Letters 171.1–176.5

We have given a letter to our honorable brother Maximus, believing that he will receive it gladly. Please write back at the next opportunity you can find whether we have achieved anything. Let him know, of course, that we are accustomed to write long letters to our closest friends, not only laymen but also bishops, in the way this one is written, so that they may be written quickly and the sheet held more conveniently when read; lest perhaps, not knowing this custom of ours, he should think an insult has been done him.

I received that honorable man, my brother, the son of Your Worthiness, the presbyter Orosius, both for his own merit and at your bidding. But a most difficult time has befallen us, when it was better for me to be silent than to speak, so that our studies ceased and, in Appius's phrase, a dog's eloquence was being exercised. So I have not been able for the time being to answer your two little books dedicated to my name, most learned and shining with every splendor of eloquence; not that I think anything in them deserves blame, but because, as the blessed apostle says, let each be fully persuaded in his own mind, one in this way, another in that. Certainly whatever could be said and drawn by so lofty a mind from the springs of the Holy Scriptures has been set down and discussed by you. But I ask Your Reverence to allow me for a little while to praise your genius. For we discuss things between ourselves for the sake of learning; but rivals, and above all heretics, if they see differing opinions between us, will slander us as acting from rancor of mind. For my part, I have resolved to love you, to receive you, to cherish you, to admire you, and to defend your words as my own. Indeed, in the dialogue I recently published I remembered Your Blessedness, as was fitting; and let us rather work so that a most pernicious heresy may be removed from the churches, one that always feigns repentance in order to have the opportunity of teaching in the churches, lest, if it showed itself in open light, it should be driven out and die.

Your holy and venerable daughters Eustochium and Paula walk worthily of their family and of your exhortation, and they send special greetings to Your Blessedness, as does the whole brotherhood who try with us to serve the Lord our Savior. Last year we sent the holy presbyter Firmus on their business to Ravenna and from there to Africa and Sicily; we think he is now staying in the regions of Africa. I beg you to greet with my respects the saints who cling to your side. I have also sent a letter to the holy presbyter Firmus; if it comes to you, please do not mind forwarding it to him. May Christ the Lord keep you safe and mindful of me, truly holy lord and most blessed father. We suffer a great shortage of Latin secretaries in this province, and so we cannot obey your instructions, especially in the edition of the Septuagint, which is marked with asterisks and obeli; for we have lost most of our earlier work through someone's fraud.

If you could see the grief of my heart and my concern for your salvation, perhaps you would have pity on your own soul, pleasing God by listening to the word, not ours but his, and you would not fix his Scriptures in your memory in such a way as to close your heart against them. It displeases you that you are being drawn to salvation, although you have drawn so many of ours to destruction. For what do we want, except that you be apprehended, brought before the authorities, and kept safe, so that you may not perish? As for having been somewhat injured in body, you did it to yourself, since you refused to use the mount that was promptly brought to you and threw yourself heavily to the ground. For certainly the other man who was brought with you, your colleague, arrived unhurt, because he did no such thing to himself.

But you do not think even this should have been done to you, because you consider that no one should be compelled to what is good. Notice what the apostle said: “Whoever desires the office of bishop desires a good work”; and yet so many, in order to make them accept the office of bishop, are held against their will, led off, shut in, guarded, and suffer many things they do not want, until the will to undertake the good work comes to them. How much more must you be drawn from a pernicious error, in which you are enemies to yourselves, and led to the truth, either to know it or to choose it, not only that you may hold your honor in a way that brings salvation, but also that you may not perish miserably! You say that God has given free choice, and so a man ought not to be compelled even to good. Why then are those I mentioned above compelled to good? Pay attention, then, to what you refuse to consider. A good will is mercifully exerted for this purpose, that a man's bad will may be set right. For who does not know that a man is neither condemned except on the merit of a bad will, nor set free unless he has a good will? Yet those who are loved are not therefore to be abandoned, cruelly and with impunity, to their bad will; rather, where the power is given, they are both to be restrained from evil and compelled to good.

