Sermons 111–114

[On original sin. On the words of the same: “Therefore, as through one man sin entered this world,” etc.] The present reading of the Apostle, brothers, when it says that the whole world received sentence through one man (Rom 5:12), compels us not to make speeches but to weep with a renewed and inward grief. For if the outstanding prophets long lamented the peril of a single people, of one city, and sometimes of one man alone, what mind would not be darkened with total darkness, what senses would not be confounded with total dullness, what eyes would not be turned into springs and streams of tears, when the fall of one became the ruin of all, and the guilt of one flowed down to the punishment of all, and the fault of the parent prepared deadly destruction for the whole race, as the Apostle says: “Therefore, as through one man sin entered this world, and through sin death” (Rom 5:12). Wretched me! He who had been the cause of all good things became here the door of evils. “Sin entered this world.” Into this world: do you wonder that he harmed his descendants, who by his crime condemned the world? But you say: How did it enter? Through whom did it enter? How? Through guilt. Through whom? Through man. And what then? Is sin a nature or a substance? It is neither nature nor substance, but an accident; and it is a hostile power, which is seen in the deed, felt in the punishment, attacks the soul, wounds the mind itself, and violates and confounds nature. And what more, brothers? Sin is to nature what smoke is to the eyes, what fever is to the body, what bitter saltiness is to the sweetest springs. For the eye is pure and clear by nature, but it is disturbed and darkened by the injury of smoke. And the body is firm in the parts of its members and in its senses, because it was made by God; but when the force and storm of fever begin to rule, the whole is made weak: then comes bitterness of mouth, then dimness of eyes, then tottering steps, then the air is hostile, then dear ones are burdensome, then even kind services seem hateful. And springs, as pleasing as they are by their sweetness and nature, become just as unpleasing when they have taken on some flaw from outside. But let us return to our subject. “As through one man sin entered this world, and through sin death.” See, brothers, the door: through man came sin, and through sin we see that we have entered into death. Sin, O cruel beast, not content to rage against the human race with one head! We have seen it devouring with a threefold mouth all the precious shoots of the human stock: with a threefold mouth, brothers: sin seizes, death devours, hell swallows. And with what a spring of tears, as we said, must we weep for such a parent, who left us the heirs of such great miseries, who not only lost the good things conferred on him but left all his descendants liable to such fierce creditors? O hard and cruel inheritance! O wretched heirs that we are, who had no wish to take it up and were not permitted to renounce it! Hear what follows: “And so death passed into all men.” But lest it perhaps seem unjust that it passed through one into all, it is because all were in one: you detest that you were condemned through him through whom you glory that you were brought into the light. But you say: If I owe it to my race that I was born, do I owe it also to a crime, so that nature makes me guilty before guilt does? The Apostle's next words at once answer this question of yours, saying: “in whom all sinned.” If all sinned in him, rightly did all receive punishment through him. “As through one man sin entered this world, and through sin death; and so it passed into all men, in whom all sinned.” Whether in the man or in the sin, all sinned through him and in him. Sin, then, was not turned into nature; but while sin brings in death, it exacts through nature the penalty owed to it. God had made nature so as to create men for life; yet when nature unwillingly gives birth for death, it confesses itself liable to the sin whose penalty it serves in life. For who, brothers, would think that nature wishes its offspring extinguished and its shoots, so dear to it, killed? But while it groans and grieves, it sighs for the freedom it lost and longs to take it up again. But through whom it has received it, John first pointedly shows, who on seeing Christ cries out and proclaims: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). The sin of the world, brothers, is what the Apostle testifies entered through one man. Rejoice, then, brothers, because the sin which pressed us down with heavy weight to Tartarus has been taken away by Christ and already sunk in Tartarus; and us, whom the guilt of the first parent had bound over to death, the grace of the second and divine parent has called back from punishment to life. So man could not be saved without Christ, because the sin of the whole world remained until his coming. But you embrace being justified through Christ, and you reject being condemned through Adam; and you complain that another's punishment has harmed you, you who see that another's righteousness has come to your help. Is not the whole tree in the seed? So the flaw of the seed is the flaw of the whole tree. If nature could have helped itself by itself, its author would never have taken it on himself to repair it. Do you believe it was created for life, you who still doubt that it has been repaired through its author? “For until the law,” he says, “sin was in the world.” When you hear “until the law,” understand until the end of the law, that is, until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. “But sin was not imputed,” he says, “when there was no law.” And when was there no law, since it began with man himself? If there had been no law, Adam would surely not have been a transgressor, as the same Apostle discloses when he says: “But death reigned from Adam to Moses.” Both had received a law; but Adam transgressed as soon as he received it, while Moses promulgated the law he had received to transgressors, as the Apostle says: “The law was set down because of transgressions” (Gal 3:19). So death reigned through the law, because transgressors are more grievous offenders than sinners; and it savagely devoured those who had fallen not only by the parent's fault but now by their own crime. “But death reigned,” he says, “from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of Adam's transgression” (Rom 5:13–14). For it devoured not only the great but also the little ones; it laid waste not only the guilty but also the innocent: innocent, I mean, of their own guilt, not of the parent's. And hence the condition was the more grievously to be lamented, because the little infant paid the penalty of the parent whose life he had scarcely tasted, and atoned for the sin of the world, he who had not known the world. Let us accept, then, brothers, that through one, and by the offence of one, death reigned, if we desire that all be absolved through one and live through Christ: for whoever lives owes it to Christ, not to himself; and his dying he will owe to Adam.

