Likewise in the same book, chapter 63, the words of Julian: 'For he did not say that sin passed over, but death; death assuredly inflicted by the severity of the judgment, the avenger of the transgression; pursuing not the seeds of bodies, but the vices of morals.' 1. To these things. Most stupid man, you have struck yourself with your own dagger: for you wish that not sin, but death, passes through the seeds, which yet you say was 'inflicted by the severity of the judgment, the avenger of the transgression.' Let it then be turned back upon you from your own words. What has this to do with posterity, who one and all have died, do die, and shall die—by that very death which passed upon all men, and is the avenger of the transgression, as you say?
For that other thing is to be laughed at, which you say: that death—which you have called the penalty of sin—alone passed into the race, apart from that which was the cause of this so great evil. Behold an excellent defender of the just judgment of God, who would transmit the penalty of the progenitor into the posterity, who do not have the cause of his penalty! 2. But it delights us, what you subjoin: 'pursuing not the seeds of bodies, but the vices of morals.' As though you command rather than teach that no one is dead, nor dies, nor shall die, except him who shall have been an imitator of Adam's transgression. Are you not ashamed of so great a vanity?
Was there then no one, nor will there be, nor is there—at least according to the definition of your master Pelagius, which you have defended in so many books, by which you both decree that 'a man can be without sin, and can easily keep the commandments of God'? As then we were saying, even according to yourselves, there was no one through so many ages who, being found a stranger to this imitation of yours, would not deserve to undergo in himself this penalty of Adam, which you call 'the avenger of transgression, and which is bidden to pursue not the seeds but the vices of conduct.' And surely those whom you say 'can be without sin, and can easily keep the commandments of God' ought to be without vices.
Finally, so many thousands of infants, according to you, are born, have been born, and will be born without any vice. Why then are they smitten with this death which has been brought in by the severity of judgement as the avenger of transgression—a death which neither their own cause has followed, nor, as you say, has passed into any one of them? 3. Here, so to speak, there fell from your hands that notable definition of your fellow-disciple Coelestius: 'Since the sin of Adam injured himself alone, and not the human race.' This is that Coelestius, one of those of whom in the first of your four books to Turbantius you say these things:
'The teachers of our time, most blessed brother Turbantius, the authors also of the wicked sedition which still rages, have resolved to attain, through the ruin of the whole Church, to the reproach and destruction of those men whose holy pursuits they envy; not understanding how much honour they have conferred upon those whose glory they have shown cannot be uprooted except along with the catholic religion.' Have you then so forgotten friendship? Is this how you have been accustomed to defend? Or do you now yourself need a patron? And have they been deceived who had prepared you as their defender? 4. And let these things be said by me as by one who has not understood you to be too crafty and eloquent—a charge which you too will throw out without any hesitation;
yet if you persuade yourself of this, you will be very greatly mistaken. For I have understood you, and I know how most ineptly you think against the faith that holds fast to what is right, and I keep in memory by what twists of words you here employ; and grant us a little patience, and we shall prove these things. 5. You abuse, that is to say, the simplicity of the Christians who shall happen upon these books of yours to read them: for these indeed are your words, 'But that not sin, but death passed into all men—death brought in surely by the severity of judgement, the avenger of transgression.' Here, here, meanwhile, let me hold you a little while; here let me usefully spend with you some delay;
I ask, if you speak plainly and not as in a dilemma, like Loxias to Croesus and Pyrrhus (for there is one and the same spirit of error), how are you too not a traducianist, even though it pleases you—and is still permitted you—to impose the name on catholic Christians? For not even that very death which you assign comes, otherwise than even you yourself allow, except by passage or transmission (traux), and is to come—the death which even you will to be a penalty, yet without any deserving of penalty. 6.
In order, therefore, to escape these straits which you, more loquacious than eloquent, have made for yourself, you reply in what follows, and you argue that you spoke here of that death by which Adam was punished after his transgression—the death which does not destroy bodies, but which through crimes, by contempt of God, comes to be in the soul, and is eternal; inasmuch as it drags one to eternal punishment—the death which Holy Scripture also signifies when it says: 'The widow who lives in pleasures is dead' (1 Tim. 5:6). And in the Gospel: 'Let the dead bury their dead' (Matt. 8:22; Luke 9:60).
