Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 1.42–2.14

Now as for his concluding the letter by saying: "Let no one, then, lead you astray, and let the ungodly not deny that they hold these views; but if they speak the truth, let either a hearing be granted, or at least let those very bishops who now dissent condemn what I said above that they hold with the Manichees, as we condemn those things which they cast at us, and full concord is made. But if they are unwilling, know that they are Manichees and keep away from their company": this is to be despised rather than refuted. For which of us hesitates to say anathema to the Manichees, who say that neither human beings nor marriage were instituted by the good God, nor the law given which was ministered to the Hebrew people through Moses? But we also, not undeservedly, say anathema to the Pelagians, who are such enemies of the grace of God which came through Jesus Christ our Lord that they say it is given not freely but according to our merits, and so grace is no longer grace; and they place so much in free choice, by which man has been sunk into the depths, that they say a man merits grace by using it well, when no one can use it well except through grace, which is not paid as a debt but given by God's free mercy; and they contend that little children are already saved in such a way that they dare to deny that they need to be saved by the Savior. And holding and sowing these execrable dogmas, they still demand a hearing besides, when, being condemned, they ought to do penance.

Now let us consider the other letter, not Julian's only, but common to him and many Pelagian bishops, which they sent to Thessalonica, and, with the Lord's help, answer it as we can. So that this work of ours may not become longer than the need of the case demands, what need is there to refute also those things which do not contain the insidious poisons of their dogma, but by which they only seem to ask for the agreement of the Eastern bishops in their support, or on behalf of the Catholic faith against the profanity, as they call it, of the Manichees, striving for nothing else than that, by setting up a horrible heresy of which they pretend to be the adversaries, the enemies of grace may lie hidden under the praise of nature? For who ever raised a question with them on that point? Or to which Catholic are they displeasing because they condemn those whom the apostle foretold would depart from the faith, "having their conscience seared, forbidding to marry, abstaining from foods" which they think unclean, and not thinking that all things were made by God? Who ever compelled them to deny that every creature of God is good, and that there is no substance which the supreme God did not make, except God himself, who was not made by anyone? It is not these things in them, which are clearly Catholic, that are censured and condemned. For the impiety of the Manichees, excessively foolish and harmful, is detested not only by the Catholic faith but also by all heretics who are not Manichees. Hence these Pelagians too do well in saying anathema to the Manichees and contradicting their errors. But they do two evils for which they too are to be anathematized: one, that they accuse Catholics under the name of Manichees; the other, that they themselves also bring in a heresy of new error. For it is not because they do not suffer from the disease of the Manichees that they are of sound faith. There is not one kind of pestilence, in minds any more than in bodies. So, just as a physician of the body would not at once have pronounced a man free from danger of death because he had declared him not dropsical, if he had seen him sick with another mortal disease, so the truth does not congratulate these men because they are not Manichees, if they are mad with another kind of perversity. Therefore what we anathematize with them is one thing, what we anathematize in them is another. For we detest with them what rightly displeases them too, yet in such a way that we detest in them that for which they themselves rightly displease us.

The Manichees say that the good God is not the creator of all natures; the Pelagians say that God is not the cleanser, savior, and liberator of human beings of all ages. The Catholic Church refutes both, defending God's creation against the Manichees, so that no nature is denied to have been established by him, and against the Pelagians, so that lost human nature is sought out in all ages. The Manichees censure the concupiscence of the flesh not as an accidental fault but as a nature evil from eternity; the Pelagians praise it besides, as no fault at all, but a natural good. The Catholic Church refutes both, saying to the Manichees, "It is not a nature but a fault", and saying to the Pelagians, "It is not from the Father but from the world", so that both may allow it to be healed like a bad state of health, the former by ceasing to believe it incurable, the latter by ceasing to proclaim it praiseworthy. The Manichees deny that the beginning of evil in man, created good, came from free choice; the Pelagians say that even an evil man has sufficient free choice to do the good commandment. The Catholic Church refutes both, saying to the former, "God made man upright", and to the latter, "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." The Manichees say that the soul, a particle of God, has sin through the mixture of an evil nature; the Pelagians say that the righteous soul, not indeed a particle but a creature of God, has no sin even in this corruptible life. The Catholic Church refutes both, saying to the Manichees, "Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad" (which would not be said to a man, who cannot make a nature, unless sin were not a nature but a fault), and saying to the Pelagians, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." With these mutually opposed diseases the Manichees and Pelagians fight each other, with unlike will but like vanity, separated by differing opinion but near in perverse mind.

