Commonitorium against the heresy of Pelagius and Caelestius and the writings of Julian, with Subnotations on Augustine's Unfinished Work against Julian 14

Again, from the third of the four books addressed to Turbantius, near the beginning of chapter 3, the words of Julian: 'Because we say that the grace of baptism must not be changed according to cases, therefore Christ, who is the redeemer of his own work, increases his benefits toward his image with continual generosity, and those whom he had made good by creating, he makes better by renewing and adopting.' I would like you first to teach and prove from where the little ones, whom you confess to be God's work and deny to be guilty, had a captivity, so that they need a redeemer. For no one inopportunely offers the price of redemption for a free man. From what oldness are they to be renewed, or, as you would have it, made new, if they are not defiled by the old foulness of sin? But on the baptism of little ones I will press you to this point, to convict you by your own definitions of holding rather that they do not need it, and of thinking that they ought to be baptized in word only, to delude the simple, while in fact denying it by the conclusions of your disputations. For those who, according to you, have the state of their birth immaculate, with no stain of origin, as you would have it, from what are they to be cleansed when they are washed? If they are not born liable to the guilt of their origin, from what are they to be freed, so that Christ may truly and properly be 'Jesus' for them also, which in Latin is rendered 'Saviour'? And those who draw no vice from their generation, from what are they to be regenerated? Finally, leaving aside countless things for the present, this must be said against you: if the little ones at their birth have received this state of innocence and purity, as you say, which Adam had before sin, whom, as you decree, no stain of the same progenitor has sprinkled, no contagion defiled, and who, growing up with the free choice of the will which is in nature, never fall away to the last end of life from the goods innate or born with them, what need did they have of Christ's baptism? Or do you perhaps say: for the kingdom of heaven and adoption as sons? But why would such a state, and so great a holiness of life acquired afterwards by their own acts in a preserved nature, not admit them to that kingdom or adopt them as sons? But let those who rush in hear again, as from a temple-keeper and a watchful guardian: 'Unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.' And let us see of what power baptism itself is, and how many and how great are the effects it has. The apostle Paul says of it: 'He who redeemed us saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewal.' So it is salvation, redemption, and renewal. Will it then be no penalty for unbaptized little ones not to have salvation, redemption, renewal; finally, not to enter the kingdom of heaven, not to be rescued from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of the Son of God's love, not to eat the flesh of the Lord and drink his blood? Of this sacrament the voice of the Saviour says: 'Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will not have life in yourselves.' Certainly, beyond any evasion, no one receives this without baptism, nor does anyone become a partaker of that sacrament without it. Or do you command, as you usually do, evading here too, that this sentence about receiving the flesh and blood of the Lord is not general but special, that is, for those who were present when he spoke? Let Christians hear, let them hear, if you leap to this, and let them answer you that on these terms the Lord's supper, in which, placed with the apostles alone, he established the sacraments of his body and blood to be observed, was commanded to them alone and pertains to no one else, whether to those who were not present at that supper or to all of us who came after. Do you see by what snares, by what straits you are choked, when you deny that the bond of origin is a great evil, a great penalty and inevitable condemnation, from which Christ has freed the whole human race, every age, only through these sacraments, in which the washing of regeneration and renewal comes first? These things being gathered against your so great and so manifest and most impious audacity, it is clear that you, as a follower of Caelestius, who defined that infants even unbaptized have eternal life, rather deny that little ones ought to be baptized, and, as I have said, only mock with words, while in your mind holding an open impiety in common with pagans and Jews. To prove this clearer than light, hear by what names, each with its proper cause, of the benefits Christ conferred on the human race you make the little ones strangers, as though the Lord Christ Jesus himself owed them none of these things and provided them none. Surely, willing or not, Christ is the life-giver. Here I will ask: of both soul and body? Though unwilling, you will confess so. I will repeat the question: of every age without exception? You will answer: of every age. I will press more closely: of the little ones too? You will say: yes. But hear; I will tell you in what way, and, so to speak, by what art, he gives life. 'But God,' says his herald and vessel of election, the apostle Paul, 'who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us in Christ, by whose grace we have been saved.' What do you think now? Did he count and name the little ones too, or are they outside this mercy and love, because they are not dead in sins, and do they wait for you, a most vain doorkeeper, to admit them to mercy, to be given life, when he has ceased to have mercy on sinners, so that he may give them life otherwise than others? But let us pass on from here, for brevity's sake, to another name. That he is Saviour is written thus in the Gospel: 'For to you is born today a Saviour in the city of David.' Hence also in Greek he is properly called Jesus; and [he says] to Zacchaeus: 'Today salvation has come to this house, since he too is a son of Abraham.' Again: 'The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.' Do you hear what he says? 