Sermons at Carthage.

What Augustine meant by writing to Pinianus and his family that he was more oppressed by work at Carthage than anywhere else, may perhaps be illustrated from his diligence in preaching while in that capital. He seems to have been almost constantly in the pulpit during this period “of the sharpest conflict with them,”⁶⁵ preaching against the Pelagians. There is one series of his sermons, of the exact dates of which we can be pretty sure, which may be adverted to here. This includes Sermons 151 and 152, preached early in October, 418; Sermon 155 on October 14, 156 on October 17, and 26 on October 18. They thus follow one another almost with the regularity of the days. The first was based on Rom. vii. 15-25. Augustine declares this text to contain dangerous words if it is not properly understood; for men are prone to sin, and when they hear the apostle so speaking they do evil and think they are like him. They are meant to teach us, however, that the life of the just in this body is a war, not yet a triumph: the triumph will come only when death is swallowed up in victory. It would, no doubt, be better not to have an enemy than even to conquer. It would be better not to have evil desires. But we have them. Nevertheless, let us not follow after them. If they rebel against us, let us rebel against them; if they fight, let us fight; if they besiege, let us besiege: let us look only to this, that they do not conquer. With some evil desires we are born: others we make by bad habit. It is on account of those with which we are born that infants are baptized—that they may be freed from the guilt of inheritance, not from any evil of custom, which, of course, they have not. And it is on account of these, too, that our war must be endless: the concupiscence with which we are born cannot be done away as long as we live; it may be diminished, but not done away. Neither can the law free us, for it only reveals the sin to our fuller apprehension. Where, then, is hope, save in the superabundance of grace?

The next sermon (152) takes up the words in Rom. viii. 1-4, and points out that the inward aid of the Spirit brings all the help we need. “We, like farmers in the field, work from without: but, if there were no one who worked from within, the seed would not take root in the ground, nor would the sprout arise in the field, nor would the shoot grow strong and become a tree, nor would branches and fruit and leaves be produced. Therefore the apostle distinguishes between the work of the workmen and the work of the Creator (1 Cor. iii. 6, 7). If God give not the increase, empty is this sound within your ears; but if He gives, it avails somewhat that we plant and water, and our labor is not in vain.” He then applies this to the individual striving against his lusts; warns against Manichean error; and distinguishes between the three laws,—the law of sin, the law of faith, and the law of deeds,—defending the last, the law of Moses, against the Manicheans. Then he comes to the words of the text, and explains its chief phrases, closing thus: “What else do we read here than that Christ is a sacrifice for sin? … Behold by what ‘sin’ he condemned sin: by the sacrifice which he made for sins, he condemned sin. This is the law of the Spirit of life which has freed you from the law of sin and death. For that other law, the law of the letter, the law that commands, is indeed good; ‘the commandment is holy and just and good:’ but ‘it was weak through the flesh,’ and what it commanded it could not bring about in us. Therefore there is one law, as I began by saying, that reveals sin to you, and another that takes it away: the law of the letter reveals sin, the law of grace takes it away.”

Sermon 155 covers the same ground, and more, taking the broader text, Rom. viii. 1-11, and fully developing its teaching, especially as discriminating between the law of sin and the law of Moses and the law of faith; the law of Moses being the holy law of God written with His finger on the tables of stone, while the law of the Spirit of life is nothing other than the same law written in the heart, as the prophet (Jer. xxx. 1, 33) clearly declares. So written, it does not terrify from without, but soothes from within. Great care is also taken, lest by such phrases as, “walk in the Spirit, not in the flesh,” “who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” a hatred of the body should be begotten.

“Thus you shall be freed from the body of this death, not by having no body, but by having another one and dying no more. If, indeed, he had not added, ‘of this death,’ perchance an error might have been suggested to the human mind, and it might have been said, ‘You see that God does not wish us to have a body.’ But He says, ‘the body of this death.’ Take away death, and the body is good. Let our last enemy, death, be taken away, and my dear flesh will be mine for eternity. For no one can ever ‘hate his own flesh.’ Although the ‘spirit lusts against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit,’ although there is now a strife in this house, yet the husband is seeking by his strife not the ruin of, but concord with, his wife. Far be it, far be it, my brethren, that the spirit should hate the flesh in lusting against it! It hates the vices of the flesh; it hates the wisdom of the flesh; it hates the contention of death. This corruption shall put on incorruption,—this mortal shall put on immortality; it is sown a natural body—it shall rise a spiritual body; and you shall see full and perfect concord,—you shall see the creature praise the Creator.” One of the special interests of such passages is to show, that, even at this early date, Augustine was careful to guard his hearers from Manichean error while proclaiming original sin. One of the sermons which, probably, was preached about this time (153), is even entitled, “Against the Manicheans openly, but tacitly against the Pelagians,” and bears witness to the early development of the method that he was somewhat later to use effectively against Julian’s charges of Manicheanism against the Catholics.⁶⁶

Three days afterwards, Augustine preached on the next few verses, Rom. viii. 12-17, but can scarcely be said to have risen to the height of its great argument. The greater part of the sermon is occupied with a discussion of the law, why it was given, how it is legitimately used, and its usefulness as a pedagogue to bring us to Christ. It then passes on to speak of the need of a mediator; and then, of what it is to live according to the flesh, which includes living according to merely human nature, and the need of mortifying the flesh in this world. All this, of course, gave full opportunity for opposing the leading Pelagian errors; and the sermon is brought to a close by a direct polemic against their assertion that the function of grace is only to make it more easy to do what is right. “With the sail more easily, with the oar with more difficulty: nevertheless even with the oar we can go. On a beast more easily, on foot with more difficulty: nevertheless progress can be made on foot. It is not true! For the true Master who flatters no one, who deceives no one,—the truthful Teacher and very Saviour to whom this very grievous schoolmaster has led us,—when he was speaking about good works, i.e., about the fruits of the twigs and branches, did not say, ‘Without me, indeed, you can do something, but you will do it more easily with me;’ He did not say, ‘You can produce your fruit without me, but more richly with me.’ He did not say this! Read what He said: it is the holy gospel,—bow the proud necks! Augustine does not say this: the Lord says it. What says the Lord? ‘Without me you can do nothing!’”

On the very next day he was again in the pulpit, and taking for his text chiefly the ninety-fifth Psalm.⁶⁷ He began by quoting the sixth verse, and laying stress on the words “Our Maker.” ‘No Christian,’ he said, ‘doubted that God had made him, and that in such a sense that God created not only the first man, from whom all have descended, but that God to-day creates every man,—as He said to one of His saints, “Before that I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee.” At first He created man apart from man; now He creates man from man: nevertheless, whether man apart from man, or man from man, “it is He that made us, and not we ourselves.” Nor has He made us and then deserted us; He has not cared to make us, and not cared to keep us. Will He who made us without being asked, desert us when He is besought? But is it not just as foolish to say, as some say or are ready to say, that God made them men, but they make themselves righteous? Why, then, do we pray to God to make us righteous? The first man was created in a nature that was without fault or flaw. He was made righteous: he did not make himself righteous; what he did for himself was to fall and break his righteousness. This God did not do: He permitted it, as if He had said, “Let him desert Me; let him find himself; and let his misery prove that he has no ability without Me.” In this way God wished to show man what free will was worth without God. O evil free will without God! Behold, man was made good; and by free will man was made evil! When will the evil man make himself good by free will? When good, he was not able to keep himself good; and now that he is evil, is he to make himself good? Nay, behold, He that made us has also made us “His people” (Ps. xcv. 7). This is a distinguishing gift. Nature is common to all, but grace is not. It is not to be confounded with nature; but if it were, it would still be gratuitous. For certainly no man, before he existed, deserved to come into existence. And yet God has made him, and that not like the beasts or a stock or a stone, but in His own image. Who has given this benefit? He gave it who was in existence: he received it who was not. And only He could do this, who calls the things that are not as though they were: of whom the apostle says that “He chose us before the foundation of the world.” We have been made in this world, and yet the world was not when we were chosen. Ineffable! wonderful! They are chosen who are not: neither does He err in choosing nor choose in vain. He chooses, and has elect whom He is to create to be chosen: He has them in Himself, not indeed in His nature, but in His prescience. Let us not, then, glory in ourselves, or dispute against grace. If we are men, He made us. If we are believers, He made us this too. He who sent the Lamb to be slain has, out of wolves, made us sheep. This is grace. And it is an even greater grace than that grace of nature by which we were all made men.’ “I am continually endeavoring to discuss such things as these,” said the preacher, “against a new heresy which is attempting to rise; because I wish you to be fixed in the good, untouched by the evil… . For, disputing against grace in favor of free will, they became an offence to pious and catholic ears. They began to create horror; they began to be avoided as a fixed pest; it began to be said of them, that they argued against grace. And they found such a device as this: … . ‘Because I defend man’s free will and say that free will is sufficient in order that I may be righteous,’ says one, ‘I do not say that it is without the grace of God.’ The ears of the pious are pricked up, and he who hears this already begins to rejoice: ‘Thanks be to God! He does not defend free will without the grace of God! There is free will, but it avails nothing without the grace of God.’ If, then, they do not defend free will without the grace of God, what evil do they say? Expound to us, O teacher, what grace you mean? ‘When I say,’ he says, ‘the free will of man, you observe that I say “of man”?’ What then? ‘Who created man?’ God. ‘Who gave him free will?’ God. ‘If, then, God created man, and God gave man free will, whatever man is able to do by free will, to whose grace does he owe it, except to His who made him with free will?’ And this is what they think they say so acutely! You see, nevertheless, my brethren, how they preach that general grace by which we were created and by which we are men; and, of course, we are men in common with the ungodly, and are Christians apart from them. It is this grace by which we are Christians, that we wish them to preach, this that we wish them to acknowledge, this that we wish,—of which the apostle says, ‘I do not make void the grace of God, for if righteousness is by the law, Christ is dead in vain.’” Then the true function of the law was explained as a revealer of our sinfulness and a pedagogue to lead us to Christ: the Manichean depreciation of the Old-Testament law was attacked, but its insufficiency for salvation was pointed out; and so his hearers were brought back to the necessity of grace, which is illustrated from the story of the raising of the dead child in 2 Kings iv. 18–37: the dead child being Adam; the ineffective staff (by which we ought to walk), the law; but the living prophet, Christ with his grace, which we must preach.

“The prophetic staff was not enough for the dead boy: would dead nature itself have been enough? Even this by which we are made, although we nowhere read of it under this name, we nevertheless, because it is given gratuitously, confess to be grace. But we show to you a greater grace than this, by which we are Christians… . This is the grace by Jesus Christ our Lord: it was He that made us,—both before we were at all it was He that made us, and now, after we are made, it is He that has made us all righteous,—and not we ourselves.” There was but one mass of perdition from Adam, to which nothing was due but punishment; and from that mass vessels have been made unto honor. “Rejoice because you have escaped; you have escaped the death that was due,—you have received the life that was not due. ‘But,’ you ask, ‘why did He make me unto honor, and another unto dishonor?’ Will you who will not hear the apostle saying, ‘O man, who art thou that repliest against God?’ hear Augustine? … . Do you wish to dispute with me? Nay, wonder with me, and cry out with me, ‘Oh the depth of the riches!’ Let us both be afraid,—let us both cry out, ‘Oh the depth of the riches!’ Let us both agree in fear, lest we perish in error.”

The Letter to Optatus.

Augustine was not less busy with his pen, during these months, than with his voice. Quite a series of letters belong to the last half of 418, in which he argues to his distant correspondents on the same themes which he was so iterantly trying to make clear to his Carthaginian auditors. One of the most interesting of these was written to a fellow-bishop, Optatus, on the origin of the soul.⁶⁸ Optatus, like Jerome, had expressed himself as favoring the theory of a special creation of each at birth; and Augustine, in this letter as in the paper sent to Jerome, lays great stress on so holding our theories on so obscure a matter as to conform to the indubitable fact of the transmission of sin. This fact, such passages as 1 Cor. xv. 21 sq., Rom. v. 12 sq., make certain; and in stating this, Augustine takes the opportunity to outline the chief contents of the catholic faith over against the Pelagian denial of original sin and grace: that all are born under the contagion of death and in the bond of guilt; that there is no deliverance except in the one Mediator, Christ Jesus; that before His coming men received him as promised, now as already come, but with the same faith; that the law was not intended to save, but to shut up under sin and so to force us back upon the one Saviour; and that the distribution of grace is sovereign.

