Three Letters to Sympronianus 3.1–3.14

The whole treatise of the Novatians, which you sent me with propositions gathered from every side, brother Sympronian, comes to this: that it is not permitted to repent after baptism; that the church cannot forgive mortal sin; indeed, that the church itself perishes by receiving sinners. A splendid honour, a singular authority, a great firmness: to reject the guilty, to flee the touch of sinners, to distrust its own innocence! Who claims this, brother: Moses, or Paul, or Christ? But Moses wishes to be blotted out of the book for the blasphemers; and Paul to be accursed for his brothers; and the Lord himself prefers to suffer for the unrighteous. “None of these,” you will say. Who then? “Novatian taught this.” Some spotless and pure man, then, who had not listened to Novatus, who never deserted the church, who was made bishop by bishops, who was consecrated by the regular law, who obtained a vacant chair in the church? “What is that to you?” you will say; “Novatian taught this.” But when, brother, or at what times? Immediately after the Lord’s passion? After the reign of Decius, that is, nearly three hundred years after the Lord’s passion. What then? Did he follow prophets, like the Cataphrygians, or some Philumene, like Apelles? Or did he himself receive so much authority? Did he speak in tongues? Did he prophesy? Could he raise the dead? For he would have had to have one of these, in order to bring in a gospel of new law. And yet the Apostle cries out against it: “Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach a gospel besides what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.” “Novatian understood it so,” you will say, “but Christ taught it.” So from Christ until the reign of Decius no one understood? And after Decius, at last, every bishop was impatient, and all the others lax, who preferred to mingle with the lost, to perish with the wretched, to be wounded by another’s wound? With Novatian as champion righteousness is set free; with him as author whatever went wrong is corrected!

“Come,” you will say, “let us contend with examples and fight with reason.” But I have been free from care until now, content with the very order of the church and the peace of the ancient congregation; I have learned no zeal for discord and have sought out no arguments for contests. You, after you were separated from the rest of the body and divided from the mother, search through all the recesses of books as a diligent inquirer, in order to give an account of what you have done; you stir up every hidden thing; whatever has been at rest from then on, you disturb. Our forefathers disputed nothing of their own accord; with us security itself is unarmed. What fortified thing have you brought from your side? I do not know what Novatian did, what Novatus committed, how Evaristus swelled with pride, what Nicostratus announced: while I despise your weapons I do not know them; see whether you are fighting against an unarmed truth. Yet let us wait to see what you object, what you say. Could even naked truth or unskilled innocence hold its ground? You propose, and rightly, that the church is the people renewed by water and the Holy Spirit, without denial of the name of Christ, the temple and house of God, the pillar and support of the truth, a holy virgin with most chaste senses, the bride of Christ from his bones and flesh, having no spot or wrinkle, keeping the laws of the gospels intact. Which of us denies this? Indeed we add that the church is the queen in a golden and many-coloured robe, a fruitful vine on the sides of the Lord’s house, the mother of young maidens without number, the one beautiful dove of her mother and perfect, the very mother of all, built on the foundations of the prophets and apostles, with Jesus Christ himself the cornerstone, a great house enriched with every variety of vessels.

But these points of ours later; meanwhile let us look at those of yours. The church is the people reborn of water and the Holy Spirit. Come: who has shut up the fountain of God? Who has snatched away the Spirit? On the contrary, with us is the living water, the very water that springs from Christ; you, separated from the everlasting fountain, from where are you born? The Holy Spirit too has not departed from the principal mother; from where did he come to you? Unless perhaps he followed one in discord, left so many priests behind, was content with an unconsecrated seat, and fell in love with the worn-out cistern of an adulterous fountain. From where does your people have the Spirit, which no anointed priest seals? From where the water, which has left the mother-source? From where the renewal, which has lost the cradle of the peace that brings to marriage? The church is the people without denial of the name of Christ: are there no confessors among us, whom chains, fires, and swords have proved? “There were,” you will say, “but they perished by receiving those who denied.” Shall I keep silent, then, about this too, that your Novatian, while he still lived in the church, wrote, urged, and read out a booklet on receiving those who had denied, that is, the lapsed? Meanwhile, whom will you be able to persuade that the whole church fell because the lapsed were received? That because penitents were admitted, the people of those who admitted them became deniers? And if some community was more lax, did the others too, which did not approve what it did but followed custom and peace, lose the name Christian? Hear the voice of Jeremiah: “In those days they will not say: The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge; but each will die in his own sin.” Nor is the Lord silent in Ezekiel: “As the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine. Each will die in his own sin.” And again below: “The son will not take on the crime of the father, nor will the father take on the crime of the son; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon him.” You yourself set down this example: “And if these three were in its midst, Noah, Job, and Daniel, they will not deliver sons or daughters; they alone will be saved.” See, those are saved who are set in the midst of sinners, who cannot deliver others. You bind the whole world with the chains of a few; you condemn the whole church for the weakness of a small portion. What are all the saints with you, whom Novatus trained, Evaristus chose, Nicostratus taught, Novatian instructed? Have you escaped thorns and thistles? Have you no tares in your crop? Have your grains already been cleansed? Will that Cleanser come to you without a winnowing fan? Will you alone of all have no chaff?

