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Against the Donatists

St Optatus of Milevis, tr. Vassall-Phillips, 1917

Book 2, The Third Endowment, Spiritus, the Holy Spirit, is in the Church, Not with the…

Now perhaps you will see that the Endowments of the Church cannot be with you, for you cannot claim for yourselves alone the SPIRIT of God,¹ nor can you shut up² (in a small corner of Africa) Him whose Presence we recognise though we see it not.³ For so has it been written in the Gospel:
‘God is a Spirit,’ and ‘breatheth where He willeth, but you hear not His voice, nor do you know whence He cometh and whither He goeth.’⁴

Permit God to come whence He willeth, and allow Him freedom to go where He pleaseth. He can be heard, but He cannot be seen. And yet, through your lust for calumny, you have been pleased to blaspheme and say:
‘What Spirit can there be in that Church,⁵ excepting one which should give birth to sons of Hell?’⁶

Thou⁷ hast vomited forth thine invective and hast thought that thou mightest thus be able to strengthen thyself by producing testimony from the Gospel, where we read:
‘Woe to you, hypocrites, who compass seas and lands to make one proselyte, and when you have found him, make him a son of Hell twofold worse than yourselves.’⁸

If this accusation----unjust and groundless though it be----had to be made at all, would that it had been made by any other of your party than yourself.⁹ Indeed I am lost in wonder that you, of all men, should have dared falsely to bring against another a charge, the very thought of which might well make you blush, were you but to consider your own Consecration. For you have reminded us that we read in the Gospel:
‘Woe to you, hypocrites, who compass seas and lands to make one proselyte ‘----
that is, to change his sect. As for you personally, I have no idea to what sect you previously belonged. But your quotation was unfortunate. I think that perhaps you are already sorry that you made it.¹⁰ Is it we who have travelled through any lands? Is it we who have compassed any seas? Is it we who have set sail to foreign ports? Is it we who have brought in a Spaniard or a Gaul? Have we consecrated a foreigner, not known to our people?¹¹

Notes

St. Optatus passes to the third Endowment of the Church, the Spirit of adoption, whereby we are the sons of God. Parmenian had claimed this for the Donatists, and had said that it could not belong to the Catholic Church, whose sons he declared (as we shall see in a moment) to be the sons, not of God, but of Hell.
includere (cf. ‘inclusus in templis,’ ii, 15).
quod intelligitur et non videtur.
This is a combination of John iv, 24 with John iii, 8.
in illa Ecclesia, i.e. the Catholic Church. Optatus is quoting from Parmenian’s treatise.
In reading the history of the Donatists we are reminded again and again of English Puritans and Scotch Covenanters. Sir Walter Scott, in some of the Waverley Novels, puts upon the lips of the soldiers of Cromwell and the disciples of Calvin and John Knox almost the identical words that St. Optatus puts upon the lips of Parmenian and his friends.
As in many other places, St. Optatus now passes abruptly, when addressing Parmenian, from the plural to the single number. I have endeavoured throughout to make these transitions as far as possible in the translation, though it is often the case (as here) that they possess no significance.
Matt. xxiii, 15.
As Parmenian was not an African, he was the one Donatist who should have been most careful not to have said ‘you compass sea and land.’ This charge had better have been made, if at all, by anyone else.
tamen importune a te hoc dictum est. Aestimo quod te iam forte huius dicti poeniteat. So PG. Ziwsa with the other MSS. reads dictum esse aestimo quod, etc. But this is hard to translate, and we do well always to remember in case of any doubt that P is much the best MS.
It was against the Canon Law of the time to bring in a foreigner to be consecrated Bishop, as it was considered of great importance that he should be already well-known to the people over whom he was to rule. For this reason Optatus reproaches Parmenian with being a peregrinus (cf. iii, 3).