Augustine pries into God’s sovereign counsels somewhat more freely here than is usual with him. “But why those also are created who, the Creator foreknew, would belong to damnation, not to grace, the blessed apostle mentions with as much succinct brevity as great authority. For he says that God, ‘wishing to show His wrath and demonstrate His power,’ etc. (Rom. ix. 22). Justly, however, would He seem unjust in forming vessels of wrath for perdition, if the whole mass from Adam were not condemned. That, therefore, they are made on birth vessels of anger, belongs to the punishment due to them; but that they are made by re-birth vessels of mercy, belongs to the grace that is not due to them. God, therefore, shows His wrath,—not, of course, perturbation of mind, such as is called wrath among men, but a just and fixed vengeance… . He shows also His power, by which He makes a good use of evil men, and endows them with many natural and temporal goods, and bends their evil to admonition and instruction of the good by comparison with it, so that these may learn from them to give thanks to God that they have been made to differ from them, not by their own deserts which were of like kind in the same mass, but by His pity… . But by creating so many to be born who, He foreknew, would not belong to His grace, so that they are more by an incomparable multitude than those whom He deigned to predestinate as children of the promise into the glory of His kingdom,—He wished to show by this very multitude of the rejected how entirely of no moment it is to the just God what is the multitude of those most justly condemned. And that hence also those who are redeemed from this condemnation may understand, that what they see rendered to so great a part of the mass was the desert of the whole of it,—not only of those who add many others to original sin, by the choice of an evil will, but as well of so many children who are snatched from this life without the grace of the Mediator, bound by no bond except that of original sin alone.”

With respect to the question more immediately concerning which the letter was written, Augustine explains that he is willing to accept the opinion that souls are created for men as they are born, if only it can be made plain that it is consistent with the original sin that the Scriptures so clearly teach. In the paper sent to Jerome, the difficulties of creationism are sufficiently urged; this letter is interesting on account of its statement of some of the difficulties of traducianism also,—thus evidencing Augustine’s clear view of the peculiar complexity of the problem, and justifying his attitude of balance and uncertainty between the two theories. ‘The human understanding,’ he says, ‘can scarcely comprehend how a soul arises from a parent’s soul in the offspring; or is transmitted to the offspring as a candle is lighted from a candle and thence another fire comes into existence without loss to the former one. Is there an incorporeal seed for the soul, which passes, by some hidden and invisible channel of its own, from the father to the mother, when it is conceived in the woman? Or, even more incredible, does it lie enfolded and hidden within the corporeal seed?’ He is lost in wonder over the question whether, when conception does not take place, the immortal seed of an immortal soul perishes; or, whether the immortality attaches itself to it only when it lives. He even expresses doubt whether traducianism will explain what it is called in to explain, much better than creationism; in any case, who denies that God is the maker of every soul? Isaiah lvii. 16 says, “I have made every breath;” and the only question that can arise is as to method,—whether He “makes every breath from the one first breath, just as He makes every body of man from the one first body; or whether He makes new bodies indeed from the one body, but new souls out of nothing.” Certainly nothing but Scripture can determine such a question; but where do the Scriptures speak unambiguously upon it? The passages to which the creationists point only affirm the admitted fact that God makes the soul; and the traducianists forget that the word “soul” in the Scriptures is ambiguous, and can mean “man,” and even a “dead man.” What more can be done, then, than to assert what is certain, viz., that sin is propagated, and leave what is uncertain in the doubt in which God has chosen to place it?

This letter was written not long after the issue of Zosimus’ Tractoria, which demanded the signature of all to African orthodoxy; and Augustine sends Optatus “copies of the recent letters which have been sent forth from the Roman See, whether specially to the African bishops or generally to all bishops,” on the Pelagian controversy, “lest perchance they had not yet reached” his correspondent, who, it is very evident, he was anxious should thoroughly realize “that the authors, or certainly the most energetic and noted teachers,” of these new heresies, “had been condemned in the whole Christian world by the vigilance of episcopal councils aided by the Saviour who keeps His Church, as well as by two venerable overseers of the Apostolical See, Pope Innocent and Pope Zosimus, unless they should show repentance by being convinced and reformed.” To this zeal we owe it that the letter contains an extract from Zosimus’ Tractoria, one of the two brief fragments of that document that have reached our day.

The Correspondence with Sixtus.

There was another ecclesiastic in Rome, besides Zosimus, who was strongly suspected of favoring the Pelagians. This was the presbyter Sixtus, who afterwards became Pope Sixtus III. But when Zosimus issued his condemnation of Pelagianism, Sixtus sent also a short letter to Africa addressed to Aurelius of Carthage. This, though brief, spoke with considerable vigor against the heresy which he was commonly believed to have before defended,⁶⁹ and which claimed him as its own.⁷⁰ Some months afterwards, he sent another similar, but longer, letter to Augustine and Alypius, more fully expounding his rejection of “the fatal dogma” of Pelagius, and his acceptance of “that grace of God freely given by Him to small and great, to which Pelagius’ dogma was diametrically opposed.” Augustine was overjoyed with these developments. He quickly replied in a short letter⁷¹ in which he expresses the delight he had in learning from Sixtus’ own hand that he was not a defender of Pelagius, but a preacher of grace. And close upon the heels of this he sent another much longer letter,⁷² in which he discusses the subtler arguments of the Pelagians with an anxious care that seems to bear witness to his desire to confirm and support his correspondent in his new opinions. Both letters testify to Augustine’s approval of the persecuting measures which had been instituted by the Roman see in obedience to the emperor; and urge on Sixtus his duty not only to bring the open heretics to deserved punishment, but to track out those who spread their poison secretly, and even to remember those whom he had formerly heard announcing the error before it had been condemned and who were now silent through fear, and to bring them either to open recantation of their former beliefs, or to punishment.

It is pleasanter to recall the dialectic of these letters. The greater part of the second is given to a discussion of the gratuitousness of grace, which, just because grace, is given to no preceding merits. Many subtle objections to this doctrine were brought forward by the Pelagians. They said that “free will is taken away if we assert that man does not have even a good will without the aid of God:” that we make “God an accepter of persons, if we believe that without any preceding merits He has mercy on whom He will, and whom He will He calls, and whom He will He makes religious:” that “it is unjust, in one and the same case, to deliver one and punish another:” that, if such a doctrine be preached, “men who do not wish to live rightly and faithfully, will excuse themselves by saying that they have done nothing evil by living ill, since they have not received the grace by which they might live well:” that it is a puzzle “how sin can pass over to the children of the faithful, when it has been remitted to the parents in baptism:” that “children respond truly by the mouth of their sponsors that they believe in remission of sins, but not because sins are remitted to them, but because they believe that sins are remitted in the church or in baptism to those in whom they are found, not to those in whom they do not exist;” and consequently they said that “they were unwilling that infants should be so baptized unto remission of sins as if this remission took place in them,” for (they contended) “they have no sin; but they are to be baptized, although without sin, with the same rite of baptism through which remission of sins takes place in any that are sinners.” This last objection is especially interesting,⁷³ because it furnishes us with the reply which the Pelagians made to the argument that Augustine so strongly pressed against them from the very act and ritual of baptism, as implying remission of sins.⁷⁴ His rejoinder to it here is to point to the other parts of the same ritual, and to ask why, then, infants are exorcised and exsufflated in baptism. “For, it cannot be doubted that this is done fictitiously, if the Devil does not rule over them; but if he rules over them, and they are therefore not falsely exorcised and exsufflated, why does that Prince of sinners rule over them except because of sin?”

On the fundamental matter of the gratuitousness of grace, this letter is very explicit. “If we seek for the deserving of hardening, we shall find it… . But if we seek for the deserving of pity, we shall not find it; for there is none, lest grace be made a vanity if it is not given gratis but rendered to merits. But, should we say that faith preceded and in it there is desert of grace, what desert did man have before faith that he should receive faith? For, what did he have that he did not receive? and if he received it, why does he glory as if he received it not? For as man would not have wisdom, understanding, prudence, fortitude, knowledge, piety, fear of God, unless he had received (according to the prophet) the spirit of wisdom and understanding, of prudence and fortitude, of knowledge and piety and the fear of God; as he would not have justice, love, continence, except the spirit were received of whom the apostle says, ‘For you did not receive the spirit of fear, but of virtue, and love, and continence:’ so he would not have faith unless he received the spirit of faith of whom the same apostle says, ‘Having then the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, “I believed and therefore spoke,” we too believe and therefore speak.’ But that He is not received by desert, but by His mercy who has mercy on whom He will, is manifestly shown where he says of himself, ‘I have obtained mercy to be faithful.’” “If we should say that the merit of prayer precedes, that the gift of grace may follow, … . even prayer itself is found among the gifts of grace” (Rom. viii. 26). “It remains, then, that faith itself, whence all righteousness takes beginning, … . it remains, I say, that even faith itself is not to be attributed to the human will which they extol, nor to any preceding merits, since from it begin whatever good things are merits: but it is to be confessed to be the gratuitous gift of God, since we consider it true grace, that is, without merits, inasmuch as we read in the same epistle, ‘God divides out the measure of faith to each’ (Rom. xii. 3). Now, good works are done by man, but faith is wrought in man, and without it these are not done by any man. For all that is not of faith is sin” (Rom. xiv. 23.)

Letters to Mercator and Asellicus.

By the same messenger who carried this important letter to Sixtus, Augustine sent also a letter to Mercator,⁷⁵ an African layman who was then apparently at Rome, but who was afterwards (in 429) to render service by instructing the Emperor Theodosius as to the nature and history of Pelagianism, and so preventing the appeal of the Pelagians to him from being granted. Now he appears as an inquirer. Augustine, while at Carthage, had received a letter from him in which he had consulted him on certain questions that the Pelagians had raised, but in such a manner as to indicate his opposition to them. Press of business had compelled the postponement of the reply until this later date. One of the questions which Mercator had put concerned the Pelagian account of infants sharing in the one baptism unto remission of sins, which we have seen Augustine answering when writing to Sixtus. In this letter he replies: “Let them, then, hear the Lord (John iii. 36). Infants, therefore, who are made believers by others, by whom they are brought to baptism, are, of course, unbelievers by others, if they are in the hands of such as do not believe that they should be brought, inasmuch as they believe they are nothing profited; and accordingly, if they believe by believers and have eternal life, they are unbelievers by unbelievers and shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on them. For it is not said, ‘it comes on them,’ but ‘it abideth on them,’ because it was on them from the beginning. and will not be taken from them except by the grace of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord… . Therefore, when children are baptized, the confession is made that they are believers, and it is not to be doubted that those who are not believers are condemned: let them, then, dare to say now, if they can, that they contract no evil from their origin to be condemned by the just God, and have no contagion of sin.” The other matter on which Mercator sought light concerned the statement that universal death proved universal sin:⁷⁶ he reported that the Pelagians replied that not even death was universal—that Enoch, for instance, and Elijah, had not died. Augustine adds those who are to be found living at the second advent, who are not to die but to be “changed;” and replies that Rom. v. 12 is perfectly explicit that there is no death in the world except that which comes from sin, and that God is a Saviour, and we cannot at all “deny that He is able to do that, now, in any that he wishes, without death, which we undoubtedly believe is to be done in so many after death.” He adds that the difficult question is not why Enoch and Elijah did not die, if death is the punishment of sin; but why, such being the case, the justified ever die; and he refers his correspondent to his book On the Baptism of Infants⁷⁷ for a resolution of this greater difficulty.

