Letters 59.3–59.17

But not for that reason, dearest brother, must church discipline be abandoned or priestly severity relaxed, because we are assailed with abuse or shaken with terrors, since Scripture meets us, saying: “But he who is presumptuous and stubborn, a man boasting of himself, will achieve nothing at all, who has enlarged his soul like the underworld.” And again: “And do not fear the words of a sinful man, for his glory will be dung and worms. Today he will be lifted up, and tomorrow he will not be found, because he has returned to his earth, and his thought will perish.” And again: “I saw the ungodly exalted and lifted up above the cedars of Lebanon; and I passed by, and behold, he was not; and I sought him, and his place was not found.” Exaltation and puffing up and arrogant, proud boasting are born not from the teaching of Christ, who teaches humility, but from the spirit of Antichrist, whom the Lord reproaches through the prophet and says: “But you said in your heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of God, I will sit on a high mountain above the high mountains toward the north; I will ascend above the clouds, I will be like the Most High.” And he added, saying: “But you will go down to the underworld, into the foundations of the earth; and those who see you will wonder at you.” Hence divine Scripture threatens a like punishment to such men in another place too, and says: “For the day of the Lord of hosts is upon everyone who is insolent and proud, and upon everyone who is lifted up and lofty.” So each one is at once betrayed by his mouth and his words, and whether he has Christ in his heart or Antichrist is uncovered by his speaking, as the Lord says in his gospel: “Brood of vipers, how can you speak good things, since you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man out of good treasure brings forth good things, and the evil man out of evil treasure brings forth evil.” Hence too that rich sinner, who implores help from Lazarus, placed in Abraham's bosom and set in refreshment, while he, racked in torments, is scorched by the heat of the burning flame, pays the penalty in his mouth and tongue more than in all the parts of his body, because, evidently, he had sinned more with his tongue and mouth.

For since it is written, “Nor will the abusive attain the kingdom of God,” and again the Lord says in his gospel, “Whoever says to his brother ‘Fool,’ and whoever says ‘Raca,’ will be liable to the Gehenna of fire,” how can they escape the censure of the avenging Lord who heap such things not only on brothers but also on priests, to whom so great an honor is granted by God's favor that whoever did not obey his priest and the one judging here for the time was at once put to death? In Deuteronomy the Lord God speaks, saying: “And whatever man acts in pride, so as not to listen to the priest or the judge, whoever he may be in those days, that man shall die; and all the people, when they hear, will fear and will not act impiously even now.” Likewise, when Samuel was spurned by the Jews, God says to him: “They have not spurned you, but they have spurned me.” And the Lord too in the gospel: “He who hears you hears me and him who sent me; and he who rejects you rejects me and him who sent me.” And when he had cleansed a leper, he said: “Go and show yourself to the priest.” And afterward, at the time of his passion, when he had received a slap from the priest's servant, and the servant had said to him, “Is that how you answer the high priest?”, the Lord said nothing insulting against the high priest, nor took anything from the priest's honor, but rather, asserting and showing his own innocence, said: “If I have spoken wrongly, reproach me for the wrong; but if rightly, why do you strike me?” Likewise afterward in the Acts of the Apostles, the blessed apostle Paul, when it was said to him, “Do you thus assail the priest of God with abuse?”, although, the Lord having already been crucified, they had begun to be sacrilegious, impious, and bloody, and no longer kept anything of priestly honor and authority, yet Paul, thinking of the mere name, though empty, and a kind of shadow of the priest, said: “I did not know, brothers, that he was high priest; for it is written: You shall not speak evil of the ruler of your people.”

Since these many and great examples go before, by which priestly authority and power is established by divine favor, what sort of men do you think those are who, enemies of the priests and rebels against the catholic church, are frightened neither by the threat of the Lord's forewarning nor by the vengeance of the coming judgment? For heresies have arisen and schisms been born from no other source than this: that God's priest is not obeyed, and it is not borne in mind that there is one priest in the church for the time and one judge for the time in the place of Christ. If the whole brotherhood obeyed him according to the divine teachings, no one would stir anything against the college of priests; no one, after the divine judgment, after the vote of the people, after the consent of the fellow bishops, would make himself judge, no longer of the bishops, but of God; no one would split the church of Christ by rending its unity; no one, pleasing himself and swollen with pride, would found a new heresy apart and outside. Unless there is someone of such sacrilegious rashness and lost mind as to think that a priest is made without God's judgment, when the Lord says in his gospel: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny, and neither of them falls to the ground without the Father's will?” Since he says that not even the least things happen without the will of God, does anyone think that the highest and greatest things happen in God's church without God's knowing or permitting it, and that the priests, that is, his stewards, will not be ordained by his decision? This is not to have the faith by which we live; this is not to give honor to God, by whose nod and will we know and believe that all things are ruled and governed. Clearly there are bishops who are not made by the will of God, but they are those made outside the church, those made against the ordering and tradition of the gospel, as the Lord himself sets down in the twelve prophets and says: “They have appointed a king for themselves, and not through me.” And again: “Their sacrifices are like the bread of mourning; all who eat of them will be defiled.” And through Isaiah too the Holy Spirit cries out and says: “Woe to you, deserting children. Thus says the Lord: You have taken counsel, but not through me; and you have made a covenant, but not through my Spirit, to add sins upon sins.”

