On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, and on the Baptism of Infants 2.49–3.9

Therefore those who say, “If it came about by the sin of the first man that we die, it should come about by the coming of Christ that we who believe in him do not die,” and add as if a reason, “For the transgression of the transgressor did not harm us more than the incarnation or redemption of the Savior benefited us,” why do they not rather attend to, listen to, and believe without dispute what the apostle said without ambiguity: “For through a man came death, and through a man the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive”? For he was speaking of nothing other than the resurrection of the body. He said, then, that the death of the body of all came about through one man, and promised that the resurrection of the body of all to eternal life would come about through the one Christ. How, then, did the one harm us more by sinning than the other benefited us by redeeming, since through the sin of the one we die temporally, but through the redemption of the other we rise again not to a temporal but to an everlasting life? Our body, then, is dead because of sin, but the body of Christ alone died without sin, so that, blood without guilt being shed, the handwritings of all guilts might be blotted out, by which those who believe in him were formerly held as debtors by the devil. Therefore: “This is my blood, which will be shed for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

He could also have granted believers this, that they should not experience the death of this body; but if he had done so, a certain happiness would have been added to the flesh, but the fortitude of faith would have been diminished. For men so fear this death that they would call Christians happy for no other reason than that they could not die at all; and for that reason no one would hasten to the grace of Christ for the sake of that life which will be blessed after this death, through the virtue even of despising death itself, but people would believe in Christ more softly, to be rid of the trouble of death. He bestowed more grace, then; he gave more to his faithful without doubt. For what great thing would it be, seeing that those who believed did not die, to believe that one would not die? How much greater, how much braver, how much more praiseworthy to believe in such a way that, though going to die, one hopes to live without end! Finally, this will be granted to some at the end, that they will not feel this death, by a sudden change, but will be caught up together with those who rise again in the clouds to meet Christ in the air, and so will live always with the Lord. And rightly so for them, since there will no longer be descendants who would believe for this reason, not by hoping for what they do not see, but by loving what they see. That faith is nerveless and weak, and should not be called faith at all, since faith has been defined thus: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hence also in the same epistle to the Hebrews, where this is written, when he had then listed certain people who pleased God by faith, he says: “All these died according to faith, not having received the promises, but seeing them from afar and greeting them and confessing that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” And a little later he concluded this same praise of faith thus: “And all these,” he says, “having obtained testimony through faith, did not receive the promises of God; for they foresaw better things for us, that they should not be made perfect without us.” This would not be the praise of faith, nor, as I have said, would it be faith at all, if men in believing pursued visible rewards, that is, if the reward of immortality were paid to believers in this world.

Hence the Lord himself willed to die, so that, as is written of him, “through death he might make void him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who through fear of death were all their life subject to slavery.” By this testimony it is also sufficiently shown that this death of the body happened with the devil as its prince and author, that is, from the sin which he persuaded; for otherwise he would not most truly be said to have the power of death. Hence he who died without any sin, either original or personal, said what I recalled a little earlier: “Behold, the prince of the world will come” (that is, the devil, who has the power of death) “and will find nothing in me” (that is, of sin, because of which he made men die). And as though it were said to him, “Why then do you die?”, he says, “But that all may know that I do the will of my Father, rise, let us go hence”; that is, so that I may die having no cause of death from sin under the author of sin, but from the righteousness of obedience, having become obedient unto death. By that testimony, then, this too has been shown: that believers' overcoming the fear of death belongs to the contest of faith itself, which would surely have been lacking if immortality had followed at once for those who believe.

Although, then, the Lord performed many visible miracles, from which faith itself might sprout as from certain milky beginnings and grow from that tenderness into its own strength (for it is the stronger the less it now seeks such things), yet he willed that what we hope for as promised should be awaited invisibly, so that the righteous might live by faith; so much so that not even he himself, who rose again on the third day, willed to remain among men, but, having shown in his own flesh the example of the resurrection to those whom he deigned to have as witnesses of this, he ascended into heaven, withdrawing himself from their eyes too, and granting nothing of the kind to the flesh of any of them as he had shown in his own flesh, so that they too might live by faith, and might now for the present await invisibly, through patience, the reward of that righteousness by which one lives by faith, a reward which will afterwards be visible. To this understanding I believe must also be referred what he says of the Holy Spirit: “He cannot come unless I go away.” For this was to say: you will not be able to live righteously by faith, which you will have from my gift, that is, from the Holy Spirit, unless I take away from your eyes what you now behold, so that your heart may advance spiritually by believing invisible things. This righteousness by faith he commends again, speaking of the Holy Spirit thus: “He will convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they did not believe in me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father and you will no longer see me.” What is this righteousness by which they would not see him, if not that the righteous should live by faith, and that, looking not at what is seen but at what is not seen, we might by the Spirit, from faith, await the hope of righteousness?

