Letter CXI.
(November, a.d. 409.)
To Victorianus, His Beloved Lord
and Most Longed-for Brother and Fellow-Presbyter, Augustin Sends
Greeting in the Lord.
1. My heart has been filled with great sorrow by
your letter. You asked me to discuss certain things at great length
in my reply; but such calamities as you narrate claim rather many
groans and tears than prolix treatises. The whole world, indeed, is
afflicted with such portentous misfortunes, that there is scarcely
any place where such things as you describe are not being committed
and complained of. A short time ago some brethren were massacred by
the barbarians even in those deserts of Egypt in which, in order to
perfect security, they had chosen places remote from all
disturbance as the sites of their monasteries. I suppose, moreover, that the outrages which they have perpetrated in the regions of Italy and Gaul are known to you also; and now similar events begin to be announced to us from many provinces of Spain, which for long seemed exempt from these evils. But why go to a distance for examples? Behold! in our own county of Hippo, which the barbarians have not yet touched, the ravages of the Donatist clergy and Circumcelliones make such havoc in our churches, that perhaps the cruelties of barbarians would be light in comparison. For what barbarian could ever have devised what these have done, viz. casting lime and vinegar into the eyes of our clergymen, besides atrociously beating and wounding every part of their bodies? They also sometimes plunder and burn houses, rob granaries, and pour out oil and wine; and by threatening to do this to all others in the district, they compel many even to be re-baptized. Only yesterday, tidings came to me of forty-eight souls in one place having submitted, under fear of such things, to be rebaptized.
2. These things should make us weep, but not
wonder; and we ought to cry unto God that not for our merit, but
according to His mercy, He may deliver us from so great evils. For
what else was to be expected by the human race, seeing that these
things were so long ago foretold both by the prophets and in the
Gospels? We ought not, therefore, to be so inconsistent as to
believe these Scriptures when they are read by us, and to complain
when they are fulfilled; rather, surely, ought even those who had
refused to believe when they read or heard these things in
Scripture to become believers now when they behold the word
fulfilled; so that under this great pressure, as it were, in the
olive-press of the Lord our God, although there be the dregs of
unbelieving murmurs and blasphemies, there is also a steady out
flowing of pure oil in the confessions and prayers of believers. For unto those men who incessantly reproach the Christian faith, impiously saying that the human race did not suffer such grievous calamities before the Christian doctrine was promulgated throughout the world, it is easy to find a reply in the Lord’s own words in the gospel, “That servant which knew not his lord’s will, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes; but the servant which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.” What is there to excite surprise, if, in the Christian dispensation, the world, like that servant, knowing the will of the Lord, and refusing to do it, is beaten with many stripes? These men remark the rapidity with which the gospel is proclaimed: they do not remark the perversity with which by many it is despised. But the meek and pious servants of God, who have to bear a double portion of temporal calamities, since they suffer both at the hands of wicked men and along with them, have also consolations peculiarly their own, and the hope of the world to come; for which reason the apostle says, “The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in us.”