For the rest (I speak provoked, I speak grieving, I speak compelled): when a bishop is put in the place of one deceased, when he is chosen in peace by the vote of the whole people, when he is protected by God's help in persecution, faithfully joined to all his colleagues, already proven to his people in the episcopate for four years, serving discipline in quiet, proscribed in the storm, with the name of his episcopate attached and added, so often demanded for the lion in the circus and in the amphitheater, honored with the testimony of the Lord's favor, and in these very days, in which I wrote this letter to you, demanded again for the lion in the circus by the outcry of the populace because of the sacrifices which the people were ordered by a published edict to celebrate: when such a man, dearest brother, is seen to be attacked by certain desperate and lost men placed outside the church, it is plain who is attacking: not, of course, Christ, who either appoints or protects priests, but he who, adversary of Christ and enemy of his church, persecutes the head of the church with his hostility for this purpose, that, the helmsman removed, he may rage more fiercely and violently to bring shipwreck on the church.

Nor ought it to trouble anyone faithful, mindful of the gospel and keeping the commands of the forewarning apostle, dearest brother, if in the last times some proud, stubborn men, enemies of God's priests, either withdraw from the church or act against the church, since both the Lord and his apostles foretold that such men would come. Nor let anyone wonder that the servant is deserted by some, since his disciples left the Lord himself while he was doing the greatest mighty works and wonders and proving the powers of God the Father by the testimony of his deeds. And yet he did not rebuke those who withdrew or threaten them severely, but rather, turning to his apostles, said: “Do you also wish to go?”, keeping, that is, the law by which man, left to his freedom and placed in his own choice, seeks for himself either death or salvation. Yet Peter, on whom the church had been built by the same Lord, speaking as one for all and answering with the voice of the church, says: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the word of eternal life, and we believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God”; signifying, that is, and showing that those who withdraw from Christ perish by their own fault, but that the church, which believes in Christ and holds once for all what it has known, never departs from him at all; and that those are the church who remain in the house of God, while those are not a planting planted by God the Father whom we see not made firm with the stability of wheat but winnowed like chaff by the spirit of the scattering enemy. Of them John too says in his letter: “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us.” Likewise Paul admonishes us not to be moved when the wicked perish from the church, nor to have our faith lessened when the faithless withdraw. “For what,” he says, “if some of them have fallen away from the faith? Has their unbelief made void the faithfulness of God? By no means; for God is true, but every man a liar.”

As for us, it befits our conscience, brother, to take pains that no one perish from the church by our fault; but if anyone perishes of his own accord and by his own crime, and is unwilling to do penance and return to the church, we who take thought for their health will be blameless on the day of judgment, and they alone will remain in punishment who were unwilling to be healed by the wholesomeness of our counsel. Nor ought the abuse of the lost move us to depart from the right way and the sure rule, since the apostle too instructs us, saying: “If I were pleasing men, I would not be the servant of Christ.” It makes a difference whether one desires to win the favor of men or of God. If men are pleased, the Lord is offended. But if we strive and labor to be able to please God, we ought to despise human abuse and curses.

