Poem on the Ungrateful (Against the Enemies of Grace) 1–481

[Preface] Whence the origin of a holy will arises, whence piety is in souls, and whence faith: this, against the ungrateful, proud of a false virtue, I have worked out in ten times a hundred verses. If you take care to learn them with a quiet mind, you will be safe, reader, from the hostile whirlwind; you will not be swept away, a rebel, by freedom of choice, nor will you dare to deny any of God's gifts. But you will confess that the good things that are yours, by Christ's working, are not taken up from merit, but toward merit.

[The poem] Love for the race made kin in Christ, a chaste love instilled from on high, bids me go beyond my own strength and kindle pious minds with song, lest, after a famous victory has finished the war, it relax secure spirits with a careless peace, as though, the enemy being crushed, no fear remained and the venomous head of the trampled snake no longer quivered. Whence, then, the lulled inventions of evil rise again, and what deceit a new origin brings forth from their very end, grant me to tell, almighty Father, and to lay bare the malicious art by which error, laid low, strives up again. The dogma which, steeped in the gall of the ancient dragon, the British serpent vomited out in pestilent speech, held that the first humans were made on this condition: that whether they transgressed the command laid down or remained blameless, keeping the law, they would in any case meet this death by which life leaves the flesh; which was not born of sin, but by God's own ordaining was fixed as the companion of what he created. Therefore, it said, their offspring drew no guilt from their fathers, and are not now born unlike that

origin of the first parents, who, using their freedom badly, sinned, harming their offspring by example, not by seed. All, it said, can live innocent in the citadel of virtue and keep the inborn beauty of the mind, since uprightness rests in the choice of the one who wills. Natural good, and a law set within hearts, teach this inwardly, as the written law does outwardly; and the grace of Christ, added to these, established in itself a refuge for the fallen generally, if they were willing to be renewed in the holy font: so that, once pardon had loosed the guilt contracted by free will, nature might of its own accord return to its own strength, and the vigor of which it had been stripped by errors it could, once cleansed, keep after receiving it once. So rich, they say, is this gift of baptism, and so much is conferred on man in this covenant, that it suits even little ones, who lack all fault, so that those who are well born may be better, and the good of nature be made glorious by added honor. None of all men, they say, was born by God's judgment shut out from this gift; but each one merits by his own freedom to take hold of the promises of the one who calls, which are not owed to those who turn away, but owed to the upright. When mad error was spreading such things far and wide, and drawing untaught ears with deadly inventions, there came, at God's urging, the pious care of the holy Fathers, provided throughout the world, moving as one, destroying the fierce enemies with heavenly darts. For with the same decrees the one Spirit thundered. The plague as it crept in was first cut down by Rome, the see of Peter, which, made the head of the world for pastoral honor, whatever it does not possess by arms

it holds by religion. Nor was the care of the rulers of the East slower to shine forth: it bound the captured author of the wicked dogma by a kindly law to condemn his own invention, unless he preferred to be cut off from the body of Christ and separated from the holy flock. This judgment seems indeed lenient, and to have borne too much with the wicked; but holy faith in that trial overcame the brood that was to spring from the dire seed. For it was foreseen and guarded by divine gift that, though the beast, dodging the penalty that threatened it, had kept the same treacherous views within itself, it would yet kill its own shoot by condemning it, extinguishing with its mouth the evil brood it had brought forth with its mouth. Then too the guest of the Lord's renowned Bethlehem, graceful in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin eloquence, an example of conduct and teacher of the world, Jerome, dissected the enemy in most excellent books, and made known with what whirlwind the darkness that had arisen wished to obscure the true light. What shall I say of the care that in the great city of Constantinople the good bishop Atticus bore with learned mouth, refuting the envoys of the heretics with the ancient faith? From it, then, the impious hearts, though they covered themselves with the veil of a feigned show of judgment, bore also the torments of a silent rebuff. I pass over with what great tumult famous Ephesus was rightly stirred, not suffering to remain under its roofs the vessels of wrath, the breath of disease, and the seeds of death; and with what faith the land of Trinacria too, burning with zeal, drove the viperous troop from its shores. You, Africa, pursue the cause of our faith more ardently; and, with the throne of apostolic law joining its vigor to yours, the fierce entrails of the war

