Letters 225.1–225.9

Unknown to you by face, but already known to you to some extent in mind and speech, if you remember (for I sent and received letters through my holy brother the deacon Leontius), I now again dare to write to Your Blessedness, not only out of the wish to greet you, as then, but also out of devotion to the faith by which the Church lives. Since your most vigilant diligence keeps watch for all the members of the body of Christ and fights by the power of truth against the snares of heretical doctrines, I thought I need not at all fear being burdensome or importunate to you in a matter that concerns the salvation of many and therefore your goodness; rather, I believed I would be guilty if I did not refer what I see to be very harmful to the special patron of the faith.

Many of the servants of Christ who live in the city of Marseilles think that whatever you argued in Your Holiness's writings against the Pelagian heretics about the calling of the elect according to God's purpose is contrary to the opinion of the fathers and the mind of the Church. For some time they preferred to blame their own slowness rather than to criticize what they did not understand, and some of them wanted to ask Your Blessedness for a clearer and plainer explanation of this. Then it came about by the disposition of God's mercy that, since similar questions had troubled some in Africa, you issued the book On Rebuke and Grace, full of divine authority. When it reached us by an unhoped-for opportunity, we thought all the complaints of the objectors would be laid to rest, since all the questions on which Your Holiness needed to be consulted are answered there so fully and completely, as if you had made it your special aim to settle what was disturbed among us. But when this book of Your Blessedness had been read, those who already followed the holy and apostolic authority of your teaching became much more understanding and better instructed, while those who were hindered by the obscurity of their own conviction withdrew more opposed than they had been. Their abrupt dissent is to be feared, first for their own sake, lest the spirit of Pelagian impiety make sport of men so distinguished and outstanding in the pursuit of every virtue; then lest the simpler people, who have great reverence for these men because of their evident uprightness, think that what they hear asserted by those whose authority they follow without judgment is the safest course for them.

For this is their definition and profession: that every man sinned when Adam sinned, and that no one is saved by his own works but by the grace of God through regeneration; yet that the propitiation which is in the sacrament of the blood of Christ is offered to all men without exception, so that whoever wishes to come to faith and to baptism can be saved. They say that God foreknew before the foundation of the world who would believe or who would persevere in that faith, which must afterwards be helped by grace, and that he predestined to his kingdom those whom, called freely, he foresaw would be worthy of election and would leave this life with a good end. Therefore every man is admonished by the divine teachings to believe and to act, so that no one may despair of attaining eternal life, since a reward is prepared for voluntary devotion. But this purpose of God's calling, by which, either before the beginning of the world or in the very creation of the human race, a separation is said to have been made of those to be chosen and those to be rejected, so that, as it pleased the Creator, some were created vessels of honor and others vessels of dishonor, they say both takes from the fallen the concern to rise again and gives the saints an occasion of lukewarmness, since labor is superfluous either way if the rejected cannot enter by any effort and the elect cannot fall away by any negligence. For however they act, nothing can happen to them other than what God has determined, and under an uncertain hope the course cannot be steady, since, if the choice of the one predestining holds otherwise, the effort of the one striving is in vain. So, they say, all effort is removed and virtues abolished if God's decree precedes human wills; under this name of predestination a kind of fatal necessity is introduced, or the Creator is said to be the author of different natures, if no one can be other than he was made. And to set out their opinion more briefly and fully: whatever Your Holiness raised against yourself in this book in the sense of those who contradict you, and whatever objection on this question you most powerfully defeated in the books against Julian, all this these holy men cry out most strenuously. And when we bring against them the writings of Your Blessedness, armed with the strongest and countless testimonies of the divine Scriptures, and after the pattern of your arguments ourselves add something to corner them, they defend their obstinacy by antiquity, and assert that the passages brought from the apostle Paul's letter to the Romans to show the divine grace that precedes the merits of the elect were never understood by any churchman as they are now understood. And when we ask them to explain these passages according to whose sense they please, they say they have found nothing that satisfies them, and demand silence about things whose depth no one has reached. Their obstinacy finally goes so far as to declare that our faith is contrary to the edification of hearers, and so, even if true, ought not to be brought forward, since what should not be received is harmful when taught, and there is no danger in keeping silent about what cannot be understood.

