On Marriage and Concupiscence

Since I had long been troubled that I had written several times and had received no reply from your Sublimity, I suddenly received three letters from your Kindness: one, not addressed to me alone, by my fellow bishop Vindemialis, and not long afterward two by my fellow presbyter Firmus. This holy man, joined to us, as you could learn from him, by a most intimate love, talked much with us about your Excellency and told us truthfully what kind of man he knows you to be in the heart of Christ; and so he surpassed not only the letters that the bishop I mentioned, or he himself, brought, but even those we complained we had not received. His account of you was all the sweeter to us because he told us things that you yourself could not write back, even if I asked, lest you become the herald of your own praises, which holy Scripture forbids. Yet I too am afraid to write these things to you, lest I incur the suspicion of flattery, my illustrious lord, deservedly most eminent, and son most dear in the love of Christ.

Consider, then, what delight and joy it was for me to hear your praises in Christ, or rather the praises of Christ in you, from one who could neither deceive me, because of his faithfulness, nor be ignorant of them, because of his friendship with you. But we have also heard other things from others, though not so many or so certain: how sound and catholic your faith is, how devout your expectation of the things to come, what love you have for God and the brothers; how you do not think proudly in your high honors nor hope in the uncertainty of riches, but in the living God, and are rich in good works; how your house is a rest and comfort for the saints and a terror to the ungodly; how great your care is that no one, covered with the veil of Christ's name, should lie in wait for the members of Christ, whether among his old enemies or his more recent ones; and how you provide for the salvation of those same enemies while being hostile to their error. These things and the like, as I said, we are used to hearing from others too; but now, through the brother mentioned above, we have learned more of them, and on better witness.

But as for your conjugal chastity, so that we might praise and love it in you as well, from whom could we have heard of it except from someone close to you and of your household, who knew your life not on the surface but through and through? It delights me, then, to speak with you somewhat more intimately and at somewhat greater length about this good of yours, which is God's gift. I know that I am no burden to you if I send something long, since by reading it you are with us the longer. For I have learned this too: that amid your many great cares you read easily and gladly, and take great delight in our little works, even those we have written to others, if any of them have been able to come into your hands. How much more will you deign to attend closely to what is written to you, where I speak as though you were present, and to receive it the more gladly! From this letter, then, go on to the book that I have sent with it, which will itself, in its opening, more fittingly make known to your Reverence both why it was written and why it was sent to you in particular.

New heretics, my dearly beloved son Valerius, who contend that the medicine of Christ, by which sins are healed, is not necessary for little children born in the flesh, cry out against us with the utmost malice that we condemn marriage and the divine work by which God creates human beings from males and females. They do so because we say that those who are born of such intercourse contract original sin, of which the apostle says, “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned”; and because we do not deny that they, of whatever parents they are born, are still under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ and, rescued by his grace from the power of darkness, are transferred into the kingdom of him who willed not to be born of that same intercourse of the two sexes. Because we say this, then, which is contained in the most ancient and most firm rule of the catholic faith, these champions of a novel and perverse doctrine, who say that there is no sin in little children to be washed away by the bath of regeneration, faithlessly or ignorantly slander us, as if we condemned marriage, and as if we said that the work of God, that is, the human being who is born of it, is the work of the devil. They do not notice that the good of marriage can no more be accused because of the original evil that is contracted from it than the evil of adulteries and acts of sexual immorality can be excused because of the natural good that is born of them. For just as sin, whether contracted by little children from the one or from the other, is the work of the devil, so a human being, whether born from the one or from the other, is the work of God. The purpose of this book, therefore, is this: that, so far as the Lord deigns to help us, we may distinguish from the goodness of marriage the evil of carnal concupiscence, because of which a human being born through it contracts original sin. For this shameful concupiscence, which is shamelessly praised by shameless men, would not exist had man not sinned first; but marriage would exist even if no one had sinned, for the sowing of children would then have taken place in the body of that life without this disease, without which it cannot now take place in the body of this death.

I wished to write to you in particular about this subject for three chief reasons, which I will state briefly. The first is that, by the gift of Christ, you keep conjugal chastity with great care; the second, that you have effectively resisted, by your power in attending to the matter and pressing it, these profane novelties that we resist here by argument; the third, that I learned that something they had written had come into your hands, and though you laughed at it with the most robust faith, it is still good that we should also know how to give help in defending what we believe. For the apostle Peter commands us to be ready to make our defense to everyone who asks us for a reason for our faith and hope; and the apostle Paul says, “Let your speech be seasoned with salt in grace, so that you may know how you ought to answer each one.” These are chiefly the things that compelled me to hold with you, in this volume, such discourse as the Lord would deign to give. For it has never pleased me to thrust any of my little works, not so much diligently as impudently, upon an illustrious man who has not asked for it, conspicuous in so high a rank as you are, especially one who is not yet enjoying a dignity of leisure but is still occupied in public affairs, and military ones at that. If, then, I have now done something of the kind, graciously pardon it for the reasons I have mentioned, and turn a kindly mind to what follows.

Blessed Paul shows that conjugal chastity also is a gift of God when, speaking of this subject, he says: “But I would that all men were as I myself am; but each has his own gift from God, one in this way, another in that.” See, he said that this too is a gift from God; though lower than that continence in which he wanted all to be as he himself was, it is nevertheless a gift from God. From this we understand that when these things are commanded to be done, nothing else is shown than that we ought to have our own will too for receiving and keeping them; but when they are shown to be gifts of God, we learn from whom they must be sought if we do not have them, and to whom thanks must be given if we have them, and that our wills avail little for seeking, taking up, and keeping them unless they are helped by God.

What, then, do we say when conjugal chastity is found even in some ungodly people? Are they to be said to sin in this, that they use a gift of God badly, not referring it to the worship of him from whom they received it? Or are these things perhaps not even to be thought gifts of God when unbelievers do them, according to the apostle's statement, “Everything that is not of faith is sin”? But who would dare to say that sin is a gift of God? For the soul and the body, and whatever goods of soul and body are naturally implanted, are gifts of God even in sinners, since God made them, not they themselves; but it was of the things they do that it was said, “Everything that is not of faith is sin.” When, therefore, people without faith do the things that seem to belong to conjugal chastity, whether seeking to please human beings, themselves or others, or avoiding human troubles in the things they desire viciously, or serving demons, sins are not restrained; rather, some sins are overcome by other sins. Far be it, then, that anyone should truly be called chaste who keeps marital faithfulness to his wife for any reason other than the true God.

The union of male and female for the sake of begetting, then, is the natural good of marriage. But he uses this good badly who uses it like a beast, so that his aim is the pleasure of lust, not the will to offspring. Yet in some animals without reason, as in most birds, a kind of confederation of pairs is kept, and a shared skill in building nests, with the times for warming the eggs divided between them and the tasks of feeding the young taken in turn, so that when they mate they seem rather to be about the business of continuing their kind than of satisfying lust. Of these two, the former is in the beast a likeness of man; the latter is in man a likeness of the beast. But as for what I said belongs to the nature of marriage—that male and female are joined in a partnership for begetting and so do not defraud each other, as every partnership by nature does not want a fraudulent partner—this evident good, when unbelievers have it, they turn into evil and sin, because they use it unfaithfully. In the same way, then, the marriages of believers turn to the use of righteousness even that concupiscence of the flesh by which the flesh lusts against the spirit. For they intend to beget children who will be regenerated, so that those who are born of them as children of the world may be reborn as children of God. Therefore those who do not beget children with this intention, this will, this end—that they may transfer them from being members of the first man into being members of Christ—but, as unbelieving parents, glory in unbelieving offspring, do not have true conjugal chastity, even if they are so observant that they lie together only for the procreation of children, as the marriage contract states. For since chastity is a virtue, to which the contrary vice is unchastity, and all virtues, even those that act through the body, dwell in the mind, how can the body be asserted with true reason to be chaste when the mind itself prostitutes itself away from the true God? This prostitution the holy psalm accuses, where it says: “For behold, those who put themselves far from you shall perish; you have destroyed everyone who prostitutes himself away from you.” True chastity, therefore, whether conjugal, widowed, or virginal, is not to be so called unless it is devoted to the true faith. For since consecrated virginity is rightly preferred to marriage, what Christian of sober mind would not set Christian catholic married women, even those who have married more than once, above not only the Vestals but also heretical virgins? So great is the power of faith, of which the apostle says, “Everything that is not of faith is sin,” and of which it is also written to the Hebrews, “Without faith it is impossible to please God.”

Since this is so, those surely err who think that marriage is condemned when carnal lust is blamed, as though this disease came from marriage and not from sin. Were not those first spouses, whose marriage God blessed, saying, “Increase and multiply,” naked and not ashamed? Why, then, did shame arise from those members after sin, unless because an indecent motion appeared there that marriage would without doubt not have had if human beings had not sinned? Or perhaps, as some think because they do not attend carefully enough to what they read, were the first human beings created blind, like dogs, and—what is more absurd—did they gain sight not, like dogs, by growing, but by sinning? Far be it from us to believe this. What moves those who think so is the passage: “Taking of its fruit she ate; and she gave to her husband with her, and they ate. And the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” From this, people of little understanding suppose that their eyes had been closed before, since divine Scripture testifies that they were then opened. But did Hagar, Sarah's maidservant, have her eyes closed before, when, as her son thirsted and wept, she opened her eyes and saw a well? Or were those two disciples walking on the road with the Lord after his resurrection with their eyes closed, those of whom the gospel says that in the breaking of the bread their eyes were opened and they recognized him? What is written of the first human beings, then, “the eyes of both were opened,” we must understand as meaning that they were made attentive to observe and recognize the new thing that had happened in their body—a body that lay before their open eyes every day, naked and well known. Otherwise, how could Adam, with his eyes closed, give names to all the beasts of the earth and the birds that were brought to him, which he could not do without distinguishing them, and could not distinguish them without seeing them? How, finally, was the woman herself shown to him, when he said, “This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”? Lastly, if anyone is so contentious as to say that he could have done these things not by seeing but by touching, what will he say about what we read there, that the woman saw the tree from which she was about to take the forbidden food, how beautiful it was to the eyes to look upon? They were therefore naked and not ashamed, not because they did not see, but because they had felt nothing in the members they saw that could make them ashamed. For it was not said, “They were both naked and did not know it,” but “they were not ashamed.” For since nothing had gone before that was not permitted, nothing had followed that would cause shame.

There man, having first transgressed God's law, began to have in his members another law warring against his mind, and he felt the evil of his own disobedience when he found the disobedience of his flesh most justly paid back to him. For the serpent too, in seducing him, had promised such an opening of the eyes—for knowing, that is, something that would better have remained unknown. Then indeed man felt in himself what he had done; then he distinguished evil from good, not by being without it but by suffering it. For it was unjust that he who had not obeyed his Lord should be obeyed by his servant, that is, by his own body. For why is it that the eyes, lips, tongue, hands, and feet, and the bending of the back, neck, and sides, are placed within our power, so that they are moved to the tasks suited to them when our body is free of impediments and healthy, yet when it comes to the begetting of children, the members created for this work do not serve the nod of the will, but one must wait for lust to move them as though by its own right—and sometimes it does not do so when the mind wills, while sometimes it does so even against its will? Should not the freedom of the human will blush at this, that by despising God who commanded it, it had lost its proper command even over its own members? Where could it be more fittingly shown that human nature was depraved as the desert of disobedience than in these disobedient parts, from which that very nature subsists by succession? For that is why these parts of the body are properly called by the name of nature. When, therefore, those first human beings had felt in their flesh this motion, indecent because disobedient, and had blushed at their nakedness, they covered these members with fig leaves, so that what was not moved at the will of those who willed might at least be veiled at the will of those who were ashamed; and since what gave indecent pleasure made them ashamed, what was decent might be done by covering it.

Because the good of marriage could not perish even with this evil added to it, imprudent people think that this is not an evil but belongs to that good. But the two are distinguished not only by subtle reasoning but also by the most common natural judgment, which both appeared in those first human beings and is held today by married people. For what they afterward did in propagation is the good of marriage; but what they first covered in confusion is the evil of concupiscence, which everywhere avoids being seen and in its shame seeks privacy. Therefore marriage glories because it makes something good even out of that evil, and blushes because it cannot happen without it. It is as if someone with an injured foot should reach some good even by limping: neither is the arrival bad because of the evil of the limping, nor is the limping good because of the good of the arrival. So we ought neither to condemn marriage because of the evil of lust nor to praise lust because of the good of marriage.

This, indeed, is the disease of which the apostle speaks, addressing married believers too: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in the disease of desire, like the Gentiles who do not know God.” Not only, then, should a married believer not use another's vessel, as those do who covet other men's wives, but he should know that not even his own is to be possessed in the disease of carnal concupiscence. This is not to be understood as though the apostle had forbidden conjugal intercourse, that is, lawful and honorable intercourse; but that this intercourse—which would have had no morbid lust attached to it if the freedom of the will had not perished in it through a preceding sin, and which now has it attached—should be a matter not of will but of necessity, without which, however, the fruit of the will itself cannot be reached in procreating children. In the marriages of believers this will is not directed to the end that children should be born who will pass away in this world, but that they may be reborn to remain forever in Christ. If this comes about, the reward of the marriage will be full happiness; if it does not, the spouses will have the peace of a good will. Whoever possesses his vessel, that is, his wife, with this intention of heart surely does not possess her in the disease of desire, like the Gentiles who do not know God, but in sanctification and honor, like the believers who hope in God. For a man uses that evil of concupiscence and is not overcome by it when he bridles and restrains it as it seethes with disordered and unseemly motions, and does not slacken the rein and employ it except in providing for offspring, so that he may beget carnally those who are to be regenerated spiritually, not so as to subject the spirit to the flesh in sordid slavery. No Christian ought to doubt that the holy fathers from Abraham and before Abraham, to whom God bears witness that they pleased him, used their wives in this way, since some of them were even allowed to have several each, where the reason was the multiplication of offspring, not a desire for varied pleasure.

For if the God of our fathers, who is our God too, had not been displeased by that multitude of wives on the ground that lust might thereby vaunt itself more freely, then holy women too would each have served several men. But if any woman did so, what would drive her to have several husbands except the foulness of concupiscence, since by this license she would not have more children? Yet that it belongs more to the good of marriage to be one man and one woman, not one and many, is sufficiently shown by the very first union of spouses, made by God, so that marriages should take their beginning where the more honorable example would be seen. But as the human race advanced, good women were joined to certain good men, several to each. From this it appears that the one arrangement sought rather the moderation of dignity, and the other was permitted by the nature of fruitfulness. For by nature one can more readily rule over many than many over one. Nor can it be doubted that by the natural order men rule over women rather than women over men. Keeping this, the apostle says, “The head of the woman is the man,” and, “Wives, be subject to your husbands”; and the apostle Peter says, “As Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord.” Although this is so—that the nature of rule loves singularity, while we more readily see plurality among those who are subject—nevertheless several women would never lawfully have been joined to one man unless more children were born as a result. Hence if one woman lies with several men, since this brings her no multiplication of offspring but only frequency of lust, she cannot be a wife, but a harlot.

Since, indeed, not only fruitfulness, whose fruit is in offspring, and not only chastity, whose bond is faithfulness, but also a certain sacrament of marriage is commended to married believers—which is why the apostle says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church”—the reality of this sacrament is without doubt that male and female, joined in marriage, persevere inseparably as long as they live, and that it is not lawful for spouse to be separated from spouse except for the cause of sexual immorality. For this is kept in Christ and the church: that the living one with the living one is separated by no divorce for eternity. So great is the observance of this sacrament in the city of our God, on his holy mountain, that is, in the church of Christ, among all married believers, who are without doubt members of Christ, that although women marry, and wives are taken, for the sake of procreating children, it is not lawful to leave even a barren spouse in order to marry another who is fruitful. If anyone does this, he is guilty of adultery—not by the law of this world, where, once a repudiation has intervened, it is allowed without any charge to contract other marriages with others (as the Lord testifies that even holy Moses permitted the Israelites because of the hardness of their hearts), but by the law of the gospel; and so is she too, if she marries another. So fully do the rights of marriage, once entered into, remain between the living that those who have been separated from each other are still spouses to each other rather than to those to whom they have joined themselves. For they would not be adulterers with the others unless they remained spouses to each other. Finally, when the husband with whom there was a true marriage has died, a true marriage can take place with the man with whom there was adultery before. So there remains between the living something conjugal that neither separation nor union with another can take away. But it remains to the harm of guilt, not to the bond of the covenant, just as the soul of an apostate, withdrawing as it were from marriage with Christ, does not lose the sacrament of faith that it received in the bath of regeneration, even when faith is lost. For it would without doubt be given back to him on his return if he had lost it on departing. But he who has withdrawn has it to the heaping up of punishment, not to the merit of reward.

