On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.35–2.13

Yet a little earlier the apostle himself showed clearly enough how he could rightly say of his flesh, “taking me captive.” For when he had said, “For I know that good does not dwell in me,” he explained this very thing by adding, “that is, in my flesh.” This, then, is what is taken captive under the law of sin, the thing in which good does not dwell, that is, the flesh. And he now called “flesh” the place where there is a certain diseased affection of the flesh, not the very structure of the body, whose members are not to be presented as weapons to sin, that is, to that same concupiscence which holds this carnal part of ours captive. For as far as its bodily substance and nature are concerned, in faithful men, whether married or continent, it is already a temple of God. And yet, if nothing at all of our flesh were held captive—not indeed under the devil, for there too the forgiveness of sin has taken place, so that sin is not imputed, which is properly called the law of sin—yet if our flesh were not held captive to some extent under that law of sin, that is, under its own concupiscence, how would what the same apostle says be true: “awaiting adoption, the redemption of our body”? The redemption of our body, therefore, is still awaited to the extent that it is still in some part captive under the law of sin. Hence here too he cries out, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” What are we to understand here, except that the body which is corrupted weighs down the soul? When, therefore, this same body is received back incorruptible, there will be full deliverance from the body of this death, from which those who will rise to punishment are not delivered. It is understood, then, to belong to the body of this death that another law in the members wars against the law of the mind, while the flesh lusts against the spirit, even if it does not subjugate the mind, since the spirit too lusts against the flesh. And so, although the law of sin itself holds some part of the flesh captive, from which it resists the law of the mind, it nevertheless does not reign in our body, mortal though it is, if its desires are not obeyed. For enemies against whom one fights often both come off worse in the struggle and, though beaten, hold something captive. And what is held under the law of sin in our flesh is nevertheless in the hope of redemption, because that vicious concupiscence will not remain at all, and our flesh, healed of that plague and disease and wholly clothed with immortality, will remain in eternal blessedness.

The apostle then adds: “So then I myself with the mind serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” This is to be understood thus: with the mind I serve the law of God by not consenting to the law of sin; but with the flesh I serve the law of sin by having desires of sin, which, although I do not consent to them, I am not yet wholly without. Let us note, finally, what he brings in after this: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Even now, he says, when the law in the members wars against the law of the mind and holds something captive in the body of this death, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Hear why: “For the law of the Spirit of life,” he says, “in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.” Set me free—how? Only because it has dissolved its guilt by the forgiveness of all sins, so that, although it still remains and is diminished more and more from day to day, it is nevertheless not imputed as sin.

As long, then, as this forgiveness of sins has not taken place in the offspring, this law of sin is there in such a way that it is also imputed as sin, that is, its guilt is also with it, which holds the offspring debtor to eternal punishment. For what a parent passes on to his carnal offspring is what he too was by carnal birth, not what he is by spiritual rebirth; because that very thing by which he was born carnally, although, its guilt being loosed, it does not hinder his fruit, nevertheless lies hidden as in the seed of the olive, even though, because of the forgiveness of sins, it does no harm to the oil—that is, to the life by which the righteous man lives by faith according to Christ, who is named from oil, that is, from the chrism. But what is covered in the regenerated parent without any guilt, as in the seed of the olive, because it has been forgiven, is surely held with guilt in the offspring not yet regenerated, as in the wild olive, until there too it is forgiven by the same grace. For from the time when Adam, by sinning, was turned from such an olive—in which there was not even any seed of the kind from which the bitterness of the wild olive might be born—into a wild olive, he made the whole human race a wild olive, because it was so great a sin that by it there was a great change of nature for the worse. So—as we now see in the trees themselves—if divine grace turns anything from it into an olive, the fault of the first birth, which was original sin derived and contracted from carnal concupiscence, is forgiven there, covered, and not imputed; and yet from it a wild olive is born, unless it too is reborn into an olive by the same grace.

