On the Grace of Christ and On Original Sin 2.12–2.29

The synod said: 'Now, since Pelagius has anathematized the foolish talk inserted, rightly answering that a man with the help and grace of God can be anamartētos, that is, without sin, let him answer the other headings too.' Another heading in the teaching of Caelestius, the disciple of Pelagius, from those things which were heard and recorded at Carthage by the holy Aurelius, bishop of Carthage, with other bishops: 'That Adam was made mortal, and would have died whether he sinned or did not sin. That Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race. That the law sends to the kingdom just as the Gospel does. That before the coming of Christ there were men without sin. That newborn infants are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression. That neither through the death or transgression of Adam does the whole human race die, nor through the resurrection of Christ does the whole human race rise.' Also: that the holy bishop Augustine answered against his disciples in Sicily, writing to Hilary on the headings submitted to him a book in which these things are contained: 'That a man can be without sin if he wills. That infants, even if they are not baptized, have eternal life. That rich men who are baptized, unless they renounce everything, have no credit for any good they may seem to do, and cannot have the kingdom of God.' Pelagius said: 'That a man can be without sin has been spoken of above. As to there having been men without sin before the Lord's coming, we too say that before the coming of Christ some lived holily and righteously, according to the tradition of the holy Scriptures. But the rest, even by their own testimony, were not said by me, and I am not bound to answer for them; but nevertheless, to satisfy the holy synod, I anathematize those who hold them or have at any time held them.'

See, to omit other things, you see that Pelagius anathematized those who hold that Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race, and that infants who are born are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression. What else, then, could the bishops who were judges understand here but that he confessed that sin passes from Adam into little ones? It was to avoid confessing this that Caelestius would not condemn the things that this man condemned. Accordingly, if I show that he too thinks nothing else about little ones than that they are born without any contagion of any fault, what difference will there be between him and Caelestius on this question, except that the one was more open, the other more hidden; the one more obstinate, the other more deceitful; or certainly the one freer, the other more cunning? For the one would not condemn in the church of Carthage what he afterward confessed at Rome that he held, and professed himself ready to be corrected if an error had crept upon him as a man; but this man both condemned that teaching as contrary to the truth, so as not to be condemned by Catholic judges, and reserved it to defend afterward, either condemning it falsely or interpreting it cunningly.

But I see that it is now most justly demanded of me not to put off showing, as I promised, whether he too thinks what Caelestius thinks. In the first book of his more recent work, which he wrote in defense of free choice, and which he mentioned in the letter he sent to Rome, he says: 'All good and evil, for which we are either praiseworthy or blameworthy, does not arise with us but is done by us; for we are born capable of either, not full of them; and as we are begotten without virtue, so also without vice; and before the action of his own will there is in man only what God created.' You clearly see that in these words of Pelagius the teaching of both men is contained, that little ones are born without any contagion of any fault from Adam. It is no wonder, then, that Caelestius would not condemn those who say that Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race, and that infants who are born are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression; but it is a great wonder with what face Pelagius condemned these things. For if, as he says, evil does not arise with us, and we are begotten without vice, and before the action of his own will there is in man only what God created, then certainly Adam's sin harmed him alone, because it made no passage into his offspring. For it is not that sin is not an evil, or that sin is not a vice, or that God created sin. But he says: evil does not arise with us, and we are begotten without vice, and there is in those being born only what God created. And therefore, since according to this opinion of his he thinks it most true that Adam's sin harmed him alone, not the human race, why did Pelagius condemn it, unless in order that the Catholic judges might be deceived? The same can be said of the other: if evil does not arise with us, and we are begotten without vice, and there is in a man being born only what God created, then without doubt the infants who are born are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression, in whom there was no evil or vice, and there was in him only what God had created. And yet Pelagius anathematized those who hold, or have at any time held, that little ones fresh from birth are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression, that is, without any evil, without any vice, having only what God created. Why, then, did Pelagius condemn this too, unless in order that the Catholic synod might be deceived, so that a new heretic might not be condemned?