Now they attack the grace of Christ together, they make his baptism void together, they dishonor his flesh together, but these things too in different ways and for different reasons. For the Manichees hold that divine help comes by the merits of a good nature, the Pelagians by the merits of a good will. The former say, "God owes this to the labors of his members"; the latter say, "God owes this to the virtues of his servants." For both, then, the reward is reckoned not according to grace but according to debt. The Manichees say that the washing of regeneration, that is, the water itself, is superfluous, and contend with profane heart that it does no good; the Pelagians assert that what is said in holy baptism for the expiation of sins gives no help to infants, since they have no sin. And so, in the baptism of little children, as far as the forgiveness of sins is concerned, the Manichees destroy the visible element, the Pelagians even the invisible sacrament. The Manichees dishonor the flesh of Christ by blaspheming the virgin birth; the Pelagians by making the flesh of those to be redeemed equal to the flesh of the Redeemer. For this is precisely why Christ was born, certainly not in the flesh of sin, but in the likeness of the flesh of sin: because the flesh of other human beings is born flesh of sin. The Manichees, then, utterly detesting all flesh, take away from the flesh of Christ its evident reality; but the Pelagians, asserting that no flesh of sin is born, take away from the flesh of Christ its proper dignity.

So let the Pelagians stop charging Catholics with what they are not, and rather hasten to amend what they themselves are; and let them not wish to be considered lovable because they oppose the hateful error of the Manichees, but let them rightly recognize that they are hateful because they do not turn away from their own error. For two errors can be contrary to each other, yet both are to be detested, because both are contrary to the truth. For if the Pelagians are to be loved because they hate the Manichees, the Manichees too are to be loved because they hate the Pelagians. But far be it that our Catholic mother should choose to love one party out of hatred of the other, when, with the Lord's warning and help, she ought to avoid both and desires to heal both.

