De Rusticiano Subdiacono A Donatistis Rebaptizato [Incertus]

A sermon attributed to Augustine on Rusticianus the subdeacon, rebaptized by the Donatists and ordained a deacon. I. Still grieving and sorrowful, brothers, I present myself to your Holiness: for I have not yet been able to digest the pain of the past misfortune (shall I say my own, or that of the church?). Three times I have attempted to offer you the word I owe; each time both my tears and yours have suppressed my struggling voice: nor could I better express the cares that weighed upon me than by an abundance of tears. What then is to be done? Will a limit never be set to my mourning, never to yours? How often will you see me enter, and not cease beating your breasts and heaving groans? How often, when I see you assembled, shall I dissolve into tears and sighs? The divine words have circumscribed a time for weeping (Eccl. 3:4), both for me and for you. Nor did I 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, "Behold how he loved him!" [John 11:35–36]); rather, if there is anything pleasant, anything agreeable in tears, I gathered it from yours: for I said within myself, "Behold how they loved him; those who followed the father with such great affection will give the same to the son, who has become their father; they who make the heir of the burden will make him the heir of love; he who succeeds to the honor will succeed also to the charity." It is a good omen for one entering to see signs of the ancient love for the shepherd in the sheep.

The love that was transferred to him upon whom the care was conferred will continue: nor will they cease to love the shepherd who has been changed, who ought to feed the sheep, whose voice they will hear, and who, with God as witness and his conscience as witness, is prepared, with the Lord's help, to spend and even to lay down his life for the least of the little sheep. I. If there is any reason for grief, for weeping, it is all mine, not yours, not his, by whose absence we are touched with longing. He is released, I am bound; he has finished the race, I am still running. He is in the homeland, from which I am a pilgrim: the cares he laid down, he has placed in my bosom. He held a clear course; what will become of me I do not know: he has landed, I am tossed about. From the shore he sees the angry sea, the raging storms: I cry out in the midst of the waves, "Save us, we perish!" And truly we perish, and truly danger presses upon us, and truly it threatens my head—not only my own peril, but yours as well; for without you I cannot be safe. The loss of your souls is my loss. Whatever of you perishes for 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; if I do not return it, a great danger is created for my head. See, brothers, if, considering my burden, I can refrain from tears, if I ought not to grieve over my heavy load.

My burden is lightened; your charity will make what is monstrous more gentle: and with the Lord's help, both the shepherd and the little sheep will find pasture, and after they have rested at noon, they will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Matt. 8:11), where there will be no sun, nor any heat (Rev. 7:16), but in the shadow of the Lord, peace and refreshment, when our mourning will be turned into a lyre, and the voices of those weeping into the songs of those rejoicing. Moreover, most beloved, while we mourn for the shepherd who has been snatched away, an occasion for grief arises from the lost brother. A limb has been cut off from us, a part of us has become the faction of Donatus, a soldier of the Lord has crossed 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 which 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 place him on level ground as he rushed headlong into the abyss, and to rescue him from the danger which he loved, in which he perished? This was my first and urgent care, which is now my grief. I did not wish 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 (Luke 10:18). And although he, by the demands of his sins, has fallen from the Lord, I nevertheless grieve that concerning him I cannot say to my Lord, "Behold me with the children whom you have given me" (Isa. 8:18).

I know that it is known to all of you, and I know so well, because only your own [people] know, that the delays he drew out here displeased [you]. How often did our venerable Valerius, in my presence, say to him with paternal severity, "What are you doing here? Why do you desert your station? Why do you not collaborate with your presbyter? Why do you prefer Mutigene to Hippo, to which you are bound?" And when he would answer that he was by no means suited for the solitude, that he had entered the clericate, not the monastic life, that he had no one at Mutigene with whom he could associate, the holy old man would reply, "You are bound to a wife, do not seek a release (1 Cor. 7:27): the church of Mutigene is yours, not ours; to it you gave your name, not to Hippo: did you not renounce the world? did you not lose, did you not [renounce] your own?" He would hear the speaker, but he heard badly, he who did not obey the speaker. What happened?

