Letters 108.1–108.15

My dearest sons, honorable men, when they had brought to Your Benevolence my letter, in which I admonished and asked you not to rebaptize our subdeacon, wrote back to me that you had replied: “I cannot do otherwise than receive those who come to me and give them the faith they ask for.” And yet, if someone baptized in your communion who had long been separated from you should come to you, and through ignorance think that he must be baptized again and ask for it, when you have inquired and learned where he was baptized, you do indeed receive him as he comes to you, and yet you do not give him the faith he asks for; rather you teach the man that he has what he seeks, and you do not heed the words of one in error but apply the zeal of one who corrects. Therefore one who wrongly gives what is no longer to be given, and violates the sacrament that has been given, is accused by his own error, not excused by that of the one who asks. Tell me, then, I beg you: how does he who asked it of you not have what he had already received through me? If it is because of “foreign water” and a “foreign fountain,” as those who do not understand are wont to say, since it is written, “Keep yourself from foreign water, and do not drink from a foreign fountain”: when Felicianus separated from you in the party of Maximian, he was being dragged along as “an adulterer of the truth, a chain of sacrilege,” as the words of your council declare. If he had carried off your fountain with him, what fountain was there in which you baptized your people after he had separated? But if he had baptized in a foreign fountain, why did you not rebaptize after him? For now your bishop sits together with Primian, whom he condemned and by whom he was condemned.

But, as our people who saw you about this matter informed me by letter, when they asked what you would say to this, you replied that, being newly ordained, you could not be a judge of the deeds of your father, but would abide in what you had received from your predecessors. At this I truly grieved over the constraint you are under, since I consider you, from what I hear, a young man of good character. For what forces you to this answer except the constraint of a bad cause? But if you pay attention, my brother, if you think rightly, if you fear God, no constraint forces anyone to persevere in a bad cause. For this reply of yours does not solve the question I put to you, but clears our cause of every slander of your accusations. You say that, being newly ordained, you cannot be a judge of the deeds of your father, but abide in what you received from your predecessors. Why then do we not rather abide in the church which, as Scripture testifies, beginning from Jerusalem and bearing fruit and growing through all nations, we received from the Lord Christ through the apostles, without being judged for the deeds of I know not what fathers, which are said to have been committed nearly a hundred years ago? For if you do not dare to judge your father, who is still alive and whom you can question, why am I told to judge one who died long before I was born? Why are so many Christian nations told to judge the deeds of African traditors who died so many years ago, whom so many Christians then living, situated in the most remote lands, could neither hear nor know even while they were alive? You who do not dare to judge Primian, who is still here and known, why do you want to lay on me the judging of Caecilian, long ago and unknown? If you do not judge your fathers for their own deeds, why do you judge your brothers for the deeds of others?

Or perhaps you deny that we are brothers? But we do better to listen to the Holy Spirit commanding through the prophet: “Hear, you who tremble at the word of the Lord: say, ‘You are our brothers,’ to those who hate you and who detest you, that the name of the Lord may be honored and may appear to them in gladness; but let them be ashamed.” For truly, if the name of the Lord were more delightful to men than the names of men, would Christ, who cries out, “My peace I give to you,” be divided in his members by those who say, “I indeed am of Paul, but I of Apollos, and I of Cephas,” and would they be torn apart by the names of men? Would Christ be exorcised in his own baptism, of whom it was said, “This is he who baptizes,” of whom it was said, “Christ loved his church and gave himself up for it, that he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the washing of water in the word”? Would he, then, be exorcised in his own washing, if the name of the Lord, whose baptism it is, were more delightful than the name of men, of whom you say, “What this one gives is holy, not what that one gives”?

And yet your colleagues, when they wished, paid attention rather to the truth, and judged holy, for the sake of the gladness of the Lord's honor, not only the baptism that Primian gave in your communion but also that which Felicianus gave in the sacrilegious schism of Maximian; and once he had been corrected they did not dare to violate the mark, not only the one he himself had received among you but also the one he had imprinted on others outside you as a deserter, because they recognized it as royal. You do not want to judge this deed of theirs, so good, in which you ought to imitate them to your credit; and you follow their judgment in the thing for which they deserve to be detested by all. You fear to judge Primian, lest you be compelled to hear something you would blame; on the contrary, judge, and there you will rather be able to find something to praise. For we did not want you to call to mind what Primian did badly but what he did excellently: in receiving those whom his own condemner had baptized in a most wicked separation, he corrected the error of men and did not destroy the sacraments of God; he recognized the good of Christ even in malicious men, and amended the evil of men without violating the good of Christ. Or if this deed displeases you, at least attend to this, and consider it prudently, as your good mind should: you do not judge the one man Primian for Primian's own deeds, and yet you judge the Christian world for the deeds of Caecilian. You fear that it would pollute you to know what you dare not punish; then acquit the nations, which could not even know what you allege.

