Letters 93.25–93.46

What we usually say to all the Donatists, we say all the more forcefully to you. Suppose that some could have (what is impossible) a just cause for separating their communion from the communion of the whole world and calling it the church of Christ, on the ground that they had justly separated themselves from the communion of all nations: how do you know whether, in a Christian society spread so far and wide, before you separated, some had not already separated with just cause in the most distant lands, from which the report of their righteousness could not reach you? How can the church be in you rather than in those who perhaps separated earlier? So it comes about that, since you do not know this, you are uncertain even to yourselves, which must happen to all who use for their society a testimony not divine but their own. For you cannot say, “If this had happened, it could not have escaped us”, since you could not say, if asked, how many factions have already arisen out of the party of Donatus in Africa itself; especially since those who do this think themselves the more righteous the fewer they are, and are certainly the more hidden. And so you are uncertain whether some few righteous people, and therefore hardly known, somewhere far off, opposite the south of Africa, before the party of Donatus set its righteousness apart from the iniquity of other men, did not first separate with most just cause on the side of the north, and whether that is not rather the church of God, as a spiritual Zion, which anticipated all of you by a just separation, and with much more presumption interprets in its favour what is written, “Mount Zion, the sides of the north, the city of the great king”, than the party of Donatus interprets in its favour, “Where do you feed, where do you lie down at noon?”

And yet you are afraid that, when you are compelled to unity by the imperial laws, the name of God will be blasphemed for longer by the Jews and pagans; as if the Jews did not know how the first people of Israel wished to destroy even by war those two and a half tribes that had received lands beyond the Jordan, when they thought these had separated from the unity of their people. As for the pagans, they can blaspheme us more over the laws that Christian emperors have passed against the worshippers of idols; and yet many of them have been corrected and converted to the living and true God, and are being converted daily. But clearly, if both Jews and pagans thought Christians were as few as you are, who claim that you alone are Christians, they would not even deign to blaspheme us; they would never stop laughing. Are you not afraid that the Jews will say to you: “Where is that passage which your Paul understands of your church, where it is said, ‘Rejoice, you barren one who does not bear; break forth and cry, you who are not in labour, for many are the children of the desolate, more than of her who has a husband’, so setting the multitude of Christians above the multitude of Jews, if your fewness is the church of Christ?” Will you say to them, “We are the more righteous because we are few”, and not notice that they will answer: “Say you are as many as you like, you are still not those of whom it was said, ‘Many are the children of the desolate’, if you are left so small in number”?

Here you will set against me the example of that righteous man in the flood, who alone with his household was found worthy to be saved. Do you see, then, how far you still are from righteousness? Until you are reduced to seven, with yourself as the eighth, we do not call you righteous; provided, however, that, as I was saying, no one before the party of Donatus forestalled this righteousness, and, moved by some just cause, separated himself with his seven far away somewhere else and saved himself from the flood of this world. Since you do not know whether this has happened, and it is as unheard of to you as the name of Donatus is unheard of to many peoples of Christians living in distant lands, you are uncertain where the church is. For it will be where what you did afterwards was perhaps first done, if there could be any just cause for which you could separate yourselves from the communion of all nations.

We, however, are certain that no one could justly separate himself from the communion of all nations, because each of us seeks the church not in his own righteousness but in the divine Scriptures, and sees it fulfilled as it was promised. For she it is of whom it is said: “As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters”; and these could not be called thorns except for the malice of their conduct, nor daughters except for the communion of the sacraments. She it is who says: “From the ends of the earth I have cried to you, when my heart was in anguish”; who says in another psalm, “Weariness has held me because of sinners who forsake your law”, and, “I saw the senseless and I pined away.” She it is who says to her bridegroom: “Where do you feed, where do you lie down at noon, lest I become as one veiled over the flocks of your companions?” That is what is said elsewhere: “Make your right hand known to me, and those instructed in heart in wisdom”, in whom, shining with light and glowing with love, you rest as at noon, lest perhaps, as one veiled, that is, hidden and unknown, I rush not into your flock but into the flocks of your companions, that is, of heretics. She calls them companions just as she called those thorns daughters, because of the communion of the sacraments; and of them it is said elsewhere: “But you, my equal, my guide and my familiar friend, who took sweet food together with me; we walked in the house of the Lord in harmony. Let death come upon them, and let them go down alive into hell”, like Dathan and Abiram, the authors of an ungodly separation.

