Works (City of God, On the Trinity, etc.) 39

Against the Pelagian heretics, who say that Adam, even if he had not sinned, would still have died in body, and that in him the human race was not corrupted (whence it follows that they contend that deaths, and deadly diseases, and all the evils which we see even little children suffer, would have existed even in paradise, though no one had sinned), I wrote a book to Count Valerius, the title of which is 'On Marriage and Concupiscence,' because I had learned that word had reached him that the Pelagians said we were condemners of marriage.

Finally, in that work I distinguished, with such argument as I could, the good of marriage from the evil of carnal concupiscence which conjugal chastity uses well. On receiving this book, the illustrious man I mentioned sent me on a leaflet certain sentences excerpted from the work of Julian the Pelagian heretic (in which work, in four books, he thought he had answered that one book of mine which I have recorded I wrote, 'On Marriage and Concupiscence') — sentences sent to him by I know not whom, who saw to it that they were excerpted, as he pleased, from Julian's first book; and that same Valerius requested that I answer them as quickly as possible. And so it came about that under the same title I wrote a second book also, against which Julian composed eight others with excessive loquacity.

To these I now reply, setting forth his words and appending to them my response to each passage, as the refutation of them seemed fit to be rendered; since I have already refuted his four earlier books, after they came into my hands, clearly enough in six books. I discharge my promise. 1. JULIAN. Though hindered by great anguishes, which — as I look upon the state of the Churches in this tempest — are stirred up in me partly by indignation, partly by pity, I had not yet cast off the pledge of my promise, namely that I, who had become a debtor by promising, should take care to be so also by paying.

For in the books which I dictated against Augustine's writings, addressed to our brother Bishop Turbantius, a man conspicuous for the great splendour of his virtues, I promised that, if no misfortune should occur to hinder my studies, I would forthwith meet all the arguments of those who, from the doctrine of the Manichees, defend the transmission of sin, that is, natural evil — from which task I have been held back until now by various and undissimulable necessity. AUGUSTINE. Would that you might imitate Turbantius, who after those writings of yours, and after these praises of yours by which you call him a man conspicuous for the great splendour of his virtues, was freed from your error!

But an answer has been made to those books of yours, and it has been shown you what most brilliant Catholic lights, in the treatment of the holy Scriptures, you attempt to darken with this reproach, that is, with the appellation of Manichees. The work is dedicated to Florus. 2. JULIAN. In truth, as soon as I was permitted to breathe again, my plan was, as far as the very nature of the matter would allow, briefly to fulfil my promises — had you not willed, most blessed father Florus, that I should enter yet again upon a more strenuous province; you who, since you avail so much by the reverence of your holiness that I judge it irreligious to obey your precepts sluggishly, have easily obtained that I extend into longer roads the compendium of that brevity which I had chosen.

You will therefore favour a work undertaken by your authority, whose name I have inserted for this reason above all, that my pen might proceed more secure and more cheerful under the patronage of so great a command. There was, then, conceived in my mind a plan of brevity not untimely; because in those four books nearly all that had been brought forth by the mouth of Augustine against us — things devised by the Manichees — the truth of the Catholic faith (for which, and with which, we earn the hatred of a falling world) had crushed, armed as much with invincible disputations as with the testimonies of the sacred Law, nor was almost anything left over, if we had fair judges to deal with. AUGUSTINE. Against those four books of yours, six books have been written by me.

For after commemorating the Catholic teachers (whom you make out to be Manichees, casting up against me under this charge what they learned and taught in the Catholic Church), which I set forth in the two earlier volumes, I answered in the following four books your single books one by one; refuting the darkness of your heresy by the light of Catholic truth, which by forsaking it you are blinded and rage insane, and, concerning a matter about which there was never any controversy in the Church of Christ, you, like a new heretic, seek fair judges — as though any could seem to you fair judges save those whom you have deceived with your error. But what judge better than Ambrose will you be able to find?

Of whom your master Pelagius says that not even an enemy dared to reprove his faith and his most pure sense in the Scriptures. Would this man, then, with a most pure sense in the Scriptures, retain the most impure dogma of the Manichee, when he says: 'We are all born under sin, whose very origin is in fault'? You yourself, then, now judge with how impure a sense you reprove this Catholic dogma, and do not delay to correct yourself with Ambrose as judge. They are confirmed by the reasoning of the Scriptures. 3. JULIAN.

Nevertheless I had passed over some testimonies of the Scriptures by which they think something can be urged against us, which I had promised I would go on to explain, so as to teach that whatever ambiguous words of the Law are wont to be seized upon by our enemies neither prejudice the plain truth, and are to be understood according to that which is confirmed by the most absolute authorities of holy Scripture and by insuperable reasoning. Since indeed by this very fact anyone shows himself an unskilled and profane interpreter of the divine Law, whoever thinks that to be defended by its sanction which cannot be vindicated by justice. AUGUSTINE. What you assert, rather, cannot be defended by any reasoning of justice.

For the misery of the human race, from which we see no man exempt from birth to death, does not pertain to the just judgment of the Almighty, if there is no original sin. The divine equity cannot be assailed by biblical testimonies. 4. JULIAN. For if the Law of God is the fountain and mistress of justice, God's equity can also be aided by its helps, but cannot be assailed. Therefore the nature of things allows no support for iniquity to be procured from the strength of that Scripture, which had this one cause of its promulgation: that by its testimonies, remedies, threats, and punishments iniquity might be destroyed. AUGUSTINE. By its testimonies it is declared that 'Man is become like to vanity; his days pass away like a shadow.'

