To Pammachius Against John of Jerusalem

³⁷ Reversing the order, we have given our answer respecting the state of souls and the resurrection of the flesh; and, leaving out the opening portions of the letter, we have confined ourselves to the refutation of this most remarkable treatise. For we preferred to speak of the things of God rather than of our own wrongs. “If one man sin against another, they shall pray for him to the Lord. But if he sin against God, who shall pray for him?” In these days, on the contrary, we make it our first business to pursue with undying hate those who have injured us— to those who blaspheme God we indulgently hold out the hand.

John writes to Bishop Theophilus an apology, of which the introduction runs thus: “You, indeed, as a man of God, adorned with apostolic grace, have upon you the care of all the Churches, especially of that which is at Jerusalem, though you yourself are distracted with countless anxieties for the Church of God, which is under you.” This is barefaced adulation, and an attempt to concentrate authority in the hands of an individual. You, who ask for ecclesiastical rules, and make use of the canons of the Council of Nicæa, and claim authority over clerics who belong to another diocese and are actually living with their own bishop, answer my question, What has Palestine to do with the bishop of Alexandria?

Unless I am deceived, it is decreed in those canons that Cæsarea is the metropolis of Palestine, and Antioch of the whole of the East. You ought therefore either to appeal to the bishop of Cæsarea, with whom you know that we have communion while we disdain to communicate with you, or, if judgment were to be sought at a distance, letters ought rather to be addressed to Antioch. But I know why you were unwilling to send to Cæsarea, or to Antioch. You knew what to flee from, what to avoid.

You preferred to assail with your complaints ears that were preoccupied rather than pay due honour to your metropolitan. And I do not say this because I have anything to blame in the mission itself, except certain partialities which beget suspicion, but because you ought rather to clear yourself in the actual presence of your questioners. You begin with the words, “You have sent a most devoted servant of God, the presbyter Isidore, a man of influence no less from the dignity of his very gait and dress than from that of his divine understanding, to heal those whose souls are grievously sick; would that they had any sense of their illness!

A man of God sends a man of God.” No difference is made between a priest and a bishop; the same dignity belongs to the sender and the sent; this is lame enough; the ship, as the saying goes, is wrecked in harbour. That Isidore, whom you extol to the sky by your praises, lies under the same imputation of heresy at Alexandria as you at Jerusalem; wherefore he appears to have come to you not as an envoy, but as a confederate. Besides, the letters in his own handwriting, which, three months before the sending of the embassy, had been sent to us through an error in the address, were delivered to the presbyter Vincentius, and to this day they are in his keeping.

In these letters the writer encourages the leader of his army to plant his foot firmly upon the rock of the faith, and not to be terrified by our Jeremiads. He promises, before we had any suspicion of his mission, that he will come to Jerusalem, and that on his arrival the ranks of his adversaries will be instantly crushed. And among the rest he uses these words: “As smoke vanishes in the air, and wax melts beside the fire, so shall they be scattered who are for ever resisting the faith of the Church, and are now through simple men endeavouring to disturb that faith.”