She it is to whom the answer is given at once: “Unless you know yourself, O fairest among women, go out in the tracks of the flocks, and feed your kids in the tents of the shepherds.” O answer of the sweetest bridegroom! “Unless you know yourself,” he says; for surely a city set on a mountain cannot be hidden, and therefore you are not veiled, so as to run into the flocks of my companions; for I am the mountain prepared on the top of the mountains, to which all nations will come. Unless, then, you know yourself, not in the words of slanderers but in the testimonies of my books; unless you know yourself, for of you it is said: “Lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes; spread out again and again to the right and to the left. For your seed shall inherit the nations, and you shall inhabit the cities that were desolate. There is nothing for you to fear, for you shall prevail; nor be ashamed that you were detestable. For you shall forget your shame for ever; you shall not remember the disgrace of your widowhood. For I am the Lord who makes you, the Lord is his name; and he who rescues you, the God of Israel himself, shall be called God of the whole earth.” Unless you know yourself, O fairest among women, for of you it is said, “The king has desired your beauty”; for of you it is said, “Instead of your fathers sons are born to you; you shall make them princes over all the earth.” Unless, then, you know yourself, go out. I do not cast you out, but go out, so that it may be said of you, “They went out from us, but they were not of us.” Go out in the tracks of the flocks: not in my tracks, but in the tracks of the flocks, and not of one flock but of flocks divided and wandering. And feed your kids, not as Peter, to whom it is said, “Feed my sheep”, but feed your kids in the tents of the shepherds, not in the tent of the shepherd, where there is one flock and one shepherd. For she knows herself, lest this befall her, because this befell those who did not know themselves in her.

She it is of whose fewness, compared with the very many wicked, it is said that “narrow and strait is the way that leads to life, and few are those who walk in it.” And again, she it is of whose multitude it is said: “So shall your seed be, as the stars of heaven and as the sand of the sea.” For the same faithful, holy and good people are both few in comparison with the more numerous wicked and many in themselves, because “many are the children of the desolate, more than of her who has a husband”, and “many will come from east and west and recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven”, and because God presents to himself an abundant people, zealous for good works, and many thousands whom no one can number are seen in the Apocalypse, from every tribe and tongue, in white robes and with victorious palms. She it is who is sometimes obscured and, as it were, clouded over by a multitude of scandals, when sinners bend the bow to shoot at the upright in heart in the dark of the moon; but even then she stands out in her firmest members. And if some distinction is to be drawn in these divine words, perhaps it was not said for nothing of the seed of Abraham, “as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore”, so that by the stars of heaven may be understood the fewer, firmer and brighter, and by the sand of the seashore the great multitude of the weak and carnal, which sometimes appears quiet and free in a time of calm, but sometimes is covered and troubled by the waves of tribulations and temptations.

Such was the time of which Hilary wrote, from which you thought you could lie in wait against so many divine testimonies, as though the church had perished from the world. In this way you might say that there were not so many churches of Galatia at the time when the apostle said, “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?” and, “Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” For so you slander a learned man, who was sharply rebuking the slow of heart and the fearful, with whom he was again in labour until Christ was formed in them. For who does not know that at that time many of small understanding were deceived by obscure words, so that they thought the Arians believed what they themselves believed, and that others yielded through fear and consented in pretence, not walking straight toward the truth of the Gospel; and would you have refused them pardon when afterwards they were corrected, as they were pardoned? You plainly do not know the letters of God. Read what Paul wrote about Peter, and what Cyprian too thought of it, and let not the gentleness of the church displease you, which gathers the scattered members of Christ and does not scatter those gathered. And yet those who were then most steadfast and could understand the insidious words of the heretics, few indeed compared with the rest, but still, some of them went bravely into exile for the faith, and some lay hidden throughout the world. And thus the church, which grows through all nations, was preserved in the Lord's wheat, and will be preserved to the end, until it holds absolutely all nations, even the barbarian. For she is the church in the good seed which the Son of Man sowed and foretold would grow among the weeds until the harvest. “The field is the world; the harvest is the end of the age.”

