Letters 179.1–181.9

That I have not been favored with a letter from Your Holiness, I dare not resent at all; for I would rather believe that a bearer was lacking than suspect that I am despised by Your Reverence, most blessed lord and deservedly venerable brother. But now, since I have learned that the servant of God Luke, by whom I have sent this, will soon return, I shall give abundant thanks to the Lord and to your kindness if you deign to visit me with a letter. As for our brother Pelagius, your son, whom I hear you love much, I suggest that you show him this love: that people who know him and have listened to him carefully may not think that Your Holiness is deceived by him.

For some of his disciples, young men of very honorable birth and educated in the liberal arts, at his exhortation gave up the hopes they had in the world and devoted themselves to the service of God. But when certain things appeared in them contrary to the sound doctrine contained in the Savior's Gospel and declared in the apostles' words, that is, when they were found arguing against the grace of God, by which we are Christians and in which by the Spirit, from faith, we await the hope of righteousness, and when they began to be corrected by our admonitions, they gave me a book which they said was Pelagius's, asking me to answer it. When I saw that I ought to do this, so that the wicked error itself might be more thoroughly removed from their hearts in this way, I read it and replied.

In this book he calls the grace of God nothing but the nature in which we were created with free choice. But that grace which Holy Scripture commends with countless testimonies, teaching that by it we are justified, that is, made righteous, and are helped by God's mercy in every good work, whether in doing or in perfecting it (as the prayers of the saints also show most plainly, in which things are asked of the Lord that are commanded by the Lord): this grace he not only passes over in silence, but says many things contrary to it. For he affirms and vehemently argues that human nature can suffice of itself through free choice alone for working righteousness and keeping all God's commandments. Hence who, on reading the book, would not see how the grace of God is attacked, of which the apostle says, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ”; and that no place is left for divine help, for the sake of which we must say in prayer, “Lead us not into temptation”; and that the Lord too would seem to have said to the apostle Peter without cause, “I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail,” if all this is accomplished in us by no aid from God but by the power of the will?

So by these perverse and impious arguments not only are our prayers contradicted, in which we ask of the Lord whatever we read and hold that the saints asked, but our blessings too are opposed, when we say over the people, wishing it for them and asking the Lord, that he make them abound in love toward one another and toward all, and grant them, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power through his Spirit, and fill them with all joy and peace in believing, that they may abound in hope and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Why do we ask these things for them, which we know the apostle asked of the Lord for the peoples, if our nature, created with free choice, can already supply all these things to itself by its own will? Why too does the same apostle say, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God,” if we are led by the spirit of our own nature to become sons of God? Why does he likewise say, “The Spirit helps our weakness,” if our nature was so created that it does not need to be helped by the Spirit for works of righteousness? Why is it written, “But 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,” if we were already so made that by the powers of free choice we can overcome all temptations by enduring them?

Why should I say more to Your Holiness, since I feel I am burdensome, especially as you hear my letter through an interpreter? If you love Pelagius, let him too love you, or rather himself, and not deceive you. For when you hear him confess the grace of God and the help of God, you think he means what you mean, who think according to the Catholic rule, because you do not know what he has written in his book. For this reason I have sent the book itself and mine in which I answered him; from these Your Reverence may see what he calls the grace or help of God when it is charged against him that he contradicts the grace and help of God. So show him, by teaching and exhorting and by praying for his salvation, which ought to be in Christ, that he should confess that grace of God which the saints of God are proved to have confessed when they asked of the Lord the very things he commanded them to do; for they would neither be commanded except to show our will, nor be asked for except that the weakness of the will might be helped by him who commanded.