Some of them, indeed, do not turn aside from the Pelagian paths so far that, when they are compelled to confess the grace of Christ that precedes all human merits (lest, if it is given for merits, it be called grace in vain), they want it to refer to the state of each man in which the Creator's grace established him, deserving nothing beforehand since he did not even exist, as free in choice and rational, so that by distinguishing good and evil he can direct his will both to the knowledge of God and to obedience to his commandments, and can reach this grace by which we are reborn in Christ through, of course, his natural capacity, by asking, seeking and knocking: so that he receives, finds and enters because, having used the good of nature well, he has deserved by the help of that initial grace to reach this saving grace. The purpose of the calling grace they define entirely as this: that God determined to take no one into his kingdom except through the sacrament of regeneration, and that all men universally are called to this gift of salvation, whether through the natural law, or the written law, or the preaching of the gospel, so that those who are willing may become sons of God, and those who were unwilling to believe may be without excuse; for God's justice lies in this, that those who have not believed perish, and his goodness appears in this, that he repels no one from life but wills all without distinction to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. Here they bring forward the testimonies in which the exhortation of the divine Scriptures urges the wills of men to obey, men who by free choice either do what is commanded or neglect it. And they think it follows that, since the transgressor is said not to have obeyed because he did not will to, the faithful man too must be held without doubt to have been devout because he willed to; and that each man has as much capacity for good as for evil, and moves his mind with equal force either to vices or to virtues: God's grace fosters it when it seeks the good, and just condemnation receives it when it follows evil.

And when, in the midst of this, the multitude of countless infants is put to them as an objection, infants who, apart from original sin, under which all men are equally born in the condemnation of the first man, have as yet no wills and no actions of their own, and yet are not separated without God's judgment, so that, being taken from the use of this life before they can distinguish good and evil, some through regeneration are taken up among the heirs of the heavenly kingdom and others without baptism pass among the debtors of eternal death, they say that such are lost and such saved according as divine knowledge foresaw what they would be in their later years if they were kept until the age of action. They do not consider that they are subjecting the grace of God, which they want to be the companion and not the forerunner of human merits, even to those wills which, by their own fancy, they do not deny were preceded by it. But they subject God's election to merits of any kind, however fictitious, so far that, since past merits do not exist, they invent future ones that will never be; and by a new kind of absurdity among them, things are foreknown that will not be done, and things foreknown are not done. This foreknowledge by God of human merits, according to which the grace of the One who calls is said to work, they think they establish far more reasonably when they come to consider those nations which in past ages were left to walk in their own ways, or even now still perish in the impiety of their ancient ignorance, on whom no light either of law or of gospel has shone. Yet, insofar as the door has been opened and the way made for preachers, the people of the Gentiles who sat in darkness and the shadow of death have seen a great light, and those once not a people are now the people of God, and those on whom he once had no mercy he now has mercy on. These, they say, were foreseen by the Lord as believers, and the times and ministries of teachers were so arranged for each nation as the belief of good wills was going to arise. Nor, they say, does it waver that God wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, since those are without excuse who could have been taught by natural understanding to worship the one true God, and did not hear the gospel because they would not have received it.

They say that our Lord Jesus Christ died for the whole human race, and that no one at all is excepted from the redemption of his blood, even if he passes all this life with a mind utterly estranged from him, because the sacrament of divine mercy belongs to all men; and that very many are not renewed by it because they are foreknown not even to wish to be renewed. Therefore, as far as God is concerned, eternal life is prepared for all; but as far as freedom of choice is concerned, it is grasped by those who have believed God of their own accord and have received the help of grace as the merit of their belief. Those whose opposition troubles us, though they formerly thought better, have taken up this preaching of such a grace chiefly because, if they professed that all good merits are preceded by grace and given by it so that they can exist, they would necessarily concede that God, according to the purpose and counsel of his will, by a hidden judgment and a manifest work, makes one vessel for honor and another for dishonor, since no one is justified except through grace and no one is born except in transgression. But they shrink from confessing this; they are afraid to ascribe the merits of the saints to the work of God, and they do not accept that the predestined number of the elect can neither be increased nor diminished, lest the urgings of those who exhort have no place among unbelievers and the negligent, and the imposition of effort and labor be superfluous, since its zeal would be frustrated if election were lacking. For only so, they say, can each man be called to correction or to progress, if he knows that by his own diligence he can be good and that his freedom will be helped by God's aid for this, if he chooses what God commands. And so, since in those who have reached the age of free will there are two things that work human salvation, namely God's grace and man's obedience, they want obedience to come before grace, so that the beginning of salvation must be believed to rest with the one who is saved, not with the One who saves, and so that the will of man obtains for itself the help of divine grace, not grace subjecting the human will to itself.