As you know, and as I also put in the book I wrote on the Palestinian proceedings to our venerable elder Aurelius, I rejoiced that this whole question had been settled by that answer of Pelagius, and he seemed to me to have confessed most plainly that there is original sin in little ones, by saying anathema to those who believed that by Adam's sin he alone, and not the human race too, was harmed, and who supposed that little ones are in the state in which that first man was before the transgression. But afterward, when I had read his four books, from the first of which I copied the words mentioned a little earlier, and had found the man still thinking against the Catholic faith about little ones, I began first to wonder at so shameless a lie in an ecclesiastical court and on so great a question. For if he had already written those books before, how did he say that he anathematized those who had at any time held so? And if he undertook that work afterward, how did he anathematize those who hold so? Unless perhaps he is going to say, ridiculously, that he condemned those who had at any time held so and those who hold so, but that concerning future time, that is, those who were going to hold so, he could prejudge neither himself nor others, and so he did not lie, because he was afterward found to hold so. But he does not say this, not only because it is ridiculous, but because it cannot be true. For in those same books he both speaks against the passing of sin from Adam into little ones and boasts of the proceedings of the Palestinian synod, where he was thought truly to have condemned those who hold so, and stole his acquittal by deceit.

For what has it to do with the matter we are now dealing with that he answers his disciples that he condemned those charges because he too says that that first sin harmed not only the first man but also the human race, not by propagation but by example, that is, not that those propagated from him contracted any fault from him, but that all who sinned afterward imitated him who sinned first? Or because he says that infants are not in the state in which Adam was before the transgression because they cannot yet grasp a commandment, while he could, and they do not yet use the choice of a rational will, without the use of which no commandment would have been given him? What has this to do with the matter, that by so explaining the words charged against him he thinks he rightly condemned the saying that Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race, and that infants who are born are in the state in which Adam was before sin, and yet, having condemned these, he does not falsely hold what is found in his later writings, that little ones are born without any evil, without any fault, and that there is in them only what God created, not the wound which the enemy inflicted?

In saying these things, and explaining otherwise words charged for another reason, does he succeed in showing that he did not deceive the judges? Not at all; for he deceived the judges the more secretly, the more craftily he explains these things. For when the Catholic bishops heard the man anathematizing those who say that Adam's sin harmed him alone, not the human race, they thought he held nothing other than what the Catholic Church has been accustomed to proclaim, on which ground it truly baptizes little ones for the forgiveness of sins: not sins which they committed by imitation because of the example of the first sinner, but sins which they contracted by birth because of the fault of origin. And when they heard him anathematizing those who say that infants who are born are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression, they believed that he meant nothing else than those who think that little ones have contracted no sin from Adam and accordingly are in the state in which he was before sin. For it was this that was charged against him, not anything else; this was what the question turned on. Accordingly, when he explains this by saying that infants are not in the state in which Adam was before sin because they are not yet in the same firmness of mind or body, not because any guilt of propagation has passed into them, let him be answered: 'When those things were charged against you to be condemned, the Catholic bishops did not understand them so; therefore, when you condemned them, they believed you to be a Catholic. So what they thought you held had to be acquitted; but what you did hold had to be condemned. So it was not you who were acquitted, since you held what was to be condemned; what was acquitted was what you ought to have held. And so that you might be thought acquitted, you were believed to think what is praiseworthy, since the judges did not understand that you were concealing what was to be condemned. You have rightly been judged an associate of Caelestius, whose partner you show yourself to be; though in the court you covered up your books, yet after the court you published them.'

Since this is so, you surely perceive that episcopal councils and the apostolic see and the whole Roman church, and the Roman empire, which by God's favor is Christian, have been most rightly roused against the authors of so wicked an error, until they recover their senses from the snares of the devil. For who knows whether God may perhaps give him repentance, so that he may come to know and confess and even proclaim the truth, and truly condemn the falsehood that deserves condemnation? But however these men may choose to conduct themselves, we cannot doubt that the Lord's mercy has provided for many who were following them because they saw them joined to Catholic communion.