Let him be asked openly whether he agrees that we must pray to the Lord that we may not sin. If he does not, let the apostle be read in his hearing, saying, “But we pray to God that you do nothing evil”; but if he does agree, let him openly preach the grace by which we are helped, so that he himself may not do much evil. For by this grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord all who are freed are freed, since no one can be freed in any other way apart from it. That is why it is written, “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive”: not because no one will be condemned, but because no one will be freed otherwise; because, just as no one is a son of man except through Adam, so no one is a son of God except through Christ. So all sons of men can become such only through Adam, and all of them who become sons of God can become such only through Christ. Let him then state openly on this point too what he thinks: whether he agrees that even little children, who cannot yet will or refuse righteousness, are nevertheless freed through the grace of Christ, because of the one man through whom sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so passed to all men, in whom all sinned; and whether he believes that the blood of Christ, which was certainly shed for the forgiveness of sins, was shed for them too, because of original sin. On these points above all we want to know from him what he believes, what he holds, what he confesses and preaches without ambiguity. In the other matters charged against him, even if he is shown to err, he can be borne more tolerably until he is corrected.

I also ask you to be so kind as to send us the church proceedings by which he is said to have been cleared. I ask this at the wish of many bishops who, like me, are troubled by uncertain reports on this matter; but I have written this alone because I did not want to miss the opportunity of a bearer hurrying away from us, who I heard could soon return to us. Instead of these proceedings he has already sent us, not indeed any part of the proceedings, but a kind of defense of himself written by himself, in which he said he had answered the charges of the Gauls. In it, to pass over other things, when he answered the charge that he had said a person can be without sin and keep God's commandments if he wishes, he says: “We did say this; for God has given him this possibility. We did not say that anyone is found who has never sinned from infancy to old age, but that one converted from sins can, by his own effort and helped by the grace of God, be without sin, yet not on that account be unchangeable thereafter.”

In this answer of Pelagius Your Reverence sees that he confessed that a person's earlier life, from infancy, is not without sin, but that he can be converted to a life without sin by his own effort and with the help of God's grace. Why then, in the book I answered, does he say that Abel lived here in such a way that he committed no sin at all? For these are his words on the matter: “This,” he says, “can rightly be said of those whom Scripture mentions neither for good nor for evil; but of those whose righteousness it mentions, it would without doubt have mentioned their sins too, if it had perceived that they sinned in anything. But granted,” he says, “that at other times, because of the great number of the crowd, it refrained from recording the sins of all; at the very beginning of the world, when there were only four people, what,” he says, “shall we say? Why did it not wish to record the faults of all? Was it because of an enormous multitude, which did not yet exist? Or because it recorded only those who had committed sins, and could not record anything of the one who had committed none? Certainly,” he says, “in the first age only four people are reported to have existed: Adam and Eve, from whom Cain and Abel were born. Eve sinned; Scripture has made this known. Adam too transgressed; the same Scripture has not kept silent. And Scripture itself has also testified that Cain sinned; and it indicates not only their sins but also the nature of their sins. But if Abel too had sinned,” he says, “Scripture would without doubt have said this too; if it did not say it, then he did not sin.”

I have extracted these words from his book, and Your Holiness will be able to find them in the volume itself, so that you may understand how far you should believe him when he denies the rest; unless perhaps he says that Abel himself committed no sin, but was nevertheless not without sin, and so cannot be compared with the Lord, who alone was without sin in mortal flesh, because there was in Abel the original sin which he had contracted from Adam, though he had not committed it in himself. Would that he said at least this, so that meanwhile we might have his definite opinion on the baptism of infants! Or perhaps, since he said “from infancy to old age,” he may say that Abel did not sin because he is not shown to have grown old. His words do not indicate this: he called the earlier life, from the beginning, sinful, and said that the later life can be without sin. For he says that he did not say that anyone is found who has not sinned from infancy to old age, but that one converted from sins can, by his own effort and helped by the grace of God, be without sin. When he says “converted from sins,” he shows that the earlier life is spent in sins. So let him admit that Abel sinned, whose first life was in this world, a life which he admits is not without sins; and let him look back at his book, where it is established that he said what in this defense he says, “We did not say.”

But if he denies that this book, or this passage in that book, is his, I have suitable witnesses, honorable and faithful men and without doubt his admirers, by whose testimony I can clear myself: that they themselves gave me the book, that this is read in it, and that they said it was Pelagius's; so that at least this may suffice me, lest he say it was either written or falsified by me. Then let each person choose which of them to believe. It is not my business to argue this matter further. We ask that you at least send it to him, in case he denies that he holds these views, hostile to the grace of Christ, which are charged against him. For his defense is so plain that, if he has not deceived your holy prudence (you who do not know his other writings) by any ambiguity of words, we shall rejoice with great joy, not much caring whether he never held those perverse and impious views or at some time corrected himself of them.

