'If, on account of sin, God said to the man, In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread, and the earth shall bring forth to thee thorns and thistles, why, even after the remission of sins, does this labour remain, and why does even the earth of the faithful bring forth these hard and rough things? Likewise, if, on account of sin, it was said to the woman, In groaning shalt thou bring forth, why even after the remission of sins do faithful women suffer those same pains in giving birth?' And yet it is agreed that, on account of the sin which they had committed, those first men heard these things from God and deserved them; nor do these words of the divine book which I have set down, concerning the labour of the man and the childbearing of the woman, meet with resistance, except from one wholly alien to the catholic faith, who opposes those same scriptures.
But since such men too are not lacking, in the same manner as we answer them when this question is put to them, saying that before remission these are the punishments of sins, but after remission they are the contests and exercises of the righteous, so also we ought to answer those whom the death of the body likewise disturbs: that we confess it both befell through sin, and that after the remission of sins — so that its great fear may be overcome by those who advance — it has been left to us for the contest, and let us not disdain this. For if the virtue of faith, which works through love, were a small thing, to conquer the fear of death would not be so great a glory of the martyrs, nor would the Lord say, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends' — which John in his epistle thus states:
'As he laid down his life for us, so we also ought to lay down our life for the brethren.' By no means, therefore, would the surpassing patience shown in undergoing or despising death for righteousness' sake be praised, if death were not a great and exceedingly hard trouble. Whoever conquers the fear of this trouble by faith obtains a great glory of that faith itself, and a just reward. Whence it is no wonder both that the death of the body would not have befallen man had not sin gone before — sin upon which even such a penalty should follow — and that after the remission of sins it befalls the faithful, so that in conquering the fear of it the fortitude of righteousness may be exercised. For the flesh which was first made was not the flesh of sin, in which flesh man, amid the delights of paradise, was unwilling to keep righteousness.
Whence God determined that, after his sin, the flesh of sin thence propagated should strive with labours and troubles to receive righteousness. On this account also Adam, dismissed from paradise, dwelt over against Eden — that is, over against the seat of delights — that he might signify that the flesh of sin, which had not kept obedience amid delights before it was the flesh of sin, must be instructed in labours, which are contrary to delights.
Therefore, just as those first men are rightly believed to have been freed from the ultimate penalty through the blood of the Lord by afterwards living justly—yet in that life they did not merit to be recalled to paradise—so also the flesh of sin, even if a man, once his sins are remitted, lives justly in it, does not thereby merit not to undergo that death which it drew from the propagation of sin. Something of this sort has been intimated to us concerning the patriarch David in the book of Kingdoms; when the prophet had been sent to him and was threatening him with evils to come from the wrath of God on account of the sin he had committed, by his confession of sin he merited pardon, the prophet answering that this outrage and crime had been remitted to him;
and yet those things came to pass which God had threatened, namely that he should be thus humbled by his son. Wherefore here too it is not said: 'If God had threatened on account of that sin, why, once the sin was forgiven, did He fulfil what He had threatened?' except that most rightly, if it be so asked, the answer will be that the remission of that sin was made lest the man be hindered from receiving eternal life, but that the effect of that threat followed, so that the man's piety might be exercised and proved in that humiliation. So too God both inflicted bodily death upon man on account of sin, and after the remission of sins did not remove it, for the sake of exercising righteousness. Let us therefore hold to the unbending confession of faith.
There is one alone who was born without sin in the likeness of sinful flesh, who lived without sin amid the sins of others, who died without sin on account of our sins. Let us not turn aside to the right hand or to the left; for to turn to the right is to deceive oneself by saying that one is without sin, but to turn to the left is by some perverse and depraved sense of security to give oneself over to sins as if with impunity. For the ways that are on the right the Lord knows, who alone is without sin and can blot out our sins; but perverse are those on the left, the friendships with sins.
Those twenty-year-old youths too prefigured the type of the new people, they who entered the land of promise, who are said to have turned aside neither to the right nor to the left. For the age of twenty years is not to be compared to the innocence of little children; but, unless I am mistaken, this number shadows forth and echoes something mystical. For the Old Testament excels in the five books of Moses, while the New shines forth in the authority of the four Gospels. These numbers, multiplied by one another, come to twenty; for four times five, or five times four, is twenty.