[On death, had through a man, and life and grace, had through Christ, and on the abounding of offence because of the law. On the words of the same: “For if by the offence of one, death reigned through one.”] If someone holds out a cup of cold water to a thirsty traveller, he refreshes somewhat the spirit of the man burning with heat and plainly comes to the help of humanity, yet he does not wholly quench his thirst; so too our sermon does not suffice for those who long to know the great secret of divine knowledge, since for the present it is at the service of haste and of the time. For if the whole of a man's short life is not enough to learn human things thoroughly, what time do we believe can suffice for understanding divine ones? So forgive me, brothers, if within a point of time, scarcely the moment of one hour, I cannot light up what is dark, unlock what is closed, confirm what is doubtful, reach what is deep, open in every way the ineffable mystery of so many ages and put it into words, if we cannot speak cautiously to rivals, securely to sons, confidently to believers, steadfastly to unbelievers. But since today the apostolic word has poured itself wholly with clear light into the minds of the hearers and has left nothing ambiguous to catholic minds, when it says, “For if by the offence of one death reigned through one” (Rom 5:17), we shall set aside the zeal for declaiming and rest in all simplicity on the apostolic words themselves, so that our sermon may create no obscurity for those who wish to know the truth. “For if by the offence of one,” as he says, “death reigned through one,” why does the authority of the gospel labour to suggest and prove that death was acquired for posterity from one man, the first? And although that sentence suffices which says, “God did not make death” (Wis 1:13), why some would have death, so grim, so cruel, so merciless, made by God, I cannot understand. No one, without sacrilege, thinks that so loving and so good a God could have created death, whose author the whole world accuses and detests with continual grief, groans and tears. If even among men death is the penalty for crimes, with what audacity is it believed that death was created together with man and implanted in him, as a penalty, by an innocent God before life? But let us hear the Apostle: “For if by the offence of one death reigned through one, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace, of the gift and of righteousness reign in life through the one, Christ our Lord” (Rom 5:17). See, one and one: Adam and Christ. Through the one sin reigned unto death; through the other grace reigned unto life. Then the Apostle's next words open and declare these two principles of life and death, of acquittal and punishment, of longed-for freedom and extreme condemnation: “Therefore, as through the offence of one unto all men to condemnation, so also through the righteousness of one unto all men to justification of life” (Rom 5:18). Through one and through one, either death reigns or life is granted. What, then, could the interpreter's speech add here? If you add silence to these words, every effort of the rivals collapses. “Through the offence of one unto all men to condemnation, so also through the righteousness of one unto all men to justification of life.” As the river serves its spring and fruit its seed, so posterity serves its origin, either bound over or rescued, as is more fully proved by what the Apostle added: “For as through the disobedience of one man many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one many will be made righteous” (Rom 5:19). Let man be the sinner, so that God may be just; for the guilt redounds on the judge if his punishment strikes the innocent. And so he said, “As through the disobedience of one man many were made sinners,” so that they might know that they had been sharers in the guilt of him whose punishment they feel they share. But now let the lovers of the law hear, on the Apostle's testimony, what the law accomplished. “But the law came in,” he says, “so that offence might abound” (Rom 5:20). See, as the Apostle says, the law produced not a lessening of offences but an abundance; not of itself, brothers, but through the one who through weakness could not bear the law. It is not the greatness of the light, which God made for the eyes alone, that dulls the eyes; rather, the infirmity of the eyes cannot bear the whole light and endure its brightness. So too the law, brothers, which was in itself just enough and holy enough, by demanding strict discipline from frail man, burdened and exposed the offender more and more. And why this, brothers? So that through the grace and pardon of the Creator he might return to life, he who through pride and ignorance, while he wrongly boasted of his innocence, was being led into the debt and punishment of his parent. So the disease lay hidden, through which the secret places of the marrow and the channels of the veins in everyone tended to the destruction of the vital organs themselves, and it was producing a kind of morbid mass in all the inner parts. The law came, to expose the wound and at last to announce that a heavenly physician was coming for the long-standing sickness. The law came, to draw out to the skin by the poultices of the commandments