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Against the Donatists
St Optatus of Milevis, tr. Vassall-Phillips, 1917
Book 5, As the Donatists Could Not Rebaptise Children Who Were Dead, Why Should They…
And to make an end, however late,1 I think that even this is enough. Still, although we may be making a mistake in bringing forward so many proofs, let me give this one more. Let us suppose that, in your absence, a thousand have been baptised. Of these say that a hundred have chanced to die. For a little while keep your hands off this wickedness.2 Let your ‘holiness’ (as you call it) first raise again those who have been buried, let it cleanse the dead if it can, and let them be brought back to the living.3 If you are not able to raise the dead, to what purpose do you endeavour to lay hands upon the living, excepting to fulfil that which God spoke of you through the Prophet Ezekiel,4 saying:
‘that they might kill souls, which ought not to die’?
Notes
- This chapter is to be found in G at the end of Chapter viii. Though not to be found in RBv, Du Pin thinks on intrinsic grounds that it was written by Optatus, but that it has been dislocated in position. He placed it (and in this Ziwsa follows him) here, at the end of the Book. The words with which the passage begins (Et ut vel sero compendium faciam, credo etiam hoc sufficere etc.) undoubtedly seem to point to this transposition. It is possible that St. Optatus placed it in his first edition and deliberately omitted it in his second. It is certainly very poor and not worthy of the book or of its argument.
- sc. of rebaptising.
- If the holiness of the Donatists was great enough, as they claimed, to give the grace of Baptism----the life of the soul, it ought to suffice to restore the life of the body. According to Catholic doctrine God gives the life of the soul in Baptism, but God can also, if it so please Him, raise the dead to renewed earthly life.
- Ez. xiii, 19.