Hilary, then, was rebuking either the weeds, not the wheat, of the ten Asian provinces, or else the wheat itself, which was in danger through some failing, and he thought it should be rebuked the more usefully the more vehemently. For the canonical Scriptures too have this way of rebuking, so that something is said as if to all and the word reaches certain people. For when the apostle says to the Corinthians, “How do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?”, he clearly shows that not all were such, and yet he testifies that such people were not outside but among them. And so that those who did not think so should not be led astray by them, he warned a little later, saying: “Do not be led astray; bad company corrupts good morals. Be sober, righteous, and do not sin; for some have no knowledge of God; I speak to your shame.” But when he says, “For since there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not carnal and walking according to man?”, he speaks as if to all, and you see how grave is what he says. And so, if we did not read in the same letter, “I give thanks to my God always for you, for the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in everything you were enriched in him, in all speech and in all knowledge, as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you, so that you lack nothing in any grace”, we would think all the Corinthians carnal and natural, not perceiving the things of the Spirit of God, quarrelsome, jealous, walking according to man. So too “the whole world lies in the evil one” because of the weeds that are throughout the whole world, and Christ is “the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for those of the whole world” because of the wheat that is throughout the whole world.

But the love of many grows cold because of the abundance of scandals, the more and more, as the name of Christ is glorified, the wicked and the utterly and persistently perverse are also gathered into the communion of his sacraments; yet, like chaff, they are to be separated from the Lord's threshing floor only at the final winnowing. These do not extinguish the Lord's wheat, few indeed in comparison with them, but many in themselves; they do not extinguish God's elect, who are to be gathered at the end of the age, as the Gospel says, from the four winds, from the heights of the heavens to their ends. For theirs is the voice: “Save me, O Lord, for the holy man has failed, for truths are diminished among the sons of men”; and of them the Lord says that amid the abundance of iniquity, “he who perseveres to the end will be saved.” Finally, what follows teaches that not one man but many are speaking in the same psalm, where it is said: “You, O Lord, will preserve us and guard us from this generation for ever.” Because of this abundance of iniquity, which the Lord foretold would come, this too was said: “When the Son of Man comes, do you think he will find faith on earth?” For the doubt of him who knows all things prefigured our doubt in him, when the church, often deceived by many of whom she hoped much, because they were found other than they were believed to be, is so troubled about her own that she is unwilling to believe anything good easily of anyone. Yet it is not right to doubt that those whose faith he will find on earth are growing with the weeds throughout the whole field.

This, then, is the church that swims within the Lord's net with bad fish, from whom she is always separated in heart and conduct and withdraws, so that she may be presented to her husband glorious, without spot or wrinkle. But she awaits bodily separation on the seashore, that is, at the end of the age, correcting those she can, tolerating those she cannot correct; yet she does not desert the unity of the good because of the iniquity of those she does not correct.

Do not then, brother, against so many, so clear, so undoubted divine testimonies, try to collect slanders from the writings of bishops, whether of ours, like Hilary, or, before the party of Donatus separated, of the unity itself, like Cyprian and Agrippinus; first, because this kind of writing must be distinguished from the authority of the canon. For they are not read as if testimony were brought from them in such a way that it is not permitted to think otherwise, if perhaps at some point they thought otherwise than the truth demands. For we are among those who do not disdain to take as said to us too what the apostle said: “And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Nevertheless, to what we have attained, let us walk in that”: in that way, that is, which is Christ, of which way the psalm speaks thus: “May God have mercy on us and bless us; may he make his face shine upon us, that we may know your way on earth, your salvation among all nations.”

Next, if the authority of Cyprian, holy bishop and glorious martyr, pleases you (which, as I have said, we distinguish from the authority of the canon), why does it not please you in him that he both held by love and defended by argument the unity of the whole world and of all nations; that he judged those who wished to separate from it as righteous to be most arrogant and proud, mocking them for taking upon themselves what the Lord did not grant even to the apostles, to gather the weeds before the time, or trying to separate the chaff from the wheat as if it had been granted to them to carry the chaff and cleanse the threshing floor; that he showed that no one can be stained by other people's sins, which is the only cause of separation all the authors of ungodly sedition claim; that, in the very matter in which he thought otherwise, he decreed that colleagues who held different views were neither to be judged nor removed from the right of communion; that in the very letter to Jubaianus, which was read first in the council whose authority you say you follow in rebaptizing, though he admits that in the past those who had been baptized elsewhere were admitted into the church without being baptized again (and so he thinks they were without baptism), he nevertheless sets so much value and wholesomeness on the peace of the church that because of it he does not believe they were separated from the church's gifts (or offices)?

