Poem on the Ungrateful (Against the Enemies of Grace) 511–961

now performs; and that, since the will was free without the law, fortified by the page written on the heart, eternal life could thus have been gained, without this help that rises above the law, just as you claim that without the law it is grasped by natural virtue; but that now, as the ages sank into many evils, the help has increased: not as though, without it, nature could not take hold of salvation through hard labors, but so that, with it aiding the efforts and dispositions for works, the free mind might carry off the prize set before it more quickly. Say that when infants are renewed, innocent souls are not renewed, and that they are reborn in the flesh only, washed outwardly, there being no inner stains in them: since, though they cannot show signs of a right will, yet they are the more free of all filth in that, beyond the condition given by their maker, they have added nothing of their own for the font to abolish. If these things do not breathe from your hearts, and the same ship has not carried you out to the deep with the condemned, to be sunk in the sea, lower the sails of your pride, and stand humbly with us in the calm harbor. Declare steadfastly the wounds of conquered nature, the soul stripped of virtue, the blinded eyes of the heart, and the choice armed for its own punishment with the very darts that overcame it, so that it can never rise, and by its striving is always rolled back into new falls; for which its own wisdom is a snare, and death holds it subdued, unless true salvation from the gift of Christ is present, and grace counts the crushed mind worthy. Or is your lofty spirit ashamed to confess these things, lest the sick man be held cheaper under so many diseases, since nothing at all of his dowry of virtues is left by which he might merit the physician's help and get well for a fee?

Then take your step back into the enemy's camp, and join those with whose wit and deceitful arms you play, brandishing the darts of the same tongue. Exult in the goods of nature, and teach that the honor of the mind has stood unharmed through all the ages. And, so as not to uncover yourselves wholly with the naked dogma, declare that the punishment of sin runs only along a bodily path, diminishing nothing of the soul. Acquit of guilt those pierced through by the wound, and accuse the very justice of God, who lets the punishment pass on where you will not let the guilt pass on. But God is not unjust; and the plain voice of Paul teaches that all men fell when the one fell; in whom the whole line of peoples, laid low together, perished, and no one has the means to rise to life unless he is born again by a holy birth. For as many as you count righteous from the earliest age, there is no doubt they were saved by this help which now the almighty grace exercises more widely in the whole world. This grace, as has been said, is not a judge of merits, which it finds only full of evils; and unless it gives what is good, the blind will will do nothing well. That it may be sought by anyone's zeal and longing, grace itself acts, and it is the guide of all who come to it; and unless one runs through it, one does not come to it. So we are carried to the way by the way: without light no one sees the light: to seek life without life is death. "If running is not of those who run, nor willing of those who will," you say, "then neither is punishment owed to vices nor reward to praise, if either nature is bound and must will evil, or good deeds cannot be ascribed to our labor." Do not those masters of yours think the same things and plead the same,

those masters of yours, whose words you belch out? But since a kindred pride has uttered a like complaint, the answer is now given both to you and to them. We all were once God's inviolate and lofty image in our first father, while he lived in the nourishing grove and, obeying the command, kept away from one tree. But after he broke the law of the command and took in a proud counsel mixed from the fountain of envy, he fell, and we all fell together in our falling parent: for the venomous drunkenness of sin runs through all, and stays in the belly of the corrupted heart, an inflamed boil seething from raw food. Hence the vigor of the mind is dulled and clothed in foul darkness, and its sluggish eye cannot bear the lightning of the divine light; hence choice, slipping through trackless ways, limps, and in its blind and fettered efforts there is motion, but error is not absent. So the will remains ever loving something to carry itself toward, and is deceived in a labyrinth, having entered the windings of uncertain roads: it desires vain things, swells and fears with vain things; and, rushing with every kind of restlessness, it rises from wound into wounds. So when grace heals this choice, you say it is taken away, and you think it is destroyed by the force that breathes on it. What wonder if the frenzied sick man, with raving heart, loves his disease and drives away the physician? Recognize at last the inventions of the ancient deceit, and unlearn the habit of offering your captured ears again to the viper's whisper. Stop plucking harmful fruit from the broken branches of choice: this food does not reform you, nor does that food nourish the beauty of angelic glory. Rather it snatches those greedy for forbidden things, and swollen with foul bile, far away from the tree of life they despised.