Since we know, by the revelation of God's mercy and your teaching, Your Blessedness, that this is most perverse, we can stand firm in not believing it; but we are not equal to the authority of those who hold such views, for they far surpass us in the merits of their lives, and some of them stand above us having recently attained the honor of the highest priesthood. Nor has anyone easily dared to go against the arguments of men so much his superiors, except a few fearless lovers of perfect grace. As a result the danger has grown with their dignities, not only for those who hear them but also for those who are heard, while reverence for them holds many in a useless silence or leads them to careless assent, and what is contradicted by almost no one seems to them most sound. Therefore, if in these remnants of the Pelagian perversity a fiber of no small virulence is being nourished; if the beginning of salvation is wrongly placed in man; if the human will is impiously put before the divine will, so that a man is helped because he willed, not wills because he is helped; if a man evil by origin is wrongly believed to begin receiving good not from the highest Good but from himself; if God is pleased by nothing except what he himself has given: then grant us in this cause, most blessed pope, best of fathers, as far as you can with the Lord's help, the diligence of your goodness, and deign to open with the clearest explanations what is more obscure and harder to grasp in these questions.

First, since most people do not think the Christian faith is violated by this dissent, show how much danger lies in their conviction. Next, how free choice is not impeded by this grace that works beforehand and works with us. Then, whether God's foreknowledge remains according to his purpose in such a way that the very things purposed are to be taken as foreknown; or whether this varies by kinds of cases and types of persons, so that, since callings differ, in those who are saved without doing any work God's purpose alone seems to exist, while in those who are going to do some good the purpose may rest on foreknowledge; or whether it is uniform, so that, although foreknowledge cannot be divided from purpose by a difference in time, foreknowledge nevertheless rests in a certain order on purpose, and, as there is nothing in any affairs whatever that divine knowledge has not anticipated, so there is no good that has not flowed into our participation from God as its author. Finally, how, by this preaching of God's purpose by which those become believers who have been foreordained to eternal life, none of those who must be exhorted is hindered, nor do they have an occasion for negligence if they despair of being predestined. We also ask you, bearing patiently with our foolishness, to show how this is to be answered: that when the opinions of earlier writers on this matter are reviewed, almost all are found to hold one and the same view, by which they took God's purpose and predestination as according to foreknowledge, so that God made some vessels of honor and others of dishonor because he foresaw the end of each, and foreknew in what will and action each would be under the very help of grace.

When all these points have been untied, and many more besides, which you with your deeper insight can better see to belong to this cause, have been discussed, we believe and hope that not only will our feebleness be strengthened by the defense of your arguments, but those too, distinguished by merits and honors, whom the fog of this opinion darkens, will receive the purest light of grace. For let Your Blessedness know that one of them, a man of outstanding authority and spiritual pursuits, the holy Hilary, bishop of Arles, is an admirer and follower of your teaching in all other matters, and that on this point which he calls into complaint he has long wished to share his view with Your Holiness by letter. But since it is uncertain whether he will do this, or to what purpose, and since the weariness of all of us finds relief, by God's providing grace in this present age, in the vigor of your love and knowledge, add instruction for the humble and rebuke for the proud. It is necessary and useful to write even what has been written, lest what is not often refuted be thought trivial. For they think healthy what does not hurt, and do not feel a wound covered over by skin; but let them understand that what keeps a persistent swelling will come to the knife. May the grace of God and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ crown you at all times and glorify you forever as you go from strength to strength, my lord pope most blessed, ineffably wonderful, incomparably to be honored, most excellent patron.