Against the Letter of Parmenian 2.33–3.2

But among many things I wonder at the man that, when he was arguing that baptism cannot be had unless received and cannot be received without someone giving it, he inserted a testimony from the gospel: ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from heaven.’ For someone unacquainted with these words, when this man had begun to say, ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him’, before he said ‘from heaven’, might think that he was going to say ‘by Donatus’, or ‘by Parmenian’, or ‘by someone of the party of Donatus’, or simply ‘by the party of Donatus itself’. I recognize the gospel and acknowledge that it is written there: ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from heaven.’ But is Donatus heaven? Is Parmenian heaven? Is the party of Donatus itself? It would not be heaven even if it were in heaven. For he who said, ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from heaven’, would never have said, ‘unless it has been given him from the sun or the moon or the stars’, though these are in heaven; how much less would he have said, ‘unless it has been given him from the party of Donatus’, which not only is not heaven nor in heaven, but does not even want to be in the kingdom of heaven! Nor, without doubt, would he have said, ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from the church’; for the church itself receives from heaven. But if he had said, ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him by a righteous man’, these brazen men would indeed rush in and proclaim that they are righteous, so that whoever wished to receive might receive from them; and we would not raise the question whether they were righteous or not, but would easily show from certain men who were exposed and expelled that there are, or were, hidden unrighteous men among them, and that they nevertheless did not reject them or say that what had been given and received from such men was not given or not received. But even this would be said falsely, if it were said: ‘A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him by a righteous man.’ For I ask from whom that righteous man himself, from whom another receives, received it. If he too received it from a righteous man, I ask the same about him, until I come, from the very head of the human line, to someone who did not receive from a man; and so I show that it is false that a man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him by a man.

What, then, do these men do, unknowingly, by means of this gospel testimony, but admonish people at last to wake up and notice that, truly, when a man desires to receive something holy, it is not men who are to be looked to, but him alone who gives this to man from heaven, because ‘a man cannot receive anything unless it has been given him from heaven’? But if they say, ‘He receives it indeed from heaven, not from a man, but still through a man’, I ask: through what kind of man? If only through a righteous man, then those do not have it who among them received it through most wicked hidden men. If also through an unrighteous man, what reason is there, then, for them to rebaptize anyone? If through an unrighteous man only when he is hidden, then those do not have it whom Optatus, the evident henchman of Gildo, baptized. If through an unrighteous man even when evident, provided he has not yet been condemned and cast out of the church’s communion, then those do not have it whom Felicianus of Musti baptized in the schism of Maximian while he was outside their communion; yet now, since they have returned with him, no one rebaptizes them. Finally, if a man, though from heaven, can nevertheless receive anything only through a man, I ask through what man John the Baptist himself, who was saying these things, had received what he had certainly received from heaven; and none is found. And so the bad cause is refuted by the testimonies it brings forward. For although the Son says that he has received from the Father, and that the Holy Spirit receives from what is his, not as if by stages, but as he himself explained, saying, ‘Because all that the Father has is mine, therefore I said: He will receive from what is mine’, yet that a man can receive something from God without any man in between, John himself attests by his own example, and so many saints before the Son of God became man; and, after he rose and ascended into heaven, the hundred and twenty people who were gathered together, whom the Holy Spirit coming from heaven filled with no man on earth laying on a hand; and, when the order of the church was already established, Peter himself marvelled that the centurion Cornelius, with those who were with him, was filled with the same Holy Spirit before baptism itself, before the laying on of hands. So no one receives without a giver; but as regards the holiness of baptism, God is present to give and a man to receive, whether God gives through himself, or through an angel, or through a holy man, or through a wicked man, as through so many either hidden or evident men, whom the servants of the householder are forbidden to gather out of the harvest before the time, and whom the Lord’s wheat, like chaff, does not rashly desert bodily, but piously bears spiritually, while meanwhile separated in heart, until the time of winnowing.

