Commonitorium against the heresy of Pelagius and Caelestius and the writings of Julian, with Subnotations on Augustine's Unfinished Work against Julian 3–11

A question against the catholic faith, raised long ago among some of the Syrians, and especially in Cilicia, by Theodore, formerly bishop of the town of Mopsuestia, is still being gnawed over among a few of them up to now. It is not brought forward openly, but is kept for the time being within the churches, as though by catholics, by the very people who commit fornication with it: namely, that the progenitors of the human race, Adam and Eve, were created mortal by God, and that by their transgression they harmed none of their descendants but injured only themselves; that they made themselves guilty before God of breaking the commandment, and no one else at all. This foolish question, no less hostile to the right faith, was first brought to Rome, under Anastasius of holy memory, supreme pontiff of the Roman church, by Rufinus, once a Syrian by nation. Being crafty, he guarded himself against the odium of it and did not dare to put it forward himself, but he deceived Pelagius, a monk of the British race, and steeped and instructed him thoroughly in the aforesaid impious vanity. Pelagius soon dared to compose commentaries on the apostle Paul, and when he came to that well-known place in the letter to the Romans where it says: 'Therefore, as through one man sin entered this world, and through sin death, and so it passed through to all men,' and so on, he said there that only those are held guilty and liable by that transgression who wished to imitate him in transgressing God's commandments, not all who have been born of his seed through the series of generations. From this he argues more widely about the following passages of this letter and declares that no man at all was harmed by generation, nor is harmed by the transgression of Adam's sin, but by imitation, he says: since that man sinned first in the human race, he becomes guilty and liable who imitates him by his own will, not by being born but by sinning. To this Pelagius Caelestius attached himself, noble by birth indeed and a lawyer of the courts of that time, but by a defect of nature a eunuch from his mother's womb. Taught by the aforesaid Pelagius, he drank in this most impious view still more undiluted and, by his incredible talkativeness, made many sharers and accomplices in this madness of his. He dared openly and publicly to say that Adam was made mortal and would have died whether he sinned or not; that Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race; that infants who are born are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression; that the whole human race does not die through Adam's death, since neither does the whole human race rise through Christ's resurrection; that infants, even if they are not baptized, have eternal life. These five headings produce one most impious and abominable opinion. He added besides that a man can be without sin and can easily keep God's commandments, since even before the coming of Christ there were men without sin, and that the law sends to the kingdom of heaven just as the gospel does. [3] These and similar things pleased Julian also and the rest of his comrades. When they had been recognized and exposed and condemned by the authority of the church together with the persons named, they were defended by the same Julian in a great number of books, and he was pleased to be counted third with Caelestius and Pelagius in the condemnation. Then, against his childish undertakings, Augustine of holy memory, the bishop, published various works at various times; Julian chose one of them to contradict in the four books he completed addressed to Turbantius, as though wholly ignorant of the other works the holy man afterwards produced on this subject. In his last eight books, wandering with horrid talkativeness and wishing rather to show himself eloquent and knowing, after the countless insults he hurled against the holy man named above, he dared shamelessly, indeed now impiously, to defend the things which, as we mentioned above, he had learned to his ruin from Pelagius and Caelestius. As already in the first four books, turning over the same things again and again and finding no prudent way out, he filled the parchments and papers with insults and abuse rather than with any reasoning of the right faith; and whereas this question ought to have been handled with the greatest brevity and with the authority of the holy and divine Scriptures, he wrote up for himself a great, distorted, and wholly unnecessary mass of talk, from which to forge impious things and to accomplish nothing at all; for he accomplishes nothing who devotes his effort to impiety. Yet the holy bishop Augustine, often named, overturned Julian's first four books in six books of his own, and the eight later ones also by his replies placed beneath each of their chapters, and so with the hammer