But for those who have agreed by consent to abstain for ever from the use of carnal concupiscence, far be it that the conjugal bond between them should be broken. Rather, it will be the firmer, the more they have entered into pledges with each other that must be kept more lovingly and harmoniously, not by the voluptuous couplings of bodies but by the voluntary affections of minds. For it was not falsely that the angel said to Joseph, “Do not be afraid to take Mary your wife.” She is called his wife from the first pledge of betrothal, though he had not known her by intercourse and was not going to know her; nor had the name of wife perished or remained false where there had been, and was to be, no mingling of flesh. That virgin was indeed all the more holily and wonderfully pleasing to her husband because she was fruitful even without a husband: unequal to him in offspring, equal to him in faithfulness. Because of this faithful marriage both deserved to be called the parents of Christ: not only she his mother but also he his father, as the husband of his mother—both in mind, not in flesh. Yet whether he was father in mind alone, or she mother in the flesh as well, both were parents of his lowliness, not of his loftiness; of his weakness, not of his divinity. For the gospel does not lie where we read, “And his father and mother were marveling at the things said about him,” and in another place, “And his parents went to Jerusalem every year”; and again a little later, “And his mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you done so to us? See, your father and I were seeking you in sorrow.’” But he, to show that besides them he had a Father who begot him without a mother, answered them, “Why is it that you were seeking me? Did you not know that I must be in the things that are my Father's?” And again, lest he be thought to have denied them as his parents by this saying, the evangelist went on to add, “And they did not understand the word that he spoke to them. And he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject to them.” Subject to whom, if not to his parents? And who was subject, if not Jesus Christ, who, “though he was in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God”? Why, then, was he subject to those who were far below the form of God, unless because “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,” the form of which they were the parents? But since she bore him without his sowing seed, surely they would not both have been parents even of that form of a servant unless they had been spouses to each other even without the mingling of flesh. Hence also the series of generations, when the parents of Christ are recorded in a connected succession, had to be carried down to Joseph rather, as was done, so that in that marriage no injury should be done to the male sex, which is certainly the superior; and nothing was lost to the truth, since both Joseph and Mary were of the seed of David, from which Christ had been foretold to come.

Every good of marriage, then, was fulfilled in those parents of Christ: offspring, faithfulness, sacrament. The offspring we recognize as the Lord Jesus himself; faithfulness, because there was no adultery; the sacrament, because there was no divorce. Only conjugal intercourse was not there, because in the flesh of sin it could not take place without that concupiscence of the flesh which came about from sin; and he willed to be conceived without it, who was to be without sin, not in the flesh of sin but in the likeness of the flesh of sin, so that by this too he might teach that all flesh born of intercourse is flesh of sin, since the only flesh not born of it was not flesh of sin. Conjugal intercourse that takes place with the intention of begetting is not itself sin, however, because the good will of the mind leads the bodily pleasure that follows it and does not follow it as it leads; nor is human choice dragged along by sin as its master, since the wound of sin is justly brought into the service of begetting. A certain itch of this wound reigns in the foul deeds of adulteries and of every kind of sexual immorality and impurity, but in the necessities of marriage it serves. There the shamefulness of such a master is condemned; here the honorableness of such an attendant is abashed. This lust, then, is not the good of marriage, but the obscenity of sinners, the necessity of those who beget, the heat of wantonness, the shame of marriage. Why, then, should those not remain spouses who by consent cease to lie together, if Joseph and Mary remained spouses, who never even began to lie together?

For this propagation of children, which among the holy fathers was a most dutiful service for begetting and preserving the people of God, in whom the prophecy of Christ had to go before, no longer has that necessity. For there now lies open, from all nations, an abundance of children to be begotten spiritually, from wherever they have been born carnally. And what is written, “A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,” is recognized as divided between that time and this: that was the time for embracing, this is the time for refraining from embracing.

So the apostle too, speaking of this, says: “But this I say, brothers: the time is short; it remains that those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who weep as though they did not weep, and those who rejoice as though they did not rejoice, and those who buy as though they did not buy, and those who use this world as though they did not use it; for the form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxiety.” All these things, to say something briefly in explanation, I think should be understood thus. “This I say, brothers: the time is short”: the people of God is no longer to be propagated carnally by generation but is now to be gathered spiritually by regeneration. “It remains,” then, that those who have wives should not be subjugated to carnal concupiscence; that those who weep in the sadness of present evil should rejoice in the hope of future good; that those who rejoice because of some temporal advantage should fear the eternal judgment; that those who buy should so possess by having as not to cling by loving; and that those who use this world should reckon that they are passing through, not remaining; “for the form of this world is passing away.” “I want you,” he says, “to be free from anxiety,” that is, I want you to have your heart lifted up to the things that do not pass away. Then he adds: “He who is without a wife thinks about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he who is joined in marriage thinks about the things of the world, how he may please his wife”; and so in a way he explains what he had said above: “Those who have wives, let them be as though they had none.” For those who have wives in such a way that they think about the things of the Lord, how they may please the Lord, and do not think, in the things of the world, about pleasing their wives, are as though they had none. This is done with ease when the wives too are such that their husbands please them not because they are rich, or high in rank, or noble by birth, or lovable in the flesh, but because they are believers, devout, chaste, good men.

But in married people, just as these things are to be desired and praised, so others are to be tolerated, lest they fall into damnable crimes, that is, into acts of sexual immorality or adulteries. For the sake of avoiding this evil, even those acts of intercourse between spouses that are not done for the sake of begetting but serve a victorious concupiscence—in which they are commanded not to defraud each other, lest Satan tempt them because of their incontinence—are not indeed prescribed by way of command, yet they are granted by way of pardon. For thus it is written: “Let the husband render the debt to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The woman does not have power over her own body, but the husband; likewise the husband does not have power over his own body, but the woman. Do not defraud each other, except by consent for a time, so that you may be free for prayer; and come together again, lest Satan tempt you because of your incontinence. But this I say by way of pardon, not by way of command.” Where pardon is to be given, then, it will by no means be denied that there is some fault. Since, therefore, intercourse with the intention of begetting, which is what is properly to be ascribed to marriage, is not blameworthy, what does the apostle grant by way of pardon, except that spouses, when they do not contain themselves, demand the debt of the flesh from each other not from the will to offspring but from the pleasure of lust? Yet this pleasure does not fall into fault because of marriage; rather, because of marriage it receives pardon. For this reason too marriage is praiseworthy, since for its own sake it causes even what does not belong to it to be forgiven. For even this intercourse, in which concupiscence is served, is not so conducted as to prevent the offspring that marriage requires.

But it is one thing not to lie together except with the sole will to beget, which has no fault; another to seek the pleasure of the flesh in lying together, but not beyond one's spouse, which has a venial fault, because, even if the intercourse is not for the sake of propagating offspring, the propagation of offspring is still not obstructed for the sake of this lust by an evil prayer or an evil deed. For those who do this, though they are called spouses, are not, nor do they keep any of the reality of marriage; they hold out an honorable name to veil their shamefulness. They betray themselves, however, when they go so far as to expose the children who are born against their will. For they hate to nourish or keep those whom they feared to beget. So when a dark iniquity rages against its own, whom it begot unwillingly, it is brought out into the light by an open iniquity, and hidden shamefulness is convicted by manifest cruelty. Sometimes this lustful cruelty, or cruel lust, goes so far as even to procure poisons of sterility and, if these avail nothing, to extinguish and destroy in some way within the womb the offspring conceived, wishing its offspring to perish before it lives, or, if it was already living in the womb, to be killed before it is born. Assuredly, if both are such, they are not spouses; and if they were such from the beginning, they came together not by marriage but rather by sexual immorality. But if they are not both such, I dare to say: either she is in a way her husband's harlot, or he is his wife's adulterer.

Since, then, marriage cannot be such as that of the first human beings could have been had sin not gone before, let it be such as that of the holy fathers was: so that the shameful concupiscence of the flesh—which in paradise neither existed before sin nor was permitted to remain there after sin, and which must of necessity exist in the body of this death—is not served, but is rather itself compelled to serve, and only for propagating offspring. Or else, since this time, which we have said is now the time for refraining from embracing, has no necessity of this duty, with so great a fertility of children to be begotten spiritually lying ready everywhere among all nations, let him who can receive that good of excellent continence receive it; but he who cannot receive it, even if he takes a wife, does not sin, and if a woman does not contain herself, let her marry. For it is good for a man not to touch a woman. But since not all receive this word, but those to whom it is given, it remains that because of acts of sexual immorality each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband, and so the weakness of incontinence, lest it fall into the ruin of crimes, is caught by the honorableness of marriage. For what the apostle says about women, “I want the younger women to marry,” can be said about men too—I want the younger men to take wives—so that it may belong to both sexes to procreate children, to be fathers and mothers of families, and to give the adversary no occasion for reproach.

In marriage, however, let the goods of marriage be loved: offspring, faithfulness, sacrament. But offspring not only that it may be born but also that it may be reborn; for it is born to punishment unless it is reborn to life. And faithfulness, not such as even unbelievers have toward each other in their jealousy for the flesh; for what husband, however ungodly, wants an adulterous wife? Or what woman, however ungodly, wants an adulterous husband? This is indeed a natural good in marriage, but a carnal one. But a member of Christ ought to fear adultery in the spouse for the spouse's sake, not for his own, and to hope from Christ for the reward of the faithfulness he shows the spouse. And the sacrament, which not even those who are separated and adulterous lose, let spouses guard in harmony and chastity. For it alone holds even a barren marriage together by the law of piety, when the hope of fruitfulness, for the sake of which it was joined, has been lost. Let him who wants to praise marriage praise these goods of marriage in marriage. But the concupiscence of the flesh is not to be ascribed to marriage, but to be tolerated in it. For it is not a good coming from natural marriage, but an evil befalling it from the ancient sin.

Because of this concupiscence, then, it comes about that even from the just and lawful marriages of the children of God, not children of God but children of the world are begotten, because those who beget, even if they have already been regenerated, do not beget from what makes them children of God, but from what makes them still children of the world. For it is the Lord's statement: “The children of this world beget and are begotten.” From what makes us still children of this world, then, our outer man is corrupted, and from this also children of this world are begotten, and they do not become children of God unless they are regenerated; but from what makes us children of God, the inner man is renewed from day to day—although the outer man itself has been sanctified through the bath of regeneration and has received the hope of future incorruption, for which reason it is also rightly called a temple of God. “Your bodies,” says the apostle, “are a temple in you of the Holy Spirit, whom you have from God, and you are not your own; for you were bought at a great price. Glorify God, then, in your body.” All this was said not only because of present sanctification but especially because of that hope of which he says in another place: “But we ourselves too, having the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, awaiting adoption, the redemption of our body.” If, then, according to the apostle, the redemption of our body is awaited, surely what is awaited is still hoped for and not yet held. So he adds: “For in hope we have been saved; but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does anyone hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” It is not, therefore, through what we await, but through what we endure, that carnal children are propagated. Far be it, then, that a believing man, when he hears the apostle say, “Love your wives,” should love in his wife the concupiscence of the flesh, which he ought not to love even in himself, since he hears the other apostle: “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him; for all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eyes and the ambition of the world, which is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world will pass away, and its concupiscence; but he who does the will of God abides for ever, as God also abides for ever.”

Whatever is born of this concupiscence of the flesh, then, is born to the world, not to God; but it is born to God when it is reborn of water and the Spirit. Regeneration alone forgives the guilt of this concupiscence, which generation contracts. What has been generated, then, must be regenerated, because there is no other way for what has been contracted to be forgiven. That what has been forgiven in the parent should be contracted in the offspring happens in wonderful ways indeed, but it does happen. So that these things, invisible and incredible to unbelievers yet true, might have some visible example, divine providence has provided one in certain trees. For why should we not believe that this was established for this purpose, that the wild olive is born from the olive? Or is it not to be believed that, in some thing created for human use, the Creator foresaw and established what might serve as an example for the human race? It is wonderful, then, how those freed by grace from the chain of sin nevertheless beget children bound by the same chain, who must be freed in the same way. We admit it is wonderful. But that the offspring of wild olives lie hidden even in the seeds of olives—when would this be believed, unless it were proved by experience? Therefore, just as from the seed of the wild olive a wild olive is begotten, and from the seed of the olive nothing but a wild olive, though there is a very great difference between the wild olive and the olive, so from the flesh of a sinner and from the flesh of a righteous man alike a sinner is begotten, though there is a very great difference between the sinner and the righteous man. And a sinner is begotten who is as yet nothing in act and new in birth, but old in guilt: a human being from the Creator, a captive from the deceiver, in need of a Redeemer. But it is asked how the captivity of offspring can be contracted even from parents already redeemed. And because this is not traced out by easy reasoning nor explained in words, unbelievers do not believe it—as though what we said about the wild olive and the olive, that the offspring should be like a kind unlike its parent, were easily found out by some reasoning or explained in words. But this can be seen by anyone who is willing to try it. Let it serve, then, as an example, from which what cannot be seen may also be believed.

For the Christian faith, which the new heretics have begun to attack, does not doubt that those who are washed in the bath of regeneration are redeemed from the power of the devil, and that those not yet redeemed by such regeneration, even the little children of the redeemed, are captives under the power of that same devil unless they too are redeemed by the same grace of Christ. For we do not doubt that the benefit of God of which the apostle speaks belongs to all ages: “who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love.” Whoever denies, then, that little children, when they are baptized, are rescued from this power of darkness, whose prince is the devil—that is, from the power of the devil and his angels—is refuted by the truth of the church's own sacraments, which no heretical novelty is allowed to take away or change in the church of Christ, since the head rules and helps his whole body, the little ones with the great. It is in truth, then, and not in falsehood, that the devil's power is exorcised in little children, and they renounce him—since they cannot do so through their own hearts and mouths, they do it through those of the people who carry them—so that, rescued from the power of darkness, they may be transferred into the kingdom of their Lord. What, then, is in them through which they are held in the power of the devil until they are rescued from it by the sacrament of Christ's baptism? What is it but sin? For the devil found nothing else by which he could bring under his own right human nature, which the good Author created good. But little children have committed no sin of their own in their own life. There remains, then, original sin, through which they are captives under the power of the devil, unless they are redeemed from it by the bath of regeneration and the blood of Christ and pass into the kingdom of their Redeemer, the power of their captor being frustrated and power being given them to become children of God instead of children of this world.

Now if we were in some way to question those goods of marriage as to how sin could have been propagated from them to little children, the work of propagating offspring will answer us: “I would have been happier in paradise if sin had not been committed. For to me belongs that blessing of God, ‘Increase and multiply.’ For this good work the different members of the different sexes were formed; they existed already before sin, but they were not shameful.” The faithfulness of chastity will answer: “If there had been no sin, what could have been more secure than I in paradise, where neither my own lust would goad me nor another's tempt me?” The sacrament of marriage too will answer: “Of me it was said in paradise before sin, ‘A man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh,’ which the apostle calls a great sacrament in Christ and in the church.” What, then, is great in Christ and in the church is very small in each husband and wife, yet it is still a sacrament of inseparable union. Which of these is there in marriage from which the chain of sin could pass to descendants? None at all; and surely the goodness of marriage would be complete in these three goods, by which marriage is good even now.