But those who say, “If this death of the body had happened because of sin, we would certainly not die after the forgiveness of sins which the Redeemer grants us,” do not understand how God, though he looses the guilt of things so that they do no harm after this life, yet allows those things to remain for the contest of faith, so that by them those who are advancing in the contest of righteousness may be instructed and exercised. For another who did not understand this could also say: “If God said to man because of sin, In the sweat of your face you shall eat your bread, and the earth shall bring forth thorns and thistles for you, why does this toil remain even after the forgiveness of sins, and why does even the land of believers bring forth these hard and rough things? Likewise, if it was said to the woman because of sin, In groaning you shall give birth, why do believing women suffer the same pains in giving birth even after the forgiveness of sins?” And yet it is certain that those first human beings heard and deserved these things from God because of the sin they had committed; and no one resists these words of the divine book, which I have set down about the toil of man and the childbearing of woman, except one who, wholly estranged from the catholic faith, opposes those Scriptures.

But since such people are not lacking either, just as we answer them when this question is put, saying that these things are punishments of sins before forgiveness, but contests and exercises of the righteous after forgiveness, so we ought also to answer those who are similarly troubled about the death of the body, so that we both confess that it happened because of sin and do not disdain that it has been left to us for the contest after the forgiveness of sins, so that the great fear of it may be overcome by those who advance. For if it were a small virtue of faith, which works through love, to overcome the fear of death, the glory of the martyrs would not be so great, nor would the Lord say: “Greater love than this no one has, that he lay down his life for his friends.” John says this in his epistle thus: “As he laid down his life for us, so we too ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” Surely, then, the special patience in undergoing or despising death for righteousness would not be praised, if the trouble of death were not great and very hard. Whoever overcomes its fear by faith gains great glory for that faith and a just reward. Hence it is not to be wondered at both that the death of the body would not have befallen man had not sin gone before, of which such a penalty too followed, and that after the forgiveness of sins it befalls the faithful, so that the fortitude of righteousness may be exercised in overcoming the fear of it.

For the flesh which was made first was not the flesh of sin, in which man refused to keep righteousness amid the delights of paradise. Hence God decreed that, after his sin, the flesh of sin that was propagated should strive through toils and troubles to regain righteousness. For this reason too Adam, sent out of paradise, dwelt over against Eden, that is, over against the seat of delights, to signify that the flesh of sin was to be instructed in toils, which are the opposite of delights, since it did not keep obedience amid delights before it was the flesh of sin. Just as, then, those first human beings, by living righteously afterwards (for which reason they are rightly believed to have been freed from the final punishment by the Lord's blood), did not however deserve in that life to be called back to paradise, so also the flesh of sin, even if, his sins forgiven, a man has lived righteously in it, does not immediately deserve not to suffer the death which it drew from the propagation of sin.

Something like this is suggested to us about the patriarch David in the book of Kingdoms. When the prophet was sent to him and threatened him with evils that would come upon him from the wrath of God because of the sin he had committed, he obtained pardon by confessing his sin, the prophet answering that that shameful crime had been forgiven him; and yet what God had threatened followed, so that he was humbled by his son. Why is it not said here too: “If God had threatened this because of that sin, why, when the sin was forgiven, did he fulfil what he had threatened?” Unless because, if it were said, it would be most rightly answered that that forgiveness of sin was granted so that the man might not be hindered from receiving eternal life, but the effect of that threat followed so that the man's piety might be exercised and proved in that humiliation. So too God both inflicted the death of the body on man because of sin and did not take it away after the forgiveness of sins, for the exercise of righteousness.