That man is born with this vanity is shown not only by the truthful Scripture by which he is bewailed, but also by the toilsome and troublous care by which he is trained. Among its remedies it is read that, even when a little child has been born, a sacrifice must be offered for sin. Among its threats it is read that the soul of a little child would perish if it were not circumcised on the eighth day. Among its punishments it is read that even little children were commanded to be slain, whose parents provoked God to wrath, so that they were destroyed by the slaughter of war. The biblical testimonies which seem ambiguous must be explained. 5. JULIAN. Nothing, therefore, can be done through the Law of God against God the author of the Law. By this one summary is excluded whatever the erring are wont to object;

but we, to teach how rich in truth is he in whom we believe, are wont to bring the light of exposition also to those passages of the Scriptures which have veiled the understanding of their meaning by the perplexity of their expression; that, once unlocked, they may possess the dignity of their origin, and not be separated, as it were, like bastard or degenerate offspring from the sacred lineage. AUGUSTINE. On the contrary, you are attempting to obscure the lights of the holy Scriptures, shining with sure truth, by the perplexity of your depraved disputations. For what is more luminous than what I just said: 'Man is become like to vanity; his days pass away like a shadow'? Which surely would not happen if he remained in the likeness of God in which he was created. What is more luminous than what is said:

'As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive'? What is more luminous than what is said: 'For who is clean from filth? Not even an infant whose life is of one day upon the earth'; and very many other passages, which you strive to wrap up in your darkness and to turn, by vain loquacity, into your perverse sense? The biblical texts are just, because divine. 6. JULIAN. This, then, according to my custom, I was thinking to carry through as the only thing so far, namely to free from the interpretations of the Traducianists those members of the divine Law which lay subject to insult; that is, by showing them to be divine, since they were just. AUGUSTINE.

With insulting mouth you call Traducianists Cyprian, Ambrose, Gregory, and the rest of their fellows who confess original sin. But it is no wonder that new heretics impose a new name on the Catholics from whom they go out; this others too have done, when they likewise went out. A rather long response has been made by me. 7. JULIAN. But because you exacted it at great cost, nay commanded it by fatherly authority, that I should confront the book of the African tractator, which Alypius — a home-bred slave of his sins — recently brought to Count Valerius, hence my response has been made longer. AUGUSTINE. A great punishment for you is this African disputant; and long before you were born, Cyprian the African was prepared as a great punishment for your heresy. Insults against Augustine. 8. JULIAN.

For he has once again given monuments of his talent and his faith, which are understood most grievously, expounded most difficultly, scarcely heard without horror; but are convicted most easily, pierced through most sharply, and, for reverence of decency, consigned to oblivion when exterminated. AUGUSTINE. Those who read do not judge as you wish. They charge that we are new heretics. 9. JULIAN. His first book, then, which alone was published before this one, charges that we are new heretics;

because we resist an opinion which, after the manner of a whitewashed sepulchre — which, according to the sentence of the Gospel, is clothed outwardly with colour, but within is full of filth and iniquity — belches forth, under the praise of Baptism, the filth of the Manichees and natural sin, so as to contaminate the hitherto pure Sacraments of the Catholic Church. AUGUSTINE. That you are new heretics is shown by the ancient Catholic faith, which you have but now begun to attack, preached by the most illustrious teachers who were before us.

But I need not answer all your revilings rather than your accusations, which you hurl not against me only, but also against Ambrose, Hilary, Gregory, Cyprian, and the other most renowned teachers of the Church, with a most shameless brow and a most impudent tongue. Suspicions against Valerius. 10. JULIAN. He also praises a powerful man, because — to our petitions, we who clamoured for nothing else than that judges be granted for so great a business, that the things which stood established as done by underhand dealings might rather be amended than punished by examination — he opposed the mass of his dignity, and did not permit time or place to be obtained for the debate. Whether the man to whom he writes did this so wickedly as this praise attests, let him see to it himself.

We however, insofar as we have thought the better of him, the mention of his name honourably inserted into my little work has made plain. But perhaps that book contains false things about its patron. Furthermore, it faithfully shows what its writer desires: namely, that against reason, against faith, against all sanctity of morals and of doctrines, the fight be waged with savage force and blind lack of self-control. AUGUSTINE. Far be it from the Christian powers of the earthly commonwealth to doubt the ancient Catholic faith, and on this account to grant its assailants place and time for examination; and not rather, being certain and grounded in it, to impose the discipline of coercion on such enemies of it as you are.

For what was done against the Donatists, their most violent mobs compelled to be done, ignorant of what had been transacted before, which ought to have been shown them; may God avert that you should have such mobs; yet, God being propitious, you do not have them. Augustine's foul conscience. 11. JULIAN. When these things had been transacted among the first parts of the volume, he proceeded to the distinction of marriage and concupiscence, as he had promised in the inscription of the title; and thereafter throughout the whole work he gave proof of his skill and virtue. For, vexed by extreme necessity between the denial of confessors and the confession of deniers, he published what a foul conscience suffers as anguish. AUGUSTINE. Revile as much as you can; for what reviler cannot do this? I could have kept silent.

12. JULIAN. To the earlier work, then, I replied in four little books, with such ability as truth supplied; having stated beforehand that I would indeed pass over those things which appeared to have no weight even for his own dogma, and which could convict me of loquacity, had I pursued whatever was feeble and empty. And yet, if it had been permitted to keep this rule, as was fitting — that is, that they should not merit even an attack because of their inept profession — nearly all his inventions ought to have been spurned in public silence. But since, with matters hastening to the worse part (which is an indication of a world sinking to its end), in the Church of God too folly and baseness have obtained dominion;

we discharge an embassy for Christ, and, in our manly portion, as much strength as we have, we bring to the defence of the Catholic religion; nor does it irk us to commit to writing the remedies which we compound against the poisons of errors. AUGUSTINE. Folly and baseness gave you birth; but if they had obtained dominion in the Church, there they would certainly have held you. An appeal to the readers. 13. JULIAN. I had certainly testified, as I said, that in the first work I would neither dispute against all the species of the transmission to be defended, nor recapitulate all the things which that book contained; but that I would grapple with those in which he had placed the sum and force of his dogma. And that I have faithfully promised this, any reader — however biased, provided he be a diligent reader of both works — will recognize.