As for my not writing to you at once, dearest brother, about this Fortunatus, the false bishop appointed by a few inveterate heretics: the matter was not one that needed to be brought hastily to your notice as if it were great or to be feared, especially since you already knew well enough the name of Fortunatus, who is one of the five presbyters who long ago fled from the church and were recently excluded by the sentence of our fellow bishops, many and most serious men, who wrote to you about this matter last year. Likewise you would recognize Felicissimus, the standard-bearer of sedition, who himself is also included in the same letter of our fellow bishops sent to you some time ago; who was not only excluded by them here but also recently driven from the church by you there. Since I was confident that these things were known to you and knew for certain that they were fixed in your memory and discipline, I did not think it necessary to report the follies of heretics to you quickly and urgently. For what the audacity of heretics and schismatics contrives among themselves ought not to concern the majesty and dignity of the catholic church. For Novatian's party too is said to have made here, as their false bishop, the presbyter Maximus, who was recently sent to us by Novatian as envoy and rejected from our communion. Yet I had not written to you about this either, since all these things are despised by us, and since I lately sent you the names of the bishops established here who, sound and whole in the catholic church, preside over the brothers. It was decided by the counsel of all of us to write this to you precisely so that there might be a short way to wash away error and see the truth, and that you and our colleagues might know to whom you ought to write and from whom in turn to receive letters; and if anyone besides those whom we included in our letter dared to write to you, you would know that he was stained either by sacrifice or by a certificate, or was one of the heretics, that is, perverse and profane. Nevertheless, finding the opportunity of a most intimate man and cleric, through the acolyte Felicianus, whom you had sent with our colleague Perseus, I wrote to you about this Fortunatus too, among the other things that had to be brought to your notice from here. But while our brother Felicianus was either delayed here by the wind or detained by us to receive other letters, he was forestalled by Felicissimus hurrying to you. For so crimes always hurry, as if by haste they could prevail against innocence.

Through Felicianus, however, I informed you, brother, that Privatus had come to Carthage, an old heretic in the colony of Lambaesis, condemned many years ago for many grave offenses by the sentence of ninety bishops, and most severely censured also by the letters of our predecessors Fabian and Donatus, as is not unknown to you either. When he said that he wished to plead his case before us at the council which we held on the last Ides of May, and was not admitted, he made this Fortunatus his false bishop, worthy of his fellowship. There had also come with him a certain Felix, whom he himself had once appointed false bishop outside the church in heresy. Jovinus and Maximus too were present as companions of the heretic Privatus, condemned by the sentence of nine of our colleagues for unspeakable sacrifices and for crimes proven against them, and excluded again by more of us last year in council. With these four was also joined Repostus of Sutunurca, who not only fell himself in the persecution but also cast down the greatest part of his people by sacrilegious persuasion. These five, with a few who had either sacrificed or had a bad conscience, co-opted Fortunatus as their false bishop, so that, their crimes agreeing together, the ruler should, of course, be such as those who are ruled.

From this you can now recognize the other lies too, dearest brother, which desperate and lost men have spread there: that, although there were no more than five false bishops, from among those who sacrificed or heretics, who came to Carthage and appointed Fortunatus as partner of their madness, they nevertheless, as sons of the devil and full of lying, dared, as you write, to boast that twenty-five bishops had been present. This lie they had first spread here too among our brothers, saying that twenty-five bishops would come from Numidia to make a bishop for them. After they were detected and confounded in this lie of theirs, only five shipwrecked men excluded by us having come together, they sailed to Rome with their cargo of lies, as if the truth could not sail after them, to convict their lying tongues by proof of the certain fact. And this, brother, is true madness: not to consider or know that lies do not deceive for long; that it is night only until the day dawns; but that when the day has brightened and the sun has risen, darkness and gloom give way to the light, and the robberies that were rampant through the night cease. In short, if you asked them for names, they would not have even any to name falsely. So great is the scarcity even of bad men among them that not even twenty-five can be gathered to them from those who sacrificed or from heretics. And yet, to deceive the ears of the simple and of those far away, the number is inflated with a lie; as if, even if this number were true, the church could be conquered by heretics or justice by the unjust.

Nor ought I, dearest brother, now to repay them in kind and run through in my speech the things they have committed and still commit, since we must consider what it befits God's priests to bring forth and write, and with us shame ought to speak rather than resentment, lest I seem, provoked, to heap up curses rather than crimes and sins. I say nothing, therefore, of the frauds done to the church; I pass over conspiracies and adulteries and various kinds of offenses. One thing only in their crime, in which the cause is not mine nor men's but God's, I do not think should be passed over in silence: that from the very first day of the persecution, when the crimes of the offenders were fresh and hot, and not only the devil's altars but still the very hands and mouths of the lapsed were smoking from the unspeakable sacrifices, they did not cease to hold communion with the lapsed and to obstruct the doing of penance. God cries: “He who sacrifices to gods, except to the Lord alone, shall be rooted out”; and the Lord says in the gospel: “He who denies me, I will deny him.” And in another place the divine indignation and wrath is not silent, saying: “To them you have poured out drink offerings, and to them you have laid on sacrifices. Shall I not be angry at these things? says the Lord.” And they obstruct the entreating of God, who himself testifies that he is angry. They obstruct Christ's being won over by prayers and satisfactions, who declares that he denies the one who denies him.