Let us hold fast, then, to the unswerving confession of faith. There is one alone who was born without sin in the likeness of the flesh of sin, lived without sin among the sins of others, and died without sin because of our sins. Let us not swerve to the right or to the left; for to swerve to the right is to deceive oneself by saying that one is without sin, and to the left, to give oneself up to sins as if with impunity, through some perverse and depraved sense of security. “For the ways that are on the right the Lord knows,” he who alone is without sin and can blot out our sins; “but those on the left are perverse,” friendships with sins. Those young men of twenty years too, who entered the land of promise, and of whom it is said that they swerved neither to the right nor to the left, prefigured such a new people. For the age of twenty years is not to be compared with the innocence of infants; but, unless I am mistaken, this number foreshadows and echoes something mystical. For the Old Testament stands out in the five books of Moses, while the New shines with the authority of the four Gospels. These numbers multiplied by each other come to twenty; for four fives or five fours are twenty. Such a people, as I said before, instructed in the kingdom of heaven through the two testaments, old and new, swerving neither to the right by proud presumption of righteousness nor to the left by secure love of sin, will enter the land of that promise, where we shall no longer wish sins to be forgiven us nor fear that they will be punished in us, freed by that Redeemer who, not sold under sin, redeemed Israel from all its iniquities, whether committed by anyone's own life or drawn by origin.

For those have yielded not a little to the authority and truth of the divine Scriptures who, although they did not wish to state openly in their writings that forgiveness of sins is necessary for infants, yet confessed that they need redemption. For by another word, itself taken from Christian teaching, they said nothing else at all. Nor should those who read the divine writings faithfully, hear them faithfully, and hold them faithfully doubt that from that flesh which first by the will of sin became the flesh of sin, and thereafter by succession passes into all by the transcription of iniquity and death, the flesh of sin has been propagated, with the single exception of the likeness of the flesh of sin, which yet would not exist if there were not the flesh of sin.

But concerning the soul, whether it too, propagated in the same way, is bound by guilt which is to be forgiven it (for we cannot say that only the flesh of the infant, and not the soul too, needs the help of the Savior and Redeemer, and that the soul is a stranger to the thanksgiving in the Psalms, where we read and say, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his rewards, who is merciful to all your iniquities, who heals all your sicknesses, who redeems your life from corruption”); or whether, even if not propagated, by the very fact that it is mixed with the flesh of sin to be weighed down, it already needs the forgiveness of that sin and its own redemption, God judging by his supreme foreknowledge which infants do not deserve to be absolved from that guilt, even those not yet born, who have done nothing good or bad anywhere by a life of their own; and how God, even if he does not create souls by transmission, is yet not the author of that guilt, because of which the redemption of the sacrament is necessary for the soul of an infant: this is a great question and requires another discussion, yet one tempered, as I think, with such restraint that a cautious inquiry is praised rather than a hasty assertion blamed. For where a most obscure matter is discussed without the help of sure and clear proofs from divine authorities, human presumption ought to restrain itself, doing nothing by leaning to one side. For although I do not know how any of these views can be demonstrated and explained, yet I believe this: that here too the authority of the divine oracles would be most clear, if man could not be ignorant of it without loss of the promised salvation. You have a work labored over according to my strength (would that it were as useful as it is long!), whose length I would perhaps defend, if I did not fear to make it longer by defending it.

On the questions you had put to me, asking me to write something to you against those who say that Adam would have died even if he had not sinned, and that nothing of his sin passed to his descendants by propagation, chiefly because of the baptism of infants, which the whole church practices with most devout and motherly care; and whether in this life there are, have been, or will be children of men having no sin at all, I had already finished two long books. In them I seemed to myself, not indeed to have met all the objections of all minds in this matter (whether that can be done by me or by anyone I do not know; indeed I have no doubt that it cannot be done), but yet to have done something by which the defenders of the faith handed down by our forefathers on these matters might not stand altogether unarmed against the novelties of those who think otherwise. But after a very few days I read certain writings of Pelagius, a holy man, as I hear, and a Christian of no small progress, which contained very brief expositions of the epistles of the apostle Paul; and there I found, when he came to the place where the apostle says that through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so passed to all men, a certain argument of those who deny that infants bear original sin, which, I confess, I did not refute in those long volumes of mine, because it had not entered my mind at all that anyone could think or say such things. Therefore, since I did not wish to add anything to that work, which I had already brought to a definite end, I thought I should insert in this letter both the argument itself, in the same words in which I read it, and what seems to me to be said against it.