But consider carefully how Pelagius tried to creep in and deceive even the episcopal judgment of the apostolic see on this very question of the baptism of little ones. For in the letter he sent to Rome to Pope Innocent of blessed memory, which, since it did not find him in the body, was given to holy Pope Zosimus and sent on to us from there, he says that he is defamed by people as denying the sacrament of baptism to little ones and promising the kingdom of heaven to some apart from the redemption of Christ. But these things are not charged against them in the way he has put them. For they neither deny the sacrament of baptism to little ones nor promise the kingdom of heaven to some apart from the redemption of Christ. So he has set out the ground on which he complains he is defamed in such a way that he could easily answer the charge while keeping his teaching intact. What is charged against them is that they will not confess that unbaptized little ones are liable to the condemnation of the first man, and that original sin, to be cleansed by regeneration, has passed into them; since they contend that they are to be baptized only in order to receive the kingdom of heaven: as if, apart from the kingdom of heaven, they could have anything but eternal death, who cannot have eternal life without partaking of the body and blood of the Lord. This is what is charged against them concerning the baptism of little ones, not what he himself put forward in such a way that he could answer his own proposition, as if it were an opponent's objection, in accordance with his teaching.

Next, notice how he answers, and see how he prepares hiding places of ambiguity as refuges for falsehood by spreading darkness over the truth, so that even we, when we first read these things, almost rejoiced at them as right or corrected. But his longer discussions in his books, where, however much he covers himself, he is often compelled to reveal himself, made these things too suspect to us, so that by looking more attentively we found them ambiguous. For after saying that he had never heard even any ungodly heretic say what he had set out about little ones, he went on to say: 'For who is so ignorant of the Gospel reading as not only to try to affirm this, but even to be able to say it lightly or even think it? Then, who is so ungodly as to want little ones to be excluded from the kingdom of heaven, by forbidding them to be baptized and reborn in Christ?'

He says these things in vain; he does not clear himself by them. That little ones cannot enter the kingdom of heaven without baptism they themselves have never denied. But that is not the question; the question is about the cleansing of original sin in little ones. Let him clear himself on that, who will not confess that in little ones the washing of regeneration has something to cleanse. And so let us attend to the rest of what he is going to say. For after inserting the testimony from the Gospel that no one can enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is reborn of water and the Spirit, about which, as we said, there is no question for them, he went on to add: 'Who is so ungodly as to forbid a little one of any age the common redemption of the human race?' This too is ambiguous: what redemption he means, whether from evil to good or from good to better. For Caelestius too, at Carthage, confessed in his statement the redemption of little ones, and yet would not confess that sin passed from Adam into them.

But note what he adds next: 'and forbid him who has been born to an uncertain life to be reborn to a perpetual and certain life?' That is: 'Who is so ungodly as to forbid him who has been born to an uncertain life to be reborn to a perpetual and certain life?' When we first read these words, we believed that by 'uncertain life' he meant this temporal life, although it seemed to us that he ought rather to have called it mortal than uncertain, because it is ended by certain death. Yet since, as long as it is lived, it is undoubtedly uncertain at every moment, we thought that he simply preferred to call this mortal life uncertain. And therefore, although he would not openly confess the eternal death of little ones who depart this life without the sacrament of baptism, a seemingly sure piece of reasoning consoled our anxiety about him. For we said: if perpetual life, as he seems to confess, can belong only to those who have been baptized, then certainly perpetual death will follow those who die unbaptized; which by no justice of God can befall those who have committed no sins in this life, except on account of original sin.

But afterward there were brothers who pointed out to us that Pelagius could have said this because on this question he is reported to have been accustomed to answer inquirers by saying: 'Where little ones who die without baptism do not go, I know; where they go, I do not know'; that is, I know that they do not go into the kingdom of heaven. But he said, or says, that he does not know where they go because he did not dare to say that those go to perpetual death whom he thought had committed no evil here and whom he would not agree had contracted original sin. So these words of his too, sent to Rome as his great clearing, are so ambiguous that they can provide hiding places for their teaching, from which the heretical sense may spring out to lie in wait, when, with no one present who can answer, some weak person is found as if in a desert.

