Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 46 part 5/7

Let this man tell, if he can, how that boy of eight days broke the covenant of God — an innocent infant, so far as pertains properly to himself — and yet in no way would God, or holy Scripture, say this falsely. Then therefore he broke the covenant of God — not this one concerning the commanded circumcision, but that one concerning the prohibition of the tree — when through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned.

And it was signified that in him this was expiated by the circumcision of the eighth day — that is, by the sacrament of the Mediator who was to come in the flesh — because it was by that same faith in Christ, who would come in the flesh and die for us, and on the third day, which after the seventh, the sabbath, would be the eighth, would also rise again, that even the righteous of old were saved. For he was delivered up for our offences, and rose again for our justification.

For from the time that circumcision was instituted among the people of God — which was then the seal of the righteousness of faith — it availed to signify the purgation even in little ones of original and ancient sin, just as baptism too, from the time it was instituted, began to avail for the renewal of man; not that before circumcision there was no righteousness of faith — for while he was yet in uncircumcision, Abraham himself, the father of the nations which were to follow his faith, was justified by faith — but in earlier times the sacrament of justification by faith lay altogether hidden.

Yet that same faith of the Mediator made the righteous of old to be saved, the small together with the great — not the Old Testament, which genders unto bondage, not the law, which was not so given as to be able to give life, but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. For just as we believe that Christ has come in the flesh, so they believed he would come; as we, that he has died, so they, that he would die; as we, that he has risen again, so they, that he would rise again; and both we and they believe that he will come to the judgment of the dead and the living. Let not this man, then, by ill defending human nature, hinder it from salvation; for we are all born under sin, and are set free through the one alone who was born without sin.

'This commingling of bodies,' he says, 'with heat, with pleasure, with seed, made by God and in its own measure laudable, is approved — which is sometimes even rendered an ample gift of the pious.' He said 'with heat,' he said 'with pleasure,' he said 'with seed,' yet he dared not say 'with lust.' Why, unless because he blushes to name what he does not blush to praise? But the gift of the pious is the fruitful propagation of children, not the shameful commotion of the members, which a sound nature would not have in begetting children, but which a vitiated nature now has.

And by reason of this, both he who is born thence needs to be reborn, that he may be a member of Christ, and he from whom he is born, if he is already reborn, needs to be freed from that law of sin which is in the body of this death. Since these things are so, how does he add and say: 'It is necessary therefore that you confess that the original sin which you had feigned has perished'? I have not feigned original sin, which the catholic faith believes from of old; but you, who deny this, are without doubt a new heretic. Now all who are begotten with sin are under the devil by the judgment of God, if they have not been regenerated in Christ. But because he was speaking of Abraham and Sarah, he subjoined and said: 'But if you should say: Use flourished in them, and offspring there was not, I shall answer:

'Whom the Creator promised, the Creator gave; it is not intercourse, but God's work, that is he who is born. For he who made the first man from dust fashions all from seed; just as, then, the clay which was taken up was the material, not the author, of man, so now that force of pleasure. The producer and mingler of seeds does not fulfil the role of the operation, but from the treasures of nature offers to God that whereof he may deign to fashion man.' All these things which he said, except that he said seeds are produced and mingled by pleasure, he would say rightly, if in them he were striving to defend the catholic sense; but because we know what he is contriving to accomplish out of these, he assuredly says even right things perversely.

That point, therefore, apart from which I do not deny the rest to be true, is for this reason not true: because that pleasure of carnal concupiscence does not produce the seeds, but those which are already in the bodies, created by the true God. By him the bodies themselves too are created; they are not made by pleasure, but are stirred up and emitted with pleasure. But whether the seeds of both sexes are mingled in the woman's womb with pleasure, let the women see what they feel in their secret inward parts; it does not become us to be idly curious even to this extent.