It was probably at the very end of 418 that Augustine wrote a letter of some length⁷⁸ to Asellicus, in reply to one which he had written, on “avoiding the deception of Judaism,” to the primate of the Bizacene province, and which that ecclesiastic had sent to Augustine for answering. He discusses in this the law of the Old Testament. He opens by pointing out that the apostle forbids Christians to Judaize (Gal. ii. 14–16), and explains that it is not merely the ceremonial law that we may not depend upon, “but also what is said in the law, ‘Thou shalt not covet’ (which no one, of course, doubts is to be said to Christians too), does not justify man, except by faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” He then expounds the use of the law: “This, then, is the usefulness of the law: that it shows man to himself, so that he may know his weakness, and see how, by the prohibition, carnal concupiscence is rather increased than healed… . The use of the law is, thus, to convince man of his weakness, and force him to implore the medicine of grace that is in Christ.” “Since these things are so,” he adds, “those who rejoice that they are Israelites after the flesh and glory in the law apart from the grace of Christ, these are those concerning whom the apostle said that ‘being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and wishing to establish their own, they are not subject to God’s righteousness;’ since he calls ‘God’s righteousness’ that which is from God to man; and ‘their own,’ what they think that the commandments suffice for them to do without the help and gift of Him who gave the law. But they are like those who, while they profess to be Christians, so oppose the grace of Christ that they suppose that they fulfil the divine commands by human powers, and, ‘wishing to establish their own,’ are ‘not subject to the righteousness of God,’ and so, not indeed in name, but yet in error, Judaize. This sort of men found heads for themselves in Pelagius and Cœlestius. the most acute asserters of this impiety, who by God’s recent judgment, through his diligent and faithful servants, have been deprived even of catholic communion, and, on account of an impenitent heart, persist still in their condemnation.”

The First Book of the Treatise “On Marriage and Concupiscence.”

At the beginning of 419, a considerable work was published by Augustine on one of the more remote corollaries which the Pelagians drew from his teachings. It had come to his ears, that they asserted that his doctrine condemned marriage. “If only sinful offspring come from marriage,” they asked, “is not marriage itself made a sinful thing?” The book which Augustine composed in answer to this query, he sent, along with an explanatory letter, to the Comes Valerius, a trusted servant of the Emperor Honorius and one of the most steady opponents at court of the Pelagian heresy. Augustine explains⁷⁹ why he desired to address the book to him: first, because Valerius was a striking example of those continent husbands of which that age furnishes us with many instances, and, therefore, the discussion would have especial interest for him; secondly, because of his eminence as an opponent of Pelagianism; and, thirdly, because Augustine had learned that he had read a Pelagian document in which Augustine was charged with condemning marriage by defending original sin.⁸⁰ The book in question is the first book of the treatise On Marriage and Concupiscence. It is, naturally, tinged, or rather stained, with the prevalent ascetic notions of the day. Its doctrine is that marriage is good, and that God is the maker of the offspring that comes from it, although now there can be no begetting and hence no birth without sin. Sin made concupiscence, and now concupiscence perpetuates sinners. The specific object of the work, as it states it itself, is “to distinguish between the evil of carnal concupiscence, from which man who is born therefrom contracts original sin, and the good of marriage” (I. i). After the brief introduction, in which he explains why he writes, and why he addresses his book to Valerius (1–2), Augustine points out that conjugal chastity, like its higher sister-grace of continence, is God’s gift. Thus copulation, but only for the propagation of children, has divine allowance (3–5). Lust, or “shameful concupiscence,” however, he teaches, is not of the essence, but only an accident, of marriage. It did not exist in Eden, although true marriage existed there; but arose from, and therefore only after, sin (6–7). Its addition to marriage does not destroy the good of marriage: it only conditions the character of the offspring (8). Hence it is that the apostle allows marriage, but forbids the “disease of desire” (1 Thess. iv. 3–5); and hence the Old Testament saints were even permitted more than one wife, because, by multiplying wives, it was not lust, but offspring, that was increased (9–10). Nevertheless, fecundity is not to be thought the only good of marriage: true marriage can exist without offspring, and even without cohabitation (11–13); and cohabitation is now, under the New Testament, no longer a duty as it was under the Old Testament (14–15), but the apostle praises continence above it. We must, then, distinguish between the goods of marriage, and seek the best (16–19). But thus it follows that it is not due to any inherent and necessary evil in marriage, but only to the presence, now, of concupiscence in all cohabitation, that children are born under sin, even the children of the regenerate, just as from the seed of olives only oleasters grow (20–24). And yet again, concupiscence is not itself sin in the regenerate; it is remitted as guilt in baptism: but it is the daughter of sin, and it is the mother of sin, and in the unregenerate it is itself sin, as to yield to it is even to the regenerate (25–39). Finally, as so often, the testimony of Ambrose is appealed to, and it is shown that he too teaches that all born from cohabitation are born guilty (40).

In this book, Augustine certainly seems to teach that the bond of connection by which Adam’s sin is conveyed to his offspring is not mere descent, or heredity, or mere inclusion in him in a realistic sense as partakers of the same numerical nature, but concupiscence. Without concupiscence in the act of generation, the offspring would not be a partaker of Adam’s sin. This he had taught also previously, as, e.g., in the treatise On Original Sin, from which a few words may be profitably quoted as succinctly summing up the teaching of this book on the subject: “It is, then, manifest, that that must not be laid to the account of marriage, in the absence of which even marriage would still have existed… . Such, however, is the present condition of mortal men, that the connubial intercourse and lust are at the same time in action… . Hence it follows that infants, although incapable of sinning, are yet not born without the contagion of sin, … not, indeed, because of what is lawful, but on account of that which is unseemly: for, from what is lawful, nature is born; from what is unseemly, sin” (42).

The Treatise “On the Soul and its Origin.”

Towards the end of the same year (419), Augustine was led to take up again the vexed question of the origin of the soul. This he did not only in a new letter to Optatus,⁸¹ but also, moved by the zeal of the same monk, Renatus, who had formerly brought Optatus’ inquiries to his notice, in an elaborate treatise entitled On the Soul and its Origin, by way of reply to a rash adventure of a young man named Vincentius Victor, who blamed him for his uncertainty on such a subject and attempted to determine all the puzzles of the question, though, as Augustine insists, on assumptions that were partly Pelagian and partly worse.

Optatus had written in the hope that Augustine had heard by this time from Jerome, in reply to the treatise he had sent him on this subject. Augustine, in answering his letter, expresses his sorrow that he has not yet been thought by Jerome worthy of an answer, although five years had passed away since he wrote, but his continued hope that such an answer will in due time come. For himself, he confesses that he has not yet been able to see how the soul can contract sin from Adam and yet not itself be contracted from Adam; and he regrets that Optatus, although holding that God creates each soul for its birth, has not sent him the proofs on which he depends for that opinion, nor met its obvious difficulties. He rebukes Optatus for confounding the question of whether God makes the soul, with the entirely different one of how he makes it, whether ex propagine or sine propagine. No one doubts that God makes the soul, as no one doubts that He makes the body. But when we consider how He makes it, sobriety and vigilance become necessary lest we should unguardedly fall into the Pelagian heresy. Augustine defends his attitude of uncertainty, and enumerates the points as to which he has no doubt: viz., that the soul is spirit, not body; that it is rational or intellectual; that it is not of the nature of God, but is so far a mortal creature that it is capable of deterioration and of alienation from the life of God, and so far immortal that after this life it lives on in bliss or punishment forever; that it was not incarnated because of, or according to, preceding deserts acquired in a previous existence, yet that it is under the curse of sin which it derives from Adam, and therefore in all cases alike needs redemption in Christ.

The whole subject of the nature and origin of the soul, however, is most fully discussed in the four books which are gathered together under the common title of On the Soul and its Origin. Vincentius Victor was a young layman who had recently been converted from the Rogatian heresy. On being shown by his friend Peter, a presbyter, a small work of Augustine’s on the origin of the soul, he expressed surprise that so great a man could profess ignorance on a matter so intimate to his very being; and, receiving encouragement, he wrote a book for Peter, in which he attacked and tried to solve all the difficulties of the subject. Peter received the work with transports of delighted admiration. But Renatus, happening that way, looked upon it with distrust, and, finding that Augustine was spoken of in it with scant courtesy, felt it his duty to send him a copy of it. This he did in the summer of 419. It was probably not until late in the following autumn that Augustine found time to take up the matter. He wrote then to Renatus, to Peter, and two books to Victor himself; and it is these four books together which constitute the treatise that has come down to us.

The first book is a letter to Renatus, and is introduced by an expression of thanks to him for sending Victor’s book, and of kindly feeling towards and appreciation for the high qualities of Victor himself (1–3). Then Victor’s errors are pointed out,—as to the nature of the soul (4–9), including certain far-reaching corollaries that flow from these (10–15), and also as to the origin of the soul (16–30). The letter closes with some remarks on the danger of arguing from the silence of Scripture (31), on the self-contradictions of Victor (34), and on the errors that must be avoided in any theory of the origin of the soul that hopes to be acceptable. These errors are that souls become sinful by an alien original sin, that unbaptized infants need no salvation, that souls sinned in a previous state, and that they are condemned for sins which they have not committed, but would have committed had they lived longer.

The second book is a letter to Peter, warning him of the responsibility that rests on him, as Victor’s trusted friend and a clergyman, to correct Victor’s errors, and reproving him for the uninstructed delight he had taken in Victor’s crudities. It opens by asking Peter what was the occasion of the great joy which Victor’s book brought him? Could it be that he learned from it, for the first time, the old and primary truths it contained (2–3)? Or was it due to the new errors that it proclaimed,—seven of which he enumerates (4–16)? Then, after animadverting on the dilemma in which Victor stood, of either being forced to withdraw his violent assertion of creationism, or else of making God unjust in His dealings with new souls (17), he speaks of Victor’s unjustifiable dogmatism in the matter (18–21), and closes with severely solemn words to Peter on his responsibility in the premises (22–23).

In the third and fourth books, which are addressed to Victor, the polemic, of course, reaches its height. The third book is entirely taken up with pointing out to Victor, as a father to a son, the errors into which he had fallen, and which, in accordance with his professions of readiness for amendment, he ought to correct. Eleven are enumerated: 1. That the soul was made by God out of Himself (3–7); 2. That God will continuously create souls forever (8); 3. That the soul has desert of good before birth (9); 4. (contradictingly), That the soul has desert of evil before birth (10); 5. That the soul deserved to be sinful before any sin (11); 6. That unbaptized infants are saved (12); 7. That what God predestinates may not occur (13); 8. That Wisd. iv. 1 is spoken of infants (14); 9. That some of the mansions with the Father are outside of God’s kingdom (15–17); 10. That the sacrifice of Christ’s blood may be offered for the unbaptized (18); 11. That the unbaptized may attain at the resurrection even to the kingdom of heaven (19). The book closes by reminding Victor of his professions of readiness to correct his errors, and warning him against the obstinacy that makes the heretic (20–23). The fourth book deals with the more personal elements of the controversy, and discusses the points in which Victor had expressed dissent from Augustine. It opens with a statement of the two grounds of complaint that Victor had urged against Augustine; viz., that he refused to express a confident opinion as to the origin of the soul, and that he affirmed that the soul was not corporeal, but spirit (1–2). These two complaints are then taken up at length (2–16 and 17–37). To the first, Augustine replies that man’s knowledge is at best limited, and often most limited about the things nearest to him. We do not know the constitution of our bodies; and, above most others, this subject of the origin of the soul is one on which no one but God is a competent witness. Who remembers his birth? Who remembers what was before birth? But this is just one of the subjects on which God has not spoken unambiguously in the Scriptures. Would it not be better, then, for Victor to imitate Augustine’s cautious ignorance, than that Augustine should imitate Victor’s rash assertion of errors? That the soul is not corporeal, Augustine argues (18–35) from the Scriptures and from the phenomena of dreams; and then shows, in opposition to Victor’s trichotomy, that the Scriptures teach the identity of “soul” and “spirit” (36–37). The book closes with a renewed enumeration of Victor’s eleven errors (38), and a final admonition to his rashness (39).