The argument, then, is set out thus: “But those,” he says, “who are against the transmission of sin try to attack it thus: If the sin of Adam, they say, harmed even those who do not sin, then the righteousness of Christ also benefits even those who do not believe; for he says that people are saved through one in like manner, indeed even more, than they previously perished through one.” To this argument, as I said, I made no reply in those two books which I wrote to you, nor did I set myself to refute it at all. Now, then, note first how, when they say, “If the sin of Adam harms even those who do not sin, then the righteousness of Christ also benefits even those who do not believe,” they judge it most absurd and most false, of course, that the righteousness of Christ should benefit even those who do not believe. From this they think it follows that the sin of the first man could not harm infants who do not sin, just as the righteousness of Christ cannot benefit any who do not believe. Let them say, then, what the righteousness of Christ benefits baptized infants; let them say whatever they please. For surely, if they remember that they are Christians, they do not doubt that it benefits them somewhat. Whatever benefit it is, then, it cannot, as they themselves assert, benefit those who do not believe. Hence they are compelled to reckon baptized infants among the number of believers and to agree with the authority of the holy church everywhere, which does not judge them unworthy of the name of faithful, since the righteousness of Christ, even according to these men, could benefit them only if they believe. Just as, then, the Spirit of righteousness in those through whom they are reborn transfers to them by their response the faith which they could not yet have by their own will, so the flesh of sin of those through whom they are born transfers to them the harm which they have not yet contracted by their own life. And just as the Spirit of life regenerates them in Christ as faithful, so the body of death had generated them in Adam as sinners; for the one is carnal generation, the other spiritual; the one makes children of the flesh, the other of the Spirit; the one children of death, the other children of the resurrection; the one children of this world, the other children of God; the one children of wrath, the other children of mercy; and for this reason the one makes them bound by original sin, the other freed from every bond of sin.

Finally, where we cannot attain something even with the keenest understanding, let us be compelled to consent to divine authority. It is good that they themselves remind us that the righteousness of Christ can benefit only believers, and that they confess that it benefits infants somewhat. Hence, as we have said, they must without any evasion place the baptized among the number of believers. Consequently, then, if they are not baptized, they will be among those who do not believe, and for this reason they will not have life, but the wrath of God remains on them, since “he who does not believe the Son will not have life, but the wrath of God remains on him”; and they have been judged, since “he who does not believe has already been judged”; and they will be condemned, since “he who believes and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned.” Let these men see now by what justice they try or attempt to assert that men who are without sin, if there is no original sin in them as there is no personal sin, belong not to eternal life but to the wrath of God, and are judged and condemned by God.

To the other things which Pelagius suggests are said by those who argue against original sin, I have answered sufficiently and clearly enough, I think, in those two books of my long work. And if to some this seems either too little or obscure, let them pardon me and settle it with those who perhaps find fault with it not because it is too little but because it is too much; and let those who still do not understand what I think has been said clearly, considering the nature of the questions, not slander me for negligence or for the poverty of my ability, but rather pray to God to receive understanding.

Yet we must note, not carelessly, that this man, good and praiseworthy, as those who know him say, did not put forward this argument against the propagation of sin in his own person, but reported what is said by those who do not approve of it; and not only this which I have just set out and answered, but also the other things to which I recall having already answered in those books. For when he had said, “If the sin of Adam, they say, harmed even those who do not sin, then the righteousness of Christ also benefits even those who do not believe” (which, you see from my answer, not only does not overthrow what we say but even reminds us what to say), he went on to add: “Then they say: If baptism cleanses that ancient offense, those who are born of two baptized parents ought to be free of this sin; for they could not transmit to their descendants what they themselves did not have at all. There is also this,” he says: “that if the soul is not from transmission, but only the flesh, then the flesh alone has the transmission of sin and it alone deserves punishment”; saying that it is unjust that a soul born today, not from the lump of Adam, should bear another's sin so ancient. “They also say,” he says, “that in no way can it be granted that God, who forgives one's own sins, imputes another's.”