Yet that shame-worthy lust — whence the members themselves are called 'shameful parts' — was not in the body of that life which was in paradise before sin, but began to be in the body of this death, disobedience being requited to disobedience after sin. Without which lust the work of spouses could be done in the begetting of children, just as many works are done by the obedience of the other members without that ardour of the members which are moved by the beck of the will, not roused by the heat of lust. Attend to the rest: 'This too,' he says, 'the authority of the apostle confirms; for when the blessed Paul was speaking of the resurrection of the dead, he said: Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened; and lower down:

'But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed its own body. If therefore God,' he says, 'has assigned to human seed — which none of the prudent or the pious denies — its own body, as to all things, whence will you prove anyone born guilty? At last, I pray, look at with what snares the assertion of natural sin is strangled. But come,' he says, 'deal, I beseech, more gently with yourself. Believe me, God made you also; but, as must be confessed, a grievous error has infected you. For what can be said more profane than that God either did not make man, or, as you say, made him for the devil, or at any rate that the devil fashioned the image of God — that is, man — which is recognized to be no less foolish than impious?'

'Is God then so destitute,' he says, 'so shameless, that he had nothing to give as a reward to holy men, save what the devil, in vice, poured into the deceived? But do you wish to know that even in those who are not holy God is shown to have bestowed this power of generation? At that time therefore, when Abraham, stricken with fear of a barbarous nation, called Sarah, who was his wife, his sister, it is related that Abimelech, king of that province, took her for the use of a night. But God, to whom the honour of the holy woman was a care, coming to Abimelech in dreams, curbed the royal audacity, threatening death if he should proceed to violate the marriage. Then Abimelech said: Wilt thou, Lord, destroy an ignorant and just nation?'

'Did they not themselves say that they were joined by kinship? Abimelech therefore rose up in the morning and took a thousand didrachmas of silver and sheep and calves and menservants and maidservants, and gave them to Abraham, and sent the woman away from himself untouched. And Abraham prayed to God for Abimelech; and God healed Abimelech and his wife and his maidservants.' But hear briefly why he has narrated these things at such great length. For in what he subjoined next he says: 'God, at Abraham's prayer, cured by the power of a secret dispensation — which is known to the modesty of lowly women — because God had closed up from without every womb in the house of Abimelech. See therefore,' he says, 'whether that ought to be called naturally evil which an angry God sometimes takes away and, appeased, restores.'

'He himself,' he says, 'makes both the children of the pious and of the impious, since the fact that they become parents pertains to nature, which rejoices in God as its author; but the fact that they are impious pertains to depravity of pursuits, which befalls each one out of free will.' To all these many things which he has said, we reply that nothing at all was said in the divine testimonies which he interposed concerning the shameful lust, which we say was not in the body of the blessed when they were naked and were not confounded. For that first passage of the apostle was said concerning the seeds of grains, which first die that they may be quickened. Which apostolic sentence — with what design I know not — this man was unwilling to complete; for he cited it thus far: Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened.

But the apostle adds: unless it die. Yet this man, as far as I judge, wished what was said about grains to be taken concerning human seed by those who read these things and either do not know the holy Scriptures or do not remember them. In short, he not only truncated that sentence, so as not to add 'unless it die,' but also passed over what follows, where the apostle laid open of what seeds he was speaking. For the apostle says: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be, but a bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some of the rest. These things passed over, this man wove in what the apostle says next: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed its own body — as though the apostle had spoken of a man in the act of intercourse:

Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened — so that we should understand the human seed to be quickened not by the man sowing children by intercourse, but by God. For thus he had prefaced: 'that pleasure does not fulfil the role of the operation, but from the treasures of nature offers to God that whereof he may deign to fashion man'; and he subjoined the testimony, as though the apostle had said this: Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened — that is, is not quickened by thee, but God fashions the man out of thy seed; as though those middle words which this man passed over were not spoken by the apostle, and thus his sentence stood — as if he were speaking of human seed: Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened;

But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed its own body. Finally, after these words of the apostle, he thus brings in his own: 'If therefore God,' he says, 'has assigned to human seed — which none of the prudent or the pious denies — its own body, as to all things' — as though the apostle in that testimony had spoken of human seed. Now, when I pondered somewhat more attentively what his purpose was aided by this fraud, I could find nothing, save that he wished to summon the apostle as a witness, whereby he might prove that God — which we too say — fashions man out of human seeds. And since no testimony met him, he fraudulently abused this one.