But in the statement of his faith, which he sent to Rome together with that letter to the same Pope Innocent, to whom he had also written the letter, by covering himself he laid himself bare much more evidently, saying: 'We hold one baptism, which we say is to be celebrated with the same sacramental words for infants as for adults.' He did not at least say 'with the same sacrament' (and even if he had said this, it would still be ambiguous), but 'with the same sacramental words,' he says; as though the forgiveness of sins were spoken to infants by the sound of words, not accomplished in the effect of realities. Yet for the time he seemed to say something that agreed with the Catholic faith; but he did not succeed in deceiving that see to the end. For after the replies of the African council (into which province that pestilent teaching had indeed crept, but had not occupied it so widely or penetrated it so deeply), other writings of his were also brought forward by the care of faithful brothers in the city of Rome, where he had spent a very long time and had earlier been engaged in these discussions and disputes; and Pope Zosimus attached them, to be execrated, to his letter which he wrote to be carried throughout the Catholic world, as you can read. There Pelagius, as if expounding the apostle Paul's letter to the Romans, argues and says: 'If Adam's sin harmed even those who do not sin, then Christ's righteousness also benefits even those who do not believe,' and other things of this kind, all of which, with the Lord's help, have been refuted and dissolved in the books we wrote on the baptism of little ones. And in those supposed expositions of his he did not dare to put forward these things in his own person; but he said this there, where he was very well known to many, and what he thought and said could not be hidden, which in those books, from the first of which I mentioned something above, he pursues not in disguise but most openly, with all the force of argument he can: that human nature in little ones should in no way be believed to be corrupted by propagation; and by claiming salvation for it he grudges it the Savior.

Since this is so, and since it is now established that there has arisen a pestilent teaching and heretical error, which, with the Lord's help, the church now avoids more openly, these two, Pelagius and Caelestius, having been either brought to a place of repentance or, if they refused, wholly condemned, who are said, or even proved, to be the authors of this perversity, or certainly, if they are not its authors but learned it from others, are nevertheless spoken of by their own words and writings, and by competent evidence, and by the report rising and spreading from all these, as its champions and teachers, through whom it has crept and grown more widely: what remains but that every Catholic, according to the strength he receives from the Lord, should refute this plague and resist it vigilantly, so that, when one contends for the truth under the necessity of answering and without love of contention, the unlearned may be instructed, and so what the enemy contrived for destruction may be turned to the benefit of the church, according to that saying of the apostle: 'There must also be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you'?

Therefore, after the many things we have been able to argue in writing against this error, the enemy of the grace of God which he bestows on small and great through Jesus Christ our Lord, we must now examine what they assert, wishing cunningly to avoid the odium of heresy: that this question lies outside any danger to the faith; so that, if they are convicted of having gone astray in it, they may seem to have erred not criminally but, as it were, civilly. For so Caelestius spoke at Carthage in the ecclesiastical proceedings: 'I have already spoken about the transmission of sin: that I have heard many established within the Catholic Church deny it and others also affirm it, although this is a matter of inquiry, not of heresy. I have always said that infants need baptism and ought to be baptized. What else does he want?' He said this as if he wanted to indicate that it should have been judged heresy then if he denied that infants ought to be baptized; but now, since he confesses that they are to be baptized, even though he does not give the reason for their baptism that the truth holds, but one that does not belong to the faith, he thinks he does not err, and so is not to be judged a heretic. Again, in the statement he gave at Rome, after he had explained his faith, as much as he pleased, from the Trinity of one Godhead to the resurrection of the dead as it will be, matters about which no one had questioned him and on which no question was raised with him, when his discourse came to the matter in hand, he said: 'But if any questions have arisen outside the faith, about which there has been dispute among many, I have not determined these by definite authority as the author of any teaching; but what I have received from the fountain of the prophets and apostles we offer for the judgment of your apostleship to be approved, so that, if perhaps some error of ignorance has crept upon us, as upon men, it may be corrected by your judgment.' You surely see that by this preface he aimed at this: that if any error appeared in him, he might seem to have erred not in the faith but in questions outside the faith, where, although error must be corrected, it is not corrected as heresy; and he who is not corrected is said to err in such a way that he is nevertheless not judged a heretic.