what was raging lethally deep within. The law came, to open with the knife of the precepts, as it were, an abscess of long standing, so that a saving discharge might then dry up the pus long gathered. Yet by itself, brothers, it could neither close the wound nor give the sick man perfect health. When the sick man saw this and at last, wretched as he was, recognized his state, he began to hurry to the physician, so that what had been exposed through the law and long enlarged by it might be healed by the skill and grace of so great a physician. We say that the wound was enlarged, brothers, because after the incision rot, stench, horror and distress are produced in the wound itself by the cutting, and through the treatment the very appearance of the wretched illness becomes worse than the danger had been to the man who did not know of it while it lay hidden. So the physician came; and to one already worn out with treatments and utterly exhausted by the harassments of cures he brings help by the authority of a word alone, as that centurion confesses when he says: “Say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Matt 8:8); and so the prophetic word was fulfilled: “He sent his word and healed them” (Ps 107:20). And so there follows: “Where sin abounded, grace abounded still more” (Rom 5:20); as if he were saying: Where the wound was widened, health was poured out still more. So let no one be ungrateful to the law, which raised up and nursed the one it had found sick and lying down and, to hand him over to salvation, led him with healthy exultation all the way to the physician, so that, as the Apostle said: “As sin reigned unto death, so grace might reign unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 5:21). Grace reigns unto life, sin unto death. Right faith ascribes to God the author not death, not the destruction of man, but salvation. Let death be man's, let it be sin's, so that life, created and restored, may be believed to come through Christ alone. [Sermon 113. On not remaining in sin so that grace may abound, and on serving the virtues. On the words of the same: “What then shall we say? Shall we remain in sin so that grace may abound?” etc.] When the blessed Apostle asks about things known and inquires into things manifest, he is plainly rebuking and reproving those who corrupt the divine words by their interpretation and take from them support for crimes, whence they ought to have taken lessons in virtues. For today he began thus: “What then shall we say? Shall we remain in sin so that grace may abound?” (Rom 6:1). Above he had said, brothers, “Where sin abounded, grace abounded still more”; and so he begins in this way, and with his divine and singular teaching he joins the unskilled as one asking, so as to answer with full learning what belongs to heavenly wisdom. “If where sin abounded, grace abounded still more, what then shall we say? Shall we remain in sin so that grace may abound?” If love is inclined toward offenders, if grace is abundant to sinners, if divine generosity is a friend to the unjust, surely if future goods are gained by present evils, why for us the steep road of the virtues, why the hard labour of attaining righteousness, why the continual torment of keeping innocence among the wicked? Let human crimes be increased so that heavenly goodness may overflow; let us do evil, as he said, so that good may come (Rom 3:8); let us remain in sin so that grace may abound. To this, brothers, the same Apostle who asks the question answers: “Far from it. For how shall we who have died to sin still live in it?” (Rom 6:2). When he says, “Far from it,” he curses such an understanding and mind of the foolish; for the physician works for the cure and for health, not for the wound; he rejoices not in rot or diseases but in health alone. So too God, who applied to the greatness of the wound the greatness and strength of medicine, granted grace not to sin but to man; he poured out the shower of his love not to multiply offences but to destroy them. Let no one, no one so rejoice in sickness as to want to remain in the wound. He is ungrateful to the physician and an enemy of the cure who always burns to be treated and never desires to be healed here; and so he wants God's grace to overflow on his sins that he wants sins heaped up for himself. Wretched is he who by such a wish strives to be guilty through pardon. This madness, brothers, must be fled, must be fled, which even after treatment is held captive by love of diseases; for a relapse of sickness is more often deadly. As for his saying, “we who have died to sin,” here he speaks of a figure of the present time; for he said that we have died to sin, he did not say that sin has already wholly died for us; because, although in the saints and the faithful sin has died as to the doing of the deed, it still lives and still rages for our death. But sin itself will die in us when “this corruptible has put on incorruption and this mortal has put on immortality, and the saying that is written comes to pass: Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O underworld, is your victory? The sting of death is sin” (1 Cor 15:54–56). He lives to sin who, as he says in what follows, serves its desires; and he wretchedly serves its goads who complies with vices, who