But further, if that concupiscence of the flesh is questioned, through which those members became shameful that had not been shameful before, will it not answer that it began to exist in man's members after sin? And that it is therefore called in the apostle's words the law of sin, because it made man subject to itself when he refused to be subject to his God; and that it is the thing at which the first married couple blushed then, when they covered their shameful parts, and at which all now blush when they seek privacy for lying together and do not dare to have as witnesses of this act even the children whom they begot by it? Against this natural modesty the error of the Cynic philosophers struggled with astonishing shamelessness, since they held that because this act was lawful and honorable, it should be done openly with one's spouse. Hence the filthiness of this shamelessness rightly received the name of dogs; for that is why they were called Cynics.

This concupiscence, in short, this law of sin dwelling in the members, which the law of righteousness forbids us to obey, as the apostle says, “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires, and do not present your members to sin as weapons of iniquity”—this concupiscence, I say, which is expiated only by the sacrament of regeneration, surely passes on the chain of sin by generation to descendants, unless they too are released from it by regeneration. For in the regenerate this concupiscence itself is no longer sin, when consent is not given to it for unlawful deeds, and the members are not handed over by the mind, their queen, to carry them out; so that if what is written, “You shall not covet,” is not done, at least what we read elsewhere is done: “Do not go after your lusts.” But because, by a certain way of speaking, it is called sin, since it came about by sin and, if it conquers, produces sin, its guilt prevails in the one who is generated; and this guilt the grace of Christ, through the forgiveness of all sins, does not allow to prevail in the one who is regenerated, if he does not obey it when it, so to speak, commands evil deeds. It is called sin in the sense that it was made by sin, though in the regenerate it is no longer itself sin, just as speech, which the tongue produces, is called a tongue, and writing, which the hand produces, is called a hand; and it is called sin also in the sense that, if it conquers, it produces sin, just as cold is called sluggish, not because it is produced by sluggish people, but because it makes people sluggish.

This wound, inflicted on the human race by the devil, compels whatever is born through it to be under the devil, as though he were plucking fruit by right from his own shrub; not that human nature is from him, for it is only from God, but the fault is, which is not from God. For human nature is condemned not on its own account—it is praiseworthy, being the work of God—but on account of the damnable fault by which it has been corrupted. And on account of what it is condemned for, on that account it is also subjected to the damnable devil, because the devil himself too is an unclean spirit: good, certainly, in that he is a spirit, evil in that he is unclean; for he is a spirit by nature and unclean by fault, and of these two the former is from God, the latter from himself. So he does not hold human beings, whether of greater age or infants, because they are human beings, but because they are unclean. Let him, then, who wonders that a creature of God is subject to the devil not wonder; for a creature of God is subject to a creature of God, the lesser to the greater, since a man is subject to an angel—not, however, on account of nature, but on account of fault, since it is the unclean subject to the unclean. This is his fruit from the ancient root of uncleanness that he planted in man; though he himself, the more unclean he is, will suffer the greater punishments at the last judgment. Nevertheless, even those for whom it will be more tolerable in that condemnation are subject to him as to the prince and author of sin, because there will be no cause of condemnation except sin.

Therefore the devil holds little children guilty, born not from the good by which marriage is good, but from the evil of concupiscence, which marriage indeed uses well but at which marriage too blushes. For although marriage is honorable in all the goods that properly belong to it, even if it keeps its bed undefiled not only from acts of sexual immorality and adulteries, which are damnable crimes, but also from those excesses of intercourse that take place not for the sake of offspring under the rule of the will but for the sake of pleasure under the victory of lust, which in spouses are venial sins—still, when it comes to the work of begetting, that lawful and honorable intercourse itself cannot be without the heat of lust, so that what belongs to reason, not to lust, can be accomplished. This heat, whether it follows the will or goes before it, still does not move the members, which cannot be moved by the will, except by a kind of command of its own; and so it shows itself to be not the servant of a will that commands but the punishment of a will that disobeyed, and to be set in motion not by free choice but by some enticing goad, and therefore to be shameful. From this concupiscence of the flesh—which, although in the regenerate it is no longer reckoned as sin, nevertheless does not befall nature except from sin—from this concupiscence of the flesh, I say, as the daughter of sin, and, when consent is given to it for shameful acts, the mother also of many sins, whatever offspring is born is bound by original sin, unless it is reborn in him whom the virgin conceived without this concupiscence, and who therefore, when he deigned to be born in the flesh, alone was born without sin.

But if it is asked how this concupiscence of the flesh remains in the regenerate, in whom the forgiveness of all sins has taken place—since it is through it that the carnal offspring even of a baptized parent is sown and with it that it is begotten—or at any rate, if in a baptized parent it can exist and not be sin, why the same thing should be sin in the offspring, the answer is that concupiscence of the flesh is forgiven in baptism, not so that it ceases to exist, but so that it is not imputed as sin. And though its guilt is already loosed, it still remains until all our weakness is healed, as the renewal of the inner man advances from day to day, when the outer man has put on incorruption. For it does not remain substantially, like some body or spirit, but is a certain affection of an evil quality, like a languor. Nothing remains, then, that is not forgiven when it takes place, as it is written, “The Lord is merciful to all our iniquities”; but until what follows also takes place, “who heals all your languors, who redeems your life from corruption,” the concupiscence of the flesh remains in the body of this death, and we are commanded not to obey its vicious desires to commit unlawful acts, so that sin may not reign in our mortal body. Yet this concupiscence is diminished daily in those who make progress and are continent, and most of all when old age comes on as well. But in those who serve it wickedly it gains such strength that often, even when their members fail with age and those same parts of the body are less able to be moved to that work, it does not cease to rage more shamefully and more wantonly.

In those, then, who are regenerated in Christ, when they receive the forgiveness of absolutely all sins, it is certainly necessary that the guilt of this concupiscence also, though it still remains, be forgiven, so that, as I said, it is not imputed as sin. For just as the guilt of those sins that cannot remain, because they pass away as they are done, nevertheless remains, and will remain for ever unless it is forgiven, so the guilt of this concupiscence is taken away when it is forgiven. For this is what it is not to have sin: not to be guilty of sin. For if someone, for example, has committed adultery, even if he never does it again, he is guilty of adultery until the guilt of it is forgiven by pardon. He has sin, then, although what he committed no longer exists, since it passed away with the time in which it was done. For if to stop sinning were the same as not to have sins, it would be enough for Scripture to warn us, “Son, you have sinned; do not do so again.” But it is not enough; it added, “and pray about your former sins, that they may be forgiven you.” They remain, then, unless they are forgiven. But how do they remain, if they are past, unless because they have passed away in act but remain in guilt? So conversely it can happen that something remains in act but passes away in guilt.

For the concupiscence of the flesh does something even when neither the heart's assent is given to it, so that it reigns, nor the members, as weapons with which to carry out what it commands. And what does it do, but produce those evil and shameful desires themselves? For if they were good and lawful, the apostle would not forbid obeying them, saying, “Let not sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires.” He does not say “so that you have its desires,” but “so that you obey its desires,” so that, since they are greater in some and lesser in others, according as each has made progress in the newness of the inner man, we may keep up the contest of righteousness and chastity in this: not to obey them. Yet we ought to will that these desires should not even exist, even if we cannot attain this in the body of this death. For this is why the same apostle, speaking in another place as though in his own person, instructs us, saying, “For I do not do what I do not will, but what I hate, that I do,” that is, I lust; for he did not will to do even this, so as to be perfect in every part. “But if I do what I do not will,” he says, “I agree with the law that it is good”—because the law too does not will what I also do not will. For the law that says, “You shall not covet,” does not will that I should covet, and I do not will to covet. In this, then, the will of the law and my will agree. But because he did not will to lust and yet did lust, though he did not serve that concupiscence by any consent, he added: “But now it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells in me.”

But a man is greatly deceived who, consenting to the concupiscence of his flesh and deciding and resolving to do what it desires, thinks he may still say, “It is not I who do it,” even if he hates it, because he consents. For both are true at once: he himself hates it, because he knows it is evil, and he himself does it, because he has resolved to do it. And if he adds what Scripture forbids when it says, “And do not present your members to sin as weapons of iniquity,” so that he carries out with the body too what he resolved to do in the heart, and then says, “It is not I who do it, but the sin that dwells in me,” because he is displeased with himself when he decides and does it, he errs so badly that he does not even recognize himself, since, when it is wholly himself, both in the heart that resolves and in the body that carries it out, he still does not think it is himself. He, then, who says, “It is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells in me,” speaks the truth if he only lusts; not if he decides by the heart's consent, or even carries it out by the service of the body.

Then the apostle adds: “For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh; for to will is present with me, but to accomplish the good I do not find.” This was said because good is accomplished when there are no evil desires, just as evil is accomplished when evil desires are obeyed. But when they exist but are not obeyed, neither is evil accomplished, since they are not obeyed, nor good, since they exist; but good is done in part, because consent is not given to evil concupiscence, and evil remains in part, because there is at least the lusting. That is why the apostle does not say that to do good is not present with him, but to accomplish it. For he does much good who does what is written, “Do not go after your lusts,” but he does not accomplish it, because he does not fulfill what is written, “You shall not covet.” The law said, “You shall not covet,” for this reason: so that, finding ourselves lying in this disease, we might seek the medicine of grace, and might know in that commandment both toward what we ought to strive by progress in this mortality and what can be reached by us in that most blessed immortality. For unless it were at some time to be accomplished, it would never have been commanded.

Then the apostle, repeating himself to commend the preceding statement more fully, says: “For I do not do the good that I will, but the evil that I do not will, that I do. But if I do what I do not will, it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells in me.” And he goes on: “I find, then, a law, that when I will to do good, evil is present with me”—that is: I find that the law is good for me when I will to do what the law wills, since evil is present, not to the law itself, which says, “You shall not covet,” but to me: the evil that I do not will, since I lust even against my will. “For I delight in the law of God,” he says, “according to the inner man; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive under the law of sin that is in my members.” This delight in the law of God according to the inner man comes to us from the great grace of God. For in it our inner man is renewed from day to day, when it perseveringly makes progress in it. For it is not fear that tortures but love that delights. There we are truly free, where we do not take delight unwillingly.

But what he says, “but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind,” is the very concupiscence of which we are speaking, the law of sin in the flesh of sin. And when he said, “and taking me captive under the law of sin,” that is, under itself, “which is in my members,” either he said “taking captive” for “trying to take captive,” that is, pressing to consent and carry out; or rather—and this admits of no dispute—“taking captive” according to the flesh, for unless carnal concupiscence, which he calls the law of sin, held the flesh, it would surely not stir up in it any unlawful desire that the mind ought not to obey. But because he did not say “taking my flesh captive” but “taking me captive,” we had to look for another sense here and to take “taking captive” as if he had said “trying to take captive.” But why should he not say “taking me captive” when he wanted his flesh to be understood? Was it not said of Jesus, when his flesh had not been found in the tomb, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have put him”? Was that wrongly said because it did not say “the flesh” or “the body of my Lord,” but “my Lord”?

Yet a little earlier the apostle himself showed clearly enough how he could rightly say of his flesh, “taking me captive.” For when he had said, “For I know that good does not dwell in me,” he explained this very thing by adding, “that is, in my flesh.” This, then, is what is taken captive under the law of sin, the thing in which good does not dwell, that is, the flesh. And he now called “flesh” the place where there is a certain diseased affection of the flesh, not the very structure of the body, whose members are not to be presented as weapons to sin, that is, to that same concupiscence which holds this carnal part of ours captive. For as far as its bodily substance and nature are concerned, in faithful men, whether married or continent, it is already a temple of God. And yet, if nothing at all of our flesh were held captive—not indeed under the devil, for there too the forgiveness of sin has taken place, so that sin is not imputed, which is properly called the law of sin—yet if our flesh were not held captive to some extent under that law of sin, that is, under its own concupiscence, how would what the same apostle says be true: “awaiting adoption, the redemption of our body”? The redemption of our body, therefore, is still awaited to the extent that it is still in some part captive under the law of sin. Hence here too he cries out, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” What are we to understand here, except that the body which is corrupted weighs down the soul? When, therefore, this same body is received back incorruptible, there will be full deliverance from the body of this death, from which those who will rise to punishment are not delivered. It is understood, then, to belong to the body of this death that another law in the members wars against the law of the mind, while the flesh lusts against the spirit, even if it does not subjugate the mind, since the spirit too lusts against the flesh. And so, although the law of sin itself holds some part of the flesh captive, from which it resists the law of the mind, it nevertheless does not reign in our body, mortal though it is, if its desires are not obeyed. For enemies against whom one fights often both come off worse in the struggle and, though beaten, hold something captive. And what is held under the law of sin in our flesh is nevertheless in the hope of redemption, because that vicious concupiscence will not remain at all, and our flesh, healed of that plague and disease and wholly clothed with immortality, will remain in eternal blessedness.

The apostle then adds: “So then I myself with the mind serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” This is to be understood thus: with the mind I serve the law of God by not consenting to the law of sin; but with the flesh I serve the law of sin by having desires of sin, which, although I do not consent to them, I am not yet wholly without. Let us note, finally, what he brings in after this: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Even now, he says, when the law in the members wars against the law of the mind and holds something captive in the body of this death, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Hear why: “For the law of the Spirit of life,” he says, “in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.” Set me free—how? Only because it has dissolved its guilt by the forgiveness of all sins, so that, although it still remains and is diminished more and more from day to day, it is nevertheless not imputed as sin.

As long, then, as this forgiveness of sins has not taken place in the offspring, this law of sin is there in such a way that it is also imputed as sin, that is, its guilt is also with it, which holds the offspring debtor to eternal punishment. For what a parent passes on to his carnal offspring is what he too was by carnal birth, not what he is by spiritual rebirth; because that very thing by which he was born carnally, although, its guilt being loosed, it does not hinder his fruit, nevertheless lies hidden as in the seed of the olive, even though, because of the forgiveness of sins, it does no harm to the oil—that is, to the life by which the righteous man lives by faith according to Christ, who is named from oil, that is, from the chrism. But what is covered in the regenerated parent without any guilt, as in the seed of the olive, because it has been forgiven, is surely held with guilt in the offspring not yet regenerated, as in the wild olive, until there too it is forgiven by the same grace. For from the time when Adam, by sinning, was turned from such an olive—in which there was not even any seed of the kind from which the bitterness of the wild olive might be born—into a wild olive, he made the whole human race a wild olive, because it was so great a sin that by it there was a great change of nature for the worse. So—as we now see in the trees themselves—if divine grace turns anything from it into an olive, the fault of the first birth, which was original sin derived and contracted from carnal concupiscence, is forgiven there, covered, and not imputed; and yet from it a wild olive is born, unless it too is reborn into an olive by the same grace.

Blessed, then, is the olive whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered; blessed is the one to whom the Lord has not imputed sin. But what is forgiven and covered and not imputed has, until the full change into eternal immortality takes place, a certain hidden force from which a bitter wild olive is sown, unless there too, by the same husbandry of God, it is forgiven, covered, and not imputed. But there will be nothing at all faulty even in carnal seed when, through the same regeneration that now takes place by the holy bath, which cleanses and heals all the evils of man to the end, the same flesh through which the soul became carnal will itself become spiritual as well, with no concupiscence of the flesh to resist the law of the mind, and emitting no carnal seed. For so we must understand what the same apostle says: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her with the bath of water in the word, that he might present the church to himself glorious, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing.” So, I say, this must be understood: that by the same bath of regeneration and word of sanctification absolutely all the evils of regenerated human beings are cleansed and healed—not only the sins, all of which are now forgiven in baptism, but also those contracted later through human ignorance or weakness; not that baptism is repeated as often as there is sin, but because by that one baptism, given once, it comes about that pardon for any sins whatever is obtained for believers not only before but also after. For what good would repentance be, either before baptism if baptism did not follow, or after it if baptism did not come first? In the Lord's Prayer itself, which is our daily cleansing, with what fruit, with what effect would “Forgive us our debts” be said, unless it were said by those who have been baptized? And again, to whom would the generosity of almsgiving and any amount of kindness be of any use for the forgiveness of his sins, if he had not been baptized? Finally, the very happiness of the kingdom of heaven, where the church will have no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, where there will be nothing to reprove, nothing feigned, where there will be not only no guilt but no concupiscence of sin either—whose will it be, if not the baptized?

