WHOSE TITLE IN THE ANCIENT COPIES IS: A Commonitorium to the reader against the heresy of Pelagius and Coelestius, and also against the writings of Julian, by Marius Mercator, servant of Christ. 1. A question against the catholic faith, raised long ago among certain of the Syrians, and especially in Cilicia by Theodore, formerly bishop of the town of Mopsuestia, is even now very secretly gnawed at among a few of them, nor is it brought forth openly; but it is meanwhile retained by those very men who croak about it as though they were catholics within the Churches—namely, that the progenitors of the human race, Adam and Eve, were created mortal by God, and that they injured none of their posterity by their own transgression;
but harmed only themselves, and made themselves guilty of the command before God, and no other at all. 2. This inept question, and no less hostile to right faith, Rufinus, a certain man, by nation a Syrian, first brought to Rome under Anastasius, of holy memory, supreme pontiff of the Roman Church; and, crafty as he was, fortifying himself against the odium of it and not daring to bring it forth through himself, he then deceived Pelagius, a Briton by race, at that time a monk, and thoroughly imbued and instructed him in the aforesaid impious vanity. 3. This man (or: Who), having soon dared to compose Commentaries on the Apostle Paul, when he had come to that most well-known passage of the Epistle to the Romans, where it is thus contained:
'Therefore, as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death, and so it passed upon all men,' etc. (Rom. 5:12)—there he said that only those are held guilty and liable by that transgression who shall have willed to imitate this man in transgressing God's commands: not all who are begotten of his seed through the series of successions; and from this he disputes more broadly concerning the subsequent passages of this Epistle, and pronounces that no man whatever was injured by generation, nor is injured, by the transgression of Adam's sin;
'But by imitation,' he says, 'because she first sinned in the human race; and that he is made guilty and liable who has imitated this man by his own will—not by being born, but by sinning.' 4. To this Pelagius adhered Coelestius, a man indeed noble by birth, a forensic advocate of that time, but by a defect of nature a eunuch issued from his mother's womb. He, instructed by Pelagius, drank in this most impious notion more deeply, and by incredible loquacity made many partners and accomplices of this his madness. 5. For he dared openly and publicly to disseminate everywhere among the peoples the meaning of the same man in these sentences of words: that is, 'that Adam was made mortal, who, whether he sinned or did not sin, would have died;
'that Adam's sin injured himself alone, and not the human race; that infants who are born are in that state in which Adam was before the transgression; that neither does the whole race of men die through the death of Adam, because neither does the whole race of men rise through the resurrection of Christ; that infants, even if they are not baptized, have eternal life.' These five chapters generate one most impious and abominable opinion. He added moreover 'that a man can be without sin, and easily keep God's commands, since before the coming of Christ there were men without sin; and that the Law sends to the kingdom of heaven, just as the Gospel does.' 6.
These things and others of this kind pleased Julian himself too, and the rest of his comrades-in-arms. When these things, being made known and detected, had been condemned by ecclesiastical authority along with the aforesaid persons, they were also defended by Julian in a multitude of books, and it pleased him to be numbered as third in the condemnation along with Pelagius and Coelestius. 7. Then against his puerile presumptions, Augustine, bishop of holy memory, composed various books at various times; out of all of which Julian chose one of the two issued at the first time to Valerius, against which he might contradict in four books finished by himself addressed to Turbantius;
and against the next one he boasts that he has replied with eight last volumes issued to Florus, pretending to be wholly ignorant that that holy man labored over many others on this matter. 8. In these eight last volumes, ranging about with dreadful loquacity, wishing to show himself eloquent and a smatterer, after innumerable reproaches of revilings which he hurled against the aforesaid holy man, he shamelessly—nay, now impiously—dared to defend those things which we mentioned above that he had learned from Pelagius and Coelestius to his own destruction;
although, just as already in the first four books, rolling over the same things and always the same, and prudently finding no way out, he filled his parchments or papers with insults and contumelies rather than with any reasoning of right faith. And whereas this question ought to have been treated with the utmost brevity and with the authority of the holy and divine Scriptures, he wrote for himself a great deal of distorted and altogether unnecessary material of loquacity, out of which he might both forge impious things and accomplish absolutely nothing. For he accomplishes nothing who devotes his labor to impiety. 9. The holy [add. yet]
oft-mentioned bishop Augustine overthrew with his six books the first four of that man's, and likewise the eight latter ones, by his individual replies subjoined to the individual chapters; thus he beat down—nay, shattered—the man's empty and leaden daggers with the hammer of catholic truth. 10. And when the work of both had come into our hands, I read it through more diligently and understood [Baluz. omits: read it through more diligently and understood], that the whole sum of the inept and rather impious labor of Julian seems to be reduced to one perverse opinion: namely, that the transgression of Adam and Eve did not make them mortal, nor did their harm pass to their posterity by original succession;
but that one is made guilty only by imitation of those who shall have despised the divine commands. 11. This, then, as I said—the whole work, when I had read it through more diligently—I too replied to briefly, according to the measure of our strength, with Annotations [Baluz. add. from] his books appended wherever opportunity required, so that the reader, after the trumpet of so great a father and master, may not disdain to take up also our chaff-pipe, and may understand, with all brevity, that Julian, in laboring over his most numerous books, has expended empty effort—and rather full of boasting along with the utmost impiety.
Indeed, since you too, venerable presbyter Pientius, commanded that I ought to gather into one body those very Annotations of which I have spoken, I obey your commands, not unaware that we shall run into the curses and revilings of that man's accursed and unbridled tongue. But what can the rabid barkings of a dog tied up outside the Church of God avail? Let us rather glory that we are made partakers and associates of so great men and so great ecclesiastical doctors, shining throughout the whole world, against whom that man hurls such unheard-of, such abominable, such obscene and atrocious curses. 13. I know indeed that he will also be angry with us concerning the order of the chapters, and, by speaking more than is his wont, will stir up an empty din of words against us;
namely, accusing us that there is no order of our sayings against him. The Annotations, as we have already said, we appended in part [Baluz. scattered], or applied, to his perverse senses; we composed no book against him. 14. Let him indeed take care to fill his capacious wax-tablets with the middling 'Quadrivium' (Juvenal, Satire 1)... We, with the slenderness of our talent, founded upon the Christian faith, set far apart indeed from the wise of this world, both patiently endure his reproaches together with our Fathers and masters, and refute, convict, and bewail his straying from catholic truth—by the divine utterances of the Scriptures [Baluz. add. ours], not by the art of sophisms.