And this death, you will say, I have said passed and passes into Adam's posterity—not absolutely all, but only those who became imitators of his transgression, unmindful, as he too was, of the divine commandments. But that other death, you will say, which is the dissolution of the body, or the separation of the soul from the body, would have been in Adam even if he had not sinned. 7. Whence those distinguished definitions of your comrade-in-arms and fellow-disciple Coelestius, and of the master of you both, Pelagius—definitions which, together with their persons, were long ago condemned throughout the whole world by ecclesiastical authority: 'That Adam was made mortal, who whether he sinned or did not sin would have been going to die; and that the sin of Adam injured himself alone, and not the human race;'
and that infants are in that state in which Adam was before his transgression.' 8. Whence also arose that last assertion of yours, which to your own hurt you did not fear to put forward: 'Infants, even if they die unbaptized, have eternal life.' And that which is more than sacrilegious: 'Neither does the whole race of men die through the death of Adam, since neither does the whole race of men rise again through the resurrection of Christ.' 9. These, surely, are the magnificent decrees of your magisterium; these are the dogmas, as you say, of Christian erudition—but we Christians do not call them dogmas of truth. 'Away with your trappings, to the rabble! I know you within and beneath the skin' (Persius, Sat. 3).
(3.) 'What does it profit you,' as the same poet says, 'to keep a cunning fox in your putrid breast?' (the same, Sat. 5). But I will surely, by careful investigation, drag you out into the light, out of your most tortuous and fetid dug-out dens, to be exposed to the Christian peoples. 10.
Now hear, you also, and those who shall deign to read both me and you, what against this most impious, most depraved, most shameless, most insolent opinion of yours you yourself once pronounced—namely, in that letter of yours which at that time you dared to send to the apostolic see, when you refused to meet with the whole Church throughout the whole world to condemn Pelagius and Coelestius—a letter which, before it came into the hands of the bishop of that holy Roman Church, by your contriving was circulated by certain persons deceived by you throughout almost all Italy, and, as something great, is known to have been insinuated into the ears of many. For there, among other things, you say thus:
'Whoever, therefore, is the assertor that neither does the whole race of men die through the death of Adam, nor does the whole race of men rise through the resurrection of Christ, thinks contrary to the Apostle, who says: As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive' (1 Cor. 15:22). 11. Here by what fraud, and by what deceit, we know and hold whom you mean and intend by 'all'—namely, not absolutely all men, that is, the whole human race, but all those who willed to be imitators of Adam:
and likewise, without doubt, you must of necessity say that, by the resurrection of Christ—which that Apostle declared—all shall rise, yet not the whole human race utterly shall rise, but only the just and the holy, who shall have imitated the justice and holiness of Christ; whereas it is established that absolutely all shall rise through Christ, although some unto the kingdom, others unto judgement. And you add: 'Justly therefore is he disapproved who contradicts this sentence which says, By man came death, and by man the resurrection of the dead' (1 Cor. 15:21); likewise: 'That the sin of Adam injured himself alone, and not the human race—this sentence,' you say, 'is rightly refuted by us;'
for it must be believed to have harmed not himself alone, but the human race.' 12. And here what you are doing—your most depraved and most tortuous meaning being, as you suppose, kept safe—you could not hide from us: because they themselves, as you wish to teach, although few in comparison with the whole race, are nonetheless the human race. Likewise: 'That infants,' you say, 'are in the state in which Adam was before his transgression, I reckon,' you say, 'among undisciplined questions. For those who are born today are not in that state in all respects in which Adam was before his sin, although it cannot be denied that they too, like him, are the work of God.' 13.
What state you here mean and intend—your meaning, as you judge, being kept safe to you—we know very well: namely, not the state of the soul before sin, but of the smallness and littleness in which infants are born. Remember indeed that you have here said nothing about unbaptized little ones, that if they have been forestalled by death they have eternal life—which is most false; for Christ neither wills this, nor willed it, as your most senseless rashness commands and teaches. Likewise you subjoin: 'That Adam too was made mortal, who whether he sinned or did not sin would have been going to die;' nor did you say that this rests upon reason.
'For it must be believed,' you say, 'that he was indeed made immortal, but such that, if he had not sinned, he could obtain the power of immortality through the tasting of the tree of life;' wrongly therefore was it said, 'whether he sinned or did not sin, he would have been going to die.' 14. Lest either anyone, or you yourself, should say that I have slandered you, as if you did not afterwards hold a view contrary to these definitions: hear again what is held by your own words in the very book of yours with which we are dealing.