Such a people, as I have foretold, instructed in the kingdom of heaven through the two Testaments, Old and New, not turning aside to the right by a proud presumption of righteousness, nor to the left by a complacent love of sin, will enter into the land of that promise, where we shall no longer pray for sins to be forgiven us, nor fear them to be punished in us, being freed by that Redeemer who, not sold under sin, redeemed Israel from all its iniquities, whether committed by anyone's own life or contracted by origin.
For those men have not yielded but little to the authority and truth of the divine Scriptures, who, even if they were unwilling to express openly in their writings that the remission of sins is necessary for little children, yet confessed that redemption is needful for them. For by another word, itself drawn from Christian teaching, they said absolutely nothing else. Nor is it to be doubted by those who read the divine writings faithfully, hear them faithfully, hold them faithfully, that from that flesh which was first made sinful flesh by the will of sin, thereafter, as the transcription of iniquity and death passed by succession into all, the flesh of sin was propagated—with the one exception of the likeness of sinful flesh, which nevertheless would not exist unless there were sinful flesh.
But as to the soul—whether it too is bound in the same way by a propagated guilt which is remitted to it—for we cannot say that only the flesh of a little child, and not also its soul, needs the aid of the Saviour and Redeemer, or that it is a stranger to that thanksgiving which is in the Psalms, where we read and say:
My soul, bless the Lord, and forget not all His benefits, who is gracious to all thy iniquities, who heals all thy diseases, who redeems thy life from corruption'—or whether, on the other hand, though not propagated, yet by the very fact that it is mingled with the flesh of sin to be weighed down by it, it has need both of the remission of that very sin and of its own redemption, God judging by His supreme foreknowledge which little ones do not merit to be absolved from that guilt, even those who, not yet born, have done nothing anywhere of good or evil by their own life; and how God, even if He does not create souls by transmission, is nevertheless not the author of that guilt on account of which the redemption of the sacrament is necessary for the soul of a little child—this is a great question and calls for another disputation, tempered nevertheless, as I judge, with such restraint that a cautious inquiry should rather be praised than a hasty assertion be blamed.
For where a most obscure matter is discussed without the aid of the sure and clear testimonies of the divine authorities, human presumption ought to restrain itself, doing nothing by leaning to either side. For even if I am ignorant how any of these things can be demonstrated and explained, yet this I believe: that from this very point too there would be the clearest authority of the divine oracles, if a man could not be ignorant of it without loss of the promised salvation. You have here a work elaborated—would that it were as serviceable as it is lengthy!—according to my strength, whose length I might perhaps defend, did I not fear to do so by defending it at greater length. BOOK THREE.
To his dearest son Marcellinus, Augustine the bishop, servant of Christ and of the servants of Christ, greeting in the Lord. Concerning the questions which you had proposed to me, that I should write you something against those who say that Adam, even if he had not sinned, would have died, and that nothing passed from his sin by propagation to his posterity—especially on account of the baptism of little children, which the whole Church, with a most devout and motherly custom, frequents—and who say that in this life there are, have been, and will be sons of men having absolutely no sin whatever, I had already completed two lengthy books.
In these I seemed to myself not indeed to have met all the movements of all minds in this matter—which whether it can be done by me or by anyone I do not know; nay, I do not doubt that it cannot be done—but nevertheless to have accomplished something, whereby the defenders of the faith handed down from our forefathers concerning these things might not stand altogether unarmed against the novelties of those who think otherwise.
But after very few days I read certain writings of Pelagius, a holy man, as I hear, and a Christian of no small advancement, which contained very brief expositions on the epistles of the apostle Paul; and there I found, when he had come to that place where the apostle says that through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed upon all men, a certain argument of those who deny that little children bear original sin—an argument which, I confess, I did not refute in those long volumes of mine, because it had absolutely never come into my mind that anyone could think or say such things.
