On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants 3.10–3.23

Hence, not without reason, the blessed Cyprian sufficiently shows how the church has kept this as believed and understood from the beginning. When he asserted that infants fresh from the mother's womb are already fit to receive the baptism of Christ, since he had been consulted whether this ought to be done before the eighth day, he tried as far as he could to show them to be complete, lest anyone should think, from the very number of days (infants were formerly circumcised on the eighth), that they were still to be completed. But although he gave them a great defense, he nevertheless confessed that they are not free from original sin; because, if he denied this, he would take away the very reason for baptism, for the receiving of which he was defending them. You can read that letter of the martyr I mentioned, On Baptizing Infants, if you wish; for it cannot be lacking at Carthage. But I have thought fit to transfer a few things from it into this letter of mine too, as far as seemed sufficient for the present question; note them carefully. “As regards the case of infants,” he says, “who you said ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after they are born, and that the law of ancient circumcision must be considered, so that you thought one who is born should not be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day, it seemed quite otherwise in our council. For no one agreed to what you thought should be done; but rather we all judged that the mercy and grace of God is to be denied to no human being who is born. For since the Lord says in his gospel, The Son of Man did not come to destroy the souls of men but to save them, as far as it lies with us, if it can be done, no soul is to be lost.” Do you notice what he says, how he holds that it is destructive and deadly not only to the flesh but also to the soul of an infant to depart from this life without that saving sacrament? Hence, even if he said nothing else, it was for us to understand that a soul cannot perish without sin. But see what, a little later, while defending the innocence of infants, he nevertheless most openly confesses about them: “But if anything,” he says, “could hinder men from obtaining grace, rather graver sins could hinder adults, the advanced, and the elder. Further, if even to the gravest offenders, who have sinned much against God before, when they afterwards believe, forgiveness of sins is given, and no one is kept from baptism and grace, how much more ought an infant not to be kept from it, who, newly born, has not sinned, except that, born carnally according to Adam, he has contracted the contagion of the ancient death by his first birth; who comes the more easily to receive the forgiveness of sins for this very reason, that not his own but another's sins are forgiven him.”

You see with what confidence, from the ancient and undoubted rule of faith, so great a man says these things. He brought forward these most certain proofs so that what was uncertain, on which the man to whom he writes had consulted him and on which he mentions that a decree of the council had been made, namely that an infant might be baptized even before the eighth day from the day he was born, since no one doubted to baptize him if he was brought, might be proved by these foundations. For it was not then being decreed or confirmed by the council as something new, or as something assailed by anyone's contradiction, that infants are held bound by original sin; but since the consultation there turned on and was disputed about this, whether because of the law of carnal circumcision they ought to be baptized even before the eighth day, no one agreed with him who denied it, because it was no longer a matter for consultation or dispute, but was held firm and certain that the soul would perish from eternal salvation if it ended this life without obtaining that sacrament, even though infants fresh from the womb were bound only by the guilt of original sin; for which reason the forgiveness of sins, although much easier for them, since the sins are another's, was nevertheless necessary. By these certainties that uncertain question about the eighth day was resolved, and it was judged in the council that one may come to the aid of a newborn human being on any day, lest he perish for ever; while an account was also given of carnal circumcision itself, that it was a shadow of the future; not so that we should understand that baptism too ought to be given on the eighth day from a person's birth, but that we are spiritually circumcised in the resurrection of Christ, who rose from the dead on the third day after his passion indeed, but on the eighth in the days of the weeks by which the times roll on, that is, on the first day after the sabbath.

