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

A question against the catholic faith, raised long ago among some of the Syrians, and especially in Cilicia, by Theodore, formerly bishop of the town of Mopsuestia, is still being gnawed over among a few of them up to now. It is not brought forward openly, but is kept for the time being within the churches, as though by catholics, by the very people who commit fornication with it: namely, that the progenitors of the human race, Adam and Eve, were created mortal by God, and that by their transgression they harmed none of their descendants but injured only themselves; that they made themselves guilty before God of breaking the commandment, and no one else at all. This foolish question, no less hostile to the right faith, was first brought to Rome, under Anastasius of holy memory, supreme pontiff of the Roman church, by Rufinus, once a Syrian by nation. Being crafty, he guarded himself against the odium of it and did not dare to put it forward himself, but he deceived Pelagius, a monk of the British race, and steeped and instructed him thoroughly in the aforesaid impious vanity. Pelagius soon dared to compose commentaries on the apostle Paul, and when he came to that well-known place in the letter to the Romans where it says: 'Therefore, as through one man sin entered this world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men,' and so on, he said there that only those are held guilty and liable by that transgression who wished to imitate him in transgressing God's commandments, not all who have been born of his seed through the series of generations. From this he argues more widely about the following passages of this letter and declares that no man at all was harmed by generation, nor is harmed by the transgression of Adam's sin, but by imitation, he says: since that man sinned first in the human race, he becomes guilty and liable who imitates him by his own will, not by being born but by sinning. To this Pelagius Caelestius attached himself, noble by birth indeed and a lawyer of the courts of that time, but by a defect of nature a eunuch from his mother's womb. Taught by the aforesaid Pelagius, he drank in this most impious view still more undiluted and, by his incredible talkativeness, made many sharers and accomplices in this madness of his. He dared openly and publicly to say that Adam was made mortal and would have died whether he sinned or not; that Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race; that infants who are born are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression; that the whole human race does not die through Adam's death, since neither does the whole human race rise through Christ's resurrection; that infants, even if they are not baptized, have eternal life. These five headings produce one most impious and abominable opinion. He added besides that a man can be without sin and can easily keep God's commandments, since even before the coming of Christ there were men without sin, and that the law sends to the kingdom of heaven just as the gospel does. [3] These and similar things pleased Julian also and the rest of his comrades. When they had been recognized and exposed and condemned by the authority of the church together with the persons named, they were defended by the same Julian in a great number of books, and he was pleased to be counted third with Caelestius and Pelagius in the condemnation. Then, against his childish undertakings, Augustine of holy memory, the bishop, published various works at various times; Julian chose one of them to contradict in the four books he completed addressed to Turbantius, as though wholly ignorant of the other works the holy man afterwards produced on this subject. In his last eight books, wandering with horrid talkativeness and wishing rather to show himself eloquent and knowing, after the countless insults he hurled against the holy man named above, he dared shamelessly, indeed now impiously, to defend the things which, as we mentioned above, he had learned to his ruin from Pelagius and Caelestius. As already in the first four books, turning over the same things again and again and finding no prudent way out, he filled the parchments and papers with insults and abuse rather than with any reasoning of the right faith; and whereas this question ought to have been handled with the greatest brevity and with the authority of the holy and divine Scriptures, he wrote up for himself a great, distorted, and wholly unnecessary mass of talk, from which to forge impious things and to accomplish nothing at all; for he accomplishes nothing who devotes his effort to impiety. Yet the holy bishop Augustine, often named, overturned Julian's first four books in six books of his own, and the eight later ones also by his replies placed beneath each of their chapters, and so with the hammer