It is pleasant to know that Augustine found, in this case also, that righteousness is the fruit of the faithful wounds of a friend. Victor accepted the rebuke, and professed his better instruction at the hands of his modest but resistless antagonist.

The Second Book of “Marriage and Concupiscence.”

The controversy now entered upon a new stage. Among the evicted bishops of Italy who refused to sign Zosimus’ Epistola Tractoria, Julian of Eclanum⁸² was easily the first, and at this point he appears as the champion of Pelagianism. It was a sad fate that arrayed this beloved son of an old friend against Augustine, just when there seemed to be reason to hope that the controversy was at an end and the victory won, and the plaudits of the world were greeting him as the saviour of the Church.⁸³ But the now fast-aging bishop was to find, that in this “very confident young man” he had yet to meet the most persistent and the most dangerous advocate of the new doctrines that had arisen. At an earlier period Julian had sent two letters to Zosimus, in which he attempted to approach Augustinian forms of speech as much as possible, his object being to gain standing ground in the Church for the Italian Pelagians. Now he appears as a Pelagian controversialist. In opposition to the book On Marriage and Concupiscence, which Augustine had sent Valerius, Julian published an extended work in four thick books addressed to Turbantius.⁸⁴ Extracts from the first of these books were sent by some one to Valerius, and were placed by him in the hands of Alypius, who was then in Italy, for transmission to Augustine. Meanwhile, a letter had been sent to Rome by Julian,⁸⁵ designed to strengthen the cause of Pelagianism there. A similar one also, written in the names of the eighteen Pelagianizing Italian bishops, was addressed to Rufus, bishop of Thessalonica and representative of the Roman see in that portion of the Eastern Empire which was regarded as ecclesiastically a part of the West, the purpose of which was to obtain the powerful support of this important magnate, and perhaps, also, a refuge from persecution within his jurisdiction. These two letters came into the hands of the new Pope, Boniface, who gave them also to Alypius for transmission to Augustine. Thus provided, Alypius returned to Africa.

The tactics of all these writings of Julian were essentially the same. He attempted not so much to defend Pelagiansim as to attack Augustinianism, and thus literally to carry the war into Africa. He insisted that the corruption of nature which Augustine taught was nothing else than Manicheism; that the sovereignty of grace, as taught by him, was only the attribution of “acceptance of persons” and partiality to God; and that his doctrine of predestination was mere fatalism. He accused the anti-Pelagians of denying the goodness of the nature that God had created, of the marriage that He had ordained, of the law that He had given, of the free will that He had implanted in man, as well as the perfection of His saints.⁸⁶ He insisted that this teaching also did dishonour to baptism itself which it professed so to honour, inasmuch as it asserted the continuance of concupiscence after baptism and thus taught that baptism does not take away sins, but only shaves them off as one shaves his beard, and leaves the roots whence the sins may grow anew and need cutting down again. He complained bitterly of the way in which Pelagianism had been condemned,—that bishops had been compelled to sign a definition of dogma, not in council assembled, but sitting at home; and he demanded a rehearing of the whole case before a lawful council, lest the doctrine of the Manicheans should be forced upon the acceptance of the world.

Augustine felt a strong desire to see the whole work of Julian against his book On Marriage and Concupiscence before he undertook a reply to the excerpts sent him by Valerius. But he did not feel justified in delaying obedience to that officer’s request; therefore he wrote at once two treatises. One of these was an answer to these excerpts, for the benefit of Valerius; it constitutes the second book of his On Marriage and Concupiscence. The other was a far more elaborate examination of the letters sent by Boniface, and bears the title, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians.

The purpose of the second book of On Marriage and Concupiscence, Augustine himself states, in its introductory sentences, to be “to reply to the taunts of his adversaries with all the truthfulness and scriptural authority he could command.” He begins (2) by identifying the source of the extracts forwarded to him by Valerius with Julian’s work against his first book, and then remarks upon the garbled form in which he is quoted in them (3-6), and passes on to state and refute Julian’s charge that the Catholics had turned Manicheans (7-9). At this point, the refutation of Julian begins in good earnest, and the method that Augustine proposes to use is stated; viz., to adduce the adverse statements, and refute them one by one (10). Beginning at the beginning, he quotes first the title of the paper sent him, which declares that it is directed against “those who condemn matrimony and ascribe its fruit to the Devil” (11). This certainly, says Augustine, does not describe him or the Catholics. The next twenty chapters (10-30), accordingly, following Julian’s order, labour to prove that marriage is good and ordained by God; but that its good includes fecundity indeed, but not concupiscence, which arose from sin and contracts sin. It is next argued, that the doctrine of original sin does not imply an evil origin for man (31-51). In the course of this argument, the following propositions are especially defended: that God makes offspring for good and bad alike, just as He sends the rain and sunshine on just and unjust (31-34); that God makes everything to be found in marriage except its flaw, concupiscence (35-40); that marriage is not the cause of original sin, but only the channel through which it is transmitted (41-47); and that to assert that evil cannot arise from what is good leaves us in the clutches of that very Manicheism which is so unjustly charged against the Catholics—for, if evil be not eternal, what else was there from which it could arise but something good (48-51)? In concluding, Augustine recapitulates, and argues, especially, that shameful concupiscence is of sin and the author of sin, and was not in paradise (52-54); that children are made by God, and only marred by the Devil (55); that Julian, in admitting that Christ died for infants, admits that they need salvation (56); that what the Devil makes in children is not a substance, but an injury to a substance (57-58); and that to suppose that concupiscence existed in any form in paradise introduces incongruities in our conception of life in that abode of primeval bliss (59-60).

The Treatise “Against Two Letters of the Pelagians.”

The long and important treatise, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, consists of four books. The first of these replies to the letter sent to Rome, and the other three to that sent to Thessalonica. After a short introduction, in which he thanks Boniface for his kindness and gives reasons why heretical writings should be answered (1-3), Augustine begins at once to rebut the calumnies which the letter before him brings against the Catholics (4-28). These are seven in number. 1. That the Catholics destroy free will. To this Augustine replies that none are “forced into sin by the necessity of their flesh” but all sin by free will, though no man can have a righteous will save by God’s grace. It is really the Pelagians, he argues, who destroy free will by exaggerating it (4-8). 2. That Augustine declares that such marriage as now exists is not of God (9). 3. That sexual desire and intercourse are made a device of the Devil, which is sheer Manicheism (10-11). 4. That the Old-Testament saints are said to have died in sin (12). 5. That Paul and the other apostles are asserted to have been polluted by lust all their days. Augustine’s answer to this includes a running commentary on Rom. vii. 7 sq., in which (correcting his older exegesis) he shows that Paul is giving here a transcript of his own experience as a typical Christian (13-24). 6. That Christ is said not to have been free from sin (25). 7. That baptism does not give complete remission of sins, but leaves roots from which they may again grow. To this Augustine replies that baptism does remit all sins, but leaves concupiscence, which, although not sin, is the source of sin (26-28). Next, the positive part of Julian’s letter is taken up, and his profession of faith against the Catholics examined (29-41). The seven affirmations that Julian makes here are designed as the obverse of the seven charges against the Catholics. He believed: i. That free will is in all by nature, and could not perish by Adam’s sin (29); 2. That marriage, as now existent, was ordained by God (30); 3. That sexual impulse and virility are from God (31-35); 4. That men are God’s work, and no one is forced to do good or evil unwillingly, but are assisted by grace to good and incited by the Devil to evil (36-38); 5. That the saints of the Old Testament were perfected in righteousness here, and so passed into eternal life (39); 6. That the grace of Christ (ambiguously meant) is necessary for all, and all children—even those of baptized parents—are to be baptized (40); 7. And that baptism gives full cleansing from all sins—to which Augustine pointedly asks, “What does it do for infants, then?” (41). The book concludes with an answer to Julian’s conclusion, in which he demands a general council and charges the Catholics with Manicheism.

The second, third, and fourth books deal with the letter to Rufus in a somewhat similar way. The second and third books are occupied with the calumnies brought against the Catholics, and the fourth with the claims made by the Pelagians. The second book begins by repelling the charge of Manicheism brought against the Catholics (1-4). The pointed remark is added, that the Pelagians cannot hope to escape condemnation merely because they are willing to condemn another heresy. It then defends (with less success) the Roman clergy against the charge of prevarication in their dealing with the Pelagians (5-8), and in the course of this all that can be said in defence of Zosimus’s wavering policy is said well and strongly. Next the charges against Catholic teaching are taken up and answered (9-16), especially the two important accusations that they maintain fate under the name of grace (9-12), and that they make God an “accepter of persons” (13-16). Augustine’s replies to these charges are in every way admirable. The charge of “fate” rests solely on the Catholic denial that grace is given according to preceding merits; but the Pelagians do not escape the same charge when they acknowledge that the “fates” of baptized and unbaptized infants do differ. It is, in truth, not a question of “fate,” but of gratuitous bounty; and “it is not the Catholics that assert fate under the name of grace, but the Pelagians that choose to call divine grace by the name of ‘fate’” (12). As to “acceptance of persons,” we must define what we mean by that. God certainly does not accept one’s “person” above another’s; He does not give to one rather than to another because He sees something to please Him in one rather than another: quite the opposite. He gives of His bounty to one while giving all their due to all, as in the parable (Matt. xx. 9 sq.). To ask why He does this, is to ask in vain: the apostle answers by not answering (Rom. ix.); and before the dumb infants, who are yet made to differ, all objection to God is dumb. From this point, the book becomes an examination of the Pelagian doctrine of prevenient merit (17-23), and the conclusion is reached that God gives all by grace, from the beginning to the end of every process of doing good: i. He commands the good; 2. He gives the desire to do it; and, 3. He gives the power to do it; and all, of His gratuitous mercy.

The third book continues the discussion of the calumnies of the Pelagians against the Catholics, and enumerates and answers six of them: viz., that the Catholics teach, i, that the Old-Testament law was given, not to justify the obedient, but to serve as cause of greater sin (2-3); 2, that baptism does not give entire remission of sins, but the baptized are partly God’s and partly the Devil’s (4-5); 3, that the Holy Ghost did not assist virtue in the Old Testament (6-13); 4, that the Bible saints were not holy, but only less wicked than others (14-15); 5, that Christ was a sinner by necessity of His flesh (doubtless Julian’s inference from the doctrine of race sin) (16); 6, that men will begin to fulfil God’s commandments only after the resurrection (17-23). Augustine shows that at the basis of all these calumnies lies either misapprehension or misrepresentation. In concluding the book, he enumerates the three chief points in the Pelagian heresy, with the five claims growing out of them of which they most boasted; and then elucidates the mutual relations of the three parties, Catholics, Pelagians, and Manicheans, with reference to these points, showing that the Catholics stand asunder from both the others and condemn both (24-27).

This conclusion is really a preparation for the fourth book, which takes up these five Pelagian claims, and, after showing the Catholic position on them all in brief (1-3), discusses them in turn (4-19): viz., the praise of the creature (4-8), the praise of marriage (9), the praise of the law (10-11), the praise of free will (12-16), and the praise of the saints (17-18). At the end, Augustine calls on the Pelagians to cease to oppose the Manicheans only to fall into heresy as bad as theirs (19); and then in reply to their accusation that the Catholics were proclaiming novel doctrine, he adduces the testimony of Cyprian and Ambrose, both of whom had received Pelagius’ praise, on each of the three main points of Pelagianism (20-32),⁸⁷ and closes with the declaration that the “impious and foolish doctrine,” as they called it, of the Catholics, is immemorial truth (33), and with a denial of the right of the Pelagians to ask for a general council to condemn them (34). All heresies do not need an ecumenical synod for their condemnation; usually it is best to stamp them out locally, and not to allow what may be confined to a corner to disturb the whole world.