And so not only all sins, but absolutely all the evils of human beings are taken away by the holiness of the Christian bath, by which Christ cleanses his church, so that he may present her to himself, not in this world but in the world to come, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing. For those who say that the church is such now, and yet are in it: since they themselves confess that they have sins, if they speak the truth, then, since they are not clean from sins, the church surely has a spot in them; but if they speak falsely, since they speak with a double heart, the church has a wrinkle in them. And if they say that they have these things but the church does not, then let them confess that they are not its members and do not belong to its body, so that they are condemned even by their own confession.

Now concerning this concupiscence of the flesh, which I have taken care to distinguish at length from the goods of marriage because of the new heretics, who, when it is blamed, slander us as though marriage were blamed—so that, by praising it as a natural good, they may confirm their pestilent doctrine, by which they assert that the offspring born through it contracts no original sin—concerning this concupiscence of the flesh, then, blessed Ambrose, bishop of Milan, by whose priestly ministry I received the bath of regeneration, spoke briefly thus, when, expounding the prophet Isaiah, he was setting forth the carnal birth of Christ: “Therefore,” he says, “as man he was tempted in all things, and in the likeness of men he endured all things; but as born of the Spirit he abstained from sin. For every man is a liar, and no one is without sin except God alone. It has therefore been kept that no one born of man and woman, that is, through that mingling of bodies, is seen to be free from sin. But he who is free from sin is free also from conception of this kind.” Did holy Ambrose, then, by the truth of this statement of his, condemn the goodness of marriage, and not rather the vanity of these heretics, though they had not yet appeared? I thought this worth mentioning because Pelagius praises Ambrose so highly as to say: “Blessed Ambrose the bishop, in whose books above all the Roman faith shines out, who shone forth as a beautiful flower among Latin writers, whose faith and most pure understanding of the Scriptures not even an enemy has dared to criticize.” Let him, then, repent of what he has thought against Ambrose, so that he need not repent of having praised Ambrose so. You have a book that is as laborious for you to read, both from the burden of its length and the difficulty of its question, as it was for me to dictate, in whatever small portions of time could find you, or will find you, at leisure. I would certainly not have thrust it, worked out as well as the Lord deigned to help me amid my church cares, upon you amid your public ones, had I not heard from the man of God who knows you more intimately that you read so willingly that you even spend some hours of the night wakefully in reading.

Amid the cares of your military service, of the illustrious rank you bear as your merits deserve, and of the necessary business of the state, my dearly beloved and honored son Valerius, you burn with such zeal for the divine words against the heretics that I cannot adequately say with what joy of mind I am delighted. So, after I read your Sublimity's letter, in which you thank me for the book I wrote to you but advise me to hear through my brother and fellow bishop Alypius what the heretics take up for dispute from certain passages of that book, I was roused to write this. And since I learned this not only from the report of my brother, but also read the papers he produced, which you yourself took care to send to Rome after his departure from Ravenna, and in which I was able to find the empty talk of our adversaries, I have resolved to answer them, with the Lord's help, with as much truth as I can and with the authority of the divine Scriptures.

The paper to which I now reply is headed with this title: “Chapters from the book that Augustine wrote, against which I have extracted a few things from books.” Here I see that the man who sent these writings to your Excellency wished to extract them from some books or other, for the sake, I suppose, of a quicker reply, so as not to delay your urgency. When I considered what these books might be, I judged them to be those that Julian mentions in the letter he sent to Rome, a copy of which reached me at the same time. For there he says: “They also say that the marriages now taking place were not instituted by God; this is read in the book of Augustine, against whom I have just replied in four little books.” I believe these extracts were taken from those little books. So it might perhaps have been better for my effort to be spent in refuting and rebutting his whole work, which he set out in four volumes, had I not been unwilling to delay my reply, just as you did not delay sending the writings that had to be answered.

He set down, then, these words from my book, which I sent to you and which you know very well, and tried to refute them: “They cry out against us with the utmost malice that we condemn marriage and the divine work by which God creates human beings from males and females, because we say that those who are born of such intercourse contract original sin, and we do not deny that they, of whatever parents they are born, are still under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ.” In these words of mine he passed over the testimony of the apostle that I had inserted, by whose great weight he felt himself pressed. For when I had said that human beings at birth contract original sin, I at once brought in what the apostle says: “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death; and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” Having passed over this testimony, as we said, he stitched together the rest, quoted above. For he knows how the hearts of catholic believers are accustomed to take these apostolic words that he passed over—words so straightforward and shining with such light, which the new heretics strive to obscure and distort with dark and twisted interpretations.

Then he appended other words of mine, where I said: “They do not notice that the good of marriage can no more be accused because of the original evil that is contracted from it than the evil of adulteries and acts of sexual immorality can be excused because of the natural good that is born of them; for just as sin, whether contracted from the one or from the other, is the work of the devil, so a human being, whether born from the one or from the other, is the work of God.” Here too he passed over the words in which he feared catholic ears. For to come to these words, we had said above: “Because we say this, then, which is contained in the most ancient and most firm rule of the catholic faith, these champions of a novel and perverse doctrine, who say that there is no sin in little children to be washed away by the bath of regeneration, faithlessly or ignorantly slander us, as if we condemned marriage, and as if we said that the work of God, that is, the human being who is born of it, is the work of the devil.” With these words of ours passed over, there follow the words of ours that he did set down, as written above. In what he passed over, then, he feared this: that what we said—that they say there is no sin in little children to be washed away by the bath of regeneration—addresses all the hearts of the catholic church, appeals in a clear voice, as it were, to the faith itself, handed down and founded from of old, and stirs it most vehemently against them. For all run to church with their little children for no other reason than that the original sin contracted in them by the generation of the first birth may be expiated by the regeneration of the second birth.

Then he returns to our earlier words, though I do not know why he repeats them: “But we say that those who are born of such intercourse contract original sin, and we do not deny that they, of whatever parents they are born, are still under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ.” He had already given these words of ours a little before. Then he adds what we said about Christ: “who willed not to be born of the same intercourse of both sexes.” But here too he passed over what I had set down: “so that, rescued by his grace from the power of darkness, they may be transferred into the kingdom of him who willed not to be born of that same intercourse of both sexes.” See, I beg you, how he avoided our words, as one wholly an enemy of the grace of God that comes through Jesus Christ our Lord! For he knows that it is most shameless and most impious to separate little children from that statement of the apostle in which he said of God the Father, “who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love.” That is doubtless why he preferred to pass over these words rather than set them down.

After this he set down that passage of ours where we said: “For this shameful concupiscence, which is shamelessly praised by shameless men, would not exist had man not sinned first; but marriage would exist even if no one had sinned; for the sowing of children would then take place without this disease.” Up to this point he set down my words; for he feared what I added: “in the body of that life, without which it cannot now take place in the body of this death.” And here, so as not to finish my sentence but in a way to cut it short, he dreaded that testimony of the apostle where he says, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” For the body of this death did not exist in paradise before sin; that is why we said that in the body of that life which existed there the sowing of children could have taken place without this disease, without which it cannot now take place in the body of this death. And before the apostle came to this recollection of human misery and divine grace, he had said: “I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive in the law of sin that is in my members.” After these words he cried out: “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” In a body, then, not of this death but such as there was in paradise before sin, there was surely no other law in our members warring against the law of our mind—the law that, even when we do not will it, and when we do not consent or present our members to it to fulfill what it craves, nevertheless dwells in them and assails the mind that resists and fights back, so that the conflict itself, even if it is not damnable, because it does not accomplish iniquity, is nevertheless miserable, because it has no peace. I have pointed out sufficiently, then, that he chose to set out my words for refutation in such a way that in one place he broke off my sentences by removing the middle, and in another cut them short by not adding the ends; and I have sufficiently shown why he did this.

Now let us see what words of his own he set against those words of ours that he set out as he wished. For his words now follow, and, as the man who sent you the paper indicated, he first wrote out something from a preface—doubtless the preface of those books from which he extracted a few things. It runs thus: “The teachers of our time, most blessed brother, the authors of the wicked faction that is still seething, have resolved to bring about the insult and destruction of the men whose holy endeavors inflame them, through the ruin of the whole church, not understanding how much honor they have conferred on those whose glory, they have shown, could not be overthrown except together with the catholic religion. For if anyone says either that there is free choice in human beings or that God is the creator of those who are born, he is called a Caelestian and a Pelagian. So, in order not to be called heretics, they become Manichees, and while they fear a false infamy they incur a true crime, like wild beasts that are surrounded with feathers so that they may be driven into the nets; lacking reason, they are thrust by an empty fear into true destruction.”

It is not as you say, whoever you are who said this; it is not so. You are much deceived, or you mean to deceive. We do not deny free choice; but “if the Son sets you free,” says the Truth, “then you will be truly free.” You grudge this Liberator to those captives to whom you have attributed an empty freedom. For “by whatever anyone has been overcome,” as Scripture says, “to that he is bound as a slave”; and no one is released from this chain of slavery, from which no human being is exempt, except by the grace of the Liberator. For “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” God is the creator of those who are born, then, in such a way that all go from the one into condemnation of whom he is not the liberator in their rebirth. For he is called the potter who from the same lump makes one vessel for honor according to mercy, another for dishonor according to judgment; to whom the church sings of mercy and judgment. It is not the case, then, as you say, deceiving yourself and others, that “if anyone says either that there is free choice in human beings or that God is the creator of those who are born, he is called a Caelestian and a Pelagian”—for the catholic faith says these things—but if anyone says that there is free choice in human beings for worshiping God rightly without his help, and whoever says that God is the creator of those who are born in such a way as to deny that he is the redeemer of little children from the power of the devil, he is called a Pelagian and a Caelestian. That there is free choice in human beings and that God is the creator of those who are born, we both say; it is not from this that you are Caelestians and Pelagians. But that anyone is free to do good without the help of God, and that little children are not rescued from the power of darkness and so transferred into the kingdom of God—this you say, and it is from this that you are Caelestians and Pelagians. Why do you hold out the covering of a common doctrine in order to deceive, so as to cover your own crime, from which your name has been given you? And to frighten the unlearned with a wicked name, you say: “So, in order not to be called heretics, they become Manichees.”

Hear, then, briefly what is at issue in this question. Catholics say that human nature was created good by the good God, its Creator, but, corrupted by sin, needs Christ the physician. Manichees say that human nature was not created good by God and then corrupted by sin, but that man was created by the prince of eternal darkness from a mixture of two natures that always existed, one good and one evil. Pelagians and Caelestians say that human nature was created good by the good God, but is so healthy in little children at birth that at that age they have no need of the medicine of Christ. Recognize, then, your own name in your own doctrine, and stop throwing at the catholics, by whom you are refuted, a doctrine and a name that belong to others; for the truth refutes both, the Manichees and you. To the Manichees it says: “Have you not read that he who made man from the beginning made them male and female? And he said, ‘For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined, let man not separate.” So, against the Manichees, who deny both, it shows that God is both the creator of human beings and the one who joins spouses. But to you it says: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” But you, excellent Christians, answer Christ: “If you came to seek and to save what was lost, you did not come for little children—they were not lost, and were born saved; go to the older ones. We bar you by your own words: ‘It is not the healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.’” So it comes about that the Manichee, who says that an evil nature has been mixed into man, wants at least the good soul to be saved from it by Christ; but you contend that in little children, since they are saved, there is nothing to be saved by Christ. And so the Manichee abominably vilifies human nature, but you praise it cruelly. For whoever believe you as its praiser will not bring their infants to the Savior. When you hold such wicked views, what good does it do you not to fear what is done to you so that you may fear to your salvation, and to make yourself out a man, not a beast surrounded with feathers to be driven into the nets? What was needed was for you to hold the truth and not be afraid in your zeal for it; but as it is, you are so unafraid that, if you were afraid, you would escape the malicious nets rather than run into them. Your catholic mother frightens you for this reason, because she fears for you and for others from you; and if, through her sons placed in some position of power, she acts so that you may fear, she does it not from cruelty but from love. But you, a very brave man, think it cowardly to fear men. Fear God, then, and do not try with such obstinacy to overthrow the ancient foundations of the catholic faith. And yet I wish that this spirited mind of yours would at least fear men in this cause; I wish, I say, that it would rather tremble in cowardice than perish in boldness!

Let us see the rest of what he joins together. But what shall I do? Shall I set out each of his statements and answer them, or, passing over those that the catholic faith contains, deal with and refute only those in which he strays from the path of truth and tries to graft the Pelagian heresy, like poisonous shoots, onto catholic shrubs? That is certainly shorter. But I think I must take care that no one who has read my book, and not read all that he said, should think that I was unwilling to set out the statements on which his depend and from which the false things I refute are shown, as if by consequence, to be true. So let the reader not be reluctant to attend to and consider everything included in this little work of ours: both what he said and what I myself answer.

The man who sent your Affection the paper headed what follows thus: “Against those who condemn marriage and assign its fruits to the devil.” Not against us, then, who neither condemn marriage—which we even praise in its own order with the praise it is due—nor assign its fruits to the devil. For the fruits of marriage are the human beings who are begotten from it in due order, not the sins with which they are born. Nor are human beings under the devil because they are human beings, in which respect they are the fruits of marriage, but because they are sinners, in which respect there is the propagation of faults; for the devil is the author of guilt, not of nature.

Consider the rest, by which he thinks he agrees, against us, with the title set before it. “God,” he says, “who had fashioned Adam from the clay, built Eve from the rib and said, ‘She shall be called Life, because she is the mother of all the living.’” That is not, in fact, how it is written; but what does it matter to us? For it often happens that memory fails over the words while the sense is kept. Nor was it God who gave Eve the name, to be called Life, but her husband. For thus we read: “And Adam called the name of his wife Life, because she is the mother of all the living.” But perhaps he understood it so that God may be believed to have given Eve that name through Adam, as through prophecy. For in her being called Life and mother of the living there is a great sacrament of the church, which it would take long to discuss now and is not necessary for the work undertaken. For that also which the apostle calls “This is a great sacrament, but I speak in Christ and in the church” was said by Adam himself: “For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh.” Yet the Lord Jesus in the gospel records that God said it, because God indeed said through the man what the man foretold by prophesying. So look at what follows. “By the first name,” he says, “he showed for what work she had been prepared, and said, ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth.’” Which of us denies that the woman was prepared for the work of childbearing by the Lord God, the good creator of all good things? See what he adds to this. “God, therefore,” he says, “the creator of male and female, formed members suited to generation and ordained that bodies should be begotten from bodies, while yet the power of his working intervenes in their effecting it, administering all that exists by the same power by which he created it.” We confess that this too is catholic, and also what he adds next: “If, then, there is no offspring except through sex, no sex except through the body, no body except through God, who can doubt that fruitfulness is rightly ascribed to God?”

After these things, which were said truly and in a catholic way—or rather written truly in the divine books, though not said in a catholic way by him, because they were not said with the intention of a catholic heart—the Pelagian and Caelestian heresy now begins to be brought in, for the sake of which he said them. For note what follows. “But you,” he says, “who say, ‘We do not deny that those who are born of whatever parents are under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ,’ show us now what the devil recognizes as his own in the sexes, by which, as you say, he may rightly possess their fruit. The difference of the sexes? But this is in the bodies, which God made. Their union? But it is vindicated by the privilege of blessing no less than of institution. For it is the voice of God: ‘A man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh’; it is the voice of God: ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth.’ Or perhaps fruitfulness itself? But that is the very reason marriage was instituted.”