of catholic truth he blunted, indeed broke, Julian's vain and leaden daggers. When the work of both came into our hands, since the whole sum of the foolish and still more impious labour of Julian seems to come down to one depraved opinion, namely that the transgression of Adam and Eve did not make them mortal, nor did their guilt pass to their descendants by original succession, but that one is made guilty only by imitating those who despised the divine commandments, having read this whole work, as I said, more carefully, I too have answered briefly, according to the measure of our strength, by placing notes on his books wherever opportunity required, so that the reader, after the trumpet of so great a father and teacher, may not disdain to take up our straw pipe also, and may understand with all brevity that Julian, in working out his very numerous books, spent an empty labour, full rather of boasting, with the greatest impiety. Since you too, venerable presbyter Pientius, have ordered that I should gather these same notes into one body, I have obeyed your orders, not unaware that we shall run into the curses and abuse of that unbridled tongue. But what can the barking of a mad dog tied up outside the church of God do? Let us glory in becoming sharers and companions of such great men, such great teachers of the church shining plainly throughout the world, against whom he hurls such unheard-of, abominable, obscene, and atrocious curses. I know indeed that he will also be angry with us about the order of the chapters and, talking even more than usual, will raise an empty din of words against us, accusing us, of course, of having no order in what we say against him. We have, as we said, placed or set our notes here and there beside his depraved views; we have not composed any book against him. Let him take care, as far as we are concerned, 'to fill capacious tablets in the middle of the crossroads'; we, with our slender wit, grounded in the Christian faith and far removed from those wise in the world, both patiently accept his reproaches together with our fathers and teachers and refute, convict, and lament his deviations from catholic truth by the divine words of the Scriptures, not by the art of sophisms. [4] Now the words of Julian from his first book to Florus, chapter 112, are these: 'But let them run to him who cries, My yoke is easy and my burden light, who also grants pardon to the one who does wrong, out of his inestimable goodness, and the innocence which he creates good he makes better by renewing and adopting.' To this, besides the answers of the holy man: He indeed makes all new by creating, but he does not renew all by regenerating, except only those of whom he himself says: 'Unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven,' or, as he also says, 'unless one is born anew.' Hence you are suspected of fraud and deceit, since nowhere in your whole work did you think fit to mention renewal, but the word 'making new' always came to your mind. For it is certain that there is a great difference between making new and renewing. What is made new, as everyone knows, can be understood as what never was and has newly come into being; what is renewed is what was already old and had fallen into oldness, which, if it is renewed, is said to be renewed. Nor can it easily be proved that divine Scripture used this expression, 'making new'; but of renewal it speaks very often. Hear, against your will, the apostle Paul saying: '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.' And again the same: 'But when the kindness and love for humankind of our Saviour appeared, not because of works of righteousness which we did, but according to his mercy he saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out most richly upon us in Christ.' Again the same: 'Though our outer man is corrupted, yet the inner is renewed day by day.' Then hear who are adopted; hear, I say, not me, but: 'a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for adoption, that you may proclaim the mighty works of God, who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.' Do you hear what he says? Do you perceive what he preaches? That those are adopted, so as to become God's people for adoption, who have been called out of darkness into that marvellous light. From which it follows that unless one has been called out of darkness into that marvellous light, he is not a chosen race, not a royal priesthood, not a holy nation, nor does he deserve to be a people for adoption. Or will you perhaps say and command that only adults, who are called as sinners out of darkness into that marvellous light, become the people of God, while little children, set in light from their very birth and without any darkness, since they are only, as you would have it, made new and not renewed from any oldness of sin, are not of the people of God? What Christian would bear you saying such things? Who would not shudder at you as you write this and flee you like a deadly poison?

[Julian:] 'But the feeble itch of the wretched blind, sick of their own accord, can bring no weight against the very reason of truth; but since, from some passages of Scripture and especially of the apostle Paul, they assert a natural sin ...' To this: No one says that sin is natural or a nature, but original; and that it is in nature, not outside nature; and that it can be called natural, not absurdly but by a loose usage, though not a nature. Being deceived yourself, you deceive whom you can. And yet there is some difference between original and natural; and although what is natural can also be called original, what is original does not compel one to admit that it is also natural. Take an example. Nature is every man of whatever age, sex, and condition; origin is, for example, senator, decurion, slave, tenant, barbarian, which are not names of nature but of origin and condition. So we do not say that sin is nature or natural, but that man, by cause of his origin, is bound slavishly through sin; although, as we have already said, sin cannot exist apart from the nature in which it is, unless you most madly think it must be sought outside it, existing by its own cause and having its own substance or nature; and if you think so, may the Manichee devour you, who raves impiously that the nature of evil holds and has a principality of its own right, its own state and origin. [Julian:] 'It cannot be proved by the holy Scriptures what justice cannot defend; for if the perfect form of justice is in the law of God, its adversary, that is injustice, is permitted to gain no strength through it; and therefore what reason refutes, authority cannot vindicate.' To this: I wish you would prove by your reason the virgin's childbearing, or conception without union with a man, and God made man and brought through the growth of the years to the cross: since no human reasoning attests this, the authority of the divine words vindicates it through faith. We must laugh, then, or rather weep, at what you say: 'what reason refutes, authority cannot vindicate.' But who can count the testimonies of the Scriptures, so great and so frequent, against this wretched little declamation of yours, in which, since reason can search out nothing, one has recourse to faith, so that eternal salvation may be sought by its authority?