you finish off, and lay the conquered low far and wide. Your kindly bishops came together from all your cities, and in a most famous double assembly of elders you decree what Rome approves, what kingdoms follow. Nor was it only the power of synods that was put forth there, as if they pressed by force those whom our side could not overcome by reason: the arts were broken up, and the venom of the heretical view uncovered; and no argument at all was left that learned faith did not dissolve. Things were set down, and remain written, which from the floodgates of the eternal fountain flowed in an overflowing course and were issued by the tongues of three hundred leaders, kind severity thus tempering its law: that those who wished to turn back from the condemned error should receive peace, and those who held perverse views be driven out. Could the holy council proceed to any other end, whose leader was Aurelius, and whose mind was Augustine? He it was whom the grace of Christ, watering him from a richer horn, gave to our age as a light kindled from the true light: for God is his food, his life, and his rest; and all his will is the one love of Christ; Christ's honor alone is his. And while he ascribes no good things to himself, God becomes all to him, and Wisdom reigns in a holy temple. Of this man, then, among all who drove the mad beasts from the holy flock, the diligence was greater, the work greater, and it filled the whole world more excellently. For wherever the cunning enemy turned his step, wherever he made his doubtful way by hidden windings, he was forestalled by meeting this man, and the snares of a thousand roads found no entrance at all.

And when the rage of the greedy wolves, shut out, gnashed outside, and turned its lies to every art, lest it should corrupt the minds of any sheep or disturb wavering hearts with crooked complaints, God acted through this man's mouth; through this man's mouth rivers of books flowed out through all the world, which the meek and humble drink, and in the fields of souls they strive to let in the streams of life-giving teaching. And now, when the whirlwind of the stormy night had been scattered, alas! new wars, new births arise in the very bosom of the secure mother: she, who seemed to herself to grow through her children, shudders to see a discordant shoot rise up, trembling at degenerate offspring from enemy seed, in whom for a long time, by a deceiving appearance, the kindly love of the mother had erred, while, covered by the beauty of their conduct, the origin of a foreign stock was hidden. So do false things creep in beneath true ones, and by a blind confusion they please at the front which lie hidden at the end; so by the love of praise the zeal for virtues is corrupted, and from an honorable beginning one often passes into the vice of swelling pride: by which some are now shamefully puffed up, and try to blow alive the extinguished sparks of a dogma that was destroyed, while, placing freedom of choice and the disposition to will in the strength of a natural motion, they teach that each person can pursue good things by his own ability, as much as it lies with each to be carried into evil. You who affirm this, in what will you differ from those who say that natural good was hurt by no wound of sin, and that all men are now born with that light which was inborn in the first?

Or do you pick out certain things which, with part cut away, you may accept and store, purged, in the bosom of your heart? Tell us, then, what you approve from it and what you reject, and which of the condemned things you release from the charge. Are you ashamed to give the enemy the right hand of peace openly? And is it not safe to defend, in any part, those who were driven out, simply? Those whom you do not hesitate to exclude from the temple, drive from your mind. A new discord divides you from yourself: you cherish in your heart what you hold down in your mouth. Join yourself to friendly minds, and with those who desire it make a treaty on your own terms; spare your own now, and agree to the pacts. Behold, having wandered through the ends of the earth, they are here, and, filling your ears with tearful complaints, they begin: "Driven from the world, received in no place, wanderers, at last, urged on by report, we return, and we embrace what pleases you: the piety of your teaching has been set out to us; we dispute nothing by denying it. Let us join our view with yours. If you believe that man was made immortal, we too believe it; that he fell into death by sinning, and bound all his offspring by guilt and death; that there is no one who does not need the holy baptism of Christ, and that infants too are cleansed in the font of the washing: provided only that the glory of our choice, and the light created in the beginning, which of its own accord can stand firm in right things, remain unhurt, and be not absent from those strengths which, by God's founding, all human nature received generally in Adam; and that no one have any complaint of a power of choice not received: since, without distinction, whether the Law or the grace of Christ

wills to save every man; and that the gift of the one who calls be so set before us that there is no one who cannot come to it by his own freedom and his own strength; and that salvation belong to those worthy to be saved from the spring of their willing. If this is your faith and your teaching, with the things removed which we have rejected after your example, add us to the holy flocks, and at last, good men, defend your own." If the enemy, humbled, were to weep such things before you, what would you answer? With what feeling would they move you once learned? You deliberate, you tremble, you waver, you delay and hesitate, and you turn over which way your doubtful opinion should throw itself. It is unjust not to give peace to kindred minds, and to deny to those whom one faith and the same wisdom bind the common access of the saints to holy things. But to join a treaty with such men, and to violate the decrees of the holy Fathers, and to despise the laws of pious kings, written by the law of God, is most hostile, and too bold and ruinous. Let them, then, humbly seek again Peter's throne at Rome and the council of lofty Carthage, and plead there the same things that were lamented here in vain to a fearful favor. But when the watchful prudence of a thousand elders (long since having perceived and holding it known that the whole sum of the wicked heresy may be hidden under a small part, from which the full stain of evil may be renewed and the whole body of the invention rise again through its single members) has rejected the enemy plying his old arts, and the healthful censure has stood within its bounds: will not a just grief be able to break open the hidden places of the heart, and stir the wretches to such complaints that they say: "What justice is this, Fathers, in your kindly hearts? To what end, so harsh, to what end so severe,

