Against the Letter of Parmenian 3.3–3.13

‘What do you want?’ he says. ‘Shall I come to you with a rod, or in love and a spirit of gentleness?’ Here already it appears that he is speaking of punishment, to signify which he named the rod. Yet is the rod also without love, because he put it so: ‘Shall I come to you with a rod, or in love?’ But what follows, ‘a spirit of gentleness’, reminds us to understand that the rod too has love. But the love of severity is one thing, the love of gentleness another. There is one love, but it works different things in different people. ‘It is actually reported’, he says, ‘that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife.’ Let us see how he commands them to deal severely with so monstrous a deed. ‘And you’, he says, ‘are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, so that he who has done this deed might be taken away from your midst.’ Why ‘mourned’ rather than ‘been angry’, unless because if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it? And not mourning because he was being taken away, but mourning, he says, ‘so that he might be taken away’; that is, so that the grief of those mourning might ascend to God, and God himself might take away from their midst the one who had done this deed, as he knew how, lest perhaps they, through human unskilfulness, root up the wheat as well. So when necessity compels such punishment, the humility of those who mourn ought to obtain the mercy that the pride of those who rage drives away. Nor ought the salvation of the very one who is taken away from the midst of the brothers to be neglected; but it must be done in such a way that such punishment is useful to him, and done with prayers and supplications, if he cannot be corrected by rebukes. And so he goes on to say: ‘For I, absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged, as if present, him who has done this, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus, to hand such a one over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.’ What, then, was the apostle doing, except providing for spiritual salvation through the destruction of the flesh, so that, whether by some punishment or even by bodily death, as Ananias and his wife fell at the feet of the apostle Peter, or through repentance, since he had been handed over to Satan, he might put to death in himself the wicked lust of the flesh? For he himself likewise says, ‘Put to death your members that are on earth’, among which he also mentions sexual immorality; and again: ‘For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live.’ Yet he does not separate from brotherly love the man whom he commanded to be separated from the brotherly congregation. For he says this more plainly to the Thessalonians: ‘If anyone does not obey our word through this letter, note that man and do not associate with him, so that he may be ashamed. And do not regard him as an enemy, but correct him as a brother.’ Let these men at last hear and understand how apostolic love labours that, bearing with one another, we should be eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. For here too, when he had said, ‘And do not regard him as an enemy, but correct him as a brother’, as if showing why he said this, he at once added: ‘Now may the God of peace himself give you peace always in every way.’ So also about this man who had his father’s wife he proclaims mourning rather, and everywhere commends peaceable love, as he also says of himself: ‘Lest when I come again my God humble me before you, and I mourn many of those who sinned before and have not repented of the impurity and licentiousness and sexual immorality that they practised.’ And a little later he says: ‘I said before and I say beforehand, as when present the second time, and now absent, to those who sinned before and to all the others, that if I come again I will not spare.’ So he judged by mourning, so that the mercy of God, without breaking the bond of peace, in which all salvation consists, might crush and correct sinners, as he is understood to have done for this very man who had committed immorality with his father’s wife. For no one else is found whom he could mean in the second letter to the same Corinthians when he says: ‘For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears, not that you should be grieved, but that you might know the love that I have more abundantly for you. But if anyone has caused grief, he has grieved not me, but in part (not to burden you) all of you. Sufficient for such a one is this rebuke by the many, so that on the contrary you should rather forgive and comfort him, lest such a one be swallowed up by excessive grief. Therefore I beg you to confirm your love toward him. For to this end I also wrote, that I might know your proof, whether you are obedient in all things. Whom you forgive anything, I also forgive. For what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, I did it for your sakes in the person of Christ, so that we may not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.’ What could be done or said more moderately, more carefully, more fully of pious solicitude and fatherly and motherly love? Just as he applies correction to the sinner, so he wants consolation to be given back to the one corrected and crushing and humbling his heart in repentance, ‘lest’, he says, ‘he be swallowed up by excessive grief’. But what about the words with which he concluded this sentence: ‘So that we may not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs’? For it is he who, by the image of a seemingly just severity, urges cruel savagery, seeking nothing else with his most venomous cunning than to corrupt and break the bond of peace and love; while it is preserved among Christians, all his forces become powerless to harm, the traps of his snares are broken, and his plans of overthrow vanish.