Come, tell the rest: the church is the body of Christ. A body, certainly, not a member; a body gathered into one out of many parts and members, as the Apostle says: “For the body too is not one member, but many.” So the church is a full body, both a body and solid, and now spread through the whole world. Like a city, I say, whose parts are joined into one; not as you Novatians are, an arrogant little portion and a swelling gathered up and separated from the rest of the body. The church is the temple of God: a spacious temple, surely, a great house, which has indeed vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and earthenware, some for honour, but many splendid ones destined for the manifold uses of various works. The church is a holy virgin with most chaste senses, the bride of Christ. A virgin, true; but also a mother. A bride, plainly; but also a wife and spouse taken from her husband, and therefore bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh. For of her David said: “Your wife like a fruitful vine on the sides of your house; your children like olive shoots around your table.” Many births, then, belong to this virgin, and offspring without number, with which the whole world is filled, with which a populous swarm ever seethes in hives overflowing on every side. Great is this mother’s care for her children, and tender her affection: the good are honoured, the proud are chastised, the sick are cared for; no one perishes, no one is despised; her young are kept safe under the mother’s indulgence. The church is one having no spot or wrinkle: that is, having no heresies, no Valentinians, no Cataphrygians, no Novatians. For in these there are certain spotted and wrinkled folds that envy the adornment of precious garments. But the sinner who repents is no spot on the church; for as long as he sins and does not repent, he is placed outside the church. When he ceases to sin, he is already healed. The heretic, however, tears the garment of the Lord, the church of Christ, cuts it off, spoils it, wrinkles it. “For when there are schisms,” he says, “and strife among you, are you not carnal, and do you not walk according to man?” And again: “Their speech creeps like a cancer.” This is the spot on unity, this the wrinkle. Indeed, where the Apostle speaks about these things, he sets out the love and charity of Christ: “As Christ,” he says, “loved the church and gave himself up for her”, so as to remove heretics, because they do not know how to love. But why apply this to the wretched penitent? For he wishes both to love and to be loved.

The church is the one that keeps the laws of the gospels intact. Intact, certainly, because whole, because full: where reward is given to the faithful, where tears are not denied to the wretched, where the sick are cared for, where insolent health and proud righteousness claim nothing for themselves, where love persists, solicitous in all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. Hence that saying of the Apostle: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?” Where the whole brotherhood bears its burdens, grieving in common, secure in mutual devotion; all bearing with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. This will be the church, brother Sympronian; this will be the people reborn of water and the Holy Spirit in Christ. “I do not know,” you say, “whether sin can be forgiven by bishops, since the Lord said: Whoever denies me before men, I will deny him before my Father who is in heaven.” Why then did your Novatian, not yet a priest even by a false episcopate, long before Cornelius became bishop at Rome, before he envied his priesthood, urge these things? You have the testimony of Cyprian, of Cyprian whom even you have never been able to defame. For in one place he wrote to Antonianus in this way: “It was further added, with Novatian then writing and reading out with his own voice what he had written, and with Moses, then a confessor and now a martyr, subscribing, that peace should be given to the lapsed who were sick and at the point of death; and this letter was sent through the whole world and brought to the knowledge of all the churches.” What do you say, brother Sympronian? Novatian wrote this, and, to add the service of his own free will, he also read out what was written. His right hand is a witness, the hand that wrote is a witness, the tongue that read is a witness. Cornelius, against whom all this envy of yours broke out, was not yet bishop. Much later, with very many fellow bishops, with very many confessors and soon martyrs, as the same Cyprian writes, Cornelius agreed to the counsel of the elders that it was permitted to give peace. If the approach to penance is to be denied, Novatian is guilty, who wrote, urged, and read these things. Where was that impatient rigour then? Where that fierce censure? If no one had preferred Cornelius to you, that authority of the writer would have remained. Now the whole judgment displeases; now darts are hurled at us, by the very men on whose authority the cause of the darts grew strong.