do you persist in closing the circle of the earth to us? Are we the only ones in the whole world whose faith is everywhere suspect to you, whom you cannot tolerate if even a syllable of ours sounds different from your mouth? We no longer defend ourselves by words or arguments; we ask for judgment by precedent. What, while peace remains, the free voice of many asserts, let that be granted to us without war. We do not cherish our own inventions, nor do we hold to our first pursuits: see, what was once the point of conflict has been cut away; we have turned back and yield to yours, and whatever has pleased them we put forward. What guilt remains? How far must we be driven back? But if these things too, which we count pious, are far from the truth, and your care rightly fights against them, why are those held free of ill-will and of the penalty of error who teach condemned things and, safe through famous towns, fill great peoples with the very things for asserting which we are punished and allowed to stand in no land?" You see what care these things, brought before the holy senate of bishops, would demand, and what decrees they would provoke. Or, because you are secure in your hidden fault, are not pressed by a synod, and no fear of punishment drives you, do you scorn the spectre of the terror I have set out, and laugh at these things as dreams full of empty phantoms? Then let us set aside what is still to be done and its outcome, and bring into the open only what has already been done, so that it may easily be discussed, even with them, what this is over which we have long been moved in different directions in dispute. Among the many things which the heresiarch handed down to his followers (as you know), he says that the nature which was made good

is created in no one at all with any vices, and that the guilt of the first parent harmed no one; and that, since men are now born such as the father of our race was before his guilt, a man can run through life without sin if he wills, just as the first man could, by his freedom, commit no offense. Indeed, you confess that these things were condemned by councils and by the hand of the world. The same author adds this as well: that the law once sent the saints into the kingdom of heaven just as grace sends them now. This too, you know, was destroyed by holy judgment. It was objected that the master himself had said another thing: that the grace of Christ is given according to men's merits, in proportion as each has made himself fit for God's gifts. But seeing this to be too contrary to the faith and too repugnant, he said he did not believe so, and that those whose minds held it deserved to be condemned. By this you see that the accused agreed with the judges who condemned these things, and that no one can defend them; yet he himself is found to have cultivated them again in his books, returning by deceit to a reprobate mind. Now, then, since it has been shown what displeased our side, let it appear how sound your faith is. The grace by which we are Christ's people is confined by you within this limit, and you ascribe to it this form: that it calls all, indeed, and invites them, and, passing over none, strives to bring a common salvation to all and to absolve the whole world from sin; but that each one by his own choice obeys the one who calls, and by his own judgment, his mind moved, stretches himself

toward the light offered, which withdraws itself from no one, but helps those who desire the right and enlightens those who will. Hence, with the goodness of the Lord as helper and teacher, the zeal for virtues grows, so that what each has learned from the commandments must be sought, he pursues with unbroken love. Moreover, you say that this freedom is common and equal to souls that have been taught, so that they can complete the blessed course by persevering, and the end they sought is accomplished by the gift of God, who never fails the upright. But since not all have the same vigor, and the will, scattered, is drawn by the allurements of various things, some of their own accord succumb to vices, who could have called back their foot from the fall and stood firm. Now, since your view has been run through in summary, as well as could be, tell me how you prove that the grace of Christ passes over no man at all of all who are born, to whom it would not wish to impart the kingdom and the blessed life. For not even in our own time has the gospel of Christ been surely made known in all lands, not to say that the beginnings of the gift did not run through the whole world at once. The commands were given to carry it to all alike; but what is said at one time is not done at one time. And while, as the Lord opens the way for his ministers, the firstfruits grow, there must surely have been some parts of the earth where grace had not yet freed men's hearts from the darkness of impiety, and countless men perished, sunk in dread night, while many minds shone with the light they had received. Or did the divine goodness indeed not cease to will to call all men, but the hearts were not at once fit to which the gifts of salvation could be given,

