On Baptism, against the Donatists 1.15–2.2

They also ask whether sins are forgiven through baptism in the party of Donatus, so that if we say they are forgiven they may answer: “Then the Holy Spirit is there, since when he had been given to the disciples by the Lord’s breathing on them, the Lord then went on to say: ‘Baptize the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins they will be forgiven him; if you retain anyone’s, they will be retained.’ And if this is so,” they say, “our communion is the church of Christ; for the Holy Spirit does not work the forgiveness of sins outside the church. And if our communion is the church of Christ, your communion is not the church of Christ. For she is one, whichever she may be, of whom it was said, ‘My dove is one, she is the only one of her mother’; nor can there be as many churches as there are schisms.” But if we say that sins are not forgiven there, “Then,” they say, “there is no true baptism there, and therefore you ought to baptize those you receive from us. And since you do not do this, you admit that you are not in the church of Christ.”

We resist them according to the Scriptures, questioning them so that they may answer for themselves what they ask of us. For I ask them to say whether sins are forgiven where there is no love. For sins are the darkness of souls. We hear John saying, “He who hates his brother is in darkness even until now.” But no one would make schisms if they were not blinded by hatred of their brothers. If then we say that sins are not forgiven there, how is someone who is baptized among them reborn? For what is it to be reborn through baptism but to be renewed from oldness? And how is one renewed from oldness whose past sins are not forgiven? But if he is not reborn, neither has he put on Christ; from which it follows that he seems to need to be baptized again, since the apostle says: “For as many of you as were baptized in Christ have put on Christ”; and if he has not put him on, he is not to be held as baptized in Christ either. But since we say he was baptized in Christ, we admit that he has put on Christ, and if we admit this, we admit that he is regenerated. And if this is so, his sins too have been forgiven. How then does John say, “He who hates his brother remains in darkness even until now,” if forgiveness of sins has already taken place? Or is there no hatred of the brothers in schism? Who would say that, since the origin and persistence of schism is nothing else than hatred of a brother?

They think they solve this question when they say: “Then there is no forgiveness of sins in schism, and so no regeneration of the new man, and therefore no baptism of Christ either.” But since we admit that Christ’s baptism exists there, we put this question to them to solve: was Simon the magician dipped in Christ’s true baptism? They will answer yes, because they are compelled by the authority of holy Scripture. I ask then whether they admit that his sins were forgiven. Certainly they will admit it. Again I ask why Peter told him that he had no part in the lot of the saints. “Because,” they say, “he sinned afterward, wishing to buy with money the gift of God, which he believed the apostles were selling.”

What if he came to baptism itself in pretence? Were his sins forgiven or not? Let them choose what they like; whichever they choose is enough for us. If they say they were forgiven, how then will “the holy Spirit of discipline flee the deceitful,” if in this deceitful man he worked the forgiveness of sins? If they say they were not forgiven, I ask: if afterward he confessed his pretence with a stricken heart and true sorrow, would he be judged to need baptism again? And if it is utter madness to say so, let them admit that a man can be baptized with Christ’s true baptism and yet his heart, persisting in malice or sacrilege, may not let the abolition of sins take place; and so let them understand that in communions separated from the church men can be baptized, where Christ’s baptism is given and received by the same celebration of the sacrament, yet it profits for the forgiveness of sins only when each one, reconciled to unity, is stripped of the sacrilege of dissension, by which his sins were retained and not allowed to be forgiven. For just as with the man who came in pretence it happens that he is not baptized again, but is cleansed by that devout correction and truthful confession, which could not happen without baptism, so that what was given before begins to be effective for salvation once that pretence has gone through truthful confession; so too the man who, as an enemy of the love and peace of Christ, received in some heresy or schism Christ’s baptism, which those who separated themselves did not lose, and by which sacrilegious crime his sins were not forgiven, is not to be baptized again when he corrects himself and comes to the fellowship and unity of the church; because by the reconciliation and peace itself it is granted that the sacrament, which received in schism could not profit, begins to profit for the forgiveness of his sins now in unity.

