it stands; arranging everything for the insult of Catholics out of zeal for accusing, you tried to bend it much to your own will. For if you think all things were said through the prophets so as to apply to our times, you have excused the Jews, of whom it is plain these things were said, who abandoned the living God, the true God, the God who had shown them benefits, and made idols for themselves, that is, worn-out cisterns that cannot hold water. In God an everlasting majesty overflows, as water abounds in a spring with copiously flowing veins; but idols, if they are not made, do not exist, and cisterns, if they are not dug, cannot have capacious hollows. A cistern cannot be hollowed without skill and iron tools, nor can an idol be made without a craftsman. In idols there is no natural power, but it is added and attached by men's error; a power is supposed in the idol that was not born there. The cistern is worn out by skill; its making is a harassing, so that it neither has water of itself nor can hold what it receives; so the idol too is nothing of itself and, while it is worshiped, is nothing. This is what God said, that his people did two evils, because they forsook the fountain of living water and made for themselves dug and worn-out cisterns. For the people of the Jews had deserted the true water, had not known the majesty of God, and had followed the defiled religion of idols. This is what God grieves over; this is what he says heaven shuddered at. For through the prophet Isaiah too there is the same grief of God, when he calls two elements to witness in this, saying: "Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth: I have begotten and raised sons, and they have forsaken me." Why did you say nothing about this reading, brother Parmenian? Or because water is not named here? For you are understood to have struck at the law out of zeal for accusing, so that wherever you read "water" written you gathered it with some tricks to stir up odium, and with a kind of dragnet of malice woven of arguments you have drawn everything that is good to yourself. For what is your understanding in this chapter of Jeremiah, when God cries out that he has been forsaken and cisterns dug in this way (he is angry for himself, not for his property; for the water of baptism is God's property, not God), and if you think he has been forsaken when those who were baptized with us were with you, so that your deserters would rightly seem to be coming to us? It has been proved, then, that what you said of the oil and the sacrifice of the sinner you said not against us but against yourselves.

Who the traitors of the law and the authors of the schism were we showed in the first book by the plainest documents; that the one true Catholic Church is with us we showed in the second; in the third we proved that what is said to have been done harshly has nothing to do with us; and we taught by divine evidence that you are rather the sinners. Now in this place we must speak of baptism, the matter in which the whole question now at issue consists, since your boldness has violated baptism, when you chose to repeat what Christ commanded to be done once. Nor do you deny this, brother Parmenian, since at the beginning of your treatise you said many things that are ours, for us and against you. For in comparing baptism you recalled that the flood happened once and that there was one circumcision for the Jewish people. And though you treated these things at the start of your speech, in the course of your treatise you forgot them, bringing in two waters; and, intending to speak in your arguments of true and false water, you foolishly laid down the beginning of your speech in an order that, by weakening, confirms the oneness of holy baptism. You wished to lay as a kind of foundation, from Jewish circumcision, that the baptism of Christians had been foreshadowed in the circumcision of the Hebrews; you defended the Catholic Church while you attacked it. For in the progress of your treatise you professed to empty one so as to seem to fill the other. When you speak, apart from the baptism of heretics, of one and another, though you tried to show that they are different, you cannot deny that they are two; and while you try to take away one of them, you labored to seem to make the second, as it were, the first. But circumcision was sent ahead as a figure before the coming of baptism, and you argued that among Christians there are two waters; then show also two circumcisions among the Jews, one better, the other worse. If you look for this, you will not be able to find it. The stock of Abraham, from which the Jews are reckoned, boasts of being marked with this seal. So the truth ought to follow such as its image was sent ahead. For God too, who wished to show that it should be a single thing afterward when the truth followed, did not wish anything to be taken from the ear or the finger, but that part of the body was chosen from which the foreskin, once removed, would make a saving sign in them, which cannot be done again. For done once it keeps salvation; if it were done again, it could bring destruction. So too the baptism of Christians, performed in the Trinity, confers grace; if it is repeated, it causes the loss of life. Why, then, did you see fit, brother Parmenian, to set forth a single thing and against it to compare two baptisms, though different, one true, the other false? For so you argued afterward that there are two waters, claiming the true one for yourselves and wishing to ascribe the lying one to us. After this you also mentioned the deluge; it was indeed an image of baptism, that the whole defiled world, the sinners being drowned, might be cleansed to its former face by the intervening washing. But since you were going to say afterward that, apart from the diseased fonts of the heretics, there is also another water, that is, a lying one against the true: why did you wish to mention the deluge, which happened once? If that is so, first show two arks, even if not alike, and two unlike doves carrying different branches in their mouths, if you are going to prove a true and a false water. The only and true water, then, is that which is made holy not by place, not by person, but by the Trinity. And since you said there is also a lying water, learn this too, where you can find it: with Praxeas the Patripassian, who denies the Son entirely and contends that the Father suffered. And since the Son of God is the truth, as he himself testifies, saying, "I am the door and the way and the truth": if the Son of God is the truth, where he is not, there is a lie. Since with the Patripassian the Son is not, the truth is not either; and where the truth is not, there is lying water. So, even late, stop inventing crimes now, and do not transfer to Catholics what was said against the Patripassians. Now, since we have plainly shown that what you said about the flood and circumcision could be said for us and for you, it follows to show how you so spoke the praise of baptism that in it there is much for us and for you, yet something against you. For both is what is common to us and to you; and so to you too, because you came out from us. In short, both with you and with us there is one ecclesiastical way of life, common readings, the same faith, the very sacraments of faith, the same mysteries. You praised baptism well, then; for which of the faithful does not know that the single baptism is the life of virtues, the death of crimes, an immortal birth, the acquiring of the heavenly kingdom, the harbor of innocence, and, as you too said, the shipwreck of sins? These things are given to each believer not by the worker of that thing, but by the faith of the believer and by the Trinity.

Next you ask what you said against yourselves in praising baptism. Hear; but first confess what none of you will be able to deny. For you say that the Trinity counts for nothing where your presence has not been. If you disparage us, at least revere God, who is first in the Trinity, who with his Son and the Holy Spirit works and accomplishes all things, even there where no human person has been. But you, brother Parmenian, in praising water from the reading of Genesis, said that the waters first brought forth living souls. Could they have generated them of their own accord? Was not the whole Trinity there too? Surely God the Father was there, who deigned to command, who said, "Let the waters bring forth swimming things, flying things," and the rest. If what was made were made without a worker, God would say, "Bring forth, O waters." So the Son of God was there, who worked; the Holy Spirit was there, as we read: "And the Spirit of God was borne over the waters." I see nothing there as a fourth, nothing less than the three; and yet what the Trinity worked was born, and you were not there. Or if nothing ought to be permitted to the Trinity without you, call the fish back to their origin; plunge the birds already flying into the waves, if the Trinity ought to work nothing in your absence.