Sermo de Rusticiano subdiacono

APPENDIX. I. SERMON ON RUSTICIANUS THE SUBDEACON. This sermon, extracted from a certain manuscript from Cella, was published by Jerome Vignier in the second volume of the Augustinian Supplement (Paris, 1654); I have repeated, for lack of handwritten manuscripts, the published text (v) with corrected orthography. SERMON ON RUSTICIANUS THE SUBDEACON. Still grieving and sorrowing, brothers, I present myself before your holiness; for I have been unable to digest the grief of the past misfortune—shall I say my own or yours? Three times I have attempted to furnish you with the word I owe: each time both my tears and yours suppressed my voice as I tried, and I could not better express the cares that weighed upon me than by an abundance of tears. What then will happen? Will a limit never be set to my mourning, to your mourning? How often will you see me entering, and not cease beating your breasts and uttering groans? How often, when I see you assembled, will I dissolve into tears and sighs? The time for grieving has been circumscribed for me and for you by divine scriptures—and I did not grieve when I saw you weeping—and at the memory of Lazarus, the Lord Jesus Christ wept, and the Jews who saw him weeping said: "See how he loved him!"—rather, if there is anything joyful in tears, anything pleasing, I gathered it from yours. For I said within myself: "See how they loved him!" Those who followed their father with such great affection will give the same to the son who has become their father.

heir of the burden will make them heir of love; he who succeeds to the honor will also succeed to charity. It is a good omen for the one entering to see in the sheep the signs of the ancient love for the shepherd. The transfer of love will occur to him to whom the transfer of cares has been made, nor will they cease to love the one who must feed the sheep, whose voice they will hear, and who, with God as witness and conscience as witness, is prepared, with the Lord’s help, to spend and even to lay down his own life for the least of the lambs. If there is any reason for grieving, for weeping, it is all mine, not yours, not that of the one for whom we are touched with longing. He is released, I am bound; he has finished the race, I am still running; he is in his homeland, from which I am a pilgrim; the cares he laid down he has placed in my bosom; he held the helm well, but what will become of me I do not know; he has landed, I am adrift; from the shore he sees the raging sea, the furious storms, and I cry out amid the waves: Save us, we are perishing. And truly we are perishing, and truly danger presses, and truly it strikes my head—not only my own danger, but yours as well; for without you I cannot be safe, and the loss of your souls is my loss. Whatever of you perishes from my lord, perishes at my peril; I will have to render an account, skin for skin. I have a merciful Lord, but a strict accountant: he counts his little sheep daily, he has them written down in his hands, he demands the number, and if I do not return it, great danger is created for my head.

See, brothers, whether, considering my burden, I can refrain from tears, whether I ought not to grieve over my heavy load. Lighten my weight. Your charity will make what is monstrous more gentle, and with the Lord’s help both shepherd and sheep will find pasture, and after they have rested at noon, they will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, where there will be no sun nor any heat, but in the shade of the Lord peace and refreshment, when our mourning will be turned into a lyre and the voices of the weeping into the songs of the rejoicing. Moreover, most beloved, while we mourn for the shepherd taken from us, an occasion for grief arises from the lost brother. A limb has been cut off from us; a part of us has become a part of Donatus; a soldier of the Lord has gone over to the camp of the Philistines, and from a vessel of honor has become a vessel of disgrace. You understand what I am saying. That wretched Rusticianus, deacon of Mutigensis, has cast aside the sacrament he owed to the Church and has polluted his order by unfaithful participation. What did I not do, what efforts did I not employ, to set him on level ground as he rushed headlong into the abyss and to rescue him from the danger he loved, in which he perished! That was my first and urgent care, which is now my grief. I did not want him to be taken from me at the very beginning of my burden, whom I had seen for a considerable time falling like lightning from the sky. And although, by his own sins demanding it, he deserved to be abandoned by the Lord, I nevertheless grieve that I cannot say to my Lord concerning him: ‘Behold me with the children you have given me.’

I know it is known to all of you, and I know it so well, because I know that the delays he drew out here displeased many of you. How often did our venerable Valerius, in my presence, with paternal affection, say to him: 'What are you doing here? Why do you abandon your station? Why do you not collaborate with your presbyter? Why do you prefer Hippo to Mutigena, to which you are bound?' And when he would reply that he was utterly unsuited for solitude, that he had entered the clerical state, not the monastic, that he had no one at Mutigena with whom to associate, the holy old man would answer: 'Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a release. Your church is Mutigena, not ours; to it you gave your name, not to Hippo. Did you not renounce the world, did you not renounce friends, did you not renounce blood?' He heard the speaker, but he heard badly, he who did not obey the speaker. What happened? Since he was considered rather hasty and of a disposition inclined toward scurrility, amid the trifles of the world, amid daily feasts and drinking-bouts, often even nightly ones, he finally failed; the spirit of the fear of the Lord was extinguished; from mire he rolls into mire.