But when did the Novatians begin this very heresy? Hear, I beg you, and attend to the whole course of your error. Cornelius, already made bishop of Rome by sixteen bishops, had received the place of the vacant chair, and in the virginal chastity with which he was endowed he was enduring frequent persecutions from the angry emperor. Then it happened that a certain presbyter Novatus came to Rome from Africa, after he had defrauded the widows in the church of Carthage, robbed the orphans, withheld the church’s money, thrown his father out of the house, so that he died of hunger and was not buried, and struck the womb of his pregnant wife with his heel and caused her miscarriage. And when at Carthage, as the brothers in the church pressed the matter, the day of his trial was at hand, he went into hiding here as well. Not long afterwards he urged on this Novatian, who was troubled by the episcopate of Cornelius (for he had hoped for it himself), while he was wavering with some supporters of his own party, as usually happens in such a case; he encouraged him as he hesitated, and exhorted him to hope for something great. He found some of those who had escaped the storm of that persecution, among whom he could stir up this very resentment against Cornelius over the receiving of the lapsed. He gives their letters to Novatian. On the authority of the letters, while a bishop was already sitting at Rome, and against the law of the single priesthood, Novatian took to himself the name of another bishop; he charged Cornelius with having communicated with the lapsed, and claimed himself to be innocent. Is it against this man that I must give account? Against this man that modesty must be defended? Against this man that purity of life must be vindicated?

“But why do you bishops too approve such things?” you will say. Let someone else say this; you defend Novatian. Let this cause seem inexcusable to others, though it may be pleasing to you. Let whoever is guilty on your side be innocent to you. Do not accuse another of a crime from which you cannot be cleared. Come, must we bishops now owe all the shame, because we have received the name of the apostles too, because we are marked with the name of Christ? “The Lord,” you say, “denies the one who denies; you, I would not have you acknowledge one who denies.” Who acknowledges the one who denies? He who drives him to penance, rebukes him, shows him his crime, opens his wounds, reminds him of eternal punishments, corrects him by the destruction of the flesh? This is to chastise, not to acknowledge. The Lord says to us: “You are the salt of the earth.” Rightly then we salt by saying these things, and whoever has heard will not be good for nothing. You see that the Lord’s judgment is not trampled on by us, but approved; that his severity is not cast aside, but his will disclosed. “But you forgive the sins of the penitent,” you will say, “though you are permitted to remit sin only in baptism.” Not I at all, but God alone, who both forgives what was committed in baptism and does not reject the tears of penitents. Moreover, what I do, I do not by my own right, but by the Lord’s. “We are God’s helpers,” he says; “you are God’s building.” And again: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the growth.” Therefore whether we baptize, or drive to penance, or grant pardon to penitents, we do it with Christ as the author. You must consider whether Christ can do this, whether Christ has done this.

“If forgiveness of sins could be given to penitents,” you say, “baptism was not necessary.” A most witless comparison! For baptism is the sacrament of the Lord’s passion; the pardon of penance is the merit of the one who confesses. The former all can obtain, because it is a gift of God’s grace, that is, a free giving; but this labour belongs to the few who rise again after a fall, who recover after wounds, who are helped by tearful cries, who come back to life by the destruction of the flesh. You assert that I set down in vain the example that God said: “I prefer the repentance of the sinner to his death.” What if I had added that saying of Isaiah: “When you turn and groan, then you will be saved and will know where you have been”? What if that of the Apocalypse: “Remember from where you have fallen, and repent, and do the former works”? “These things,” you will say, “were said to the Gentiles before baptism.” Hear the Apostle: “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says and speaks to those who are under the law.” So the condition of repentance will not bind those who lived without the law. And if they repented, they had done it by free faith, not by a bond of repentance imposed through the law. “So even the Jews,” you will say, “who repented before baptism, cannot repent after baptism.” Who taught you this, brother Sympronian? Who persuaded you that one who repented before should not repent afterwards? But we will look at this later. Meanwhile, if repentance after baptism is shut off for the Jews because they paid it in full beforehand, at least grant that the Gentiles, who did not know the law of repentance before, ought to repent afterwards. But I do not want you to be deceived about the Jews either. For they repented beforehand for this reason, that they had corrupted the old baptism, and they were repenting as it were after faith, the faith having been betrayed. Hear the Apostle: “For I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed; and the rock was Christ.” This baptism, then, they had violated, and that is why they were repenting.