But I, secure in the honesty of my conscience, both exhort and goad our enemy: that if he judges any argument brought forth by himself to have been passed over by me, which he himself reckons to be of any moment, he should bring it forth into the open and convict me of fear and guile. AUGUSTINE. I do not believe that you supposed the things you passed over to be of no moment; and yet, even if I grant that you did suppose this, that it is nevertheless not so, a Catholic and intelligent reader will find — if he has both that one book of mine and your four, and applies diligence. Nothing has been fulfilled by me otherwise than promised. 14. JULIAN. Certain testimonies of the Scriptures I have indeed expounded more at length, others more briefly; because I promised I would do this fully in the work that was to follow.

And so nothing there remained unexploded of all Augustine's arguments and propositions; nothing has been fulfilled by me otherwise than promised; many things among his inventions I have convicted as false, many as stupid, many as sacrilegious. AUGUSTINE. This indeed you say, but you say it; whereas he who reads and understands, if he is not a Pelagian, does not say this. No arrogance. 15. JULIAN. By this profession no ill fame of arrogance need be feared by us; because we confess that truth has been defended not by my talent, but that the weakness of our talent has been aided by the strength of truth. AUGUSTINE. You would have said 'crushed,' if you had been willing to speak the truth. Augustine admits both that I spoke falsely and that he did not read what I said. 16. JULIAN. Since therefore these things stand fulfilled no otherwise than I have said;

I cannot sufficiently marvel at the man's impudence, who in this recent work of his accuses my books of falsity, which nevertheless he attests have not yet come into his hands. It is hard indeed that the habit of sinning produces love of the offence; but nothing is harder than that it extinguishes shame; which, though it was established to arise from the practice of wickedness, yet present perils have taught more fully than any of us could have surmised. For when should I have believed that the African had so hardened his brow, that in one work and in one line he should confess both — that I had spoken false things, and that he had not read what I said? AUGUSTINE. If you did not do this, he did who excerpted from your books those things which he thought ought to be sent to Count Valerius.

Because, not believing that he had done this deceitfully, I attributed to the author what I owed to the excerptor. For I had not yet read your books, but I had read what he had excerpted from them. If you would consider that you are a man, when you saw that this could have happened, you would by no means seek out for a man, on this occasion, so odious a calumny. Augustine read only the excerpts. 17. JULIAN. For, writing to him whom he marvels to be a student of his books, though he is occupied with the sweats of military service, he indicates that leaflets were brought to him by Alypius, which were superscribed thus: 'Chapters from the book of Augustine which he wrote, against which I have excerpted a few things from the books.'

Here I see that the one who directed those writings to your Excellency wished to excerpt them from I know not what books, for the sake — as far as I judge — of a swifter response, lest he delay your insistence. But when I considered which those books might be, I judged them to be those of which Julian makes mention in the letter which he sent to Rome, a copy of which came all the way to me at the same time. For there he says: 'They say also that these marriages which are now transacted were not instituted by God, which is read in the book of Augustine, against which I have now replied in four little books.' And after these words he again infers, in his own words: 'I believe these things were excerpted from these little books;'

whence perhaps it had been better that our effort should labour to refute and confute his whole work itself, which he unfolded in four volumes; had I not been unwilling to delay my response, just as neither did you delay the transmission of the writings which must be answered. He shows therefore here most plainly that he suspects those excerpts to have been hastily collected from my work; but that he is ignorant of the whole books, to which nevertheless he dares to say he could have replied. AUGUSTINE. Why should I not dare, since I ought certainly not to doubt that you had spoken vain things in them? For you could not speak against true things save vain ones. Nor did my mind deceive me;

for I found those books of yours to be such, when I read them, as I had presumed them to be before I read them. A letter directed to Rome. 18. JULIAN. He also makes mention of a letter which he says was directed by me to Rome; but through the words which he set down, we were unable to recognize of what writing he was speaking. For to Zosimus, once bishop of that city, I addressed two letters upon these questions; but at that time when I had not yet begun the books. AUGUSTINE. This letter is not to Zosimus; but to seduce those who at Rome could be seduced by such persuasion. But if you do not acknowledge it, behold, let it not be yours. Would that those books too were not yours, but another's; lest through them you should be made far estranged from the truth.

How great his levity and weakness. 19. JULIAN. Furthermore, let him make use of the indication of the letter, by which he either received, or feigned, that I had unfolded in four volumes a reply against the new Manichees (because he disdains to seem an old one); why did he not take care to learn beforehand the things we had objected? Why did he not, being about to engage, study to recognize them; but, stirred by most base levity into the greatest contest with his eyes bandaged, advanced after the manner of the Andabatae? A deed which he defends with such an allegation as to say that he wished, by a headlong response, to imitate his patron's haste, which the latter had in transmitting the papers; as though he could not most honourably have intimated that some time ought to be granted him, in which he might arrive at the reading of the published work;

that it is a disgrace among the learned to transgress in the gravity of writing, and, in the impatience of deliberating, to assail what you do not know. To this is added that, contriving against us the odium of craftiness — namely, that it curtailed the sequence of his sayings — he lent credence to these excerpts, which seem to have been composed more plausibly by his own falsity and malignity than by the unskilled simplicity of any of us. But with whatever mind, by whatever author this came about, it nevertheless supports us in two ways;

because at once it became plain both how great is the levity, and how great the weakness, in the enemy of truth, who has demonstrated of himself both that, when he ought not to speak, he cannot keep silence, and that, from a few half-full and torn-apart rather than gathered sentences — yet only from my first book — he so gave way, broken, that he stirred the breasts of the common crowd against us with womanish voices indeed; which will appear in the courses of our disputation. AUGUSTINE. Why are you angry with me, that your books could reach me rather late; or that, seeking them, I could not swiftly find them?

Yet I could, and altogether ought to, inspect with plainly open, not bandaged, eyes the things which the leaflet sent to me contained — of whatever sort and quality they were — lest they be thought unconquered, and to refute them without delay; because, even if I could never find your books, it behoved me to convict, as far as I was able, the things which he judged to be of some moment, who reckoned they ought to be sent to so great a man, lest anyone reading them should be deceived by them. You would not, then, cast up against me what you have cast up, unless you were rather speaking with — I will not say extinguished, but certainly closed — eyes. But in no way would you say that the breasts of the common crowd are stirred by us against you, unless you knew that the Catholic faith, which you are trying to overthrow, is not hidden from the Christian multitude in either sex.