Blessed, then, is the olive whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered; blessed is the one to whom the Lord has not imputed sin. But what is forgiven and covered and not imputed has, until the full change into eternal immortality takes place, a certain hidden force from which a bitter wild olive is sown, unless there too, by the same husbandry of God, it is forgiven, covered, and not imputed. But there will be nothing at all faulty even in carnal seed when, through the same regeneration that now takes place by the holy bath, which cleanses and heals all the evils of man to the end, the same flesh through which the soul became carnal will itself become spiritual as well, with no concupiscence of the flesh to resist the law of the mind, and emitting no carnal seed. For so we must understand what the same apostle says: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her with the bath of water in the word, that he might present the church to himself glorious, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing.” So, I say, this must be understood: that by the same bath of regeneration and word of sanctification absolutely all the evils of regenerated human beings are cleansed and healed—not only the sins, all of which are now forgiven in baptism, but also those contracted later through human ignorance or weakness; not that baptism is repeated as often as there is sin, but because by that one baptism, given once, it comes about that pardon for any sins whatever is obtained for believers not only before but also after. For what good would repentance be, either before baptism if baptism did not follow, or after it if baptism did not come first? In the Lord's Prayer itself, which is our daily cleansing, with what fruit, with what effect would “Forgive us our debts” be said, unless it were said by those who have been baptized? And again, to whom would the generosity of almsgiving and any amount of kindness be of any use for the forgiveness of his sins, if he had not been baptized? Finally, the very happiness of the kingdom of heaven, where the church will have no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, where there will be nothing to reprove, nothing feigned, where there will be not only no guilt but no concupiscence of sin either—whose will it be, if not the baptized?

And so not only all sins, but absolutely all the evils of human beings are taken away by the holiness of the Christian bath, by which Christ cleanses his church, so that he may present her to himself, not in this world but in the world to come, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing. For those who say that the church is such now, and yet are in it: since they themselves confess that they have sins, if they speak the truth, then, since they are not clean from sins, the church surely has a spot in them; but if they speak falsely, since they speak with a double heart, the church has a wrinkle in them. And if they say that they have these things but the church does not, then let them confess that they are not its members and do not belong to its body, so that they are condemned even by their own confession.

Now concerning this concupiscence of the flesh, which I have taken care to distinguish at length from the goods of marriage because of the new heretics, who, when it is blamed, slander us as though marriage were blamed—so that, by praising it as a natural good, they may confirm their pestilent doctrine, by which they assert that the offspring born through it contracts no original sin—concerning this concupiscence of the flesh, then, blessed Ambrose, bishop of Milan, by whose priestly ministry I received the bath of regeneration, spoke briefly thus, when, expounding the prophet Isaiah, he was setting forth the carnal birth of Christ: “Therefore,” he says, “as man he was tempted in all things, and in the likeness of men he endured all things; but as born of the Spirit he abstained from sin. For every man is a liar, and no one is without sin except God alone. It has therefore been kept that no one born of man and woman, that is, through that mingling of bodies, is seen to be free from sin. But he who is free from sin is free also from conception of this kind.” Did holy Ambrose, then, by the truth of this statement of his, condemn the goodness of marriage, and not rather the vanity of these heretics, though they had not yet appeared? I thought this worth mentioning because Pelagius praises Ambrose so highly as to say: “Blessed Ambrose the bishop, in whose books above all the Roman faith shines out, who shone forth as a beautiful flower among Latin writers, whose faith and most pure understanding of the Scriptures not even an enemy has dared to criticize.” Let him, then, repent of what he has thought against Ambrose, so that he need not repent of having praised Ambrose so. You have a book that is as laborious for you to read, both from the burden of its length and the difficulty of its question, as it was for me to dictate, in whatever small portions of time could find you, or will find you, at leisure. I would certainly not have thrust it, worked out as well as the Lord deigned to help me amid my church cares, upon you amid your public ones, had I not heard from the man of God who knows you more intimately that you read so willingly that you even spend some hours of the night wakefully in reading.

Amid the cares of your military service, of the illustrious rank you bear as your merits deserve, and of the necessary business of the state, my dearly beloved and honored son Valerius, you burn with such zeal for the divine words against the heretics that I cannot adequately say with what joy of mind I am delighted. So, after I read your Sublimity's letter, in which you thank me for the book I wrote to you but advise me to hear through my brother and fellow bishop Alypius what the heretics take up for dispute from certain passages of that book, I was roused to write this. And since I learned this not only from the report of my brother, but also read the papers he produced, which you yourself took care to send to Rome after his departure from Ravenna, and in which I was able to find the empty talk of our adversaries, I have resolved to answer them, with the Lord's help, with as much truth as I can and with the authority of the divine Scriptures.