Since he was considered quite witty and of a disposition more inclined to scurrility, amid the trifles of the world, amid daily feasts and drinking bouts, often even nightly ones, the spirit of the fear of the Lord finally died out, extinguished in him: from the mire he rolled into the mire; by turns inviting others and being invited by others, both guest and host, when he could not pay the debt he had contracted and was pressed by creditors, and entangled himself in daily errors, and created scandal for very many, he was at last excommunicated by his own presbyter, 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 elder Valerius was away, but my stirred vitals could scarcely bear the 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 concord with the brethren—who, if he rebaptized anyone, did so within his own circle—I decided to approach him in a letter, and to act through friends with the most earnest prayers, that he should not blow upon the Baptism of Christ in our subdeacon, nor baptize him again, whom he knew had been both baptized and signed in the name of God.

He reluctantly admitted our letters: but finally, compelled by the entreaties of Maximus and Theodorus, to whom we had entrusted that business, he allowed them to be read aloud, and he himself also read them: to which he responded nothing other than, "I cannot but receive those who come to me, and give them the faith which they have requested." And when they insisted on the matter of Primianus, he said it was not for a son to inquire into his father. And because, through the letters which I sent to Macrobius, I demanded that he respond to what would be read before our people; if, however, he refused, I would read my own letters, as soon as the agents were absent; today, brothers, I free my conscience, no one is present who could stir up a disturbance, I know you all to be more ready for concord and for embracing strangers than to incite, I bring forth the letters to Macrobius, so that nothing of the proceedings may escape your conscience; but before God and men, let it be known with how sincere a heart, with how peaceful an affection, with the Lord inspiring, I have handled the matter. But if afterwards our brother perishes, he will perish in his own conscience, not in ours. The Lord will come, who will judge these men and me; he will certainly come, to vindicate the wheat, to scatter the chaff. Our waters, which they so greatly fear, he himself will examine and will judge most manifestly before all, whether he also has those which they have considered polluted. Certainly they will see whom they have pierced (John 19:57). For what else is it to rebaptize a Christian, than to pierce the Lord again?

He received the King's sign, admitted the cross, was dipped in the death of Christ: what else are you doing, who baptize such a one twice, who blow away the King's sign, who erase the cross, who render the Lord's death empty and void, and hold the entire dispensation of our salvation up to ridicule? Our water is not foreign; it is virgin and holy; the Spirit descends into our font; those whom it sprinkles are holy: let them see with what temerity they assert as polluted those whom they know to have been sprinkled by such waters. Sacrilegious novelty! O impious voice! God sanctified the waters at the beginning of the world through the incubation of the Spirit, from which so many and such great miracles emerged, which would instruct us about the sanctity of our waters, and inform us about the truth of which they were shadows, and make us certain about the regeneration we draw from the waters; yet they call them foreign, and abstain from them, and call them false, and deny all faith to them! Therefore, will the water of Primianus, whom you struck with such a monstrous anathema, whom you judged guilty of so many crimes in your assembly, be true; and yet you did not dip again those whom he baptized: and will the waters of the Catholic Church, our dove, the immaculate bride, 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 in such a great schism?

Or did they give birth anew, by a new and recent dipping of their Church, to those whom they had baptized? Not at all. The faithful waters of Felicianus and Praetextatus, which those who later came together and conspired against the Catholic Church in the communion of a mad covenant, and our waters, infidels and profane? A mad and perverse thought! They also add, "He who is baptized by a dead man, what is his washing?" (Ecclesiasticus 34:30). You err, wretches, not understanding the Scriptures. We do not say that the Baptism with which those whom we separate as dead from the communion of the living dip 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; it will put on 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, not polluted by the contagions of heretics: and he will hear the fatherly voice in his heart, "Behold my son, he was dead, he has revived," and, "He has been found" (Luke 15:24, 32).

My son, whom I had begotten amid the laboring waters, was dead, because he did not live from my spirit; and he revived, because, from the company of the dead, he returned to the place of life: he had perished, because he had been swept away in the same shipwreck as the impious; he was found, because, through the saving plank, that is, penance, we finally restored him to the harbor, that is, the Church. That this may happen to them, brothers, let us ask of 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 no longer may anything else be heard among us but the emulation of better charisms.