of catholic truth he blunted, indeed broke, Julian's vain and leaden daggers. When the work of both came into our hands, since the whole sum of the foolish and still more impious labour of Julian seems to come down to one depraved opinion, namely that the transgression of Adam and Eve did not make them mortal, nor did their guilt pass to their descendants by original succession, but that one is made guilty only by imitating those who despised the divine commandments, having read this whole work, as I said, more carefully, I too have answered briefly, according to the measure of our strength, by placing notes on his books wherever opportunity required, so that the reader, after the trumpet of so great a father and teacher, may not disdain to take up our straw pipe also, and may understand with all brevity that Julian, in working out his very numerous books, spent an empty labour, full rather of boasting, with the greatest impiety. Since you too, venerable presbyter Pientius, have ordered that I should gather these same notes into one body, I have obeyed your orders, not unaware that we shall run into the curses and abuse of that unbridled tongue. But what can the barking of a mad dog tied up outside the church of God do? Let us glory in becoming sharers and companions of such great men, such great teachers of the church shining plainly throughout the world, against whom he hurls such unheard-of, abominable, obscene, and atrocious curses. I know indeed that he will also be angry with us about the order of the chapters and, talking even more than usual, will raise an empty din of words against us, accusing us, of course, of having no order in what we say against him. We have, as we said, placed or set our notes here and there beside his depraved views; we have not composed any book against him. Let him take care, as far as we are concerned, 'to fill capacious tablets in the middle of the crossroads'; we, with our slender wit, grounded in the Christian faith and far removed from those wise in the world, both patiently accept his reproaches together with our fathers and teachers and refute, convict, and lament his deviations from catholic truth by the divine words of the Scriptures, not by the art of sophisms. [4] Now the words of Julian from his first book to Florus, chapter 112, are these: 'But let them run to him who cries, My yoke is easy and my burden light, who also grants pardon to the one who does wrong, out of his inestimable goodness, and the innocence which he creates good he makes better by renewing and adopting.' To this, besides the answers of the holy man: He indeed makes all new by creating, but he does not renew all by regenerating, except only those of whom he himself says: 'Unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven,' or, as he also says, 'unless one is born anew.' Hence you are suspected of fraud and deceit, since nowhere in your whole work did you think fit to mention renewal, but the word 'making new' always came to your mind. For it is certain that there is a great difference between making new and renewing. What is made new, as everyone knows, can be understood as what never was and has newly come into being; what is renewed is what was already old and had fallen into oldness, which, if it is renewed, is said to be renewed. Nor can it easily be proved that divine Scripture used this expression, 'making new'; but of renewal it speaks very often. Hear, against your will, the apostle Paul saying: 'As the truth is in Jesus, put off, with regard to your former way of life, the old man, who is corrupted according to the desires of error, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, who was created according to God in righteousness and holiness of truth.' And again the same: 'But when the kindness and love for humankind of our Saviour appeared, not because of works of righteousness which we did, but according to his mercy he saved us through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out most richly upon us in Christ.' Again the same: 'Though our outer man is corrupted, yet the inner is renewed day by day.' Then hear who are adopted; hear, I say, not me, but: 'a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for adoption, that you may proclaim the mighty works of God, who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.' Do you hear what he says? Do you perceive what he preaches? That those are adopted, so as to become God's people for adoption, who have been called out of darkness into that marvellous light. From which it follows that unless one has been called out of darkness into that marvellous light, he is not a chosen race, not a royal priesthood, not a holy nation, nor does he deserve to be a people for adoption. Or will you perhaps say and command that only adults, who are called as sinners out of darkness into that marvellous light, become the people of God, while little children, set in light from their very birth and without any darkness, since they are only, as you would have it, made new and not renewed from any oldness of sin, are not of the people of God? What Christian would bear you saying such things? Who would not shudder at you as you write this and flee you like a deadly poison?

[Julian:] 'But the feeble itch of the wretched blind, sick of their own accord, can bring no weight against the very reason of truth; but since, from some passages of Scripture and especially of the apostle Paul, they assert a natural sin ...' To this: No one says that sin is natural or a nature, but original; and that it is in nature, not outside nature; and that it can be called natural, not absurdly but by a loose usage, though not a nature. Being deceived yourself, you deceive whom you can. And yet there is some difference between original and natural; and although what is natural can also be called original, what is original does not compel one to admit that it is also natural. Take an example. Nature is every man of whatever age, sex, and condition; origin is, for example, senator, decurion, slave, tenant, barbarian, which are not names of nature but of origin and condition. So we do not say that sin is nature or natural, but that man, by cause of his origin, is bound slavishly through sin; although, as we have already said, sin cannot exist apart from the nature in which it is, unless you most madly think it must be sought outside it, existing by its own cause and having its own substance or nature; and if you think so, may the Manichee devour you, who raves impiously that the nature of evil holds and has a principality of its own right, its own state and origin. [Julian:] 'It cannot be proved by the holy Scriptures what justice cannot defend; for if the perfect form of justice is in the law of God, its adversary, that is injustice, is permitted to gain no strength through it; and therefore what reason refutes, authority cannot vindicate.' To this: I wish you would prove by your reason the virgin's childbearing, or conception without union with a man, and God made man and brought through the growth of the years to the cross: since no human reasoning attests this, the authority of the divine words vindicates it through faith. We must laugh, then, or rather weep, at what you say: 'what reason refutes, authority cannot vindicate.' But who can count the testimonies of the Scriptures, so great and so frequent, against this wretched little declamation of yours, in which, since reason can search out nothing, one has recourse to faith, so that eternal salvation may be sought by its authority?