The paper to which I now reply is headed with this title: “Chapters from the book that Augustine wrote, against which I have extracted a few things from books.” Here I see that the man who sent these writings to your Excellency wished to extract them from some books or other, for the sake, I suppose, of a quicker reply, so as not to delay your urgency. When I considered what these books might be, I judged them to be those that Julian mentions in the letter he sent to Rome, a copy of which reached me at the same time. For there he says: “They also say that the marriages now taking place were not instituted by God; this is read in the book of Augustine, against whom I have just replied in four little books.” I believe these extracts were taken from those little books. So it might perhaps have been better for my effort to be spent in refuting and rebutting his whole work, which he set out in four volumes, had I not been unwilling to delay my reply, just as you did not delay sending the writings that had to be answered.

He set down, then, these words from my book, which I sent to you and which you know very well, and tried to refute them: “They cry out against us with the utmost malice that we condemn marriage and the divine work by which God creates human beings from males and females, because we say that those who are born of such intercourse contract original sin, and we do not deny that they, of whatever parents they are born, are still under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ.” In these words of mine he passed over the testimony of the apostle that I had inserted, by whose great weight he felt himself pressed. For when I had said that human beings at birth contract original sin, I at once brought in what the apostle says: “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death; and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” Having passed over this testimony, as we said, he stitched together the rest, quoted above. For he knows how the hearts of catholic believers are accustomed to take these apostolic words that he passed over—words so straightforward and shining with such light, which the new heretics strive to obscure and distort with dark and twisted interpretations.

Then he appended other words of mine, where I said: “They do not notice that the good of marriage can no more be accused because of the original evil that is contracted from it than the evil of adulteries and acts of sexual immorality can be excused because of the natural good that is born of them; for just as sin, whether contracted from the one or from the other, is the work of the devil, so a human being, whether born from the one or from the other, is the work of God.” Here too he passed over the words in which he feared catholic ears. For to come to these words, we had said above: “Because we say this, then, which is contained in the most ancient and most firm rule of the catholic faith, these champions of a novel and perverse doctrine, who say that there is no sin in little children to be washed away by the bath of regeneration, faithlessly or ignorantly slander us, as if we condemned marriage, and as if we said that the work of God, that is, the human being who is born of it, is the work of the devil.” With these words of ours passed over, there follow the words of ours that he did set down, as written above. In what he passed over, then, he feared this: that what we said—that they say there is no sin in little children to be washed away by the bath of regeneration—addresses all the hearts of the catholic church, appeals in a clear voice, as it were, to the faith itself, handed down and founded from of old, and stirs it most vehemently against them. For all run to church with their little children for no other reason than that the original sin contracted in them by the generation of the first birth may be expiated by the regeneration of the second birth.

Then he returns to our earlier words, though I do not know why he repeats them: “But we say that those who are born of such intercourse contract original sin, and we do not deny that they, of whatever parents they are born, are still under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ.” He had already given these words of ours a little before. Then he adds what we said about Christ: “who willed not to be born of the same intercourse of both sexes.” But here too he passed over what I had set down: “so that, rescued by his grace from the power of darkness, they may be transferred into the kingdom of him who willed not to be born of that same intercourse of both sexes.” See, I beg you, how he avoided our words, as one wholly an enemy of the grace of God that comes through Jesus Christ our Lord! For he knows that it is most shameless and most impious to separate little children from that statement of the apostle in which he said of God the Father, “who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love.” That is doubtless why he preferred to pass over these words rather than set them down.

After this he set down that passage of ours where we said: “For this shameful concupiscence, which is shamelessly praised by shameless men, would not exist had man not sinned first; but marriage would exist even if no one had sinned; for the sowing of children would then take place without this disease.” Up to this point he set down my words; for he feared what I added: “in the body of that life, without which it cannot now take place in the body of this death.” And here, so as not to finish my sentence but in a way to cut it short, he dreaded that testimony of the apostle where he says, “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” For the body of this death did not exist in paradise before sin; that is why we said that in the body of that life which existed there the sowing of children could have taken place without this disease, without which it cannot now take place in the body of this death. And before the apostle came to this recollection of human misery and divine grace, he had said: “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.” After these words he cried out: “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” In a body, then, not of this death but such as there was in paradise before sin, there was surely no other law in our members warring against the law of our mind—the law that, even when we do not will it, and when we do not consent or present our members to it to fulfill what it craves, nevertheless dwells in them and assails the mind that resists and fights back, so that the conflict itself, even if it is not damnable, because it does not accomplish iniquity, is nevertheless miserable, because it has no peace. I have pointed out sufficiently, then, that he chose to set out my words for refutation in such a way that in one place he broke off my sentences by removing the middle, and in another cut them short by not adding the ends; and I have sufficiently shown why he did this.

