Letters 182.1–185.7

Among the other cares of the Roman church and the occupations of the apostolic see, in which we deal with the consultations of various people by faithful and healing discussion, our brother and fellow bishop Julius unexpectedly brought me the letter of your love, which you sent from the Council of Milevis out of an especially earnest concern for the faith, adding the writings of the synod of Carthage with a similar complaint. Truly the church rejoices that shepherds show such care for the flocks entrusted to them, so that they not only allow none of them to stray, but, if any sheep have been led astray by the grass of a perverse delight, and if they remain in error, they wish either to separate them entirely or, if they shun what they long since sought without license, to protect them with the watchfulness of their former keeping: taking thought on both sides, that by receiving such people the rest may not be led on by a similar example, nor, by spurning those who return, may they seem to be thrown to the bites of wolves. A very prudent consultation, and full of the Catholic faith. For who could either tolerate one who errs or not receive one who corrects himself? For as I think it harsh to connive at those who sin, so I judge it impious to refuse a hand to those who are converted.

Diligently and fittingly, then, do you consult the apostolic honor, that secret honor, I say, which, besides the things that are external, has the care of all the churches, about what opinion is to be held in anxious matters, following the pattern of the ancient rule which you know with me has always been kept throughout the whole world. But I leave this aside; for I do not think it is hidden from your prudence. Why did you also confirm this by your action, if not because you know that throughout all the provinces answers always flow from the apostolic spring to those who ask? Especially whenever a question of faith is being examined, I think that all our brothers and fellow bishops ought to refer only to Peter, that is, to the author of their name and honor, as your love has now referred, something that can benefit all the churches in common throughout the whole world. For the inventors of evils must become more cautious when they see that, on the report of a double synod, they have been cut off from church communion by the decrees of our sentence.

Your love will thus perform a double good. For you will have the grace of having kept the canons, and the whole world will enjoy your benefit. For what Catholic man would wish to converse any further with the adversaries of Christ? Who would share even the light of life with them in fellowship? The authors of the new heresy must surely be shunned. For what more bitter thing could they have devised against the Lord than to make divine help void and take away the reason for daily prayer? This is to say, “What need have I of God?” Rightly may the psalmist say against them, “Behold the men who did not make God their helper!” Denying, then, the help of God, they say that man can suffice himself and does not need divine grace, deprived of which he must fall, entangled in the devil's snares, while he strives to fulfill all the commandments of life by freedom alone. O perverse teaching of most depraved minds! Notice at last that freedom itself so deceived the first man that, using its reins too indulgently, he fell into the presumption of transgression; nor could he be rescued from it, had not the coming of Christ the Lord, by the providence of regeneration, restored to him the state of his former freedom. Let them hear David saying, “Our help is in the name of the Lord,” and, “Be my helper; do not forsake me or despise me, O God my salvation”; which he would have said in vain if what he asked of the Lord with tearful words lay only in his own will.

Since this is so, since in all the divine pages we read that nothing but the help of God is to be joined to the free will, and that it can do nothing when deprived of heavenly aid, how is it that Pelagius and Caelestius, obstinately defending, as you assert, this capacity for the will alone, persuade themselves, and (what is more worthy of common grief) many others already? We could indeed use many examples to refute such teaching, did we not know that Your Holiness is fully versed in all the divine Scriptures, especially since your report is filled with so many and such testimonies that by these alone the present doctrine can be overthrown, and there is no need of more recondite ones, since they neither dare nor are able to oppose those you have set down, which readily occur to us. So they try to take away the grace of God, which we must seek even once the freedom of our former state has been restored to us; for we cannot avoid the devil's other devices except with its help.

As for what your brotherhood asserts that they preach, that little children can be granted the rewards of eternal life even without the grace of baptism, it is utterly foolish. For unless they eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, they will not have life in themselves. Those who maintain that they have this life without regeneration seem to me to wish to make baptism itself void, since they preach that infants have what they believe is not to be conferred on them by baptism. So if they wish it to do no harm, they must admit that they are not reborn and that the sacred streams of regeneration are of no benefit. But so that the perverse doctrine of worthless men may be quickly undone by the reasoning of truth, the Lord proclaims this in the Gospel, saying, “Let the little children come, and do not forbid them to come to me.”

