The Wages of Their Lies

Dearest brother, I did not write to you at once about Fortunatus, that false overseer set up by a handful of men — and men who have been heretics for a long time — because the business was not the sort that had to be laid before you in a hurry, as though it were something large or something to be afraid of. You already know the name of Fortunatus well enough. He is one of the five elders who deserted the church a while back, and who were lately cut off from communion by the judgment of our fellow overseers: a great many of them, and men who deserve the highest respect, who wrote to you about this matter last year. You would recognize Felicissimus too, the standard-bearer of the revolt. He is named in those same letters our fellow overseers sent you long ago, and he was not only cut off from communion by them here; he was lately driven out of the church by you there. [a]

Since I was sure all this was already known to you, and certain that it stayed in your memory and in your discipline, I did not think it necessary to rush the follies of heretics to you as urgent news. It really ought not to belong to the greatness or the dignity of the universal church to busy itself with whatever heretics and schismatics may have the nerve to attempt among themselves. Novatian’s party, they say, has now made Maximus the elder its own false overseer over there — the man who was lately sent to us as Novatian’s envoy and was refused a share in our communion. Even about that I had not written to you, since all of it is beneath our notice; and I had already sent you the names of the overseers appointed there, who govern the brothers in the universal church with sound and healthy discipline.

This much, though, we all agreed to write to you, so that there might be a short way of doing away with error and finding out the truth: so that you and our colleagues would know whom to write to, and, in turn, whose letters you ought to accept. If anyone outside the men listed in our letter should dare to write to you, you will know that he is either stained by having sacrificed, or by having taken a certificate, or else that he is one of the heretics, and so a twisted and profane man.

Still, when a chance came by a very dear friend who is a member of the clergy, I wrote to you by Felicianus the acolyte, whom you had sent over with our colleague Perseus — writing about a number of matters from their side that ought to be brought to your notice, and about this Fortunatus among them. But our brother Felicianus is either held up over there by the wind or kept back by taking further letters from us, and Felicissimus has outrun him by hurrying to you. Wickedness is always in a hurry like that, as though it could beat innocence by being quick.

I let you know through Felicianus, my brother, that Privatus had come to Carthage — an old heretic from the colony of Lambaesis, condemned many years ago for many serious crimes by the judgment of ninety overseers, and severely censured in the letters of Fabian and Donatus, our predecessors, as you are well aware. He said he wanted to plead his case before us in the council we held this past fifteenth of May, and he was not allowed to; so he made that Fortunatus a pretended overseer for himself, a man worthy of his company. A certain Felix had come along with him as well, a man Privatus had himself made a false overseer earlier, outside the church, in heresy. Jovinus and Maximus were there too, keeping the proved heretic company — men condemned for wicked sacrifices and for crimes proved against them by the judgment of nine overseers, our colleagues, and cut off from communion all over again by many of us in council last year. Joined to these four was Repostus of Suturnica, who not only fell himself in the persecution but pulled down most of his own people with him by talking them into sacrilege. These five, together with a few who had either sacrificed or had bad consciences, agreed in wanting Fortunatus as a false overseer for themselves — so that, their crimes matching, the ruler would be the same sort of man as the ruled. [h]

From this, dearest brother, you can now see through the rest of the lies that desperate and abandoned men have been spreading over there. Of the men who had sacrificed and of the heretics there were no more than five false overseers who came to Carthage and appointed Fortunatus as the partner of their madness; and yet, being children of the devil and full of lies, they dared — as you write — to boast that twenty-five overseers were present. They made the same boast here earlier, in front of our brothers, saying that twenty-five overseers would come from Numidia to make an overseer for them. Once they had been caught out in that lie and put to shame — only five shipwrecked men having come together, and those cut off from communion by us — they sailed for Rome carrying the wages of their lies, as though the truth could not sail after them and convict their lying tongues by plain proof. [k]

And this, my brother, is real madness: not to think, not to know, that lies do not deceive for long; that the night lasts only until the day dawns; that when the day is clear and the sun is up, the dark and the gloom give way to light, and the robberies that were going on through the night stop. In fact, if you were to ask them for the names, they have none they could even falsely produce. There is such a poverty even of bad men among them that they cannot scrape together twenty-five, whether of men who sacrificed or of heretics. And yet, to deceive the ears of simple people and of people far away, the number is blown up with a lie — as if, even supposing the number were true, either the church could be beaten by heretics or righteousness by the unrighteous.