I received two letters from your love at the same time, in one of which you mention a third and say that you sent it earlier. I do not remember receiving it; rather, I think I remember well that I did not receive it. For those I did receive, however, I give abundant thanks to your kindness toward us. I was prevented from answering them at once, being swept away in one storm of various occupations after another. So now, having found a drop of free time, I have preferred to reply something rather than keep a long silence toward your most sincere love and become more troublesome by silence than by talkativeness.

I already knew what holy Jerome thinks about the origin of souls, and I had already read the very words from his book that you put in your letter. But what makes the question troublesome is not what moves some people, how God can justly bestow souls even on children conceived in adultery, since for those who live well and have turned to God in faith and piety not even their own sins, much less their parents', can do harm. Rather, it is rightly asked, if it is true that new souls are made from nothing one for each person born, how so innumerable a number of infants' souls, which God knows for certain will depart from their bodies without baptism before the years of reason, before they can know or grasp anything just or unjust, are justly given over to condemnation by him, with whom certainly there is no injustice. There is no need to say more about this, since you know what I wish, or rather what I do not wish, to say. I think what I have said is enough for a wise man. But if you have read something by which this question can be resolved, or heard it from his own mouth, or if the Lord has granted you to know it as you reflected on it, please share it with me, that I may give more abundant thanks.

As for the question of the dutiful and useful lie, which you thought could be resolved by the example of the Lord's saying that not even the Son knows the day and hour of the end of this age, I was delighted, as I read it, by the effort of your ingenuity; but in no way does it seem to me that figurative speech can rightly be called a lie. For it is not a lie when we call a day joyful because it makes people joyful, or a lupine sad because it saddens the face of the one who tastes it with its bitter flavor; just as God is said to know when he makes a man know, for you yourself cited this saying to Abraham. These are by no means lies, as you yourself very easily see. Accordingly, when blessed Hilary opened up the obscure question by this kind of figurative speech, so that we should understand that the Lord said he did not know in the sense that he makes others not know by concealing it, he did not excuse a lie, but showed that it was not a lie, not only in these more usual figures but also in what is called metaphor, which is known to all from ordinary usage. For will anyone maintain that it is a lie to say that vines bud like gems, that cornfields ripple like waves, that the young flower, because in these things he sees neither waves nor gems nor grasses or trees, to which these words properly apply?

Moreover, with your talent and learning you see very easily how far from these is what the apostle says: “When I saw that they were not walking rightly toward the truth of the Gospel, I said to Peter before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?’” Here there is no figurative obscurity; these are the literal words of plain speech. Surely the teacher of the Gentiles, writing to those with whom he was in labor until Christ was formed in them, and to whom he had declared, calling God to witness, “What I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie,” said either what was true or what was false. If false, which God forbid, you see what follows; and both these considerations, as you shrink from them, warn you: the proof of truthfulness, and in the apostle Peter the example of wonderful humility.

But why say more on this point, which I and the venerable brother Jerome whom I mentioned have discussed sufficiently between us in letters? And in his most recent work, which he has just published against Pelagius under the name of Critobulus, he held the same opinion on this event and the apostle's words as we too have followed, that of the most blessed Cyprian. Rather, on the origin of souls, not because of adulterous births but because of the condemnation (God forbid!) of the innocent, which I think is not a foolish question: if you have learned anything from so great a man that can rightly be answered to those in doubt, please do not refuse to share it with us. For in your letters you have appeared to me so learned and pleasant that it is worthwhile to converse with you by letter. I ask you not to delay further in sending us a certain book of the same man of God, which the presbyter Orosius brought and gave your love to copy, in which he is praised for having discussed the resurrection of the flesh brilliantly. The reason we did not ask for it sooner is that we expected you would both copy it and correct it, and for both tasks we think ample time has now been allowed. Live to God, mindful of us.