The opinion of natural evil. 20. JULIAN. Yet here too I give warning, as was done by us in the earlier work, that I shall not set down all his words exactly; but those heads by whose destruction the opinion of natural evil may be crushed. AUGUSTINE. The things you pass over will perhaps be gathered either by us or by others, so that it may appear why you passed them over. The truncation of texts. 21. JULIAN. Although this is established to have been fully accomplished in the first work; yet because he has now proposed to himself to refute some things from one book of mine alone, and charges me, as I have said before, that I have for the most part truncated the heads of his sayings which I inserted; I shall show first that what he reproaches was not done by me, and was most impudently practised by him in this very work.

Then I shall prove, by those very concise and brief sentences which he inserts from my writings by which he had been assailed, that he has so opposed them with no solid responses, that both those sentences remain unshaken, and here he confesses more plainly what is to be detested than our operation had laboured to unfold. AUGUSTINE. I have already answered these things above. Omissions. 22. JULIAN. Astonished, then, let us hear what he has written against me. 'He set down,' he says, 'these words from my book, sent to you by me and most well known to you, which he attempted to refute: "they clamour most invidiously that we are condemners of marriage and of the divine work by which God creates human beings from males and females; because we say that those who are born of such union contract original sin;"

'and we do not deny that they, of whatever parents they are born, are still under the devil, unless they are reborn in Christ.' In these words of mine he passed over the testimony of the Apostle which I had interposed, by the great weight of which he felt himself pressed. For when I had said that men contract original sin, I straightway added: 'Of which the Apostle says: "through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death; and so it passed unto all men, in whom all sinned."' This testimony, as we said, having been passed over, he wove together the rest of those things which have been recalled above. For he knows in what way the hearts of the Catholic faithful are wont to receive these apostolic words which he passed over;

These words, so upright and shining with such great light, the new heretics strive to obscure and corrupt with dark and twisted interpretations. Then he wove in other words of mine, where I had said: 'They observe that, just as the good of marriage cannot be accused on account of the original evil which is drawn from it, so neither can the evil of adulteries and fornications be excused on account of the natural good which is born from it. For as sin, whether it be drawn by little children from the one source or the other, is the work of the devil, so man, whether he be born from the one or the other, is the work of God.' Here too he passed over those things wherein he feared Catholic ears. For, that these words might be reached, it had been said above by us:

'Therefore, because we say what is contained in the most ancient and most firm rule of the Catholic faith, these asserters of a new and perverse dogma, who say that there is no sin in little children to be washed away by the laver of regeneration, slander us faithlessly or ignorantly, as though we condemned marriage, and as though we said that the work of God—that is, the man who is born of marriage—were the work of the devil.' These words of ours, then, being passed over, there follow those words of ours which he set down, as is written above. How long, you who speak these things, will you persist in mocking the simplicity of religious hearts and unskilled ears? To what end will unbridled shamelessness fling itself?

When you were writing these things, did the censure of learned men move you not at all, nor the reverence of the coming judgement, nor the very monuments of literature themselves? Now let your deceit lie open; do you not see that, once detected, it is held fast? What you wrote in your first work, what in your second—which of us do you suppose is ignorant of it? For it pleased you outright, and it was fitting, to accost you in those modes with which an eloquent consul thundered against a public parricide. AUGUSTINE: You do well to point out to us, lest perhaps we should not recognize it, that you took these things from the invectives of Cicero and turned them to your use; but we do not fear Julian, when we see that he has become a man of Tullius; rather we grieve at the madman, when we see that he has lost the Christian sense.

For what is more insane than to keep the physician Christ away from little children, by saying that there is not in them that which He came to heal? Cicero, inveighing against the parricide of his fatherland, was defending that city which its king Romulus founded by gathering sinners from every quarter; but you, so many little children who die without holy Baptism, both cry out that they have no sin, and do not permit them to draw near to the city of the King, to whose image they were made. Pronounce that I speak the truth. 23. JULIAN: You feign that I passed over the Apostle's testimony—which can neither help you, and was not passed over by me; rather it was inserted in that order in which it had been placed by you;

and as it was faithfully recalled in the first work, so indeed in the fourth book of my work it was expounded, albeit cursorily and briefly. Likewise the mention of the Catholic Church, which you had made for this purpose—that those deceived by you might desert the Catholic faith, and that the wretched might rejoice in the appellation 'Catholic'—I did not pass over. And although there was no force of argument in words of this kind, nevertheless the heading of your statements was set forth by me no otherwise than it had been arranged by you. Read my published books and the fidelity of my reply, and looking upon that of which you accuse me as fraud, pronounce meanwhile that I speak the truth; but you, if your custom will permit, blush.

But now that the inexcusable falsehood has been exposed—which, though always base, becomes yet baser when it invades the place of a censor and reproaches its own deformity upon another's comeliness—answer: what do either the name of the Church or the Apostle's words profit Manichaean sentiments, that you should allege them to have been passed over with such great ill-will? AUGUSTINE: I have already answered above this calumny of yours, by which you charge me with the falsehood of having set down your words less than fully. But that which that snipper did, you would not so readily attribute to me, if you did not wish to be a deceiver of those who read these things. They ascribe every sin to an evil nature. 24. JULIAN:

This has always been the greatest distinction between the Manichaeans and the Catholics, and a certain very broad boundary by which the dogmas of the pious and the impious are separated from one another—nay, a great mass dividing our opinions as heaven from earth by its depth: namely, that we ascribe every sin to an evil will, but they to an evil nature. These, though they follow diverse errors, yet as flowing forth from the head of that same fountain, consequently arrive at sacrileges and disgraceful deeds; just as the Catholics, on the contrary, beginning from a good starting-point and increased by good progressions, are carried up to the height of religion, which reason fortifies and piety.