But even if the apostle spoke of someone else in the second letter to the Corinthians, there too he showed with how much love church punishment ought to proceed against anyone. This is what these men, not understanding it, usually hold as chief among their slanders: ‘The righteous will correct me in mercy and rebuke me; but the oil of the sinner shall not anoint my head.’ But because these men do not know how to correct in mercy, they both pursued the innocence of Caecilian with savage suspicions and anointed the power of Optatus the Gildonian with the oil of deceitful flattery. For if, for the sake of the bond of peace, they had tolerated the iniquity of Optatus, groaning and mourning, they would certainly not break the true and Catholic peace in the holy unity of the world, or at least they would so grieve over it, broken by their forebears with abominable blindness, that, having learned at least among themselves how many bad men they are forced to bear for the peace of Donatus, they would extinguish those men’s unpeaceful slanders by the peace of their own correction.

But let us return to the sequence of that first letter to the Corinthians. When the apostle had said, ‘to hand such a one over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus’, again and again commending that this ought to be done with the humility of those who mourn, not the pride of those who rage, he at once adds: ‘Your boasting is not good’, or, by way of a reproachful utterance, ‘Your boasting is good!’ For so some, and especially the Latin, manuscripts have it, while the same meaning is kept in both. For there is no fear that anyone should understand that he said ‘your boasting is good’ in praise, since he also said above, ‘You are puffed up and have not rather mourned’, and here at once adds, ‘Do you not know that a little leaven corrupts the whole lump?’ This can more fittingly be referred to the very corruption of empty boasting. For pride, as if from the oldness of the first man, who fell through pride, makes the proud, as with a leavened and corrupted mind, into one lump, who agree with one another in it by a like vanity of boasting. And to boast, not of one’s own sins, but over another’s sins, as if from a comparison with one’s own innocence, seems a little leaven, since to boast even of one’s own iniquities is much leaven; but even that little corrupts the whole lump. For the proud man falls by the desert of his pride, and begins to want to boast even in defending his own sins. Foreseeing this, the same apostle says: ‘Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall’; and again: ‘If a man is overtaken in any fault, you who are spiritual instruct such a one in a spirit of gentleness, looking to yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ.’ What is the law of Christ but ‘A new commandment I give you, that you love one another’? What is the law of Christ but ‘My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you’? What he said here, then, ‘Bear one another’s burdens, and so you will fulfil the law of Christ’, he says in another place: ‘Bearing with one another in love, eager to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.’ For in that Pharisee too there seemed to be a little leaven, because he not only did not grieve for the sinner, but exalted himself over the other’s sins on account of his own merits. But the man who confessed his sins went down justified rather than that Pharisee who boasted of his merits, since he who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. So the apostle goes on and says: ‘Clean out the old leaven, so that you may be a new lump, as you are unleavened.’ What does ‘that you may be’ mean, and what ‘as you are’, unless that there were some such there and some not such, whom he was urging by the example of such men to be such? Yet he admonishes all as one, as though they were the same, lest those who were such should despair of those who were not yet such and think they did not belong to the framework of their body; for he admonishes them as though they were the same when he says, ‘that you may be as you are’. For those who were already so knew, and with the apostle admonishing ought to have known more and more, how to bear with those who were not yet so, so that, bearing with one another in love, they might keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, and, bearing one another’s burdens, might fulfil the law of Christ. And since our Lord Jesus Christ, to teach the way of humility, deigned to be humbled even to the death of the cross, and, like a physician bearing with the sick, so bore with love the sinners of whom he had said, ‘It is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick’, he at once set forth the chief example, saying: ‘For Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed’, so that by the example of such great humility they might learn to clean out the old leaven, that is, whatever of pride had remained in them from the old man. ‘Therefore’, he says, ‘let us celebrate the feast’, not one day but the whole of life, ‘not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.’ For it is malice and wickedness to boast, as it were, of another’s sin, as if each person should rejoice in his own righteousness only when he sees that another is not righteous. But it is sincerity and truth, even if one makes progress, to remember what one was, and much more to have pity on the fallen, since one has oneself been raised from one’s own fall through the mercy of Christ, who without any sin of his own humbled himself for sinners.

