Letters 93.47–94.8

“But the apostle Paul,” you say, “baptized after John.” Did he baptize after a heretic? Or if perhaps you dare to call that friend of the bridegroom a heretic and say that he was not in the unity of the church, I would like you to write this too. But if it is utter madness either to think or to say this, it is now for your prudence to consider why the apostle Paul baptized after John. For if he baptized after an equal, all of you ought to baptize after one another; if after a greater, you too ought to baptize after Rogatus; if after a lesser, Rogatus ought to have baptized after you, since you had baptized as a presbyter. But if the baptism now given is equally valid in those to whom it is given, though those through whom it is given are of unequal merit, because it is Christ's and not theirs by whom it is administered, I think you now understand that Paul gave the baptism of Christ to certain people because they had been baptized with the baptism of John, not of Christ. For that baptism was called John's, as the divine Scripture testifies in many places, as the Lord himself says: “The baptism of John, where was it from? From heaven or from men?” But the baptism that Peter gave was not Peter's but Christ's; and that which Paul gave was not Paul's but Christ's; and that which was given by those who in the time of the apostles proclaimed Christ not purely but from envy was not theirs but Christ's; and that which was given by those who in Cyprian's time seized estates by treacherous frauds and increased their gains by multiplying interest was not theirs but Christ's. And because it was Christ's, therefore, although it was not given by equals, it profited equally those to whom it was given. For if each is the better baptized the better the man by whom he was baptized, the apostle did not rightly give thanks that he baptized none of the Corinthians except Crispus and Gaius and the household of Stephanas; for they would have been the better baptized, the better Paul was, if they were baptized by him. Finally, when he says, “I planted, Apollos watered”, he seems to mean that he evangelized and Apollos baptized. Was Apollos better than John? Why then did he who had baptized after John not baptize after Apollos, unless because this baptism, by whomever given, was Christ's, while that one, by whomever given, though it prepared the way for Christ, was John's?

It seems invidious to say, “There was baptism after John, and there is no baptism after heretics.” But one could just as invidiously say, “There was baptism after John, and there is no baptism after drunkards.” I prefer to mention this vice because those in whom it reigns cannot hide it, and who, even if blind, does not know how many such there are everywhere? And yet among the works of the flesh, whose doers will not possess the kingdom of God, the apostle puts this too, in the place where he also lists heresies: “The works of the flesh are manifest,” he says, “which are sexual immoralities, impurities, licentiousness, idolatry, sorceries, enmities, strife, jealousies, animosities, dissensions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, carousings and the like, of which I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not possess the kingdom of God.” For the same reason, then, that there is no baptism after a heretic though there was baptism after John, there is no baptism after a drunkard though there was baptism after John: for both heresies and drunkenness are among the works whose doers will not possess the kingdom of God. Does it not seem to you intolerably unworthy that, when there was baptism after him who prepared the way for the kingdom of God not by drinking wine soberly but by drinking no wine at all, there should be no baptism after a drunkard, who will not possess the kingdom of God? What is the answer here, except that that baptism was John's, after which the apostle baptized with the baptism of Christ, while this baptism with which the drunkard baptized is Christ's? Between John and a drunkard there is a great difference, as of opposites; between the baptism of John and the baptism of Christ there is a great difference, not of opposites, but still great. Between the apostle and a drunkard there is a great difference; between the baptism of Christ given by the apostle and the baptism of Christ given by a drunkard there is no difference. So too between John and a heretic there is a great difference, as of opposites, and between the baptism of John and the baptism of Christ given by a heretic there is a great difference, though not of opposites; but between the baptism of Christ given by the apostle and the baptism of Christ given by a heretic there is no difference. For the form of the sacraments is recognized as equal even when there is a great difference in the merits of men.

But pardon me; I erred when I wished to convince you by the case of a drunkard baptizing. I had forgotten that I was dealing with a Rogatist, not with any ordinary Donatist. For among your few colleagues and all your clergy you can perhaps find no drunkard. For you are the ones who hold the Catholic faith not from the communion of the whole world but from the observance of all the divine commandments and all the sacraments; in you alone he will find it when the Son of Man comes, when he will not find faith on earth, because you are neither earth nor on earth, but dwell as heavenly beings in heaven! And you do not notice or fear that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble? Nor does that very passage of the Gospel prick you, where the Lord says, “When the Son of Man comes, do you think he will find faith on earth?” For at once, as if foreseeing that some would proudly claim this faith for themselves, he told this parable to some who thought themselves righteous and despised others: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector”, and so on. Answer yourself now what follows. Yet look more carefully at those few of yours, whether no drunkard baptizes among them. For this plague lays waste souls so widely and reigns with such freedom that I would be very surprised if it had not penetrated your little flock too, though you boast that you have already separated the sheep from the goats before the coming of the Son of Man, the one good shepherd.

