Philip Schaff (ed.) · 7 of 1125

Augustin’s Part in the Controversy. · Part 2

If he was anxious to avoid personal controversy with Pelagius himself in the hope that he might even yet be reclaimed, Augustin was equally anxious to teach the truth on all possible occasions. Pelagius had been intimate, when at Rome, with the pious Paulinus, bishop of Nola; and it was understood that there was some tendency at Nola to follow the new teachings. It was, perhaps, as late as 414, when Augustin made reply in a long letter, to a request of Paulinus’ for an exposition of certain difficult Scriptures, which had been sent him about 410. Among them was Rom. xi. 28; and, in explaining it, Augustin did not withhold a tolerably complete account of his doctrine of predestination, involving the essence of his whole teaching as to grace: “For when he had said, ‘according to the election they are beloved for their father’s sake,’ he added, ‘for the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.’ You see that those are certainly meant who belong to the number of the predestinated.…‘Many indeed are called, but few chosen;’ but those who are elect, these are called ‘according to His purpose;’ and it is beyond doubt that in them God’s foreknowledge cannot be deceived. These He foreknew and predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the first born among many brethren. But ‘whom He predestinated, them He also called.’ This calling is ‘according to His purpose,’ this calling is ‘without repentance,’”etc., quoting Rom. v. 28–31. Then continuing, he says, “Those are not in this vocation, who do not persevere unto the end in the faith that worketh by love, although they walk in it a little while.…But the reason why some belong to it, and some do not, can easily be hidden, but cannot be unjust. For is there injustice with God? God forbid! For this belongs to those high judgments which, so to say, terrified the wondering apostle to look upon.”

Among the most remarkable of the controversial sermons that were preached about this time, especial mention is due to two that were delivered at Carthage, midsummer of 413. The former of these was preached on the festival of John the Baptist’s birth (June 24), and naturally took the forerunner for its subject. The nativity of John suggesting the nativity of Christ, the preacher spoke of the marvel of the incarnation. He who was in the beginning, and was the Word of God, and was Himself God, and who made all things, and in whom was life, even this one “came to us. To whom? To the worthy? Nay, but to the unworthy! For Christ died for the ungodly, and for the unworthy, though He was worthy. We indeed were unworthy whom He pitied; but He was worthy who pitied us, to whom we say, ‘For Thy pity’s sake, Lord, free us!’ Not for the sake of our preceding merits, but ‘for Thy pity’s sake, Lord, free us;’ and ‘for Thy name’s sake be propitious to our sins,’ not for our merit’s sake.…For the merit of sins is, of course, not reward, but punishment.” He then dwelt upon the necessity of the incarnation, and the necessity of a mediator between God and “the whole mass of the human race alienated from Him by Adam.” Then quoting 1 Cor. iv. 7, he asserts that it is not our varying merits, but God’s grace alone, that makes us differ, and that we are all alike, great and small, old and young, saved by one and the same Saviour. “What then, some one says,” he continues, “even the infant needs a liberator? Certainly he needs one. And the witness to it is the mother that faithfully runs to church with the child to be baptized. The witness is Mother Church herself, who receives the child for washing, and either for dismissing him [from this life] freed, or nurturing him in piety.…Last of all, the tears of his own misery are witness in the child himself.…Recognize the misery, extend the help. Let all put on bowels of mercy. By as much as they cannot speak for themselves, by so much more pityingly let us speak for the little ones,”—and then follows a passage calling on the Church to take the grace of infants in their charge as orphans committed to their care, which is in substance repeated from a former sermon. The speaker proceeded to quote Matt. i. 21, and apply it. If Jesus came to save from sins, and infants are brought to Him, it is to confess that they, too, are sinners. Then, shall they be withheld from baptism? “Certainly, if the child could speak for himself, he would repel the voice of opposition, and cry out, ‘Give me Christ’s life! In Adam I died: give me Christ’s life; in whose sight I am not clean, even if I am an infant whose life has been but one day in the earth.’” “No way can be found,” adds the preacher, “of coming into the life of this world except by Adam; no way can be found of escaping punishment in the next world except by Christ. Why do you shut up the one door?” Even John the Baptist himself was born in sin; and absolutely no one can be found who was born apart from sin, until you find one who was born apart from Adam. “‘By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin, death; and so it passed through upon all men.’ If these were my words, could this sentiment be expressed more expressly, more clearly, more fully?”

