Letters 133.2–133.12

One of our writers says finely: 'The philosophers, the patriarchs of the heretics, have stained the purity of the church with perverse doctrine,' so that they do not know that saying about human frailty: 'Why does earth and ashes boast?' especially since the same apostle says, 'I see another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind and leading me captive'; and again, 'For I do not do what I will, but what I do not will, that I do.' If he does what he does not will, how can the saying stand that a man can be without sin if he wills? How can what he wills be, when the apostle asserts that he cannot fulfil what he desires? And when we ask them who those are whom they consider without sin, they try to evade the truth with a new trick: that they do not mean those who are or have been, but those who could be. Excellent teachers! They say that something can be which they show has never been, though Scripture says, 'Everything that is to be has already been in former time.' Nor is it necessary for me now to go through the saints one by one and point out certain moles and spots, as it were, on a most beautiful body, as many of our writers simply do, since the arguments of the heretics, and through them of the philosophers, can be refuted by a few short sentences of the Scriptures. For what does the vessel of election say? 'God has shut up all under sin, that he may have mercy on all.' And in another place: 'For all have sinned and lack the glory of God.' Ecclesiastes too, through whom Wisdom herself sang, freely declares and says, 'There is no righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin,' and again, 'If the people sin; for there is no man who does not sin'; and, 'Who will boast that he has a chaste heart?' and, 'No one is clean from filth, not even if his life is of one day.' Hence David too: 'For behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins did my mother conceive me'; and in another psalm, 'No one living will be justified in your sight.' This testimony they elude with a new argument under the name of piety. For they say that in comparison with God no one is perfect; as if Scripture had said this. For it does not say, 'No one living will be justified in comparison with you,' but, 'No one living will be justified in your sight.' For when it says 'in your sight', it wants it to be understood that even those who seem holy to men are by no means holy to God's knowledge and understanding. For man looks on the face, God on the heart. But if, when God looks and contemplates all things, from whom the secrets of the heart are not hidden, no one is righteous, it is plainly shown that the heretics do not raise man to the heights but detract from God's power. And there are many other things; if I wished to gather them from the holy Scriptures, I would exceed the limit not only of a letter but of a volume.

They assert nothing new, who, applauding themselves in this kind of faithlessness, deceive the simple and unlearned, but cannot deceive churchmen who meditate on the law of God day and night. Let them be ashamed of their leaders and associates, who say that a man can be without sin if he wills, which in Greek they call anamartētos; and because the ears of the churches in the East cannot bear this, they pretend to say 'without sin' but not to dare to say anamartētos, as if 'without sin' were one thing and anamartētos another, and the Latin tongue had not expressed in two words the Greek word, which with them is compounded. If you say 'without sin' and deny that you say anamartētos, then condemn those who preach anamartētos. But you do not. For you know what you teach your disciples inwardly, saying one thing with your mouth and hiding another in your conscience; and to us, outsiders and unlearned, you speak in parables, but to your own you confess the mysteries. But, as I had begun to say, I will briefly set out the names of your leaders and associates, so that you may see in whose fellowship you glory. Manichaeus says that his elect, whom he places in heaven among Plato's vaults, are free from all sin and could not sin even if they wished; for they have climbed to such heights of virtue that they mock the works of the flesh. Priscillian in Spain, a part of Manichaeus, whose disciples, who share his baseness, love you very much: rashly claiming for themselves the word of perfection and knowledge, they shut themselves up alone with silly women alone, and between intercourse and embraces chant to them: 'Then the almighty father Ether descends in fruitful showers into the lap of his glad spouse, and, mingled with her great body, nourishes all offspring.' They also have a part of the Gnostic heresy that comes from the impiety of Basilides. Hence you too assert that those who are without knowledge of the law cannot avoid sins. What shall I say of Priscillian, who was condemned both by the sword of the world and by the authority of the whole world? Evagrius of Pontus, of Ibora, who writes to virgins, writes to monks, writes to her whose name bears witness to the darkness of faithlessness, published a book and sentences On apatheia, which we can call impassibility or imperturbability, when the mind is never moved by any thought or vice, and, to put it simply, is either a stone or God. His books are read in Greek throughout the East, and in Latin, translated by his disciple Rufinus, by many in the West. He also wrote a book, supposedly about monks, and lists in it many who never existed, and those he describes as having existed were Origenists and undoubtedly condemned by the bishops: Ammonius, Eusebius, Euthymius, and Evagrius himself, also Or and Isidore and many others whom it is tedious to list. And, following that line of Lucretius, 'And as when physicians give foul wormwood to children, they first smear the rim of the cup with the sweet yellow liquid of honey,' so he put one John at the very beginning of the book, who was undoubtedly catholic and holy, so that under cover of him he might bring into the church the others he had included, who were heretics. And who could describe in fitting words that rashness, or rather madness of his, in giving the book of Sextus the Pythagorean, a man without Christ and a pagan, the altered name of Xystus, martyr and bishop of the Roman church? In it, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, which makes man equal to God and says he is of his substance, many things are said about perfection, so that those who do not know the philosopher's volume drink from the golden cup of Babylon under the name of a martyr. Indeed in that volume there is no mention of prophets, patriarchs, apostles, or Christ, so that he would have it that a bishop and martyr lived without faith in Christ. From it you too take very many testimonies against the church. He had done the same in the name of the holy martyr Pamphilus, entitling as Pamphilus's the first of the six books of the defence of Origen by Eusebius of Caesarea, whom no one does not know to have been an Arian, so as to pour into Latin ears those excellent four volumes of Origen's On First Principles. Do you want to know yet another leader of your error? Your doctrine is a little branch of Origen. For in that psalm where it is written (to say nothing of the rest), 'Moreover, even until night my reins have instructed me,' he asserts that a holy man (and you, of course, are one of them), when he has reached the summit of the virtues, does not even at night suffer what is human, nor is he tickled by any thought of vices. And do not blush at the fellowship of such people, while you refuse their names, with whose blasphemies you are joined. The second proposition of Jovinian is the teaching of your mind. Whatever answer was given to him, believe that it was given to you. And it cannot be that those whose opinion is one have a different end.