'What was lost,' he says. Since you declare that the flocks of little ones were not lost, without doubt they are not saved. Hear this of the lost sheep, sought and found; hear this of the drachma. Again the apostle Paul: 'A human saying, and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.' From here, excellent master, remove the little ones … [he came to call not the] righteous but sinners to repentance; he baptizes for the remission of sins; he bore our [sins] in his body on the tree; while we were [still sinners] he died at the right time for the ungodly; he condemned sin in the flesh … for our sins; and one died for all, to rescue us from the present age … And what end will there be, if we review here everything from which this excellent teacher drives away a countless multitude of little ones? That he enlightens us, the apostle John says thus: 'But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we shall have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son will cleanse us from all sin.' I ask, with what ears, with what face do you hear that we are cleansed from all sin by the blood of Jesus the Son of God, when you keep infants, who have no sin, as you say, away from this most holy blood? That he is Redeemer, hear: 'Giving thanks,' says the apostle, 'to God the Father, who has made us fit for a share in the lot of the saints in light, who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the remission of sins.' Do you think you will wake up, weighed down by so deep a sleep, and hear what he says, and feel with what shame you have spoken …, and that those are redeemed who have been or are drawn out of the power of darkness and are transferred into the kingdom of the Son of God's love, and that the gift of redemption is not without the remission of sins? Hear further, willing or not, and against your will: 'Who gave himself to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people zealous for good works.' Drive the infants away from here, then, since they are not redeemed from an iniquity they do not have, nor are they purified, since they have nothing, as you say, from which to be purified, so as to be joined to God's people, zealous for good works. And if, in this heading of redemption, we pursue everything so as to show the abyss of your most vain impiety, shall we ever finish? So I think it more convenient, to avoid prolixity, to gather as many names as we can of the Saviour's benefits, from which your impiety tries to exclude the infants, and to add a few select testimonies of Scripture for some of them, so that it may be plain to all how harmful an enemy you are to sound and right faith. That Christ is liberator, that he is mediator, that he is propitiation: I would like you to tell me the cause of mediation for a little one, whom you deny to have any cause of offence. Tell me also the access of propitiation for one whom you decree to have no fault, for whose remission God might be propitiated. That he is physician, who is needed only by those who are ill. That he reconciles, hear Paul saying: 'For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.' Again the same: 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their sins against them.' And a little after, the same: 'And not only that, but we also glory in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.' With what face do you want the little ones not to belong to this reconciliation? That he is circumciser, you will hear in what follows; meanwhile, give this infant a foreskin, which you deny he has, so that he may be circumcised. That he is shepherd; but he receives no sheep into his fold which he has not first circumcised, and he certainly circumcises the one who is dead in trespasses and in the uncircumcision of his flesh, since he came to the lost sheep too. That he is merciful and compassionate, hear the apostle Paul: 'We too,' he says, 'were 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.' That he is testator, consoler, advocate, adopter: whom, and what kind of people, he adopts, since you have become too deaf, let catholic Christians hear from the apostle Peter, who says: 'But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for adoption, that you may proclaim the mighty works of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.' That he is regenerator; but he regenerates no one except one who contracted a vice in the first generation. Otherwise, if the generation is in good order, as you like to think, what just cause of regeneration is there? Or what is there in it that ought to be emended or corrected, unless perhaps something is depraved? That he is justifier, hear the apostle Paul: 'As the truth is in Jesus, put off, with regard to your former way of life, the old man, who is corrupted according to the desires of error; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, who was created according to God in righteousness and holiness of truth.' These whom you declare clothed with no oldness, what will they do if they listen to you? They will not approach the renewer, they will not put him on, laying aside their oldness, so as to be renewed in the spirit of their mind. That those who have been baptized are transferred from darkness to the kingdom, hear the apostle Paul: 'Giving thanks,' he says, 'to God the Father, who has made us fit for a share in the lot of the saints in light, who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the remission of sins.' I ask, with what mouth, or rather with what shamelessness, did you think these things should be considered otherwise, so as not to be pressed by the truth of so great a light and the weight of Christian reason? Will you then separate the little ones from this heading too, lest those who are innocent according to you, and set in the light by the merit of innocence, should seem to be drawn out of the power of darkness? But, most senseless of mortals, they are not transferred into the kingdom of the Son of God's love in any