But lest the sins of others be left ruinously and neglected as if by connivance, which is no less cruel than that pride, he goes on and says: ‘I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with the sexually immoral, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy, or robbers, or idolaters; otherwise you would have had to go out of this world’; that is, if you keep yourselves from the sinners of this world who are outside the church, you would have had to go out of this world. For your work in this world is this, to win sinners to Christ for salvation; which cannot be done if you flee their conversation and company. ‘But now’, he says, ‘I have written to you not to associate with anyone who is named a brother if he is sexually immoral or an idolater or greedy or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber; not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But God will judge those outside. Remove the evil from among yourselves.’

See how the apostle came to this sentence, whose last little part Parmenian thought he should set down, saying that it is written, ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves. And certainly’, he says, ‘if it did not harm the good and sound, it would not be commanded to be removed.’ But he passed over what was said above, from which the apostle came to this, though by it he could certainly have been helped toward what he wanted to persuade, namely that separation from the bad ought to be made bodily, since the apostle says, ‘Not even to eat with such a one.’ Why, then, did he not mention what seemed most able to help his aim? For since he presses so hard to persuade that bodily separation must be made from those who live badly, why does he not use the testimony of the apostle saying, ‘If anyone named a brother is sexually immoral or an idolater or greedy or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber, not even to eat with such a one’, unless because he saw that, if he said this, he could be answered: ‘Is it so with you that, even if you either have no sexually immoral men and idolaters or do not know of them, you see and know no greedy man or reviler or drunkard or robber among you? Why then, against the apostle’s command, do you not only eat the food of your own table with such men, but even share the supper of the Lord’s table?’ This, I think, is what Parmenian tried to avoid, lest he be answered so: that he should not set down what seemed to sound most strongly for his cause. For if this chapter of the apostle’s letter had escaped him and had not occurred to him, he would not have set down from its last part: ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves.’

But now, since we have said this, perhaps these men will dare to deny that they have among them greedy men, revilers, drunkards, or robbers, and perhaps they will try to defend Optatus himself, who was most notorious to all Africa and whom they bore with so long. Let them say, then, if they can, that they now have a better and purer church than that very unity was in the times of the most blessed Cyprian, who severely rebuked his colleagues, from whom he was nonetheless not separated by any bodily division, naming none of them by name, but prudently and soberly applying the medicine of a most salutary sharpness, in these words: that while brothers in the church were starving, they wanted to have silver in abundance, seized estates by treacherous frauds, increased their gains by multiplying interest. And to show most plainly that he was speaking of those with whom he lived in the communion of one church, he added next: ‘What should we not deserve to suffer for sins of this kind?’ For he does not say ‘they would deserve’, but ‘we would deserve’; which he would in no way have said, since he himself was certainly not such, unless he wished to make plain that he groaned over the deeds of men who were joined to him not only in the unity of the church but also in the fellowship of the college of bishops, though he differed from them in life, morals, heart, and purpose. Let these men say, then, that their church is better now and that they do not have such colleagues as Cyprian had in that very unity. Let those who wish believe them, and shut their eyes against the evils that, from their morals, strike the face of those who pretend not to see. I will call them back to those earlier times of unity and ask them whether, when that great man Cyprian, bishop of the church of Carthage, groaned over so bad a college with the testimony of a free voice, even in writings that would be handed on to later generations, the church of Christ existed or not. If it existed, I ask how Cyprian and others like him fulfilled what the apostle commanded, ‘If anyone named a brother is sexually immoral or an idolater or greedy or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber, not even to eat with such a one’, when they ate the Lord’s bread and drank the Lord’s cup with those greedy men and robbers who, while brothers in the church were starving, wanted to have silver in abundance, seized estates by treacherous frauds, increased their gains by multiplying interest.