Therefore, by the authority of apostolic vigor, we decree that Pelagius and Caelestius, the inventors of new words, which, as the apostle said, produce nothing for edification but rather the emptiest questions, are deprived of church communion, until they come to their senses from the snares of the devil, by whom they are held captive to his will; and that meanwhile they are not received into the Lord's fold, which they themselves chose to desert by following the path of a perverse way. For those must be cut off who trouble us and wish to pervert the Gospel of Christ. At the same time we order that whoever strive to defend this with similar obstinacy be bound by the same punishment. For not only those who do these things, but also those who consent to those who do them; because I think there is not much difference between the mind of one who commits and the favor of one who consents. I add further: often one unlearns error when no one agrees with him. So, dearest brothers, let these men remain fixed under the sentence stated above: let them be absent from the Lord's courts; let them lack, for now, pastoral protection; lest the dire contagion of two sheep perhaps creep through the unwary crowd, and the wolf rejoice with greedy heart over so many flocks of sheep laid low within the Lord's fold, while the wound of two is overlooked by the keepers. We must take care, then, lest by allowing wolves we seem to be hirelings rather than shepherds.

We order, however, since Christ our Lord declared with his own voice that he does not desire the death of the dying, but only that he turn back and live, that, if they ever come to their senses and lay aside the error of their perverse doctrine and condemn the things by whose transgression they condemned themselves, the usual medicine, that is, its own refuge, shall not be denied them by the church; lest, if we perhaps forbid them when they return, they really remain outside the fold and be swallowed by the raging jaws of the waiting enemy, whom they themselves have armed against themselves with the darts of evil argument. Farewell, brothers. Given on the sixth day before the Kalends of February, in the consulship of Honorius and Constantius, most illustrious men.

We received with very grateful mind the letter of your brotherhood, full of faith and strengthened with all the vigor of the Catholic religion, sent from two councils through our brother and fellow bishop Julius; for its whole tenor and composition rests, by sound reasoning, on consideration of God's daily grace and on the correction of those who think otherwise, so that it can remove all error from them and, by giving any suitable example of our law, can provide them a worthy teacher to follow. But on these matters I think we have already said enough above, when, answering your reports, we wrote back what we thought both of their faithlessness and of your sentence. Yet something to say against them keeps coming up and offering itself, and what conquers can never be lacking, since what is conquered more fully by the strength of our faith and by the truth itself is so wretched and impious. For he who has rejected and despised all hope of life, confusing his heart with a hostile and damnable argument, since he believes that there is nothing he receives from God, and nothing left that he should ask for his healing: having taken this from himself, what has he left?

If, then, there are some whom such great perversity has bound to its defense, who give themselves to this doctrine and join it, hoping that what is proven to be far removed from and wholly opposed to Catholic teaching belongs to it, infected by those men's admonitions and words and led on to fall, they will hasten to return to the right path, lest error, besieging the mind and as it were fed on their thoughts, take possession of them for longer. For if Pelagius, wherever he stayed, deceived by this assertion the minds of those who easily or simply believed him when he argued: whether such people are here in the city (which, not knowing it, we can neither declare nor deny, since, if they exist, they hide, and never dare either to defend him when he preaches these things or to throw out such things in the presence of any of our people, and in so great a multitude of people no one can easily be detected or recognized anywhere), or whether they live in any other part of the world, we believe that by the mercy and grace of our God they will easily be corrected when they hear of the condemnation of him who has been found the obstinate and resisting author of this doctrine; nor does it matter where they are, so long as, wherever they can be found, they are healed.

Yet we cannot be persuaded that he has been cleared, although proceedings have been brought to us by some laymen or other, by which he believed he had been heard and acquitted. Whether these are genuine we doubt, because they did not come with any dispatch from that council, nor have we received any letter about this from those before whom he pleaded his case. If he had been able to be confident of his clearing, we rather believe he would have done what would have been much more proper: compelled them to indicate by their own letters what they had judged. But there are some things placed in those very proceedings in which he partly suppressed the charges by evading them, and partly confused everything in total obscurity by twisting many words back on himself; some he cleared, as it could seem for the time, by false arguments rather than true reasoning, denying some and turning others by false interpretation.

But would that (and this is rather to be wished) he would now turn from the error of his path to the true way of the Catholic faith, so that he might desire and wish to be cleared, considering God's daily grace and recognizing his help; so that he might be seen to be truly corrected and be approved by all on manifest reasoning, not by the evidence of proceedings, but by a heart converted to the Catholic faith! Hence we can neither approve nor blame those men's judgment, since we do not know whether the proceedings are genuine; and if they are genuine, it is clear that he evaded rather than cleared himself with full truth. If he is confident and knows that what he says does not deserve our condemnation, or that he has already refuted everything he had said, he ought not to be summoned by us, but should rather hasten himself to be acquitted. For if he still thinks this way, when, summoned by any letter, would he submit himself to our judgment, knowing he must be condemned? And if he had to be summoned, it would be better done by those who seem nearer and not separated from him by a long distance. But care will not be lacking if he provides material for the medicine. For he can condemn what he had held and, by sending a letter, ask pardon for his error, as befits one returning to us, dearest brothers.