Now let us see what words of his own he set against those words of ours that he set out as he wished. For his words now follow, and, as the man who sent you the paper indicated, he first wrote out something from a preface—doubtless the preface of those books from which he extracted a few things. It runs thus: “The teachers of our time, most blessed brother, the authors of the wicked faction that is still seething, have resolved to bring about the insult and destruction of the men whose holy endeavors inflame them, through the ruin of the whole church, not understanding how much honor they have conferred on those whose glory, they have shown, could not be overthrown except together with the catholic religion. For if anyone says either that there is free choice in human beings or that God is the creator of those who are born, he is called a Caelestian and a Pelagian. So, in order not to be called heretics, they become Manichees, and while they fear a false infamy they incur a true crime, like wild beasts that are surrounded with feathers so that they may be driven into the nets; lacking reason, they are thrust by an empty fear into true destruction.”

It is not as you say, whoever you are who said this; it is not so. You are much deceived, or you mean to deceive. We do not deny free choice; but “if the Son sets you free,” says the Truth, “then you will be truly free.” You grudge this Liberator to those captives to whom you have attributed an empty freedom. For “by whatever anyone has been overcome,” as Scripture says, “to that he is bound as a slave”; and no one is released from this chain of slavery, from which no human being is exempt, except by the grace of the Liberator. For “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men, in whom all sinned.” God is the creator of those who are born, then, in such a way that all go from the one into condemnation of whom he is not the liberator in their rebirth. For he is called the potter who from the same lump makes one vessel for honor according to mercy, another for dishonor according to judgment; to whom the church sings of mercy and judgment. It is not the case, then, as you say, deceiving yourself and others, that “if anyone says either that there is free choice in human beings or that God is the creator of those who are born, he is called a Caelestian and a Pelagian”—for the catholic faith says these things—but if anyone says that there is free choice in human beings for worshiping God rightly without his help, and whoever says that God is the creator of those who are born in such a way as to deny that he is the redeemer of little children from the power of the devil, he is called a Pelagian and a Caelestian. That there is free choice in human beings and that God is the creator of those who are born, we both say; it is not from this that you are Caelestians and Pelagians. But that anyone is free to do good without the help of God, and that little children are not rescued from the power of darkness and so transferred into the kingdom of God—this you say, and it is from this that you are Caelestians and Pelagians. Why do you hold out the covering of a common doctrine in order to deceive, so as to cover your own crime, from which your name has been given you? And to frighten the unlearned with a wicked name, you say: “So, in order not to be called heretics, they become Manichees.”

Hear, then, briefly what is at issue in this question. Catholics say that human nature was created good by the good God, its Creator, but, corrupted by sin, needs Christ the physician. Manichees say that human nature was not created good by God and then corrupted by sin, but that man was created by the prince of eternal darkness from a mixture of two natures that always existed, one good and one evil. Pelagians and Caelestians say that human nature was created good by the good God, but is so healthy in little children at birth that at that age they have no need of the medicine of Christ. Recognize, then, your own name in your own doctrine, and stop throwing at the catholics, by whom you are refuted, a doctrine and a name that belong to others; for the truth refutes both, the Manichees and you. To the Manichees it says: “Have you not read that he who made man from the beginning made them male and female? And he said, ‘For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined, let man not separate.” So, against the Manichees, who deny both, it shows that God is both the creator of human beings and the one who joins spouses. But to you it says: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” But you, excellent Christians, answer Christ: “If you came to seek and to save what was lost, you did not come for little children—they were not lost, and were born saved; go to the older ones. We bar you by your own words: ‘It is not the healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick.’” So it comes about that the Manichee, who says that an evil nature has been mixed into man, wants at least the good soul to be saved from it by Christ; but you contend that in little children, since they are saved, there is nothing to be saved by Christ. And so the Manichee abominably vilifies human nature, but you praise it cruelly. For whoever believe you as its praiser will not bring their infants to the Savior. When you hold such wicked views, what good does it do you not to fear what is done to you so that you may fear to your salvation, and to make yourself out a man, not a beast surrounded with feathers to be driven into the nets? What was needed was for you to hold the truth and not be afraid in your zeal for it; but as it is, you are so unafraid that, if you were afraid, you would escape the malicious nets rather than run into them. Your catholic mother frightens you for this reason, because she fears for you and for others from you; and if, through her sons placed in some position of power, she acts so that you may fear, she does it not from cruelty but from love. But you, a very brave man, think it cowardly to fear men. Fear God, then, and do not try with such obstinacy to overthrow the ancient foundations of the catholic faith. And yet I wish that this spirited mind of yours would at least fear men in this cause; I wish, I say, that it would rather tremble in cowardice than perish in boldness!