They even accuse the Roman clergy, writing that, struck by the terror of a command, they did not blush to commit the crime of prevarication, so as to pronounce afterward, against their earlier judgment, by which they had supported the Catholic dogma in the proceedings, that the nature of human beings is evil. On the contrary, the Pelagians had supposed with a false hope that the new and execrable Pelagian or Caelestian dogma could be pressed upon the Catholic minds of certain Romans, when those talents, although perverted by an abominable error, yet not contemptible, since they seemed to deserve to be earnestly corrected rather than readily condemned, were treated somewhat more gently than the stricter discipline of the church required. For when so many and such important ecclesiastical writings were passing back and forth between the apostolic see and the African bishops, and proceedings in this case had even been drawn up before that see, with Caelestius present and answering, what letter of Pope Zosimus of venerable memory, what interlocutory statement, is found in which he commanded that it must be believed that man is born without any fault of original sin? He never said this at all, never wrote it at all. But when Caelestius had put this in his statement of faith, though only among those things about which he confessed that he was still in doubt and wished to be instructed, what was approved in a man of very keen talent, who would certainly have benefited very many if he had been corrected, was the will to amend, not the falsity of the dogma. For this reason his statement was called Catholic, because this too belongs to a Catholic mind: if it happens to think otherwise than the truth demands, not to define such things as most certain, but to reject them when they are detected and shown to be wrong. For the apostle was speaking not to heretics but to Catholics when he said: "Let as many of us, then, as are perfect think this; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal this too to you." This was thought to have happened in his case when he answered that he agreed with the letter of Pope Innocent of blessed memory, by which all doubt on this matter was removed. And so that this might be done more fully and clearly in his case, a letter was awaited which was to come from Africa, in which province his cunning had become known somewhat more plainly. After this letter came to Rome, containing the point that it was not enough, for slower and more anxious people, that he professed in general terms to agree with the letter of Bishop Innocent, but that he ought openly to anathematize the wrong things he had put in his statement, lest, if he did not do so, many of little understanding should believe that those poisons of the faith in his statement had been approved by the apostolic see, because it had said that his statement was Catholic, rather than corrected, because he had himself answered that he agreed with the letter of Pope Innocent: then, when his presence was demanded, so that by definite and clear answers either the man's cunning or his correction might come to light and remain doubtful to no one, he withdrew himself and refused the examination. Nor was there any longer to be delay, as indeed there was none, in doing what would benefit others, even if it could not benefit the obstinacy and madness of those who were too perverse. But if (God forbid!) the judgment on Caelestius or Pelagius in the Roman church had then been such that those dogmas of theirs which Pope Innocent had condemned in them and with them were pronounced worthy of approval and to be held, the mark of prevarication would rather have had to be branded on the Roman clergy for this. But now, since first the letter of the most blessed Pope Innocent, answering the letters of the African bishops, condemned this very error which these men are trying to press on others; and since his successor, the holy Pope Zosimus, never said, never wrote, that what these men think about little children is to be held, and moreover, by repeated interlocutory statements, bound Caelestius, when he was trying to clear himself, to agree with the aforesaid letter of the apostolic see: surely whatever was meanwhile done more gently with Caelestius, the firmness of the most ancient and most robust faith being always kept, was a most merciful persuasion to correction, not a most ruinous approval of depravity. And the fact that Caelestius and Pelagius were afterward condemned by the same bishop, with authority renewed, was the reason of a severity briefly suspended and now necessarily to be brought forth, not a prevarication against a truth previously known, or a new knowledge of the truth.

But what need is there for us to linger longer speaking on this matter, when the proceedings and the letters sent on both sides are extant, in which all those things can be learned or recalled as they were done? For in the questions of your holy predecessor and the answers of Caelestius, by which he professed that he agreed with the letter of the blessed Pope Innocent, who does not see how Caelestius was bound and tied by a most wholesome bond, so that he might not dare any longer to maintain that original sin is not forgiven in the baptism of little children? For these are the words of the venerable Bishop Innocent on this matter to the Council of Carthage: "For he who once suffered free choice, while he used his goods too inconsiderately, falling, was sunk in the depths of transgression and found nothing by which he might rise from there; and, deceived forever by his own freedom, he would have lain under the weight of this ruin, had not the coming of Christ afterward raised him up by his grace, who through the purification of the new regeneration cleansed every past fault by the washing of his baptism." What is clearer and plainer than this judgment of the apostolic see? Caelestius professed that he agreed with it when, your holy predecessor having said to him, "Do you condemn all the things that have been spread abroad in your name?", he himself answered, "I condemn them according to the judgment of your predecessor Innocent of blessed memory." Now among the other things that had been spread abroad in his name, the deacon Paulinus had charged Caelestius with saying that the sin of Adam harmed him alone and not the human race, and that newborn infants are in the state in which Adam was before the sin. Accordingly, if he had condemned Paulinus's charges according to the judgment of the blessed Pope Innocent with a truthful heart and mouth, what would remain for him thereafter from which to contend that there is no fault in little children from the past transgression of the first man, to be cleansed through the purification of the new regeneration by holy baptism? But he showed by the final outcome that he had answered this deceitfully, when he withdrew himself from examination, lest, according to the African rescripts, he should be compelled to recall and anathematize the very words on this question which he had put in his statement.