On its help and fruit we must feed, so that the weak mind, regaining strength, may also be able to use its own strength well, and find in Christ what it lost in itself. So then, whoever you are who are stripped of the garment of your earthly parent, you do not lose the ancient honor of nature, but receive it back: acquiring what you lacked before in such a way that it is yours, if you use what was conferred modestly, and confess that what you have you have as received. The fountain of merit, then, is the Father of lights; what has flowed from there into us becomes for us the cause of greater goods, while we return to the giver what is his, and are increased by what we return, and our good becomes the glory of the giver. But you who defend the judgment of choice and merit, and ascribe to men's efforts the gifts of the one who calls: distinguish the souls of infants, and explain what dispositions and what motions these breasts have. Give the tender ones a character, and equip with the freedom of willing those who can scarcely take in thin air and milk. No signs of choice answer you, nor can you separate equals by any merits: all have one nature, and alike they cannot will either good or evil. And yet from these, merciful grace chooses some, and, born again by baptism, carries them over into the eternal kingdom, while many are left in death whose case was the same, from the same wound. Nor can you fit this to the merits of parents, as though the pious care of the good helped those to be redeemed, and the negligence of others took life away from others; for you see many born of holy parents who could not be saved by any zeal of their own families; and for others, exposed because of the shameful crimes of their mothers, the care of strangers was sent, which, snatching them from the dunghill,

might hand them over through the font of life to the heavenly court. What if you see this different end, by which the grace of Christ chooses one while another perishes, and gives him salvation, even in twins? Since you separate those conceived at one time and born at one time, you cannot allege any motions of choice. Work is absent, merit is absent, nothing unequal is brought forth. But God distinguishes even such, so that the goodness of Christ may stand out the more, which alone is the cause, for those called, both of faith and of merit: since rich Wisdom grants this too to many, that for those who have done holy things to the end of life, the reward should come from the gift. But it is not rightly or truly said that those who have no share in the divine gift, and whom grace passed by as they lived in the shadow of death, are not guilty of sin, because the power of doing right was not given. They deny that men lie prostrate, bound by the fetter of nature, nor do they believe that from one stock all offspring is born with punishment and guilt. But whoever does not reject this sees that the weight of this guilt lies equally on the wretched with so strong a mass that, even if they heap up no further evils, this one crime is still enough to be paid for by death through being born. If, then, we confess that this law, which no one undoes by himself, was laid down and imposed deservedly and justly, why do we complain that not all are saved from it? For if it remained unbroken over all offspring, we would not complain of all being justly condemned; or is what would be borne for the whole not tolerated for a part? And would it be better for all debts to be exacted than for much of the full sum to be mercifully remitted? Who, released from the filthy prison, would assail with envy the help of the one who had mercy on him, because he did not

lead all together out of the same darkness into the true light? For he does not feel how wretchedly the condemned man bears the punishment in which he himself was sunk, unless he is free of it. Then, at last, with kindly mind he conceives that fellow-feeling by which with humble prayer he wins Christ for the wretched, who, weighed down in their accustomed night, have no wish to escape. So great is the harm of error that it delights to err; and the contagion of the old disease creeps in so smoothly that what one languishes from is loved. Whence, then, does this complaint arise? Such care does not move those for whom their own punishment is not yet a grief, and who believe themselves deserted by no light. But those who, freed from darkness, live in the light rejoice, and learn from those who pay their debts how much has been forgiven them by the goodness of the one who calls. You alone, then, are complainers, you alone are proud: you alone are UNGRATEFUL, whom grace galls, for you want all its work to rest on your own choice; and the fact that not all mortals enter the halls of life you think depends on themselves in such a way that it rests as much on each one's judgment that he enters as that he does not, as though an equal power were available for either, and it were as much one's own to will good as evil. Away, mad impiety; take your malicious arts away, and, shut out, go with your British author. We are humble and slight, a little flock, afraid to lean on high things, because our sufficiency is from Christ; if we know or will anything right, we owe it to him who loosed our chains and gave back good for evil, not finding what he might choose for its merit, but giving that by which one would be chosen, so that from what was received a cause of merit might come forth;