Taking turns, both inviting others and being invited by others, both guest and host, while he was unable to pay the debt he had contracted and was pressed by his creditors and entangled himself in daily errors and created scandal for very many, finally, excommunicated by his own presbyter, he fled to the Donatists and was not only received by their bishop—which is against the law of the churches—not only rebaptized—which is impious—but was even made a deacon, which is most lamentable. When I first received this news, our venerable old man Valerius was away, but my stirred vitals could not bear delay. I groaned, I grieved, I poured out my soul for him before the face of my Lord. And because it had been reported to me by many that Macrobius, the Donatist bishop to whom he had fled, was a peaceful man not far from the kingdom of God and from fraternal concord, who, if he rebaptized anyone, did so unwillingly, I decided to approach him by letter and to act through friends with the most earnest entreaties to him, that he should not blow out the breath of Christ in our subdeacon nor baptize him again, whom he knew had been both baptized and sealed in the name of God. He reluctantly admitted our letters, but finally, driven by the entreaties of Maximus and Theodorus, to whom we had entrusted that business, he allowed them to be recited and even read them himself. To them he answered nothing other than: "I cannot do otherwise than receive those who come to me and give them the faith they have requested.

And when they pressed him about the deed of Primianus, he said that it was not for a son to inquire into his father. And because, through the letters I sent to Macrobius, I asked that he reply in a manner that could be read before our people, but if he should refuse, I would recite my own, now that the soldiers are absent, today, brothers, I discharge my pledge. No one is present who can stir up disturbances; I know you all to be more ready for harmony and for embracing strangers than for incitement. I bring forth the letters to Macrobius, so that nothing of the proceedings may escape your conscience, but that before God and men it may become known with how sincere a heart, with how peaceful an affection, inspired by the Lord, I conducted the matter. But if afterward our brother perishes, he will perish in his own conscience, not in ours. The Lord will come who will judge both him and me; he will certainly come to vindicate the grain, to scatter the chaff. He himself will examine our waters, which they so greatly dread, and will judge most manifestly before all, whether he also has those which they have called polluted. Certainly they will see whom they have stung. For what else is it to rebaptize a Christian than to pierce the Lord again? He has received the king's sign, admitted the cross, been dipped in the death of Christ. What else do you do who baptize such a one twice, who blow away the king's sign, who erase the cross, than to render the death of the Lord empty and void, and to hold the entire dispensation of our salvation as a show?

Our water is not foreign; it is virgin and holy. Into our font the Spirit descends; those whom it sprinkles are holy. Let them see with what rashness they claim as polluted those whom they know to have been sprinkled by such waters. O sacrilegious novelty! O impious voice! God sanctified the waters at the beginning of the world through the incubation of the Spirit. From them so many and such great miracles have issued, which would instruct us about the sanctity of our waters, and teach us about the truth of which they were shadows, and make us certain about the regeneration which we draw from the waters; and they call them foreign, and abstain from them, and call them false, and deny all faith to them. Will the water of Primianus, therefore, be truthful—Primianus, whom you struck with so monstrous an anathema, whom you judged guilty of such great crimes in your assembly, yet you did not re-baptize those whom he baptized—and will the waters of the Catholic Church, our dove, the immaculate spouse, be unfaithful, impure, false in their eyes? Perhaps they will say: 'Those who condemned innocent Primianus were false, and therefore his waters were not false.' But what will they say about Felicianus and Praetextatus, who condemned Primianus and had separated from him by so great a schism? Or did they give birth to those whom they had baptized with a new and recent dipping for their own church? By no means. Were the waters of Felicianus and Praetextatus faithful, who later came together and conspired in the communion of an insane pact against the Catholic Church, while our waters are unfaithful and profane?

O insane and perverse thought! They also add: “He who is baptized by a dead man, what is his washing?” You err, wretches, not understanding the scriptures. We do not say that the baptism by which those whom we separate as dead from the communion of the living is nothing, but that it profits nothing as long as one lives among the dead. Remove what hinders, and it already profits; what you received outside will avail when you are within. Correct the baptized person, it suffices. The power latent in the seed will take on increase, will clothe itself with the Spirit of God from on high, and he who was buried in Christ through baptism, though outside, after he has been admitted into the bosom of the Church and has left the dead to bury their dead, will feel the faithful water, unpolluted by the contagions of heretics, and will hear the fatherly voice in his heart: “Behold, my son was dead and has revived, was lost and has been found. My son, whom I had begotten through the laboring waters, was dead because he did not live from my Spirit, and has revived because, having cast off the company of the dead, he returned to the place of life; he was lost because he had been swept away in the same shipwreck as the impious, he has been found because through the saving plank, that is, penance, he was at last restored to the harbor, that is, the Church.” That this may come to pass for them, brothers, let us beseech the Lord as earnestly as we can, that, just as baptism is one, the water one, the faith one, so also there may be one profession of charity, and among us no other thing be heard than the emulation of better charisms.