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Against the Donatists
St Optatus of Milevis, tr. Vassall-Phillips, 1917
Book 6, That the Donatists Sacrilegiously Broke and Sold the Chalices
But when you broke the very Chalices, which carry the Blood of Christ,1 you committed two horrible sins.2 For you have melted them down, thus making money for yourselves by abominable bargains.3 Nor in this business did you even trouble to select the purchasers, but were guilty of sacrilege in selling indiscriminately,4 and of avarice in selling at all. You also suffered5 your own hands to be burned, with which you were accustomed, before us, to handle these same Chalices.6 Still you ordered the sale to take place everywhere. Perhaps wanton women bought them for their own purposes; Pagans bought them, so that from them they might manufacture vessels, in which to burn incense to their idols. O shameful wickedness! O unheard-of crime! To take away something from God, that you might give it to idols----to steal something from Christ, that it might serve for a sacrilege.
Notes
- Christi Sanguinis portatores (RB portitores).
- hoc tamen inmane facinus a vobis geminatum est.
- quorum species revocastis in massas, merces nefariis nundinis procurantes.
- inconsiderate = passim.
- passi estis. Casaubon conjectures passi essetis = in your avarice you would even have suffered.
- This is simply a sarcastic retort. Albaspinaeus and Du Pin find here a mysterious identification between the chalices and the hands of the priests who used them. When the chalices were melted down, so metaphorically were the hands of the priests who had touched them. In so far as this was true, it held good not of Catholics only, but also of Donatists who had said Mass at the same altars with the same chalices. It seems however to me that the thought of St. Optatus may be expressed more simply. If the Donatists imagined that by burning the chalices which they considered to have been polluted through the touch of Catholic priests, they were burning away that touch----in the concrete, those hands----they should remember that at the same time they were burning away their own touch----their own hands----for they too had touched the chalices which they burned. The drift of the argument is sufficiently clear, but to us it must seem laboured and far-fetched (cf. note 4, p. 255).