XXVI. Matrons, boys and virgins were compelled by the Donatists to do Penance.
Matrons, together with boys and virgins, although they had committed no sin, were compelled by you to |118 learn to do Penance, with you for their instructors, whilst they still remained in possession of their innocence and modesty. Is this a small unhappiness? You have destroyed both sexes; you have harassed all ages. Truly of you has it been said in the thirteenth Psalm:
'Destruction and unhappiness are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known, the fear of God is not before their eyes.'
You have prescribed Penance for the people. It was not performed voluntarily by any man, but it was enforced by you, nor did you inflict it equally, for the same periods of time, but arranged everything with respect of persons. By your command one person did Penance for a whole year, another for a month, yet another for hardly a day.
If to consent to unity is (as you will have it) a sin, if it is the same fault in all, why is there not the same Penance for the same guilt?
There is no doubt that the people who believe have been called Israel, and that the Faithful, one by one, are the daughters of Israel, that is, those who see God with their mind, and have faith in God. Yet you |119 have compelled these people to bend and incline their necks, have joined their heads in a row, and made of them a crowd of penitents.
These are the Faithful over whom God grieves, saying, by the mouth of Ezekiel the Prophet: 'Woe to you, daughters of Israel who mend pillows,' appurtenances of the neck, to place them under the elbow and under the hand----that is, under your elbows and under your hands, when you stretch the veils of Penance over the heads of these men and women.
The extent of your wickedness and rage I have now set forth, and I have pointed out your pride.
It remains to make clear your folly also, but this I will do in my Sixth Book.
[Footnotes moved to the end and renumbered]
1. ut paene oculis perspecta videatur. St. Augustine may have had these words before his mind, when he wrote of the martyrdom of St. Stephen: 'Hanc passionem modo de libro Actuum Apostolorum cum legitur, non solum audivimus sed etiam oculis spectavimus' ( Sermo ii de Sancto Stephano)
2. In the Canticle of Canticles.
3. The Donatists, like the Cathari, the Puritans and many other sectaries, prided themselves (without the slightest justification in fact) upon their sanctity. According to their teaching, the true Church was to be exclusively the Church of 'the Saints.' There were to be no unclean beasts in the Ark of Noah. The tares were not to be allowed to grow up with the wheat unto the harvest; nor were the bad fish to remain with the good in Peter's net. Furthermore, they made the validity of the sacraments depend upon the supposed holiness of the minister, not upon the operation of the Holy Ghost.
4. Evidently the idea of Comprehensiveness----that the One Church could be Catholic (Universal)----in the sense of comprehending various kinds of religious bodies, varying in belief and without any external bond of union (cf. ii, 3)----never occurred to St. Optatus even as a possibility. Any 'branch' theory in which the branches were separated from the trunk or from one another (cf. ii, 9 etc.) would have seemed to him unthinkable. He agrees with Parmenian in ruling it out ab initio.
5. Because no heretics or schismatics were to be found as an organised body in more than one territory.
6. In some of the countries mentioned by Optatus as belonging to the Catholic Unity, Christianity has almost disappeared as an energising force. Others of those lands, such as 'Thrace, Achaia, Macedonia, and all Greece,' are now unhappily in schism. Still, his argument has been enormously strengthened by the lapse of centuries. The Catholic of to-day is in full communion not only, as was St. Optatus, with the See of Rome where Peter sat, with the See of Lyons where Irenaeus sat, with the See of Barcelona where Pacian sat, with the See of Tours where Martin sat, with the See of Verona where Zeno sat, with the See of Milan where Ambrose was soon to sit, with the direct successors of 'Maternus from the city of Cologne, of Reticius from the city of Autun, of Marinus of Aries, of Felix from Florence of the Tuscans, of Gaudentius of Pisa, of Proterius of Capua,' and of every other of the nineteen Bishops who sat in the Synod of the Lateran with Miltiades the Pope (i, 23)----this is surely a great and striking thing----but also with Churches of which Optatus never dreamed, in islands and continents of which he had never heard.
7. ubi ergo erit proprietas Catholici Nominis?
8. rationabilis et ubique diffusa. Thus in all the MSS. Two emendations have been suggested, Non nationalis et &c, and Rationabiliter ubique diffusa. Probably, however, St. Optatus wrote it as we find it in the MSS., Rationabilis et ubique diffusa. If so, through his ignorance of Greek, he is linking together two different derivations of the word καθολικός . From κατὰ and ὅλον , = 'throughout the whole' (i.e. scattered throughout the world), and from κατὰ and λόγον = 'in accordance with reason.' We know that, in consequence of this last meaning of the word, Procurators fiscal in Roman law were often called Rationales or καθολικοί . St. Optatus was probably in his first derivation thinking of heretics, in his second of schismatics. The Church is Catholic or rationabilis (according to right reason) in contradistinction to heretics, who have strayed from the truth (against the due exercise of their reason); she is Catholic or ubique diffusa (spread everywhere) in contradistinction to schismatics, who are confined within clearly defined, very often within national, bounds and limits. Cf. St. Augustine, Gesta Collationis Carthagiensis diei iii, ci: 'Christiani Afri, et appellantur et merito sunt Catholici, ipsa sua communione nomen testantes. Catholon enim secundum totum dicitur. Qui autem a toto separatus est, partemque defendit ab universo praecisam, non sibi usurpet hoc nomen, sed nobiscum teneat veritatem.'
9. Ps. ii, 8.
10. Christo una possessio est.
11. Ps. ii, 8.
12. Ps. lxxi, 8.
13. Ps. xlix, 1.
14. Vocata est ergo terra ut caro fieret. Cf. 'I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh and will give you a heart of flesh' (Ez. xxxvi, 26).
15. Ps. cxii, 3.