In this matter, knowing your intelligence, you very easily see that your whole case is utterly overturned and extinguished. For if the church that had been throughout the world perished by sharing the sacraments with sinners, as you think (for that is why you separated), it had already perished entirely before, when, as Cyprian says, people were admitted into it without baptism; and so not even Cyprian himself had a church in which to be born, much less your much later founder and father Donatus! But if at that time, when people were admitted into it without baptism, there was nevertheless a church to give birth to Cyprian and to give birth to Donatus, it is clear that the righteous are not contaminated by other people's sins when they share the sacraments with them. And so you have no excuse with which to wash away the separation by which you went out from unity, and in you is fulfilled that oracle of holy Scripture: “A wicked son calls himself righteous, but does not wash away his going out.”

He who, because the sacraments are the same, does not dare to rebaptize even heretics is not thereby made equal to Cyprian in merit, just as whoever does not compel the Gentiles to Judaize is not made equal in merit to Peter. But Peter's limping, and also his correction, are contained in the canonical Scriptures; whereas that Cyprian thought differently about baptism from the form and custom of the church is found not in the canonical writings but in his own and in the council's. That he corrected this opinion is not found; yet it is not unfitting to think of such a man that he did correct it, and that perhaps this was suppressed by those who were too delighted with this error and did not wish to lose so great a patron. There are indeed some who contend that Cyprian did not hold this at all, but that it was forged under his name by presumptuous liars. For the integrity and knowledge of the writings of a single bishop, however illustrious, could not be guarded as the canonical Scripture is guarded by the writing of so many languages and by the order and succession of the church's celebration; and yet against it there were not lacking those who forged many things under the names of the apostles, in vain indeed, because it is so commended, so celebrated, so known; but what the effort of ungodly boldness can do against writings not founded on canonical authority it has shown from this very fact, that it did not hesitate to raise itself even against those that are confirmed by so great a weight of knowledge.

We, however, do not deny that Cyprian held that view, for two reasons: because his style has a certain face of its own by which it can be recognized, and because there our case is shown to be the more unconquerable against you, and the presumption of your separation, namely that you should not be stained by other people's sins, is overturned with complete ease; for it appears in Cyprian's writings that the sacraments were shared with sinners, when those were admitted into the church who, according to your opinion and, as you wish, his, did not have baptism, and yet the church did not perish, but the Lord's wheat remained, scattered throughout the world, in the dignity of its kind. And so, if in distress you flee to the authority of Cyprian as to a harbour, you see what rock your error strikes there; but if you no longer dare to flee even there, you are shipwrecked without any struggle.

Furthermore, Cyprian either did not hold at all what you cite him as holding, or he afterwards corrected it by the rule of truth, or he covered this, as a mole on his most radiant breast, with the abundance of love, since he both defended most copiously the unity of the church growing throughout the whole world and held most perseveringly the bond of peace; for it is written: “Love covers a multitude of sins.” To this is added that, if there was anything in him to be amended, the Father pruned him, as a most fruitful branch, with the knife of martyrdom: “For every branch in me that bears fruit,” says the Lord, “my Father prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” And why, if not because, clinging to the spreading vine, he did not forsake the root of unity? For even if he gave his body to be burned, but did not have love, it would profit him nothing.

Look a little further into the writings of Cyprian, so that you may notice how inexcusable he showed anyone to be who wished to separate himself, as if on account of his own righteousness, from the unity of the church which God promised and has fulfilled in all nations, and may understand better how true is the saying I mentioned a little earlier: “A wicked son calls himself righteous, but does not wash away his going out.” In a letter he writes to Antonianus he sets out a matter quite relevant to the one we are now dealing with; but it is better to insert his words. “Some of our predecessors,” he says, “bishops here in our province, did not think peace should be given to adulterers, and wholly closed the place of repentance to adultery; yet they did not withdraw from the college of their fellow bishops, nor break the unity of the Catholic Church by the hardness or obstinacy of their censure, so that he who did not give peace should be separated from the church because peace was given to adulterers by others. While the bond of concord remains and the indivisible sacrament of the Catholic Church endures, each bishop disposes and directs his own conduct, and will give account of his decision to the Lord.” What do you say to this, brother Vincentius? Surely you see that this great man, a peaceable bishop and most valiant martyr, strove for nothing more earnestly than that the bond of unity should not be broken. You see him in labour, not only that little ones conceived in Christ may be born, but also that those already born may not be shaken out of their mother's bosom and die.