In examining divine matters, which priests ought to handle with all care, and above all a true, just, and Catholic council, you have kept the examples of ancient tradition and, mindful of church discipline, you have strengthened the vigor of our religion with true reason, no less now in consulting than before, when you pronounced judgment. For you have shown your approval that the matter should be referred to our judgment, knowing what is owed to the apostolic see, since all of us placed in this position desire to follow the apostle himself, from whom the episcopate itself and the whole authority of this name arose. Following him, we know how to condemn what is evil as well as to approve what is praiseworthy; as, for example, in this, that, guarding the institutions of the fathers by your priestly office, you judge that they must not be trampled underfoot. For they decreed, by a sentence not human but divine, that whatever was being dealt with, even in separate and remote provinces, they would not consider finished until it came to the knowledge of this see, so that whatever just pronouncement had been made might be confirmed by its whole authority; and that from there the other churches might take, as all waters proceed from their native spring and flow uncorrupted through the various regions of the whole world from a pure source, what they should prescribe, whom they should wash, and whom, as soiled with uncleansable mud, the water worthy of clean bodies should avoid.

I congratulate you, then, dearest brothers, that you have sent us a letter by our brother and fellow bishop Julius, and that, while caring for the churches over which you preside, you show your concern for the benefit of all, and ask that what is beneficial be decreed for all alike throughout all the churches of the whole world; so that the church, established by its rules and strengthened by the decrees of a just pronouncement that guards against those men, may not lie open to them. For they, equipped, or rather wrecked, by perverse subtleties of words, arguing under the guise of the Catholic faith and breathing out, as it were, a pestilent poison, seek to corrupt the hearts of those who think rightly, turning them to the worse, and to overthrow the whole discipline of true doctrine.

So it must be healed quickly, lest the accursed disease creep further into souls; as a physician, when he sees some sickness of this earthly body, thinks it a great proof of his art if a patient given up for lost quickly escapes through his intervention; or, when he sees a festering wound, applies poultices or other remedies by which the wound that has formed can be closed over, and, if it cannot be healed while it remains, cuts off with the knife what was harmful, so that it may not corrupt the rest of the body with its decay, and keeps the rest whole and untouched. What has crept as a wound into a body otherwise very pure and healthy must therefore be cut away, lest, if it is cleaned out too late, the sewage of this evil settle almost in the very entrails, impossible afterwards to drain.

After this, are we to think there is anything right in the minds of those who think they owe it to themselves that they are good, and do not consider him whose grace they obtain every day? But in fact those who are like this obtain no grace of God, since they trust that without him they can attain as much as those who ask him and receive from him scarcely merit. For what can be so unjust, so barbarous, so ignorant of all religion, so hostile to Christian minds, as to deny that you owe whatever you obtain in daily grace to him to whom you confess you owe your birth? So you will be more excellent in providing for yourself than he who made you to exist can be in you! And when you think you owe him your life, how do you not think you owe it to him that you live as you do by obtaining his daily grace? And you who deny that we need divine help, as though we were perfect entirely by our own capacity, how is it that, when we can be such of ourselves, we do not provoke his help against us?

I would like to ask the one who denies God's help what he means: that we do not deserve it? Or that God cannot give it? Or that there is nothing for which each person ought to ask it? That God can do it, his works themselves bear witness. That we need daily help we cannot deny; for if we live well, we call on it so that we may live better and more holily; and if, thinking perversely, we are turned away from good, we need his aid all the more to return to the right way. Would anything seem so deadly, so headlong toward a fall, so exposed to every danger, as if, thinking that only what we received at birth, free choice, can suffice us, we should seek nothing further from the Lord; that is, forgetful of our Author, we should renounce his power so as to show ourselves free, as though he had nothing more to give, he who made you free at your birth; not knowing that, unless grace implored with great prayers comes down upon us, we could in no way attempt to overcome the errors of earthly stain and of the worldly body, since it is not free choice but God's help alone that can make us equal to resisting?