other way, nor before they have first been drawn out of the power of darkness and have had redemption, that is, the remission of sins. And note here redemption: you too will speak of it and grant it, but some other, invented one, I know not what, whereas the apostle says that it is, in the first place, nothing but the remission of sins. That he is purifier or expiator, hear John the Baptist: 'Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world.' What, I ask, does this Lamb signify here but a victim for sins, who for his own, whom he expiates, when he was offered and as he is daily offered in his sacraments, grants remission of past and present sins? Do you command, then, that the little ones, liable to no sin, should say that this victim, which is known to have been slain only for sins or for sinners, did them no good at all? Since again the same apostle says: 'Who gave himself for us, to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people zealous for good works.' Where will you turn? Where will you flee? Do you see, most shameless man, that the blood of this victim is the purifier of sins, and also redemption from all iniquity, through which he prepares for himself a people zealous for good works? And you, with a brow of iron and a heart of stone, separate the little ones from the people of God, who, expiated and redeemed, rejoice in so many and such divine rewards. That he is the blotter-out of the bond, hear the apostle Paul: 'And you, when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made alive together with him, blotting out the bond that was against us in its decrees, which was contrary to us; taking it out of the way, he nailed it to the cross; stripping off the flesh, he led away the principalities and powers boldly, triumphing over them in himself.' What will you build here, excellent teacher? Does he blot out in baptism the bond of the little ones too? Or, since they have no bond, either their own or their father's, do you not care to admit them to this grace of the giver? Let catholic Christians hear here what you think; whom they ought to understand you to be, I leave to their own judgment. That Christ is life, hear the apostle John: 'And this is the testimony: he who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son does not have life, but the judgment of God remains on him.' Come, headlong man, admit that a little one has this life without baptism. You have stuck here, I believe, and sticking in the same mud you pay one debt by incurring another. If, then, he does not have life without this sacrament, the judgment of God remains on him. From where this comes, I do not ask; let the prudence of the readers understand. That he refreshes and relieves, the Lord says in the Gospel: 'Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you, [and learn from me, for I am meek and] humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.' Will there be any doubt here too that no one hastens to that preacher except one who, burdened with some load, is worn out with labour, so that, laying it down, he may take his gentle yoke upon himself, meek and humble of heart? And what is that load but, as we said, the load of sins? Since, as you like to think, the little ones have none, let them not listen to this preacher, whom the Greeks call 'Ecclesiastes', and let them not care to be understood as included in taking up his meek and gentle yoke, since they had no burden to lay down. Is it not a wickedness for Christians to hear such things? And is it not a very great penalty that you are still allowed to babble through the negligence of priests? You have, I think, something to touch and goad you. But if you stir again, I know that, God granting, you will be bound more tightly, so that you stir no further. Yet let me still hold you, with necessary consideration, to what was said above, examining more closely what you think of the penalty which the transgression of the progenitors deserved by divine judgment, and, bringing you back to this question, let me lay open your abyss again. When these things are untied and the authority of the divine Scriptures presses your throat, you will know that from all your books you have supplied weapons to pagans and Jews, but leaden ones; for they could have no strength to storm the faith in Christ. And let us see again and again what they are and of what kind. In them, I ask, what is this error of an inexplicable labyrinth, what are these insoluble riddles of the Theban monster? In your letter which, as we mentioned, was sent to Pope Zosimus of holy memory, you are displeased with, and you condemn, one who holds that Adam was made mortal and would have died whether he sinned or not; and you say that this is not founded on reason either. For it must be believed, you say, that he was made immortal indeed, but such that, if he had not sinned, he could acquire the power of immortality by tasting the tree of life. You add also that he is rightly to be disapproved who contradicts the apostle when he preaches: 'As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive,' and at once you add this other testimony: 'Through a man came death, and through a man the resurrection of the dead.' When the simple Christian hears this, believing that no deceit, no fallacy is being brought in, in the way the church was accustomed to be taught by the apostles, he thinks you an excellent teacher and his own, and, attending to the rest of the same apostle's words which you follow in this cause, he decides that they must be heard. But you, having one thing shut up in your breast and another ready on your tongue, a new and excellent disputer, now thrust this upon us in this work of yours, worked out after so long a time in Cilicia. With a necessary repetition of the heading, then, let us examine again what new and unheard-of thing you have brought from there, after ploughing the sea and traversing the East. 