Nor was that the act of Primian alone; you know it too, I think. Nearly a hundred of your bishops, conspiring with Maximian in a damnable faction, dared to condemn Primian; and the Council of Bagai of three hundred and ten, as the words of its decree proclaim, “struck from the bosom of peace with the thunderbolt of its sentence Maximian, rival of the faith, adulterer of the truth, enemy of mother church, minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram.” Twelve others, who had been present at his ordination when he was set up against Primian, were joined to him in condemnation without delay; to the rest, lest the cutting off be too great, a delay was granted, with a fixed day for returning, their honors preserved if they came back within the time limit. Nor did the three hundred and ten fear to recall to their college men accused of so great a sacrilege as Maximian's, looking perhaps to what is written: “Love covers a multitude of sins.” Because, even granting that the period of delay be allowed, … they baptized outside your communion whomever they could baptize; for unless they had been outside, they could not have been invited to return when the delay was granted. Then, both before the delay ended and after it ended, those twelve condemned with Maximian were accused before three or more proconsuls, so that they might be driven from their sees by the force of the courts. Among them were Felicianus of Musti, of whom I am now treating, and Praetextatus of Assuras, lately deceased, in whose place, as a condemned man, another had already been ordained. These two were received with their honors intact, not by Primian alone but by many of your fellow bishops, when they were celebrating with a great crowd the anniversary of Optatus of Thamugadi; this after their condemnation without delay, after the end of the delay given to the others, after the accusation had been published, with all the clamor of the courts, before so many consuls; and they rebaptized no one after them. If this assertion is resisted, or if any of these things is denied, I shall be required, at the risk of my episcopate, to prove what I say.

The case is finished, brother Macrobius. God has done this, God has willed this; it was the work of his hidden providence that in the case of Maximian a mirror for correction should be held up to you, so that all the slanderous accusation against us, or rather against the church of Christ growing throughout the whole world, might be ended: I do not say yours, lest I seem insulting to you, but certainly that of your people. For nothing at all is left of the things which men who do not understand the Scriptures are wont to bring against us as if from them. They are accustomed to have this in their mouths: “Keep yourself from foreign water”; but the answer is: water is not foreign even when it is among strangers, just as that water of Maximian was not, from which you did not keep yourselves. Again it is put to us: “They have become to me like lying water that has no faithfulness”; but the answer is: this was said of feigned men who do not pertain to the sacraments of God, which cannot be lies even in liars. For certainly those were liars who condemned Primian, as you yourselves assert, on false charges; and yet the water in which, separated from you, they baptized whom they could was not lying. For when you received it in those whom Felicianus and Praetextatus baptized outside, you judged that it had been truthful even among liars. It is put to us: “He who is baptized by a dead man, what does his washing profit?” The answer is: if this was written of the baptism with which those baptize whom the church has cast out as dead, it did not say that this washing is not a washing, but that it profits nothing, which we also say. Nevertheless, when he comes with it to the church, what harmed him outside will profit him inside, not when baptism itself is repeated but when the baptized person is corrected. So the Council of Bagai speaks of Maximian and his companions as dead men cast out of the fellowship of your congregation: “By the truth-telling sling,” it says, “the shipwrecked limbs of some have been hurled onto the rough rocks; after the example of the Egyptians who perished, the shores are full of their corpses; for them in death itself the punishment is greater, that after their souls have been wrung from them by the avenging waters they do not find even burial.” Out of this crowd of the dead you received Felicianus and Praetextatus in their honors as men returning to life, and you did not rebaptize those whom they had baptized in that death, because you recognized that the baptism of Christ given outside by the dead does not profit the dead, yet that the same baptism does profit those who return to life inside. It is put to us: “Let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head.” The answer is that this is to be understood as written of the smooth and deceitful flattery of a fawning flatterer, because their head is anointed and swells when sinners are praised in the desires of their soul and those who have done wicked things are blessed. This is quite clear from the preceding line, for the whole sentence is set out thus: “The righteous man will correct me in mercy and rebuke me; but the oil of the sinner will not anoint my head.” He said that he preferred to be restrained by the truthful severity of one who is merciful than to be extolled by the deceitful praise of one who deceives. But however you may understand it, certainly in those whom Felicianus and Praetextatus baptized in the sacrilege of Maximian you either received the oil of sinners or recognized that the oil given even by sinners as ministers is Christ's; for they were certainly sinners when it was said of them at the Council of Bagai: “Know that those guilty of a notorious crime are condemned, who by a deadly work of perdition have glued together a filthy vessel out of collected dregs.”