The Treatise “Against Julian.”

These books were written late in 420, or early in 421, and Alypius appears to have conveyed them to Italy during the latter year. Before its close, Augustine, having obtained and read the whole of Julian’s attack on the first book of his work On Marriage and Concupiscence, wrote out a complete answer to it.⁸⁸ He was the more anxious to complete this task, on perceiving that the extracts sent by Valerius were not only all from the first book of Julian’s treatise. but were somewhat altered in the extracting. The resulting work, Against Julian, one of the longest that Augustine wrote in the whole course of the Pelagian controversy, shows its author at his best. According to Cardinal Noris’s judgment, he appears in it “almost divine,” and Augustine himself clearly set great store by it.

In the first book of this noble treatise, after professing his continued love for Julian, “whom he was unable not to love, whatever he [Julian] should say against him” (35), he undertakes to show that in affixing the opprobrious name of Manicheans on those who assert original sin, Julian is incriminating many of the most famous fathers, both of the Latin and Greek Churches. In proof of this, he makes appropriate quotations from Irenæus, Cyprian, Recticius, Olympius, Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzenus, Basil, John of Constantinople.⁸⁹ Then he argues, that, so far from the Catholics falling into Manichean heresy, Julian himself plays into the hands of the Manicheans in their strife against the Catholics, by many unguarded statements, such as, e.g., when he says that an evil thing cannot arise from what is good, that the work of the Devil cannot be suffered to be diffused by means of a work of God, that a root of evil cannot be inserted within a gift of God, and the like.

The second book advances to greater detail, and, in order to test them by the voice of antiquity, adduces the five great arguments which the Pelagians urged against the Catholics. These arguments are stated as follows (2). “For you say, ‘That we, by asserting original sin, affirm that the Devil is the maker of infants, condemn marriage, deny that all sins are remitted in baptism, accuse God of the guilt of sin, and produce despair of perfection.’ You contend that all these follow as consequences, if we believe that infants are born bound by the sin of the first man and are therefore under the Devil unless they are born again in Christ. For, ‘It is the Devil that creates,’ you say, ‘if they are created from that wound which the Devil inflicted on the human nature that was made at first.’ ‘And marriage is condemned,’ you say, ‘if it is to be believed to have something about it whence it produces those worthy of condemnation.’ ‘And all sins are not remitted in baptism,’ you say, ‘if there remains any evil in baptized couples whence evil offspring are produced.’ ‘And how is God,’ you ask, ‘not unjust, if He, while remitting their own sins to baptized persons, yet condemns their offspring, inasmuch as, although it is created by Him, it yet ignorantly and involuntarily contracts the sins of others from those very parents to whom they are remitted?’ ‘Nor can men believe,’ you add, ‘that virtue—to which corruption is to be understood to be contrary—can be perfected, if they cannot believe that it can destroy the inbred vices, although, no doubt, these can scarcely be considered vices, since he does not sin who is unable to be other than he was created.’” These arguments are then tested, one by one, by the authority of the earlier teachers who were appealed to in the first book, and shown to be condemned by them.

The remaining four books follow Julian’s four books, argument by argument, refuting him in detail. In the third book it is urged that although God is good and made man good and instituted marriage, which is, therefore, good, nevertheless concupiscence is evil and in it the flesh lusts against the spirit. Although chaste spouses use this evil well, continent believers do better in not using it at all. It is pointed out, how far all this is from the madness of the Manicheans, who dream of matter as essentially evil and co-eternal with God; and it is shown that evil concupiscence sprang from Adam’s disobedience, and, being transmitted to us, can be removed only by Christ. It is shown, also, that Julian himself confesses lust to be evil, inasmuch as he speaks of remedies against it, wishes it to be bridled and speaks of the continent waging a glorious warfare. The fourth book follows the second book of Julian’s work and makes two chief contentions: that unbelievers have no true virtues, and that even the heathen recognize concupiscence as evil. It also argues that grace is not given according to merit, and yet is not to be confounded with fate; and explains the text that asserts that ‘God wishes all men to be saved,’ in the sense that ‘all men’ means ‘all that are to be saved,’ since none are saved except by His will.⁹⁰ The fifth book, in like manner, follows Julian’s third book, and treats of such subjects as these: that it is due to sin that any infants are lost. that shame arose in our first parents through sin; that sin can well be the punishment of preceding sin; that concupiscence is always evil, even in those who do not assent to it; that true marriage may exist without intercourse; that the “flesh” of Christ differs from the “sinful flesh” of other men; and the like. In the sixth book, Julian’s fourth book is followed, and original sin is proved from the baptism of infants, the teaching of the apostles, and the rites of exorcism and exsufflation incorporated in the form of baptism. Then, by the help of the illustration drawn from the olive and the oleaster, it is explained how Christian parents can produce unregenerate offspring; and the originally voluntary character of sin is asserted, even though it now comes by inheritance.

The “Enchiridion.”

After the completion of this important work, there succeeded a lull in the controversy of some years’ duration; and the calm refutation of Pelagianism and exposition of Christian grace which Augustine gave in his Enchiridion,⁹¹ might well have seemed to him his closing word on this all-absorbing subject. This handbook On Faith, Hope, and Charity was written at the instance of one Laurentius, who is not otherwise known, and certainly later than the opening of A.D. 421. In it Augustine treats briefly but pretty carefully, as he himself says, “the manner in which God is to be worshipped, which knowledge divine Scripture defines to be the true wisdom of man.”⁹² One of the questions which Laurentius had asked was not only “what ought to be man’s chief end in life,” but also “what he ought, in view of the various heresies, chiefly to avoid” (4). Accordingly, in the first part of the treatise—that consecrated to the treatment of faith, in which he unfolds the proper objects of faith, that is, what we are to believe—Augustine briefly refutes the tenets of the leading heresies, inclusive of Pelagianism. This is not done formally; he notes rather the impossibility of giving a real defence of Christianity against these assaults in a practical handbook (6): but that is said which he deemed important in order to keep the heart rightly Christian in the midst of the evil thoughts of men.

On creating man, he explains, God placed him in that protected nook of life which we call Eden (25). When man lost God’s favour by sin, all his descendants, being the offspring of carnal lust, were tainted with an original sin (26), and thus the whole mass of the human race came under condemnation and lay steeped and wallowing in misery (27). Whence it is a matter of course that they cannot be restored by the merit of any good works of their own (30); for by an evil use of free will man has destroyed both himself and it, and a dead man cannot restore himself to life (30). Man cannot, therefore, arrogate to himself even the merit of his own faith, “and we shall be made truly free only when God fashions us—that is, forms and creates us anew, not as men—for He has done that already—but as good men” (31). The whole work belongs to God, “who both makes the will of men righteous and thus prepares it for assistance, and assists it when prepared” (32). As the whole human race lies under just condemnation, there is need of a Mediator (33), who, being made sin for us, reconciles us to God (41); and this is symbolized in the great sacrament of baptism (42), which is given to adults and infants alike (43 and 52). “The whole human race was originally and, as we may say, radically condemned” on account of the one sin of Adam, and this sin “cannot be pardoned or blotted out except through the one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who alone has had power to be so born as not to need a second birth” (48). Who are to be interested in this salvation it is the prerogative of God to determine, who “changes the evil will of men whichever, whenever, and wheresoever He chooses” (98), not, therefore, according to any works of their own foreseen by Him, but according to His own good pleasure. “The whole human race was condemned in its rebellious head by a divine judgment so just that, if not a single member of the race had been redeemed, no one could justly have questioned the justice of God; and it was right that those who are redeemed should be redeemed in such a way as to show, by the greater number who are unredeemed and left in their just condemnation, what the whole race deserved, and whither the deserved judgment of God would lead even the redeemed, did not His undeserved mercy interpose, so that every mouth might be stopped of those who wish to glory in their own merits, and that he that glorieth might glory in the Lord” (99). Thus Augustine taught on the great subjects of sin and grace when his mind was measurably withdrawn from controversy and intent on the creation of right frames in the hearts of men.

The Treatise “On Grace and Free Will.”

Augustine had not yet, however, given the world all he had in treasure for it. And we can rejoice in the chance that five or six years afterward drew from him a renewed discussion of some of the more important aspects of the doctrine of grace. The circumstances which brought this about are sufficiently interesting in themselves, and open to us an unwonted view into the monastic life of the times. There was an important monastery at Adrumetum, the metropolitan city of the province of Byzacium.⁹³ From this a monk named Florus went out on a journey of charity to his native country of Uzalis about 426. On the journey he met with Augustine’s letter to Sixtus,⁹⁴ in which the doctrines of gratuitous and prevenient grace were expounded. He was much delighted with it, and, procuring a copy, sent it back to his monastery for the edification of his brethren, while he himself went on to Carthage. At the monastery, the letter created great disturbance. Without the knowledge of the abbot, Valentinus, it was read aloud to the monks, many of whom were unskilled in theological questions. Some five or more of them were greatly offended, and declared that free will was destroyed by it. A secret strife arose among the brethren, some taking extreme grounds on both sides. Of all this, Valentinus remained ignorant until the return of Florus, who was attacked as the author of all the trouble, and who felt it his duty to inform the abbot of the state of affairs. Valentinus applied first to the bishop, Evodius, for such instruction as would make Augustine’s letter clear to the most simple. Evodius replied, praising their zeal and deprecating their contentiousness, and explaining that Adam had full free will, but that it is now wounded and weak, and Christ’s mission was as a physician to cure and recuperate it. “Let them read,” is his prescription, “the words of God’s elders… . And when they do not understand, let them not quickly reprehend, but pray to understand.” This did not, however, cure the malcontents; and the holy presbyter Sabrinus was appealed to, and sent a book with clear interpretations. But neither was this satisfactory; and Valentinus, at last, reluctantly consented that Augustine himself should be consulted—fearing, he says, lest by making inquiries he should seem to waver about the truth.

Two members of the community were consequently permitted to journey to Hippo, though they took with them no introduction and no commendation from their abbot. Augustine, nevertheless, received them without hesitation, as they bore themselves with too great simplicity to allow him to suspect them of deception. Now we get a glimpse of life in the great bishop’s monastic home. The monks told their story, and were listened to with courtesy and instructed with patience. As they were anxious to return home before Easter, they received a letter for Valentinus⁹⁵ in which Augustine briefly explains the nature of the misapprehension that had arisen, and points out that both grace and free will must be defended, and neither so exaggerated as to deny the other. The letter to Sixtus, he explains, was written against the Pelagians, who assert that grace is given according to merit, and briefly expounds the true doctrine of grace as necessarily gratuitous and therefore prevenient. When the monks were on the point of starting home they were joined by a third companion from Adrumetum, and were led to prolong their visit. This gave Augustine the opportunity he craved for their fuller instruction. He read with them and explained to them not only his letter to Sixtus, from which the strife had risen, but also much of the chief literature of the Pelagian controversy,⁹⁶ copies of which also were made for them to take home with them. And when they were ready to go, he sent by them another and longer letter to Valentinus, and placed in their hands a treatise composed for their especial use, which, moreover, he took the trouble to explain to them. This longer letter is essentially an exhortation “to turn aside neither to the right hand nor to the left,”—neither to the left hand of the Pelagian error of upholding free will in such a manner as to deny grace, nor to the right hand of the equal error of so upholding grace as if we might yield ourselves to evil with impunity. Both grace and free will are to be proclaimed; and it is true both that grace is not given to merits, and that we are to be judged at the last day according to our works. While the treatise which Augustine composed for a fuller exposition of these doctrines is the important work On Grace and Free Will.