You therefore, attempting to assert a natural evil with a profane wish indeed but an ineffective intent, have usurped the testimony of the Apostle, whom by this very citation I show to have felt nothing such as you attempt to persuade; for by mutually contradictory ways you both confess him Catholic, and reckon that his sayings support the Manichaean. AUGUSTINE: Which Catholic teachers would you assert to support the Manichaean—those who understood in the apostolic words that little children draw original sin, and did not, in your insane manner, praise nature as though it were sound, but rather applied to it, to be healed, a Christian medicine? If you thought with a Christian heart, you would blush, tremble, and fall silent. All heresies fortify their inventions with the Scriptures. 25. JULIAN:

Did not the same Adimantus and Faustus (whom in the books of your Confessions you call your teacher) do this by the tradition of their heresiarch, snatching and corrupting the more obscure sentences, whether of the Gospel or of the Epistles of the Apostles, in order to defend a profane dogma by the authority of names? Yet why do I speak of the Manichaeans? Absolutely all heresies fortify their inventions—by which they have swerved from piety and faith—with the expressions and sentences of the Scriptures. AUGUSTINE: They turned obscure sentences into their own dogma; you strive to obscure plain ones by your very dogma. For what is plainer than what the Apostle says:

that sin entered into this world through one man, and through sin death, and so passed through unto all men? And if the same Apostle were compelled to prove this, he would give as witness the very misery of the human race, which begins from the wailings of little children and reaches even to the groans of the decrepit. For in no way, under the care of an omnipotent and just God, would so great a misery be inflicted upon human nature, unless in two men the whole of it were driven, by the merit of sin, from the felicity of paradise into this unhappiness. The Scriptures do not prove errors. 26. JULIAN: Shall then either the authors of the sacred Books be proved authors of errors, or shall the dignity of the Scriptures expiate the crimes of those who perish? AUGUSTINE: Say this to yourselves. God is just. 27. JULIAN:

Let the lust of undisciplined expositions therefore be extinguished; let no words be believed to do anything against the manifest justice of God; and if they are of that Person whom it is necessary to venerate, let them be defended by explanations befitting the divine equity; but if they were uttered by an author not to be feared, let them be driven off even unpurified. Now, therefore, we dispute concerning the judgement of God, of whom it is written: God is faithful, in whom there is no iniquity; just and holy is the Lord God. And again: The Lord is just, and hath loved justice; His countenance hath beheld equity. And again: All Thy judgements are equity. Innumerable are the testimonies by which the divine equity is proclaimed in the sacred Volumes;

of which, however, no one among either the Gentiles or the heretics, except the Manichaeans and the Traducianists, has doubted. AUGUSTINE: By this equity a heavy yoke is upon the sons of Adam from the day of their coming forth from their mother's womb; which he who denies original sin asserts to be altogether unjust. God cannot but be just. 28. JULIAN: For it has been so impressed upon all universally, nature teaching it, that God is just, that it is manifest that He is not God who is proved not to be just. A man, therefore, can also be just; but God cannot be anything but just. AUGUSTINE: Say this to yourself. God judges most justly. 29. JULIAN: Who, since He is this one true God whom we believe and whom we venerate in the Trinity, is beyond doubt most just in the reckoning of judgement toward all.

AUGUSTINE: Say this to yourself: and show Him to be just, in that with so manifest a misery, or unto so manifest a misery, one is born from whom no original sin is drawn. Without equity, the whole Godhead would grow worthless. 30. JULIAN: By His laws, therefore, that cannot be so proved and vindicated which is established to be unjust, so that, if this could happen, His whole divinity would grow worthless. By Him, therefore, it will be proved that a dogma of injustice is confirmed from the holy Scriptures—by Him by whom it could be approved that the Trinity, in whom we believe, could be deprived of the glory of divinity. AUGUSTINE: You speak truly: but say this to yourselves, you who contrive to take away from Christ the glory by which He heals little children. God and natural sin are not reconciled. 31. JULIAN:

Since neither any reason nor any piety sustains this, either teach that it is possible, or that it is just, that natural sin be imputed to anyone; or depart from the contamination of the holy Scriptures, by whose sentences you reckon to be sanctioned that which you are compelled to confess unjust. AUGUSTINE: You err: rather you yourselves are compelled to confess unjust the heavy yoke upon little children, if, just as they have no sin of their own, so they draw no original sin. A new Manichaean, worse than the old. 32. JULIAN: But if you will do neither of these things which we have said, and yet assert that you believe in this God by whose ordinances you reckon injustice to be fortified,

then recognize that you, the new Manichaean, are far worse than the old, in that you hold such a God as the Manichaean imagined the enemy of his own god to be. AUGUSTINE: You rage against little children worse than the Manichaeans. For they at least wish the soul—which they think a part of God—to be healed through Christ in the little child; but you, in one whom you say has no evil either in soul or in flesh, permit him to be healed by Christ in no part whatever. And you, illustrious preachers, so preach Jesus that you deny Him to be the Jesus of little children. From what source He received this name, read in the Gospel, and do not deny the Savior to unsaved little children. The common folk detest the Pelagian error. 33. JULIAN:

What roundabout evasions, then, what cushions of lies and follies—which the prophet Ezekiel imputes to fornicating Jerusalem—will you set before me here, on which womanish souls may recline, holding the names of the mysteries, while with unveiled profanity they have committed offense against the very Godhead? With all conjuring tricks removed, and the troops of common folk you so often summon to your aid, teach that to be just which you attempt to affirm through the holy Scriptures. AUGUSTINE: The troops of common folk whom you mock know the Catholic faith, which confesses that infants are saved by the Savior; and therefore they detest the error of the Pelagians, who deny this. Lest the discourse be extended into infinite volumes. 34. JULIAN:

Lest, then, the discourse be extended into infinite volumes, here, here let there be discerned the genus, species, difference, mode, and quality of the matters we are treating; nay, more carefully, whether they exist, whence they exist, where they exist, what also they merit, and from whom. For in this way there will not long be wandering through the windings of disputations, and what ought to be held for certain will appear. AUGUSTINE: For this reason you wrote eight books against my one book, because by your dialectical shortcuts you were unwilling to dispute at length. The definition of justice. 35. JULIAN: The reckoning, therefore, turns upon the Creator and the creature—that is, God and man; the One judges, the other is judged; and so let it be seen what is the nature of justice and of fault.