Or perhaps these crimes are small and to be reckoned small? For these men are accustomed to say even this, weighing them not in the fair balance of the divine Scriptures but in the deceitful balance of their own customs. For whatever crime and iniquity intoxicates the multitude loses the truth of the scale. But the oracles of the heavenly pages have been set before people like a perfectly clear mirror for this purpose, that there each may see how great any sin is, which perhaps is great and yet is despised through the blind custom of those who live badly. Could greed have been accused more gravely by the divine words than by being shown equal to idolatry and called by its name, as the apostle says, ‘and greed, which is idolatry’? Could it have been judged worthy of a greater punishment than by being placed among those crimes by which those possessed by them will not possess the kingdom of God? Let them open the eyes of the heart, so that the eyes of the body are not open in vain, and read the free preacher of the truth writing in that same first letter to the Corinthians: ‘Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor the effeminate nor men who lie with males nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor revilers nor robbers will possess the kingdom of God.’ How, then, did Cyprian and other such wheat of the Lord, in that church of unity at that time, eat the Lord’s bread and drink the Lord’s cup with the greedy and the robbers, with those who will not possess the kingdom of God, and these not laymen or clerics of any kind but bishops themselves, when the same apostle commands them not to associate with them and cries, ‘not even to eat with such a one’? Was it not because they could not be separated from them bodily, lest they root up the wheat as well, that it was enough for them to be disjoined from such men in heart and distinguished in life and morals, for the sake of the balance of keeping peace and unity, for the salvation of the weak and, as it were, the suckling wheat, so as not to tear the members of the body of Christ by sacrilegious schisms?

But see, I am not pressing any of them to understand it so; let them themselves explain how that church could then have been glorious, without spot or wrinkle, where, while brothers in the church were starving, men wanted to have silver in abundance, where they seized estates by treacherous frauds, where they increased their gains by multiplying interest, where they were involved in such iniquities that because of them they would not possess the kingdom of God. But if the glorious church without spot or wrinkle was reckoned in those alone who mourned and groaned over those iniquities that were done in their midst (whence, according to the prophecy of holy Ezekiel, such men deserved to be marked with their own sign, so as to escape most safely from the devastation and destruction of the wicked), let them stop slandering the good, who do not do evil out of diseased desire but tolerate it out of peaceable love, to whom it was said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’ For this is why the Holy Spirit, through the prophet Ezekiel just mentioned, described with such a word the bad whom the good tolerate in unity, saying that they were set in the midst of the good; because if he had said that the good were in the midst of the bad, the bad would seem to be, as it were, outside and external. ‘They groan’, he says, ‘and grieve over the iniquities of my people that are done in their midst’, so that we might think of those wicked men not only as not excluded but even as included.