We have read through the book said to be his, sent to us by your love. In it we read that many things were written against the grace of God, many blasphemous things, nothing that pleased, nothing that did not thoroughly displease, to be condemned and trampled on by anyone; things like which no one else but the man who wrote them would take into his mind and hold. For we did not think it necessary at this point to argue at greater length from the law, as if Pelagius were present and resisting, since we are conversing with you who know it all and rejoice with us in equal agreement. Such examples are better set out when we deal with those who are evidently ignorant of these matters. For on the capacity of nature, on free choice, and on all of God's grace and daily grace, who that thinks rightly would not have abundant matter for discussion? Let him then anathematize what he has held, so that those who had fallen through his sermons and precepts may know at last what the true faith holds. For they can be called back more easily when they perceive that these things are condemned by their own author. But if he chooses to persist obstinately in this impiety, action must be taken so that help may at least be given to those whom not their own error but rather his has led astray, lest the medicine be lost for them too, a cure which he neither admits nor asks for. [And in another hand:] May God keep you safe, dearest brothers. Given on the sixth day before the Kalends of February.

Your holy zeal, by which you think you must ask me many things so that you may be able to resist contentious impieties not unarmed, neither ought justice to spurn nor can love. But a careful answer to everything cannot be contained in one letter, however long. Know, however, that in very many of my little works I have already answered, as best I could, all or nearly all the things you ask about. If you read them (since I hear you have so arranged the life in which you serve God that you have leisure for reading), either the whole instruction will be open to you, or I think not much will be lacking, especially since there is within you the inner Teacher by whose grace you are what you are. For how does a man help a man to learn anything, if we are not taught by the Lord? Yet even in this letter, as the Lord helps, I will not cheat your expectation, at least of a brief answer.

The Lord says, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” If, then, when little children are baptized, it is not said in vain but truly done that they are counted among believers (for which reason they are also called “the faithful” by the mouths of all Christians), then surely, if they have not believed, they will be condemned. And so, since they have added nothing to original sin by living badly, their punishment in that condemnation can rightly be called the lightest, but not none. Whoever thinks that there will be no difference of punishments, let him read what is written: “It will be more tolerable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for that city.” So let not a middle place between the kingdom and punishment be sought for infants from deceivers; but let them pass from the devil to Christ, that is, from death to life, so that the wrath of God may not remain on them; for nothing frees from this wrath of God but the grace of God. And what is the wrath of God but the punishment and penalty owed by the just God? For God is not disturbed by any emotion, as a changeable mind is angered; but what is called the wrath of God is nothing other than the just punishment of sin, which it is not surprising passes to descendants.

For fleshly concupiscence, by which they are sown and conceived, did not exist before sin, nor would it have existed at all, had not the disobedience of man been followed, as a reciprocal punishment, by the disobedience of his own flesh. Although the good of marriage makes good use of this evil, still even marital intercourse, that is, intercourse lawful and honorable for the sake of procreating children, cannot take place without it; but it could have taken place without it if human nature had remained, by not sinning, in the state in which it was created. For even the genital members, like the others, could have been moved to perform their proper work at the bidding of the will, not stirred by the heat of lust. For who would deny that those words of God, “Increase and multiply,” were not the curse of sins but the blessing of marriage? Since, then, Christ was neither sown nor conceived through this concupiscence, for the virgin's childbearing was quite otherwise, whatever human being is sown, conceived, and born through this concupiscence must be reborn, so as not to be punished. For even if he is born of reborn parents, carnal generation cannot give him what was given to them only by spiritual regeneration; just as from the seed not only of the wild olive but also of the olive only a wild olive is born, although the olive is not a wild olive. We have said much about these things in other writings of ours too, which I would rather you read than make us repeat the same things.

To unbelievers, however, who are bound by no authority of the Christian books, it is harder to reply. Their perversity cannot be corrected by the weight of divine Scripture; rather, against them Scripture itself, which they attack quite openly, must be defended. Even if the Lord helps you to be able to do this, you still achieve little with those whom you want to become Christians if you conquer their unbelief by truthful arguments, unless you also ask faith for them by humble prayers. For faith itself, as you know, is a gift of God, who apportions to each the measure of faith, and such a gift that it must precede understanding. For the prophet is not mistaken who says, “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” And because, unless … that they might believe, the apostle prayed not for those already faithful but for the Jews who were still unbelievers, when he said, “Brothers, my heart's good will and prayer to God for them is for their salvation”: for them, that is, who had killed Christ and who would surely have killed him too, if they had been given the power; for such as these the Lord too prayed while he hung mocked on the cross, and blessed Stephen while he was being stoned.