Next let us see what you say: “If God often commands a man to repent,” you say, “he often permits him to sin.” What are you saying? Does one who often shows the remedy for a crime point the way to the crime? And does a physician, when he heals, teach a man to be wounded constantly? God does not want man to sin even once, and yet he frees him from sin. Nor, surely, when he frees, does he teach sin; just as one who rescues from a fire does not point the way to the fire, nor does one who snatches a shipwrecked man from the reefs drive him onto the rocks. It is one thing to be freed from danger, another to be driven into danger. And perhaps I would allow this to be believed if penance were thought a pleasure; but so great a labour is laid upon it, the destruction of the flesh is ordered for it, constant tears, unending groans. Will the man who has been healed, then, want to be cut again, burned again? Will he want to sin again and repent again, when it is written: “Do not add sin, lest something worse befall you”? And further: “I do not have pity on one who sins constantly.” But if, as you say, the one to whom the medicine of penance is shown is driven to sin, what at last will the man do from whom penance itself is shut off, for whom, the remedy despaired of, the whole wound is covered over, to whom the approach to life is altogether denied from the beginning? “In baptism,” you will say, “we die once, as the Apostle says: Do you not know that all of you who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? So you were buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ rose from the dead, so you too might walk in newness of life.” What wonder? The Apostle was teaching that we were new, so that no one should sin; yet it followed that one who had sinned should repent. The one would live unharmed, the other healed; the innocent would receive the crown, the penitent pardon; the one would receive the reward, the other the medicine. Indeed the same Apostle says: “For if, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, much more, now justified by his blood, we will be saved through him from wrath.” From wrath, surely, which was owed to sinners. But if he did not allow the Gentile people to die, much more will he not allow the redeemed to be destroyed. Nor will he cast away those whom he redeemed at a great price; for the loss of his servants is no light thing to him. He who rises indeed will die no more, as it is written. But he himself is the advocate with the Father; he himself intercedes for our sins, a patron of the wretched in no way to be despised, nor an unfit intercessor.

Answer, brother: can the devil overpower the servants of God, and Christ not be able to release them? You say that Peter’s repentance was before the Lord’s passion. No one put this to you. And yet Peter had already been baptized; for the Lord had said to him: “He who has been washed once does not need to be washed again.” He received the remedy of Christ afterwards, yet he repented before; and he was held a saint before he came to the remedy. Nor would his repentance have been written for remembrance unless it had profited the penitent in some way. “He wept,” it says, “most bitterly.” Do you not want a believer to do what Peter did? Do you not want what profited Peter to profit us? Come, did not my Thomas doubt the resurrection after the Lord’s resurrection? Is he not marked by the Lord as guilty of unbelief, when the marks of the nails, the pierced hands, the wound in the side are shown to him, when the Lord says to him thus: “Do not be unbelieving, but believing”? What then? Was he ashamed to repent? Was he not humbled? Does he not at once confess him as his God and Lord? Does not that confession commend him?

Now how cleverly you dispose of the heading I set down: that power was given to bishops, so that what they bound on earth would be bound also in heaven. You say that this applies not to the faithful but to catechumens, so that it was permitted to loose or retain the crimes of peoples still to be baptized. Then you join the passages of two evangelists so that they seem to be one, and you add that what Matthew set out less completely, John completed: so that, since the Lord had said in Matthew, “Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he completed it in John, saying: “Whoever’s sins you forgive, they will be forgiven him; whoever’s you retain, they will be retained.” So this forgiving or binding seems to have applied to the nations who were to be baptized, because the first evangelist spoke beforehand about the nations, while the later one completed it about loosing and binding. What are you saying? Did the two evangelists report halved meanings to each other, half complete? Did they lack words or reasoning between them? Or did the Holy Spirit not fill everything wholly in all of them, carrying through the meanings set forth and defining what was said in full? No one adds to a man’s confirmed testament; shall a different tablet change God’s tablet? What is this desire for winning in you, that you dare such a thing? What of the fact that in Matthew himself, before his passion, the Lord had said: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound also in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed also in heaven”? The Lord had said this beforehand in Matthew, and made no mention of the nations there. Why then do you join to it the passage of John, where he set down his own, and set it down so as to separate it from the nations? Surely, if he had wanted it to apply to the nations, he could himself have joined what he himself was setting down. So everything you seek, you have in Matthew. Why did you not read all of it, you who teach a bishop? Go back to the first heading of this command. As Matthew himself relates, a little earlier the Lord spoke to Peter; to one, so that he might found unity from one; soon giving the same command to all in common. Yet how does he begin with Peter? “And I tell you,” he says, “that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth will be bound also in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed also in heaven.” Tell me, brother: did he speak of the nations alone when he said, “On this rock I will build my church”? Does he call the unbaptized nations the church? Is a man not yet reborn the body of Christ? What do I loose for the nations that is not bound? For if it is not reckoned, neither is it bound. What do I bind that I constrain by no law? A Gentile is free of the law. See now, on the contrary, whether both apply to the baptized. He is loosed by pardon, because he was held by sin; he is bound by anathema, because he had been loosed by faith and set free through grace. But if I grant that this licence of loosing or binding looked to the nations, much more shall I prove that it applied to the baptized. For if one who had no bond could be loosed or bound, how much more he whom the laws of faith held?