Let what has been said about baptism suffice. But the cause of your separation is usually given color by these testimonies, misunderstood. It is written: “Do not share in other men's sins”; but the answer is that he shares in other men's sins who consents to evil deeds, not he who, being himself wheat, nevertheless shares in the divine sacraments together with the chaff as long as the threshing floor is being threshed. It is written also: “Go out from there and touch no unclean thing,” and: “Whoever touches what is polluted is polluted”; but by consent of the will, by which the first man was deceived, not by bodily association, in which Judas too kissed Christ. For those fish of which the Lord speaks in the gospel, good and bad within the same nets, by which he fits together the unity of the congregation, swim together until the end of the age, which is prefigured by the name of the shore, mixed in body but separated in conduct. It is written also: “A little leaven corrupts the whole lump”; but this concerns those who consent to evildoers, not those who, according to the prophet Ezekiel, groan and mourn over the iniquities of the people of God that are done in their midst.

Daniel too laments this mixture of the wicked, and the three men also lamented it; he testifies to it in his prayer, they in the furnace; and yet they did not separate themselves by bodily disjunction from the unity of the people whose sins they confessed. The prophets, all of them: what things, and how great, they said against the very people among whom they were! And yet they did not seek for themselves another people to be among by bodily departure or segregation. The apostles themselves endured without any contamination of their own the devil Judas mingled among them until the end, when he destroyed himself with a noose, so that the Lord said to them on account of his presence among them: “And you are clean, but not all.” Nor was the lump of their unlike conduct corrupted by his uncleanness as by leaven. Nor can it rightly be asserted that his wickedness was hidden from them, except perhaps that by which he was going to betray even the Lord; for they themselves wrote of him that he was a thief and carried off everything that was put into the Lord's purse. No one slandered them with that testimony, “You saw a thief and ran along with him”; for one runs along with the deeds of the wicked not by communion in the sacraments but by consent to those same deeds. The apostle Paul, how much he complains of false brothers! Yet he was not stained by bodily mingling with them, being separated from them by the difference of a pure heart. For he rejoices that Christ is preached alike even by certain men whom he knew to be envious; and envy is certainly a devilish vice.

Finally, Bishop Cyprian, nearer our own times, when the church had already spread more widely, by whose authority you sometimes try to confirm the repetition of baptism, since that council or those writings contain it, if they are really his and not, as some think, composed and fabricated under his name: how much he loved unity, how in the plainest exhortation he counseled that within it even those with whom he disagreed should be tolerated, lest the bond of peace be broken, attending above all to this, that if some human error should creep into either side among those who think otherwise than the truth is, brotherly concord being kept, love covers even a multitude of sins. This love he so held and so loved that, if he had thought anything about the sacrament of baptism otherwise than it is, God would reveal this also to him, as the apostle says to brothers walking in love: “Let as many of us, then, as are perfect think this; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Nevertheless, where we have arrived, there let us walk.” Add to this that the fruitful branch, if it still had anything to be pruned, was pruned by the glorious knife of martyrdom; not because he was killed for the name of Christ, but because he was killed for the name of Christ in the bosom of unity. For he himself wrote, and asserts most confidently, that those who are outside unity, even if they die for that name, can be killed but cannot be crowned. So great is the power of the love of unity, whether kept or violated, either to blot out sins or to confirm them.

That same Cyprian, then, when the church had been laid waste by the persecution of the impious heathen and he was lamenting the many who had lapsed, attributing this to the evil conduct of those who were living a damnable life within the church itself, groans over the conduct of his colleagues, and does not cover his groaning with silence, but says that they had advanced to such greed that, while brothers in the church were starving, they wanted to have silver in abundance, seized estates by treacherous frauds, and increased their gains by multiplying usury. I think that Cyprian was not stained by these men's avarice, robberies, and usury, and yet that he was separated from them not by bodily segregation but by unlikeness of life. He touched the altar with them, but he did not touch their unclean life, since he censured and rebuked it as he did. For what pleases is touched; what displeases is pushed away. And so that excellent bishop lacked neither the censure by which to restrain sins nor the caution by which to guard the bond of unity. In a letter of his which he wrote to the presbyter Maximus, there is a clear and plain judgment on this matter, in which, holding to the prophetic rule, he enjoined that in no way ought the unity of the church to be deserted because of the mixture of the wicked. “For although,” he says, “there seem to be tares in the church, yet our faith or our love ought not to be hindered, so that, because we see that there are tares in the church, we ourselves should withdraw from the church. We must only labor that we may be wheat.”