But suppose they say that in the man who came in pretence his sins were indeed forgiven, by the holy power of so great a sacrament, at that very moment of time, but returned at once because of his pretence; so that the Holy Spirit was both present to the baptized man so that his sins departed, and fled from the persistence of his pretence so that they returned; so that both sayings are true, “As many of you as were baptized in Christ have put on Christ,” and, “For the holy Spirit of discipline will flee the deceitful”; that is, the holiness of baptism clothes him with Christ, and the ruin of pretence strips him of Christ, as happens when someone passes from darkness through light into darkness: his eyes are fixed on darkness all the time, but the light cannot help shining on him as he passes. If, then, they say this, let them understand that this also happens in those who are baptized outside the communion of the church, but with the church’s baptism. For this, wherever it is, is holy in itself, and so it does not belong to those who separate themselves but to the church from which they separate themselves; yet it has force even among them to this extent, that they pass through its light into the darkness of their dissension, the sins returning at once which the holiness of baptism had forgiven at that moment of time, as the darkness returns which the light had dispelled as they passed.

For that forgiven sins return where there is no brotherly love the Lord teaches most plainly in the gospel about that servant whom, when he found him to owe ten thousand talents, he forgave everything at his entreaty; but when he had not had pity on his fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii, the lord ordered him to repay what he had forgiven him. The time, then, when pardon is received through baptism is like the time of rendering account, so that all the debts found are forgiven. Yet that servant did not afterward lend money to his fellow servant and then, when he could not repay, refuse him pity; his fellow servant already owed him when he himself, rendering account to his lord, was released from a debt of such size; and he had not forgiven his fellow servant what he owed him, and came in that state to have his lord forgive him. The fellow servant’s words show this: “Have patience with me and I will repay you.” Otherwise he would have said, “You had already forgiven me this; why do you demand it again?” The Lord’s own words make this still clearer. For he says, “But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii.” He did not say, “to whom he had already forgiven a debt of a hundred denarii”; for if he had forgiven it, the man did not owe it to him. Since then he said, “who owed him,” it is plain that he had not forgiven it. And it would indeed have been better, and more fitting for one so deep in debt who was about to render account and hoped for his lord’s mercy, that he should first forgive his fellow servant what was owed him, and so come to the rendering of account where his lord’s mercy was to be implored. Yet what he had not yet forgiven his fellow servant did not prevent his lord from forgiving him everything he owed at that time of accounting. But what good was it, since because of his persisting hatred everything was at once heaped back on his head? So the grace of baptism is not prevented from forgiving all sins, even if hatred of a brother persists in the mind of the one to whom they are forgiven. For yesterday is released, and whatever is before it is released, even the very hour and moment before baptism and in baptism. But from then on he at once begins to be guilty not only of the following days, hours, and moments but also of the past ones, since all that was forgiven returns. And these things often happen in the church.

For it often happens that a man has an enemy whom he hates most unjustly, although we are commanded to love even unjust enemies and to pray for them. But suddenly, in danger of death, he begins to be alarmed and asks for baptism, which he receives in such haste that the time of danger scarcely allows the necessary questioning of a few words, much less a very long sermon to drive that hatred from his heart, even if it were known to the one baptizing. Certainly these things never cease to happen, not only among us but among them too. What then do we say? Are this man’s sins forgiven or not? Let them choose just what they like. For if they are forgiven, they return at once; the gospel says so, the truth cries it aloud. So whether they are forgiven or not, a remedy is needed afterward. Yet if he lives, and learns that this must be corrected, and corrects it, he is not baptized again, either among them or among us. So too the things that schismatics or heretics have and do no differently from the true church, we do not amend when they come to us, but rather approve. For in what they do not differ from us, in that they are not separated from us. But since these things profit them nothing as long as they are schismatics or heretics, because of the other things in which they differ from the truth and because of the most monstrous crime of separation itself, whether their sins have remained on them or, once forgiven, have at once returned, we urge them to come to the salvation of peace and love, not only so that they may have something they did not have, but so that what they had may also begin to profit them.

So it is in vain that they say to us: “If you accept our baptism, what do we lack, that you should think we ought to look to your communion?” For we answer: we do not accept your baptism, because that baptism does not belong to schismatics or heretics, but to God and the church, wherever it is found and wherever it is carried. What is yours is only that you think perversely, act sacrilegiously, and are impiously separated. For if you held or believed everything else that is true, and still persisted in that same separation against the bond of brotherly peace, against the unity of all the brothers, who have been shown throughout the whole world just as they were promised, all of whose cases and hearts you have never in any way been able to know and examine so as to condemn them justly, and who cannot be guilty because they believed the church’s judges rather than the litigants, you would lack only this: what he lacks who does not have love. Now why need we go over it again? Look for yourselves in the apostle at how much it is that you lack. And what difference does it make whether one who does not have love flies outside, carried off by some wind of temptation, or does not leave the Lord’s harvest within, to be separated at the last winnowing? And yet even such people, if they have once been born through baptism, need not be born again.