This being so, what do they want, those wretched little women laden with sins, who are carried about by every wind of doctrine, always learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth, and the other companions of the little women, with itching ears, not knowing what they hear or what they say, who receive the oldest filth as if it were a new mixture, who, as Ezekiel says, daub a wall without mortar, which is broken down when the rain of truth comes on it? Simon Magus founded a heresy with the help of Helena the prostitute. Nicolaus of Antioch, the inventor of all uncleannesses, led choirs of women. Marcion sent a woman ahead to Rome to prepare the minds of those to be deceived by him. Apelles had Philumene as companion of his doctrines. Montanus, preacher of an unclean spirit, first corrupted many churches with gold through Prisca and Maximilla, noble and wealthy women, then polluted them with heresy. I will leave the old things and pass to more recent ones. Arius, to capture the world, first deceived the emperor's sister. Donatus was helped by the wealth of Lucilla to pollute throughout Africa every unhappy person with his stinking waters. In Spain Agape led Elpidius, a woman a man, the blind the blind, into the pit, and had as her successor Priscillian, a most zealous follower of the magus Zoroaster, and from a magus a bishop; joined to him, Galla, not by race but by name, left a sister, running here and there, as heir of another, neighbouring heresy. Now too the mystery of iniquity is at work; each sex trips up the other, so that we are compelled to take up that prophetic saying: 'The partridge cried out, it gathered what it did not bring forth, making its riches not with judgment; in the middle of its days they will leave it, and in its end it will be a fool.'

As for what they afterward fitted to this sentence in order to deceive people, 'not without the grace of God', though at first sight it may deceive readers, when looked into and most carefully sifted it cannot deceive. For they place the grace of God in this, not that we are supported and guided by his help in each of our works, but they refer it to free will and to the commandments of the law, citing that saying of Isaiah, 'For God gave the law as a help,' so that thanks are to be given to God in this, that he made us such that by our own choice we can both choose good and avoid evil. And those who say this do not understand that through their mouth the devil hisses an intolerable blasphemy. For if God's grace consists only in this, that he made us with a will of our own, and we are content with free will and need his help no further, lest, if we needed it, free will be broken, then we ought no longer to pray at all, nor to move his mercy by prayers so that we may receive daily what, once received, is in our power. Men of this kind abolish prayer and boast that through free will they have become not men with a will of their own but possessors of God's power, which needs no one's help. Let fasts too be abolished, and all self-restraint. For why should I labour to receive by effort what has once been placed in my power? What I say is not my own argument; one of his disciples, or rather already a master and leader of the whole army, and, in contrast to the apostle, a vessel of perdition, running through thickets of solecisms, not (as his followers boast) of syllogisms, philosophizes and argues thus: 'If I do nothing without God's help, and everything I have done is his in each work, then it is not I who labour who will be crowned, but God's help in me; and he gave the power of choice in vain, which I cannot fulfil unless he always helps me. For a will that needs another's help is destroyed. But God gave free choice, which will not otherwise be free unless I do what I will. And therefore either I use once for all the power that was given me, so that free choice may be preserved, or, if I need another's help, the freedom of choice in me is destroyed.'