For if a bad will must always be left to its freedom, why were the Israelites, when they refused and grumbled, restrained from evil by such harsh scourges and driven on to the promised land? If a bad will must always be left to its freedom, why was Paul not allowed to use the very bad will by which he persecuted the church, but was struck down to be blinded, blinded to be changed, changed to be sent, sent to suffer for the truth such things as he had done in error? If a bad will must always be left to its freedom, why is a father warned in the Holy Scriptures not only to rebuke a stubborn son with words but also to beat his sides, so that, compelled and tamed, he may be directed to good discipline? Hence the same Scripture says: “You strike him with the rod, but you will deliver his soul from death.” If a bad will must always be left to its freedom, why are negligent shepherds rebuked and told, “You have not brought back the straying sheep, you have not sought the lost”? You too are Christ's sheep; you bear the Lord's mark in the sacrament you received; but you have strayed and are lost. Let us not displease you because we bring back the straying and seek the lost; for we do better to do the will of the Lord, who warns us to compel you to return to his fold, than to consent to the will of straying sheep so as to let you perish. So do not say any more what I hear you constantly saying: “I want to stray like this, I want to perish like this.” It is better that we do not allow this at all, as far as we can.

Just now, when you threw yourself into a well in order to die, you certainly did it by free will. But how cruel the servants of God would be if they left you to this bad will of yours and did not deliver you from that death! Who would not rightly blame them? Who would not rightly judge them wicked? And yet you threw yourself willingly into the water in order to die; they lifted you out of the water against your will, so that you would not die. You acted according to your will, but to your destruction; they acted against your will, but for your safety. If, then, this bodily safety is to be guarded so that it is preserved even in the unwilling by those who love them, how much more that spiritual safety, in the desertion of which eternal death is feared! And yet in that death which you wished to inflict on yourself you would have died not only for a time but forever, because even if you were being compelled not to salvation, not to the peace of the church, not to the unity of the body of Christ, not to holy and undivided love, but to some evils, not even so ought you to have inflicted death on yourself.

Consider the divine Scriptures and examine them as far as you can, and see whether any of the righteous and faithful ever did this, though they suffered such evils from those who were driving them to eternal destruction, not to eternal life, to which you are being compelled. I have heard that you said the apostle Paul indicated that this should be done, where he says, “And if I hand over my body to be burned”: namely, since he was listing all the good things that profit nothing without love, such as the tongues of men and angels, all mysteries, all knowledge, all prophecy, and all faith so as to move mountains, and the distribution of one's goods to the poor, it seems to you that he also counted among good things that a person should inflict death on himself. But pay careful attention and learn in what sense Scripture says that someone hands over his body to be burned: certainly not that he throws himself into the fire when he suffers a persecuting enemy, but that, when he is offered the choice either to do some evil or to suffer some evil, he chooses not to do evil rather than not to suffer evil, and so hands over his body into the power of the killer, as those three men did who were being compelled to worship the golden statue, and whom the one compelling them threatened with the burning fiery furnace if they did not. They refused to worship the idol; they did not throw themselves into the fire; and yet of them too it is written that they handed over their bodies so as not to serve or worship any god but their own God. See in what sense the apostle said, “If I hand over my body to be burned.”

But see what follows: “If I do not have love, it profits me nothing.” You are being called to this love; you are not allowed to perish from this love; and do you think it would profit you anything to throw yourself headlong into destruction, when it would profit you nothing even if another killed you as an enemy of love? Placed outside the church and separated from the structure of unity and the bond of love, you would be punished with eternal punishment even if you were burned alive for the name of Christ. For this is what the apostle says: “And if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.” So call your mind back to sound consideration and sober thought; look carefully whether you are being called to error and impiety, and if so, suffer any hardships for the truth. But if it is rather you who are in error and impiety, and where you are being called there is truth and piety, because there is Christian unity and the love of the Holy Spirit, why do you still try to be your own enemy?

For this reason the mercy of God granted that both we and your bishops should come to Carthage in so frequent and numerous an assembly and confer among ourselves about this very dissension in the most orderly manner. The proceedings were written down; our signatures too are on record. Read them, or allow them to be read to you, and then choose what you will. I have heard that you said you could discuss those proceedings with us if we left out the words of your bishops where they said: “Neither does case prejudice case, nor person prejudice person.” You want us to leave out these words, in which, without their knowing it, the truth itself spoke through them. But you will say that here they erred and fell incautiously into a false opinion; we say that here they spoke the truth, and we prove this very easily through you yourself. For if your bishops, chosen by the whole party of Donatus to sustain the case of all, so that whatever they did the rest would hold as welcome and accepted, are nevertheless not to prejudice you, as you wish, in what you think they said rashly and wrongly, then they spoke the truth, because “neither does case prejudice case, nor person prejudice person.” And there you ought to recognize that, if you do not want the person of so many of your bishops, constituted in those seven, to prejudice the person of Donatus, presbyter of Mutugenna, how much less ought the person of Caecilian, even if some evil had been found in him, to prejudice the whole unity of Christ, which is not shut up in one village, Mutugenna, but spread throughout the whole world!