For if he cries out that he needs divine help, who would not seek it fittingly if free choice benefited anyone more (since a blessed man, already chosen by the Lord, needed nothing, yet so entreats God, asking, “Be my helper; do not forsake me or despise me, O God my salvation”), do we ask free choice for ourselves, while he asks God as his helper? Do we say that our being born can suffice us, while he begs God not to be forsaken? Do we not, I ask, learn plainly what we should pray for, when so blessed a man, as we said above, prays not to be despised? Those who affirm such things must necessarily find fault with these words. Let David then be accused of being ignorant of prayer and unaware of his own nature, who, though he knew how much lay in his nature, prays, bowed down in prayers, that God may be his helper, a constant helper (nor is constant enough for him, but he prays that God may never despise him), and proclaims and cries this throughout the whole body of the Psalter. If, then, he confessed this to be so great a thing to know that he said it constantly, and so necessary that he taught it, how do Pelagius and Caelestius, setting aside every answer of the Psalms and rejecting such teaching, trust that they will persuade some that we neither ought to seek God's help nor need it, when all the saints testify that they can do nothing without it?

For that man of old, having experienced free choice while he used his good gifts too heedlessly, fell and was plunged into the depths of transgression, and found no way to rise from there; and, deceived forever by his freedom, he would have lain hidden under the weight of this ruin, had not the coming of Christ afterwards raised him up by his grace. Christ, through the purification of a new regeneration, cleansed all past fault by the washing of his baptism; and, strengthening his state so that he might advance more rightly and steadily, he did not deny his grace for the future. For although he had redeemed man from past sins, knowing that he could sin again, he kept many things in reserve for his restoration, by which he could correct him even after this. He provides daily remedies, and unless we strive relying and trusting on them, we shall in no way be able to overcome human errors. For it must be that, without the help of him by whose help we conquer, we are conquered again. But I could say more, were it not plain that you have said everything.

Whoever, then, appears to agree with this opinion, so as to say that we have no need of divine help, declares himself an enemy of the Catholic faith and ungrateful for God's benefits. Nor are they worthy of our communion, which they have polluted by such preaching. For in following what they say, they have of their own accord fled further from the true religion. For since our whole profession consists in this, and in our daily prayers we do nothing but seek how we may obtain God's mercy, how can we tolerate men who boast such things? What great error, I ask, blinds their hearts, so that, if they themselves feel no grace of God, because they are neither worthy nor deserving, they do not consider in others what divine grace bestows on each every day? All these are most deserving of blindness, who have not left themselves even this, to believe that they can be called back from their errors by divine help. For in denying help they have taken it away completely, not from others, but from themselves. They must be torn away and removed far from the heart of the church, lest the incurable error, seizing on many, grow further. For if they remain long in this impunity, they will inevitably lead many into the depravity of their mind and deceive the innocent, or rather the unwary, who now follow the Catholic faith; for these will think those men hold right views whom they see still remaining in the church.

Let the diseased wound, then, be separated from the healthy body, and with the breath of the raging disease removed, let what is sound endure more safely, and let the flock be purified of the contagion of this diseased beast. Let the whole body remain unimpaired in its perfection, which we know you follow and hold by this pronouncement against them, and which we keep together with you in equal agreement. But if they call down upon themselves some help of God, which until now they have denied, and recognize that they need his aid to be freed from this stain into which they had fallen by the crookedness of their heart; and if, drawn as it were into the light from foul darkness, with everything removed and renounced by which their whole sight was befouled and darkened so that it could not see the truth, they condemn what they have held until now, and at last, applying their minds to right discussion, somewhat corrected from this stain, give and submit themselves to true counsels to be healed: if they do this, it will be in the power of the bishops to help them in some measure and to give such wounds the kind of care which the church is not accustomed to deny the lapsed when they come to their senses; so that, called back from their precipices, they may be brought back within the Lord's fold, lest, left outside and shut out from so great a protection of the faith's defenses, they be exposed to every danger, to be devoured and torn by the teeth of wolves, which they cannot resist with the perverse doctrine by which they provoked them against themselves. But your admonitions, and the abundant examples of our law, have answered sufficiently, and we think nothing remains for us to say, since it is plain that nothing has been omitted or suppressed by you by which they may be refuted and recognized as thoroughly convicted. And so we set down no testimonies, because your report is full of them, and it is evident that so many most learned priests have said everything, and it is not fitting to believe that you have passed over anything that could help the case. [And in another hand:] Farewell, brothers.