What blasphemy does he not go beyond who says this? What poisons of the heretics does he not surpass? They assert that through the freedom of choice they no longer have need of God at all, and they do not know that it is written, 'What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?' Great thanks indeed he gives to God who through the freedom of choice is a rebel against God! We gladly embrace that freedom, but only so that we always give thanks to the Giver and know that we are nothing unless he himself preserves in us what he has given, as the apostle says: 'It is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.' To will and to run is mine; but this very 'mine' will not be mine without God's help. For the same apostle says, 'It is God who works in you both to will and to accomplish'; and the Saviour in the Gospel, 'My Father works until now, and I work.' He is always the giver and always the bestower. It is not enough for me that he gave once, unless he always gives. I ask in order to receive, and when I have received, I ask again. I am greedy to receive God's benefits; he does not fail in giving, nor am I sated with receiving. The more I drink, the more I thirst. For I have read the psalmist's song: 'Taste and see that the Lord is sweet.' Every good thing we have is a taste of the Lord. When I think I have reached the goal of the virtues, then I shall have the beginning. For 'the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom', which is driven out and destroyed by charity. This is the only perfection in men, that they know themselves to be imperfect. 'And you,' he says, 'when you have done everything, say: We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we ought to do.' If he is unprofitable who has done everything, what must be said of him who could not fulfil it? Hence the apostle too says that he has received in part and comprehended in part, and is not yet perfect, forgetting what lies behind and stretching forward to what lies ahead. He who always forgets what lies behind and desires what is to come shows that he is not content with the present. As for their tossing up and down the claim that we destroy free choice, let them hear on the contrary that those destroy the freedom of choice who misuse it against the kindness of the Giver. Who destroys choice? He who always gives thanks to God and refers to the fountain whatever flows in his own little stream, or he who says, 'Depart from me, for I am clean; I have no need of you. For you gave me once for all the freedom of choice, to do what I will; why do you thrust yourself in again, so that I can do nothing unless you complete your gifts in me?' You deceitfully put forward the grace of God, so as to refer it to the creation of man and not to seek God's help in each work, so that, of course, you may not seem to lose free choice; and while you despise God's support, do you seek the help of men?

Listen, I beg you, listen to the sacrilege: 'If', he says, 'I want to bend my finger, move my hand, sit, stand, walk, run about, spit, clear my nose with two fingers, relieve my bowels, pass urine, shall I always need the help of God?' Hear, ungrateful man, or rather sacrilegious man, the apostle preaching: 'Whether you eat or drink or do anything else, do all in the name of the Lord'; and that saying of James: 'Come now, you who say, "Today and tomorrow we will go to such a city and spend a year there and trade and make a profit," who do not know about tomorrow; for what is your life? You are a breath or a vapour that appears for a little while and then vanishes; instead of saying, "If the Lord wills and we live, we will do this or that." But now you exult in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.' Do you think you are wronged, and that the freedom of choice is destroyed, if you always run back to God as the author, if you depend on his will and say, 'My eyes are always toward the Lord, for he will pluck my feet out of the snare'? Whence do you dare to say with a rash tongue that each person is ruled by his own choice? If he is ruled by his own choice, where is God's help? If he does not need Christ as ruler, how does Jeremiah write, 'A man's way is not in himself,' and, 'A man's steps are directed by the Lord'? You say that God's commandments are easy, and yet you cannot bring forward anyone who has fulfilled them all. Answer me: are they easy or difficult? If easy, bring forward who has fulfilled them, and why David sings in the psalm, 'You who frame pain in a commandment,' and again, 'Because of the words of your lips I have kept hard ways,' and the Lord in the Gospel, 'Enter by the narrow gate,' and, 'Love your enemies,' and, 'Pray for those who persecute you.' But if they are difficult, why have you dared to say that God's commandments are easy, which no one has fulfilled? Do you not see that your statements fight against each other? Either they are easy, and there is an infinite multitude of people who have fulfilled them; or they are difficult, and you have rashly called easy what is difficult.