Fearing assuredly lest, perchance, if it should appear that the apostle spoke those things not of human seeds but of grains, we should from this be warned whence might be refuted this modest namer and shameless preacher — not of religious will, but of lustful pleasure. For concerning those very seeds which husbandmen sow in the fields, this man can be refuted. For why should we not believe that God could have granted to the blessed man in paradise, out of his own seed, that which we see granted to husbandmen out of the seed of wheat — namely, that it should be sown in that manner without any shameful lust, the genital members obeying at the beck of the will?

just as this is sown without any shameful lust, at the beck of the husbandmen's will, their hands obeying — with a more honourable desire in parents for begetting children than there is in ploughmen for filling their barns; and then the almighty Creator, by his uncontaminable presence everywhere and his creative power, out of the seeds of men, as he willed,

which he does even now, would work in the woman, just as out of the seeds of grains, as he wills, he works in the earth — the blessed mothers conceiving without lustful pleasure, bringing forth without toilsome groaning; seeing that in that felicity, and in a body not yet of this death but of that life, there would be nothing in receiving seeds that women should be ashamed of, just as there would be nothing in bringing forth offspring that they should grieve over. Whosoever does not believe, or will not have it believed, that this could have been granted by God's will and kindness to men dwelling in that felicity of paradise before all sin, is no praiser of a fecundity to be desired, but a lover of a shameful pleasure.

Likewise another testimony from the divine book, which he adduced concerning Abimelech and God's willing every womb in his house to be closed, that his women should not bear, and again opened that they should bear. What does it pertain to the matter? What has it to do with that shameful lust concerning which the question now is? Did God take that very lust away from those women and restore it when he willed? But it was a punishment that they could not bear, and a benefit indeed that they could bear after the manner of this corruptible flesh. For God would not confer upon the body of this death such a benefit as it would not have except the body of that life in paradise before sin possessed — namely, that both conception should come about without itching lust and birth without racking pain.

But why should we not understand — since indeed Scripture says every womb was closed from without — that it came about by some pain that the women could not endure intercourse; which pain, God rousing it, had been inflicted, and, taking pity, withdrawn? For if lust were to be withdrawn for the hindering of the sowing of offspring, it should be withdrawn from the men, not from the women. For a woman could lie with a man of her will even if the lust by which she is goaded ceased, provided the man were not lacking that whereby he is stirred — unless perchance, because it is written that Abimelech himself was healed, he will say that the manly lust was restored to him. Which surely if he had lost, what need was there for him to be admonished from above not to be mingled with Abraham's wife?

But he says 'healed,' because his house was healed of that plague. Now let us at last look at those three things, of which — whichever of the three we should say — he declares that nothing can be said more profane: that God either did not make man, or made him for the devil, or at any rate that the devil fashioned the image of God, that is, man. Of these three, the first and the last, that they are not said by us, even he himself, unless he be senseless or too obstinate, confesses.

The question is about that which he put in the second and middle place, where he is so deceived that he supposes this to be said by us: that God made man for the devil — as though, in the men whom God creates from human parents, he intends this, cares for this, provides for this by the reason of his work, that the devil should have servants whom he cannot make for himself. God forbid that any piety, even a childish one, should suspect this. Of his goodness God made men — both the first without sin, and the rest under sin — for the uses of his profound counsels.

For just as concerning the malice of the devil himself he knows what he does, and what he does is just and good, although that concerning which he acts is unjust and evil, nor did he on that account refuse to create him because he foreknew that he would be evil: so concerning the whole human race, although no man is born without the stain of sin, he who is supremely good works good, making some as vessels of mercy, whom grace distinguishes from those who are vessels of wrath, and others as vessels of wrath, that he may make known the riches of his glory upon the vessels of mercy. Let this man now go and argue against the apostle, whose sentence this is — nay rather, against the potter himself, whom the apostle forbids to answer, saying: O man, who art thou that repliest against God?

Does the thing formed say to him who formed it: Why hast thou made me thus? Has not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? Does this man then deny that the vessels of wrath are under the devil? Or, because they are under the devil, does another make them than he who makes the vessels of mercy? Or does he make them from elsewhere, and not from the same lump? Let him therefore say here: 'Then God makes vessels for the devil' — as though God did not know how to use these for his own just and good works, just as he uses the devil himself. Or does he indeed pasture the sons of perdition, the goats of the left hand, for the devil, and clothe and nourish them for the devil, because he makes his sun to rise upon the good and the evil, and rains upon the just and the unjust?