while the savage wildness of their ways resists the teachers, and grace runs past nations hard to approach: so that, since God had wished to offer the light to them too and to show it, each one's own hostile will accuses him and binds him with guilt, because, the first light having been crushed by his vices, he has been made unworthy of the second? But if this is affirmed, in vain do we punish those who say that no vice is inborn in those who are born, and that all are created with their freedom unharmed; whom the grace of Christ, by a just weighing of merits, chooses, calls as worthy to life, and receives. For you hold both views at once when you say that all could have grasped the gift offered to all, since the faculty of nature has not been taken away, and that those do not perish without justice who have buried the honor of the mind in the filth of vices, so that the light sent from on high would not rest in an unworthy seat. So what is one in being born, you say, differs in willing, so that merit regards the few, and nature regards all. But if you wish to defend these things by any reasoning, and want such foolish things to be believed, explain now what this is: that the good and almighty God does not subject all hearts to himself and command all alike to be faithful? For if there is no one anywhere whom he does not will to be redeemed, without doubt whatever the highest power wills is fulfilled. But not all are saved, and a great part sits in the darkness of death and is not made alive. Or do the varied motions of souls produce such things, and freedom makes the cause not one for all? Then the divine will is strong by man's choice,

or even weak, if the completion of its work lies in man, whom it would have wished in vain to help unless he showed beforehand the disposition whose course grace accompanies. But if, the cloud of contention removed, you look modestly with me with serene eyes on what is true, you will see the ancient ages full of plain examples, and in our own time you will recognize many things that teach that by God's power the hearts of those were converted in whom nothing upright had ever lodged, and which bore no sign or sense of justice. For as now the new grace of Christ draws savage nations and barbarian kingdoms, formerly ignorant or scornful of it, and founds a temple for itself in every land, so before it subdued untamed peoples and rebellious cities, piety conquering the minds that resisted. It did this not only by counsel and kind exhortation, persuading and teaching, as though grace had the pattern of the Law; but by changing the mind within and reforming it, and fashioning a new vessel from the broken one by the power of creating. Not the warnings of the Law, not the words of the prophet, not nature supplies this, for it cannot supply what was given to it; but the One who made, remakes. Let the Apostle run through the world; let him preach, exhort, plant, water, rebuke, insist, and enter wherever he finds the way opened for the word: yet that the hearer may be advanced by these efforts, it is not the teacher, nor the disciple, but grace alone that effects it, and adds heavy fruit to the plantings. Grace bids the seed of faith fix its root in the mind, and from the bosom of the heart put forth a strong shoot. Grace guards and fosters the crop as it ripens, lest darnel and thistles and empty wild oats prevail;

lest the wind break it, the torrent sweep it away, the heat scorch it; or lest, when it has lifted itself too joyful and over-strong on high, it fall, laid low in shameful ruin. "We too," you say, "hold these things of the goodness and power of God: that unless it fosters and rules those it calls, and keeps them safe from every sin, no one's own prudence will preserve him, nor will he accomplish anything by the strength of nature alone. But since willing and not willing have already been created in us, and the freedom of one's own choice, once summoned, can direct its motion where it wills, and it has been made known through the ear to the judgment of the heart by what counsel God had purposed to save the world, let the mind, aroused, shake off its long sleep, and submit and fit itself to him who leads the eager and faithful into the promised joys." Is this where you stand with us, as you claimed to think? Is this sincere faith? Is this the grace of Christ you hold? Its work you mark off by a fixed boundary and set wholly outside man, shut out entirely from the door of the mind; you scarcely allow God to reach the senses of the flesh, by which the mind judges what it takes in from outside and moves itself wherever the balanced scales of choice have pressed down the weight: as when, from the voice of a speaker, or from the sight of things done which we have seen, or which we have read, there arises in the secret hall of the heart now love or hatred, now hope, fear, anger, and grief; and yet the writer, the narrator, and the author did not plant these motions in the mind (though perhaps they wished to); but the mind, as judge, is moved of its own accord by what it has perceived, and, after its own manner, as far as it exercises itself on these things, passes into the disposition it has confirmed for itself,

following those things by willing, resisting these by not willing. But when the Almighty saves a man by grace, grace itself completes its own work; the time of acting is always at hand for what it wills to do: no delay comes to it from a man's ways, it is not held in suspense, uncertain, by any causes. Nor does it carry out by the care and service of a minister what it alone can do, or hand the task of acting to servants. They, though they bring many commands of the one who calls, knock, but do not enter souls. God, then, raises the buried, and frees those bound in the fetter of sin. He gives understanding to darkened hearts; he makes the unjust just; he puts in the love by which the lover is loved in return, and the love he sows is himself. This disposition, then, by which the dead take life, by which darkness becomes light, by which the unclean shine, by which fools begin to be wise and the sick grow well, no one gives to another, no one to himself; not the letter of the Law, nor natural wisdom, which, once driven headlong, knows how to slip but not how to rise again; and though it strives to be strong through outstanding arts, and adorns a good mind with noble conduct, yet, blind, it runs through trackless ways to the end of death, and cannot gain the true fruits of eternal life from a false virtue, and it loses the empty show of a beauty that sets, in a mortal age. For every work of goodness, unless it springs from the seed of true faith, is sin, and is turned into guilt, and a barren glory heaps up punishment for itself. So truly is what we believe a gift, and grace given freely does not enrich those it calls with a reward for merits; nor does it judge between the deeds of just works; but all

