The same Augustus to Julianus, Praetorian Prefect. Since the sacred canons permit neither the most God-beloved presbyters, nor the most reverend deacons, nor subdeacons to contract marriage after ordination of this kind, but grant this to the most reverend chanters (psaltai) and lectors alone, we have observed that certain ones, despising indeed the sacred canons, beget children from certain women to whom they cannot be joined according to the priestly rule. Since therefore the penalty for this misdeed lay in the loss of the priesthood alone, but our laws too will that the sacred canons be valid no less than the laws, we decree that those provisions which are in the sacred canons shall hold good in those matters, just as if it were inscribed in the civil laws;
and that all such men be stripped both of the priesthood and of the divine ministry, and also of the very dignity which they hold. For just as such things are forbidden by the sacred canons, so also according to our laws is the matter itself forbidden; and besides the aforesaid penalty of being cut off from the ministry, those who are born, or have been born, from such disorderly defilement shall not be legitimate or proper offspring: but the offspring that arises from such seed shall partake of disgrace; for we ordain that they be such as those whom the laws define as born of incestuous or nefarious marriages, so that they be reckoned neither natural nor base-born (nothi) nor spurious, but altogether and in every way prohibited and unworthy of succession to their begetters;
nor can they receive a donation from those men—neither they nor their mothers, nor even through interposed persons—but with the benefits conferred by the fathers upon these persons reverting to the holy church from which are those who have so transgressed. For what the sacred canons forbid, that we too abolish through our laws. But if some feigned obligation under the appearance of a loan or of another contractual instrument be made, which would render obligated him who has become a partaker of such defilement, we will that this too be invalid, and that the giving of such things go, not to that person in whose favour the writings were drawn up, but to the most holy church. Given on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of November, at Constantinople, in the consulship of Lampadius and Orestes, most distinguished men, in the year 530.