Cf. D. DeBruyne, "Le Dies Festus Januariarum du Tractatus Quintus S. Au-
TRACTATE 5 125 oughtn't fast on such a feast day of January."^^' I speak of these trivial, everyday frivolities.
(2) When baptism is administered by a drunken fellow, who is better, John or the drunkard? Answer, if you can, that your drunkard is better than John. This you will never dare! Therefore, because you are sober, baptize after your drunkard. For if the apostles baptized after John, how much the more ought the sober man baptize after the drunkard! Or do you say, "The drunkard is in unity with me"?^^ Then was not John, the friend of the bridegroom, in unity with the bridegroom?
18. But I say to you, whoever you are, "Are you better, or is John?" You will not dare to say, "I am better than John."
Therefore, let your followers baptize after you if they are better than you. For if baptism was administered after John, blush that baptism is not administered after you. You are going to say, "But I have the baptism of Christ, and I teach it." At least, then, acknowledge the judge and be not a proud bailiff.
(2) You give the baptism of Christ, and for that reason baptism is not administered after you; and baptism was adminpractices. Augustine, Epistula 36.5.1 1 (PL 33.140-141; CSEL 34. 34-35; and FOTC 12.147), defines alogia as an indulgence in banquets to the extent that one "is turned aside from the path of reason." It is "an immoderate dinner where the mind, in which the reason rules, is somehow overwhelmed by one's gorging on food and drink." Hence my translation of this verb. The verb occurs only twicff in ancient writings, here and in the fourth-century grammarian Dositheus in a list of verbs normally with passive forms that are sometimes used actively. Cf. H. Keil, (Leipzig, 1880), 8.430; see TLL 1.1714.
46. The Latin text reads tali die festo lanuariarum, i.e., "New Year's Day." Cf. D. DeBruyne, "Le Dies Festus Januariarum du Tractatus Quintus S. Augustini In loannis Evangelium," Revue Benedictine 43 (1931) 347. Berrouard, Homelies I -XVI, 331, thinks that no specific feast can be identified here, simply one of the various pagan festivals in January that created problems for Christians. But Sermo 198.1 (PL 38.1024; and FOTC 38.55) clearly supports the view that this is New Year's Day. Although it is not wholly clear that sermons 197 and 198 are Augustine's, they do correspond to two sermons listed by Possidius as two Tractates on New Year's Day against the pagans. 47. Augustine here sees holiness as adhering to the individual minister as to an individual person, whereas the Donatists had a different view, that holiness was objective, belonging to the Church as a whole, more than subjective, depending upon the individual's personal behavior: see Berrouard, Homelies I-XVI, 332-333.