After a brief introduction, explaining the occasion of his writing, and exhorting the monks to humility and teachableness before God’s revelations (1), Augustine begins this treatise by asserting and proving the two propositions that the Scriptures clearly teach that man has free will (2-5), and, as clearly, the necessity of grace for his doing any good (6-9). He next examines the passages which the Pelagians assert to teach that we must first turn to God, before He visits us with His grace (10-11). And then he undertakes to show that grace is not given to merit (12 sq.), appealing especially to Paul’s teaching and example, and replying to the assertion that forgiveness is the only grace that is not given according to our merits (15-18), and to the query, “How can eternal life be both of grace and of reward?” (19-21). The nature of grace, what it is, is next explained (22 sq.). It is not the law, which gives only knowledge of sin (22-24); nor nature, which would render Christ’s death needless (25); nor mere forgiveness of sins, as the Lord’s Prayer (which should be read with Cyprian’s comments on it) is enough to show (26). Nor will it do to say that it is given to the merit of a good will, thus distinguishing the good work which is of grace from the good will which precedes grace (27-30); for the Scriptures oppose this, and our prayers for others prove that we expect God to be the first mover, as indeed both Scripture and experience prove that He is. It is next shown that both free will and grace are concerned in the heart’s conversion (31-32), and that love is the spring of all good in man (33-40), which, however, we have only because God first loved us (38), and which is certainly greater than knowledge, although the Pelagians admit only the latter to be from God (40). God’s sovereign government of men’s wills is then proved from Scripture (41-43), and the wholly gratuitous character of grace is illustrated (44), while the only possible theodicy is found in the certainty that the Lord of all the earth will do right. For, though no one knows why He takes one and leaves another, we all know that He hardens judicially and saves graciously,—that He hardens none who do not deserve hardening, but none that He saves deserve to be saved (45). The treatise closes with an exhortation to its prayerful and repeated study (46).

The Treatise “On Rebuke and Grace.”

The one request that Augustine made, on sending the treatise On Grace and Free-Will to Valentinus, was that the monk Florus, through whom the controversy had arisen, should be sent to him. He wished to converse with him and learn whether he had been misunderstood, or had himself misunderstood Augustine. In due time Florus arrived at Hippo, bringing a letter⁹⁷ from Valentinus which thanked Augustine for his “sweet” and “healing” instruction, and introduced Florus as one whose true faith could be confided in. It is very clear, both from Valentinus’ letter and from the hints that Augustine gives, that his loving dealing with the monks had borne admirable fruit: “none were cast down for the worse, some were built up for the better.”⁹⁸ But it was reported to him that some one at the monastery had objected, to the doctrine he had taught them, that “no man, then, ought to be rebuked for not keeping God’s commandments; but only God should be besought that he might keep them.”⁹⁹ In other words, it was said that if all good was, in the last resort, from God’s grace, man ought not to be blamed for not doing what he could not do, but God ought to be besought to do for man what He alone could do: we ought, in short, to apply to the source of power. This occasioned the composition of yet another treatise, that entitled On Rebuke and Grace,¹⁰⁰ the object of which was to explain the relations of grace to human conduct, and especially to make it plain that the sovereignty of God’s grace does not supersede our duty to ourselves or to our fellow-men.

The treatise begins by thanking Valentinus for his letter and for sending Florus (whom Augustine finds well instructed in the truth), praising God for the good effect of the previous book, and recommending its continued study. This is followed by a brief exposition of the catholic faith concerning grace, free-will and the law (1-2). The general proposition that is defended is that the gratuitous sovereignty of God’s grace does not supersede human means for obtaining and continuing it (3 sq.). This is shown by the apostle’s example, who used all human means for the prosecution of his work and yet confessed that it was “God that gave the increase” (3). Objections are then answered (4 sq.),—especially the great one that “it is not my fault if I do not do what I have not received grace for doing” (6). To this Augustine replies (7-10) that we deserve rebuke for our very unwillingness to be rebuked, that on the same reasoning the prescription of the law and the preaching of the gospel would be useless, that the apostle’s example opposes such a position, and that our consciousness witnesses that we deserve rebuke for not persevering in the right way. From this point an important discussion arises, in this interest, of the gift of perseverance (11-19) and of God’s election (20-24). It is taught that no one is saved who does not persevere, and that all who are predestinated or “called according to God’s purpose” (Augustine’s phrase for what we should name “effectively called”) will persevere, and yet that we co-operate by our will in all good deeds and deserve rebuke if we do not. Whether Adam received the gift of perseverance, and, in general, what the difference is between the grace given to him (which was that grace by which he was able to stand) and that now given to God’s children (which is that grace by which we are made actually to stand), are next discussed (26-38), with the result of showing the superior greatness of the gifts of grace now to those given before the fall. The necessity of God’s mercy at all times and our constant dependence on it, are next vigorously asserted (39-42): even in the day of judgment, it is declared, if we are not judged “with mercy” we cannot be saved (41). The treatise is brought to an end by a concluding application of the whole discussion to the special matter in hand, rebuke (43-49). Seeing that rebuke is one of God’s means of working out his gracious purposes, it cannot be inconsistent with the sovereignty of that grace; for, of course, God predestinates the means with the end (43). Nor can we know, in our ignorance, whether our rebuke is, in any particular case, to be the means of amendment or the ground of greater condemnation. How dare we, then, withhold it? Let it be, however, graduated to the fault, and let us always remember its purpose (46-48). Above all, let us not venture to hold it back, lest we withhold from our brother the means of his recovery, and, as well, disobey the command of God (49).

The Letter to Vitalis.

It was not long afterwards (about 427) that Augustine was called upon to attempt to reclaim an erring Carthaginian friend, Vitalis by name, who had been brought to trial on the charge of teaching that the beginning of faith was not the gift of God but the act of man’s own free will (ex propria voluntatis). This was essentially the semi-Pelagian position which was subsequently to make so large a figure in history; and Augustine treats it now as necessarily implying the basal idea of Pelagianism.

In the important letter which he sent to Vitalis,¹⁰¹ Augustine first argues that his position is inconsistent with the prayers of the church. He, Augustine, prays that Vitalis may come to the true faith; but does not this prayer ascribe the origination of right faith to God? The Church so prays for all men. The priest at the altar exhorts the people to pray God for unbelievers, that He may convert them to the faith; for catechumens, that He may breathe into them a desire for regeneration; for the faithful, that by His aid they may persevere in what they have begun. Will Vitalis refuse to obey these exhortations, because, forsooth, faith is of free will and not of God’s gift? Nay, will a Carthaginian scholar array himself against Cyprian’s exposition of the Lord’s prayer? For certainly Cyprian teaches that we are to ask of God what Vitalis says is to be had of ourselves. We may go farther. It is not Cyprian but Paul who says, “Let us pray to God that we do no evil” (2 Cor. xiii. 7); it is the Psalmist who says, “The steps of man are directed by God” (Ps. xxxvi. 23). “If we wish to defend free will,” Augustine urges, “let us not strive against that by which it is made free. For he who strives against grace, by which the will is made free for refusing evil and doing good, wishes his will to remain captive. Tell us, I beg you, how the apostle can say, ‘We give thanks to the Father who made us fit to have our lot with the saints in light, who delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love’ (Col. i. 12, 13), if not He, but itself, frees our choice? It is, then, a false rendering of thanks to God, as if He does what He does not do; and he has erred who has said that ‘He makes us fit, etc.’ ‘The grace of God,’ therefore, does not consist in the nature of free will, and in law and teaching, as the Pelagian perversity dreams; but it is given for each single act by His will, concerning whom it is written,”—quoting Ps. lxvii. 10.

About the middle of the letter, Augustine lays down twelve propositions against the Pelagians, which are important as communicating to us what, at the end of the controversy, he considered the chief points in dispute. “Since, therefore,” he writes, “we are catholic Christians: 1. We know that new-born children have not yet done anything in their own lives, good or evil, neither have they come into the miseries of this life according to the deserts of some previous life, which none of them can have had in their own persons; and yet, because they are born carnally after Adam, they contract the contagion of ancient death by the first birth, and are not freed from the punishment of eternal death (which is contracted by a just condemnation, passing over from one to all), except they are by grace born again in Christ. 2. We know that the grace of God is given neither to children nor to adults according to our deserts. 3. We know that it is given to adults for each several act. 4. We know that it is not given to all men; and to those to whom it is given, it is not only not given according to the merits of works, but it is not even given to them according to the merits of their will; and this is especially apparent in children. 5. We know that to those to whom it is given, it is given by the gratuitous mercy of God. 6. We know that to those to whom it is not given, it is not given by the just judgment of God. 7. We know that we shall all stand before the tribunal of Christ, and each shall receive according to what he has done through the body,—not according to what he would have done, had he lived longer,—whether good or evil. 8. We know that even children are to receive according to what they have done through the body, whether good or evil. But according to what ‘they have done’ not by their own act, but by the act of those by whose responses for them they are said both to renounce the Devil and to believe in God, wherefore they are counted among the number of the faithful and have part in the statement of the Lord when He says, ‘Whosoever shall believe and be baptized, shall be saved.’ Therefore also, to those who do not receive this sacrament, belongs what follows, ‘But whosoever shall not have believed, shall be damned’ (Mark xvi. 16). Whence these too, as I have said, if they die in that early age, are judged, of course, according to what they have done through the body, i.e., in the time in which they were in the body, when they believe or do not believe by the heart and mouth of their sponsors, when they are baptized or not baptized, when they eat or do not eat the flesh of Christ, when they drink or do not drink His blood,—according to those things, then, which they have done through the body, not according to those which, had they lived longer, they would have done. 9. We know that blessed are the dead that die in the Lord; and that what they would have done had they lived longer is not imputed to them. 10. We know that those that believe, with their own heart, in the Lord, do so by their own free will and choice. 11. We know that we who already believe act with right faith towards those who do not wish to believe, when we pray to God that they may wish it. 12. We know that for those who have believed out of this number, we both ought and are rightly and truly accustomed to return thanks to God, as for his benefits.”

Certainly such a body of propositions commends their author to us as Christian both in head and heart: they are admirable in every respect; and even in the matter of the salvation of infants, where he had not yet seen the light of truth, he expresses himself in a way as engaging in its hearty faith in God’s goodness as it is honorable in its loyalty to what he believed to be truth and justice. Here his doctrine of the Church ran athwart and clouded his view of the reach of grace; but we seem to see between the lines the promise of the brighter dawn of truth that was yet to come. The rest of the epistle is occupied with an exposition of these propositions, which ranks with the richest passages of the anti-Pelagian writings, and which breathes everywhere a yearning for his correspondent which, we cannot help hoping, proved salutary to his faith.

The Treatise “On Heresies.”

It is not without significance, that the error of Vitalis took a semi-Pelagian form. Pure Pelagianism was by this time no longer a living issue. Augustine was himself, no doubt, not yet done with it. The second book of his treatise On Marriage and Concupiscence, which seems to have been taken to Italy by Alypius in 421, received at once the attention of Julian and was elaborately answered by him during that same year, in eight books addressed to one of his fellow-recusants named Florus. But Julian was now in Cilicia, and his book was slow in working its way westward. It was found at Rome by Alypius, apparently in 427 or 428, and he at once set about transcribing it for his friend’s use. An opportunity arising to send it to Africa before it was finished, he forwarded to Augustine the five books that were ready, with an urgent request that they should receive his immediate attention, and a promise to send the other three as soon as possible. Augustine gives an account of the progress of his reply to them in a letter written to Quodvultdeus, apparently in 428.¹⁰² This deacon was urging Augustine to give the Church a succinct account of all heresies; and Augustine excuses himself from immediately undertaking that task by the press of work on his hands. He was writing his Retractations, and had already finished two books of them, in which he had dealt with two hundred and thirty-two of his works. His letters and homilies remained to be examined, and he had given the necessary reading to many of the letters. He was engaged also, he tells his correspondent, on a reply to the eight books of Julian’s new work. Working night and day, he had already completed his response to the first three of Julian’s books and had begun on the fourth while still expecting the arrival of the last three, which Alypius had promised to send. If he had completed the answer to the five books of Julian which he already had in hand before the other three reached him, he might begin the work which Quodvultdeus so earnestly desired him to undertake. In due time, whatever may have been the trials and labors that needed first to be met, the desired treatise On Heresies was written (about 428), and the eighty-eighth chapter of it gives us a welcome compressed account of the Pelagian heresy, which may be accepted as the obverse of the account of catholic truth given in the letter to Vitalis.