Justice is—as it is wont to be defined by the learned, and as we ourselves can understand it—the virtue (if it be permitted, according to the Stoics, to prefer one to another) greatest of all virtues, diligently discharging its office of rendering to each his own, without fraud, without favor. AUGUSTINE: Say then, by what justice the heavy yoke of so great and manifest a misery is repaid to little children; say by what justice one little child is adopted in Baptism, another dies without this adoption; why this honor is not common to both, or estrangement from this honor, since the cause—whether good or bad—is common to both. You do not say, because, more a Pelagian than a Christian, you have taste for neither the grace of God nor the justice of God. True virtue is that which is perfected by a fourfold conjunction.

36. JULIAN: But if Zeno will not allow it to be called the greatest—Zeno who affirms so great a bond and unity of the virtues that where one has been, he says all the virtues are present, and where one has not been, all are absent, and that that is true virtue which is perfected by this fourfold conjunction—then also he will furnish us with very much help, when he has taught that neither prudence, nor fortitude, nor temperance can be maintained without justice; according to which truth Ecclesiastes also pronounces: He who sins in one thing shall lose many good things. AUGUSTINE: Hear the same Ecclesiastes saying: Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity; what abundance has a man in all his labor, wherewith he labors under the sun? and so forth.

And tell me, why has man too been made like unto vanity, who had been made like unto truth? Or do you except from this the little children, whom we see, by growing and—if they be well educated—by advancing, diminishing so great a vanity as that with which they were born, nor being wholly free of it until all the days of vanity shall have passed away like a shadow? God is the origin of justice. 37. JULIAN: This august virtue, therefore, the assessor of each one's merits, in the works of the image of God—that is, of the human soul—gleams intermittently according to the measure and powers of the creature itself; but in God Himself, the Founder from nothing of all that exists, it shines forth immense and bright throughout the eternal orb.

Its origin is divinity, its age is eternity, and eternity knows neither to cease nor to have begun, this way or that. As, therefore, its genus (by which name I wish nothing else to be understood than its origin) is God, so its species appears in the promulgation of laws and in the effects of judgements. AUGUSTINE: If God is the origin of justice, as you confess, why do you not confess that justice is given to man by Him, and rather wish justice to be the free choice of the human will than the gift of God—so that you are among those of whom it is said: Being ignorant of God's justice, and wishing to establish their own, they have not submitted themselves to the justice of God? Blush at length, I beseech you, and demand justice from Him who is, as you have been compelled to confess, the origin of justice.

The difference, mode, and quality of justice. 38. JULIAN: But its difference we can not absurdly understand to be its varied dispensation according to the opportuneness of the times. For example, sacrifices of animals had been commanded in the Old Testament. To fulfill that then pertained to reverence for the command; but now the ceasing of them, being enjoined, so serves the justice that commands, as then the offering served it. Its mode is either its stability—that it enjoins upon no one more than his powers can bear—or that it does not blunt mercy. But its quality is understood to be that by which it tastes sweetly to pious minds. There is, therefore, beyond doubt, justice, without which there is no deity; which if it were not, God would not be;

but God exists, and so without ambiguity justice exists. And it is nothing other than the virtue containing all things and rendering to each his own, without fraud, without favor. But it consists chiefly in the depth of divinity. AUGUSTINE: You have defined justice to be the virtue containing all things and rendering to each his own, without fraud, without favor. Accordingly we see that it, without fraud, rendered a denarius to those who had labored throughout the whole day in the work of the vineyard; for this had pleased them, this had been agreed upon, and they could not deny that they had been hired for this wage. But tell me, I ask you, how without favor did it give just as much to those who were only one hour in that work? Had it perhaps lost its justice? Restrain yourself, therefore, rather.

For divine justice defrauds no one, but grace bestows many things upon those who do not merit them. But why to this one thus, and to that one thus, look at what you subjoin following. For you say most truly that it consists chiefly in the depth of divinity. In this depth is that which belongs neither to him that wills, nor to him that runs, but to God that shows mercy. In this depth is that one little child is adopted into honor through the laver of regeneration, another is left in contumely, not to be admitted to the Kingdom; whereas of neither is there any merit toward either side through the choice of the will. Clemency is a great part of justice. 39. JULIAN:

But justice deserves testimony, as from its author, so also from either the good or the wicked, in that it has both justly advanced the former and justly condemned the latter. But when, toward those who merit neither anything good nor anything evil of themselves, it permits mercy to be liberal, it feels no injury; because this very thing—that God should be clement to His own work, when He is not compelled into severity—is a great part of justice. AUGUSTINE: Attend at least to the name of mercy, and consider whence it is named. What need, then, is there of mercy where there is no misery? Moreover, if you say there is no misery in little children, you deny that mercy is to be shown them; if you say there is any, you show an evil merit. For under a just God no one can be miserable unless he deserves it.

Behold, two little children lie here: one of them baptized, the other unbaptized, breathes his last; to which of them do you say God was clement? If to the one, show the evil merit of the other—you who deny that there is original sin; if to both, show any good merit of the baptized—you who deny grace, where there is no respect of persons; and say, if you can, why He was unwilling to adopt both—He who certainly founded both after His own image. Or is He so just that He is not omnipotent, if He willed and could not? Where certainly neither of them was unwilling, lest you refer the impediment of the divine power to the merit of the human will; here certainly God can say to neither of them: I willed, and you were unwilling.