[Julian:] 'Or if perhaps, since your dogma cannot stand otherwise, you answer that Adam conceived and gave birth from himself, no one will doubt that the apostle did not think this; but you have shown what you would wish to happen to your sex.' To this: Blush, most unhappy man, at such obscenity of a scurrilous, or rather mime-like, tongue. You deserve to hear the vulgar acclamations: 'You are the one; the one Philistion, the one Lentulus of the Latins; the one Maryllus to be compared with you.' For you alone surpass the wits of Martial and Petronius. Most truly the foulest stench of the spring of Amsanctus, your neighbour, the most harmful breath of Lake Avernus, and finally the pestilent blast of the Atabulus of your province have puffed you up, so that, swollen with so many diseases and unsound, indeed insane, you belched these things out, vomited them, exhaled them. And would that you had breathed out your vital spirit (for this would have been more useful to you) before you uttered with impure mouth such obscene things, so full of disgrace. What actor of foul farce, what buffoon or clown, with the licence of professed foulness, would utter these things in public? Are chaste matrons, honest and distinguished men, to read you? If they are mindful of honour and modesty, they will shudder and flee you like a monstrous viper, such as the hydra is said to have been. Are you the son of Memor, the bishop of holy and blessed memory? Were you born from the womb of Juliana, a lady of the first rank, than whom you would find nothing more honourable among the most reverend matrons? Far, far be it from me to dare believe this of you. I would sooner believe you the son of their household slaves, substituted for them, as is often said to have been done, and as you rather prove by the petulance and obscenity of your mouth. Or if it is not so, no one will doubt that they degenerated in you, who knew the holy morals, holy life, and practice of those people and have prudently examined your speech in these writings. After the death of those holy people you have, fittingly, trained your two sisters in such disciplines of your mouth. We know, we know what one of them threw at you and reproached you with, when you rose up too severely against the ruin of her modesty; and you, at once struck dumb, did not dare to trouble her grief any further with your censure.

[Julian:] 'For it was not said, they shall be two men in one man, but they shall be two in one flesh; by this name of union that pleasure of those who unite, and the desire which, gradually affecting the members, overwhelms them and, as that wise man understood, longs to make one flesh, is taught to have been instituted by God and implanted in bodies.' To this: Elegantly, buffoon, you speak in your own way, the way in which you have worn out the theatre of Arbiter and Valerius. It is agreed that in those progenitors of the human race there was a desire implanted in their nature, which the divine Scriptures indeed do not call lust, as you would have it, but a condition of the flesh by which they might fulfil that 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth' and that 'he shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh.' But if they had kept the divine commandment, it would not have been for them an immoderate goad, a hostile and importunate provoker even when its work is not sought, such as it now is, dragging by its own force and often casting down even great vessels from the citadel of chastity. So if it is not such as it was naturally given by God, only for the sake of offspring, as indeed it is not, it has been vitiated; and when it generates with this its vice, what is born from the vice is vitiated and rightly needs Christ as physician and restorer.

To this: Most stupid man, you have struck yourself with your own dagger. For you want not sin but death to pass through the seeds, which you nevertheless say was inflicted by the severity of judgment, as the avenger of transgression. Let it then be returned to you from your own words. What has this to do with the descendants, who all without exception have died, are dying, and will die by that death which passed through to all men, as the avenger of transgression, as you say? For that other point is laughable, that you say death, which you called the penalty of sin, alone passed into the race, without that which was the cause of so great an evil. Behold the excellent defender of God's just judgment, who transmits the penalty of the progenitor to descendants who do not have the cause of his penalty! It is delightful, though, what you add: 'pursuing not the seeds of bodies but the vices of morals,' as though you were commanding rather than teaching that no one has died, dies, or will die except one who has become an imitator of Adam's transgression. Are you not ashamed of such vanity? Has there then been no one through so many ages, nor is there or will there be anyone, at least according to the definition of your master Pelagius, defended by you in so many books, by which you both decree that a man can be without sin and easily keep God's commandments, no one, I say, even according to you yourselves, who was a stranger to this transgression of yours and to the death that avenges it, which was commanded to pursue not seeds but the vices of morals? Certainly those whom you say can be without sin and easily keep God's commandments must be without vices. Finally, according to you, so many thousands of infants are born, have been born, and will be born without any vice. Why then are they punished by this death, inflicted as avenger by the severity of judgment, when its cause did not follow them, nor, as you say, did it pass into anyone who had fallen?