But see, we do what you wanted; we deal with you as if your people had not said, “Neither does case prejudice case, nor person prejudice person.” You find what they ought to have said there, when the case and person of Primian were raised against them: Primian, who condemned his own condemners along with the rest, and then received the condemned and abhorred back into their honor, and chose to recognize and accept the baptism that these “dead” men had given (since in that famous sentence it had been said of them that the shores were full of the funerals of the dead), rather than to exorcise and annul it; and thereby he dissolved entirely what you are accustomed to say, misunderstanding it: “If one is baptized by a dead man, what does his washing profit him?” So if they had not said, “Neither does case prejudice case, nor person prejudice person,” they would have been held guilty in the case of Primian; but when they said it, they freed the Catholic Church, as we maintained, from the case of Caecilian.

But read the rest; examine the rest. See whether they could prove any evil against Caecilian himself, by whose person they were trying to prejudice the church. See whether they did not rather do much in his favor, and by the many documents they produced and read out against themselves did not wholly confirm that his case was good. Read these things, or have them read to you. Consider everything, go over it carefully, and choose what you will follow: whether to rejoice with us in the peace of Christ, in the unity of the Catholic Church, in brotherly love; or, for an unholy dissension, for the party of Donatus, for a sacrilegious division, to endure any longer the importunity of our love toward you.

For you point out and often repeat, as I hear, what is written in the Gospel: that seventy disciples withdrew from the Lord and were left to the choice of their evil and impious departure, and that to the other twelve who remained it was said, “Do you also want to go away?” And you do not notice that at that time the church was first sprouting from a new shoot, and that prophecy had not yet been fulfilled in it: “And all the kings of the earth shall worship him; all nations shall serve him.” The more fully this is fulfilled, the greater the power the church uses, not only to invite but also to compel to good. This is what the Lord wished to signify then: though he had great power, he chose first to commend humility. He showed this quite clearly in that parable of the banquet, where he sent to those invited and they would not come; and he said to the servant: “Go out into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in here the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame.” And the servant said to the master: “It has been done as you commanded, and there is still room.” And the master said to the servant: “Go out into the roads and hedges and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled.” See now how of those who came first it was said, “Bring them in,” not “compel”: so the beginnings of the church were signified, still growing, so that it would later have strength even to compel. Accordingly, because, once the church was strengthened by power and greatness, people had to be compelled even to the banquet of eternal salvation, after it was said, “What you ordered has been done, and there is still room,” he said, “Go out into the roads and hedges and compel them to come in.” Therefore, if you were walking peacefully outside this banquet of the holy unity of the church, we would find you as if in the roads; but now, because through the many cruel evils you commit against our people you are full of thorns and harshness, as it were, we find you as if in the hedges and we compel you to come in. Whoever is compelled is forced where he does not wish to go; but when he has come in, he now feeds willingly. So restrain now your unjust and unpeaceful mind, so that in the true church of Christ you may find the banquet of salvation.

The books on the Trinity, which is the supreme and true God, I began as a young man and publish as an old one. I had in fact laid this work aside after I discovered that they had been taken from me, or stolen, before I had completed them and polished them by revision, as I had planned. For I had decided to publish them not one by one but all together, because the later ones are linked to the earlier as the inquiry advances. So, since my plan could not be carried out because of those people who were able to get at some of them before I wished, I had left off my dictation, intending to complain of this very thing in some of my writings, so that those who could might know that those books were not published by me but taken away before they seemed to me worthy of publication. But, compelled by the most insistent request of many brothers and above all by your command, I have taken care, with the Lord's help, to finish so laborious a work; and having corrected them, not as I wished but as I could, so that they would not differ very much from those that had already been stolen and gone out into people's hands, I have sent them to Your Reverence by our son, our dearest fellow deacon, and I have permitted anyone to hear, read, and copy them. If my plan could have been kept in them, they would certainly, while containing the same ideas, have been much clearer and plainer, as far as the difficulty of explaining such great matters and my own ability allowed. There are some who have the first four, or rather five, books even without their prefaces, and the twelfth without a not inconsiderable final part. But if this edition can become known to them, they will correct everything, if they wish and are able. I ask that you have this letter placed separately, but at the head of these same books. Pray for me.