You are also accustomed to say that either the commandments are possible and rightly given by God, or they are impossible, and the fault is not in those who received the commandments but in him who gave impossible ones. Did God command me to be what God is, so that there should be no difference between me and the Lord the Creator, that I should be greater than the height of the angels, that I should have what the angels do not have? Of him it is written as his own: 'He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.' If this is common to me with Christ, what will he have of his own? Otherwise your statement destroys itself. You assert that a man can be without sin if he wills, and, after a very deep sleep, in order to deceive untaught souls, you vainly try to add, 'not without the grace of God.' For if a man can once for all be without sin by himself, what need is there of God's grace? But if without his grace he can do nothing, why was it necessary to say that he can do what he cannot? 'He can be without sin,' he says, 'he can be perfect, if he wills.' For which Christian does not want to be without sin, or who refuses perfection, if it is enough for him to will and ability follows at once when willing has come first? There is no Christian who does not want to be without sin; so all will be without sin, because all desire to be without sin. And here you will be held against your will: you who can bring forward no one, or hardly anyone, without sin will have to confess that all are without sin. 'God gave possible commandments,' he says. And who denies it? But how this statement is to be understood, the vessel of election teaches most plainly; for he says, 'What was impossible for the law, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh'; and again, 'By the works of the law no flesh will be justified.' Lest you think this was said only of the law of Moses and not of all the commandments that are contained under the one name of law, the same apostle writes: 'For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man; but I see another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind and taking me captive in the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.' Why he said this he shows in another passage: 'For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I do I do not understand. For I do not do what I will, but what I hate, that I do. But if I do what I do not will, I agree with the law, that it is good. But now it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, no good dwells. For to will is present with me, but to do the good I do not find. For I do not do the good I will, but the evil 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.'

You will protest and say that we follow the dogma of the Manichees and of those who stir up wars against the church about different natures, asserting that there is an evil nature which cannot be changed in any way. Charge this not to me but to the apostle, who knew that God is one thing and man another, the frailty of the flesh one thing and the strength of the spirit another. 'For the flesh desires against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and these are opposed to each other, so that we do not do the things we will.' From me you will never hear that nature is evil; but how the frailty of the flesh is to be discussed, let us learn from him who wrote it. Ask him why he said, 'For I do not do what I will, but the evil I hate, that I do': what necessity hinders his will, what great force commands him to do things worthy of hatred, so that he is compelled to do not what he wills but what he hates and does not will. He will answer you: '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 honour and another for dishonour?' Bring a stronger charge against God: why, when Esau and Jacob were still in the womb, he said, 'Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.' Accuse him of injustice, because Achan the son of Carmi stole something from the spoil of Jericho, and so many thousands of men were slaughtered for his fault; why the sons of Eli sinned and almost the whole people was wiped out and the ark captured; David sinned by numbering the people, and why so many thousands of men were slain in all Israel; and finally (as your comrade Porphyry is accustomed to object to us), for what reason a merciful and compassionate God allowed all the nations from Adam to Moses and from Moses to the coming of Christ to perish in ignorance of the law and the commandments of God. For neither the Britons, a province fertile in tyrants, nor the Scythian peoples and all the barbarian nations round about as far as the ocean had known Moses and the prophets. Why was it necessary for him to come in the last time and not before an innumerable multitude of men perished? The blessed apostle, writing to the Romans, discusses this question most wisely. You do not know these things, and you leave them to God's knowledge; deign also not to know these things that you ask. Grant God his own power; he has no need of you as a defender. I, wretched man, who expect your insults, who always read, 'By grace you have been saved,' and, 'Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered,' to speak of my own frailty, know that I will many things that are holy and yet cannot fulfil them; for the strength of the spirit leads to life, but the frailty of the flesh leads back to death; and I hear the Lord warning: 'Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.'