For the church gives birth to all through baptism, whether within herself, that is, from her own womb, or outside herself from the seed of her husband. But Esau too, though born of the wife, was separated from the people of God because of discord with his brother; and Asher, born through the wife’s authority indeed but of the handmaid, received the land of promise because of concord with his brothers. So also, that Ishmael was separated from the people of God was not due to his mother being a handmaid but to discord with his brother; and the authority of the wife, whose son he rather was, did not help him, since by her marital rights he was both begotten in the handmaid and received from the handmaid. So among these people, whoever are born are born by the right of the church, which is in baptism; but if they agree with their brothers, they will come through the unity of peace to the land of promise, not to be cast out again from the mother’s womb but to be acknowledged in the father’s seed; but if they persist in discord, they will belong to Ishmael’s portion. Now Ishmael was first and Isaac afterward, and Esau first and Jacob later, not because heresy gave birth before the church, or the church itself first bore the carnal or natural and afterward the spiritual, but because in the very lot of our mortality, since we are born of Adam, “what is first is not the spiritual but the natural; afterward the spiritual.” And from that natural sense, since “the natural man does not perceive the things of the Spirit of God,” all dissensions and schisms are born. Those who persist in that sense, the apostle says, belong to the old covenant, that is, to the desire for earthly promises, in which spiritual things are indeed figured, but “the natural man does not perceive the things of the Spirit of God.”

Whenever, then, people of this kind have begun to exist in this life, so that though already imbued with the divine sacraments as they were distributed through the ages they still think carnally, and hope for and desire carnal things from God, whether in this life or after it, they are natural men. But the church, which is the people of God, is an ancient thing even in the pilgrimage of this life, having a natural portion in some people and a spiritual portion in others. To the natural belongs the old covenant, to the spiritual the new. But in the first times, from Adam to Moses, both were hidden. From Moses the old was made manifest, and in it the new was hidden, because it was signified in a hidden way. But after the Lord came in the flesh, the new was revealed. The sacraments of the old ceased, but such desires did not cease. For they are in those whom the apostle describes as already born through the sacrament of the new covenant, yet still natural and unable to perceive the things of the Spirit of God. For just as under the sacraments of the old covenant some lived as spiritual men, belonging in a hidden way to the new covenant which was then hidden, so now too under the sacrament of the new covenant, which has already been revealed, many live as natural men. If they will not advance to perceiving the things of the Spirit of God, to which the apostle’s word urges them, they will belong to the old covenant. But if they advance, even before they grasp it they belong to the new by that very advance and approach. And if they are snatched from this life before they become spiritual, kept by the holiness of the sacrament, they are counted in the land of the living, where our hope and portion is the Lord. Nor do I find any truer meaning in what is written, “Your eyes saw my imperfection,” since it continues, “and in your book all shall be written.”

She who gave birth to Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham also gave birth to Moses and the prophets, later in time, before the Lord’s coming; and she who gave birth to these also gave birth to the apostles and our martyrs and all good Christians. For they all appeared, born at different times, but they are held together in the fellowship of one people, and as citizens of the same city they have experienced the labours of this pilgrimage, and some of them are experiencing them now, and the rest will experience them to the end. Likewise she who gave birth to Cain and Ham and Ishmael and Esau also gave birth to Dathan and others like him in the same people; and she who gave birth to these also gave birth to Judas the false apostle and Simon Magus and the other false Christians down to these times, stubbornly hardened in natural affection, whether they are mixed within unity or dissent by open severance. But when such men are evangelized by spiritual men and imbued with the sacraments, it is as if Rebecca gives birth to them by herself, as she did to Esau; but when such men are begotten in the people of God through those who do not proclaim the gospel purely, it is Sarah indeed, but through Hagar. Again, when good spiritual men are begotten through carnal men who evangelize or baptize, Leah or Rachel bears them by marital right, but through the womb of a handmaid; but when good believers are begotten in the gospel through spiritual men, believers who either attain to the disposition of spiritual maturity, or do not cease to strive toward it, or fail to do so only because they cannot, they are born into new life and the new covenant as Isaac from the womb of Sarah or Jacob from the womb of Rebecca.