'Sin, then, entered,' you say, 'according to the apostle, through one man into this world, and through sin death, since the world saw him both guilty and destined for the condemnation of perpetual death.' And you add: 'But only death passed through to all men, because one form of judgment includes all transgressors of every later age too. Yet this death is not permitted to rage against the saints or any innocent, but pervades only those,' you say, 'whom it sees to have emulated the transgression; which transgression, though it was not made natural, was yet the pattern of sin, and therefore, though it does not weigh on those who are born, it accuses those who imitate. Judicial death passes in that in which all sinned, but by free will.' These, then, are the more probable and more refined opinions of your doctrine; those definitions of the earlier time have been thrown away. Or have you something hidden and deep which is perhaps to be expounded to us from the Brahmans, the Gymnosophists, or the Hyperboreans, or any other nations wiser than our world? Let us come, then, to this more recent definition, by which you were pleased to hold that sin entered through one man, and through sin death, but that only death passed through to all men. I ask (I do not want you to take advantage of the slowness or slenderness of my wit): you say that two things entered, sin and death, but you want only death to have passed through to all men, though not to all without exception? Most foolishly; for if sin entered and did not pass through, it remained where it entered. I suppose it was waiting for its companion, until that too should go out when some business was done. But if we are acting seriously, and so great a matter is not to be laughed at, then, according to yourself, if sin could enter, it passed through; but if it could not pass through, it did not enter either. Or did it enter in order to stand still? If that is absurd even to say, it passed through; and where could it have passed but into all men? Further, how imitative sin, as you like to call it, can have a passage while original sin has none, you will never be able to explain. These things cannot be read without laughter, or rather without tears, since you are to be wept over by Christians rather than laughed at. To your readers, then, Christian and prudent ones, let it be left to judge; for who could even suspect from your earlier sentence that you held anything other than all those priests of God who, under the presidency of Pope Zosimus of holy memory, condemned Pelagius and Caelestius and you on all these headings about Adam? The things which were earlier disapproved and condemned by you have now, as though gathered up again and stored away, been found worthy to be received into your faith. Then, on this question of death, let us see what the universal church, which in Greek we call 'catholic', says and thinks and teaches her children: with what death she knows Adam and Eve were punished after the transgression, whether that which separates the soul from the body, which we know to have come from him to the whole human race without exception, or that of which it is said, '[the widow who lives in pleasures] is dead while living,' and again, 'Let the dead bury their own dead,' and whatever else can be brought forward for this understanding. But there is no doubt that they were punished with both, and that Christ brought a remedy for both. For since through the washing of regeneration and renewal he both remits sins, and will confer immortality through the resurrection of the flesh, which we now hold in hope through faith, on all together at one time, it must be believed that the aforesaid progenitors of the human race were condemned with nothing other than a twofold death, and that both pass into the race. But this most learned master holds and tries to teach that this bodily death was natural for them and is in the same way natural for us, and that the apostle never held or preached that it came through sin. Yet writing to the Corinthians, when he was treating of the resurrection of the body, to which this death, that is, the dissolution of the body or the separation of the soul from it, is the opposite, he speaks thus at length: 'Now I make known to you, brothers, the gospel which I preach to you, which you also received, in which you also are being saved, in what terms I preached it to you, if you hold it fast, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.' Come, deviant one, declare if you dare that the death of Christ, who died for sins, does not pertain to the little ones, whom you defend as being without sins, or that they are not baptized into the death of Christ. 'And that he was buried,' he says, 'and that he rose on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he was seen by Cephas and after this by the eleven; then he was seen by more than five hundred brothers at once, of whom many remain until now, though some have fallen asleep; then he was seen by James, then by all the apostles; last of all, as to one untimely born, he was seen also by me. For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace in me was not in vain; I laboured more abundantly than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preached and so you believed. But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, neither has Christ been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain; and we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise, if the dead are not raised. (For if the dead are not raised,) neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we are hoping in Christ, we are more miserable than all men. But now Christ has risen, the firstfruits of those who sleep. For since through a man came death, and through a man the resurrection of the dead, and as in Adam all die, so all will be made alive in Christ; but each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then those who are Christ's, who believed in his coming; then the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father. For he must reign until he puts all enemies under his feet; the last enemy to be destroyed is death.' Again the same a little later: 'Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed, at the last trumpet; for it will sound, and the dead will rise incorrupt, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality. Then the saying that is written will come to pass: Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O death, is your contention? The goad of the flesh is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who has given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Have you heard, most insane man? Do you perceive now at least, you who are most rabid with singular shamelessness and fury? 