Wherefore, since I did not wish to add anything to that work which I had already brought to a definite conclusion, I thought that both the argument itself, in the very words in which I read it, and what seems to me to be contrary to it, should be inserted into this letter. So then that argument is set down thus. 'But those,' he says, 'who are against the transmission of sin, strive to impugn it thus: If Adam's sin,' they say, 'harmed even those who do not sin, then Christ's righteousness also profits even those who do not believe, since he says that in like manner, nay rather more, are saved through the one than perished through the one before.' To this argument, then, as I said, in those two books which I wrote to you I made no reply, nor did I set myself at all to refute it. Now, then, first mark this: how, when they say:
'If Adam's sin harms even those who do not sin, then Christ's righteousness also profits even those who do not believe'—they judge it most absurd and most false that Christ's righteousness should profit even those who do not believe. Whence they think it is concluded that neither could the first man's sin harm little children who do not sin, just as Christ's righteousness cannot profit any who do not believe. Let them say, then, what Christ's righteousness profits baptized little children; let them say by all means whatever they wish. For assuredly, if they remember that they are Christians, they do not doubt that it profits something. Whatever, therefore, it may profit, it cannot profit, as they themselves also assert, those who do not believe.
Whence they are compelled to reckon baptized little children in the number of believers, and to consent to the authority of the holy Church everywhere, which does not judge them unworthy of the name of the faithful, to whom Christ's righteousness, even according to these men, could profit only if they believe. Therefore, just as the righteousness of the Spirit, by the response of those through whom they are reborn, conveys into them the faith which by their own will they could not yet have, so the flesh of sin, of those through whom they are born, conveys into them the guilt which by their own life they had not yet contracted. And just as the Spirit of life regenerates them as believers in Christ, so the body of death had begotten them as sinners in Adam; for that generation is carnal, this is spiritual; that makes sons of the flesh, this sons of the Spirit;
that begets sons of death, this sons of resurrection; that sons of the world, this sons of God; that sons of wrath, this sons of mercy; and through this, that binds them to original sin, this frees them from the bond of every sin. Finally, as to that which by our most keen understanding we are not able to attain, let us be compelled to consent to the divine authority. Well it is that they themselves admonish us that Christ's righteousness cannot profit any but believers, and confess that it profits little children something. Whence, as we have said, it is necessary that they place the baptized without any evasion in the number of believers.
Consequently, therefore, if they are not baptized, they will be among those who do not believe, and through this they will not have life, but the wrath of God abides upon them; for 'he who does not believe in the Son shall not have life, but the wrath of God abides upon him'; and they are judged, for 'he who does not believe is already judged'; and they will be condemned, for 'he who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he who does not believe shall be condemned.' Now, then, let these men see by what justice they attempt or endeavour to assert that men who are without sin pertain not to eternal life but to the wrath of God, and are divinely judged and damned, if there is in them no original sin, just as there is no proper sin.
Now to the rest of the things which Pelagius intimates that those say who dispute against original sin, I have replied, as I judge, sufficiently and clearly enough in those two books of my lengthy work. And if to some it will seem either too little or too obscure, let them grant pardon and settle the matter with those who perhaps reprehend it not because it is too little but because it is too much; and let those who do not yet understand the things which I think have been clearly said in accordance with the nature of the questions, not calumniate me for negligence or for the poverty of my ability, but rather beseech God that they may receive understanding.
Nevertheless, we ought not carelessly to note that this man—a good man and one to be praised, as those who know him report—did not bring forward this argument against the propagation of sin in his own person, but reported what those say who do not approve it; and not only this which I have just set forth and replied to, but also the rest, to which I recall that I have already replied in those books. For when he had said: 'If Adam's sin,' they say, 'harmed even those who do not sin, then Christ's righteousness also profits even those who do not believe'—which, as you perceive in the things I have replied, not only does not overthrow what we say but even admonishes us what we should say—he went on to add: 'Then they say:
If baptism cleanses that ancient offence, those who are born of two baptized parents ought to be free from this sin; for they could not transmit to their posterity what they themselves in no wise had. This too is added,' he says, 'that if the soul is not from transmission, but only the flesh, then it alone has the transmission of sin, and it alone merits punishment'—declaring it unjust that a soul born today, not from the mass of Adam, should bear so ancient a sin, which is another's. They say also,' he says, 'that by no reasoning is it granted that God, who remits our own sins, should impute the sins of others.'