So whether they seem to dwell within or are openly outside, what is flesh is flesh; whether it persists in its barrenness on the threshing floor or is carried outside by the occasion of temptation as by a wind, what is chaff is chaff. And even one who is mixed with the congregation of the saints in carnal hardness is always divided from the unity of that church which is without spot or wrinkle. Yet no one is to be despaired of, whether one who appears such within or one who opposes more openly outside. But the spiritual, or those advancing toward it with devout zeal, do not go outside; for even when by some perversity or necessity of men they seem to be expelled, they prove there more than if they had remained within, since they in no way rise up against the church but are rooted in the solid rock of unity with the strongest might of love. To this belongs what is said in Abraham’s sacrifice: “But the birds he did not divide.”

On the question of baptism, then, I think I have now argued enough. And since what is called by the name of the Donatists is a most manifest schism, it remains for us to believe devoutly about baptism what the universal church holds, far removed from the sacrilege of schism. Yet if in that church some still thought one thing and others another on this question, while keeping peace, until a universal council approved some one thing, refined and pure, the love of unity would cover the error of human weakness, as it is written: “For love covers a multitude of sins.” For where love is absent, everything else is possessed in vain; where it is present, some things are pardonably lacking.

There are great proofs of this in the letters of the blessed martyr Cyprian, to come now to him by whose authority these men carnally flatter themselves, while they are spiritually slain by his love. For in those times, before the consent of the whole church had confirmed by the decision of a plenary council what was to be followed in this matter, it seemed good to him, with about eighty of his fellow bishops of the African churches, that every man who had been baptized outside the communion of the Catholic Church must be baptized again on coming to the church. That this was not rightly done the Lord surely did not disclose to so great a man for this reason: that his devout humility and love in guarding the peace of the church for its health might be made plain, and be marked, so to speak, for medicinal knowledge not only for the Christians of that time but for those who came after. For when a bishop of such merit, of so great a church, of so great a heart, of such eloquence, of such virtue, thought something about baptism other than what truth, more carefully examined, was to confirm, and many of his colleagues held what, though not yet clearly shown, both the past custom of the church and afterward the whole Catholic world embraced, he nevertheless did not cut himself off from the others who thought differently by separating his communion, and he never ceased to urge the others too to “bear with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” For so, while the framework of the body remained, if anything was weak in some members it would recover by the health of the others, rather than being deadened by severance and admitting the care of no treatment. And if he had separated himself, how many would have followed! What a name he would have made for himself among men! How much more widely would men be called Cyprianists than Donatists! But he was not a son of perdition, of such as it was said, “You cast them down while they were being lifted up,” but he was a son of the church’s peace, who, endowed with such enlightenment of heart, did not see something for this reason: that through him something more excellent might be seen. “And yet,” says the apostle, “I show you a still more excellent way. If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” He penetrated less, then, so as to discern the hidden secret of the sacrament; but if he knew all mysteries and did not have love, he would be nothing. But since, though he saw that less clearly, he guarded love humbly, faithfully, and bravely, he was counted worthy to reach the crown of martyrdom, so that if any cloud had crept into his clear mind from the human condition, it might be put to flight by the glorious brightness of his shining blood. For not in vain did the Lord Jesus Christ himself, when he called himself the vine and his own as branches in the vine, say that they are cut off and taken from the vine as useless branches that bear no fruit. And what is the fruit but that new offspring of which he also says, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another”? That is the love without which the rest profits nothing. The apostle also says: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, self-control.” All these begin from love, and through the rest of their joining make, as it were, a marvellous cluster. Nor did the same Lord add in vain, “But the branches in me that bear fruit my Father prunes, that they may bear more fruit,” unless because even those who abound in the fruit of love may still have something to be pruned, which the husbandman does not leave untended. So that this holy man, thinking differently about baptism from the truth of the matter, which was afterward thoroughly treated and confirmed by most careful consideration, remained in Catholic unity, this was both made up for by the abundance of his love and pruned by the knife of his suffering. But lest I seem to say these things in praise of the most blessed martyr (praise that is not his but belongs to him by whose grace he became such) in order to avoid giving proof, let us now bring proofs from his letters, by which above all the mouths of the Donatists may be shut. For they set his authority before the unlearned, to show that they act rightly, as it were, in baptizing again the faithful who come to them; most wretched as they are, and unless they correct themselves altogether condemned by themselves, who choose to imitate in so great a man what did him no harm for this reason: that he walked with most persevering steps to the end in that peace from which these have strayed, who have not known the way of peace. There is indeed this point: that Christ’s baptism is holy everywhere, and though it is among heretics or schismatics it does not belong to the heresy or schism itself, and so those who come from there to the Catholic Church itself ought not to be baptized again. But still it is one thing to err in this, and another for men who have strayed from Catholic peace and plunged into the abominable pit of severance to judge, on top of that, that others must be rebaptized. For in that holy soul the breasts of love covered that blemish on its whiteness, but in these men an unpeaceable face displays this soot in its hellish foulness. But what we are going to treat next, concerning the authority of blessed Cyprian, we shall take up from another beginning.