There are two kinds of these unbelievers, whom we are accustomed to call either Gentiles or, by the word now in common use, pagans: one of those who prefer what they think are their religious practices to the Christian religion, the other of those who are bound by no name of religion. In certain books which I have entitled On the City of God, which I think have already come to your notice, and whose remaining books I am working to finish, if the Lord wills, in the midst of my occupations, I have completed ten volumes of no small size against the first of these kinds, which the apostle marks when he says, “What the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God,” or certainly when he says, “They worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” The first five of these refute those who maintain that the worship not of the one supreme and true God but of many gods is necessary for obtaining or keeping the earthly and temporal happiness of human affairs. The other, later five are against those who, exalting themselves proudly and arrogantly against saving doctrine, think they can attain the blessedness hoped for after this life even through the worship of demons and many gods. There, in the last three of these five books, their noble philosophers are refuted by us. The rest, from the eleventh on, however many there may be, of which I have finished three and have the fourth in hand, will contain what we hold and believe about the City of God, so that we may not seem in this work to have wished only to refute others' views and not also to assert our own. This fourth after the ten, which is also the fourteenth book of the whole work, will, if the Lord wills, have unraveled all the questions you put to me in your letter.

As for the other kind of unbelievers, who believe either that there is no divine power or that human affairs are no concern of it, I do not know whether one should discuss any question of piety with them, although hardly anyone is found in our times so foolish as to dare to say even in his heart, “There is no God.” But there is no lack of those other fools who have said, “The Lord will not see,” that is, he does not extend his providence to these earthly things. Yet in these books, which I want your love to read, while the City of God is asserted, it will be made credible, if God wills and to whom he wills, not only that God exists, which is implanted by nature and which scarcely any impiety ever uproots, but also that he takes care of human affairs, from the very creation of mankind to the blessing of the righteous with the holy angels and the condemnation of the ungodly with the evil angels.

So this letter must not be burdened further, dearly beloved. For we have said enough about where you may hope to learn what you wish through our ministry; and we have taken care, as far as our slender means allow, that you may have these books, if you do not yet have them, through my holy brother and fellow presbyter Firmus, who loves you much and has commended you to us very earnestly to be loved, so that he may give thanks for your mutual love.

I praise, congratulate, and admire you, dearest son Boniface, because amid the cares of wars and arms you earnestly desire to know the things that are God's. Truly it appears from this that even by your military valor you serve the faith that you have in Christ. So, to explain briefly to your love the difference between the error of the Arians and that of the Donatists: the Arians say that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are of different substances; the Donatists do not say this, but confess one substance of the Trinity. And if some of them have said that the Son is less than the Father, they have not denied that he is of the same substance; but most of them say that they believe about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit altogether what the Catholic Church believes. Nor is this the question at issue with them; they quarrel unhappily about communion alone, and by the perversity of their error they carry on rebellious hostilities against the unity of Christ. Sometimes, however, as we have heard, some of them, wishing to win over the Goths, when they see that they have some power, say that they believe what the Goths believe. But they are refuted by the authority of their own predecessors, because not even Donatus himself, whose party they boast of belonging to, is said to have believed so.

But do not let these things disturb you, dearest son. For heresies and scandals were foretold to come, so that we might be instructed among enemies, and so both our faith and our love might be more proven: our faith, so that we may not be deceived by them, and our love, so that we may also take thought for correcting them as far as we can, not only pressing them so that they may not harm the weak and may be freed from wicked error, but also praying for them, that the Lord may open their minds and they may understand the Scriptures. For in the holy books, where the Lord Christ is made manifest, there his church is also declared. But these men, with a wonderful blindness, while they know Christ himself only from the Scriptures, do not recognize his church by the authority of the divine writings, but invent it out of the vanity of human slanders.