And now, by the audacity of some new disputation or other, certain people are trying to make uncertain for us what our forefathers put forward as most certain for resolving certain things which seemed uncertain to some. When this first began to be disputed I do not know; but this I do know, that even the holy Jerome, who today is engaged in ecclesiastical letters with such a reputation for excellent learning and labor, uses this too as a most certain proof, without any dispute, to solve certain questions in his books. For in what he wrote on the prophet Jonah, when he came to the place where even little children are mentioned as chastened by fasting, he says: “The older age begins, it reaches even to the younger. For no one is without sin, not even if his life is of one day, and the years of his life are numbered. For if the stars are not clean in the sight of God, how much more the worm and corruption, and those who are held liable by the sin of offending Adam!” If we could easily question this most learned man, how many commentators on the divine Scriptures in both languages, and writers of Christian treatises, would he name who, since the church of Christ was founded, have held nothing else, received nothing else from their forefathers, and handed down nothing else to their descendants! For my part, although I have read far fewer, I do not remember having heard anything else from Christians who accept both testaments, not only those in the catholic church but also those in any heresy or schism; I do not remember having read anything else among those whom I could read writing anything on these matters, who followed the canonical Scriptures, or believed they followed them, or wished to be believed to follow them. Whence this business has suddenly arisen for us I do not know. For a little while ago, when we were there at Carthage, my ears were brushed in passing by some people conversing casually, saying that infants are baptized not to receive forgiveness of sins but to be sanctified in Christ. Disturbed by this novelty, yet since it was not the right moment to say anything against it, and they were not the kind of men whose authority troubled me, I easily set it down among things past and done with. And behold, it is now defended with blazing zeal; behold, it is even committed to memory in writing; behold, the matter is brought to such a crisis that we are even consulted about it by the brothers; behold, we are compelled to argue and write against it!

A few years ago there arose at Rome a certain Jovinian, who is said to have persuaded even nuns already advanced in age to marry, not by enticing them, as though he wished to take one of them as his wife, but by arguing that virgins dedicated to holiness have no more merit before God than married believers. Yet this fabrication never came into his mind, to try to assert that the children of men are born without original sin. And certainly, if he had maintained this, women would have been much more inclined to marry, expecting to bear offspring wholly clean. When the brothers sent his writings (for he even dared to write) to Jerome for refutation, he not only found nothing of the kind in them, but even, to refute certain of Jovinian's empty claims, brought forward among his many proofs this, as most certain, about the original sin of man, on which he believed that not even Jovinian doubted. These are his words in doing so: “He who says,” he says, “that he abides in Christ ought himself to walk as he walked. Let our opponent choose of the two which he wishes; we give him the option. Does he abide in Christ or not? If he abides, then let him walk as Christ did. But if it is rash to promise the likeness of the Lord's virtues, he does not abide in Christ, because he does not walk as Christ. He did no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth; when he was reviled, he did not revile in return, and as a lamb before the shearer so he did not open his mouth; to him came the prince of this world and found nothing in him; though he had done no sin, God made him sin for us. But we, according to the epistle of James, all sin in many things, and no one is clean from sins, not even if his life is of one day. For who will boast that he has a chaste heart? Or who will be confident that he is clean from sins? And we are held guilty in the likeness of the transgression of Adam. Hence David too says: Behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in offenses my mother conceived me.”

I have not mentioned these things because we rely on the opinions of any disputants as on canonical authority, but so that it may appear that from the beginning up to the present time, when this novelty arose, this doctrine of original sin has been guarded in the faith of the church with such constancy that it was put forward as most certain by those who treated the Lord's words in order to refute other falsehoods, rather than that anyone tried to refute it as false. For the rest, in the holy canonical books the clearest and fullest authority of this doctrine flourishes. The apostle cries out: “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed to all men, in whom all sinned.” Hence it cannot even be said clearly that the sin of Adam harmed even those who do not sin, since Scripture says, “in whom all sinned.” Nor are these sins called another's in the sense that they do not belong to infants at all (since in Adam all then sinned, when, in that power implanted in his nature by which he could beget them, they were all still that one man); but they are called another's because they were not yet living lives of their own, but the life of one man contained whatever was in the future offspring.

“In no way,” they say, “can it be granted that God, who forgives one's own sins, imputes another's.” He forgives, but to those regenerated by the Spirit, not to those generated by the flesh; and he imputes sins no longer another's, but their own. For they were another's when those who were to carry them by propagation did not yet exist; but now by carnal generation they are theirs, to whom they have not yet been forgiven by spiritual regeneration.