I have set out to show, with the Lord’s help, how much the things brought forward against us by the party of Donatus, as if on the authority of blessed Cyprian, tell for us, that is, for Catholic peace, and how much they tell against those who bring them forward. If then the need to reply compels me to recall again things I have already set down in other books, though I shall do it sparingly, it ought not to be burdensome to those who have already read and retain them; for what is necessary for instruction must be instilled more often in the slower, and when the same things are turned over and treated in many and varied ways, they help even those endowed with greater understanding, both toward ease of knowing and toward fullness of discussion. I know too how it usually vexes a reader when, on running into some knot of a question, he is sent from the book he holds in his hands to another, to look for its solution, a book he perhaps does not have. So if the needs of the present questions compel me to repeat briefly whatever I have already said in other books, let those who know forgive it, so that those who do not know may not be put out. For it is better to offer something to one who has it than to put off one who does not.

What then do these men say when they are choked by the force of the truth to which they will not consent? “Cyprian,” they say, “whose great merit and great learning we know, decreed in council, with many of his fellow bishops contributing their own opinions, that heretics or schismatics, that is, all who are outside the communion of the one church, do not have baptism, and that therefore anyone baptized by them who comes to the church must be baptized in the church.” Cyprian’s authority does not frighten me, because Cyprian’s humility refreshes me. We know indeed the great merit of Cyprian, bishop and martyr; but is it greater than that of Peter, apostle and martyr? Of him the same Cyprian speaks thus in his letter to Quintus: “For not even Peter, whom the Lord chose first and on whom he built his church, when Paul later disputed with him about circumcision, claimed anything for himself insolently or assumed anything arrogantly, so as to say that he held the primacy and that newcomers and latecomers ought rather to obey him; nor did he despise Paul because he had earlier been a persecutor of the church; but he admitted the counsel of truth and readily agreed to the lawful reasoning that Paul defended, giving us, namely, an example both of concord and of patience, that we should not obstinately love our own views, but should rather take as our own whatever is at times usefully and wholesomely suggested by our brothers and colleagues, if it is true and lawful.” Here Cyprian recalls what we too have learned in the holy Scriptures: that the apostle Peter, in whom the primacy of the apostles stands out by so excellent a grace, was corrected by the later apostle Paul when he was in the habit of acting about circumcision otherwise than the truth required. If then Peter could in some point not walk straight toward the truth of the gospel, so as to compel the Gentiles to live like Jews, as Paul writes in the letter in which he calls God to witness that he is not lying (for he says, “What I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie”; and after this so holy and fearful calling of God to witness he related all these things, in which he said: “When I saw that they were not walking straight toward the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all: If you, though you are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”), if Peter, I say, could compel the Gentiles to live like Jews against the rule of truth that the church afterward held, why could not Cyprian compel heretics or schismatics to be baptized again against the rule of truth that the whole church afterward held? I think that Bishop Cyprian is compared with the apostle Peter without any insult to himself, so far as the crown of martyrdom is concerned. Indeed I ought rather to fear being insulting toward Peter. For who does not know that that primacy of apostleship is to be preferred to any episcopate whatever? But though the grace of their chairs differs, the glory of the martyrs is one; and if perhaps the hearts of those who confess and die for the true faith in the unity of love surpass one another in some respect, the Lord knows, by whose hidden and wonderful dispensation of graces the thief hanging on the cross confesses him once and is sent into paradise that very day, while Peter, following the Lord, denies him three times and his crown is put off; for us to judge from this is rash. Yet if anyone now compelled someone to be circumcised after the Jewish manner and so to be baptized, the human race would detest this far more than if someone were compelled to be rebaptized. So since Peter, doing that, is corrected by Paul, his junior, and, kept by the bond of peace and unity, is advanced to martyrdom, how much more easily and firmly is what has been established by the decrees of the universal church to be preferred to the authority of a single bishop or to the council of a single province, since this same Cyprian stated what he thought in such a way that he wished to remain in the peace of unity even with those who thought differently on this matter! This is shown by his own first speech at the opening of that same council which these men bring forward. For it runs as follows.