But if the church did not exist even then, because Cyprian and whoever with him knew those greedy men and robbers to be what they themselves were not, though they accused them with the gravest groans and most illustrious words, yet, entering one church with them and handling the same sacraments in one congregation, were made of the same lot by this kind of communion, because they did not obey the apostle when he commanded, ‘not even to eat with such a one’, and ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’: why do we labour any more? Why do these men boast that they have any church at all, if it already ceased to exist in those times? Let them say from where Majorinus or Donatus was born, so that through them Parmenian and Primian might be born. For what use is it to them that they now falsely claim either not to have in their congregation the greedy and robbers, with whom the apostle forbids eating, or not to know them, since there were such men in that church of unity from which they boast that they arose, so as to try to persuade people that it remained only in their own society, that is, in the communion of Donatus? For if they say that the church perishes through communion with such men, why do they not say that it had already perished in Cyprian’s times? And so, not finding from where they themselves arose, let them stop saying that the church remained among them, which they say perished entirely in earlier times. But if the church always remained, remains, and will remain in the good, to whom such things are displeasing, let these men at last learn not to understand what the apostle says, ‘Remove the evil from among yourselves’, in such a way that, trying through schisms to gather the weeds, they root up the wheat as well. We argue all this in such a way that those who read or hear it may remember that these men could never show, either at that time, when things were most recent, or now, when the whole world is joined in the Catholic Church in Christian peace with a much firmer consciousness of innocence, that Caecilian or the others who were united with him were weeds. But we say these things so that each person may remain securely in the unity of the holy church, and not follow the deserters of that unity, lest he perish with them: because, even if those men had been weeds, they ought to have been tolerated until the harvest rather than separated by the ruin of schism, with the wheat rooted up.

But someone will say: ‘How, then, shall we be able to obey the apostle when he commands, “not even to eat with such a one”? For if he commanded only a separation of the heart from them, he would not say, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with the sexually immoral, not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world”, that is, those who were not Christians, of whom he says afterwards, “For what have I to do with judging those outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But God will judge those outside.” Since, then, he gives commands about a separation that is made not from those bad men who are not Christians but from those who are Christians, while separation of the heart must be made from all the bad, and therefore we must be separated in heart also from those bad men who are not Christians, what remains but to understand that we are commanded by the apostle not to be mixed with certain bad Christians, such as he describes, even by the kind of association by which we are mixed with pagans in the very fellowship of human life? And so in another place he says, “If one of the unbelievers invites you and you want to go, eat whatever is set before you, asking no questions”; but here he says, “not even to eat with such a one”. So he permits eating with unbelievers, that is, with those who have not yet believed in Christ, at whose houses he says one should eat what they set before you, since God will judge them because they are outside; but with those who are inside, that is, “if anyone named a brother is sexually immoral or an idolater or greedy or a reviler or a drunkard or a robber”, he forbids even eating. So he urges that the weeds be separated from the wheat before the time of harvest. And if we are unwilling to do this, because the Lord forbids it, we will tolerate them and persist only in separation of will and heart from them, and so we will even eat with such men, which the apostle forbids?’

In this strait, as it were, of the question I will say nothing new or unusual, but what the soundness of the church observes: that when any of the brothers, that is, of the Christians established inside in the fellowship of the church, has been detected in some such sin that he is held worthy of anathema, this should be done where there is no danger of schism, and with that love which the apostle himself commands elsewhere, saying, ‘Do not regard him as an enemy, but correct him as a brother.’ For it is done not for rooting up but for correcting. But if he does not acknowledge himself or correct himself by repenting, he will go out himself and be cut off from the communion of the church by his own will. For the Lord himself too, when the servants wanted to gather the weeds, said, ‘Let both grow until the harvest’, and gave the reason first, saying, ‘Lest perhaps, when you want to gather the weeds, you root up the wheat as well.’ By this he shows clearly enough that, when this fear is not present, but there remains a complete and certain security about the stability of the wheat, that is, when someone’s crime is so well known and appears so detestable to all that it has either no defenders at all or not such as could cause a schism, the severity of discipline should not sleep; and in it the emendation of crookedness is the more effective, the more diligent the preservation of love. But this can be done without stain to peace and unity and without injury to the wheat when the multitude of the church’s congregation is free of the crime that is anathematized. For then it helps the leader who rebukes rather than the criminal who resists; then it salutarily abstains from association with him, so that no one even eats with him, not out of hostile rage but out of brotherly restraint; then too the man is both struck with fear and healed by shame, when, seeing himself anathematized by the whole church, he can find no allied crowd with which to rejoice in his offence and insult the good.