It is not right for me, dearest brother, to do the same kind of thing back to them, and to go through in my own words what they have done and are still doing, since we have to consider what it suits God’s priests to say and to write. It is not grief that ought to speak among us so much as shame, and I ought not to look as though I had been provoked into piling up abuse rather than crimes and sins. So I say nothing about the frauds practiced inside the church. I pass over the conspiracies and the adulteries and the various kinds of crime. [l]

There is one piece of their wickedness I do not think I can hold back, because the case is not mine, and not any man’s, but God’s. From the very first day of the persecution, while the crimes of the guilty were still fresh and hot, and not only the devil’s altars but the hands and the very mouths of the lapsed were still smoking with those foul sacrifices, they never stopped sharing communion with the lapsed and getting in the way of their repentance. God cries out, “Anyone who sacrifices to any gods, except to the Lord alone, shall be uprooted.” And in the Gospel the Lord says, “Whoever denies me, I will deny him.” And in another place God’s indignation and anger are not silent either: “To them you have poured out a drink offering, and to them you have brought a grain offering. Shall I not be angry at these things? says the Lord.” And these men get in the way, so that God may not be begged — God, who says himself that he is angry. They put themselves in between, so that Christ may not be entreated with prayers and amends — Christ, who declares openly that he will deny the man who denies him.

During the persecution itself we wrote letters about this, and no one paid attention to us. A full council was held, and we decreed — not only with our agreement but with our warning attached — that the brothers should repent, and that nobody should rashly grant peace to those who had not repented. [o]

And now these sacrilegious men rush at God’s priests with an unholy madness, walking out of the church as they go; and they lift against the church the weapons of a man murdering his own kin, so that the devil’s malice may finish its work, and they take pains to keep God’s mercy from healing the wounded inside his own church. They corrupt the repentance of these poor men by the trickery of their lies, so that it can never make amends to an offended God — so that the man who once blushed to be a Christian, or was afraid to be one, may not afterwards go looking for Christ his Lord, and the man who walked out of the church may not come back to the church. Work is put in to keep sins from being paid off with proper amends and mourning, and to keep the wounds from being washed clean with tears. True peace is destroyed by the lie of a false peace. A mother’s healing arms are shut by a stepmother getting in between, so that no weeping and groaning may be heard from the breast and the lips of the lapsed.

And beyond this, the lapsed are made to use their tongues and their lips — in the Capitol, the very place where they had sinned before — to insult the priests, and to attack with abuse and foul words the confessors and the virgins and those righteous men who stand highest in the praise of the faith and are the church’s glory. By all this it is not so much the modesty and the humility and the shame of our own people that are struck, as the attackers’ own hope and life that are torn to pieces. It is not the man who hears an insult who is wretched, but the man who speaks it; it is not the man struck by his brother who is a sinner under the law, but the man who strikes a brother; and when the guilty wrong the innocent, the ones who suffer the injury are the ones who think they are inflicting it.

In the end their minds are struck by all of this, their spirit goes dull, and their sense of right is driven out of them. It is God’s anger that they cannot see their own sins, so that no repentance may follow — as it is written, “And God gave them the spirit of numbness” — that is, so that they may not turn back and be healed and be made whole after their sins by proper prayers and amends. Paul the apostle lays it down in his letter and says, “They did not receive the love of the truth, so that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them a strong delusion, so that they will believe a lie: so that all of them may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in unrighteousness.” The highest happiness is not to sin; the second is to admit our sins. In the first, innocence runs clean and unstained and keeps us safe; in the second, a medicine comes that heals us. These men have lost both by offending God: the grace received in the holiness of baptism is lost, and repentance does not come to their help, by which the sin is healed.

Do you think, brother, that what they have done against God is a trifle, that their sins are small and moderate — when because of them the majesty of an angry God is not begged; when his anger and his fire and the day of the Lord are not feared; when, with Antichrist at the door, the faith of a people under arms is disarmed by having Christ’s power and the fear of him taken away? Let the laity look to it how they are to put this right. A heavier labor lies on the priests: to assert God’s majesty and to hold it up, so that we do not seem to leave anything undone here, when God warns us and says, “And now, priests, this command is for you. If you will not listen, and if you will not take it to heart, to give glory to my name, says the Lord, then I will send a curse on you, and I will curse your blessing.”