We sent letters on this very matter at the very time of the persecution, and were not heard. In frequent councils we decreed, not only with our agreement but also with a threat, that the brothers should do penance, and that no one should rashly give peace to those who did not do penance. And they, sacrilegious against God, rash with impious fury against God's priests, withdrawing from the church and taking up parricidal arms against the church, labor that the devil's malice may complete its work: that the divine clemency may not heal the wounded in his church. They corrupt the penance of the wretched by the fraud of their lies, so that God in his anger may not be satisfied, so that he who before was either ashamed or afraid to be a Christian may not afterward seek Christ his Lord, so that he who had withdrawn from the church may not return to the church. Pains are taken that sins may not be redeemed by just satisfactions and laments, that wounds may not be washed by tears. True peace is taken away by the lie of a false peace; the saving bosom of the mother is shut by the intervention of a stepmother, so that weeping and groaning may not be heard from the breast and mouth of the lapsed. Moreover the lapsed are still further compelled to abuse the priests with the tongues and mouth with which they sinned before on the Capitol; they pursue with insults and abusive words the confessors and virgins and all the righteous who are outstanding in the praise of faith and glorious in the church. By these words it is not so much the modesty, humility, and decency of our people that is struck as their own hope and life that is torn. For it is not he who hears abuse but he who utters it that is wretched; nor is he who is beaten by a brother, but he who beats a brother, a sinner in the law; and when the guilty wrong the innocent, it is those who think they do the wrong who suffer it. Hence, in short, their mind is stricken, their spirit dull, their sense estranged: it is the wrath of God not to understand one's sins, so that penance may not follow, as it is written: “And God gave them a spirit of stupor,” so that, that is, they may not return and be healed and be made whole after their sins by just prayers and satisfactions. The apostle Paul sets down in his letter and says: “They did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved; and therefore God will send them a working of error, that they may believe a lie, that all may be judged who did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness.” The first degree of happiness is not to sin; the second, to acknowledge one's sins. In the first, innocence runs whole and untouched to keep us; in the second, medicine follows to heal us. Both of these they have lost by offending God, so that both the grace received from the sanctification of baptism is lost, and there remains no penance by which guilt is cured. Or do you think, brother, that these are light crimes against God, small and moderate sins, that through them the majesty of an angry God is not entreated, that the wrath and fire and day of the Lord are not feared, that, with Antichrist at hand, the faith of the fighting people is disarmed while the vigor and fear of Christ are taken away? Let the laity see how they may care for this. On the priests lies the greater labor of upholding and caring for the majesty of God, so that we may not seem to neglect anything in this respect, since the Lord admonishes and says: “And now this command is to you, O priests: if you will not hear, and if you will not lay it to heart to give honor to my name, says the Lord, I will send a curse upon you and curse your blessing.” Is honor then given to God when the majesty and censure of God are so despised that, when he says he is indignant and angry with those who sacrifice, and when he threatens eternal punishments and perpetual torments, it is proposed and said by the sacrilegious that God's anger should not be considered, the Lord's judgment not feared, no knocking done at the church of Christ, but that, penance being removed and no confession of the crime made, the bishops despised and trampled underfoot, peace should be preached by presbyters with deceitful words, and, so that the lapsed may not rise or those placed outside return to the church, communion be offered to those not in communion?

It was not enough for them to have withdrawn from the gospel, to have taken away from the lapsed the hope of satisfaction and penance, to have removed from all sense and fruit of penance those entangled in frauds, or stained with adulteries, or polluted by the deadly contagion of sacrifices, so that they would not entreat God nor make confession of their crimes in the church; to have set up for themselves, outside the church and against the church, a little gathering of a lost faction, into which a band of men with bad consciences, unwilling to entreat God and make satisfaction, might flow together. After all this, further still, with a false bishop appointed for them by heretics, they dare to sail and to carry letters from schismatics and profane men to the chair of Peter and to the principal church, from which priestly unity arose, and not to consider that these are the Romans whose faith was praised by the preaching apostle, to whom faithlessness can have no access. But what reason was there for coming and announcing that a false bishop had been made against the bishops? For either they are pleased with what they have done and persevere in their crime; or, if they are displeased and withdraw, they know where to return. For since it has been decided by all of us, and is equally fair and just, that each person's case be heard where the crime was committed, and since to each shepherd a portion of the flock has been assigned, which each is to rule and govern as one who will give account of his conduct to the Lord, those over whom we preside certainly ought not to run about, nor break the close-knit concord of the bishops by their crafty and deceitful rashness, but plead their case where they can have both accusers and witnesses of their crime; unless to a few desperate and lost men the authority of the bishops established in Africa seems too small, who have already judged them and have recently condemned, by the weight of their judgment, their conscience bound with the many snares of their sins. Their case has already been examined; sentence has already been pronounced on them; and it does not befit the censure of priests to be blamed for the fickleness of a changeable and inconstant mind, since the Lord teaches and says: “Let your word be yes, yes; no, no.”