“But if baptism,” they say, “cleanses that ancient offense, those who are born of two baptized parents ought to be free of this sin. For they could not transmit to their descendants what they themselves did not have at all.” See where error usually gathers strength from: when men are capable of asking about things which they are not capable of understanding. For to what hearer, or in what words, can I explain how mortal and flawed beginnings do not harm those who have been started on other, immortal beginnings, and yet harm those whom these same people, whom they no longer harm, have begotten from the same flawed beginnings? How is a man to understand this whose rather slow mind is also hindered by the prejudgment of his own opinion and by the heaviest chain of obstinacy? Yet if I had undertaken this case against those who forbade infants to be baptized at all, or contended that they are baptized needlessly, saying that those born of believers necessarily obtain their parents' merit, then I ought perhaps to be roused more laboriously and painstakingly to refute this opinion; then, if among the dull and contentious the difficulty of refuting falsehood and persuading of truth, because of the obscurity of the nature of things, stood against me, I might perhaps take refuge in these examples which are in common use and ready to hand, and in turn ask them, since they are troubled how sin which is cleansed through baptism remains in those whom the baptized beget, to explain how the foreskin, which is removed by circumcision, remains in those whom the circumcised beget, and how the chaff, which is separated by human labor with such care, remains in the grain that grows from wheat that has been winnowed.

With these and similar examples I might perhaps try in some fashion to persuade men who believed that the sacraments of cleansing are applied needlessly to the children of the cleansed, with what right counsel the infants of the baptized are baptized, and how it can be that, in a man having both seeds, that of death in the flesh and that of immortality in the Spirit, what harms his son, generated through the flesh, does not harm him, regenerated through the Spirit; and that what has been cleansed in him by forgiveness is also to be cleansed in the son by a like forgiveness, as by circumcision, as by threshing and winnowing. But now, since we are dealing with those who confess that the children of the baptized are to be baptized, how much better we do to argue thus and say: You who assert that children ought to have been born without sin from men cleansed from the stain of sin, why do you not notice that in the same way it can be said to you that from Christian parents Christian children ought to have been born? Why then do you judge that they ought to be made Christians? Was there not a Christian body in their parents, to whom it was said, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” Or perhaps a Christian body was born of Christian parents, but did not receive a Christian soul? This is much more astonishing. For whichever you hold about the soul, since surely with the apostle you do not believe that it did anything good or bad before it was born, either it was drawn by transmission, and, like the body, from Christians the soul too ought to have been Christian; or, created by Christ, whether in a Christian body or for a Christian body, it ought to have been created or sent as Christian. Unless perhaps you will say that Christian men could beget a Christian body and that Christ himself could not create a Christian soul. Yield, therefore, to the truth, and see that, just as it could come about, as you too confess, that a non-Christian is born of Christians, a non-member of Christ of members of Christ, and (to meet also all who, though falsely, are held by some name of religion) one not consecrated of the consecrated, so also it comes about that one not cleansed is born of the cleansed. What will you answer as to why a non-Christian is born of Christians, except that it is not generation but regeneration that makes Christians? Give yourselves this reason, then, that similarly no one is cleansed from sins by being born, but all by being reborn. And for this reason, from men cleansed because reborn, the man who is born must be reborn so that he too may be cleansed. For parents could transmit to their descendants what they themselves did not have at all, not only as grain transmits chaff and the circumcised man the foreskin, but also, as you too say, believers transmit unbelief to their descendants; which belongs no longer to them as regenerated by the Spirit, but is the flaw of the mortal seed by which they were generated in the flesh. For certainly those infants whom you judge must be made faithful through the sacrament of the faithful, you do not deny were born unfaithful of faithful parents.