Or if the infant is unwilling for the reason that he cries when he is baptized, then let both be left, for both are unwilling; and yet one is taken up and the other is left, because great is the grace of God, and true the justice of God. But why this one rather than that one: Inscrutable are the judgements of God. Justice and grace. 40. JULIAN: For those whom He made because He willed, He condemns only when despised; if, when He is not despised, He should make them better by consecration, He suffers no detriment of justice, and is adorned by the munificence of His compassion. AUGUSTINE: You who condemn only when despised, say whether He despises His own image except when despised. But if you dare not, say whence He despises those little children whom He does not adopt, by whom you will not find Him despised, unless you find them in Adam.

Where at once you will find that, in order for them to be despised, it is owed to all through justice, and yet that not all are despised, on account of the ineffable and inscrutable grace. God chooses the weak things. 41. JULIAN: These divisions of justice, therefore, which we have set forth, being expounded, let us discuss what is the definition of sin. Indeed, the writings both of the philosophers and of those who were Catholics supply me abundantly with what we seek; but I fear lest you resist, and, if I have summoned the senate of philosophers, you should straightway kindle against us the stool-bound craftsmen and all the common crowd. AUGUSTINE: You are contumelious against the weak things of the world, which God chose that He might confound the strong. Finally, these very ones confound those who trust in their own strength. Whereupon what shall I say: You are they?

Absolutely, though I am silent, you appear, since you are not silent. Either a liar or reckless. 42. JULIAN: Bawling with the women, and with all the dogs and tribunes, for whom your colleague Alypius lately brought from all Africa eighty or more fattened horses. AUGUSTINE: Either you calumniate, or you know not what you say; and therefore, either a liar or reckless, you speak these things. But what is more worthless than you, if you yourself invented these things? What is more stupid, if you believed those who invented them? But now, in that you even dared to write them, and did not fear lest your books should reach those places which received my colleague Alypius as he passed or came by land and sea—where your falsehoods can most plainly be read, not without derision of you, or rather detestation;

to what shall it be compared—I will not say of impudence, but of madness? You despise those who teach original sin. 43. JULIAN: By no means do you acquiesce in the opinions of the learned, so that you should add that, according to what suits your understanding, the Apostle said that God made foolish the wisdom of the world; but that our disputants can be despised by you without fear, because you are pressed by no authority of such men. AUGUSTINE: You despise those who, by their teaching original sin, so resist you that you moreover accuse them as Manichaeans, naming me, signifying them. The definition of sin which is only sin. 44. JULIAN: What then?

Shall I acquiesce to you outright, and here make forfeit of all those helps I might use, and be content with the definition which, to the indication of a good nature, escaped from the mouth of your honesty after the secret of the Manichaeans? In that book, then, whose title is either On the Two Souls or Against the Two Souls, you speak thus: 'Wait, let us first define sin. Sin is the will to admit or retain what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain. Although, if one is not free, it cannot even be called will; but I preferred to define more coarsely than too scrupulously.' AUGUSTINE: Here sin has been defined which is only sin, not that which is also the penalty of sin.

For it was of this that we had to treat, when the origin of evil was being sought—of what sort was committed by the first man before any evil of man. But you either cannot understand, or will not. Augustine's definition is gold. 45. JULIAN: O gold shining in dung! What truer, what fuller, could be said by anyone, even orthodox? Sin, you say, is the will to admit or retain what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain. Ecclesiasticus shows this: God, it says, made man, and left him in the hand of his own counsel; He set before him life and death, water and fire; whatever shall please him shall be given him. And through Isaiah God: If you be willing, He says, and will hear Me, you shall eat the good things of the land.

If you be unwilling, and will not hear, the sword shall devour you. And the Apostle: Awake righteously, and sin not; and again: Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatever a man shall sow, that shall he also reap. AUGUSTINE: These testimonies were said on account of that will, in which each one does what he wills; so that if it be not had, it may be asked of Him who works in us even to will; but if it be had, let works of justice be done, and to Him who has worked it let thanks be given. Right hand and left. 46. JULIAN: The will, therefore, is a motion of the mind, having it in its own right whether it runs down leftward to depraved things, or strives rightward to lofty things. AUGUSTINE: What then is: Turn not aside to the right hand, nor to the left?

The origin, species, difference, mode, and quality of sin. 47. JULIAN: But it is the motion of the mind of him who can now, by reason of age, use the judgement of reason; to whom, when penalty and glory are shown, or on the contrary advantage or pleasure, a help and, as it were, an occasion is offered, not a necessity imposed upon either of the two sides. This will, therefore, which alternates, received the origin of its possibility in free choice; but it takes upon itself from itself the existence of the deed itself, nor is there a will at all before it wills, nor can it will before it has also been able to be unwilling; nor does it have either in the sphere of sin—that is, to will and to be unwilling—before it attains the use of reason. From which things gathered, it appears that you defined most truly:

Sin is the will to retain or admit what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain. This sin, then, which has become clear to be nothing besides the will, is established to have received its genus—that is, its very origin—from proper appetite. Its species is now found in each single one of what are called atoms. But its difference is both in the variety of faults and in the reckonings of times. Its mode is immoderation itself; for if the mode is to serve him whom you ought, he who neglects this offends by the transgression of the true mode. Yet here it can be subtly said that there is a mode of sin, because no one offends more than he can; for if beyond one's powers, one sins with an ineffective will; this very thing could come to pass by the will alone.

But let quality be ascribed to the vice, through which is shown what of bitterness it brings, whether by disgrace or by pain. There is, then, sin, because if it were not, neither would you follow errors; but it is nothing other than a will exceeding beyond that path on which it ought to press, and from which it is free not to deviate. But it comes to be from the appetite of things not permitted; and it is nowhere except in that man who both had an evil will and could have not had it. AUGUSTINE: He is Adam himself, whom that definition of ours, which pleased you, was regarding, when I said: Sin is the will to retain or attain what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain.

For Adam, when he sinned, had absolutely nothing of evil in himself by which, though unwilling, he might be urged to do evil, and on account of which he might say: Not the good that I will do I do, but the evil that I will not, that I do. And by this he did, in sinning, that which justice forbade, and from which it had been free for him to abstain. For to him who says, The evil that I will not, that I do, it is not free to abstain therefrom. And by this, if you distinguish these three things, and know that sin is one thing, the penalty of sin another, and both a third—that is, so a sin that it is also the penalty of sin—you understand which of these three pertains to that definition, where there is a will to do what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain.