‘He who has believed wrongly’, he says, ‘cannot obtain the sacrament of baptism, because it is written: What is crooked cannot be adorned.’ What then? Suppose someone baptized among them who, for example, had thought that Christ began to exist from the time he was born of the virgin Mary according to the flesh; and afterwards, moved by the word of truth, when he learned that he is the one of whom John says, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, of whom he consequently says, ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’, he confessed to them his former error and anxiously informed them that he had been in it when he was baptized: would they order him to be baptized again? They would certainly never do it, but would congratulate the man’s unlearned simplicity, at first crooked through a carnal opinion, afterwards corrected by the reasoning of truth. Or if he even thought such a perversity must be stubbornly defended, and, having long resisted and not been corrected, was even driven out of the church, and afterwards, having come to know the truth, returned, they would certainly judge that he must be healed by repentance, not wounded by the repetition of baptism, even if he confessed that he had held this in his heart also at the time when he was baptized among them. ‘What is crooked cannot be adorned’, therefore, because the sacrament he had received would not serve him as an adornment if he persisted in a crooked faith, but rather for punishment; while yet the sacrament itself, in itself, would remain whole even in the crooked man, whom it did not adorn but judged; and so in no way should the holiness of that sacrament be violated, even when that man’s crookedness had to be corrected.

Parmenian even dares to set before us divine examples by which he thinks he shows that one should look for a holy man from whom to receive the sacrament. ‘The Son of God himself’, he says, ‘the Lord Jesus Christ himself, from whom the beginning of spiritual baptism arose, when he was to be baptized according to the Father’s will, is he shown to have come to the faithless and profane Pharisees, or to the most holy John?’ But if we are invited by this example to receive baptism, we ought to look for someone inferior to us to be baptized by, since the Lord was baptized by one who had said beforehand that he ought to be baptized by the Lord himself, and who testified that he was unworthy to untie the strap of his sandal. Indeed, to leave aside a more careful inquiry into why our Saviour himself wished to be baptized, since he wished it for some certain reason, perhaps for this reason, though he who could even baptize his own baptizer could have dipped himself, the Lord willed to be baptized by a servant, and he through whom all things were made willed to be baptized by one who was made among all things, both to teach humility and to show that it does not matter who is baptized by whom, so long as he is baptized with the baptism with which he is to be baptized. Nor would he have disdained to be baptized by the Pharisees, if the Pharisees had had such a baptism as that with which he willed to be baptized for the sake of a definite sacrament. For when he had also to be circumcised, was John sought out, since this was already customarily done by the Jews? And when the sacrifice of the law had to be offered for him, was that temple avoided which he calls a den of robbers? Into it certainly both the good and the bad entered, and the bad did not harm the good, since the Lord, who says, ‘Be holy, because I too am holy’, makes his saints live among the bad so inviolably, if they keep the holiness they receive, just as the Lord Jesus himself was polluted by no contagion of malignity in the Jewish nation, neither when, made under the law in the perfect way of humility, he received those first sacraments, nor when afterwards he lived with his chosen disciples, together with his betrayer, right up to the last kiss. For by his example, who not only did not do evil but consented to no malice, the grains are safe among the chaff, because they neither do such things nor consent to those who do them, even if the good tolerate the bad in the same crop until the harvest, on the same threshing floor until the winnowing, within the same nets until the separation that will take place on the shore. But these men are truly blind leaders of the blind, who see so many bad men in the number of their own and do not see the way of peace, and persuade people to follow them, not to bear with one another for the bond of unity, but to divide from one another for the sacrilege of schism.