Here there fell from your hands, so to speak, that excellent definition of your fellow disciple Caelestius: that Adam's sin harmed him alone, and not the human race. This is the Caelestius who is one of those about whom you say this in the first of your four books to Turbantius: 'The teachers of our time, most blessed brother Turbantius, the authors of the wicked sedition that still rages, have decided to bring about insult and destruction for the men by whose holy pursuits they are burned, through the ruin of the whole church, not understanding how much honour they have conferred on those whose glory they have shown could not be torn down except together with the catholic religion.' Have you so forgotten friendship? Is this how you are accustomed to defend? Or do you now need a patron yourself, and were they deceived who had prepared you as their defender? And let these things be said by me as though I had not understood how very cunning and eloquent you are, as you will no doubt boast; if you persuade yourself of this, you will be much deceived. For I have understood you, and I know what you most impiously think against the faith that holds to what is right, and I remember what circumlocutions of words you use here; bear with us a little and we shall prove it. You abuse, namely, the simplicity of Christians who happen to read these books of yours. These, surely, are your words: 'Not sin but death passed into all men, inflicted indeed by the severity of judgment as the avenger of transgression.' Here, here let me hold you a little while, here let me spend some time usefully with you. I ask, if you speak simply and not in ambiguities, as Loxias did to Croesus and Pyrrhus, you who now speak as the one spirit of error: how are you not a traducian too, the name you like, and are still allowed, to put upon catholic Christians? For not even death itself, which you grant, came or will come otherwise, as even you agree, than by passing on or transmission, and you want it to be a penalty without the desert of penalty. To escape these straits, which you made for yourself, more talkative than eloquent, you reply in what follows and argue that you spoke here of that death with which Adam was punished after the transgression, which does not destroy bodies but comes about in the soul through crimes, by contempt of God, and is eternal, since it drags to eternal punishment; which holy Scripture also signifies, saying: 'The widow who lives in pleasures is dead while living,' and in the Gospel: 'Let the dead bury their own dead.' And this kind, you will say, I said passed and passes to Adam's descendants, not to all without exception but only to those who have been imitators of his transgression, forgetful, as he was, of the divine commandments. But the other kind, you will say, which is the dissolution of the body or the separation of the soul from the body, would have been in Adam even if he had not sinned. Hence come those excellent definitions of your comrade and fellow disciple Caelestius and of Pelagius, the master of you both, which together with their persons were long ago condemned throughout the world by the authority of the church: that Adam was made mortal and would have died whether he sinned or not; that Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race; and that infants are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression. From this was born that last point of yours, which you did not fear to vomit out to your own harm: 'Infants, even if they die unbaptized, have eternal life'; and that more than sacrilege: 'The whole human race does not die through Adam's death, since neither does the whole human race rise through Christ's resurrection.' These are the magnificent decrees of your teaching, these of 'Christian learning', as you call it. But do not we Christians speak the doctrines of truth? 'Your trappings are for the people: I know you inside and in the skin.' What does it profit you, as the same poet says, 'to keep a cunning fox in a vapid breast'? I will drag you into the light by diligent investigation, digging out your most winding and fetid holes, to expose you to the Christian peoples.

Hear now, you and those who deign to read me and you, what you yourself once declared against this most impious, most depraved, most shameless, most petulant view of yours: namely in your letter which you dared to send to the apostolic see at the time when, summoned, you refused to condemn Pelagius and Caelestius together with the universal church throughout the world. Before it came into the holy hands of the bishop of that Roman church, it was spread through your agency by some whom you had deceived, throughout almost all Italy. For there, among other things, you say: 'Who then is the asserter that neither does the whole human race die through Adam's death, nor does the whole human race rise through Christ's resurrection, against the apostle: As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive?' Here we know and hold by what fraud and deceit you say and mean 'all': namely not all men without exception, that is the whole human race, but all those who wished to be imitators of Adam. And as to the resurrection through Christ, in which the apostle said that all will rise, you must likewise without doubt say that not the whole human race at all will rise, but only the just and holy, who have imitated Christ's righteousness and holiness, whereas it is certain that all without exception will rise through Christ, though some to the kingdom, others to judgment. And you add: 'Rightly, then, is he disapproved who contradicts this sentence, which says: Through a man came death, and through a man the resurrection of the dead.' Also: 'That Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race: this sentence too,' you say, 'is rightly refuted by us; for it must be believed that it harmed not him alone but the human race.' And here too we could not fail to see what you are doing, keeping, as you think, your most depraved and twisted view: because they themselves, as you want to teach, though few in comparison with the whole race, are the human race. Also: 'That infants,' you say, 'are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression, I count among the undisciplined questions; for that they are not in all respects in the state in which he was cannot be denied.' What state you mean and intend here too, keeping your view, as you suppose, we know very well: not that of Adam before sin, but that of the smallness and littleness in which infants are born. Remember, indeed, that you said nothing here about unbaptized little ones having eternal life if death overtakes them; which is most false, since Christ does not will it and did not will it, as your most senseless rashness commands and teaches. Also you add: 'That Adam too was made mortal and would have died whether he sinned or not,' and you said this too was not founded on reason. 'For it must be believed,' you say, 'that he was made immortal indeed, but such that, if he had not sinned, he could gain the power of immortality by tasting the tree of life. Wrongly, then, is it said that he would have died whether he sinned or not.'