Hear, I pray, through me the voice of the Lord's wheat, labouring among the chaff on the Lord's threshing floor until the final winnowing, throughout the whole world, that is, in which God has called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting, where even children praise the Lord: “Whoever, taking occasion from this imperial law, persecutes you not out of love that would correct but out of the hatred of enmity, displeases us. And although no earthly thing can rightly be possessed by anyone except either by divine right, by which all things belong to the righteous, or by human right, which is in the power of the kings of the earth, and therefore you falsely call yours the things you neither possess as righteous men and have been ordered to lose by the laws of earthly kings, and you say in vain, ‘We laboured to gather them’, when you read what is written, ‘The righteous will eat the labours of the ungodly’; nevertheless, whoever, taking occasion from this law, which the kings of the earth, serving Christ, have promulgated to amend your ungodliness, greedily seeks your private property, displeases us. Whoever, finally, holds the very property of the poor or the basilicas of the congregations, which you held under the name of the church and which are owed to no church but that which is the true church of Christ, not through justice but through avarice, displeases us. Whoever receives someone cast out by you for some disgrace or crime in the same way as those are received who, apart from the error by which you are separated from us, lived among you without crime, displeases us.” But you do not easily show these things, and if you show them, we tolerate some whom we cannot correct or punish; we do not leave the Lord's threshing floor because of the chaff, nor break the Lord's nets because of bad fish, nor desert the Lord's flock because of the goats to be separated at the end, nor move out of the Lord's house because of vessels made for dishonour.

But you, brother, as it seems to me, if you were not concerned with the vain glory of men and despised the reproach of the senseless, who will say, “Why now?”, would without doubt pass over to the church which I perceive you feel to be the true one. Nor do I look far for evidence of this opinion of yours. You yourself, at the beginning of that letter of yours to which I am now replying, put these words: “Since I knew you very well,” you say, “when you were still far removed from the Christian faith and once devoted to the study of literature, as a lover of quiet and honourable conduct; and since afterwards, converted to the Christian faith, as I learned from the report of many, you were giving yourself to disputations about the law …” Certainly, if you sent me that letter, these are your words. Since, then, you acknowledge that I was converted to the Christian faith, though I was converted neither to the Donatists nor to the Rogatists, you confirm without any doubt that the Christian faith exists apart from the Rogatists and apart from the Donatists. This faith, then, as we say, is spreading among all nations, which, according to God's testimony, are blessed in the seed of Abraham. Why then do you still hesitate to hold what you feel, except that you are ashamed either of having once felt what you do not feel, or of having defended something else; and while you blush to correct an error, you do not blush to remain in error, which certainly ought rather to have made you blush?

This is what Scripture did not keep silent: “There is a shame that brings sin, and there is a shame that brings grace and glory.” Shame brings sin when someone blushes to change a wrong opinion, lest he be thought inconstant or be held, on his own testimony, to have erred for a long time; so they go down alive into hell, that is, aware of their own ruin, whom Dathan, Abiram and Korah, swallowed by the opening of the earth, prefigured so long before. But shame brings grace and glory when someone blushes for his own iniquity and by repenting is changed for the better. You are reluctant to do this, overcome by that ruinous shame, lest men who do not know what they are saying should cast at you that saying of the apostle: “For if I build up again the very things I tore down, I make myself a transgressor.” If this could be said even against those who, once corrected, preach the truth that they attacked when perverse, it would be said first of all against Paul himself, in whom the churches of Christ glorified God when they heard that he was preaching the faith he once ravaged.

And do not think that anyone can pass from error to truth, or from any sin, great or small, to correction, without repentance. But it is a too shameless error to wish to slander the church, which so many divine testimonies show to be the church of Christ, because it treats differently those who desert it, if they correct this very thing by repentance, and those who were never yet in it and are then receiving its peace for the first time: humbling the former more, receiving the latter more gently, loving both, serving the healing of both with a mother's love. You have a letter longer perhaps than you would wish. It would be much shorter if I were thinking only of you in replying; but now, even if it profits you nothing, I do not think it will profit nothing those who take care to read it with the fear of God and without respect of persons. Amen.