[Julian:] 'Or if perhaps, since your dogma cannot stand otherwise, you answer that Adam conceived and gave birth from himself, no one will doubt that the apostle did not think this; but you have shown what you would wish to happen to your sex.' To this: Blush, most unhappy man, at such obscenity of a scurrilous, or rather mime-like, tongue. You deserve to hear the vulgar acclamations: 'You are the one; the one Philistion, the one Lentulus of the Latins; the one Maryllus to be compared with you.' For you alone surpass the wits of Martial and Petronius. Most truly the foulest stench of the spring of Amsanctus, your neighbour, the most harmful breath of Lake Avernus, and finally the pestilent blast of the Atabulus of your province have puffed you up, so that, swollen with so many diseases and unsound, indeed insane, you belched these things out, vomited them, exhaled them. And would that you had breathed out your vital spirit (for this would have been more useful to you) before you uttered with impure mouth such obscene things, so full of disgrace. What actor of foul farce, what buffoon or clown, with the licence of professed foulness, would utter these things in public? Are chaste matrons, honest and distinguished men, to read you? If they are mindful of honour and modesty, they will shudder and flee you like a monstrous viper, such as the hydra is said to have been. Are you the son of Memor, the bishop of holy and blessed memory? Were you born from the womb of Juliana, a lady of the first rank, than whom you would find nothing more honourable among the most reverend matrons? Far, far be it from me to dare believe this of you. I would sooner believe you the son of their household slaves, substituted for them, as is often said to have been done, and as you rather prove by the petulance and obscenity of your mouth. Or if it is not so, no one will doubt that they degenerated in you, who knew the holy morals, holy life, and practice of those people and have prudently examined your speech in these writings. After the death of those holy people you have, fittingly, trained your two sisters in such disciplines of your mouth. We know, we know what one of them threw at you and reproached you with, when you rose up too severely against the ruin of her modesty; and you, at once struck dumb, did not dare to trouble her grief any further with your censure.

[Julian:] 'For it was not said, they shall be two men in one man, but they shall be two in one flesh; by this name of union that pleasure of those who unite, and the desire which, gradually affecting the members, overwhelms them and, as that wise man understood, longs to make one flesh, is taught to have been instituted by God and implanted in bodies.' To this: Elegantly, buffoon, you speak in your own way, the way in which you have worn out the theatre of Arbiter and Valerius. It is agreed that in those progenitors of the human race there was a desire implanted in their nature, which the divine Scriptures indeed do not call lust, as you would have it, but a condition of the flesh by which they might fulfil that 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth' and that 'he shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh.' But if they had kept the divine commandment, it would not have been for them an immoderate goad, a hostile and importunate provoker even when its work is not sought, such as it now is, dragging by its own force and often casting down even great vessels from the citadel of chastity. So if it is not such as it was naturally given by God, only for the sake of offspring, as indeed it is not, it has been vitiated; and when it generates with this its vice, what is born from the vice is vitiated and rightly needs Christ as physician and restorer.

To this: Most stupid man, you have struck yourself with your own dagger. For you want not sin but death to pass through the seeds, which you nevertheless say was inflicted by the severity of judgment, as the avenger of transgression. Let it then be returned to you from your own words. What has this to do with the descendants, who all without exception have died, are dying, and will die by that death which passed through to all men, as the avenger of transgression, as you say? For that other point is laughable, that you say death, which you called the penalty of sin, alone passed into the race, without that which was the cause of so great an evil. Behold the excellent defender of God's just judgment, who transmits the penalty of the progenitor to descendants who do not have the cause of his penalty! It is delightful, though, what you add: 'pursuing not the seeds of bodies but the vices of morals,' as though you were commanding rather than teaching that no one has died, dies, or will die except one who has become an imitator of Adam's transgression. Are you not ashamed of such vanity? Has there then been no one through so many ages, nor is there or will there be anyone, at least according to the definition of your master Pelagius, defended by you in so many books, by which you both decree that a man can be without sin and easily keep God's commandments, no one, I say, even according to you yourselves, who was a stranger to this transgression of yours and to the death that avenges it, which was commanded to pursue not seeds but the vices of morals? Certainly those whom you say can be without sin and easily keep God's commandments must be without vices. Finally, according to you, so many thousands of infants are born, have been born, and will be born without any vice. Why then are they punished by this death, inflicted as avenger by the severity of judgment, when its cause did not follow them, nor, as you say, did it pass into anyone who had fallen?