and from things given to things yet to be given, a growing diligence might climb by steps, and God might become for all their one good. But why, from the whole stock of the human race, some part is chosen to be born again in Christ, and some part perishes, when the same cause entangles all together, and those who differ in gift are not distinguished by merit, we do not dare to search out too far, nor to go along hidden ways, nor to tread remote paths with our step. For many things lie well covered, and not knowing them is profitable, while gentle faith modestly bears with certain things deferred, and without loss is ignorant of what has not been revealed. So when God fostered one people chosen out of all with laws, rites, temple, anointing, and signs, what was hidden and has been unveiled at the end of the world, it did no harm not to know: that all nations were one day to be called into the eternal kingdom, and that throughout the world would be given what the hope of a small people then held. So the last day, by which the age of the world is closed, is not given to our knowledge; and yet the throng of saints is not troubled, impatient of this secret. The very fleshly origin of the human race too, how many causes it covers in varied order! And though one hand brings forth all from the same leaven, and the elements of the parents do not come together from different principles, from one clay comes unequal work: the potter varies the measures through his vessels, and distinguishes the one material by the right of the creator. So the same nature of soul and the same nature of flesh enter the world under different conditions. To these it is given to rule, those must serve; beauty and great strength and a green old age receive some, others an unhonored look and a weak body; in some there flourishes a mind fit for famous arts,

in one, cold sluggish blood weighs on the breast; some, not even lawful warmth stirs to beget; but others cannot rein in an insane fury; this one, mild and calm, a quiet modesty adorns; … With these and a thousand ways varying the one seed, distinct beginnings take on unequal forms. And yet among things so much at odds no one accuses the author, who holds within himself the law of this work, while he unfolds his good pleasure by fair judgment, and a just power keeps the causes of things in shadow. If, then, the earthly frame, and the offspring given over to death, is brought forth by such unlike births that, though the look of the work is plain, yet the rule of the will from which this unequal measure comes has not been published, what wonder if the secret of the great counsel above all things lies hidden, and is withdrawn into his lofty good pleasure? While the vain things of the world flow by, while we live in the body of death and the contest of the appointed struggle is fought out, God has covered it from our knowledge, and thought it more useful to veil certain things for the testing of the pious. We, then, do not press upon closed things, nor urge hidden things with impudent care; it is enough to see the works of the Almighty and to know the author of all good things, without whom the mind begins nothing right. Let mad impiety dare to tie the causes of divine works to swollen choice: we, when we see the plain gifts of God, whose one fountain is his supreme will, are glad to tremble with Paul, and in modest awe to hang, astonished, on the nod of Christ before his unconquered throne: whose judgment we call so inscrutable and deep that we confess it wholly true and just.

For one merit is enough for undergoing death; for life, none, except what grace has given. But you, O new people, who, torn from the stock of the wild olive, are grafted and grow in the branches of the holy olive, learn, now formed, that you did not begin the honor of the ancient foliage by your own effort, but by the right of the mighty farmer were grafted to live on the fruitful wood. Overcome the blasts of the proud, and resist the vain whirlwinds of the raging, strong in steadfast piety; and let not the image of a deceiving beauty creep upon you, so that you think none of these men errs. Though they lead their life on the cross, and afflict their bodies with unceasing death, abstain from wealth, are chaste and kind, and, leaving earthly things, bear their minds above the stars: yet if they think anyone can lay hold of these things by his own virtue, or that he can be such that this labor deserves to be helped, and say that the mind of one seeking true goods has merited it: by what they want to grow, they are lessened; by advancing they fall short; by rising they fall; by running they go backward. For whence they seek in vain to shine with empty things, thence they are darkened: since, for love of praise, they seek their own, not the things of Christ; nor is God for them the beginning, and they do not give the kingdom in the body to the head. For them Christ the rock is not the foundation of the temple; but on the unstable sand of a wavering choice they rise, about to fall under the foul mass of their pride. The stone which certain builders rejected, these now also reject, and want, without it, a third wall, which no corner binds with any bond, and which no joint holds fastened together. These are not led to the bridegroom's chamber, and they enter