What of what the same pope wrote back on this very case to the bishops of Numidia also, since he had received letters from both councils, that is, from the Council of Carthage and from that of Milevis: does he not speak most openly about little children? For these are his words: "But what your Fraternity asserts that they preach, that little children can be granted the rewards of eternal life even without the grace of baptism, is utterly foolish. For unless they eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, they will not have life in themselves. And those who maintain this for them without regeneration seem to me to wish to annul baptism itself, when they preach that these have what we believe is conferred on them only by baptism." What does the ungrateful man say to this, whom the apostolic see had spared with most kindly gentleness, as though corrected by his own profession? What does he say to this? After the end of this life, will little children, even if while they live they are not baptized in Christ, be in eternal life or not? If he says "They will", how then did he answer that he condemned what had been spread abroad in his name according to the judgment of Innocent of blessed memory? See, Pope Innocent of blessed memory says that little children do not have life without the baptism of Christ and without participation in the body and blood of Christ. If he says "They will not", how then, not receiving eternal life, are they certainly condemned in consequence by eternal death, if they contract no original sin?

What do these men say to this, who dare even to write their slanderous impieties, dare even to send them to the Eastern bishops? Caelestius is held to have given his consent to the letter of the venerable Innocent; the very letter of the aforesaid bishop is read, writing that unbaptized little children cannot have life. And who will deny that it follows that those who do not have life have death? Whence, then, this miserable punishment in infants, if there is no original guilt? How then are the Roman clergy accused of prevarication under Bishop Zosimus by these deserters of the faith and assailants of grace, as though they had thought otherwise in the later condemnation of Caelestius and Pelagius than they thought in the earlier one under Innocent? For since, by the letter of the venerable Innocent about little children remaining in eternal death unless they were baptized in Christ, the antiquity of the Catholic faith shone out clearly, surely whoever had departed from that judgment would rather have been a prevaricator of the Roman church. Since, thanks be to God, this did not happen, but that judgment was kept by the constantly repeated condemnation of Caelestius and Pelagius, let these men understand that they themselves are what they accuse others of, and let them at last be healed of prevarication against the faith. For the Catholic faith does not say that the nature of human beings is evil, in so far as man was first established by the Creator; nor is what God creates in it now, when he makes human beings from human beings, its evil, but what it contracts from that fault of the first man.

Now we must look at the things which they briefly set down in their letter as charges against us, and to which this is our answer. We do not say that by the sin of Adam free choice perished from the nature of human beings, but that it has power for sinning in human beings subject to the devil; but that it has no power for living well and piously unless the will itself of man has been set free by the grace of God and helped to every good of action, speech, and thought. We say that no one but the Lord God is the maker of those who are born, and that marriage was instituted not by the devil but by him; yet that all are born under sin because of the fault of their descent, and therefore are under the devil until they are reborn in Christ. Nor do we assert fate under the name of grace, because we say that the grace of God is not preceded by any merits of human beings. But if some like to call the will of Almighty God by the name of fate, we indeed avoid profane novelties of words, but we do not love to contend about words.

But why they thought fit to charge us with asserting fate under the name of grace, when I was thinking about it somewhat more attentively, I first examined their words which follow. For they thought this charge should be made against us in this way: "Under the name of grace," they say, "they assert fate, so that they say that, unless God has breathed into an unwilling and resisting man the desire for good, and that imperfect, he can neither turn away from evil nor lay hold of good." Then, somewhat later, where they themselves recall what they maintain, I noticed what they said on this matter: "We confess," they say, "that baptism is necessary for all ages; also that grace helps the good purpose of each person, but does not implant the zeal for virtue in one who resists, because there is no respect of persons with God." From these words of theirs I understood that they either think, or wish it to be thought, that we assert fate under the name of grace for this reason: because we say that the grace of God is given not according to our merits, but according to the most merciful will of him who said: "I will have mercy on whom I have had mercy, and I will show mercy to whom I have been merciful." To which is added in consequence: "So then it is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who has mercy." From this someone equally foolish could think or say that the apostle is an asserter of fate. But here these men reveal themselves plainly enough. For since they slander us, saying that we assert fate under the name of grace, because we say that the grace of God is not given according to our merits, beyond doubt they confess that they themselves say it is given according to our merits. So their blindness could not hide and disguise that they think and hold what Pelagius, when it was charged against him, condemned with crafty fear in the episcopal judgment in Palestine. For it was charged against him, from the words of his disciple Caelestius, that he too said that the grace of God is given according to our merits. Detesting this, or as if detesting it, with his mouth only, he did not delay to anathematize it; but, as his later books indicate and as the assertion of these followers of his lays bare, he kept it with a feigned heart, until afterward what he had then covered from fear by the cunning of denial, his boldness brought out even in writing. And still the Pelagian bishops do not fear, are not even ashamed, to send their letters to the Catholic Eastern bishops, in which they accuse us of being asserters of fate because we do not say that the grace of God is given according to our merits, which Pelagius, fearing the Eastern bishops, did not dare to say and was compelled to condemn.