Is honor being given to God, then, when the majesty and the decree of God are so despised that, though he declares he is indignant and angry with those who sacrifice, and though he threatens penalties without end and punishments that never stop, sacrilegious men can put a proposal forward and say: “Let God’s anger not be thought about; let the Lord’s judgment not be feared; let nobody knock at the church of Christ; but with repentance done away with and no confession of sin made, with the overseers despised and trampled underfoot, let peace be announced by the elders in lying words; and, so that the lapsed will not get up again and those left outside will not come back to the church, let communion be offered to men who are not in communion.”

And it was not enough for these men that they had pulled away from the Gospel; that they had taken from the lapsed the hope of making amends and of repenting; that they had taken people caught in fraud, or stained by adultery, or polluted by the deadly infection of the sacrifices, and shut them off from every feeling and every fruit of repentance, so that they should not beg God or confess their crimes in the church; that they had set up outside — outside the church, and against the church — a little meeting house of their own abandoned faction, once a crowd of men with bad consciences, unwilling to beg God and make amends to him, had flowed together into it. [u]

After all that they still dare — with a false overseer appointed for them by heretics — to set sail and to carry letters from schismatics and profane men to the chair of Peter and to the chief church, the source from which the unity of the priesthood arose; and they do not stop to think that these are the Romans whose faith was praised in the apostle’s preaching, and that faithlessness can find no way in among them.

But what was the point of their coming and announcing that a false overseer had been made in opposition to the overseers? Either they are pleased with what they have done and are sticking to their wickedness, or, if they are sorry and are backing out, they know where they may go back to. For it has been decreed by all of us — and it is fair and just alike — that every man’s case should be heard in the place where the offense was committed. Each individual shepherd has been assigned a portion of the flock to rule and govern, and he has to give the Lord an account of what he does. So the people we are set over ought not to run about, and ought not to break up the harmony of the overseers’ agreement by their crafty and deceitful recklessness. They ought to plead their case there, where they can have both the accusers and the witnesses of their crime — unless perhaps the authority of the overseers appointed in Africa looks too small to a few desperate and abandoned men — overseers who have already given judgment about them, and who lately condemned, by the weight of their verdict, a conscience tied up in many chains of sins. Their case has been examined already; sentence has already been passed on them. And it does not suit the dignity of priests to be reproached with the lightness of a changeable and unsteady mind, when the Lord teaches and says, “Let your word be: Yes, yes; No, no.”

If you count up the men who gave judgment about them last year, together with the elders and the deacons, then more people were present at that hearing and judgment than there are men who now seem to be attached to Fortunatus. For you ought to know, dearest brother, that as soon as he was made a false overseer by the heretics he was deserted by almost all of them. The people who in the past had been offered delusions and given deceitful promises — that they would all go back to the church together — saw a false overseer made there instead, learned that they had been fooled and cheated, and are coming back day by day and knocking at the door of the church. [x]

Meanwhile we, who have to give our account to the Lord, are weighing anxiously and examining carefully who ought to be received and let into the church. Some are held back by their crimes to such a degree, or are so stubbornly and firmly opposed by their brothers, that they cannot be received at all without giving offense and putting a great many people at risk. Some rotten matter must not be gathered up and brought in in such a way that the parts that are sound and whole are damaged; and a shepherd is neither useful nor wise who mixes diseased and infected sheep into his flock in a way that contaminates the whole flock with the sickness that clings to them.

Do not pay attention to their number. One man who fears God is better than a thousand godless sons, as the Lord said through the prophet: “Son, do not take pleasure in godless sons, even if they multiply for you, unless the fear of the Lord is with them.”

If only you could be here with us, dearest brother, when these evil and crooked men come back from the split! You would see what work it takes for me to talk our brothers into patience — to get them to quiet the grief in their minds and agree to take the wicked in and heal them. They are glad and delighted when men who are bearable and less guilty come back; but on the other hand they grumble and are unhappy every time the incorrigible and the violent come back — men fouled by adultery or by sacrifices, and proud on top of it — and come back to the church in a way that corrupts the good tempers inside it. I barely talk the people around; in fact I wring it out of them, that they should allow such men to be let in. And the brotherhood’s grief is all the more just because now and then one man and another, received by my easy hand against the opposition and protest of the people, has turned out worse than he was before, and has not been able to keep faith with his own repentance, because he had not come with true repentance.