‘But’, he says, ‘it was said through the prophet to King Jehoshaphat: O King Jehoshaphat, do you help a sinner, or do you love one whom the Lord hates? Therefore the wrath of the Lord has been upon you.’ For which of us says that a sinner should be helped in that in which he wants to sin, as Ahab himself was, whom Jehoshaphat helped by going with him into battle when Ahab despised the truthful words of the prophet Micaiah? And yet not even so did the very bad desert of King Ahab harm the innocence of King Jehoshaphat, for the Lord delivered him from the danger of battle when he cried out to him, but allowed the other, a sacrilegious despiser, to come into the hands of the enemy. And if Jehoshaphat experienced any danger, which the prophet tells him came from the wrath of the Lord, he had deserved it not by another’s sin but by his own, because, as was said to him, he was helping one who sinned. But before God his other good deeds prevailed. For so it is said to him: ‘Have you helped that sinner, and are you a friend to those who hate the Lord? For this there is wrath upon you from the face of the Lord. But good words of God are with you in all things, because you have removed the groves from the land and have prepared your heart to seek God.’ But he who lives in the church of God, where there are also those who seek their own things, not those of Jesus Christ, who proclaim Christ not chastely, through envy and strife, and who says, ‘Whether by occasion or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice, yes, and I will rejoice’, remains unpolluted and whole among them, because he does not consent with them in seeking their own things, since he blames and rebukes this; and he does not help them to sin, but helps toward this: that Christ may be preached more widely, and that, by those who hear and do, through those who do not do what they say, Christ may be believed, hoped in, and loved. For to such the same apostle gave the command, saying: ‘Do not be yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with iniquity? What fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Beliar? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are temples of the living God. For he says: I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean. And I will receive you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.’ Understanding these words carnally, these men have cut themselves up into little pieces by so many divisions in Africa alone. For they do not understand that no one is yoked with unbelievers except one who commits the sins of the pagans or favours those who commit such things; nor does anyone become a partner of iniquity except one who either does or approves of unjust things. And who has fellowship with darkness except through the darkness of his own consent, when he leaves Christ and follows Beliar? Who puts his part with unbelievers except one who becomes a sharer in their unbelief? For so he ceases to be a temple of God, and in no other way joins himself to idols. But those who are temples of the living God, and shine like lights in the world in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, holding the word of life, are not infected by anything they tolerate for unity, nor are they straitened, because God dwells and walks in them; and they go out from the midst of the bad and are separated, meanwhile, in heart, lest perhaps, wanting to do it by the sedition of schism, they be separated spiritually from the good before they are separated bodily from the bad.

As for what is written that God said, ‘Those who glorify me I will glorify, and he who despises me shall be despised’, they least of all want to look at it. For how do they glorify God who say that his promises could not be fulfilled throughout the world, the promises he made to our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which, foretelling through the prophets so long before, he displayed through his only Son, who was made for him of the seed of David according to the flesh, so that in him, that is, in the seed of Abraham, all nations might be blessed; who say that the Son of God himself said in vain, ‘Let both grow until the harvest’, as if he were mistaken or had deceived, when only the weeds have grown through the world, while the wheat has failed in the whole world except for the party of Donatus? How do those who think such things glorify the Lord, when it is written, ‘In the breadth of a nation is the king’s glory, but in the dwindling of the people is the prince’s ruin’? Or how do they not despise the Lord, who with incredible rashness of impiety blow out his baptism in those whose case they have not heard and on whom they could in no way judge, and dare to claim for themselves what is God’s; who receive back men condemned by themselves, in their full rank, for the peace of Donatus, and detest men they have not heard, against the peace of the Lord; who contend that the baptism handed down through the apostles in those parts of the world has perished, and grant that the baptism handed down through Felicianus among the Maximianists has not perished? But now how do Catholics not glorify the Lord, who trust that his promises could not be prevented by any crimes of men from being fulfilled, who treat his sacraments with such due veneration that, even if they have been handled by the unworthy, they show that, while those men are condemned by their perversity, the sacraments remain in untouched holiness?

‘Again’, they say, ‘it is written: Do not take part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather even rebuke them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that are done by them in secret.’ We have already said how these very words are to be understood: that not to take part is not to consent; which, for the sake of the church’s discipline, is too little unless they are also rebuked, so that they can be corrected. But these things must be done with peace kept, and as far as the duty of preserving unity allows, lest the wheat be rooted up as well.