Is it really so, sons of pride, enemies of the grace of God, O new Pelagian heretics: whoever says that all the good merits of man are preceded by the grace of God, and that the grace of God is not given to merits, lest it not be grace, if it is not given freely but paid as due to those who merit it, seems to you to assert fate? Do not you yourselves also, with whatever intention, say that baptism is necessary for all ages? Did you not in this very letter of yours put this statement about baptism and that about grace side by side? Why did not baptism, which is given to infants, remind you by that very nearness what you ought to think about grace? For these are your words: "We confess that baptism is necessary for all ages; also that grace helps the good purpose of each person, but does not implant the zeal for virtue in one who resists, because there is no respect of persons with God." In all these words of yours I say nothing for the moment of what you said about grace. Give an account of baptism: why you say that it is necessary for all ages, tell us why it is necessary for little children. Surely because it confers some good on them, and that something is neither small nor middling, but great. For even if you deny that they contract original sin to be forgiven in baptism, yet you do not deny, indeed you even proclaim, that by that washing of regeneration they are adopted from sons of men into sons of God. Tell us, then: all the little children baptized in Christ who have departed from the body, by what preceding merits did they receive this so sublime gift? If you say that they merited this by the piety of their parents, it will be answered to us: why is this good sometimes denied to the children of the pious and granted to the children of the ungodly? For sometimes offspring born of religious parents, at a tender age and freshly from the womb, is overtaken by death before it is washed in the washing of regeneration, and an infant born of enemies of Christ is baptized in Christ through the mercy of Christians; a baptized mother mourns her own child unbaptized, and a chaste woman picks up another's child, exposed by an unchaste mother, to be baptized. Here certainly the merits of the parents are absent; absent, as you admit, are also those of the little children themselves. For we know that you do not believe this of the human soul, that before the earthly body it lived somewhere and did something good or evil, by which it might deserve this difference in the flesh. What cause, then, procured baptism for this little one and denied it to that one? Do they have fate, because they have no merit? Or is there with the Lord respect of persons in their case? For you have mentioned both, first fate, afterward respect of persons, so that, since both must be refuted, there might remain what you want to bring in against grace: merit. Answer, then, about the merits of little children: why some depart from their bodies baptized, others unbaptized, and why they neither possess nor lack so excellent a good by the merits of their parents, so as to become sons of God from sons of men by no merits of their parents, none of their own. You are silent, of course, and you find yourselves rather in what you charge against us. For if, where there is no merit, you say that it follows that there is fate, and for this reason you want man's merit to be understood in the grace of God, lest you be compelled to confess fate, see, it is rather you who assert fate in the baptism of little children, in whom you admit there is no merit. But if you grant that in baptizing little children no merit at all precedes and yet there is no fate, why, when we say that the grace of God is given freely precisely so that it may be grace, not paid as due to preceding merits, do you boast that we are asserters of fate, not understanding that in the justifying of the ungodly, as there are no merits precisely because it is God's grace, so there is no fate precisely because it is God's grace, and so there is no respect of persons precisely because it is God's grace?