With us they recognize Christ in what is read: “They pierced my hands and feet; they numbered all my bones; they looked and stared at me; they divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots”; and they refuse to recognize the church in what follows shortly after: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him; for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he shall rule over the nations.” With us they recognize Christ in what is read: “The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you’”; and they refuse to recognize the church in what follows: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession.” With us they recognize Christ in what the Lord himself says in the Gospel: “It was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day”; and they refuse to recognize the church in what follows: “and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” And countless are the testimonies of the holy books, which I ought not to crowd into this book. In them, just as the Lord Christ appears, whether according to his divinity, equal to the Father, in which “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” or according to the lowliness of the flesh he took on, because “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” so his church also appears, not in Africa alone, as these men rave with most shameless vanity, but spread throughout the whole world.

For they prefer their own quarrels to the divine testimonies, because in the case of Caecilian, formerly bishop of the church of Carthage, against whom they brought charges which they neither could nor can prove, they separated themselves from the Catholic Church, that is, from the unity of all nations. Yet even if the charges they brought against Caecilian were true and could at some time be shown to us, we would anathematize him, though now dead; but still we ought not to abandon, for the sake of any man, the church of Christ, which is not invented by contentious opinions but proved by divine testimonies; because it is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in man. For (I may say it without injury to his innocence) if Caecilian sinned, Christ did not therefore lose his inheritance. It is easy for a man to believe things true or false about another man; but it is a mark of wicked shamelessness to wish to condemn the communion of the whole world because of a man's crimes which you cannot show to the world.

Whether Caecilian was ordained by betrayers of the divine books, I do not know; I did not see it; I heard it from his enemies. It is not read out to me from the law of God, not from the proclamation of the prophets, not from the holiness of the psalms, not from an apostle of Christ, not from the speech of Christ. But the church spread throughout the whole world, with which the party of Donatus is not in communion, the testimonies of all the Scriptures proclaim with one voice. “In your seed all nations shall be blessed,” said the law of God. “From the rising of the sun to its setting a pure sacrifice is offered to my name, for my name is glorified among the nations,” God said through the prophet. “He shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth,” God said through the psalm. “Bearing fruit and growing in the whole world,” God said through the apostle. “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” the Son of God said with his own mouth. Caecilian, bishop of the church of Carthage, is accused by human quarrels; the church of Christ established in all nations is commended by divine voices. Piety, truth, and love themselves do not allow us to accept against Caecilian the testimony of men whom we do not see in the church to which God bears witness; for those who do not follow the divine testimonies have lost the weight of human testimony.

I add that they themselves, as accusers, sent the case of Caecilian to the judgment of the emperor Constantine; or rather, after the episcopal judgments, where they could not crush him, they brought Caecilian himself, as most obstinate persecutors, to the examination of that emperor. And what they now blame in us, to deceive the ignorant, saying that Christians ought not to ask anything of Christian emperors against the enemies of Christ, they themselves did first. They did not dare to deny this even at the conference we held together at Carthage; indeed they even dared to boast that their predecessors had prosecuted Caecilian criminally before the emperor, adding moreover the lie that they had defeated him there and had him condemned. How then are they not persecutors, who, when they had persecuted Caecilian by accusing him and had been defeated by him, wished to claim false glory for themselves by a most shameless lie, not only not thinking it a fault but even boasting of it to their own praise, if they could prove that Caecilian had been condemned on their predecessors' accusation? How they were beaten in every way at that conference, since the proceedings are very long, and it is much for you, occupied with other matters necessary for the Roman peace, to have them read, perhaps a summary of them could be read to you. I believe my brother and fellow bishop Optatus has it, or, if he does not, he can very easily get it from the church of Sitifis; since even this book, by its length, may perhaps be burdensome to your cares.

For what happened to the Donatists is what happened to the accusers of holy Daniel. For as the lions were turned against those men, so against these were turned the laws by which they wished to crush an innocent man; except that, by the mercy of Christ, these laws which seem to be against them are rather for them, since many have been corrected by them and are being corrected daily, and they give thanks that they have been corrected and freed from that raging destruction. Those who hated now love, and they rejoice, now that they have recovered their sanity, that the laws that troubled them were most salutary, as much as they hated them in their madness; and toward the rest, with whom they would have perished, they are now stirred by a love like ours, so that we may press together that those may not perish. For the physician is troublesome to the raving madman, and the father to the undisciplined son, the one by binding, the other by beating, but both by loving. But if they neglected them and let them perish, that false gentleness would rather be cruel. For if the horse and the mule, which have no understanding, resist with bites and kicks the men who handle their wounds to cure them, and though men are often in danger between their teeth and hooves and are sometimes hurt, still they do not abandon them until, by healing pains and troubles, they bring them back to health: how much more must a man not be abandoned by a man, and a brother by a brother, so that he may not perish forever, who, once corrected, can understand how great a benefit was being done him when he complained that he was suffering persecution!