“To the grace of God, by which we have been predestinated unto the adoption of sons by Jesus Christ unto himself (Eph. i. 5), and by which we are delivered from the power of darkness so as to believe in Him and be translated into His kingdom (Col. i. 13) (wherefore He says, ‘No man comes to Me, except it be given him of My Father’ [John vi. 66]), and by which love is shed abroad in our hearts (Rom. v. 5), so that faith may work by love,” the Pelagians, he tells us, “are to such an extent inimical that they believe that man is able, without it, to keep all the Divine commandments—whereas, if this were true, it would clearly be an empty thing for the Lord to say, ‘Without Me ye can do nothing’ (John xv. 5).” “When Pelagius,” he adds, “was at length accused by the brethren, because he attributed nothing to the assistance of God’s grace towards the keeping of His commandments, he yielded to their rebuke so far as, not indeed to place this grace above free will, but at least to use faithless cunning in subordinating it, saying that it was given to men for this purpose, viz., that they might be able more easily to fulfil by grace what they were commanded to do by free will. By saying, ‘that they might be able more easily,’ he, of course, wished it to be believed that, although with more difficulty, nevertheless men were able without Divine grace to perform the Divine commands. But they say that the grace of God, without which we can do nothing good, does not exist except in free will, which without any preceding merits our nature received from Him; and that He adds His aid only that by His law and teaching we may learn what we ought to do, but not that by the gift of His Spirit we may do what we have learned ought to be done. Accordingly, they allow that knowledge, by which ignorance is banished, is divinely given to us, but deny that love, by which we may live a pious life, is given; so that, forsooth, while knowledge, which without love puffeth up, is the gift of God, love itself, which edifieth so that knowledge may not puff up, is not the gift of God (1 Cor. viii. 11). They also destroy the prayers which the Church offers, whether for those that are unbelieving and resist God’s teaching, that they may be converted to God; or for the faithful, that faith may be increased in them and they may persevere in it. For they contend that men do not receive these things from Him but we have them from ourselves, saying that the grace of God by which we are freed from impiety is given according to our merits. Pelagius was, no doubt, compelled to condemn this by his fear of being condemned by the episcopal judgment in Palestine; but he is found to teach it still in his later writings. They also go so far as to say that the life of the righteous in this world is without sin, and the Church of Christ is perfected by them in this mortality to the point of being entirely without spot or wrinkle (Eph. v. 27); as if it were not the Church of Christ, that, in the whole world, cries to God, ‘Forgive us our debts.’ They also deny that children, who are carnally born after Adam, contract the contagion of ancient death from their first birth. For they assert that they are so born without any bond of original sin, that there is absolutely nothing that ought to be remitted to them in the second birth; yet they are to be baptized, but only that, adopted in regeneration, they may be admitted to the kingdom of God, and thus be translated from good into better,—not that they may be washed by that renovation from any evil of the old bond. For although they be not baptized, they promise to them, outside the kingdom of God indeed, but nevertheless, a certain eternal and blessed life of their own. They also say that Adam himself, even had he not sinned, would have died in the body, and that this death would not have come as a penalty to a fault, but as a condition of nature. Certain other things also are objected to them, but these are the chief, and moreover either all, or nearly all, the others may be understood to depend on these.”

The Treatise “On the Predestination of the Saints.”

The composition of the work On Heresies was not, however, the only interruption which postponed the completion of the second elaborate work against Julian. It was in the providence of God that the later energies of this great leader in the battle for grace should be expended in dealing with the subtler forms of error, as exhibited in semi-Pelagianism. We have seen his attention being already called to modifications of Pelagianism of this sort. And now information as to the rise of this new form of the heresy at Marseilles and elsewhere in Southern Gaul was conveyed to him along with entreaties that, as “faith’s great patron,” he would give his aid towards meeting it, by two laymen with whom he had already had correspondence,—Prosper and Hilary.¹⁰³

They pointed out¹⁰⁴ the difference between the new party and thoroughgoing Pelagianism; but, at the same time, the essentially Pelagianizing character of its formative elements. Its representatives were ready, as a rule, to admit that all men were lost in Adam, and that no one could recover himself by his own free will but all needed God’s grace for salvation. But they objected to the doctrines of prevenient and of irresistible grace; and they asserted that man could initiate the process of salvation by turning first to God, and that all men could resist God’s grace and no grace could be given which they could not reject; and especially they denied that the gifts of grace came irrespective of merits, actual or foreseen. They affirmed that what Augustine taught as to the calling of God’s elect according to His own purpose was tantamount to fatalism, was contrary to the teaching of the fathers and the true Church doctrine, and, even if true, should not be preached, because of its tendency to drive men into indifference or despair. Hence, Prosper especially desired Augustine to point out the dangerous nature of these views, and to show that prevenient and co-operating grace is not inconsistent with free will, that God’s predestination is not founded on foresight of receptivity in its objects, and that the doctrines of grace may be preached without danger to souls.

Augustine’s answer to these appeals was a work in two books, On the Predestination of the Saints, the second book of which is usually known under the separate title of The Gift of Perseverance.

The former book begins with a careful discrimination of the position of his new opponents. They have made a right beginning in that they believe in original sin and acknowledge that none are saved from it save by Christ, and that God’s grace leads men’s wills, and without grace no one can suffice for good deeds. These things will furnish a good starting-point for their progress to an acceptance of predestination also (1–2). The first question that needs discussion in such circumstances is, whether God gives the very beginnings of faith (3 sq.). They admit that what Augustine had previously urged suffices to prove that faith is the gift of God so far as that the increase of faith is given by Him; but they deny that it will prove that the beginning of faith may not be understood to be man’s, to which, then, God adds all other gifts (compare 43). Augustine insists that this contention is no other than a repetition of the Pelagian assertion of grace according to merit (3), that it is opposed to Scripture (4–5), and that it begets arrogant boasting in ourselves (6). He replies to the charge that he had himself once held this view, by confessing it, and explaining that he was converted from it by 1 Cor. iv. 7, as applied by Cyprian (7–8); and he then expounds that verse as containing in its narrow compass a sufficient answer to the present theories (9–11). He answers, further, the objection that the apostle distinguishes faith from works, and works alone are meant in such passages, by pointing to John vi. 28, and similar statements in Paul (12–16). Then he answers the objection that he himself had previously taught that God acted on foresight of faith, by showing that he was misunderstood (17–18). He next shows that no objection lies against predestination that does not lie with equal force against grace (19–22),—since predestination is nothing but God’s foreknowledge of and preparation for grace, and all questions of sovereignty and the like belong to grace. Did God not know to whom He was going to give faith (19)? Or did He promise the results of faith, works, without promising the faith without which, as going before, the works were impossible? Would not this place God’s fulfilment of His promise out of His power, and make it depend on man (20)? Why are men more willing to trust in their weakness than in God’s strength? Do they count God’s promises more uncertain than their own performance (22)? He next proves the sovereignty of grace, and of predestination which is but the preparation for grace, by the striking examples of infants, and, above all, of the human nature of Christ (23–31), and then speaks of the twofold calling, one external and one “according to purpose,”—the latter of which is efficacious and sovereign (32–37). In closing, the semi-Pelagian position is carefully defined and refuted as opposed, alike with the grosser Pelagianism, to the Scriptures of both Testaments (38–42).

The Treatise “On the Gift of Perseverance.”

The purpose of the second book, which has come down to us under the separate title of On the Gift of Perseverance, is to show that that perseverance which endures to the end is as much of God as the beginning of faith, and that no man who has been “called according to God’s purpose” and has received this gift, can fall from grace and be lost.

The first half of the treatise is devoted to this theme (1–33). It begins by distinguishing between temporary perseverance which endures for a time, and that perseverance which continues to the end (1), and by affirming that the latter is certainly a gift of God’s grace. and is, therefore, asked from God: which would otherwise be but a mocking petition (2-3). This, the Lord’s Prayer itself might teach us, as under Cyprian’s exposition it does teach us,—each petition being capable of being read as a prayer for perseverance (4-9). Of course, moreover, it cannot be lost; otherwise it would not be “to the end.” If man forsakes God, of course it is he that does it; and he is doubtless under continual temptation to do so. But if man abides with God, it is God who secures that, and God is equally able to keep one when drawn to Him, as He is to draw him to Him (10-15). He argues anew at this point, that grace is not according to merit but always in mercy; and explains and illustrates the unsearchable ways of God in His sovereign but merciful dealing with men (16-25). He closes this part of the treatise with a defence of himself against adverse quotations from his early work on Free Will, which he has already corrected in his Retractations.

The second half of the book discusses the objections that were being urged against the preaching of predestination (34-62), as if it opposed and enervated the preaching of the Gospel. He replies that Paul and the apostles, and Cyprian and the fathers, preached both together; that the same objections will lie against the preaching of God’s foreknowledge and grace itself, and, indeed, against preaching any of the virtues, as, e.g., obedience, while declaring them God’s gifts. He meets the objections in detail, and shows that such preaching is food to the soul and must not be withheld from men; but he explains that it must be given gently, wisely, and prayerfully. The whole treatise ends with an appeal to the prayers of the Church as testifying that all good is from God (63-65), and to the great example of unmerited grace and sovereign predestination in the choice of one human nature without preceding merit, to be united in one person with the Eternal Word,—an illustration of his theme of the gratuitous grace of God which he is never tired of adducing (66-67).

The “Unfinished Work” against Julian.

These books were written in 428-429, and after their completion the unfinished work against Julian was resumed. Alypius had sent the remaining three books, and Augustine slowly toiled on to the end of his reply to the sixth book. But he was to be interrupted once more, and this time by the most serious of all interruptions. On the 28th of August, 430, while the Vandals were thundering at the gates of Hippo, he turned his face away from the strifes of earth—whether theological or secular—and full of faith and of good works entered into rest with the Lord whom he loved. The last work against Julian was already one of the most considerable in size of all his books, but it was never finished and retains until to-day the significant title of The Unfinished Work. Augustine had hesitated to undertake this treatise, because he found Julian’s arguments too vapid either to deserve refutation or to afford occasion for really edifying discourse. Certainly the result falls below Augustine’s usual level; and this can scarcely be due, as is so often said, to failing powers and great age, since nothing that he wrote surpasses in mellow beauty and chastened strength the two books On the Predestination of the Saints, which were written after four books of this work were completed.

The plan of the work is to state Julian’s arguments in his own words, and to follow these with remarks. It thus takes on something of the form of a dialogue. It follows Julian’s work, book by book. The first book states and answers certain calumnies which Julian had brought against Augustine and the catholic faith on the ground of their confession of original sin. Julian had argued that, since God is just, He cannot impute another’s sins to innocent infants; since sin is nothing but evil will, there can be no sin in infants who are not yet in the use of their will; and, since the freedom of will that is given to man consists in the capacity of both sinning and not sinning, free will is denied to those who attribute sin to nature. Augustine replies to these arguments, and answers certain objections that are made to his work On Marriage and Concupiscence, and then corrects Julian’s false explanations of certain Scriptures from John viii., Rom. vi., vii., and 2 Timothy. The second book is a discussion of Rom. v. 12, which Julian had tried, like the other Pelagians, to explain of the “imitation” of Adam’s bad example. The third book examines the abuse by Julian of certain Old-Testament passages—in Deut. xxiv., 2 Kings xiv., Ezek. xviii.—in his effort to show that God does not impute the father’s sins to the children; as well as his similar abuse of Heb. xi. The charge of Manicheism, which was so repetitiously brought by Julian against the catholics, is then examined and refuted. The fourth book treats of Julian’s strictures on Augustine’s treatise On Marriage and Concupiscence ii. 4-11, and proves from 1 John ii. 16 that concupiscence is evil, and not the work of God but of the Devil. Augustine argues that the shame that accompanies it is due to its sinfulness, and that there was none of it in Christ; also, that infants are born obnoxious to the first sin, and that the corruption of their origin is proved by Wisd. x. 10, 11. The fifth book defends On Marriage and Concupiscence ii. 12 sq., and argues that a sound nature could not feel shame on account of its members, and that regeneration is needed for what is generated by means of shameful concupiscence. Then Julian’s abuse of 1 Cor. xv., Rom. v., Matt. vii. 17 and 33, with reference to On Marriage and Concupiscence ii. 14, 20, 26, is discussed; and then the origin of evil and God’s treatment of evil in the world are examined. The sixth book traverses Julian’s strictures on On Marriage and Concupiscence ii. 34 sq., and argues that human nature was changed for the worse by the sin of Adam, and thus was made not only sinful but the source of sinners; and that the forces of free will by which man could at first do rightly if he wished and refrain from sin if he chose, were lost by Adam’s sin. An attack is made upon Julian’s definition of free will as “the capacity for sinning or not sinning” (possibilitas peccandi et non peccandi); and it is shown that the evils of this life are the punishment of sin,—including, first of all, physical death. At the end, 1 Cor. xv. 22 is treated.