For those who affirm fate contend that not only our acts and what befalls us, but even our very wills, depend on the position of the stars at the time when each one is conceived or born, which they call constellations; but the grace of God surpasses not only all the stars and all the heavens, but even all the angels. Then, the asserters of fate attribute both the good and the evil of human beings to fate; but God, in the evil of human beings, pursues their merits with due retribution, while the good he bestows by undeserved grace with merciful will, doing both not through a temporal conjunction of the stars but through the eternal and deep counsel of his severity and goodness. We see, then, that neither belongs to fate. Here, if you answer that this very benevolence of God, by which he does not follow merits but bestows undeserved goods by free goodness, should rather be called fate, when the apostle calls it grace, saying, "By grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves, but it is the gift of God; not from works, lest anyone be lifted up", do you not notice, do you not see clearly, that it is not we who assert fate under the name of divine grace, but rather you who call divine grace by the name of fate?

Likewise, respect of persons is rightly said to exist where the one who judges, leaving aside the merit of the case he is judging, supports one party against the other because he finds something in the person worthy of honor or pity. But if someone has two debtors and wishes to forgive the debt to one and exact it from the other, he gives to whom he wills but defrauds no one; nor is this to be called respect of persons, since there is no injustice. Otherwise, to those who understand little, there may seem to be respect of persons where the lord of the vineyard gave the workers who had worked there one hour as much as those who had borne the burden of the day and the heat, making equal in wages those between whom there had been so great a difference in labor. But what did he answer to those who murmured against the householder about this apparent respect of persons? "Friend," he says, "I do you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go. I wish to give to this last one as to you. Or is it not lawful for me to do what I wish? Or is your eye evil because I am good?" Here, surely, the whole justice is this: "I wish." "To you," he says, "I have paid; to this man I have given; and in order to give to him I took nothing from you, nor did I lessen or deny what I owed." "Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish? Or is your eye evil because I am good?" So, just as there is no respect of persons here, because one is honored freely in such a way that the other is not defrauded of what is due, so also, when according to the purpose of God one is called and another is not called, a free good is given to the one called, of which good the calling itself is the beginning, and to the one not called evil is paid back, because all are guilty from the fact that through one man sin entered into the world. And in that comparison of the workers, where those who worked one hour and those who worked twelve times as much received one denarius (the latter, by human but vain reasoning, ought to have received twelve denarii for the amount of their labor), both were made equal in good; not some set free and others condemned, since even those who labored more had it from the householder himself both that they were so called as to come and that they were so fed as not to faint. But where it is said, "So then he has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills", he who makes one vessel for honor, another for dishonor, the good is given undeservedly and freely, because the one to whom it is given is from the same lump; but the evil is paid back deservedly and as due, because in the lump of perdition evil is not evilly repaid for evil; and it is evil to him to whom it is repaid, because it is his punishment, but it is good to him by whom it is repaid, because it is his right action. Nor is there any respect of persons in the case of two debtors equally guilty, if to one is forgiven, from the other exacted, what is equally owed by both.

But so that what we are saying may become clear by the evidence of an example, let us suppose twins born of some prostitute and exposed so that others might pick them up: one of them died without baptism, the other baptized. What shall we say was fate or fortune here, which are nothing at all? What respect of persons, since there is none with God, even if there could be any in these infants, who certainly had nothing by which one might be preferred to the other, and no merits of their own, either good, by which one might deserve to be baptized, or evil, by which the other might deserve to die without baptism? Or were there merits of the parents, where the father was a fornicator and the mother a prostitute? But whatever they were, they were certainly not different for these two who died in so different a condition, but common to both. If, then, neither fate did this, because no stars decree these things, nor fortune, because it is not fortuitous chances that bring them about, nor a difference of persons or of merits, what remains, as far as the baptized one is concerned, but the grace of God, which is given freely to the vessels made for honor; and, as far as the unbaptized one is concerned, the wrath of God, which is paid back to the vessels made for dishonor in accordance with the merits of the lump itself? But in the one who was baptized we compel you to confess the grace of God, and we prove that no merit of his preceded; as for the one who died without baptism, why he lacked the sacrament which you too admit is necessary for all ages, and what was punished in him in this way, that is for you to see, who will not have it that there is original sin.