Letters 204.1–204.9

I ought not to disregard your request, in which you asked me to instruct you how you should answer the heretics, whose salvation in the Lord's mercy is also being sought by the zeal of your energy. For although huge crowds of them (at which we rejoice greatly) understand what benefit is being conferred on them, some of them, by a pitiable impulse of madness ungrateful both to God and to men, when they cannot lay us waste by murdering us, believe they can frighten us by their own destruction, seeking either their own joy from our deaths or our grief from their deaths. But the mad error of a few men ought not to hinder the salvation of so many great peoples. What we wish for them, not only God and wise men but even they themselves, though they are most hostile to us, perceive; for when they think we can be frightened by their own ruin, they do not doubt that we fear lest they perish.

But what are we to do, seeing how many, with the Lord's help, are finding the way of peace through the occasion you provide? Can we, or ought we to, hold you back from this pressing for unity, out of fear that some most obstinate men, most cruel to themselves, may destroy themselves, not by our will but by their own? We would indeed wish that all who carry the sign of Christ against Christ, and who glory in the very gospel, which they do not understand, against the gospel, would depart from their perversity and rejoice with us in his unity. But since God, by a disposition that is hidden indeed but still just, has predestined some of them to the extreme penalties, it is beyond doubt better that, while incomparably greater numbers are restored and gathered from that pestilent division and dispersion, some perish in their own fires, than that all alike should burn in the everlasting fires of hell, as they deserve for their sacrilegious dissension. For the Church grieves for these who perish as holy David grieved for his rebellious son, for the preservation of whose life he had given orders out of anxious love. For when he was killed, as his abominable impiety deserved, David lamented him with the witness of a tearful voice; but when the proud and wicked one had gone to his own place, the people of God, which had been divided by his tyranny, recognized its king, and the completeness of unity consoled the father's grief for the son he had lost.

So we do not find fault, my excellent lord and honorable son, with your thinking that such men at Thamugadi should first be admonished by an edict. But as to what you said there, “Know that you will be given over to the death you deserve,” they thought, as their replies show, that you had threatened that you would kill them once arrested, not understanding that you were speaking of that death which they wish to inflict on themselves. For you have not received the right of the sword against them by any laws, nor do the imperial ordinances whose execution has been entrusted to you command that they be put to death. In your second edict, of course, Your Charity made what you meant clearer. And in thinking that their bishop himself should be addressed by letter, you showed most humanely with what gentleness even those are tempered in the Catholic Church who by the power of the Christian emperor are set over the correction of errors, whether by detaining or by punishing; except that you treated him in more honorific words than befitted a heretic.

But in wishing me to answer his reply, I believe you thought this too was owed to the people of Thamugadi, that the deceitful teaching of the one by whom they were being led astray should be refuted somewhat more carefully. But we are very busy, and we have refuted empty talk of this kind in very many other works of ours. For I do not know how many times we have already shown, in argument and in writing, that they cannot have the death of martyrs because they do not have the life of Christians, since it is not the punishment but the cause that makes a martyr. We have also taught that free will was given to man in such a way that nonetheless punishments for grave sins have been most rightly established by both divine and human laws; and that it belongs to the religious kings of the earth to restrain with fitting severity not only adulteries or murders or other such crimes and outrages, but also sacrileges; and that those are much mistaken who think we receive such people as they are, because we do not rebaptize them. For how are they received as they are, when they are heretics and by passing over to us become Catholics? For it is not the case that depraved hearts may not be corrected because sacraments once given may not be repeated.

As for the most frenzied deaths that some of them inflict on themselves, for which they are commonly held detestable and abominable even by many of their own, whose minds such madness has not possessed, we have often answered them according to the Scriptures and Christian reason; for it is written, “He who is evil to himself, to whom will he be good?” Or certainly, let one who thinks it expedient and lawful for himself to kill himself, when placed in the same temptations, kill his neighbor too if he wishes to die, since Scripture says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But that it is not lawful, without the command of laws or lawful authorities, to kill another, even one who wishes and asks for it and can no longer live, the scripture of the Kingdoms shows clearly enough, where King David ordered the slayer of King Saul to be killed, although he had said that Saul, already wounded and half alive, had asked him to do this and to free with a single blow from those torments a soul struggling with the bonds of the body and longing to be released. Accordingly, since everyone who kills a human being without the authority of any lawful power is a murderer, whoever kills himself is not a murderer only if he is not a human being. All this we have said in many ways in many other sermons and letters of ours.

Nevertheless, I must admit that I do not recall having ever yet answered them about that elder Razis, whom, constrained by an extreme lack of examples, they boast that they have scarcely at last found in the books of the Maccabees, after searching all the church's authorities, as an authority for the crime by which they destroy themselves. But here is what may suffice for Your Charity and for all prudent people to refute them: if they are prepared to carry over to the life of Christians examples of all the deeds of the Jewish people and of those writings, then let them carry over this one too. But if there are very many deeds there, even of those men who are praised by the truth of those writings, which are either not suited to this present time or were not rightly done even at that time, of that kind too is what this Razis committed against himself. Since he was noble among his own people and had advanced far in Judaism (which the apostle says were losses and refuse to him in comparison with Christian righteousness), and since for these reasons this same Razis was called father of the Jews, what wonder is it if, as a man, proud elation crept in on him, so that he preferred to die by his own hand rather than, after that eminence in the sight of his people, endure unworthy slavery in the hands of his enemies?

Such deeds are often praised in the literature of the Gentiles. But in these books of the Maccabees, although the man himself was praised, his deed was narrated, not praised, and set before our eyes to be judged rather than imitated; to be judged, of course, not by our own judgment, which we too as human beings could have, but by the judgment of sober teaching, which is clear even in those ancient books themselves. For this Razis was far from those words where we read: “Accept whatever is brought upon you, and endure it in pain, and in your humiliation have patience.” So this man was not wise in choosing death, but impatient in bearing humiliation.

It is written that he wished to die nobly and manfully; but does that mean wisely? Nobly, that is, so as not to lose the freedom of his birth as a captive; manfully, because he had such strength of mind as made him able to kill himself. When he could not accomplish it with the sword, he threw himself headlong from the wall, and so, still alive, ran to a steep rock, and there, already drained of blood, he drew out his entrails, and, tearing them apart with both hands, scattered them on the people, and then afterward, exhausted, he fell dead. These things are great, yet not good; for not everything that is great is good, since there are great evils too. God said, “Do not kill the innocent and the righteous.” If, then, this man was not innocent and righteous, why is he set forth to be imitated? But if he was innocent and righteous, why is the killer of an innocent and righteous man, that is, of Razis himself, thought to be praiseworthy besides?

Let this suffice for the present to fill this letter, so that it does not become too long. But I owe the people of Thamugadi a service of love of this kind, since they have been well commended to me both by your wish and by my honorable and dearest son Eleusinus, who served as tribune among them: namely, to reply to both letters of Gaudentius, the bishop of the Donatists, and above all to the second, which he thinks he composed according to the holy Scriptures, in such a way that nothing may be thought to have been passed over.