Again to Timothy the same apostle says: ‘Do not take part in the sins of others. Keep yourself chaste.’ He taught in what follows how what he said first is to be understood. For he who keeps himself chaste does not take part in the sins of others. For if he takes part, he consents; if he consents, he is corrupted; if he is corrupted, he does not keep himself chaste. But indeed at last Parmenian woke up and noticed what Tyconius was saying, but in vain; for at once, out of love for his own opinion, he shut his eyes against the truth. For he says: ‘Or is it, dearest brother, that the sins of others do not pollute others? And this is not taking part with criminals: though you meet with them, not doing their deeds.’ And yet he did not say the whole. For it is too little not to do their deeds unless they displease; it is too little that they displease unless they are rebuked. For not to do is one thing, not to take part, that is, not to consent to those who do, is another, and also to rebuke is another. Why, then, when he had begun to see, did he at once turn away and refuse to come to the end, and set down barely a third of the whole? Or did he think that, as they did with the people, the sentence of truth too should be cut off? We say that he who does not do evil, does not consent to one who does it, and rebukes one who does it, lives firm and whole among the wicked, like wheat among chaff; but he says only, ‘not doing their deeds’. And yet let us see how he refutes this third part of the whole sentence.

‘That this is against the divine law’, he says, ‘no one who reveres the law is unaware.’ So far these words can be said by either side. For another man too can say: ‘That this is in accordance with the divine law no one who reveres the law is unaware.’ But what is needed is to prove, not to say. Let us see, then, how he proves it. ‘For what does it profit’, he says, ‘to have kept innocence, if you are mixed with the guilty and liable with them?’ Certainly, if that is so, it is not that keeping innocence does not profit, but that innocence has not been kept. For no one can rightly be said to be mixed with the guilty and liable except through a consent that stains the conscience. But he who fulfils what is written, ‘Nothing unjust pleases the righteous man’, wherever any necessity compels him to live, cannot be mixed with iniquities. ‘Or how’, he says, ‘can you remain incorrupt, you who are associated with the corrupt?’ Plainly so, if he is associated, that is, if he commits something evil with them or favours those who commit it; but if he does neither, he is in no way associated. Further, if he adds a third thing, that he is not slack in punishing, but either the righteous man corrects in mercy and rebukes, or even, if he holds that office and the consideration of preserving peace allows, rebukes sinners before all, so that the rest may fear, and removes them either from some rank of honour or from communion in the sacraments itself, and does all this with the love of correcting, not the hatred of persecuting, he has fulfilled the fullest duty not only of the most chaste innocence but also of the most diligent severity. But where the other things are hindered, those two, always kept, guard him incorrupt and chaste: that he neither does evil nor approves it when done.

But still let us see from where he teaches what he affirms. ‘Since it is written’, he says, ‘A little leaven corrupts the whole lump.’ Parmenian said this and departed, and now it cannot be shown to him that in the party of Donatus there is not only a little leaven but much poison from those asps’ eggs that have hatched, and from the now very powerful serpents condemned on behalf of Primian and called back again to Primian. ‘But they have been corrected’, he says. Thanks be to God. If it is true, I do not begrudge it. And would that it were done perfectly! For if to return from the Maximianists to the party of Donatus is some degree of correction, how much truer and more perfect a correction it is to come back from the party of Donatus itself to Catholic unity! And Tyconius indeed said many things, by which, in those times and, as he knew from inside, how they would not confess that their whole lump had been corrupted by their own leaven, not a little but much, they who accused the whole world of being leavened by the sins of the Africans. But I wonder at these men, if they still like to understand these apostolic words in this way, that they want to defend Optatus the Gildonian so far as not to grant that he was even a little leaven. But if they grant even this, how great do they think their lump is, that the whole could not be corrupted? Or if it was corrupted only in those whom Optatus pleased, let them learn by experience to understand what they read: that the whole lump is in those to whom what is said as ‘whole’, whether good or bad, belongs. It belongs to those who consent; to those who do not consent it does not belong at all. And so it must be corrected by church discipline, lest by persuasion it reach many. Where the consideration of peace allows this to be done and it is not done, the negligence itself incurs guilt, and is in danger of consenting through sloth in correcting.