Do you see, I beg you, how Pelagius put all this into his writings not in his own person, but in that of others—so well knowing that this is some sort of novelty which has now begun to sound against the ancient opinion implanted in the Church, that he himself was either ashamed or afraid to confess it? And perhaps he himself does not perceive this: that a man is born without sin, for whom he confesses baptism to be necessary, in which the remission of sins takes place; that a man is condemned without sin, whom, if unbaptized, it is necessary to reckon among unbelievers, since the evangelical Scripture assuredly cannot deceive, in which it is most plainly read: 'He who does not believe shall be condemned';
finally, that without sin the image of God is not admitted to the kingdom of God, since 'unless a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,' and thus either without sin he is hurled into eternal death, or—what is more absurd—outside the kingdom of God he has eternal life; whereas the Lord, foretelling what He will say to His own at the end: 'Come, ye blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom which was prepared for you from the beginning of the world,' has also made manifest what that kingdom itself is which He spoke of, concluding thus: 'So these shall go into eternal burning, but the just into eternal life.'
These things, then, and the others which follow this error, being exceedingly perverse and repugnant to Christian truth, I believe that so eminently Christian a man does not hold at all. But it may be that he is still perhaps so moved by the arguments of those men also who think against the transmission of sin, that he waits to hear or to know what may be said against them;
and therefore he was unwilling to keep silent about what those say who think against the transmission of sin, that the question to be examined might be intimated, and he removed it from his own person, lest he too should be judged to hold this. But I, even if I am not able to refute the arguments of those men, yet see that I must cleave to those things which in the Scriptures are most plain, so that from these the obscure things may be revealed, or, if the mind is not yet fit to be able either to perceive them when demonstrated or to trace them out when hidden, they may be believed without any hesitation.
But what is plainer than so many and so great testimonies of the divine oracles, by which it appears most clearly that neither can any man attain to eternal life and salvation apart from fellowship with Christ, nor can anyone be justly condemned by the divine judgement, that is, be separated from that life and salvation? Whence it follows that, since nothing else is done when little children are baptized except that they are incorporated into the Church, that is, joined to the body and members of Christ, it is manifest that they pertain to damnation unless this be conferred upon them. But they could not be damned if they had no sin at all.
Since that age could contract nothing in its own life, it remains to understand—or, if we cannot yet do this, at least to believe—that little children draw original sin. And through this, if the apostolic words have anything ambiguous, in which he says: 'Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed upon all men,' and they can be drawn and transferred to another meaning, is that too ambiguous: 'Unless a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God'? Is that too: 'Thou shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins'?
Is that too, that 'the physician is not needful to the healthy but to the sick,' that is, that Jesus is not necessary to those who have no sin but to those who are to be saved from sin? Is that too, that 'unless men eat his flesh,' that is, are made partakers of his body, 'they shall not have life'? By these and by other testimonies of this kind, which I now pass over—most clear with divine light, most certain with divine authority—does not the truth proclaim without any ambiguity, that not only can unbaptized little children not enter into the kingdom of God, but they cannot even have eternal life apart from the body of Christ, into which, that they may be incorporated, they are steeped in the sacrament of baptism?
Does not the truth testify without any doubt that they are carried to Jesus, that is, to Christ the Saviour and Physician, in the pious hands of those who bear them, for no other reason than that they may be healed of the plague of sin through the medicine of His sacraments? Why, then, do we hesitate so to understand even the apostle's words themselves, about which perhaps we were in doubt, that they may agree with these testimonies about which we cannot doubt? Although, in that whole passage where the apostle speaks of the condemnation of many through the sin of one and the justification of many through the righteousness of one, nothing seems to me ambiguous, except that he says 'Adam is a form of the one to come.'