“Your word is always a lamp to my feet and a light to my paths.” So, whenever I receive a letter from your most blessed Holiness, I feel the darkness of my foolishness scattered, and, as if the eye-salve of explanation had been poured into the eyes of my mind, I see more clearly, the night of ignorance driven away and the mist of doubt wiped off. I have often felt this given to me at other times through the gift of your letters, but especially through this little book, your recent letter, whose bearer was as welcome to me as he was worthy, a man blessed of the Lord, our brother the deacon Quintus. A long while after he had come to the City, when I had come there according to my customary practice after the Lord's Pascha to venerate the apostles and martyrs, he delivered your blessing to us. Yet, the time he had spent in Rome without my knowledge being forgotten, he seemed to me to have come most recently from your presence, so that I believed he had come to me from you at that very moment, when I first saw him and when he offered me the full fragrance of your sweetness in your words, which breathe the chastity of a heavenly ointment. I confess, however, to your venerable Unanimity that I could not read the volume itself in Rome as soon as I had received it; for there were such crowds there that I could not examine your gift carefully and enjoy it as I wished, that is, read it straight through once I had begun to read. And so, as usually happens, in the secure expectation of a feast prepared, I restrained the hunger of my eager mind, and with sure hope of being filled, holding in my hand the loaves of my desire in a volume to be devoured (which afterwards, when I devoured it, was most sweet both in my mouth and in my stomach), I easily held back my appetite as it gaped at the honeycombs of your letters, until I set out from the City and could devote wholly to this work the day that had to be spent at a halt on the journey, which we had in the town of Formiae, so that, free from all the dregs of cares and the stifling of crowds, I might feast on the spiritual delights of your letter.

What then can I, lowly and earthly, answer to this wisdom which is given you from above, which this world does not grasp and which no one understands except one who is wise with the wisdom of God and eloquent with the Word of God? And so, because I have proof of Christ speaking in you, in God I will praise your words and will not fear the terror of the night, since you have taught me in the spirit of truth the wholesome restraint of the soul to be kept regarding mortal things that pass away, by which you saw that blessed mother and grandmother Melanium wept for the bodily death of her only son, with a silent grief, yet not without a mother's tears in her sorrow. Her modest and grave tears you understood more deeply, as a spirit nearer or more equal to her soul; and, saving the manly fortitude of a woman perfect in Christ, you contemplated her mother's heart better, from an equal standing, by the likeness of your own heart, so that you perceived that she, first moved by natural affection and then pierced by a weightier cause, wept not so much for that human thing, that she had lost in this present world an only son who had paid the debt of mortality, as because she thought him taken away almost overtaken in worldly vanity, since the ambition of senatorial rank had not yet left him, and not according to the holy greed of her prayers, namely that he should have passed from the glory of the religious life to the glory of the resurrection, to take with his mother a common rest and crown, if in the life of this world he had, by his mother's example, preferred sackcloth to the toga and the monastery to the senate.

Yet that same man, as I think I reported to your Holiness before, departed enriched with such works that, if he did not wear his mother's noble humility in his dress, he displayed it in his mind. For he was, according to the word of the Lord, so meek in conduct and humble in heart that it is not without reason believed that he has entered into the Lord's rest, since “there is a posterity for the peaceable man”, and “the meek shall possess the land”, pleasing God “in the land of the living.” For certainly he fulfilled that saying of the apostle too, not only with the silent disposition of a meek man but also with conspicuous religious service: though he was a colleague in the rank and honour of the high ones of this world, he did not, like one glorious on earth, mind high things, but, as a perfect imitator of Christ, agreed with the humble, and persisted all day long in showing mercy and lending. Hence his seed too has become mighty on earth among those who, as God's strong ones of the earth, are greatly exalted, so that the holy merit of the man is revealed even by the most blessed visitation of his family and household. “The generation of the upright,” it says, “will be blessed”; glory that does not fall and riches that do not slip away are in his house, a house built in the heavens not by the labour of hands but by holiness of works. But I cease telling more about the memory of a man as dear to me as he was devoted to Christ, since I recall that in earlier letters I told not a little about him, and since I can say nothing better or holier of this son's blessed mother Melanium, the root equal to her holy branches, than what your Holiness has deigned to say and discuss about her: so that, because I, a sinner with unclean lips, could say nothing worthy, being far from the merits of her faith and the virtues of her soul, you, that man of Christ, the teacher of Israel in the church of the truth, were provided by the grace of God, arranging things for the better, as a worthier herald of so manly a soul in Christ, who both saw her mind, strengthened by divine power, as I have said, with a nearer spirit, and praised her piety, mixed with virtue, with worthier eloquence.

You have deigned to ask me what the activity of the blessed will be in that world after the resurrection of the flesh. But I consult you, as a teacher and spiritual physician, about the present state of my life: that you may teach me to do the will of God, to walk in your footsteps after Christ, and first to die that Gospel death by which we forestall our bodily dissolution by a voluntary departure, withdrawing from the life of this world not by dying but by resolve; for this life is wholly a life of temptations, or, as you once said to me, wholly temptation. Would, then, that my ways might be so directed after your footsteps that, by your example loosing the old shoe from my feet, I might break my bonds and exult in freedom to run the course, so that I may attain that death by which you have died to this world, that you may live to God with Christ living in you, whose death and life are recognized in your body and heart and mouth; for your heart does not savour earthly things, nor does your mouth speak of the works of men, but the word of Christ abounds in your breast and the spirit of truth is poured out on your tongue, gladdening the city of God with the rush of the heavenly river!