by their own freedom: what the grace of Christ confers they have not received, and yet they have it; the power of the Father does not draw them to the Word, but of their own accord, in swift course, they forestall the help of one who delays; nor for every sowing do they need him without whom they seem to themselves able to do very much. What good is it to spit out the Pelagian invention in words and to punish the condemned with the voice alone, when, with a few sinews removed from the filthy skin, the inmost bowels of the viperous view are cherished? How fortunate that that evil master of dire error smeared the deadly cups with no honey, but brought out a poison tainted with unmistakable fierceness, and revealed the venom by its bitter taste! For if he had not loaded the first principles of his argument with the things which his craftier disciples took away, he would have captured countless minds with an ambiguous fiction; but minds, seeing many misshapen things on the very threshold, turn away from the horrid halls of terrifying death. Nor can the worn-out thieves now deceive them, for it is easy for anyone to know, by no doubtful signs, where their arts tend and whence they arise. They do not, then, seem to think with the condemned when they say that death passed into all through the one first man, whose crime has stained all; and that no one will come into eternal life unless reborn from the font; and that guilty infants are set free by this gift, whom the first origin brings forth, all alike, to death. But they do think with the condemned, and put forward condemned things, when they say that nothing of their beauty was taken from souls by the ancestral wound, and that that splendor in all

is now inborn just as it was before the ruin. Hence, they say, freedom of choice can discern with its own eye of the heart whatever is to be done rightly, and the skillful mind suffices not only for the advantages of the present life, to protect and adorn itself, but, being also fit to receive the highest and eternal goods, the mind is carried of its own accord to heavenly things, and comes to Christ by a way that it has made itself. Hence a man made firm by long habit of right can resist adversities and not yield to the punishments which the enemy has applied through the flesh to overcome the soul, the help of God withdrawing, who deserts his own fittingly and usefully, so that from the contest of the struggle they may bring back palms they have sought; lest the pious have no merits, and we be robbed of the honor of true praise, if what they will or do not will by the sense of nature, and hold as instilled by the commands of the law, the hand of divine help should work in them: as though it were fitting for Christ's servants alone to lack virtue and be unable to lay hold of upright conduct, which even idol-worshippers mostly have. When the impudent tongue pours out such things in foolish words, flee, you new people, flee the hostile views, and wisely separate yourself far from the snares of death. For Christ is your righteousness; with him as your leader you must run, lest your course, without Christ, be a wandering error. For no one, no one at all, was not born with the wound of the first father; by which wound the mind was struck within before the limbs without, when the mind took in what pride, cast down from the region of the sky, had urged. So the soul, whose light came from the highest light,

wraps its choice in darkness; and, leaving the light, by its own counsel chose to grow black with foul night. Nor can it now of itself lift its captive eyes on high: since, as the tyrant despoiled it, it lost even this, to know under how great a wound it lies. For if anything remains to it from those happy beginnings, and for the prudent conduct of the life of exile, the wisdom of the world believes this sound, and that nothing was more sublime in itself, and loves its own sense, admiring itself as famous through countless arts: that it seeks hidden things by lofty conjectures, that it remembers rightly, understands keenly, judges fitly; that it has cultivated the study of eloquence, that it has founded cities with laws, and cut back savage ways by reason, so that fear of punishment vied with the duty of love. And when it busies itself with numbers, in learning the stars of heaven by their courses, and seems to know the varied eclipses of the sun and the labors of the moon, how beautiful it is to itself, and how it fades away in these very things! Though these come from the first honor of nature, yet they cannot lead to the true life. (In the end it fell headlong from these into many religions, and clung to things made, leaving their maker behind.) For if even now that vigor remained unharmed in which nature was innocent, each one's own will could reconcile him to God and absolve him from punishment; in vain would Christ have atoned for death by dying, and the blood of the Lamb would not take away the sin of the world, nor would the human race need to be begotten again under a new condition: since sound wisdom, sound faith, sound choice, a mind free of disease would lead a life worthy of sharing in the highest things. But how deep nature, once laid low, has been sunk, and under how great a mass of ruin it is crushed,