You see, then, how he asks us what the devil recognizes as his own in the sexes, through which those who are born of whatever parents are under him unless they are reborn in Christ: whether we say that the difference of the sexes belongs to the devil, or their union, or fruitfulness itself. We answer, then: none of these; for the difference of the sexes belongs to the vessels of those who beget, the union of both belongs to the sowing of children, and fruitfulness itself belongs to the blessing of marriage. And all these are from God. But among all these he was unwilling to name the concupiscence of the flesh, which is not from the Father but is from the world, of which world the devil is called the prince; and he did not find it in the Lord, because the Lord as man did not come to men through it. Hence he himself also says: “See, the prince of this world comes, and in me he finds nothing”—nothing of sin, that is, neither what is contracted by one being born nor what is added by one living. This he was unwilling to name among all the natural goods that he mentioned; and at it even marriage is ashamed, though it glories in all these goods. For why is that act of married people withdrawn and hidden even from the eyes of their children, except because they cannot be in the praiseworthy union without the shameful lust? At this even those blushed who first covered their shameful parts, which had not been shameful before but were to be proclaimed and gloried in as works of God. They covered them, then, when they blushed; and they blushed when, after their own disobedience, they felt their members disobedient. At this even this praiser of it blushed; for he mentioned the difference of the sexes, he mentioned their union, he mentioned fruitfulness, but he was ashamed to mention that. No wonder if those who praise it are ashamed of what we see even those who beget are ashamed of.

But he adds, saying: “Through what, then, are those whom God made under the devil?” And he answers himself as if in our voice: “Through sin,” he says, “not through nature.” Then, setting his own reply against ours: “But just as,” he says, “there cannot be offspring without the sexes, so there cannot be sin without the will.” Yes indeed, so it is. For so “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” Through the evil will of that one man all sinned in him, when all were that one man, from whom therefore each has contracted original sin. “For you say,” he says, “that they are under the devil because they are born of the union of both sexes.” I say plainly that they are under the devil because of sin; but that they are not free from sin because they are born of that union which cannot accomplish even what is honorable without shameful lust. Ambrose too, of most blessed memory, bishop of the church of Milan, said this, when he said that the carnal birth of Christ was free from sin because his conception was free from the union of the two sexes, but that no human being conceived from that union is without sin. For these are his words: “Therefore,” he says, “as man he was tempted in all things, and in the likeness of men he endured all things; but because he was born of the Spirit, he abstained from sin. For every man is a liar, and no one is without sin except God alone. It has therefore been kept,” he says, “that no one born of man and woman, that is, through that mingling of bodies, is seen to be free from sin. But he who is free from sin is free also from conception of this kind.” Will you dare, Pelagians and Caelestians, to call him too a Manichee? That is what the heretic Jovinian called him, against whose impiety that holy man defended the virginity of holy Mary as remaining even after childbirth. If, then, you do not dare to call him a Manichee, why do you call us Manichees, when we defend the catholic faith in the same cause with the same statement? Or if you boast that that most faithful man too thought this in accord with the Manichees, boast away, boast away, so that you may fill up more completely the measure of Jovinian; we, with that man of God, patiently endure your curses and insults. And yet your heresiarch Pelagius so praises the faith of Ambrose and his most pure understanding of the Scriptures as to say that not even an enemy dared to criticize him. Consider, then, how far you have gone, and at last restrain yourselves from the audacities of Jovinian. Although he, by praising marriage too much, made it equal to holy virginity, he still did not deny that the fruits of marriage, even those fresh from the womb, need Christ the Savior and Redeemer from the power of the devil. This you deny; and because we resist you for the salvation of those who cannot yet speak for themselves and for the foundations of the catholic faith, you boast that we are Manichees. But now let us look at what follows.

For he asks again: “Whom, then, do you confess to be the author of little children? The true God?” I answer: the true God. Then he adds: “But he did not make evil”; and he asks again whether we confess the devil to be the author of little children, and again answers: “But he did not create the nature of man.” Then he as it were concludes and infers: “If the union is evil, the condition of bodies is also foul, and therefore you ascribe bodies too to an evil author.” To this I answer: I do not ascribe bodies to an evil author, but sins, because of which it came about that, while everything in bodies, that is, in the works of God, was pleasing, there nevertheless befell male and female something to be ashamed of, so that their union was not such as it could have been in the body of that life, but such as we see with blushing in the body of this death. “But God,” he says, “divided in sex what he would join in operation. From him, then, is the union of bodies, from whom is the origin of bodies.” We have already answered above that this is from God, but not sin, not the disobedience of the members through the concupiscence of the flesh, which is not from the Father. Then he says that “the fruits of so many good things, that is, of bodies, sexes, and unions, cannot be evil, nor are human beings made by God for this purpose, that they should be held by the devil by lawful right, as you say.” It has already been said that they are held not because they are human beings, which is the name of nature, of which the devil is not the author, but because they are sinners, which is the name of guilt, of which the devil is the author.

But among so many names of good things—bodies, sexes, unions—he does not name lust or the concupiscence of the flesh. He is silent because he is ashamed; and with a wonderful shamelessness of shame, if one can say so, he is not ashamed to praise what he is ashamed to name. See, finally, how he preferred to indicate it by circumlocution rather than to say it. “But after the man,” he says, “knew his wife by natural appetite.” See, again he was unwilling to say, “knew his wife by the concupiscence of the flesh”; he says “by natural appetite,” where we could still understand the just and honorable will by which he willed to procreate children, not that lust at which this man so blushes that he prefers to speak to us ambiguously rather than plainly express what he thinks. What is “natural appetite”? Is not the will to be well, and the will to take up, nourish, and educate one's children, a natural appetite, and one that belongs to reason, not to lust? But because we know his intention, we do not think he meant by these words anything but the lust of the genital members. Do not these words seem to you fig leaves, under which lies hidden nothing but what is shameful? For in this way he has sewn himself the coverings of this circumlocution, as they sewed themselves aprons. Let him weave on and say: “But after the man knew his wife by natural appetite, the divine Scripture says, Eve conceived and bore a son and called his name Cain. But let us hear,” he says, “what Adam says: ‘I have acquired a man through God.’ Hence it is certain that he is the work of God, whom the divine Scripture testifies was acquired through God.” Who doubts this? Who denies it, especially a catholic Christian? Man is the work of God; but the concupiscence of the flesh—without which, had sin not gone before, man would have been sown by genital members obedient to a tranquil will like the other members—is not from the Father but is from the world.

But now, I beg you, look a little more attentively at the name he has found with which to cover again what he blushes to disclose. “For Adam had begotten him,” he says, “by the power of the members, not by a difference of merits.” What he meant by “a difference of merits,” I confess I do not understand; but by “the power of the members” he meant, I believe, what he is ashamed to say plainly. For he preferred to say “the power of the members” rather than “the concupiscence of the flesh.” Clearly, even if he did not intend it, he has indicated something that seems relevant to the matter. For what is more powerful than a man's members, when they do not serve the man's will? Though they may be bridled by temperance or continence, so that their use is to some extent in man's power, their motion is not. Adam, then, begot children by this “power of his members,” as he calls it, at which he blushed after sin, before he begot them. But if he had not sinned, he would not have begotten them by the power of his members but by the obedience of his members. For he himself would have been powerful, commanding them as subject to his will, if he himself, subject to the one more powerful, had served him with that same will.

After some other things, again: “The divine Scripture says,” he says, “‘Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore a son, and he called his name Seth, saying, The Lord has raised up for me another seed in place of Abel, whom Cain killed.’” Then he adds: “As proof that intercourse was instituted, the Deity is said to have stirred up the seed itself.” This man has not understood what is written; he thought that “The Lord has raised up for me another seed in place of Abel” was said so that God might be believed to have stirred up in him the lust for intercourse, by whose motion the seed would be stirred up so that it could be poured into the woman's lap. He does not know that “He has raised up for me a seed” was said to mean nothing but “He has given me a son.” And indeed Adam did not say this after his intercourse, in which he emitted seed, but after his wife's childbirth, in which he received a son by God's gift. For what cause for rejoicing is there—except perhaps for the lustful, who possess their vessel in the disease of concupiscence, which the apostle forbids—if seed is poured out in the extreme pleasure of intercourse and neither conception nor birth follows, in which the true fruit of marriage lies?

Nor would I say this as though anyone other than the supreme and true God were to be thought the creator either of human seed or of man himself from seed; but this seed would have come forth from man through the tranquil obedience of the members at the nod of the will, had sin not gone before. Nor is the question now about the nature of man, but about its fault. For the former has God as its author; but from the latter original sin is contracted. For if the seed itself has no fault, what is the meaning of what is written in the book of Wisdom: “Not being ignorant that their race was wicked and their malice natural, and that their thinking could never be changed; for their seed was cursed from the beginning”? Of whomever it says this, it surely says it of human beings. How, then, is the malice of any human being natural and his seed cursed from the beginning, unless one looks back to this, that “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned”? And whose evil thinking can never be changed, unless because it cannot change by itself, but can if divine grace comes to its aid? Without that aid, what are human beings but, as the apostle Peter says, like dumb animals, born by nature for capture and destruction? Hence the apostle Paul, mentioning both in one place—the wrath of God with which we are born and the grace by which we are set free—says: “And we all once lived in the desires of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and of the affections, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest; but God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, made us alive together with Christ, by whose grace we have been saved.” What, then, is the natural malice of man, and seed cursed from the beginning, and born by nature for capture and destruction, and by nature children of wrath? Was that nature so created in Adam? Far from it; but because it was corrupted in him, it has so run, and runs, through all by nature that nothing sets it free from this perdition but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

What, then, is this that he adds, saying of Noah and his sons that they were blessed like Adam and Eve, when God said, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over it”? To these words of God he adds his own: “This pleasure, then, which you want to seem diabolical, already existed in the spouses mentioned above, and as it was good by its institution, so it remained by blessing.” For there is no doubt that it was of this union of bodies, the practice of which was by then well established, that it was said to Noah and his sons, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” There is no need to repeat the same things at length. The question here concerns the fault by which a good nature was depraved, of which fault the devil is the author; not the goodness of nature itself, of which God is the author, who has not withheld his goodness even from that corrupted and depraved nature so as to take away human fruitfulness, vitality, health, the very substance of mind and body, sense and reason, food, nourishment, and growth; who also makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust; and whatever good there is in human nature is from the good God, even in those human beings who will not be set free from evil.

Here too he said “pleasure,” since pleasure can also be honorable; he did not say concupiscence of the flesh or lust, which is shameful. But in what follows he disclosed his embarrassment and could not hide from what nature itself has forcefully laid down. “And that saying,” he says, “‘For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh’”; and after these words of God he adds his own: “To express the reality of the works,” he says, “the prophet came near the danger of shame.” O confession wholly open and wrung out by the force of truth! The prophet, then, to express the reality of the works, came near the danger of shame, because he said, “The two will be in one flesh,” by which he meant the union of male and female to be understood. Let him state the reason why, in expressing the works of God, the prophet came near the danger of shame. Is it really so, that human works ought not to be shameful, but plainly matters of glory, while the divine works are shameful? Is it really so, that in speaking of and expressing the works of God the prophet's love or labor is not honored, but his modesty is endangered? For what could God make that his herald should be ashamed to speak of; and, what is graver, how should a man be ashamed of some work that not man but God made in man, when all craftsmen strive with all the labor and industry they can not to blush for their works? But surely what makes us ashamed is what made those first human beings ashamed when they covered their shameful parts. That is the penalty of sin, that is the wound and trace of sin, that is the enticement and tinder of sin, that is the law in the members warring against the law of the mind, that is the disobedience from within ourselves against ourselves, paid back with most just requital to the disobedient. Of this we are ashamed, and rightly ashamed. For if it were not so, what would be more ungrateful, more irreligious, than to be confounded in our members not by our fault or our punishment, but by the works of God?

He also says much to no purpose about Abraham and Sarah, how they received a son by promise, and at last he names concupiscence, yet he does not add “of the flesh,” because that is shameful. In the name of concupiscence one may sometimes glory, since there is also the concupiscence of the spirit against the flesh, and there is also the concupiscence of wisdom. He says, then: “Certainly you have defined this concupiscence, without which there is no fruitfulness, as naturally evil. Why, then, is it stirred up in the old by a heavenly gift? Prove now, if you can, that what you see God confer as a gift belongs to the work of the devil.” He says this as though the concupiscence of the flesh had been lacking in them before and God had given it to them, when it was without doubt present in the body of this death; but fruitfulness was lacking, of which God is the author, and it was given when God willed. Far be it from us, however, to say what he thought we would say, that Isaac was begotten without the heat of intercourse.

But let him now say why the child's soul would perish from his people if he had not been circumcised on the eighth day—what he himself had sinned, how he had offended God, that he should be punished by so severe a sentence for another's neglect of him—if there were no original sin. For God commanded thus concerning the circumcision of infants: “The male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin on the eighth day, his soul shall perish from his people, because he has broken my covenant.” Let him say, if he can, how that child of eight days broke the covenant of God—an innocent infant, as far as he himself is concerned; and yet God, or holy Scripture, would by no means say this falsely. He broke the covenant of God, then, not this one about the commanded circumcision, but that one about the forbidden tree, when “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” And this was signified as expiated in him by the circumcision of the eighth day, that is, by the sacrament of the Mediator who was to come in the flesh; because through the same faith in Christ—who was to come in the flesh, to die for us, and to rise on the third day, which was to be the eighth, following the seventh, the Sabbath—the righteous of old too were saved. For “he was handed over for our offenses and rose for our justification.” From the time circumcision was instituted in the people of God, being then the seal of the righteousness of faith, it availed for little children too as a sign of cleansing from the original and old sin, just as baptism too began to avail for the renewal of man from the time it was instituted. Not that there was no righteousness of faith before circumcision—for Abraham himself, the father of the nations who were to follow his faith, was justified by faith while still uncircumcised—but in earlier times the sacrament of justification by faith was entirely hidden. Yet the same faith in the Mediator saved the righteous of old, the little ones with the great—not the old covenant, which bears children for slavery, not the law, which was not given as one that could give life, but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. For just as we believe that Christ has come in the flesh, so they believed he would come; as we believe he died, so they believed he would die; as we believe he has risen, so they believed he would rise; and both we and they believe that he will come to judge the dead and the living. Let this man not, then, by defending human nature badly, hinder it from salvation; for we are all born under sin and are set free only through the one who was born without sin.

“This union of bodies,” he says, “with heat, with pleasure, with seed, was made by God and is approved as praiseworthy in its own measure; and sometimes it even becomes a generous gift to the godly.” He said “with heat,” he said “with pleasure,” he said “with seed,” but he did not dare to say “with lust.” Why, unless because he blushes to name what he does not blush to praise? The gift to the godly, however, is the fruitful propagation of children, not the shameful stirring of the members, which a healthy nature would not have in begetting children, but which a corrupted nature now has. For this reason both he who is born of it needs to be reborn, so that he may be a member of Christ, and he of whom he is born, if he has already been reborn, needs to be set free from that law of sin which is in the body of this death. Since this is so, how can he go on to say, “You must then confess that the original sin you had invented has perished”? I did not invent original sin, which the catholic faith has believed from of old; but you, who deny it, are without doubt a new heretic. All who are generated with sin are under the devil by the judgment of God, if they have not been regenerated in Christ.

But since he was speaking about Abraham and Sarah, he added: “But if you say, ‘Intercourse flourished in them, and there was no offspring,’ I will answer: the one whom the Creator promised, the Creator gave; the one who is born is the work not of intercourse but of God. For he who made the first man from dust fashions all from seed. Just as the clay that was taken up then was the material, not the author, of man, so now that force of pleasure, which produces and mixes the seeds, does not do the work itself, but offers to God from the treasuries of nature that from which he may deign to make a man.” All these things that he said, except where he says that the seeds are produced and mixed by pleasure, he would say rightly if he were striving to defend a catholic sense in them; but because we know what he is trying to achieve by them, he says even right things perversely. That one statement, apart from which I do not deny that the rest is true, is not true, because the pleasure of carnal concupiscence does not produce the seeds; they are already in bodies, created by the true God, by whom the bodies themselves are created; they are not made by pleasure, but are stirred up and emitted with pleasure. Whether the seeds of both sexes are mixed with pleasure in the woman's womb, let women consider what they feel in their hidden parts; it is not fitting for us to be idly curious even to that point. Yet that lust which is to be blushed at—from which the members themselves have been called shameful—did not exist in the body of that life which was in paradise before sin, but began to exist in the body of this death after sin, disobedience being paid back for disobedience. Without that lust the work of spouses in begetting children could have been done, just as many works are done by the obedience of the other members, which are moved at the nod of the will, not roused by the heat of lust.