'Through a man came death,' he says. What death is this, tell us, which is proclaimed to have run through all by a man? That one of yours, or the one which the church knows to have been already conquered by Christ's resurrection, and to be conquered in us also at the end? But I warn you: lend your ear and hear what follows. 'For as in Adam,' he says, 'all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.' Who ever doubted that the apostle understood here no other making alive than the future resurrection of the flesh in all men? Do you command, then, that only a very few will rise, and that death has been conquered, and is to be conquered at the end, only in those who have imitated or will imitate the transgressing Adam, into whom that death of yours (for it must always be called yours) could pass, and not in all men without exception who draw their origin from Adam and Eve, the first transgressors, and the origin of a mortality not innate in them but acquired through sin? And what is the meaning of the so lengthy, yet sound and saving, teaching of so great a herald on this, if you, a new spirit of error, which God forbid, are listened to? Nor will any opening lie open for you to slander us, as though we said and thought that an equal resurrection, that is, of one merit, is to be granted to all, because all, though with different outcomes, die by one death; hear again: 'We shall all indeed rise, but we shall not all be changed.' Let the reader recall that our first parents were punished with both deaths, and see what I have held on this heading, and what you hold. Hear further, though, what will rouse you to greater rage against us and the church of God: 'If we are out of our mind, it is for God; if we are sober, it is for you. For the love of Christ,' he says, 'urges us, judging this, that if one died for all, then all died; and he died for all, so that those who live may no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and rose,' so that he might be Lord of both the living and the dead. Be silent: no one has died or will die except through Adam, but as a penalty; no one will rise except through Christ, but one to reign, another to pay eternal penalties, each, as Scripture says, in his own order; so that, as we have often said and protest to you with the apostle, no man at all in any age has died except through Adam, and no one will live again in the flesh except through Christ. Remember also that we hold, and have received into our faith, concerning the two deaths, that Christ did not have the one ... We pray that no one most madly say or think otherwise, since he was not born as all other men are, from carnal pleasure; but in him there was a new generation, from a virgin immaculate before and after childbirth, without lust; attend, reader. But that other death, that is, the separation of the soul from the body, he took on voluntarily, though it was not owed; and if he had not been killed by the crime of the Jews, it could have come about that he died of old age, not owing what we contracted in Adam, with the interest of our own sins which we add; although no Christian at all ought to doubt that all the presages of the prophets about him had rather to be fulfilled by the cross to be inflicted on him by the parricidal fury of the Jews. Now off to an evil cross with this magnificence of your words, fugitive! No one listens to you as you bark madly, no one from the church follows you in your straying, no one agrees with one so insane. We, concerning mortality, which was given to the human race as a penalty from the transgression of the progenitors and ran into nature through the seeds and will run on to the end, until 'death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O death, is your contention?', have sworn to this sense of the divine Scriptures and to these words, with the whole church of God and with our illustrious fathers, the teachers of the church. With due reverence and honour, of course, for the bishop Augustine of holy and blessed memory, who with his pastoral club drove you away from the church, we have placed or set these notes here and there, wherever it seemed convenient, beside certain chapters of your fragments in the codices I read; you will recognize them, or any reader who wishes may notice them. Nor will you have cause to laugh at the great brevity of this little work of ours, since you ought not to boast of so many books, full of horrid talkativeness rather than of anything worth consideration. I do not want you to feign ignorance in this matter. For you know that in this question which is debated between us, namely the mortality of the human race, which through the first transgressors of the divine commandment has run generally through the seeds and runs and will run on to the end, and which consumes your whole case, you are tied as to a very strong stake. If the Christian and prudent reader notices that this case between us, or rather in you, has been extinguished, he will know that nothing, absolutely nothing, has remained for you to mutter about, either then or now; and he will judge that to your whole discourse, which you boast to be the height of eloquence, that saying fits better and more aptly than it did the man of whom it was said: 'Enough eloquence, too little wisdom; his vast spirit always desired the immoderate, the incredible, the too lofty.' And about your opinions, by which, wandering and vain, you are puffed up, a prudent man of another age will pronounce with his mouth and fit to you this saying: that the mountains were in labour, and a ridiculous mouse was born.