Do you see, I ask, how Pelagius put all this into his writings not in his own person but in that of others, knowing so well that this was some novelty or other, now beginning to sound out against the ancient opinion ingrained in the church, that he himself was either ashamed or afraid to profess it? And perhaps he himself does not hold that a man is born without sin, for whom he admits baptism is necessary, in which forgiveness of sins takes place; that a man without sin is condemned, who, unbaptized, must be reckoned among those who do not believe, since certainly the gospel Scripture cannot deceive, in which we read most plainly, “He who does not believe will be condemned”; finally, that the image of God without sin is not admitted to the kingdom of God, since “unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God,” and so either is cast down without sin into eternal death, or, what is more absurd, has eternal life outside the kingdom of God; since the Lord, foretelling what he will say to his own at the end, “Come, blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world,” also made plain what that kingdom is of which he spoke, concluding thus: “So those will go into eternal burning, but the righteous into eternal life.” These and other things which follow from this error, being very perverse and repugnant to Christian truth, I believe that man, so excellently Christian, does not hold at all. But it may be that he is still perhaps so moved by the arguments of those who hold against the transmission of sin that he waits to hear or learn what is said against them; and therefore he did not wish to keep silent about what those say who hold against the transmission of sin, so that the question might be raised for discussion, and he removed it from his own person, so that he might not be judged to hold this himself.

As for me, even if I were unable to refute their arguments, I see nevertheless that we must hold fast to what is most plain in the Scriptures, so that by it obscure things may be revealed, or, if the mind is not yet fit either to discern them when shown or to track them out when hidden, they may be believed without any hesitation. And what is plainer than so many great testimonies of the divine oracles, by which it most clearly appears that no man can come to eternal life and salvation apart from fellowship with Christ, and that no one can be unjustly condemned, that is, separated from that life and salvation, by divine judgment? From which it follows that, since nothing else is done when infants are baptized than that they are incorporated into the church, that is, joined to the body and members of Christ, it is manifest that, unless this is conferred on them, they belong to damnation. But they could not be damned if they certainly had no sin. And since that age could not contract any sin in its own life, it remains to understand, or, if we cannot yet do this, at least to believe, that infants draw original sin.

And therefore, if the apostle's words, in which he says, “Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed to all men,” have anything ambiguous and can be led and transferred to another meaning, is this too ambiguous: “Unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God”? Is this too: “You shall call his name Jesus; for he will save his people from their sins”? Is this too, that “the healthy have no need of a physician, but those who are sick,” that is, that Jesus is not necessary for those who have no sin, but for those who are to be saved from sin? Is this too, that unless men eat his flesh, that is, are made partakers of his body, they will not have life? By these and other testimonies of this kind, which I now pass over, most clear with divine light and most certain with divine authority, does not the truth proclaim without any ambiguity that unbaptized infants not only cannot enter the kingdom of God, but cannot have eternal life apart from the body of Christ, into which they are imbued with the sacrament of baptism in order to be incorporated? Does not the truth testify without any doubt that they are carried to Jesus, that is, to Christ the Savior and physician, in the devout hands of those who carry them, for no other reason than that through the medicine of his sacraments they may be healed of the plague of sin? Why, then, do we hesitate to understand even the apostle's words, about which we were perhaps in doubt, in such a way that they agree with these testimonies about which we cannot doubt?

Although in that whole passage, where the apostle speaks of the condemnation of many through the sin of one and the justification of many through the righteousness of one, nothing seems to me ambiguous except his saying that Adam is a type of the one to come. For this indeed not only fits this view, by which it is understood that his future descendants were generated with sin from the same type, but these words can also be drawn to other and other meanings. For we too have sometimes said one thing about it and will perhaps say another, which yet is not contrary to this meaning; and Pelagius himself explained it in more than one way. But the other things that are said there, if they are carefully noted and treated, as I tried in some fashion in the first of those two books, even if they produce a somewhat obscure discourse through the necessity of the subject itself, will yet be unable to have any other sense than that by which it came about that from ancient times the whole church has held that faithful infants obtain the forgiveness of original sin through the baptism of Christ.