“But if the soul is not from transmission, but only the flesh, then the flesh alone has the transmission of sin and it alone deserves punishment” (for this is what they hold), saying that it is unjust that a soul born today, not from the lump of Adam, should bear another's sin so ancient. Note, I beg you, how the circumspect Pelagius (for I have copied these words just quoted from his book) perceived in how difficult a question about the soul he is involved. For he does not say, “because the soul is not from transmission,” but “if the soul is not from transmission,” acting most rightly in speaking hesitantly rather than confidently about so obscure a matter, on which we can find no sure and open testimonies in the holy Scriptures, or can find them only with the greatest difficulty. Therefore I too answer this proposition without hasty assertion: if the soul is not from transmission, what justice is this, that a soul newly created and altogether immune from every offense, entirely free from every contagion of sin, should be compelled to endure in infants the sufferings of the flesh and various torments, and, what is more horrible, even the assaults of demons? For the flesh suffers none of these in such a way that it is not rather the soul, which lives and feels, that pays the penalty. If this is shown to be just, it can also be shown by what justice the soul in the flesh of sin incurs original sin, to be cleansed by the sacrament of baptism and the compassion of grace. But if the former cannot be shown, neither, I think, can the latter. Either, then, let us bear both as hidden and remember that we are men, or let us undertake at another time another work on the soul, if it seems necessary, disputing with sober caution.

For now, however, let us so take what the apostle says, “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed to all men, in whom all sinned,” that we may not be judged to oppose, most foolishly and unhappily, so many and such great and most plain testimonies of the divine Scriptures, by which we are taught that no one can obtain eternal life and salvation apart from fellowship with Christ, which comes about in him and with him when we are imbued with his sacraments and incorporated into his members. For it was said to the Romans, “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed to all men,” in no other sense than that in which it was said to the Corinthians, “Through a man came death, and through a man the resurrection of the dead; for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.” For no one doubts that this was said there of the death of the body, since the question under discussion, with the apostle's great earnestness, was the resurrection of the body. And that is why he seems to have been silent about sin there, because the question was not about righteousness; but here, to the Romans, he set down both, and commended both at great length: sin in Adam, righteousness in Christ, and death in Adam, life in Christ; all of which words of the apostle's discourse I examined and opened up, as far as I could and as seemed sufficient, in the first of those two books, as I have already said.

And yet there too, to the Corinthians, he so concluded at the end that passage on the resurrection, treated at length, as not to let us doubt that the death of the body too came about by the merit of sin. For when he had said, “This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality. And when this corruptible has put on incorruption and this mortal immortality, then,” he says, “will come about the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”, he then added: “Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” Since, then, as the apostle's most plain words declare, death will be swallowed up in victory when this corruptible and mortal puts on incorruption and immortality, that is, when God gives life also to our mortal bodies because of his Spirit dwelling in us, it is manifest that the sting of this death of the body too, which is the opposite of the resurrection of the body, was sin; the sting, however, by which death was brought about, not the sting which death brought about; for we die by sin, we do not sin by death. So “sting of death” is said in the way in which “tree of life” is said, not a tree which man's life made, but one by which man's life would come about; and as “tree of knowledge,” by which man's knowledge would come about, not one which man made by his knowledge. So also, then, “sting of death,” by which death was brought about, not which death brought about. For so too we say “cup of death,” by which someone has died or could die, not one which a dying or dead man has prepared. The sting of death, then, is sin; pierced by sin, the human race was put to death. Why do we still ask of which death, whether of the soul or of the body? Whether the first, by which we all now die, or the second, by which the ungodly will die then? There is no cause for tossing the question about, no room for evasion; the apostle's words, by which he was treating this, answer when questioned. “When this mortal,” he says, “has put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” He was dealing with the resurrection of the body, that death will be swallowed up in victory when this mortal has put on immortality. Then death itself will be mocked, which will be swallowed up in victory by the resurrection of the body. Then it will be said to it: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” This, then, will be said to the death of the body. For victorious immortality will swallow this up, when this mortal is clothed with immortality. To the death of the body, I say, it will then be said: Where, O death, is your victory, by which you had so conquered all here that even the Son of God fought with you and overcame you, not by avoiding you but by taking you on? You conquered in the dying, you are conquered in those who rise. Your victory, by which you had swallowed up the bodies of the dying, was temporal; our victory, by which you have been swallowed up in the bodies of those who rise, will stand eternal. Where is your sting, that is, the sin by which we were pierced and poisoned, so that you came to be even in our bodies and possessed them for so long an age? “Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” We all sinned in one, so that we all died in one; we received the law, not so that we might end sin by amendment, but so that we might increase it by transgression. For “the law came in, so that sin might abound,” and “Scripture has shut up all things under sin.” But thanks be to God, who has given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, so that where sin abounded grace might superabound, and that the promise might be given from faith in Jesus Christ to those who believe, and that we might conquer death by immortal resurrection, and its sting, sin, by free justification.