If the number of those who judged them last year is counted together with the presbyters and deacons, more were present at that judgment and hearing than there are of these very men who now seem to be joined with Fortunatus. For you should know, dearest brother, that since he was made false bishop by heretics he has already been deserted by almost all. For those before whose eyes tricks were formerly held up, and to whom deceitful words were given, that they were said to be about to return to the church together, after they saw that a false bishop had been made there, learned that they had been cheated and deceived, and are coming back daily and knocking at the church; while we, from whom account must be rendered to the Lord, anxiously weigh and carefully examine who ought to be received and admitted to the church. For with some either their own crimes stand in the way, or the brothers so obstinately and firmly resist, that they cannot be received at all without the scandal and danger of very many. For some rotten things must not be gathered in so that what is whole and sound is wounded; nor is that shepherd useful or wise who so mixes diseased and infected sheep with the flock that he contaminates the whole flock with the affliction of the clinging evil. Oh, if you could be present here with us, dearest brother, when these perverse and wrong men return from the schism, you would see what labor I have to persuade our brothers to patience, so that, the grief of their minds being calmed, they consent to the receiving and healing of the wicked. For as they rejoice and are glad when those who are tolerable and less guilty return, so on the other hand they murmur and resist whenever the incorrigible and insolent, defiled by adulteries or sacrifices, and on top of this proud as well, come back to the church in such a way as to corrupt the good dispositions within. I scarcely persuade the people, nay I wring it from them, to allow such men to be admitted. And the grief of the brotherhood has been made more just by the fact that one or two, received against the resistance and opposition of the people yet by my indulgence, proved worse than they had been before and could not keep faith with their penance, because they had not come with true penance either.

But what shall I say of those who have now sailed to you with Felicissimus, guilty of every crime, sent as envoys by Fortunatus the false bishop, bringing you a letter as false as he himself whose letter they carry is false, as manifold as is their consciousness of sins, as execrable and shameful as their life, so that, even if they were in the church, such men ought to be cast out of the church? In fact, because they know their own conscience, they do not dare to come or approach the threshold of the church, but wander about outside through the province to deceive and despoil the brothers; and, being now well enough known to all and shut out everywhere for their crimes, they sail even there to you. For they cannot have the face to approach us or to stand among us, since the charges brought against them by the brothers are most bitter and most grave. If they wish to submit to our judgment, let them come. In short, if they can have any excuse and defense, let us see what sense of satisfaction they have, what fruit of penance they bring. The church here is closed to no one, nor is the bishop denied to anyone. Our patience, readiness, and kindness are at hand for those who come. I wish all to return to the church; I wish all our fellow soldiers to be gathered within the camp of Christ and the dwellings of God the Father. I remit everything; I overlook much out of zeal and desire to gather the brotherhood. Even offenses committed against God I do not examine with the full judgment of religion. In remitting sins more than I ought, I almost sin myself. I embrace with ready and full love those who return with penance, confessing their sin with humble and simple satisfaction.

But if there are any who think that they can return to the church not by prayers but by threats, or suppose that they can make an entrance for themselves not by laments and satisfactions but by terrors, let them hold for certain that the Lord's church stands closed against such men, and that the camp of Christ, unconquered, strong, and fortified by the Lord's protection, does not yield to threats. A priest of God who holds the gospel and keeps Christ's precepts can be killed; he cannot be conquered. Zechariah, God's priest, suggests and supplies us with examples of courage and faith: when he could not be frightened by threats and stoning, he was killed in the temple of God, crying out and repeating what we too cry out and say against the heretics: “Thus says the Lord: You have forsaken the ways of the Lord, and the Lord will forsake you.” For because a few rash and wicked men forsake the heavenly and saving ways of the Lord and, not doing holy things, are deserted by the Holy Spirit, we ought not therefore to be forgetful of the divine tradition, so as to judge the crimes of madmen greater than the judgments of priests, or think that human efforts can do more to attack than divine protection avails to defend.