the Word becomes man, and the sower of all things, under the condition of a servant's form, deigns to be born of a virgin and to go down into all the feelings of the weak. Power is harassed, Wisdom is mocked; Justice bears with the unjust, Mercy with the cruel; Glory undergoes contempt, and Power torments; and Life, nowhere violable by any, is driven to the punishment of the cross, so that by its death the slayer might be slain; so that, the blood of the just being poured out for the unjust, the death of the one innocent might be the life of many guilty. When captives, then, are redeemed at this price, let them recognize in what a prison they were shut, or by what disease they were besieged; for their rescue help could come in no other way than by the death of the healer. And because, of their great wealth, some things remain that adorn the naked and console the needy, let not these last things so delight those fallen from the highest that they swell with pride over their punishment, and, the order reversed, are proud of the very thing by which they were made wretched. Or when their dulled eyes, at last, after long darkness, … let them not ascribe this to nature and the freedom of willing rather than to Christ: lest, forsooth, the power of choice be emptied if it lacks the right of choosing. With this counsel the sower of death crept in on the first parents; by this art he laid all low in one, persuading them that it was far better to have what prudent freedom and desire, taught by the forbidden thing, would promise them (though the Lord did not grant it); and now, a serpent creeping in the footsteps of his old fraud, he strives to inflame the deceived with a like fury:

so that, since it is a fine thing to spend care on true things, and it is wholesome for those eager for justice to know and will the good, he persuades them that there is so much light in each one's natural ability that the mind, alive with a natural motion, without God breathing on it, may blaze with the love of Christ, and that saving grace thus confers nothing on such men but pays them back, and enriches the good with a price, not with a gift. From these seeds many more things are now springing up, and among the wheat, swelling with its first milk, a bristling crop of tares, propped up by thorns, comes up. But let us, who are the Lord's seed, who stand by the help of the farmer and live breathed on by the breath from above, shake the taste of the viper's cup far from us; and let us steadfastly confess that we are the new creation of the divine work, which has been wholly separated and cut off from that old stock, and has now no share at all in a fleshly origin, since it is a member of Christ and lives in the body of the head: from him all vigor flows into the limbs beneath him, and so each part is given life in its own order, so that what they do, and fulfill with ordered motions, they are able to do from him who, bringing peace to the highest and the lowest, mingled himself with the lowest to graft us into the highest. Let them be silent, then, who say we must take care that the saints do not lack a ground for receiving a crown, if goods of their own are not found in them. For in teaching this with too swollen an impiety, what do they want but to strip us of justice, of virtue, and of God, lest the light flash in the night, lest the weak return to strength, lest the dead live? But for us let it be our glory to draw these things

from the highest fountain of true goods, and always to shine with splendor from above; not to hope in the fading flower of grass. For just as a branch can bear no fruit unless it remains in the vine, which, serving from the root, drives sap into the leaves and fills the grapes with juice, so those barren of virtues and lacking fruit will be food for everlasting fire, who, leaving the vine, dare to trust in the sprawling freedom of their foliage, so as not to be fruitful through Christ's abundance; and they believe they can excel more by their own powers than if God were the author of virtues pleasing to him. Let them think, then, that they will be base and misshapen when God becomes the one glory of the transformed saints, and no longer will the pressure of bodily toil crush them in uncertainty, but Christ will always be all in all. And if this is fair and great above all things, why is it shameful, even in this valley of weeping, to be strong in God, and to have the least share in mortal work, which is nothing but the sin by which freedom is tormented, to which alone evil deeds go back? And yet when we bend our mind to holy acts, when the chaste mind fights against the desires of the flesh, when we do not yield to the tempter, and, harassed by bitter punishments, we would rather [die] with heart unharmed, we act by freedom; but by freedom redeemed, whose ruler is God, light from the highest light, life, salvation, power, wisdom: it is the grace of Christ by which it runs, rejoices, endures, takes care, chooses, presses on, believes, hopes, loves, is cleansed, is justified. For if we do anything right, Lord, we do it with you helping us; you move hearts; you grant the prayers of the one who asks

what you wish to give, keeping what you have bestowed, and creating merits from merits, crowning your own gifts with crowns. But it must not be thought that care is lessened by this, or zeal for virtues relaxed, or the work of the mind made sluggish, because the goods of the saints are yours, and whatever in them is sound or strong thrives from you, so that man's will might seem to do nothing while you do all. For without you what does it do, except wander far from you, ever ready to enter headlong paths and byways by its own motion, unless you, O good one, take it up weary and sick, bring it back, cherish it, guard it, and honor it? Then its course will be swift, and its eyes will see; freedom will be free, wisdom wise, judgment just, virtue strong, and capacity sound. Of this help, Father, may we always stand in need; from it may our choice proceed; without it may our bodily senses be able to do nothing, so that the servile work may rest. And while your will, not ours, is done in us, may we keep lawful sabbaths in holy feasts.