Consider the rest: “This too,” he says, “the authority of the apostle confirms. For when blessed Paul was speaking of the resurrection of the dead, he said, ‘Fool, what you sow is not made alive,’ and below, ‘But God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its own body.’ If, then,” he says, “God assigns to human seed its own body, as he does to all things—which no one, whether prudent or godly, denies—how will you prove that anyone is born guilty? Look back at last, I beg, and see by what snares the assertion of natural sin is strangled. But come,” he says, “deal more gently with yourself, I pray. Believe me, God made you too; but, as must be admitted, a grave error has infected you. For what more profane thing can be said than that God either did not make man, or, as you say, made him for the devil, or at least that the devil fashioned the image of God, that is, man—which is seen to be no less foolish than impious? Is God, then,” he says, “so poor, so shameless, that he had nothing to give as a reward to holy men except what the devil poured into the deceived as a fault? But do you want to know that God is proved to have granted this power of generation even to those who are not holy? At the time when Abraham, struck with fear of a barbarous people, said that Sarah, who was his wife, was his sister, Abimelech, king of that region, is related to have taken her for the use of the night. But God, who cared for the honor of the holy woman, came to Abimelech in his sleep and curbed the king's audacity, threatening him with death if he went on to violate the marriage. Then Abimelech said: ‘Lord, will you destroy an ignorant and righteous nation? Did they not themselves say that they were joined as brother and sister?’ Abimelech therefore rose in the morning and took a thousand didrachmas of silver, and sheep and calves and menservants and maidservants, and gave them to Abraham, and sent the woman back from him untouched. And Abraham prayed to God for Abimelech; and God healed Abimelech and his wife and his maidservants.” Why he narrated these things at such length, learn briefly. For in what he added next he says: “At Abraham's prayer God healed, by the power of a secret dispensation, what is known to the modesty of even common women; for God had closed from outside every womb in the house of Abimelech. See, then,” he says, “whether what God sometimes takes away when angered, and gives back when appeased, ought to be called naturally evil. He himself,” he says, “makes the children both of the godly and of the ungodly; for that they become parents belongs to nature, which rejoices in God as its author, but that they are ungodly belongs to the depravity of their pursuits, which befalls each from free will.”

To all these many things that he said we answer that nothing in the divine testimonies he inserted was said about the shameful lust which we say did not exist in the bodies of the blessed when they were naked and not ashamed. For the first, the apostle's words, was said of the seeds of grain, which first die so that they may be made alive. With what design he was unwilling to complete this statement of the apostle I do not know; for he quoted it only this far: “Fool, what you sow is not made alive.” But the apostle adds: “unless it dies.” But he, as I suppose, wanted what was said of grain to be taken of human seed by those who read these things and either do not know the holy Scriptures or do not remember them. In fact, he not only cut this statement short, not adding “unless it dies,” but also passed over what follows, where the apostle made clear of what seeds he was speaking. For the apostle says: “And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of some other kind.” Passing over these words, he joined on what the apostle says next: “But God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its own body”—as though the apostle had said of a man lying with a woman, “Fool, what you sow is not made alive,” so that we should understand that human seed is made alive not by the man who sows children by intercourse but by God. For so he had said beforehand, that that pleasure “does not do the work itself, but offers to God from the treasuries of nature that from which he may deign to make a man”; and he added the testimony as if the apostle had said, “Fool, what you sow is not made alive,” that is, is not made alive by you, but God makes a man from your seed—as though the middle words that he passed over had not been said by the apostle, and the apostle's statement ran thus, as if speaking of human seed: “Fool, what you sow is not made alive; but God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its own body.” Then after these words of the apostle he brings in his own: “If, then, God assigns to human seed its own body, as he does to all things—which no one, whether prudent or godly, denies”—as though the apostle had spoken of human seed in that testimony.

When I considered somewhat more attentively what his purpose gained by this deceit, I could find nothing except that he wanted to bring in the apostle as a witness to prove that God makes a man from human seed, which we too say. And since no testimony occurred to him, he misused this one deceitfully—fearing, no doubt, that if it appeared that the apostle had said those things not of human seeds but of grain, we might be reminded by it of something with which to refute him, who is ashamed to name, and shameless to proclaim, not a religious will but a lustful pleasure. For he can be refuted from the very seeds that farmers sow in their fields. Why should we not believe that God could have granted to blessed man in paradise, in regard to his own seed, what we see granted to farmers in regard to the seed of wheat: that it should be sown without any shameful lust, the genital members obeying the nod of the will, just as the wheat is sown without any shameful lust, the farmers' hands obeying the nod of their will—the desire of parents to beget children being more honorable than that of plowmen to fill their barns; and that then the almighty Creator, with his undefilable presence everywhere and his creative power, should work from human seeds in the woman as he willed—as he does even now—just as he works as he wills from the seeds of grain in the earth, blessed mothers conceiving without lustful pleasure and giving birth without painful groaning? For in that happiness, and in a body not yet of this death but of that life, there would have been nothing to shame women in receiving seed, as there would have been nothing to pain them in bringing forth offspring. Whoever does not believe, or does not want it believed, that this could have been granted by the will and kindness of God to human beings living in that happiness of paradise before any sin, is not a praiser of fruitfulness to be desired but a lover of pleasure to be ashamed of.

Again, as for another testimony from the divine book that he put forward, about Abimelech and every womb in his house being closed by God's will so that his women should not give birth, and opened again so that they should: what has it to do with the matter? What does it say about that shameful lust which is now in question? Did God take that lust away from those women and give it back when he willed? No; it was a punishment that they could not give birth, and a kindness that they could give birth in the manner of this corruptible flesh. For God would not confer on the body of this death such a kindness as only the body of that life in paradise before sin would have had, so that conception would come about without itching lust and childbirth without torturing pain. And since Scripture says that every womb was closed from outside, why should we not understand that it was done by some pain, so that the women could not endure intercourse—a pain inflicted when God roused it and removed when he had mercy? For if lust had been taken away to prevent the sowing of offspring, it would have had to be taken from the men, not the women. For a woman could lie with a man by her will even if the lust that goads her were absent, provided the man did not lack that by which he is aroused. Unless perhaps, because it is written that Abimelech himself was healed, he will say that male lust was given back to him. But if he had lost it, what need was there for him to be warned by God not to have intercourse with Abraham's wife? No: Scripture says he was healed because his house was healed of that plague.

Now let us look at those three things, any one of which, he says, would be the most profane thing that could be said if we said it: that God either did not make man, or made him for the devil, or at least that the devil fashioned the image of God, that is, man. Of these three, even he himself, unless he is senseless or too obstinate, admits that we do not say the first and the last. The question concerns the one he put second, in the middle, where he is so mistaken as to think that we say God made man for the devil—as though, in the human beings whom God creates from human parents, he intended this, cared for this, provided for this by the plan of his work, that the devil should have servants whom he cannot make for himself. Far be it that any piety, even a child's, should suspect this. God made human beings by his goodness, both the first without sin and the rest under sin, for the purposes of his deep counsels. For just as he knows what to do with the malice of the devil himself, and what he does is just and good, though the one with whom he deals is unjust and evil, and he did not refuse to create him because he foreknew that he would be evil, so it is with the whole human race, although no human being is born without the stain of sin: he who is supremely good works good, making some as vessels of mercy, whom grace distinguishes from those who are vessels of wrath, and others as vessels of wrath, to make known the riches of his glory toward the vessels of mercy. Let him go now and argue against the apostle, whose statement this is—or rather against the potter himself, to whom the apostle forbids any reply, saying, “O man, who are you to answer back to God? Does the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me thus?’ Or does the potter not have power over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honor, another for dishonor?” Does he deny, then, that the vessels of wrath are under the devil? Or, because they are under the devil, does someone other than he who makes the vessels of mercy make them? Or does he make them from elsewhere and not from the same lump? So let him say here, “Then God makes vessels for the devil”—as though God did not know how to use them for his just and good works, just as he uses the devil himself.

Or does he feed for the devil the sons of perdition, the goats on the left side, and nourish and clothe them for the devil, because he makes his sun rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust? He creates the evil, then, in the same way as he feeds and nourishes the evil; for what he bestows on them by creating belongs to the goodness of nature, and the growth he gives them by feeding and nourishing is not given to their malice; it is a good help that the Good One gives to the same good nature that he created. For insofar as they are human beings, it is the good of nature, of which God is the author; but insofar as they are born with sin, to perish unless they are reborn, they belong to the seed cursed from the beginning by the fault of that ancient disobedience. This fault, however, the maker even of the vessels of wrath uses well, to make known the riches of his glory toward the vessels of mercy, so that no one who belongs to the same lump, if he is set free by grace, may ascribe it to his own merits; but “he who glories, let him glory in the Lord.”

Departing with the Pelagians from this most true and most firmly founded apostolic and catholic faith, this man does not want those who are born to be under the devil, lest little children be brought to Christ to be rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into his kingdom. And so he accuses the church spread through the whole world, in which everywhere all the little infants who are to be baptized are breathed upon for no other reason than that the prince of the world may be cast out of them—the one by whom the vessels of wrath must be possessed, since they are born from Adam, unless they are reborn in Christ and, made vessels of mercy by grace, transferred into his kingdom. Coming out against this most firmly founded truth, and not wishing to seem to attack the whole church of Christ, he addresses me as if alone, and as if rebuking and admonishing me, says: “God made you too; but, as must be admitted, a grave error has infected you.” Indeed I acknowledge that God made me, and I give thanks; yet I would have perished with the vessels of wrath if he had only made me from Adam and had not remade me in Christ. Since he, possessed by Pelagian impiety, does not believe this, if he persists in so great an evil to the end, let not he but the catholics consider what kind of error, and how great, has not infected him but plainly killed him.

Consider what follows: “That children received from marriage are naturally good,” he says, “let us learn from the apostle, who says of the wicked: ‘Leaving the natural use of the woman, they burned in their desires toward one another, males working shamefulness with males.’ He shows, then,” he says, “that the use of the woman is both natural and praiseworthy in its measure, but that the crime is committed by one's own will against the modesty of the institution. Rightly, therefore,” he says, “in those who use it well the kind and measure of concupiscence are praised, and in the base its excess is punished. Indeed, at the same time that God gave vigor to the members of Abraham and Sarah, withered with age, he punished those same members in Sodom with a rain of fire. If, then, you think,” he says, “that the vigor of the members must be accused because through it the Sodomites were smeared with crimes, you will accuse also the creation of bread and wine, since the divine Scripture has indicated that they sinned from this source too. For the Lord says through the prophet Ezekiel: ‘Yet these were the iniquities of Sodom your sister: pride; in fullness of bread and abundance of wine she and her daughters overflowed; and they did not help the hand of the poor and needy.’ Choose now,” he says, “which you prefer: either ascribe the union of bodies to the divine work, or define the creation of bread and wine as likewise evil. If you do this, you will clearly be convicted of being a Manichee. He who keeps the measure of natural concupiscence uses a good well; he who does not keep the measure uses a good badly. What, then,” he says, “do you mean by saying that ‘the good of marriage can no more be accused because of the original evil that is contracted from it than the evil of adulteries can be excused because of the natural good that is born of them’? By these words,” he says, “you have conceded what you had denied and taken away what you had conceded, and you labor at nothing more than not to be understood. Show a bodily marriage without union; or give this act one single name and call marriage either good or evil. You certainly undertook to define marriage as good: if marriage is good, if man, the fruit of marriage, is good, if this fruit, the work of God, cannot be evil, being born from good through good, where then is the original evil, which has been destroyed by so many prior admissions?”

To this I answer that not only children from marriage but also those from adultery are something good according to the work of God by which they were created; but that according to original sin they are born in condemnation from the first Adam, not only if they are begotten of adultery but also if of marriage, unless they are regenerated in the second Adam, who is Christ. And as for what the apostle says of the wicked, “Leaving the natural use of the woman, they burned in their desires toward one another, males working shamefulness with males,” he did not say the conjugal use, but the natural use, meaning that which takes place with the members created for this, so that through them both sexes can be united for begetting. And therefore, when anyone is united even with a harlot with those same members, the use is natural, yet not praiseworthy but blameworthy. But if anyone uses, even with his wife, that part of the body which was not established for begetting, it is against nature and shameful. Indeed, the same apostle first said of women, “For their women exchanged the natural use for that use which is against nature,” and then spoke of males working shamefulness with males, having left the natural use of the woman. By this name, then, “natural use,” the conjugal union was not praised; rather, crimes more unclean and more wicked were marked out than if they used even women unlawfully, but still naturally.

Bread and wine, however, we do not blame because of the luxurious and the drunken, any more than gold because of the covetous and the greedy. So too we do not blame the honorable union of spouses because of the shameful lust of bodies. For the former could have existed without any sin having been committed first, and married people would not have blushed at it; but the latter arose after sin, and they were forced to veil it in confusion. Hence it has remained for later married people, though they use this evil well and lawfully, to avoid human sight in this kind of act, and so to confess what is shameful, since no one ought to be ashamed of what is good. In this way these two things are made known: the good of the praiseworthy union, from which children are begotten, and the evil of the shameful lust, because of which those who are begotten must be regenerated so as not to be condemned. Therefore he who lies with someone lawfully with shameful lust uses an evil well; he who does so unlawfully uses an evil badly. For what both the evil and the good blush at more rightly receives the name of evil than of good; and we do better to believe him who says, “I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh,” than this man who calls it good; if he is confounded at it, he confesses it evil, but if he is not confounded, he adds shamelessness, a worse evil. We rightly said, then, that “the good of marriage can no more be accused because of the original evil that is contracted from it than the evil of adulteries can be excused because of the natural good that is born of them,” since human nature, which is born whether of marriage or of adultery, is the work of God. If it were an evil, it should not be generated; if it had no evil, it would not need to be regenerated. And to sum up both in one word: if human nature were an evil, it could not be saved; if there were no evil in it, it would not need to be saved. He, then, who says it is not good denies the goodness of the Creator of the nature he created; but he who denies that there is evil in it grudges the merciful Savior to the nature that has been corrupted. Therefore, in human beings who are born, neither are adulteries to be excused by the good that the good Creator has created from them, nor is marriage to be accused by the evil that is to be healed there by the merciful Savior.

“Show,” he says, “a bodily marriage without union.” I do not show a bodily marriage without union; but neither does he show that same union without confusion. In paradise, however, if sin had not gone before, there would indeed have been no generation without the union of both sexes, but there would have been union without confusion; for in coming together there would have been a tranquil obedience of the members, not a shameful concupiscence of the flesh. Marriage, then, is good, from which a human being sown in due order is born; and the fruit of marriage is good, namely the human being himself who is so born; but sin is evil, with which every human being is born. For God made and makes man; but “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.”

“By a new kind of argument,” he says, “you both profess to be a catholic and act as patron to the Manichee, by calling marriage both a great good and a great evil.” He does not know at all what he is saying, or pretends not to know. For either he does not understand what we say, or does not want it understood. If he does not understand, he is hindered by the prejudice of error; if he does not want what we say to be understood, it is the fault of obstinacy, by which he defends his error. Jovinian too, who a few years ago tried to found a novel heresy, used to say that the catholics acted as patrons of the Manichees because against him they preferred holy virginity to marriage. But this man will answer that he does not think what Jovinian thought about there being no difference between marriage and virginity. Nor do I say that they think this; but let the new heretics recognize, from Jovinian's throwing the Manichees at the catholics, that this is nothing new. We, then, say that marriage is a good, not an evil. But just as the Arians charge us with being Sabellians, although we do not say, as the Sabellians do, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one and the same, but say, as the catholics do, that the nature of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is one and the same, so the Pelagians throw the Manichees at us, although we do not say, as the Manichees do, that marriage is an evil, but say, as the catholics do, that an evil befell the first human beings, the first spouses, and from there passed through to all human beings. But just as the Arians, while fleeing the Sabellians, fell into something worse, because they dared to distinguish in the Trinity not persons but natures, so the Pelagians, while trying perversely to avoid the plague of the Manichees, are convicted of thinking more pernicious things about the fruit of marriage than the Manichees themselves, since they believe that little children do not need Christ the physician.