Now consider the very matter he mentioned against the ungodly separatists. If those who gave peace to penitent adulterers were communicating with adulterers, were those who did not do so stained by the fellowship of the others? But if, as the truth holds and the church rightly maintains, peace was rightly given to penitent adulterers, those who wholly closed the place of repentance to adulterers were certainly acting ungodly: they denied healing to members of Christ, withdrew the keys of the church from those who knocked, and with hard cruelty contradicted the most merciful patience of God, who let them live precisely so that by repenting they might be healed through offering the sacrifice of a contrite spirit and a broken heart. Yet their error and ungodliness, monstrous as it was, did not defile those merciful and peaceable men who shared the Christian sacraments with them and tolerated them within the nets of unity until, brought to the shore, they should be separated; or, if it did defile them, then the church was already destroyed by communion with the wicked, and there was none to give birth to Cyprian himself. But if, as is certain, the church remained, it is certain too that in the unity of Christ no one can be stained by other people's sins, provided he does not consent to the deeds of the wicked, so as to be polluted by sharing in the sins themselves, but tolerates the wicked like chaff on the Lord's threshing floor until the final winnowing, for the sake of fellowship with the good. This being so, where is the presumption of your separation? Are you not wicked sons? You call yourselves righteous, but you do not wash away your going out.

Now if I wished to mention also what Tyconius, a man of your communion, put in his writings (he wrote rather against you for the Catholic Church, while vainly separating himself from the communion of the Africans as traditors, for which one thing Parmenian strangles him), what could you answer except what that same Tyconius said of you and I recalled a little earlier: “What we want is holy”? For this Tyconius, a man, as I said, of your communion, writes that a council of two hundred and seventy of your bishops was held at Carthage, in which, after seventy-five days, setting aside all past matters, a sentence was polished and decreed that traditors, guilty of an immense crime, should be received into communion as if blameless if they were unwilling to be baptized. He says too that Deuterius, bishop of Macriana, of your communion, mixed a congregation of traditors with his church, and, according to the statutes of that council of two hundred and seventy of your bishops, made unity with traditors; and that Donatus communicated with this Deuterius continually after this deed, and not only with this Deuterius but with all the bishops of the Moors, who, he says, communicated with traditors without baptism for forty years, until the persecution carried out by Macarius.

But you say: “Who is this Tyconius to me?” He is the Tyconius whom Parmenian restrains by writing in reply and deters from writing such things; yet he does not refute the very things he writes. He presses him, as I said above, with one thing only: that though he said such things about the church spread throughout the world, and that other people's sins stained no one in its unity, he nevertheless removed himself from the contagion of the Africans as traditors and was in the party of Donatus. Parmenian could have said that he had lied about all this; but, as the same Tyconius mentions, many were still alive through whom these things could be shown to be most certain and most evident.

But I say nothing of these. Contend that Tyconius lied; I call you back to Cyprian, whom you yourself mentioned. Plainly, according to the writings of Cyprian, if anyone in unity is stained by other people's sins, the church perished before Cyprian, and there was nothing from which Cyprian himself could come into being. But if it is sacrilege to think this, and it is certain that the church remains, no one is stained in its unity by other people's sins; in vain, wicked sons, you call yourselves righteous; you do not wash away, you do not cleanse, your going out.

“Why then,” you say, “do you seek us? Why do you receive in this way those you call heretics?” See how easily and briefly I answer. We seek you because you were lost, so that we may rejoice over you found, as we grieved over you lost. We call you heretics, but before you are converted to Catholic peace, before you are stripped of the error in which you are entangled; when you pass over to us, you certainly first leave what you were, so that you do not pass over to us as heretics. “Then baptize me,” you say. I would, if you were not baptized, or if you had been baptized with the baptism of Donatus or Rogatus and not of Christ. It is not the Christian sacraments that make you a heretic, but wicked dissent. The good that remained in you is not to be denied because of the evil that came from you; and you have that good to your harm if you do not have it where the good you have comes from. For all the Lord's sacraments are from the Catholic Church; you have and give them just as they were had and given even before you went out from it. Yet you do not fail to have them because you are not there, where the things you have come from. We do not change in you the things in which you are with us, for in many things you are with us (of such it is said, “for in many things they were with me”); but we correct the things in which you are not with us, and we want you to receive here what you do not have there where you are. You are with us in baptism, in the creed, in the other sacraments of the Lord; but in the spirit of unity and the bond of peace, in short in the Catholic Church itself, you are not with us. If you receive these, the things you have will not then begin to be present, but will then begin to profit you. So we do not, as you think, receive your people; by receiving them we make ours those who leave you to be received by us, and in order to begin to be ours, they first cease to be yours. Nor do we compel workers of the error we detest to be joined to us; we want those men joined to us precisely so that they may not be what we detest.