Chapter 30.—68. Petilianus said: "Or if any one chance to recollect the chants of a priest, is he therefore to be deemed a priest, because with sacrilegious mouth he publishes the strain of a priest?"
69. Augustin answered: In this question you are speaking just as though we were at present inquiring what constituted a true priest, not what constituted true baptism. For that a man should be a true priest, it is requisite that he should be clothed not with the sacrament alone, but with righteousness, as it is written, "Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness."2063
But if a man be a
priest in
virtue of the sacrament alone, as was the high
priest Caiaphas, the persecutor of the one most true
Priest, then even though he himself be not truthful, yet what he gives is true, if he gives not what is his own but what is
God’s; as it is said of Caiaphas himself, "This spake he not of himself: but being high
priest that year, he prophesied."
2064
And yet, to use the same simile which you employed yourself: if you were to hear even from any one that was
profane the prayer of the
priest couched in the words suitable to the
mysteries of the
gospel, can you possibly say to him, Your prayer is not true, though he himself may be not only no true
priest, but not a
priest at all? seeing that the
Apostle Paul said that certain
testimony of I know not what Cretan
prophet was true, though he was not reckoned among the
prophets of
God for he says, "One of themselves, even a
prophet of their own, said the Cretians are always
liars,
evil beasts, slow
bellies: this witness is true."
2065
If, therefore, the
apostle even himself bore witness to the
testimony of some obscure
prophet of a
foreign race, because he found it to be true, why do not we, when we find in any one what
belongs to
Christ, and is true even though the man with whom it may be found be
deceitful and
perverse, why do not we in such a case make a distinction between the fault which is found in the man, and the
truth which he has not of his own but of
God’s? and why do we not say, This
sacrament is true, as
Paul said, "This witness is true"? Does it at all follow that we say, The man himself also is truthful, because we say, This sacrament is true? Just as I would ask whether the
apostle counted that
prophet among the
prophets of the
Lord, because he confirmed the
truth of what he found to be true in him. Likewise the same
apostle, when he was at Athens, perceived a certain
altar among the
altars of the false gods, on which was this
inscription, "To the unknown
God." And
this
testimony he made use of to build them up in
Christ, to the extent of quoting the
inscription in his sermon, and adding, "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly
worship, Him declare I unto you." Did he, because he found that
altar among the
altars of
idols, or set up by sacrilegious
hands, therefore
condemn or
reject what he found in it that was true? or did he, because of the
truth which he found upon it, therefore
persuade them that they ought also to follow the sacrilegious practices of the
pagans? Surely he did neither of the two; but presently, when, as he judged fitting, he wished to introduce to their
knowledge the
Lord Himself unknown to them, but known to him, he says among other things, that "He is not
far from every one of us: for in Him we
live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own
poets have said."
2066
| 2066 Acts xvii. 23, 27, 28.
|
Can it be said that here also, because he found among the sacrilegious, the evidence of
truth, he either approved their
wickedness because of the evidence, or
condemned the evidence because of their
wickedness? But it is unavoidable that you should be always in the wrong, so long as you do despite to the sacraments of
God because of the faults of men, or think that we take upon ourselves the sacrilege even of your schism, for the sake of the sacraments of God, to which
we are unwilling to do despite in you.
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