Peace Before the Battle

Cyprian, Liberalis, Caldonius, Nicomedes, Caecilius, Junius, Marrutius, Felix, Successus, Faustinus, Fortunatus, Victor, Saturninus, another Saturninus, Rogatianus, Tertullus, Lucianus, Eutyches, Amplus, Sattius, Secundinus, another Saturninus, Aurelius, Priscus, Herculanus, Victoricus, Quintus, Honoratus, Montanus, Hortensianus, Verianus, Iambus, Donatus, Pompeius, Polycarpus, Demetrius, another Donatus, Privatianus, another Fortunatus, Rogatus, and Monulus, to Cornelius their brother: greetings.

Some time ago, dearest brother, after taking counsel together, we decided this: that those who had been thrown down by the enemy in the fury of the persecution, who had lapsed and had defiled themselves with unlawful sacrifices, should go through a long and complete penance, and that if the danger of illness pressed hard, they should be given peace at the very point of death. It was not right — and neither the Father’s love nor God’s mercy allowed it — that the church should be shut against people knocking at it, or that the help that comes with the hope of salvation should be refused to people who were mourning and pleading, so that they would leave this world and be sent off to their Lord with no communion and no peace. For the one who laid down the law that whatever was bound on earth should be bound in heaven also allowed that things could be loosed there which had first been loosed here in the church. [d]

But now we see the day of another trouble beginning to come near again, and we are warned, over and over, that we should be ready and armed for the fight the enemy is announcing to us; that by our urging we should also make ready the people God in his kindness has put into our care; and that we should gather in from every quarter all the soldiers of Christ who want their weapons and are eager for battle inside the Lord’s camp. Under the pressure of that necessity we have decided that peace is to be given to those who have not gone away from the church of the Lord, and who from the first day of their lapse have never stopped repenting, and grieving, and begging the Lord. We have decided that they ought to be armed and equipped for the battle that is at hand.

We have to act on the warnings we are given, and act as they fit. The sheep must not be abandoned by their shepherds at the moment of danger; the whole flock must be gathered into one place, and the Lord’s army brought up for the contest of the war of heaven. There was good reason for drawing the mourners’ penance out over a longer stretch of time, and for helping only the sick as they were dying, so long as peace and quiet held. That allowed the mourners’ tears to be put off a long while, and help to come late to the dying in their sickness. [i]

But now peace is needed not for the sick but for the strong, and communion is to be granted by us not to the dying but to the living. We must not leave men we are stirring up and urging into battle unarmed and stripped bare; we must fortify them with the protection of Christ’s body and blood. The thanksgiving is appointed for exactly this purpose, that it may be a safeguard to those who receive it; so we must arm the men we want kept safe against the enemy with the protection of the Lord’s own rich food. How do we teach them, or spur them on, to pour out their blood in confessing his name, if we refuse the blood of Christ to men who are about to go into the war? How do we make them fit for the cup of martyrdom, if we do not first admit them, in the church, to drink the cup of the Lord by the right of communion?

We ought to make a distinction, dearest brother. On one side are the men who have given up the faith — who have gone back to the world they renounced and are living as the pagans live, or who have deserted to the heretics and day after day take up murderous weapons against the church. On the other side are those who do not leave the church’s doorstep; who keep begging, steadily and in grief, for the comfort of God their Father; and who say plainly that they are ready now for the battle, ready to stand and fight bravely for their Lord’s name and for their own salvation. [l]

In times like these we grant peace not to men who are asleep but to men on watch. We grant it not in the middle of easy living but in the middle of weapons. We grant it not for rest but for the field. If they stand bravely — as we hear of them, and want of them, and believe of them — and beat the enemy down alongside us in the encounter, we will not be sorry we granted peace to men as brave as that. It is in fact the great honor and glory of our office as overseers to have granted peace to martyrs, so that we, as priests who present God’s sacrifices every day, may prepare offerings and victims for God.