And what power works this death in us but love, which is strong as death? For it so blots out and destroys this world for us that it accomplishes the effect of death through the affection of Christ, turned to whom we are turned away from this world, and living to whom we die to the elements of this world, and do not judge as though living in their sight and use; for our portion is the death of Christ, whose resurrection from the dead we do not lay hold of in glory unless we imitate his death on the cross by mortifying the members and senses of the flesh, so that we may no longer live by our own will but by his, whose will is our sanctification, and who died and rose for us so that we might no longer live for ourselves but for him who died for us and rose again, and gave us his Spirit as the pledge of his promise, just as he placed in heaven the pledge of our life in his own body, which is of our body. Hence now the Lord is our expectation, and our substance, which was made by him, is with him and in him and through him, who was conformed to the body of our lowliness so that he might conform us to the body of his glory and place us with himself in the heavenly places. Therefore those who are worthy of eternal life will one day be in the glory of his kingdom, so as to be with him, as the apostle says, and to remain with him, as the Lord himself said to the Father: “I will that where I

am, they too may be with me.” Without doubt that is what you have in the psalms: “Blessed are those who dwell in your house; for ages of ages they will praise you.” I think this praise will be uttered by the voices of those singing together, even though the bodies of the saints, when they rise, will be changed, so as to be like the Lord's body as it appeared after the resurrection, in which the living image of human resurrection shone out beforehand, so that the Lord himself, in the very body in which he had suffered and risen, was like a mirror of contemplation for all. Since he rose in the same flesh in which he had died and been buried, he often showed, when brought before men's eyes and ears, all the functions of all his members expressly. And if even the angels, whose creation is simply spiritual, are said to have tongues, with which they sing praises to the Lord their creator and never cease giving thanks, how much more will men, though their bodies after the resurrection are spiritual, yet with all the members of the glorified flesh remaining, and in all the members their forms and proportions, have tongues in their mouths and give voice with speaking tongues, with which to utter in words the divine praises or the affections of their senses and joys! Perhaps the Lord will even add this to the grace and glory of his saints in the ages of his kingdom, that they sing with tongues and voices the more excellent the further they have advanced by a blessed change to a more blessed nature of bodies, so that, established in bodies now spiritual, they may perhaps speak no longer in human words but in those angelic and heavenly words such as the apostle heard in paradise! And perhaps he testified that those words were unutterable for man for this reason: that new tongues are being prepared for the saints among the other kinds of rewards. Men of this world are not yet allowed to use them, so that the immortals, of whom it is said, “For they will shout and sing a hymn”, may speak with these tongues befitting their glory; without doubt in the heavenly places, where they will be with the Lord and delight in the abundance of peace, rejoicing before the throne, casting bowls and crowns before the feet of the Lamb and singing a new song to him, joined to the choirs of angels, Powers, Dominions, Thrones, so that they too, together with the Cherubim and Seraphim and those four living creatures, may sing with unceasing voice: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts”, and the rest that you know.

This, then, is what I, needy and poor, that foolish little one of yours whom you, as truly wise, are accustomed to bear with, ask: that you teach me your knowledge or opinion on this. For I know that you are enlightened by the spirit of revelation from the very leader and fountain of the wise, so that, as you have known the past and see the present, you may also judge of the future: what you think about these everlasting voices of the heavenly creatures, or even of those who act above the heavens in the sight of the Most High, and by what organs they are expressed. For although the apostle, by saying, “If I speak with the tongues of angels”, showed that they have a certain speech proper to their nature, or, so to speak, their race, as much higher than human senses and words as the very creation and station of angels surpasses mortal inhabitants and earthly abodes, yet perhaps he spoke of “tongues of angels” in the sense of kinds of sounds and speech; just as, when discussing the variety of charisms, he numbers kinds of tongues among the gifts of grace, meaning surely that this was given as a sign, that individuals were granted to speak in the language of many nations. But the voice of God, often sent forth to the saints from a cloud, also shows that there can be speech without a tongue, since the tongue is a member of the body, small and great. But perhaps, from the very fact that God placed the function of the voice in this member, he called even the words and voices of the incorporeal creation of angels a tongue, just as Scripture is accustomed to assign the names of members to God as well, according to the kinds of his works. Pray for us and teach us.

Our dearest and sweetest brother Quintus, as slowly as he returns to us from you, so quickly does he hasten to go back from us to you. His insistence in demanding a letter is shown by this very letter, which has more erasures than lines; the excessive haste of the said collector made it a rough draft. For he came to us on the day before the Ides of May to ask for a reply, and on the Ides he obtained leave to be sent off before the sixth hour. See then whether I have commended or accused him by such testimony. Perhaps, or rather without doubt, he will be judged more praiseworthy than blameworthy, who most rightly hurried back from the darkness, which we are compared with your light, to his own light.