When we came, according to custom, to the church of Carthage for the solemn assembly, and a synod of us was held, gathered for various matters, our fellow presbyter Orosius gave us a letter from our holy brothers and fellow priests Heros and Lazarus, a copy of which we have decided to attach to this. When it had been read, we observed that Pelagius and Caelestius were charged as authors of an error that is altogether wicked and must be anathematized by all of us. Hence it came about that we asked that what had been done in this church of Carthage about Caelestius almost five years ago be reviewed. When this had been read, as Your Holiness will be able to see from the attached documents, although the judgment was clearly established, since at that time this great wound seemed to have been cut out of the church by episcopal judgment, we nevertheless decided by common deliberation that the authors of such a persuasion, though the same Caelestius is said to have afterwards reached the presbyterate, must be anathematized unless they most openly anathematize these things; so that, if their own healing cannot be achieved, at least the healing of those who have been deceived by them, or can be deceived, may be brought about once the sentence passed against them is known.

We have thought it right, lord brother, to make this proceeding known to your holy love, so that the authority of the apostolic see may also be added to the decrees of our lowliness, for protecting the salvation of many and for correcting the perversity of some. For these men, by their damnable arguments, do this: not by defending free choice but rather by exalting it to sacrilegious pride, they leave no place for the grace of God by which we are Christians, by which even the choice of our will is made truly free, when it is set free from the domination of fleshly desires, as the Lord says: “If the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free”; and this help is obtained by faith, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. But they assert, as we have learned from brothers who have also read their books, that the grace of God is to be reckoned to consist in this: that he established and created human nature such that it could fulfill God's law by its own will, whether the law written naturally in the heart or given in writing; and that this same law belongs to grace, in that God gave it to men as a help.

But that grace by which, as was said, we are Christians, of which the apostle is the preacher when he says, “For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man; but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive in the law of sin that is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord”: this they refuse altogether to acknowledge, nor do they dare to attack it openly. But what else are they doing, when they never stop persuading people who are natural and do not perceive the things of the Spirit of God that, for working and perfecting righteousness and fulfilling God's commandments, human nature alone can suffice for them? They do not heed what is written: “The Spirit helps our weakness,” and, “It is not of him who wills or of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy,” and that we are one body in Christ Jesus, and individually members one of another, having different gifts according to the grace given to us; and, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace in me was not in vain, but I labored more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me”; and, “Thanks be to God, who has given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ”; and, “Not that we are sufficient to think anything as from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God”; and, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing power may be God's and not from us”; and countless others, for which a volume would not suffice if we wished to collect them from all the Scriptures. And we fear that in mentioning these very things to you, who preach them with greater grace from the apostolic see, we may seem to act unfittingly; but we do so because, being weaker, the more attentive any one of us is thought to be in preaching the word of God anywhere, the more often and the more boldly we suffer them rising up against us.

So even if Pelagius seemed to Your Reverence to have been justly acquitted by the episcopal proceedings said to have been held in the East, the error itself and the impiety, which now has many defenders scattered in various places, must still be anathematized by the authority of the apostolic see as well. For let Your Holiness consider, and have compassion with us with a shepherd's heart, how pestilent and deadly it is for Christ's sheep that the necessary consequence of these men's sacrilegious arguments is that we should not pray that we may not enter into temptation, which the Lord warned his disciples to do and placed in the prayer he taught, nor that our faith may not fail, which he himself testified that he asked for the apostle Peter. For if these things are placed in our power by the capacity of nature and the choice of the will, who would not see that they are asked of the Lord in vain and prayed for deceitfully, when by praying we ask for what is obtained by the sufficient powers of nature as already created? And the Lord Jesus ought not to have said, “Watch and pray,” but only, “Watch, so that you may not enter into temptation”; nor to the most blessed first of the apostles, “I have prayed for you,” but, “I warn you,” or, “I command and charge you, that your faith may not fail.”

Their contentiousness also contradicts our blessings, so that we seem to say in vain over the people whatever we ask for them from the Lord, that by living rightly and devoutly they may please him; or what the apostle prays for the faithful when he says: “I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power through his Spirit.” So if, in blessing the people, we wish to say, “Grant them, O Lord, to be strengthened with power through your Spirit,” their argument contradicts us, asserting that free choice is denied if what is in our power is asked of God. “For if we wish,” they say, “we can be strengthened with power by that capacity of nature which we do not receive now, but received when we were created.”