Let us see the rest of what he joins together. But what shall I do? Shall I set out each of his statements and answer them, or, passing over those that the catholic faith contains, deal with and refute only those in which he strays from the path of truth and tries to graft the Pelagian heresy, like poisonous shoots, onto catholic shrubs? That is certainly shorter. But I think I must take care that no one who has read my book, and not read all that he said, should think that I was unwilling to set out the statements on which his depend and from which the false things I refute are shown, as if by consequence, to be true. So let the reader not be reluctant to attend to and consider everything included in this little work of ours: both what he said and what I myself answer.

The man who sent your Affection the paper headed what follows thus: “Against those who condemn marriage and assign its fruits to the devil.” Not against us, then, who neither condemn marriage—which we even praise in its own order with the praise it is due—nor assign its fruits to the devil. For the fruits of marriage are the human beings who are begotten from it in due order, not the sins with which they are born. Nor are human beings under the devil because they are human beings, in which respect they are the fruits of marriage, but because they are sinners, in which respect there is the propagation of faults; for the devil is the author of guilt, not of nature.

Consider the rest, by which he thinks he agrees, against us, with the title set before it. “God,” he says, “who had fashioned Adam from the clay, built Eve from the rib and said, ‘She shall be called Life, because she is the mother of all the living.’” That is not, in fact, how it is written; but what does it matter to us? For it often happens that memory fails over the words while the sense is kept. Nor was it God who gave Eve the name, to be called Life, but her husband. For thus we read: “And Adam called the name of his wife Life, because she is the mother of all the living.” But perhaps he understood it so that God may be believed to have given Eve that name through Adam, as through prophecy. For in her being called Life and mother of the living there is a great sacrament of the church, which it would take long to discuss now and is not necessary for the work undertaken. For that also which the apostle calls “This is a great sacrament, but I speak in Christ and in the church” was said by Adam himself: “For this reason a man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh.” Yet the Lord Jesus in the gospel records that God said it, because God indeed said through the man what the man foretold by prophesying. So look at what follows. “By the first name,” he says, “he showed for what work she had been prepared, and said, ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth.’” Which of us denies that the woman was prepared for the work of childbearing by the Lord God, the good creator of all good things? See what he adds to this. “God, therefore,” he says, “the creator of male and female, formed members suited to generation and ordained that bodies should be begotten from bodies, while yet the power of his working intervenes in their effecting it, administering all that exists by the same power by which he created it.” We confess that this too is catholic, and also what he adds next: “If, then, there is no offspring except through sex, no sex except through the body, no body except through God, who can doubt that fruitfulness is rightly ascribed to God?”

After these things, which were said truly and in a catholic way—or rather written truly in the divine books, though not said in a catholic way by him, because they were not said with the intention of a catholic heart—the Pelagian and Caelestian heresy now begins to be brought in, for the sake of which he said them. For note what follows. “But you,” he says, “who say, ‘We do not deny that those who are born of whatever parents are under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ,’ show us now what the devil recognizes as his own in the sexes, by which, as you say, he may rightly possess their fruit. The difference of the sexes? But this is in the bodies, which God made. Their union? But it is vindicated by the privilege of blessing no less than of institution. For it is the voice of God: ‘A man will leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will be in one flesh’; it is the voice of God: ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth.’ Or perhaps fruitfulness itself? But that is the very reason marriage was instituted.”