it alone makes clean out of unclean; and that the one chosen may love the one who chose him, he receives this not by effort but by gift. For if grace were a spectator of merits, and gave itself to those whose mind is purer, and whom it found fit for itself through freedom of choice, it ought to have taken up only the innocent and only the just, those eager for the truth and willing what is right; and the perverse and those foul from the habit of crimes it ought to have driven far off, and denied light to darkness. But the Savior of the world came not to pay rewards to the just, nor to bring healing to the healthy, but to seek what had fallen away, scattered, broken, and lying, and to restore what was found and give it into care. Finally, lest anyone be thought to be rated by the splendor of his conduct, or called to the highest goods by the merit of faith, as if faith itself were not breathed into minds by divine gift: recall the countless throng of old and young in times past, who, using shamefully the blind freedom of the mind, through the worship of demons, through magic arts, through love of keeping what was stolen, through sexual immorality, through murders, led a wicked life; and yet, when death was upon them, at the very edge of the last breath, their night removed, they came to know God in his mercy; and by the gift of the cleansing washing, with no signs left of their former evil, taken from the world, they exchanged Tartarus for a throne. What merits do you count here? If you look at those that went before, they were impious; if you seek those added afterward, there were none. If you ascribe it to merit that they willed to be reborn, surely so right a will was brought forth from the womb of faith. And who gives faith, if not grace? So it is that willing well

grace gives, by granting faith, which, once believed, heals, which creates the merit of the will, and is itself born by the breath of God alone, and, reforming the mind, rouses the sleeping fire from the cold ash. Therefore the mother of the will and the creator of works is not from merit; since what is not done by it is not done well. Whom the way does not lead along a straight line, the further he walks, the further he strays. Whether, then, believing that merit can exist before faith, you give it to the virtues of impiety; or you wish faith to be your own, not received by the gift of the giver but born of the freedom of willing: saving grace has no seat among you, shut out by a puffed-up choice, which with proud brow you raise up, only to fall the more heavily from a greater height. What beginning do you set for the divine works in those to be redeemed? To do God's commands before the washing, to know and love God, to believe the promises of Christ, to seek, to knock, and to ask, you assert, is the proper act of all who strive to make themselves fit for the one who calls. Does the divine hand only begin to renew those received from the waters, and is each one's own will the cause of his life, so that grace is the wage of works, and a judgment of price, by which what is called a gift is bought? Or does God begin his help with the word, and declare himself by the voice of his ministers in all the world, so that the will, enticed by speech knocking at the ears, runs ahead of his help by its own judgment, and grace is no longer grace; which, doing the office of the law, acts only by the right of one who warns, and serves the field along with the planter,

and the earth gives the increase to the seeds, not God; as if the clod stood by its own fertility, and by the skill of the tiller the crop were to spring up; and the divine hand did not first furrow anything in the field of the heart, to work the tamed plain and make the fallow land rejoice in what is sown? With such things taken over from the hostile dogma, is it not plain how much you cherish those who were condemned? You teach that, for taking up the beginnings of true life, nature confers on each the disposition of faith; and with you grace is nothing other than the Law, than the prophet's warning, than the minister's teaching. That is to say, that the same choice is present in general in those born of condemned seed in the body of death as the first man had when not yet subdued by the law of sin; and that no wound passed from his wound to his offspring except through the bodily condition, which answers to it outwardly in such a way that within it lessens nothing, and the substance of the mind keeps its own splendor and is pressed by no penal night. Add what remains of your swollen rampart, soon to fall; heap it up, and fit consequent causes to causes. And since nothing of the first virtue has perished among you, say that true righteousness proceeds from unharmed souls, worthy of God and to be set in heaven: so that Christ died in vain. Put forward many saints from the origin of the world who by skill and of their own accord pleased God without God; and that the decrees of the Law were given at a time when worse ways and a more corrupt age needed the terror of threats and the fear of death. Say that the punishing letters and the ministers of death fulfilled here the work that life-giving grace