This law of love was promulgated from the mouth of Christ the Lord; for these similitudes are his, both of the tares to be tolerated in the unity of the field throughout the world until the time of harvest, and of the bad fish within the same nets until the time of the shore. If, then, your forefathers had kept this law of love in mind, if they had reflected with the fear of God, they would not, on account of Caecilian and I know not what Africans, whether really criminal, as you think, or, as is rather to be believed, assailed by slanders, have cut themselves off by a wicked separation from the church which Cyprian himself described as extending its rays through all nations and spreading its branches through all the earth with abundant fruitfulness; not, I say, from so many Christian nations, which knew nothing at all of who was making the charges, or what, or against whom. That is not done except either from private enmity rather than common benefit, or from that vice which Cyprian himself names next and warns must be avoided. For having enjoined that the church is not to be deserted because of the tares seen in it, he continues and adds: “We must only labor that we may be wheat, so that when the wheat begins to be stored in the Lord's barns, we may receive fruit for our work and labor. The apostle says in his letter: ‘But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but also of wood and earthenware, some for honor and some for dishonor.’ Let us take pains and labor as much as we can to be a vessel of gold and silver. But to break the earthen vessels is permitted to the Lord alone, to whom also the rod of iron has been given. The servant cannot be greater than his lord, nor may anyone claim for himself what the Father has granted to the Son alone, so as to think that he can either carry the shovel and the fan to winnow and purge the threshing floor, or separate all the tares from the wheat by human judgment. That is proud presumption and sacrilegious obstinacy, which depraved fury takes upon itself; and while they always take upon themselves something more than gentle justice demands, they perish from the church, and while they insolently exalt themselves, blinded by their own swelling they lose the light of truth.”

What is clearer, what truer, than this testimony of Cyprian? You see with how great a light of the gospel and the apostles it shines; you see that those who, as if offended on behalf of their own righteousness by the iniquities of others, desert the unity of the church, are themselves rather the most iniquitous; you see that those are tares outside who would not tolerate tares in the unity of the Lord's field; you see that those are chaff outside who would not tolerate such things in the unity of the great house; you see how truly it is written: “A wicked son calls himself righteous, but does not wash away his going out.” His going out, that is, by which he goes out of the church, he does not cleanse, does not excuse, does not defend, does not show to be pure and blameless; for this is what “does not wash away” means. For if he did not call himself righteous, but were truly and rightly righteous, he would not most impiously desert the good on account of the wicked, but would most patiently bear with the wicked for the sake of the good, until the Lord himself, either by himself or by his angels, should separate the tares from the wheat, the chaff from the grain, the vessels of wrath from the vessels of mercy, the goats from the sheep, and the bad fish from the good at the end of the age.

But if you try to take those testimonies of the Scriptures, which your forefathers believed should be understood or brought forward to divide the people of God, otherwise than the sense of the divine oracles demands, stop now; look at that mirror which God, if you will be wise, has set up by a most merciful provision to admonish you. I mean the case of Felicianus, “rival of the faith, adulterer of the truth, enemy of mother church, minister of Dathan, Korah, and Abiram,” as was proclaimed at the Council of Bagai; of whom they further added that the earth had not opened and swallowed him up so that he might be reserved for a greater punishment above it. “For had he been snatched away,” they say, “he would have gained his punishment by the shortcut of death; now he collects the interest of a heavier death, since being dead he is present among the living.” For I ask: did those who, conspiring with him, condemned the innocence of Primian then touch this unclean dead man? If they touched him, then by touching what was polluted they were certainly polluted. Why then is a delay for returning granted, as though to innocent men, to those established in his communion and separated from yours, so that on their return they may have the foundations of honor and faith intact? And why do those who merely were not present at Maximian's ordination deserve to hear that “the shoots of the sacrilegious sapling” did not pollute them, though they were placed in the same party, bound in the same schism, divided from you, allied with them, living together in Africa, very well known, very friendly, very closely joined to them, men who, though not present to ordain him, nevertheless for his sake condemned Primian even in his absence; and yet the sapling of Caecilian is said to have defiled the Christian peoples of the whole world, most numerous, most remote, most unknown, many of whom could know, I do not say his case, but not even his name? They do not share in others' sins who not only knew the sin of Maximian but even raised it up by setting him up against Primian; and they do share in others' sins who in distant nations did not know that Caecilian had been made bishop, or in nearer ones only heard of it, or in Africa itself knew of it simply and peaceably, or in Carthage itself set him up against no one … had already been! Nor did they run with a thief who communicated with the man of whom the advocate Nummasius, speaking for your bishop Restitutus in his presence, says that “by a hidden, almost a theft of sacrilege, he seized the primacy of the episcopal name”; nor did they put in their portion with an adulterer who communicated with the adulterer of the truth; nor was their whole lump corrupted by a little leaven when they favored him, when they remained in his party not as men cut off from you unknowingly, but took care that he be cut off from you and set up against you. And then you yourselves, because you invited them to return in such terms that you said that men joined in such close fellowship with Maximian were unpolluted by the sacrilegious sapling, because you received Praetextatus and Felicianus with their honors preserved, because you live in peaceful concord with them, because today you see Felicianus sitting with you: you are stained by no communion in others' sins, defiled by no contact with uncleanness, corrupted by the leaven of no malice; and yet by these testimonies the crime of another is laid against the Christian world, the division of unity is defended by a deadly separation, and the branch that has remained in the root of the true mother is accused as unclean by the branch that has been cut off!