succumbs to crimes in unhappy and continual captivity, who thinks that what belongs to offence belongs to nature, and uses the disease, which is an accident, as if it were the work and gift of the Creator. And so, to refute the ignorance of such people, he added, saying: “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? For we were buried with him through baptism into death” (Rom 6:3–4). Let the faithful hear and understand how the Lord's three-day burial is figured in baptism by the triple immersion, so that they may rejoice that they have risen with Christ, if not yet in body, already in newness of life; and that the whole man may be the dwelling of the virtues who had before been the receptacle of the vices. “So that, as Christ rose from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). Christ refers whatever belongs to his virtues to the glory of the Father; and man, who has nothing of his own, labours to claim for himself that he has risen through Christ. His saying, “let us walk in newness of life,” confirms what we said above: that, though not yet in this body, he may yet go about wholly changed in his life; let him understand himself and rule over the elements, who till now served the elements through ignorance; let him who before shamefully stole what belonged to others give away his own for glory; let him who practised the unlawful things of the flesh despise even what the body is allowed; and let him who till now impiously strove to extinguish innocence himself die more gloriously for innocence. And what more? If from the old man he has now been made new, let him change the whirlpool of the vices into the spring of the virtues. Right to the end of the reading the blessed Apostle presses this and shows it: that he can live with Christ and reign with Christ who follows the innocence of the risen Christ, imitates his life and strives to fulfil his holiness. As for his saying, “so that the body of sin may be destroyed” (Rom 6:6): destroyed, brothers, in act, not in substance; in deed, not in form; because he wants man to perish to sin, not to God, he who says: “Consider yourselves dead to sin but alive to God” (Rom 6:11). And he strives with all love, brothers, to restore man to heavenly freedom, he who says: “Let not sin reign in your mortal body” (Rom 6:12); and again: “Sin shall not have dominion over you” (Rom 6:14). He did not say, “Let it not come to you”; he did not say, “Let it not provoke you or tickle you”; but, “Let it not reign, let it not have dominion”: let it fight for the glory of the victor, let it struggle and fall for the conqueror's triumph; and at last let the impious dominion of sin grieve to be trampled in complete security by those who were once its servants; let the cruel tyrant groan to find himself under the feet of his own captives; and let the veteran enemy lament that he has come to grace the triumph of those over whom he had long triumphed.

[On the servants of law and of grace. On the words of the same: “Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace?” etc.] As to a traveller the return home is always sweet and dear, and the porches of his own house are welcome after a time away, so to me, after intervals in preaching, the return to the course of the apostolic readings is sweeter. For religious necessity often compels us to depart from the set order of speaking and the continuous path of discourse, because the order of teaching must be so governed that one thing is not hindered by another. So let us hear what the blessed Apostle has said today. What does he say? “Shall we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Far from it” (Rom 6:15). This question, brothers, refutes the ignorance of those who, held captive by the custom of the law, do not know how to feel the power of the gift of grace; and those whom the series of the law's precepts showed to be defiant, the mere advantages of gifts and the pomp of festivals have made obstinate in vain observances. And when time has shut out the law, what will the worshipper of the law do, disowned by the law? Jew, what do you have that you have not lost? And if you have lost it, why do you boast as if you had not lost it? Where is the temple, where the priest, where the sacrifice, where the incense, where your purifications, where the devotion of your solemnities that must not be omitted? But, so that you may be a Jew indeed, rightly are you circumcised, because you have been cut off from all the good things just mentioned. For it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not abide in all the things written in the book of the law” (Deut 27:26; Gal 3:10). If he is cursed who offends in one point, how often will he be cursed who will be shown to have done nothing of them all? “Shall we sin,” he says, “because we are not under the law but under grace?” As if he were saying, brothers: Shall we sin because, now healed, we have not remained under treatment? Shall we sin because, now cured, we have left behind fire, iron and medicines? Unhappy is the sick man who after the cure cares nothing for the torment. And what more, brothers? Does anyone heal who seeks and waits for the sick man's choice? For since fire is always kindled in the body from a cold humour, and excessive chill, while it troubles and shakes the