But this opinion greatly deceives him. The questions which he thinks lie outside the faith are very different from those in which, without harm to the faith by which we are Christians, either the truth is not known and a definitive judgment is suspended, or it is conjectured otherwise than it is by human and weak supposition. Such is the question what kind of place paradise is, or where it is, where God placed the man he formed from the dust, although the Christian faith does not doubt that that paradise exists; or whether Elijah or Enoch is there now or somewhere else, though we do not doubt that they live in the bodies in which they were born; or whether the apostle was caught up to the third heaven in the body or out of the body, although it is a shameless inquiry of those who want to know what he, to whom this was granted, testifies without harm to the faith that he does not know; or how many heavens there are, into the third of which he records that he was caught up; or whether the elements of this visible world are four or more; what makes the sun or moon fail in those eclipses which astronomers are accustomed to predict by a sure reckoning of times; why the ancients lived as long as holy Scripture testifies, and whether, in proportion to their longer age, they began to beget children at a late puberty; where Methuselah could have lived, who was not in the ark, and who, by the number of years as counted in most manuscripts both Greek and Latin, is found to have outlived the flood; or whether the fewer manuscripts, which are very rarely found, should rather be believed, in which the number of years is so written as to show that he died before the flood. For who does not see that in these and various and innumerable questions of this kind, whether concerning the most obscure works of God or the most hidden recesses of the Scriptures, which it is difficult to comprehend and define in any definite class, many things may be unknown without harm to the Christian faith, and in some one may err without any charge of heretical teaching?

But in the case of the two men, through one of whom we were sold under sin and through the other redeemed from sins, through one cast headlong into death and through the other set free for life (because the former ruined us in himself by doing his own will, not the will of him by whom he was made, while the latter saved us in himself by doing not his own will but the will of him by whom he was sent): in the case of these two men, then, the Christian faith properly consists. 'For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus'; since 'there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved,' and in him 'God has fixed faith for all by raising him from the dead.' And so without this faith, that is, without faith in the one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, without faith, I say, in his resurrection, which God has fixed for all, and which certainly cannot be truly believed without his incarnation and death: without faith, then, in the incarnation and death and resurrection of Christ, Christian truth does not doubt that the righteous of old could not have been cleansed from sins so as to be righteous, and justified by the grace of God; whether among those righteous whom holy Scripture records, or among those whom it does not record, but who must nevertheless be believed to have existed, either before the flood, or from then until the giving of the law, or in the time of the law itself, not only among the children of Israel, as the prophets were, but also outside that people, as Job was. For their hearts too were cleansed by the same faith in the mediator, and love was poured out in them through the Holy Spirit, who breathes where he wills, not following merits but even producing merits themselves. For the grace of God will in no way be grace unless it is in every way free.

Although, then, death reigned from Adam until Moses, because not even the law given through Moses could conquer it (for it was not given as one that could give life, but as one that should show the dead, for whose quickening grace was needed, to be not only laid low by the propagation and dominion of sin but also convicted by the added transgression of the law itself; not so that anyone should perish who even then understood this in the mercy of God, but so that, destined for punishment by the reign of death and made manifest even to himself by the transgression of the law, he might seek God's help, so that where sin abounded grace might abound all the more, the grace which alone frees from the body of this death): although, then, not even the law given through Moses could take away the reign of death from any man, yet even in the time of the law there were men of God who were not under the law that terrifies, convicts, and punishes, but under grace that delights, heals, and frees. There were those who said, 'I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins my mother nourished me in the womb'; and, 'There is no peace in my bones because of my sins'; and, 'Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me'; and, 'Strengthen me with a guiding spirit'; and, 'Do not take your Holy Spirit from me.' There were those who said, 'I believed, therefore I have spoken.' For they too were cleansed by the same faith as we, which is why the apostle says, 'Having the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, I believed, therefore I have spoken, we too believe, therefore we also speak.' From that same faith it was said, 'Behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and they will call his name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.' From that same faith it was said of him, 'And he, like a bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, will exult like a giant to run his course; his going forth is from the height of heaven, and his circuit to the height of heaven; and there is no one who can hide from his heat.' From that same faith it was said to him, 'Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever; the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of uprightness. You have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows.' By the same spirit of faith they saw these things as future by which we believe them as done. For those who were able to prophesy these things to us with faithful love were not themselves without a share in them. And why does the apostle Peter say, 'Why do you tempt God by putting on the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they are,' unless because they too were saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, not through the law of Moses, through which came not healing but knowledge of sin, as the apostle teaches when he says, 'For through the law comes knowledge of sin; but now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets'? If, then, it has now been manifested, it existed then too, but hidden. Its hiddenness was signified by the veil of the temple, which was torn when Christ died, to signify its revelation. So even then this grace of the one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, was in the people of God, but it lay hidden, like the rain in the fleece, which God sets apart for his inheritance, not as owed but freely given; but now, as though that fleece had been dried, that is, the Jewish people rejected, it is seen openly in all nations as on the threshing floor.