What of your habit of boasting about the persecutions you have endured? If martyrs are made not by the cause but by the penalty, then when it was said, “Blessed are those who suffer persecution,” it was idle to add, “for righteousness' sake.” Do not the Maximianists very easily beat you even on this claim to glory, since they suffered persecution not only afterward together with you but earlier also from you? The words I mentioned a little while ago belong to the advocate who accused Maximian in the presence of your colleague Restitutus, who had been ordained in the place of Salvius of Membresa, condemned without delay with those other eleven, before the very day of the delay had passed. Titianus too, when the very day of the delay had passed, accused Felicianus and Praetextatus and the whole conspiracy against Primian in the gravest words. The Council of Bagai was also cited more than once in proconsular and then in municipal proceedings; courts were set in motion, most threatening orders obtained; it was demanded and ordered that those who resisted be brought to coercion; an official staff was assigned, and the help of the cities granted, so that what had been judged might be carried out. Why then do you contend with us about persecution endured, you who have not shared these things with us on equal terms? For since not everyone who undergoes persecution comes to suffering, your clergy and Circumcellions have arranged matters between us so that you undergo persecution and we undergo suffering. But, as I said, contend for this praise with the Maximianists, who read out against you the court records in which you harassed them with persecutions through the judges; though plainly you afterward came to concord with some of them who had been corrected by such coercion. Hence concord with us too is not to be despaired of, if God deigns to help and to inspire you with a peaceable mind. For as for what is commonly said against us from your side with a mouth more abusive than truthful, “Their feet are swift to shed blood,” it is rather we who have experienced this in the many robberies of your Circumcellions and clergy, who, mangling human bodies with most atrocious slaughter, have stained so many places with the blood of our people. Their leaders, when they escorted you with their bands as you entered this region, shouting “Praise to God” among their songs: these are the cries they have used like battle trumpets in all their robberies! Yet on another day, shaken and stung by the goads of your words, which you hurled at them through a Punic interpreter with an honest and frank indignation, provoked by their deeds rather than pleased by their services, they rushed out from the midst of the congregation in a furious commotion, as we could hear from those who were present; and after their feet, swift to shed blood, you did not wash the floors with any salt water, as your clergy thought must be done after our people had been there.

But, as I had begun to say, this testimony of the Scriptures which you are wont to throw at us more by way of abuse than of proof, “Their feet are swift to shed blood,” that grandiloquent sentence of the Council of Bagai vomited forth with violent force against Felicianus and Praetextatus also. For when they had said what seemed fit to say about Maximian, “Not only is he condemned,” they say, “by the just death of his crime; the chain of sacrilege also drags many into partnership in the crime, of whom it is written: ‘The poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood,’” and so on. Having said this, in order to show next who were those whom the chain of sacrilege dragged into partnership in the crime, and to condemn them with the same severity as Maximian, they say: “Therefore those guilty of a notorious crime: Victorianus of Carcabia,” to whom they join eleven others, among them Felicianus of Musti and Praetextatus of Assuras. After these things had been said against them, such concord was made with them that nothing was taken from their honors, and no one washed by them, after the feet of those washers “swift to shed blood,” was judged to need washing again. Why then should concord with us be despaired of? May God turn away the envy of the devil, and may the peace of Christ prevail in our hearts; and, as the same apostle says, let us forgive one another, if anyone has a complaint against another, as God in Christ has forgiven us; so that, as I have already said and must often say, love may cover a multitude of sins.