Here there fell from your hands, so to speak, that excellent definition of your fellow disciple Caelestius: that Adam's sin harmed him alone, and not the human race. This is the Caelestius who is one of those about whom you say this in the first of your four books to Turbantius: 'The teachers of our time, most blessed brother Turbantius, the authors of the wicked sedition that still rages, have decided to bring about insult and destruction for the men by whose holy pursuits they are burned, through the ruin of the whole church, not understanding how much honour they have conferred on those whose glory they have shown could not be torn down except together with the catholic religion.' Have you so forgotten friendship? Is this how you are accustomed to defend? Or do you now need a patron yourself, and were they deceived who had prepared you as their defender? And let these things be said by me as though I had not understood how very cunning and eloquent you are, as you will no doubt boast; if you persuade yourself of this, you will be much deceived. For I have understood you, and I know what you most impiously think against the faith that holds to what is right, and I remember what circumlocutions of words you use here; bear with us a little and we shall prove it. You abuse, namely, the simplicity of Christians who happen to read these books of yours. These, surely, are your words: 'Not sin but death passed into all men, inflicted indeed by the severity of judgment as the avenger of transgression.' Here, here let me hold you a little while, here let me spend some time usefully with you. I ask, if you speak simply and not in ambiguities, as Loxias did to Croesus and Pyrrhus, you who now speak as the one spirit of error: how are you not a traducian too, the name you like, and are still allowed, to put upon catholic Christians? For not even death itself, which you grant, came or will come otherwise, as even you agree, than by passing on or transmission, and you want it to be a penalty without the desert of penalty. To escape these straits, which you made for yourself, more talkative than eloquent, you reply in what follows and argue that you spoke here of that death with which Adam was punished after the transgression, which does not destroy bodies but comes about in the soul through crimes, by contempt of God, and is eternal, since it drags to eternal punishment; which holy Scripture also signifies, saying: 'The widow who lives in pleasures is dead while living,' and in the Gospel: 'Let the dead bury their own dead.' And this kind, you will say, I said passed and passes to Adam's descendants, not to all without exception but only to those who have been imitators of his transgression, forgetful, as he was, of the divine commandments. But the other kind, you will say, which is the dissolution of the body or the separation of the soul from the body, would have been in Adam even if he had not sinned. Hence come those excellent definitions of your comrade and fellow disciple Caelestius and of Pelagius, the master of you both, which together with their persons were long ago condemned throughout the world by the authority of the church: that Adam was made mortal and would have died whether he sinned or not; that Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race; and that infants are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression. From this was born that last point of yours, which you did not fear to vomit out to your own harm: 'Infants, even if they die unbaptized, have eternal life'; and that more than sacrilege: 'The whole human race does not die through Adam's death, since neither does the whole human race rise through Christ's resurrection.' These are the magnificent decrees of your teaching, these of 'Christian learning', as you call it. But do not we Christians speak the doctrines of truth? 'Your trappings are for the people: I know you inside and in the skin.' What does it profit you, as the same poet says, 'to keep a cunning fox in a vapid breast'? I will drag you into the light by diligent investigation, digging out your most winding and fetid holes, to expose you to the Christian peoples.

Hear now, you and those who deign to read me and you, what you yourself once declared against this most impious, most depraved, most shameless, most petulant view of yours: namely in your letter which you dared to send to the apostolic see at the time when, summoned, you refused to condemn Pelagius and Caelestius together with the universal church throughout the world. Before it came into the holy hands of the bishop of that Roman church, it was spread through your agency by some whom you had deceived, throughout almost all Italy. For there, among other things, you say: 'Who then is the asserter that neither does the whole human race die through Adam's death, nor does the whole human race rise through Christ's resurrection, against the apostle: As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive?' Here we know and hold by what fraud and deceit you say and mean 'all': namely not all men without exception, that is the whole human race, but all those who wished to be imitators of Adam. And as to the resurrection through Christ, in which the apostle said that all will rise, you must likewise without doubt say that not the whole human race at all will rise, but only the just and holy, who have imitated Christ's righteousness and holiness, whereas it is certain that all without exception will rise through Christ, though some to the kingdom, others to judgment. And you add: 'Rightly, then, is he disapproved who contradicts this sentence, which says: Through a man came death, and through a man the resurrection of the dead.' Also: 'That Adam's sin harmed him alone and not the human race: this sentence too,' you say, 'is rightly refuted by us; for it must be believed that it harmed not him alone but the human race.' And here too we could not fail to see what you are doing, keeping, as you think, your most depraved and twisted view: because they themselves, as you want to teach, though few in comparison with the whole race, are the human race. Also: 'That infants,' you say, 'are in the state in which Adam was before the transgression, I count among the undisciplined questions; for that they are not in all respects in the state in which he was cannot be denied.' What state you mean and intend here too, keeping your view, as you suppose, we know very well: not that of Adam before sin, but that of the smallness and littleness in which infants are born. Remember, indeed, that you said nothing here about unbaptized little ones having eternal life if death overtakes them; which is most false, since Christ does not will it and did not will it, as your most senseless rashness commands and teaches. Also you add: 'That Adam too was made mortal and would have died whether he sinned or not,' and you said this too was not founded on reason. 'For it must be believed,' you say, 'that he was made immortal indeed, but such that, if he had not sinned, he could gain the power of immortality by tasting the tree of life. Wrongly, then, is it said that he would have died whether he sinned or not.'