But suppose one of the lapsed should play us false — and may the Lord keep that from our brothers — and look for peace by a trick, taking peace at the moment the struggle is coming on with no intention of fighting. He is betraying and cheating himself, hiding one thing in his heart and saying another out loud. As far as we are allowed to see and to judge, we look at each man’s face; we cannot examine the heart and inspect the mind. The one who discerns and searches out what is hidden is the judge of such men, and he will come quickly and judge the secret, hidden things of the heart. Still, the bad ought not to stand in the good men’s way; rather the bad ought to be helped along by the good. So peace is not to be refused to men who are about to endure martyrdom, just because there are some who will back out. Peace should be granted, for this very reason, to everyone who is about to enter the war: so that through ignorance on our part the one man who is to be crowned in the struggle is not the first to be passed over.

And let no one say that a man who accepts martyrdom is baptized in his own blood, and needs no peace from the overseer, since he is about to have the peace of his own glory and to receive a greater reward from the Lord’s kindness. In the first place, no one can be made fit for martyrdom whom the church has not armed for the contest, and a man’s spirit falls short if the thanksgiving he has received has not lifted it and roused it. For the Lord says in his Gospel: [p]

“But when they hand you over, do not worry about what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given you in that hour. It is not you who are speaking, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you.”

Now since he says that the Father’s Spirit speaks in those who are handed over and set in the confession of his name, how can a man be found ready or fit for that confession if he has not first received the Father’s Spirit in the receiving of peace — the Spirit who gives his servants strength, and himself speaks and confesses in us?

And there is this besides. Suppose a man leaves everything he has and runs, and living in hiding places and out in the wilds falls in with robbers by chance, or dies of fever and weakness. Will it not be laid to our charge that so good a soldier — a man who left everything he had, who thought nothing of his house and his parents and his children and chose to follow his Lord — died with no peace and no communion? Will not lazy neglect, or hard cruelty, be charged against us on the day of judgment: that we are shepherds, and yet were not willing to look after the sheep entrusted and committed to us while there was peace, nor to arm them for the battle? Will the Lord not bring against us the charge he speaks through his prophet?

“Look: you consume the milk, and you clothe yourselves with the wool, and you slaughter the fat ones; but you do not feed my flock. You have not strengthened the weak, or healed the sick, or bound up the broken, or brought back the strays, or looked for the lost, and you wore the strong out with hard labor. And my sheep were scattered, because there were no shepherds; and they became food for every wild animal of the field, and there was no one to look for them or bring them back. So this is what the Lord says: Look, I am against the shepherds. I will require my sheep at their hand, and stop them from feeding my sheep, and they will feed them no longer; and I will rescue my sheep from their mouth, and I will feed them with judgment.”

So then, to keep the sheep the Lord committed to us from being demanded back from our own mouths — the mouths with which we refuse them peace, and set the harshness of human cruelty against them instead of the kindness of God’s fatherly love — we have determined, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit and the warning of the Lord given in many plain visions, that since the enemy is foretold and shown to be at hand we should gather the soldiers of Christ inside the camp, examine each man’s case, and grant peace to the lapsed — or rather, hand out weapons to men who are about to fight. We trust this will please you too, when you consider the Father’s mercy. [s]

But if there is any of our colleagues who thinks, now that the contest presses, that peace ought not to be granted to our brothers and sisters, he will give an account to the Lord on the day of judgment for his grinding strictness or his inhuman hardness. As befitted our faith and our love and our anxious care, we have set out for you what was in our own minds: that the day of the contest has come close; that a violent enemy will rise up against us soon; that a struggle is coming, and not the sort it has been, but far more serious and fierce. This is shown to us from above again and again. About this we are warned often by the Lord’s foresight and mercy; and we who trust him may be sure of his help and his love, because the one who tells his soldiers in peacetime that the battle is coming will give them victory in the encounter when they are at war.

We wish you, dearest brother, always and heartily to be well.