They also deny that little children are to be baptized for the sake of the salvation given through Christ the Savior, and so by this deadly teaching they kill them forever, promising that even if they are not baptized they will have eternal life, and that they do not belong to those of whom the Lord says, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost”; because, they say, these were not lost, and there is nothing in them to be saved or redeemed at so great a price, since nothing in them is corrupted, nothing is held captive under the devil's power, nor do we read that blood was shed for them for the forgiveness of sins. And yet Caelestius has already confessed in his booklet in the church of Carthage that the redemption of little children too takes place through the baptism of Christ; but many who are said to be or to have been their disciples do not stop asserting, wherever they can, these evils by which they try to overthrow the foundations of the Christian faith. Hence, even if Pelagius and Caelestius have been corrected, or say they never held these views, and deny that whatever writings are brought against them are their own, and there is no way to convict them of lying, still, in general: whoever teaches and asserts that human nature can suffice of itself for overcoming sins and keeping God's commandments, and is thereby found an enemy of the grace of God, which is declared more evidently in the prayers of the saints; and whoever denies that little children are freed from perdition and receive eternal salvation through the baptism of Christ, let him be anathema. As for whatever else is charged against them, we do not doubt that Your Reverence, when you have examined the episcopal proceedings said to have been held in the East on the same case, will judge in a way in which we may all rejoice in the mercy of God. Pray for us, most blessed lord pope.

Since the Lord, by a special gift of his grace, has placed you in the apostolic see, and has given you to our times as such a man that it would rather count against us as negligence if we kept silent before Your Reverence about what should be brought to your notice for the church's sake, than that you could receive it with disdain or negligence, we ask you to be so good as to apply your pastoral care to the great dangers of the weak members of Christ.

For a new and very pernicious heresy is attempting to rise up, of enemies of the grace of Christ, who by impious arguments try to take from us even the Lord's Prayer. For when the Lord taught us to say, “Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors,” these men say that a person in this life, once he knows God's commandments, can reach such perfection of righteousness by the choice of free will alone, without the help of the Savior's grace, that it is not even necessary to say, “Forgive us our debts.” And what follows, “Lead us not into temptation,” is not, they say, to be understood as though we ought to ask for divine help so as not to fall into sin when tempted; rather, this is placed in our power, and the human will alone suffices to accomplish it; as though the apostle said in vain, “It is not of him who wills or of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy,” and, “God is faithful, who will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear, but with the temptation will also make a way out, so that you can endure it”; and as though the Lord also said in vain to the apostle Peter, “I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail,” and to all his own, “Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation,” if all this is in human power. They also maintain, with a presumption not at all Christian, that little children, even if they are not initiated with any sacraments of Christian grace, will have eternal life, emptying what the apostle says: “Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so it passed to all men, in whom all sinned,” and in another place: “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.”

To pass over the many other things they argue against the Holy Scriptures, as we point out to your apostolic heart these two for now, by which they try to overthrow altogether all that makes us Christians (and what faithful hearts could bear them?): that God is not to be asked to be our helper against the evil of sin and for working righteousness, and that the sacrament of Christian grace does not help little children to attain eternal life; we have no need to say much or to magnify so great an impiety with words, since without doubt these things move you so that you cannot possibly overlook correcting them, lest they creep further and contaminate, or rather kill, many, while under the name of Christ they estrange them wholly from the grace of Christ.

The authors of this most pernicious error are said to be Pelagius and Caelestius, whom we would rather see healed within the church than cut off from the church with their salvation despaired of, unless some necessity compels it. One of them, Caelestius, is said to have reached even the presbyterate in Asia; what was done about him a few years ago Your Holiness is better informed by the church of Carthage. Pelagius, as letters sent by some of our brothers relate, is said to be living in Jerusalem and deceiving a number of people. Yet far more, who have been able to investigate his views more carefully, are contending against him for the grace of Christ and the truth of the Catholic faith, and above all your holy son, our brother and fellow presbyter Jerome.

But we think that, with the help of the mercy of the Lord our God, who deigns both to guide you when you take counsel and to hear you when you pray, those who hold such perverse and pernicious views will more readily yield to the authority of Your Holiness drawn from the authority of the Holy Scriptures, so that we may rather rejoice together at their correction than grieve at their destruction, most blessed lord. But whichever they themselves choose, Your Reverence certainly sees that provision must be made urgently and quickly, at least for the others, very many of whom they can entangle in their snares if they are left alone. We have sent this to Your Holiness from the council of Numidia, following the example of the church of Carthage and our fellow bishops of the province of Carthage, who, we have learned, have written about this case to the apostolic see, which you adorn with blessing. [And in another hand:] May you grow in the grace of the Lord, mindful of us, most blessed lord, deservedly venerable and holy pope to be honored in Christ.