In vain you blaspheme and thrust into the ears of the ignorant that we condemn free choice. Let him be condemned who condemns it. We differ from the brute animals in that we were created with free choice; but free choice itself, as we have said, relies on God's help and needs his aid in each thing; which you do not want, holding that whoever once has free choice does not need God as helper. Free choice gives a free will; it does not at once make out of free choice a god who needs no one's help. You yourself, who boast of a righteousness in men that is perfect and equal to God, and confess that you are a sinner, answer me: do you want to be free of sin or not? If you want to, why, according to your opinion, do you not fulfil what you desire? But if you do not want to, you show yourself a despiser of God's commandments. If you are a despiser, then certainly a sinner too. If a sinner, hear Scripture speaking to you: 'To the sinner God said: Why do you recite my righteous acts and take my covenant in your mouth? But you have hated discipline and cast my words behind you.' Since you do not want to do the words of God, you cast them behind your back, and as a new apostle you decree to the world what is to be done and what is not. But it is not as you say; something else is turning in your mind. For when you call yourself a sinner and say that a man can be without sin if he wills, you want it understood that you are indeed holy and lack all sin, but take the name of sin out of humility, so as to praise others rather and disparage yourself.

Who could bear that argument of yours too? You say in these words: 'To be is one thing, to be able to be another. To be is not placed in our power; but "to be able to be" is said generally, in the sense that, although another has not been, yet whoever wishes to be can be.' I ask, what sort of argument is this: that what never was can be; that what you testify no one has done can be done; to attribute it to anyone at all, when you do not know whether he will exist; and to give to I know not whom what you cannot prove to have existed in the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles? Hear the simplicity of the church, or its rusticity or unskilfulness, as it seems to you. Say what you believe; preach publicly what you tell your disciples in secret. You who say you have freedom of choice, why do you not say freely what you think? The secrets of your chambers hear one thing, the congregations of our people another. For the untaught crowd cannot bear the weight of your secrets nor take solid food, being content with the milk of infancy. I have not yet written, and you threaten me with the thunderbolts of your replies, so that, terrified by this fear, I may not dare to open my mouth; and you do not notice that we write precisely so that you may be compelled to answer and at last say openly what, according to time, persons, and places, you either say or keep silent. I do not wish to deny you the freedom to say what you have once written. It is a victory for the church that you say openly what you think. For either you will answer the same as we say, and will be not adversaries but friends; or, if you say what is contrary to our doctrine, we shall win in this, that all the churches will know what you think. To have exposed your opinions is to have overcome them. The blasphemy is plain at first sight. What is blasphemous by its very profession needs no refuting. You threaten us with a reply, which no one can avoid except one who writes nothing at all. How do you know what we are going to say, that you are preparing a reply? Perhaps we shall say your own things, and you sharpen the pen of your wit in vain. The Eunomians, Arians, and Macedonians, separate in name, united in impiety, give us no labour; for they say what they think. This is the only heresy that blushes to say in public what it does not fear to teach in secret. The rage of the disciples brings out the silences of the masters. What they have heard in chambers they preach on the housetops, so that, if what they have said pleases the hearers, it may be credited to the glory of the masters; if it displeases, the fault may be the disciple's, not the master's. That is why your heresy has grown and you have deceived very many, especially those who cling to women and know that they cannot sin; for you are always teaching and always denying, and you deserve to hear that prophetic word: 'Their glory in births and in travail. Give them, O Lord. What will you give them? A barren womb and dry breasts.' My mind is boiling; I cannot restrain my words. The narrow limits of a letter do not allow the size of a long work. In this little work no one's name is touched specifically; we have spoken against the master of a perverse doctrine. Whoever is angry and writes back will betray himself, like a mouse, by his own sign, and will receive greater wounds in a real contest.

For many years, from youth to this age, I have written various little works, and I have always been eager to say to my hearers what I had learned publicly in the church, and not to follow the arguments of the philosophers but to rest content with the simplicity of the apostles, knowing that it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will reject,' and, 'The foolishness of God is wiser than men.' This being so, I challenge my adversaries to sift all my writings from the beginning and, if they find any fault in my small talent, to bring it into the open. For either they will be good, and I will contradict their slander, or they will be blameworthy, and I will confess my error, preferring to correct it rather than to persevere in a perverse opinion. And you too, excellent teacher, either defend what you have said and support the sharp points of your opinions with further eloquence, so that you may not deny, when it pleases you, what you have said; or, if you have certainly erred, as a man, confess it freely and restore harmony to those who are at variance. Let it come to your mind that the Saviour's tunic was not torn even by the soldiers. You see the quarrels of brothers among themselves and you laugh and rejoice that some are called by your name, others by Christ's. Imitate Jonah and say, 'If this storm is because of me, take me up and cast me into the sea.' He was thrown into the deep in humility, to rise more gloriously as a type of the Lord; you are raised to the stars by pride, so that Jesus may say of you, 'I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.'