For this indeed agrees not only with this meaning, by which it is understood that his future posterity were begotten from the same form with sin, but also these words can be led to other and other meanings. For we too have sometimes said something else from this, and perhaps shall say something else, which nevertheless is not adverse to this meaning; and Pelagius himself expounded it in more than one way. But the rest of the things which are there said, if they be diligently observed and handled—as in the first of those two books I have attempted somehow to do—even though by the very necessity of the matters themselves they produce a somewhat obscure discourse, yet they will not be able to have any other sense than that through which it came to pass:
namely, that from antiquity the whole Church has held that the faithful little children obtained the remission of original sin through Christ's baptism. Whence not undeservedly the blessed Cyprian sufficiently shows how the Church keeps this as believed and understood from the beginning. For when he was asserting that little children, most recently from their mother's womb, are already fit to receive Christ's baptism—since he had been consulted whether this ought to be done before the eighth day—he strove as far as he could to show them perfect, lest anyone should think, on account of the very number of days on which infants were formerly circumcised on the eighth, that they were still to be perfected.
But when he had furnished them with a great patronage of defence, he nevertheless confessed that they are not immune from original sin; for if he denied this, he would take away the very cause of that baptism, for the receiving of which he was defending them. You can read, if you wish, the very letter of the aforesaid martyr, On Baptizing Little Children; for it cannot be lacking at Carthage. But into this letter of ours also, as far as seemed sufficient for the present question, I have judged that a few things should be transferred from it, which do you prudently attend to:
'But as far as concerns the case of infants,' he says, 'whom you said ought not to be baptized within the second or third day on which they were born, and that the law of the ancient circumcision was to be considered, so that you thought one who is born should not be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day, far otherwise did it seem in our council. For in this which you thought was to be done, no one consented; but we all rather judged that the mercy and grace of God is to be denied to no man that is born. For since the Lord in His Gospel says: The Son of Man came not to destroy the souls of men, but to save them, as far as is in us, if it can be done, no soul is to be destroyed.'
Do you note what he says, how he holds that it is destructive and deadly, not only to the flesh but also to the soul of the infant, to depart from this life without that saving sacrament? Whence, even if he now said nothing else, it was for us to understand that the soul cannot perish without sin. But see a little later, while defending the innocence of little children, what nevertheless he most plainly confesses concerning them: 'For the rest,' he says, 'if anything could hinder men from the attainment of grace, graver sins could rather hinder adults and the grown and those greater in years.'
Furthermore, however, if to even the gravest offenders and those who had before greatly sinned against God, when they afterwards believe, remission of sins is granted, and no one is prohibited from baptism and grace, how much more ought an infant not to be prohibited, who, newly born, has committed no sin, save that, being born carnally according to Adam, he has contracted the contagion of the ancient death by his first nativity! And he comes to the receiving of the remission of sins the more easily by this very fact, that not his own sins but another's are remitted to him. You see with how great confidence, from the ancient and undoubted rule of faith, so great a man speaks these things.
He brought forward these most certain proofs for this reason: that what was uncertain—about which the one to whom he writes back had consulted, and about which he records that a decree of the council was established, namely, that even before the eighth day from the day on which the infant was born (since, if it were brought, no one would doubt to baptize it), it might be proved by these supports. For it was not then being decreed or confirmed in the council as something new, or as though beaten by anyone's contradiction, that infants are held bound by original sin; but while that consultation was there being turned over and debated, on account of the law of carnal circumcision, whether they ought to be baptized even before the eighth day.
Therefore no one consented to him who denied this, because it was now held not as a matter to be consulted or debated, but as firm and certain, that the soul would perish for eternal salvation if it ended this life without the receiving of that sacrament, although the little children most recently from the womb were bound only by the guilt of original sin; wherefore for them, though much easier, because of another's sins, yet the remission of sins was necessary.
By these certain things that uncertain question about the eighth day was dissolved, and in the council it was judged that to a man who is born it is lawful to succour him on any day, lest he perish forever; while even concerning carnal circumcision itself the reason was given, that it was a shadow of the thing to come—not that we should understand that baptism too ought to be given on the eighth day from the day on which a man is born, but that we are spiritually circumcised in Christ's resurrection, who indeed rose from the dead on the third day after His passion, yet on the eighth in the days of the weeks by which times roll on, that is, on the first day after the Sabbath.