So that neither anyone nor you yourself may say that I have slandered you, as though you did not afterwards hold these definitions, hear again what is contained in your own words in your book which we are discussing, chapter 65: 'Sin, then, according to the apostle, entered 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.' Before, you denied that sin entered this world through that one man, whereas now you confess that it entered. 'But death,' you say, 'passed through to all men, because one form of judgment includes all transgressors of every later age. Yet this death,' you say, 'is not permitted to rage against the saints or any innocent, but pervades only those 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.' To this: If that by which Adam was punished is judicial death, and it is the one which passed and passes to the descendants, not to all without exception, as you say, but only to imitators, what, or of what kind, will that other death be which separates the soul from the body? Here, hard pressed, you will say: natural, since Adam would have died whether he sinned or not. Behold the Christian pedigree! Behold the ancient tradition of the church! But surely you see how in your words, contrary to yourself, you tear yourself like a viper, since you spend an empty zeal on the rattles of words rather than on any real argument. I should like, however, to question you more closely about what you think of death of either kind, you who allow at least one of them to pass on. Tell me, then: what is the death which in your judgment passes on? Is it a substance or nature, or some accidental thing? For we remember that at the time when you were present in the city of Rome, sifting the church among some simpler folk together with the sharers of this most insane error of yours, you used to ask: 'What is sin,' you would say, 'something evil or good?' 'Evil, of course,' they answered you. To this you added: 'Is God the author and maker of this evil?' 'Far be it, far be it,' they cried to you; 'far, far be this madness; not even the most impious Manichee dared to profess this, who neither thinks nor professes that God is the author of evil, but most wickedly insists that evil has from eternity its own principle, its own essence, and its own nature.' Then you used at once to say that it must be asked whether sin was a substance or a nature or some accidental thing. When Christian simplicity hesitated a little, you inferred thus: that sin can in no way be a substance or nature, since in that case it would have God as its maker and author, for there is no nature which God did not create; but since it was established above that he is not the author of evil, sin, which was most plainly shown to be evil, is not a substance or nature; and what is not a substance, you said, must by no right and no reason be believed to pass into the substance or nature which a man is. And you concluded: 'Wrongly and foolishly, then, is sin believed to be passed on from Adam.' As I said above, then, allow me too to question you in this way and along the same lines of argument, so that you may teach us by answering. This death at least, which is according to the soul and is eternal, and which Adam the transgressor received and, you say, transmitted to his descendants, though you define it as passing only to a very few imitators (for of that other death, which separates the soul from the body, you make no mention): is it some substance or nature, or something accidental to substance? If you still have any light in you, you will answer that it happened to nature or substance and cannot be called a substance, since it was given as a penalty to the first transgressor and thereafter to the human race; and no prudent person, you will say, would call a penalty a substance or nature. Here at once you are caught in your own nets. You transmit it to the descendants, at least to the imitators of Adam, as though it had been shown that it can pass from substance into the substance or nature which a man is. What are you, excellent master of the lost and dialectical disputer? Do you see where you have fallen? Do you perceive now at least how far you have strayed from the path of truth? But for the present, if there is any shame in you, let these things suffice. If God grants a lease of life and allows time for re-examining these excellent books of yours and re-reading that most wise letter of yours, we shall meanwhile bring forward other things of yours too, which we avoid with great execration; and when the Lord wills, we shall answer you again.

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.