You say that Matthew set down: “If your brother sins against you, go and rebuke him alone with him alone,” and that the Lord immediately added: “Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed also in heaven,” so that it seems to refer to an offence against a brother. Come, do you not see that above he says: “If your brother sins against you,” but here he adds: “Truly I say to you, whatever you loose on earth” and so on? The one he commanded to one man, the other he granted to many; the one is loosed by the man against whom the wrong is committed, the other by the church; the one without a priest, without the brothers, the other is obtained from all. “Whatever you loose,” he says; he makes no exception at all. “Whatever,” he says: great or small. Notice that further on he tells Peter that a sin committed against a man is to be forgiven seventy times seven times, to show that elsewhere it can be forgiven at least once. Yet one who sins against Peter wounds the Lord, as he himself indicates to Samuel: “They have not set you at naught, but me.” So the church is granted at least once what we ourselves are commanded so many times.

Now let us return to the straying sheep, that drachma, and the younger son. I had touched on these examples briefly in my former letter, but you repeated them in full, teaching and showing that the drachma, the sheep, and the younger son refer to the tax collectors and sinners, that is, the humble people, and not to the image of the Christian people or the pattern of the faithful. I am glad to be taught; but I am sorry that you have not understood. For what shall I assert? That whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law; certainly I agree that this too was said principally to those before, but as a pattern for the faithful, as an image of things to come, as the Apostle says: “These things happened to them in a figure; but they were written for our correction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.” And again: “All of which were shadows to them of the good things to come.” Certainly you yourself grant that those things were spoken to the tax collectors and sinners, that is, to the humble people, and therefore the younger. Tell me then: is not the Christian people itself the younger? Has it not clung to the root? Has it not joined those members together? Built, as it is written, on the foundations of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself the cornerstone. Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not of the Gentiles too? Yes, of the Gentiles too. Since God is one, who justifies the ungodly by faith and through faith. Certainly that humble people, which God compared to the drachma, the younger son, and the little sheep, was the church: from which came the whole crowd of believers, from which the Christian people. To this body our members too have been joined, and whole portions of believers, so that from the wild olive of the Gentiles they might come together into the good olive, as the Apostle says, “made sharers of its richness”; and so that we might all be one in Christ, Jew and Greek, slave and free. If then we are one body with those humble ones, what the humble of old heard has been said to us too; and so whatever was preached about a part of the body has been announced to the whole body.

I will say it more plainly: that later people, that poor and lowly people, was an image of the church, the humble and modest soul, the soul set free through Christ. This the Lord came to save; this he did not leave in the underworld; this is the sheep that is carried back on his shoulders, that is, by the effort and strength of patience. This is the drachma that is sought, and when found is shown to the neighbours. Do you see that its pattern fits the likeness of penitents? Do you see that the mercy extends up to this time? Do you see that whatever was said to the church at its birth pertains to the fullness of the church? Hence the Lord added there: “So there will be joy in heaven over one sinner doing penance more than over ninety-nine righteous who had no need of penance.” For if all things were written for them to admonish us, to whom at last will that humble sinful people be compared, if not to the penitent people? And if the figures are run through in order, the ninety-nine healthy are the whole church; the one straying is the small portion of offenders; the drachma that was lost is the wretched sinner; the son returning after his evils is reckoned like the redeemed man. Now you see that I rightly set down, when I was treating the cure of penitents, that the Lord said: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are ill.” Rightly also that saying: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Whatever was said about tax collectors and sinners will apply to all the sick and all the wretched.