By this rule is also to be understood what he next sets against us, saying that it is written: ‘Let it be an eternal statute for you throughout your generations to distinguish between the holy and the irreligious and between the clean and the unclean.’ For the more one advances in the church, the better he does this. For when the blade had grown and borne fruit, then the weeds appeared. And although the servants of the householder were already dividing and distinguishing between the two by knowledge, they are nevertheless commanded to let them grow, and that until the harvest. But so much for this. For what remains must be considered and treated somewhat more carefully, from another beginning.

Since every pious reasoning and measure of church discipline ought above all to look to the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, which the apostle commanded to be kept by bearing with one another, and without which the medicine of punishment is shown to be not only superfluous but even harmful, and therefore no longer medicine at all; those bad sons, who, not from hatred of others’ iniquities but from zeal for their own contentions, aim either to drag off whole weak peoples, entangled by the boast of their name, or at least to divide them, swollen with pride, mad with obstinacy, insidious with slanders, turbulent with seditions, put forward the shadow of a rigid severity, lest they be shown to lack the light of truth; and the things that the holy Scriptures commanded to be done, with the sincerity of love kept safe and the unity of peace preserved, for correcting the faults of brothers by a sharper treatment, they misappropriate for the sacrilege of schism and as an occasion for cutting off, saying: ‘See, the apostle says: Remove the evil from among yourselves. And certainly’, they say, ‘if that evil did not harm the sound, it would not be commanded to be removed.’

Meanwhile let us see whether perhaps it is not for nothing that the apostle did not say, ‘Remove the bad from your congregation’, but ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’; because, even when someone is prevented from separating bad men from the congregation of the church, if he removes the evil from himself, he is not mixed with them in heart, and so he is spiritually not only joined to the good but also separated from the bad. For just as in that place to Timothy, when he had said, ‘Do not take part in the sins of others’, as if he were saying that it could happen that Timothy might be unable to separate some bad men from the congregation of the church and therefore be compelled to tolerate them, he said, as if giving advice on how not to take part in their sins, ‘Keep yourself chaste’ (for no one can be mixed with the bad except a bad man; the good man in no way, even though he lives with them in one congregation); so here too to the Corinthians, when he had said, ‘For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those who are inside?’, lest perhaps they be troubled by some number of the bad so mixed with the wheat that it could not be gathered and separated without harm to it, he said, ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’: so that, if perhaps they could not remove the bad from their congregation, by removing the evil from themselves, that is, by not sinning with them and not consenting to or favouring them in sinning, they might live among them wholly sound and incorrupt. For it is through his own evil that anyone consents to the bad; but if he removes the evil from himself, he has nothing by which to consent to another’s evil. Therefore, whoever has despised the church’s discipline so as to stop warning, correcting, and rebuking bad men with whom he does not sin and whom he does not favour, even if he holds such an office and the peace of the church permits him also to separate them from participation in the sacraments, sins not by another’s evil but by his own. For negligence in so great a matter is itself a grave evil. And so, as the apostle warns, if he removes the evil from himself, he will remove not only boldness in committing or the plague of consenting, but also laziness in correcting and negligence in punishing, using prudence and obedience in what the Lord commanded, lest the wheat be harmed. For whoever tolerates weeds among the wheat with this intention, removing the evil from himself, neither takes part with them, and distinguishes and judges them meanwhile, for the day. For he does not know what will be tomorrow. And so, with love kept, whatever a necessary severity compels to be punished must be punished not without hope of correction. That this may appear clearly enough, let us go over that whole passage of the apostle’s letter more carefully.