limbs, itself produces and begets a sharper burning, so the sick man, to increase the flame that always seethes and pants in his veins, impatiently waits for cold water to be given him, not knowing that then heat is quenched by heat and burning is fed by cold. So the law, since it always waits upon and bears with man's will, and yet man, hindered by the burden of sins, is not able to obey the commands of the law, does not release its worshipper from the bond of sin but binds him with the crime of transgression. And so he added, saying: “Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves as servants to obey, you are servants of the one whom you obey, whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto life?” (Rom 6:16). Why is it, brothers, that while we were speaking of the law, he disclosed that man had been a servant of sin? “Whether of sin,” he says, “unto death, or of obedience unto life.” Because he had said above: “Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law but under grace” (Rom 6:14). So those who are under the law of sin are pressed down and bowed by its rule, and the wretched will not be able to be freed from the basest servitude of sin unless grace sets them free. “But thanks be to God,” he said, “that you were servants of sin” (Rom 6:17). Does he give thanks as one who rejoices that man was a servant of sin? Far from it. He gives thanks not because we were once servants of so cruel a master, but because we are no longer subjugated, as he shows more expressly in what follows, saying: “But you obeyed from the heart that form of teaching into which you were delivered; and, freed from sin, you have become servants of righteousness” (Rom 6:17–18). We obeyed, brothers, by the kindness of the one who called, not by our own choice, since we were held captive in this way. “But you obeyed from the heart that form of teaching.” Which? That of the Gospel, surely, where by a new kind of freedom servitude was not abolished but changed, because devoted service is better than vain and presumptuous freedom. “You have become servants of righteousness.” This servitude, brothers, does not bind but releases; it does not burden but honours; it wipes off the stain of servitude, it does not stamp it on. What here, I ask, is not divine, where servitude is driven out by servitude, condition put to flight by condition, death dies by death, perdition is healed by perdition, and, to say it properly and briefly, where all adversity is laid low by the sword of adversity itself? As for his saying, “I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh: for as you presented your members to serve impurity and iniquity unto iniquity, so now present your members to serve righteousness unto sanctification” (Rom 6:19), he shows the greatness of his love by lowering the gospel teaching to such humble and almost shameful examples, so as to lay on holiness as much as on impurity, on righteousness as much as on iniquity, and to command servitude. The comparison, brothers, seems absurd and unseemly, which wants man to be as subject to glory as to shame; but would that it were even as much! When does human frailty serve God as much as the world, heaven as much as earth, virtue as much as the vices? The whole wretched man is so given over to the flesh, so taken up with present things, that he leaves nothing in himself to serve the future life and divine goods. The blessed Apostle fittingly fitted and fittingly expressed in one sentence the force of temporal allurement for human consciences: that human members should serve righteousness, chastity and purity with as much will as the vehemence and madness with which they gave themselves to shame and the vices. He asks little, or perhaps nothing, who is willing to yield his rightful claim; and he takes away every excuse who commands you to pay back for the greatest things what is possible and customary for you. So give God, O man, as much as you gave the flesh and the vices. And why should you owe yourself to the vices rather than to God, when God seeks from you only as much as that, and out of his love? There follows: “For when you were servants of sin, you were free from righteousness; but now, freed from sin, you have become servants of righteousness” (Rom 6:20, 22). Before, servants of sin; now, servants of righteousness. See, through the Apostle, servitude succeeds servitude; you who were defiant, show now the time of your freedom. Sin before falsely called you free, whom it held wretchedly captive; now grace calls you servant, whom, to make you truly free, it has adopted as a son of God himself. So Christ's saying is fulfilled in which he says: “Whoever wishes to be lord, let him be servant” (Matt 20:27). Blessed is this servitude, which begets everlasting lordship. For that freedom brought us the fruit of punishment and unbearable confusion, as he says: “For what fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For their end is death” (Rom 6:21). See how the devil frees, see with what reward he honours that servitude: death at once ends life and begins punishment. But those who serve Christ, brothers, with death mocked, are carried over with the wages of holiness to everlasting life; for the end in Christ admits no end, because that end does not destroy man but perfects him.