So then he creates the evil in the same way as he pastures and nourishes the evil, because what he bestows on them by creating pertains to the goodness of nature, and what he gives them for growth by pasturing and nourishing pertains not indeed to their malice, but he, the good, gives good aid to that same good nature which he created. For in so far as they are men, it is a good of nature, whose author is God; but in so far as they are born with sin — doomed to perish if they are not reborn — they pertain to the seed accursed from the beginning through the fault of that ancient disobedience.

Which nevertheless the Maker uses well, even in the vessels of wrath, that he may make known the riches of his glory upon the vessels of mercy — lest anyone should ascribe it to his own merits, if, pertaining to the same lump, he is freed by grace; but let him that glorieth glory in the Lord. Departing with the Pelagians from this apostolic and catholic faith, most truthful and most firmly founded, this man will not have the newborn to be under the devil, lest the little ones be carried to Christ, that they may be rescued from the power of darkness and translated into his kingdom.

And thus he accuses the Church spread throughout the whole world, in which everywhere all the infants to be baptized are, for no other reason, breathed upon in exorcism, save that the prince of this world may be cast forth from them — by whom the vessels of wrath must needs be possessed when they are born of Adam, if they are not reborn in Christ and, made vessels of mercy through grace, translated into his kingdom. Coming against this most firmly founded truth, lest he should seem to assail the whole Church of Christ, he addresses me as though I were but one man, and, as it were, chiding and admonishing, says: 'God made you also; but, as must be confessed, a grievous error has infected you.'

Indeed, that God made me I acknowledge, and give thanks — who nevertheless would have made me to perish as a vessel of wrath, had he only made me out of Adam and not remade me in Christ. And since, possessed by Pelagian impiety, he does not believe this, if he perseveres in so great an evil to the very end, let not himself, but the catholics see of what kind and how great is the error which has not merely infected him, but plainly slain him. Attend to what follows: 'But that the children,' he says, 'received from wedlock are naturally good, let us learn from the apostle saying, who says of the wicked: Leaving the natural use of the woman, they burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working that which is unseemly. He shows therefore,'

he says, 'that the use of the woman is both natural and in its own measure laudable, but that outrage is committed out of one's own will against the modesty of the institution. Deservedly therefore,' he says, 'both in those who use it well the kind and measure of concupiscence is praised, and in the base its excess is punished. In short, at the same time God quickened the members of Abraham and Sarah, withered with age, at which he punished those very members in the Sodomites with a fiery shower. If therefore you think,' he says, 'that the vigour of the members is to be accused, since through it the Sodomites were sunk in outrages, you will also accuse the creature of bread and wine, since Scripture divinely signified that they sinned from this cause too; for the Lord says through Ezekiel the prophet:'

Nevertheless these were the iniquities of Sodom, your sister: pride; in fullness of bread and abundance of wine she and her daughters overflowed, and they did not help the hand of the poor and the needy. 'Choose now,' he says, 'which you prefer: either reckon the union of bodies to be a divine work, or else likewise define the creation of bread and wine to be evil. But if you do this, you are plainly convicted of being a Manichaean.' Now whoever keeps a measure in natural desire uses a good thing well; whoever keeps no measure uses a good thing badly.

'What then do you say,' he asks, 'so that the good of marriage cannot be accused because of the original evil that is drawn from it, just as the evil of adulteries cannot be excused because of the natural good that is born from it?' 'By these arguments,' he says, 'you have conceded what you had denied, and you have taken away what you had conceded, and you labor at nothing more than to be too little understood. Show me bodily marriages without intercourse; or else impose upon this work some single name, and call the union either good or evil. You have at any rate promised to define marriages as good:'

'If marriage is good, if the fruit of marriage—man—is good, if this fruit cannot be an evil work of God, since he is born through a good thing from a good thing, where then is the original evil, which has been done away with by so many prejudgments?' To this I reply that not only sons from marriage but also those from adultery are indeed something good according to the work of God by which they were created; yet according to original sin they are born under condemnation from the first Adam—not only if they are begotten of adultery but also if of marriage—unless they be reborn in the second Adam, who is Christ. But as for what the Apostle says concerning the wicked:

'Leaving the natural use of the woman, they burned in their desires one toward another, males working shame with males'—he did not say the conjugal use, but the natural, meaning by it that use which is performed with the members created for this purpose, that through them each sex may be joined for begetting. And therefore, when with these same members anyone couples even with a harlot, it is a natural use, yet not praiseworthy but blameworthy. But from that part of the body which was not instituted for begetting, if anyone use it even with his wife, it is against nature and shameful. Finally, this same Apostle first said concerning the women:

'For their women changed the natural use into that use which is against nature'; then of the males working shame with males, having left the natural use of the female. Therefore the union of spouses is not praised under this name, that is, of natural use; rather, more unclean and more wicked outrages are being censured than if they were used—even unlawfully, yet with women—in a natural manner. But bread and wine we do not blame on account of the gluttonous and the drunken, just as we do not blame gold on account of the greedy and the avaricious. Wherefore neither do we blame the honorable union of spouses on account of the shameful lust of the body. For that union could have existed with no preceding commission of sin, of which the married would not blush;

but this lust arose after sin, and being ashamed they were compelled to veil it. Whence there has remained for later married persons—even for those who use this evil well and lawfully in a work of this kind—the need to avoid human observation, and thus to confess what is shameful, though no one ought to be ashamed of what is good. Thus these two things are commended: the good of the praiseworthy union, whence children are begotten, and the evil of shameful lust, whence those who are begotten must be reborn, lest they be condemned. Accordingly, he who lawfully lies together with shameful lust uses an evil well; but he who does so unlawfully uses an evil badly. For it more rightly receives the name of evil than of good, since both the evil and the good blush at it; and we more rightly believe him who says:

'I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, there dwells no good thing'—rather than him who calls this a good; wherefore, if he blushes at it, he confesses it evil; but if he does not blush, he adds shamelessness, a worse evil. Rightly therefore did we say: 'The good of marriage cannot be accused because of the original evil that is drawn from it, just as the evil of adulteries cannot be excused because of the natural good that is born from it,' since human nature, which is born either of marriage or of adultery, is the work of God. For if it were evil, it should not be begotten; if it had no evil, it should not be reborn. And to conclude both in a single word: if human nature were evil, it would not be something to be saved; if there were nothing of evil in it, it would not be something to be saved.

He therefore who says that it is not good denies the Creator of the good creature; but he who denies that evil is in it grudges the merciful Savior of the corrupted creature. Wherefore in men being born, adulteries are not to be excused on account of the good which was created there by the good Author, nor are marriages to be accused on account of the evil which is there to be healed by the merciful Savior. 'Show me,' he says, 'bodily marriages without intercourse.' I do not show bodily marriages without intercourse, but neither does he himself show that same intercourse without shame. But in paradise, if sin had not gone before, there would indeed have been no begetting without the union of both sexes, yet there would have been a union without shame;

there would indeed have been in the act of coupling a tranquil obedience of the members, not a shameful concupiscence of the flesh. Accordingly, marriage is good, from which man is born, sown in ordered fashion, and the fruit of marriage is good, which is the man himself who is thus born; but sin is evil, with which every man is born. For God indeed made and makes man; but through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and thus it passed into all men, in whom all sinned. 'By a new manner of arguing,' he says, 'you both profess yourself a Catholic and give patronage to the Manichaean, by calling marriage both a great good and a great evil.' He utterly does not know what he is saying, or pretends not to know.

For either he does not understand, or he does not wish to understand, what we say. But if he does not understand, he is hindered by a preoccupation of error; if, however, he does not wish to understand what we say, it is a vice of obstinacy, by which he defends his own error. And Jovinian, who a few years ago attempted to found a new heresy, used to say that the Catholics gave patronage to the Manichaeans, because against him they preferred holy virginity to marriage. But this man will reply that he does not, like Jovinian, hold the view of the indifference of marriages and virgins. Nor do I say that they hold this; nevertheless let these new heretics recognize, from Jovinian who charged the Catholics with Manichaeism, that this is nothing new. We therefore say that marriage is good, not evil.

But just as the Arians accuse us of being Sabellians—although we do not say that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one and the same, which the Sabellians say, but say that the nature of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is one and the same, which the Catholics say—so the Pelagians charge us with Manichaeism, although we do not say that marriage is an evil, which the Manichaeans say, but say that the first evil befell the first married pair of human beings and thence passed into all men, which the Catholics say.