Let no one, then, be deceived or deceive on this matter. This manifest sense of holy Scripture removes and takes away all evasions. Just as death is drawn from origin in this body of death, so sin too has been drawn from origin in this flesh of sin; and to heal it, both what was drawn by propagation and what was increased by will, and to raise that flesh itself, the physician came in the likeness of the flesh of sin, the physician not needed by the healthy but by the sick, who came to call not the righteous but sinners. Accordingly, what the apostle says, when he admonished believers not to separate from unbelieving spouses, “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified in the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified in the brother; otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy,” is either to be taken as both we elsewhere, and Pelagius when he treated that same epistle to the Corinthians, explained it: that examples had already gone before, both of husbands whom their wives, and of wives whom their husbands, had won for Christ, and of little ones whom the Christian will even of one parent had prevailed to make Christians; or, if, as the apostle's words seem rather to sound and in a way to compel, some sanctification is to be understood there, by which the unbelieving husband or wife was sanctified in the believing spouse and by which the children of believers were born holy, whether because any husband or wife who had learned it in the law refrained from intercourse during the woman's menstrual blood (for Ezekiel places this among those precepts which are not to be taken figuratively), or because of any other sprinkling of holiness, not plainly set down there, from the very bond of marriages and children; nevertheless this must be held without doubt: whatever that sanctification may be, it does not avail to make Christians and to forgive sins unless they are made faithful by Christian and ecclesiastical instruction and sacraments. For neither are unbelieving spouses, however holy and righteous the spouses they cling to, cleansed from the iniquity which compels those separated from the kingdom of God to come into damnation; nor are infants, of whatever holy and righteous parents they are begotten, absolved from the guilt of original sin unless they have been baptized in Christ; and we ought to speak for them the more earnestly, the less they can speak for themselves.

For that disputation, against whose novelty we must strive with the ancient truth, aims at this: that infants should seem to be baptized quite needlessly. But this is not said openly, lest a custom of the church so healthfully established should not bear its violators. But if we are commanded to bring help to orphans, how much more ought we to labor for these, who will remain more destitute and more wretched than orphans, even under their parents, if the grace of Christ is denied them, which they cannot ask for themselves!

As for what they say, that some men already using the reason of their own will have lived or live in this world without any sin: it is to be wished that this may come about, it is to be striven for that it may come about, it is to be prayed for that it may come about, yet it is not to be trusted as though it had come about. For in those who wish, strive, and pray with fitting supplication for this, whatever remains of sins is loosed daily through what we truthfully say in prayer: “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.” Whoever says that this prayer was not necessary in this life for anyone, even a holy man who knows and does the will of God, except the one Holy of holies, greatly errs and cannot at all please the very one whom he praises; and if he thinks himself such, he deceives himself and the truth is not in him, for no other reason than that he thinks what is false. The physician, then, who is not needed by the healthy but by the sick, knows how to perfect us by his healing for eternal salvation; he who does not in this world take away death itself, although it was inflicted by the merit of sin, from those whose sins he forgives, so that even in overcoming the fear of it they may undertake the contest for the sincerity of faith; and who in some things does not help even his righteous ones to perfect righteousness, since they can still be lifted up, so that, while no living person is justified in his sight, we may always owe thanksgiving to his indulgence, and so be healed by holy humility from that first cause of all vices, that is, from the swelling of pride. While my plan was bringing forth this letter as a short one, a long book has been born; would that it were as perfect as it is at last finished!