“You define,” he says, “that a human being, if born of sexual immorality, is not guilty, and if born of marriage, is not innocent. For this is where your statement leads, that a natural good can come into being from adulteries and an original evil is contracted even from marriage.” He tries entirely in vain, before an intelligent reader, to pervert what is right. Far be it from us to say that a human being born of sexual immorality is not guilty; rather, we say that a human being, whether born of marriage or of sexual immorality, is something good because of God the author of nature, and contracts something evil because of original sin. Our statement, then, that a natural good can come into being even from adulteries, while an original evil is contracted even from marriage, does not lead where he tries to bring it—that one is not born guilty from adulteries nor innocent from marriage—but to this: that from both one is made guilty by generation because of original sin, and from both one is to be absolved by regeneration because of the good of nature.

“One of these,” he says, “is true, the other false.” To him I reply with the same brevity: no, both are true, neither is false. “It is true,” he says, “that the human being born of adulteries cannot excuse their guilt, because what the adulterers did belongs to the fault of the will, but what they begot looks to the praise of fruitfulness; for if someone sows stolen wheat, the harvest that springs up is not liable. So I blame the thief,” he says, “but praise the crop. I pronounce innocent the one who is born from the nobility of the seeds, as the apostle says, ‘God gives it a body as he wills, and to each of the seeds its own body’; but I condemn the shameful man who sinned from the perversity of his purpose.”

To this he adds: “But clearly, if evil is contracted from marriage, marriage can be accused and cannot be excused, and you place its work and fruit under the devil's right, since every cause of evil is without good. But a human being who is born of marriage,” he says, “is to be ascribed not to crimes but to seeds. And the cause of the seeds lies in the creation of bodies; and he who uses these bodies badly wounds the merit of the good, not its kind. It is plainly clear, then,” he says, “that good is not the cause of evil. If, then,” he says, “original evil is contracted even from marriage, the coming together of marriage is the cause of evil, and that must be evil through which and from which an evil fruit has appeared, as the Lord says in the gospel: ‘A tree is known by its fruits.’ How,” he says, “do you think you should be listened to, when you say that marriage is good, yet define that nothing but evil comes forth from it? It is certain, then, that marriages are guilty if original sin is derived from them, and that they cannot be defended unless their fruit is shown to be innocent. But they are defended and declared good; their fruit, therefore, is shown to be innocent.”

Before I answer this, I want the reader to note that these men aim at nothing but that the Savior should not be necessary for little children, whom they deny to have any sins at all from which to be saved. This great perversity, so hostile to the grace of God given through Jesus Christ our Lord, who came to seek and to save what was lost, tries to insinuate itself into the hearts of those of little understanding by praise of the divine works, that is, by praise of human nature, praise of seed, praise of marriage, praise of the union of both sexes, praise of fruitfulness—all of which are good. I will not say “by praise of lust,” since even he is ashamed to name it, so that he may seem to praise something else and not it. And so, by not distinguishing the evils that have befallen nature from the goodness of nature itself, he does not show it to be healthy, which is false, but does not allow it, being sick, to be healed. And therefore he grants that what we said is true—that the good that is born of adulteries, that is, the human being, cannot excuse their guilt—and this, about which there is no question between us, he supports and confirms as best he can by the likeness of the thief sowing stolen wheat, from which a good harvest certainly springs. But the other thing we said, that the good of marriage cannot be accused because of the original evil that is contracted from it, he will not agree to be true, because if he agreed he would be not a Pelagian heretic but a catholic. “But clearly,” he says, “if evil is contracted from marriage, it can be accused and cannot be excused, and you place its work and fruit under the devil's right, since every cause of evil is without good.” And he weaves the rest onto this to prove that the cause of evil cannot be good, and so that marriage, because it is good, is not the cause of evil, and therefore that a sinner who needs a Savior cannot possibly be born of it—as though we said that marriage is the cause of sin. Although the human being born of it is not born without sin, marriage was instituted for the sake of begetting, not of sinning. That is why the Lord's blessing of marriage is: “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” But the sin that is contracted from it by those who are born does not belong to marriage, but to the evil that has befallen the human beings by whose union marriage exists. For the evil of shameful lust can exist without marriage, and marriage could have existed without it; but it belongs to the condition of a body not of that life but of this death that marriage cannot now exist without it, though it can exist without marriage. For the shameful concupiscence of the flesh certainly exists without marriage when it commits adulteries and every kind of sexual immorality and uncleanness, far contrary to the chastity of marriage; or when it commits none of these, because the man permits it by no consent, and yet it rises and moves and moves him, and often in sleep reaches the likeness of the act itself and the end of its motion. This evil, then, even in marriage is not the evil of marriage; but marriage has it ready in the body of this death, even against its will, and cannot without it fulfill what it wills. It does not come to marriage, then, from its institution, which was blessed, but from this: that “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.”

What, then, does he mean by saying, “A tree is known by its fruits,” since we read that the Lord said this in the gospel? Was the Lord speaking of this, and not rather of the two wills of human beings, the good and the evil, calling the one a good tree and the other an evil tree, because good works spring from a good will and evil ones from an evil will, and good cannot spring from evil nor evil from good? But if we set down marriage as a good tree, according to the gospel likeness he mentioned, we shall surely have to set down sexual immorality, on the contrary, as an evil tree. So if a human being is called the fruit of marriage, as a good fruit from a good tree, surely a human being ought not to have been born of sexual immorality; for an evil tree does not produce good fruit. But if he says that in that case adultery should not be put in the place of the tree, but rather human nature, from which a human being is born, then here too the tree will not be marriage but human nature, from which a human being is born. That gospel likeness therefore has no bearing on this question, because marriage is not the cause of the sin that is contracted by one being born and expiated in one being reborn; the voluntary sin of the first man is the cause of original sin. “You say again,” he says, “‘For just as sin, whether contracted by little children from the one or from the other, is the work of the devil, so a human being, whether born from the one or from the other, is the work of God.’” I both said it and said it most truly; and if he were not a Pelagian but a catholic, he himself would say nothing else in the catholic church.

What, then, is this that he asks us: through what is sin found in a little child? Through the will, or through marriage, or through the parents? For so he speaks, and he answers, as it were, each of these, and by clearing all of them of sin he wants nothing to remain through which sin may be found in a little child. Note, finally, his very words: “Through what, then,” he says, “is sin found in a little child? Through the will? There was none in him. Through marriage? But this belongs to the act of the parents, who, as you had stated beforehand, did not sin in this act; though, as appears from what follows, you had not truly conceded this. Is marriage, then, to be execrated,” he says, “as having caused evil? But marriage only indicates the act of the persons. The parents, then, who caused sin by their coming together, are rightly damnable. There can be no doubt now,” he says, “if we follow your opinion, that spouses are handed over to eternal punishment, since by their labor it came about that the devil gained dominion over human beings. And where is what you said a little before, that man is the work of God? For if there is evil in human beings through their origin, and through the evil the devil has right over human beings, you are saying that the devil is the author of human beings, since the origin of those who are born comes from him. But if you believe that man is made by God and that spouses are innocent, see how impossible it is that original sin should be contracted from them.”

To all these things the apostle answers him. He blames neither the will of the little child, which in him is not yet his own for sinning, nor marriage, insofar as it is marriage, which has from God not only its institution but also its blessing, nor the parents, insofar as they are parents, joined to each other lawfully and legitimately for procreating children; but he says: “Through one man sin entered into this world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” If these men received this with catholic ears and minds, they would not have spirits rebellious against the faith and grace of Christ, nor would they try in vain to turn these apostolic words, so clear and so manifest, to their own heretical sense, asserting that this was said because Adam sinned first, in whom anyone thereafter who wished to sin found an example of sinning, so that sin passed from that one man into all human beings not by generation but by imitation of him. Surely, if the apostle had wanted imitation to be understood here, he would have said that sin entered into this world and passed through to all men not through one man but rather through the devil. For of the devil it is written: “And those who are of his side imitate him.” But he said “through one man” because it was from him that the generation of human beings began, so as to teach that original sin went through to all by generation.

What else do the apostle's following words indicate? For after saying this, he added: “For until the law sin was in the world”—that is, because not even the law could take away sin. “But sin,” he says, “was not imputed when there was no law.” It existed, then, but was not imputed, because what was to be imputed was not shown; as he says elsewhere, “Through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” “But death reigned,” he says, “from Adam until Moses”—this is what he had said above, “until the law”—not that there was no sin from Moses onward, but because not even the law given through Moses could take away the reign of death, which certainly reigns only through sin. And its reign is this, that it casts mortal man headlong even into the second death, which is eternal. In whom did it reign? “Even in those,” he says, “who did not sin in the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one to come.” Of whom to come, if not Christ? And what kind of type, if not by contrast? This he says briefly elsewhere too: “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive”: as that in the one, so this in the other. That is the type; but this type is not alike in every respect. Hence the apostle here went on to add: “But the gift is not like the offense; for if through the offense of one many died, much more has the grace of God and the gift in the grace of one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many.” What does “much more has abounded” mean, except that all who are set free through Christ die temporally because of Adam, but will live without end because of Christ himself? “And the gift,” he says, “is not as it was through the one man who sinned. For the judgment was from one to condemnation, but the grace from many offenses to justification.” From one what, if not one offense? For there follows: “but the grace from many offenses.” Let these men say how the judgment was from one offense to condemnation, unless because even the one original sin, which passed through to all men, is enough for condemnation. But grace is from many offenses to justification, because it releases not only that one which is contracted by origin, but also the others that are added in each human being by the motion of his own will. “For if through the offense of one death reigned through the one, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of righteousness reign in life through the one Jesus Christ. So then, as through the offense of one it came to all men to condemnation, so also through the righteousness of one it comes to all men to justification of life.” Let them still remain in the vanity of their mind and say that the one man did not pass on a descent of sin but offered an example of it. How, then, did it come to all men to condemnation through the offense of one, and not rather through the many offenses of each, unless because even if there is only that one, it is enough to bring to condemnation even with no others added, as it brings the little children who die, who are born from Adam, unless they are reborn in Christ? Why, then, does he ask of us what he does not want to hear from the apostle: through what sin is found in a little child, through the will, or through marriage, or through the parents? See, let him hear through what; let him hear and be silent: through what sin is found in a little child: “Through the offense of one,” says the apostle, “it came to all men to condemnation.” He said “all” to condemnation through Adam, and “all” to justification through Christ, though Christ certainly does not bring to life all who die in Adam. But he said “all” and “all” because, just as no one comes to death except through Adam, so no one comes to life except through Christ; as we say of a teacher of letters, if he is the only one in a city, “He teaches everyone here their letters,” not because everyone learns, but because no one learns except from him. Finally, those whom he had called “all” he afterward called “many,” meaning the same people by both “all” and “many”: “For as through the disobedience of one man many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of one many will be made righteous.”

Let him still ask through what sin is found in a little child. Let the holy pages answer him: “Through one man sin entered into this world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” “Through the offense of one many died.” “The judgment was from one to condemnation.” “Through the offense of one death reigned through the one.” “Through the offense of one it came to all men to condemnation.” “Through the disobedience of one many were made sinners.” See through what sin is found in a little child! Let him now believe in original sin; let him allow little children to come to Christ to be saved. What is this that he says: “The one who is born does not sin, the one who begot does not sin, the one who created does not sin: through what cracks, amid so many defenses of innocence, do you imagine sin entered?” Why does he look for a hidden crack, when he has a wide-open door? “Through one man,” says the apostle; “through the offense of one,” says the apostle; “through the disobedience of one man,” says the apostle. What more does he want? What does he want more plain? What does he want more insistently repeated?

“If sin,” he says, “comes from the will, the will that commits sin is evil; if from nature, the nature is evil.” I answer at once: sin comes from the will. Perhaps he asks whether original sin does too. I answer: certainly original sin too, because this too was sown from the will of the first man, so that it both was in him and passed to all. But as to what he added next, “if from nature, the nature is evil,” I ask him to answer, if he can: just as it is evident that all evil works come from an evil will as the fruits of an evil tree, from where does he say that the evil will itself, that is, the evil tree of evil fruits, arose? If from an angel, what was the angel himself but a good work of God? If from a man, what was the man himself but a good work of God? Indeed, since the evil will of the angel arose from the angel, and that of man from man, what were these two, before these evils arose in them, but a good work of God and a good and praiseworthy nature? See, then: evil arises from good, and there was nothing at all from which it could arise except good—I mean the evil will itself, which no evil preceded; not evil works, which exist only from an evil will as from an evil tree. Yet an evil will could arise from good not because the good was made by the good God, but because it was made from nothing, not from God. What, then, does he mean by saying, “If nature is the work of God, the work of the devil is not allowed to pass through the work of God”? Did not the work of the devil, when it first arose in the angel who became the devil, arise in a work of God? So if evil, which existed nowhere at all, could arise in a work of God, why could evil, which already existed somewhere, not pass through a work of God—especially since the apostle uses that very word, saying, “and so it passed through to all men”? Are human beings not the work of God? Sin passed through human beings, then, that is, the work of the devil through the work of God; or, to say the same thing another way, since the work of the devil, that is, sin, which arose through the devil himself, who is a creature or work of God, passed through another work of God, that is, man, the work of a work of God passed through a work of God. And therefore God alone is unchangeable and of most powerful goodness, because even before there was any evil he made all works good, and from the evils that have arisen in the good things he made, he works well through all things.

“In one person,” he says, “the intention is rightly blamed and the origin praised, because there are two things, to which contrary judgments are applied; but in a little child there is one thing, nature only, since there is no will. That one thing, then,” he says, “will be ascribed either to God or to the demon. If nature,” he says, “is through God, there cannot be original evil in it; if from the devil, there will be nothing by which man may be claimed for the divine work. So he is a complete Manichee who defends original evil.” Let him rather hear what is true against this. In one person the intention is rightly blamed and the nature praised, because there are two things to which contrary judgments are applied; but in a little child too there is not one thing only, that is, the nature in which man was created by the good God; for he has also the fault that passed through one man to all men, as the apostle wisely holds, not as Pelagius or Caelestius or any of their disciples foolishly holds. Of these two things, then, which we have said are in a little child, one is ascribed to God, the other to the devil. And that both are subjected to the power of the devil because of one of them, that is, because of the fault, is not unfitting, because this happens not by the power of the devil himself but by the power of God; and fault is subjected to fault, nature to nature, since both are also in the devil; so that when the beloved and elect are rescued from the power of darkness, to which they are rightly subject, it may appear what is given to the justified by God, who is good and works good from evils.