Although the great preacher of grace was taken away by death before the completion of this book, yet his work was not left incomplete. In the course of the next year (431) the Œcumenical Council of Ephesus condemned Pelagianism for the whole Christian world; and an elaborate treatise against the pure Pelagianism of Julian was in 430 already an anachronism. Semi-Pelagianism was yet to run its course, and to work its way to a permanent position in the heart of a corrupt church; but pure Pelagianism was to abate with the first generation of its advocates. As a leaven it will, of course, persist as long as an evil heart of unbelief persists among men: but under the leadership of Augustine the Church for all time found its bearings with reference to it, and henceforth it must needs assume subtler forms to menace the dominion of the doctrines of grace. As we look back now through the almost millennium and a half of years that have intervened since Augustine lived and wrote, it is to his Predestination of the Saints,—a completed, and well-completed, treatise, dealing with one of these subtle forms of the great error for the confutation of which he had expended so much of time and strength,—and not to The Unfinished Work, which was still engaged with its gross form, that we look as the crown and completion of his labors in behalf of the grace of God.

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Footnotes

1. Compare his work written this year, On Several Questions to Simplicianus. For the development of Augustine’s theology, see the admirable statement in Neander’s Church History, E. T., ii. 625 sq. ↩

2. On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 46. ↩

3. On the Merits and Remission of Sins, iii. 12. ↩

4. Epistle 157, 22. ↩

5. On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 46. ↩

6. Sermon 176, 2. ↩

7. Ibid. 174. ↩

8. Ibid. 174. ↩

9. Flavius Marcellinus was a Christian man of high character and devout mind. Honorius mentions him as a “man of conspicuous renown,” in a law enacted August 30th, 414 (Cod. Theod. xvi., 5, line 55). He was appointed by Honorius to preside over the commission of inquiry into the disputes between the Catholics and Donatists in 411, and held the famous conference between the parties that met in Carthage on the 1st, 3d, and 8th of June, 411. He discharged this whole business with singular patience, moderation, and good judgment; which appears to have cemented the intimate friendship between him and Augustine. Augustine’s treatise on The Spirit and Letter is also addressed to him, and the City of God was undertaken on his suggestion. He was put to death in September, 413, “having, though innocent, fallen a victim to the cruel hatred of the tyrant Heraclius,” as Jerome writes in his book iii. against the Pelagians. ↩

10. On the Merits and Remission of Sins, iii. 1. ↩

11. Ibid. i. 1. Compare Epistle 139. ↩

12. On the prominence of infant baptism in the controversy, and why it was so, see Sermon 165, 7 sq. “What do you say? ‘Just this,’ he says, ‘that God creates every man immortal.’ Why, then, do infant children die? For if I say, ‘Why do adult men die?’ you would say to me, ‘They have sinned.’ Therefore I do not argue about the adults: I cite infancy as a witness against you,” and so on, eloquently developing the argument. ↩

13. On the Merits and Remission of Sins, iii. 1. ↩

14. Letter, 139, 3. ↩

15. Letter, 140. ↩

16. See chaps. i and 5. ↩

17. Sermon 163 treats the text similarly. ↩

18. See this prayer beautifully illustrated from Scripture in On the Merits and Remission of Sins, ii. 5. ↩

19. See above, p. 7. ↩

20. As quoted above, p. 18. ↩

21. Epistle 146. See On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 50, 51, 52. ↩

22. Epistle 149. See especially 18 sq. ↩

23. Ibid. 121. ↩

24. Sermon 293. ↩

25. Sermon 176, 2. ↩

26. The inscription says, “V Calendas Julii,” i.e., June 27. But it also says, “In natalis martyris Guddentis,” whose day appears to have been July 18. Some of the martyrologies assign the 28th of June to Gaudentius (which some copies read here), but possibly none to Guddene. ↩

27. Sermon 294. ↩

28. The passage is quoted at length in On the Merits and Remission of Sins, iii. 10. Compare Against Two Letters of the Pelagians iv. 23. ↩

29. Epistle 157, 22. ↩

30. Epistle 156 among Augustine’s Letters. ↩

31. Epistle 157, 22. ↩

32. Epistles 177, 6; and 179, 2. ↩

33. Epistle 168. On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 48. ↩

34. On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 47; and Epistle 186, 1. ↩

35. Compare On Nature and Grace, 7; and Epistle 186, 1. ↩

36. Epistle 169, 13. ↩

37. On Nature and Grace, 1; Sallust’s Jugurtha, prologue. ↩

38. For Augustine’s press of work just now, see Epistle 169, 1 and 13. ↩

39. The argument occurs in Pelagius’ Commentary on Paul, written before 410, and is already before Augustine in On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, etc., iii. 5. ↩

40. Epistle 166. ↩

41. An almost contemporary letter to Oceanus (Epistle 180, written in 416) adverts to the same subject and in the same spirit, showing how much it was in Augustine’s thoughts. Compare Epistle 180, 2 and 5. ↩

42. Epistle 172. ↩

43. See On the Perfection of Man’s Righteousness, i. ↩

44. Migne’s Edition of Augustine’s Works, vol. v. pp. 1719–1723. ↩

45. Compare the words of Cicero quoted above, vol. xiv., p. 467. ↩

46. Compare the similar words in Epistle 177, 3, which was written, not only after what had occurred in Palestine was known, but also after the condemnatory decisions of the African synods. ↩

47. Epistles 175 and 176 in Augustine’s Letters. ↩

48. Epistle 177. The other bishops were Aurelius, Alypius, Evodius, and Possidius. ↩

49. Epistle 178. ↩

50. Epistle 179. ↩

51. See The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, New York ed., vol. i., p. 459, and the references there given. Compare Canon Robertson’s vivid account of them in his History of the Christian Church, ii. 18, 145. ↩

52. Epistle 188. ↩

53. Compare On the Grace of Christ, 40. In the succeeding sections. some of its statements are examined. ↩

54. Epistles 181, 182, 183, among Augustine’s Letters. ↩

55. Epistle 186, written conjointly with Alypius. ↩

56. The book given him by Timasius and James, to which On Nature and Grace is a reply. ↩

57. Compare also Innocent’s letter (Epistle 181) to the Carthaginian Council, chap. 4, which also Neander, History of the Christian Church, E. T., ii. 646, quotes in this connection, as showing that Innocent “perceived that this dispute was connected with a different way of regarding the relation of God’s providence to creation.” As if Augustine did not see this too! ↩

58. The book addressed to Dardanus, in which the Pelagians are confuted, but not named, belongs about at this time. Compare Retractations, ii. 49. ↩

59. Sermon 131, preached at Carthage. ↩

60. On the Grace of Christ, 2. ↩

61. The so-called Confession of Faith sent to Innocent after the Synod of Diospolis, which, however, arrived after Innocent’s death. ↩

62. On Original Sin, i. ↩

63. Ibid. 5. ↩

64. On the Grace of Christ, 55. ↩

65. On the Gift of Perseverance, 55. ↩

66. Compare below. Neander, in the second volume (E. T.) of his History of the Christian Church, discusses the matter in a very fair spirit. ↩

67. Sermon 26. ↩

68. Epistle 190. ↩

69. See Epistle 194, i. ↩

70. Ibid. 191, i. ↩

71. Epistle 191. ↩

72. Ibid. 194. ↩

73. It appears to have been first reported to Augustine by Marius Mercator, in a letter received at Carthage. See Epistle 193, 3. ↩

74. As, for example, in On the Merits and Remission of Sins, etc., i. ↩

75. Epistle 193. ↩

76. Compare On Dulcitius’ Eight Questions, 3. ↩

77. That is, On the Merits and Remission of Sins, etc., ii. 30 sq. ↩

78. Epistle 196. ↩

79. On Marriage and Concupiscence, i. 2. ↩

80. Compare the Benedictine Preface to The Unfinished Work. ↩

81. Epistle 202, bis. Compare Epistle 190. ↩

82. This able and learned man was much the most formidable of the Pelagian writers. He was a son of a dear friend of Augustine and was himself much loved by him. He became a “lector” in 404, and was ordained bishop by Innocent I. about 417. Under Zosimus’ vacillating policy he took strong ground on the Pelagian side, and, refusing to sign Zosimus’ Tractoria, was exiled with his seventeen fellow-recusants, and passed his long life in vain endeavours to obtain recognition for the Pelagian party. His writings included two letters to Zosimus, a Confession of Faith, the two letters answered in Against Two Letters of the Pelagians (though he seems to have repudiated the former of these), and two large books against Augustine, the first of which was his four books against the first book of On Marriage and Concupiscence, in reply to extracts from which the second book of that treatise was written, whilst Augustine’s Against Julian, in six books, traverses the whole work. To this second book Julian replied in a rejoinder addressed to Florus, and consisting of eight books. Augustine’s Unfinished Work is a reply to this. Julian’s character was as noble as his energy was great and his pen acute. He stands out among his fellow-Pelagians as the sufferer for conscience’ sake. A full account of his works may be read in the Benedictine Preface to Augustine’s Unfinished Work, with which may be compared the article on him in Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of Christian Biography. ↩

83. Compare Epistle 195. ↩

84. A fellow-recusant. ↩

85. Julian afterwards repudiated this letter, perhaps because of some falsifications it had suffered: it seems to have been certainly his. ↩

86. Compare Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, iii. 24; and see above, p. 11. ↩

87. To wit: Cyprian’s testimony on original sin (20-24), on gratuitous grace (25-26), on the imperfection of human righteousness (27-28); and Ambrose’s testimony on original sin (29), on gratuitous grace (30), and on the imperfection of human righteousness (31). ↩

88. Compare Epistle 207, written probably in the latter half of 421. ↩

89. That is, Chrysostom. ↩

90. Compare On Rebuke and Grace, 44; Enchiridion, 103; City of God, xxii. 1, 2. ↩

91. See vol. iii. of The Post-Nicene Library, pp. 237 sq. ↩

92. Retractations, lib. ii. c. 63. ↩

93. Now a portion of Tunis. ↩

94. Epistle 194. ↩

95. Epistle 214. ↩

96. Epistle 215, 2 sq. ↩

97. Epistle 216. ↩

98. On Rebuke and Grace, i. ↩

99. Retractations, ii. 67. Compare On Rebuke and Grace, 5 sq. ↩

100. On the importance of this treatise for Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, see Wiggers’ Augustinianism and Pelagianism, E. T. p. 236, where a sketch of the history of this doctrine in Augustine’s writings may be found. ↩

101. Epistle 217. ↩

102. Epistle 224. ↩

103. Compare Epistles 225, i, and 156. It is, of course, not certain that this is the same Hilary that wrote to Augustine from Sicily, but it seems probable. ↩

104. Letters 225, and 226. ↩