For sin was in this way defined, not the penalty of sin, not both. But these three genera have also their own species, concerning which it would now be long to dispute. If indeed examples of these three genera be sought, that of the first genus occurs in Adam without any knot of question. For there are many evils which men do, from which they are free to abstain; but to none is it so free as it was to him who stood before his God, by whom he had been created upright, depraved by absolutely no vice. But of the second genus, where there is only the penalty of sin, the example is in that evil which anyone in no part does, but only suffers;

as when, for his own crime, he who has sinned is killed, or is tortured by any other bodily penalty whatever. But the third genus, where there is the sin itself and the penalty of sin, can be understood in him who says: The evil that I will not, that I do. To this pertain also all those things which through ignorance, when evils are done, are not thought evils, or are even thought goods. For blindness of heart, if it were not sin, would be unjustly reproved; but it is justly reproved, where it is said: Blind Pharisee! and in very many other places of the divine eloquences. And again the same blindness, if it were not the penalty of sin, it would not be said: For their own malice blinded them; and if this came not from the judgement of God, we should not read:

Let their eyes be darkened that they see not, and bow down their back always. Who, moreover, is blind in heart willingly, when no one wishes to be blind even in body? Accordingly, original sin pertains neither to that which we placed in the first place, where there is the will to do evil, from which one is free to abstain—otherwise it would not be in little children, who do not yet use the choice of the will; nor to that which we mentioned in the second place. For we are now treating of sin, not of the penalty, which is not sin, although it follows by the merit of sin; which indeed even little children suffer, because there is in them a body dead on account of sin. Yet the death of the body itself is not sin, nor are any bodily torments whatsoever;

But original sin belongs to that third class, in which sin is of such a kind that it is at once itself a sin and the penalty of sin; it is indeed present in those who are born, yet it begins to show itself in them as they grow, when wisdom becomes necessary for the foolish, and continence for those who desire evil things. Nevertheless the origin even of this sin descends from the will of the sinner. For there was Adam, and in him we all were; Adam perished, and in him all perished. Bring forth the means by which you may teach a natural sin. 48. JULIAN: But it merits both execration from honorable men and, from that very justice on which this whole case here turns, a lawful condemnation. And so, with all the curtains drawn back, bring forth at last, plainly into the light, the means by which you teach that sin is natural.

Certainly nothing above has been falsely inferred, whether concerning the praise of divine justice or concerning the definition of fault. Show, then, that these two things can hold good in little children: if there is no sin without will, if there is no will where liberty is not unfolded, if there is no liberty where there is no faculty of choice through reason—by what monstrous thing is sin found in infants, who do not have the use of reason? Therefore they have neither the faculty of choosing, and through this no will either; and once these things are irrefutably conceded, no sin at all whatever. Pressed, then, by these masses, let us see whither you break out. 'By no sin of their own,' you say, 'are little children burdened, but they are burdened by another's.' It is not yet clear what evil you hold.

For we suspect that you have brought these things forward to stir up hatred against some man, whose iniquity you would portray like a Punic orator. In whose presence, then, did an alien crime weigh down unstained innocence? Who was that man who would adjudge these as guilty—so mindless, so savage, so forgetful of God and of equity, a barbarous foe? We praise your talent outright; your erudition is evident; you could not do otherwise than to allege the person of some judge—nay rather of a tyrant—worthy of the human race's hatred, than that by swearing you might charge him with not only not sparing those who had committed no sin, but even those who could not have sinned.

For in a suspicious mind a good conscience is wont to labor in its own defense, lest perchance it may have transgressed, because it even could transgress; but he is absolutely acquitted of the charge who is defended by the very impossibility of the thing. Reveal, then, who this consigner of the innocent is. You answer: God. You have indeed struck the mind; but since so great a sacrilege scarcely deserves belief, let us be in doubt as to what you have said. For we know that this name can be used equivocally: For there are many gods and many lords; yet for us there is one God the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things. Which God, then, do you call into accusation?

Here you, most religious priest and most learned rhetorician, exhale something more grievous and more horrible than either the vale of Amsanctus or the pit of Avernus—nay, more wicked than the very worship of idols had committed in those places. God Himself, you say, who commends His charity toward us, who has loved us and did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us, He Himself so judges, He Himself is the persecutor of the newborn, He Himself for an evil will delivers little children to eternal fires—little children whom He knows could have had neither a good nor an evil will. After this sentiment, then, so monstrous, so sacrilegious, so deadly, if we were dealing with sane judges, I ought to report nothing concerning you but execration.

For with just and probable gravity I would judge you unworthy of debate, since you had fled so far from religion, from erudition, and finally from common sense, that—what scarcely any barbarism would do—you should think your own Lord a criminal. AUGUSTINE: It is no great matter that you see that little children do not have their own will for choosing good or evil. I would rather that you saw what he saw who, writing to the Hebrews, said that Levi the son of Israel was in the loins of his father Abraham when Abraham was tithed, and that therefore he too was tithed in him. If for this you had a Christian eye, you would discern by faith—if you were not strong in understanding—that all were in the loins of Adam who were to arise from him through the concupiscence of the flesh;

which nakedness of his, after the sin by which his nakedness was announced to him, he felt, beheld, blushed at, and covered. Whence Ambrose, my teacher—and one excellently praised by the mouth of your own teacher—says: 'What is therefore more grievous, Adam girded himself with this interpretation, in that very place where he ought rather to have girded himself with the fruit of chastity. For in the loins, by which we are girded, certain seeds of generation are said to be. And so Adam was ill-girded there with useless leaves, where he signified not the future fruit of the future generation, but certain sins.' Rightly too he says what I mentioned a little before: 'There was Adam, and in him we all were; Adam perished, and in him all perished.' Not seeing this, you bark against me, blind man;