As for what he thought he was saying piously, “If nature is through God, there cannot be original evil in it,” does not someone else think he speaks more piously in saying, “If nature is through God, no evil can arise in it”? And yet that is false; for the Manichees wanted to assert this, and tried to fill with all evils not a creature of God made from nothing but the very nature of God. For evil has arisen only in the good—not, however, in the supreme and unchangeable good, which is the nature of God, but in a good made from nothing through the wisdom of God. There is, then, something by which man is claimed for the divine work, because he would not be a man unless he were created by the divine work. But there would be no evil in little children unless sin had been committed by the will of the first man and original sin contracted from the corrupted origin. It is not, then, as he says, “He is a complete Manichee who defends original evil”; rather, he is a complete Pelagian who does not believe in original evil. For it was not from the time the pestilent doctrine of Manichaeus began that little children to be baptized began to be exorcised and breathed upon in the church of God, so that it might be shown by these very mysteries that they are not transferred into the kingdom of Christ unless rescued from the power of darkness. Nor is it in the books of Manichaeus that we read that the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost; or that through one man sin entered into this world, and the rest belonging to the same statement, which we mentioned above; or that God repays the sins of the fathers on the children; or what is written in the psalm, “I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins my mother nourished me in the womb”; or, “Man has become like vanity; his days pass like a shadow”; or, “See, you have made my days old, and my substance is as nothing before you; indeed, every living man is all vanity”; or what the apostle says, “Every creature has been subjected to vanity”; or in the book of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity. What abundance has a man from all his labor at which he labors under the sun?”; or in the book of Ecclesiasticus, “A heavy yoke is on the sons of Adam from the day of their coming out of their mother's womb until the day of their burial into the mother of all”; or what the apostle says, “In Adam all die”; or what holy Job says, where he speaks of his sins: “For man born of woman is short of life and full of wrath; like the flower of the grass he falls; he flees like a shadow and will not stand. Have you not taken care even of him, and made him enter into judgment in your sight? For who will be clean from filth? Not even one, even if his life on earth has been one day.” What he meant by filth—since he meant sins—the reading itself shows, where it is quite clear what he is speaking of. Hence also that passage in the prophet Zechariah, where the filthy garment is taken from the priest and it is said to him, “See, I have taken away your sins.” I think that all these, and others of this kind, which show that every human being is born under sin and the curse, are read not in the darkness of the Manichees but in the light of the catholics.

What shall I say about the interpreters of the divine Scriptures who flourished in the catholic church—how they did not try to turn these texts into other senses, since they were steadfast in the most ancient and most robust faith and were not moved by newfangled error? If I wished to collect them and use their testimonies, it would take too long, and I might seem to have relied less than I ought on the canonical authorities, from which we must not turn away. Yet—to pass over most blessed Ambrose, to whom Pelagius, as I have already mentioned, bore so great a testimony of soundness in the faith, and who nevertheless defended nothing else in little children, as the reason they need Christ the physician, but original sin—will anyone say that Cyprian, of most glorious crown, not only was a Manichee but even could have been one, since he suffered before that plague appeared in the Roman world? And yet in his book on the baptism of little children he so defends original sin as to say for that reason that a little child ought to be baptized even before the eighth day, if necessary, lest his soul perish; and he wants it understood that the child comes to the pardon of baptism the more easily, the more the sins forgiven him are not his own but another's. Let this man dare to call these men Manichees, and bespatter with this wicked charge the most ancient tradition of the church, by which, as I have said, little children are exorcised and breathed upon, so that, rescued from the power of darkness, that is, of the devil and his angels, they may be transferred into the kingdom of Christ. As for us, we are more ready, with these men and with the church of Christ, established in the antiquity of this faith, to endure any curses and insults whatever than to be praised by the Pelagians with any eloquence whatever.

“You say again,” he says, “‘There would be no concupiscence had man not sinned first, but marriage would exist even if no one had sinned.’” I did not say, “There would be no concupiscence,” since there is also a spiritual concupiscence to be gloried in, by which wisdom is desired; but I said, “There would be no shameful concupiscence.” Let my words be read again, which he himself also set down, so that it may appear with what deceit they are cited by him. But let him call it by whatever name he likes: I said that that would not exist, had man not sinned first, at which those in paradise blushed who covered their shameful parts—which no one denies followed because the sin of disobedience had gone before. Whoever wants to understand what they felt ought to consider what they covered. For they made themselves girdles of fig leaves, not garments; and these girdles are called in Greek perizōmata. What perizōmata cover is known to all; some Latin translators have rendered them campestria. And who does not know what parts of the body are covered by those who wear the campestre? For the young Roman men covered these when they exercised naked on the Campus, from which this kind of covering got its name.

“That marriage, then,” he says, “which, as you say, could have existed without concupiscence, without motion of bodies, without necessity of the sexes, you pronounce praiseworthy; but these marriages which take place now you define as devised by the devil. What you dream could have been instituted,” he says, “you judge to be good; but these, of which the divine Scripture says, ‘A man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh,’ you declare to be diabolical evils, which should in the end be called a disease, not marriage.” It is no wonder if the Pelagians try to twist our statements into the senses they want, since they are accustomed to do this even with the holy Scriptures—not where something is said obscurely, but where the testimonies are clear and open—in the manner, indeed, of other heretics too. For who would say that marriage could have existed without motion of bodies, without necessity of the sexes? For God made the sexes, since he made them male and female, as it is written. And how could it happen that those who were to be joined, and to beget by that very joining, should not move their bodies, since no bodily approach of one human being to another takes place without motion of the body? The question here, then, is not about the motion of bodies, without which they could not unite at all, but about the shameful motion of the genitals, which surely would not exist—and yet the seed-sowing union would not be lacking—if the genitals served not lust but the will, like the other members. Is it not so even now, in the body of this death, that we command the foot, the arm, the finger, the lip, the tongue, and at our nod they are at once stretched out? Even the fluid held inside the bladder—what is more wonderful—is commanded to flow out, even when we are not pressed by its quantity, and it obeys. Indeed, the hidden organs and sinews by which that fluid is held are commanded to propel it, press it out, and expel it, and, if there is health, they serve the will without difficulty. How much more easily and tranquilly, then, would the member itself be extended and man be sown, with the genital parts of the body obeying, had not the disobedience of these members been paid back as a just punishment to those disobedient human beings? This punishment the chaste feel, who would doubtless prefer, if they could, to sow children at the command of the will rather than by the itch of pleasure. But the unclean, who because of this disease love not only harlots but even their wives, exult in this punishment of the flesh with a heavier punishment of the mind.

Far be it from us, then, to say what he pretends we say, that the marriages that take place now were devised by the devil. They are absolutely the same marriage that God instituted from the beginning. For he did not take this good of his, instituted for the generation of human beings, away even from condemned human beings, from whom he did not take away the senses and members of the flesh either, which are surely his gifts, though now destined to die by the condemnation that was due. This, I say, is the marriage of which it was said—apart from that great sacrament of Christ and the church which is figured here—“For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh.” For this was said before sin, and if no one had sinned it could have taken place without shameful lust. And now, although in the body of this death it does not take place without it, it is still the very thing that does not cease to take place: that a man cleaves to his wife and the two are in one flesh. So if it is said that marriage now is one thing, and would have been another if no one had sinned, this is said not according to its nature but according to a certain quality changed for the worse. Just as a man who has changed his life, whether for the better or for the worse, is called another man, although he is the same man—for a righteous man is one thing and a sinner another, though he is the same man—so marriage without shameful lust is one thing, and marriage with shameful lust another. Yet according to its constitution, by which a woman is lawfully joined to a man, the faithfulness of the carnal debt is kept free from the sin of adulteries, and children are sown in this lawful way, it is the same marriage that God instituted—although the devil wounded not marriage itself but the human beings from whom marriages are formed, by the ancient persuasion of sin, persuading them to the sin of disobedience, to which the disobedience of the members was paid back in return by divine judgment. In this state the married, though they blushed at their nakedness, could not altogether lose the goodness of marriage instituted by God.

From here he passes from those who are joined to those who are begotten—for whose sake we labor in this question with so many disputes against the new heretics—and, driven by a hidden prompting of God, says something by which he unties this whole knot by his own confession. For, wishing to stir up greater odium against us because we say that little children are born under sin even from lawful marriage, he says: “Those, then, who were never born you say could have been good; but these who have filled the world, for whom Christ died, you define as the work of the devil, born of a disease, and guilty from the beginning. I have proved, then,” he says, “that you aim at nothing else than to deny that God is the creator of these human beings who exist.” I, for my part, say that the creator of all human beings is none but God, although all are born under sin and perish unless they are reborn; for it is a fault, sown by the persuasion of the devil, through which they are born under sin, not the created nature by which they are human beings. But let shameful lust not move the members except when we will, and then it is not a disease; let even the lawful and honorable intercourse of married people not blush at it, avoiding sight and seeking privacy, and then it is not a disease; let the apostle not forbid wives to be possessed in this disease, and then it is not a disease. For what the Greek has, en pathei epithymias, some have translated into Latin as “in the disease of desire” or “of concupiscence,” others as “in the passion of concupiscence,” or in whatever other way it is found in various manuscripts. But passio in the Latin language, especially in the usage of the church, is not usually understood as a term of blame.

But whatever he thinks about the shameful concupiscence of the flesh, note what he has said about the little children, for whom we labor so that they may be believed to need a Savior, lest they die without salvation. I repeat his words: “Those, then, who were never born you say could have been good; but these who have filled the world, for whom Christ died, you define as the work of the devil, born of a disease, and guilty from the beginning.” Oh, if only he would untie the knot of contentiousness as he has untied the knot of this question! Will he now say that he said these things about adults? The question is about little children, about those being born; it is about them that he stirs up odium against us, because we define them as guilty from the beginning—because we say that those for whom Christ died are guilty. Why, then, did Christ die for them, if they are not guilty? From there, from there indeed, we shall win our case, from the very place where he thought odium should be stirred up. He says: how are little children guilty, for whom Christ died? We answer: no, how are little children not guilty, for whom Christ died? This dispute needs a judge. Let Christ judge, then, and let him say what his death availed for. “This is my blood,” he says, “which will be shed for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Let the apostle judge with him, since Christ himself speaks in the apostle too. He cries out and says of God the Father that he did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all. I think he says that Christ was handed over for us all in such a way that in this case little children are not separated from us. But what need is there to labor over this, about which even he no longer disputes, since he not only confesses that Christ died even for little children, but even blames us for calling guilty the little children for whom Christ died? Now, then, let the apostle, who said that Christ was handed over for us all, also say why Christ was handed over for us. “He was handed over,” he says, “for our offenses and rose for our justification.” If, then, as this man both confesses and professes, both says and objects, little children too are among those for whom Christ was handed over, and Christ was handed over for our offenses, then little children certainly have original offenses, for which Christ was handed over. He has something to heal in them, who, as he himself says, is not needed as a physician by the healthy but by the sick; he has a reason to save them, who came into the world, as the apostle Paul says, to save sinners; he has something to forgive in them, who testifies that he shed his blood for the forgiveness of sins; he has a reason to seek them, who came, as he says, to seek and to save what was lost; the Son of God has something to destroy in them, who came, as the apostle John says, for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. He, then, is an enemy of the salvation of little children who so asserts their innocence as to deny the necessary medicine to the wounded and injured.

Now note what follows and what he adds: “If before sin,” he says, “that from which human beings would be born was created through God, but that by which parents are aroused was created through the devil, holiness will doubtless be ascribed to those who are born and guilt to those who beget. Since this most plainly condemns marriage, remove this idea, I beg, from the midst of the churches, and truly believe that all things were made through Jesus Christ and without him nothing was made.” He says this as though we said that something of substance in human beings was created through the devil. The devil persuaded evil as sin; he did not create it as a nature. But plainly he persuaded a nature, since man is a nature, and so by persuading he corrupted it. For one who wounds does not create members but harms them. But wounds inflicted on bodies make the members limp or move with difficulty, not the virtue by which a man is righteous; while the wound called sin wounds the very life by which one was living rightly. And this wound the devil then inflicted far greater and deeper than the sins known to human beings. Hence by that great sin of the first man our nature, there changed for the worse, not only became a sinner but also begot sinners. And yet the very languor by which the power of living well perished is certainly not a nature but a fault, just as bad health in the body is surely no substance or nature but a fault; and, though not always, still very often the bad health of parents is in a certain way implanted in, and appears in, the bodies of their children.

But this sin, which changed man himself for the worse in paradise, because it is far greater than we can judge, is contracted by everyone who is born and is forgiven only in one who is reborn; so that even from parents already reborn, in whom it has been forgiven and covered, it is contracted into the guilt of the children who are born, unless the second, spiritual birth absolves those too whom the first, carnal birth has bound. Of this wonderful thing the Creator has produced a wonderful example in the olive and the wild olive, where not only from the seed of the wild olive but even from the seed of the olive nothing but a wild olive springs up. Therefore, although this carnal concupiscence, warring against the law of the mind, is present also in human beings who are generated by nature and regenerated by grace, yet, because it has been forgiven in the forgiveness of sins, it is no longer reckoned to them as sin, nor does it do any harm, unless consent is given to its motions toward unlawful things. But their offspring, because it is sown not through spiritual but through carnal concupiscence, like a wild olive of our kind from that olive, so contracts guilt from it by being born that it cannot be set free from that plague except by being reborn. How, then, does he claim that we ascribe holiness to those who are born and guilt to those who beget, when the truth rather shows that, even if there has been holiness in those who beget, original guilt is present in those who are born, which is abolished only in those who are reborn?

Since this is so, let him think whatever he likes about this concupiscence of the flesh and this lust—imperious over the unchaste, to be tamed by the chaste, yet shameful to chaste and unchaste alike—since, as I see, it pleases him greatly. Let him not hesitate to praise what he is ashamed to name; let him call it, as he has called it, the vigor of the members, and not respect the horror of chaste ears; let him call it the power of the members, and not beware of shamelessness; let him say, if he does not blush, that in paradise, had no one sinned, this vigor could have flourished there like a flower, and that there was no need to cover what would move in such a way that no one would be confounded by it, but that, a wife always being ready, it would always be exercised and never repressed, lest its will should ever be denied to so great a happiness. For far be it that that blessedness should either lack in that place what it wanted or feel in its body or mind what it did not want; and so, if the motion of lust anticipated the will of human beings, the will would at once follow, and the wife, who for this reason ought never to be absent, whether she was to conceive or was already pregnant, would at once be brought near, and either offspring would be sown or the natural and praiseworthy pleasure would be satisfied and the man's seed would perish, lest the appetite of so good a concupiscence be cheated—only the spouses would not turn to that use which is against nature, but as often as it delighted them they would use the members created for this, the genitals. And yet what if that use against nature also perhaps delighted them—what if that praiseworthy lust neighed after this pleasure too? Would they follow it, because it was sweet, or resist it, because it was base? If they followed it, where is any thought of honor? If they resisted it, where is the peace of such great happiness? If perhaps he blushes at this and says that the peace of that happiness and the order in these things could have been so great that the concupiscence of the flesh would never anticipate the will of those human beings, but would rise up when they themselves willed, and that they would will it when it was needed for sowing children, so that no emission of seed would be in vain and no intercourse would take place that was not followed by conception and birth, the flesh serving at their nod, lust serving at their nod—if he says this, let him at least consider that what he describes does not exist in human beings now. And if he will not grant that lust is a fault, let him at least say that through the disobedience of those human beings the concupiscence of the flesh itself was corrupted, so that what would have moved obediently and in order now moves disobediently and without order, so that it does not obey the nod even of chaste married people, but moves also when it is not needed, and, when it is needed, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, follows their nod, yet puts forth motions of its own. This disobedience of it, then, those disobedient human beings received and poured into us by descent. For it was not moving at their nod, but certainly without order, when they covered the members that had before been matters for glory and were then shameful.

But, as I said, let him think whatever he likes about this lust, proclaim it however he likes, praise it as much as he likes—for, as he shows in many places, he likes it much—so that the Pelagians, whichever of them, by a vow of continence, do not enjoy the flesh of wives, may delight in it, if not by its use, at least by its praises. Only let him spare the little children, so as not to praise them uselessly and defend them cruelly; let him not say that they are saved already, but let him allow them to come not to Pelagius the praiser but to Christ the Savior. For, to close this book now—since his discourse, written in the paper you sent, ended by saying, “Truly believe that all things were made through Jesus, and without him nothing was made”—let him grant that Jesus is Jesus for little children too, and, as he confesses that all things were made through him in that he is the Word, God, so let him confess that little children too are saved by him in that he is Jesus, if he wants to be a catholic Christian. For so it is written in the gospel: “And they will call his name Jesus; for he will save his people from their sins.” He is called Jesus, then, because Jesus in Latin is Savior; “for he will save his people”—and among that people there are certainly little children too—and “he will save them from their sins.” There are, then, original sins in little children too, because of which Jesus, that is, the Savior, can be theirs also.