Three days afterwards, on the invitation of the Bishop of Carthage, Augustin preached a sermon professedly directed against the Pelagians, which takes up the threads hinted at in the former discourse, and develops a full polemic with reference to the baptism of infants. He began, formally enough, with the determination of the question in dispute. The Pelagians concede that infants should be baptized. The only question is, for what are they baptized? We say that they would not otherwise have salvation and eternal life; but they say it is not for salvation, not for eternal life, but for the kingdom of God.…“The child, they say, although not baptized, by the desert of his innocence, in that he has no sin at all, either actual or original, either from himself or contracted from Adam, necessarily has salvation and eternal life even if not baptized; but is to be baptized for this reason,—that he may enter into the kingdom of God, i.e., into the kingdom of heaven.” He then shows that there is no eternal life outside the kingdom of heaven, no middle place between the right and left hand of the judge at the last day, and that, therefore, to exclude one from the kingdom of God is to consign him to the pains of eternal fire; while, on the other side, no one ascends into heaven unless he has been made a member of Christ, and this can only be by faith,—which, in an infant’s case, is professed by another in his stead. He then treats, at length, some of the puzzling questions with which the Pelagians were wont to try the catholics; and then breaking off suddenly, he took a volume in his hands. “I ask you,” he said, “to bear with me a little: I will read somewhat. It is St. Cyprian whom I hold in my hand, the ancient bishop of this see. What he thought of the baptism of infants,—nay, what he has shown that the Church always thought,—learn in brief. For it is not enough for them to dispute and argue, I know not what impious novelties: they even try to charge us with asserting something novel. It is on this account that I read here St. Cyprian, in order that you may perceive that the orthodox understanding and catholic sense reside in the words which I have been just now speaking to you. He was asked whether an infant ought to be baptized before he was eight days old, seeing that by the ancient law no infant was allowed to be circumcised unless he was eight days old. A question arose from this as to the day of baptism,—for concerning the origin of sin there was no question; and therefore from this thing of which there was no question, that question that had arisen was settled.” And then he read to them the passage out of Cyprian’s letter to Fidus, which declared that he, and all the council with him, unanimously thought that infants should be baptized at the earliest possible age, lest they should die in their inherited sin, and so pass into eternal punishment. The sermon closed with a tender warning to the teachers of these strange doctrines: he might call them heretics with truth, but he will not; let the Church seek still their salvation, and not mourn them as dead; let them be exhorted as friends, not striven with as enemies. “They disparage us,” he says, “we will bear it; let them not disparage the rule [of faith], let them not disparage the truth; let them not contradict the Church, which labours every day for the remission of infants’ original sin. This thing is settled. The errant disputer may be borne with in other questions that have not been thoroughly canvassed, that are not yet settled by the full authority of the Church,—their error should be borne with: it ought not to extend so far, that they endeavour to shake even the very foundation of the Church!” He hints that although the patience hitherto exhibited towards them is “perhaps not blameworthy,” yet patience may cease to be a virtue, and become culpable negligence: in the mean time, however, he begs that the catholics should continue amicable, fraternal, placid, loving, long suffering.

Augustin himself gives us a view of the progress of the controversy at this time in a letter written in 414. The Pelagians had everywhere scattered the seeds of their new error; and although some, by his ministry and that of his brother workers, had, “by God’s mercy,” been cured of their pest, yet they still existed in Africa, especially about Carthage, and were everywhere propagating their opinions in subterraneous whispers, for fear of the judgment of the Church. Wherever they were not refuted, they were seducing others to their following; and they were so spread abroad that he did not know where they would break out next. Nevertheless, he was still unwilling to brand them as heretics, and was more desirous of healing them as sick members of the Church than of cutting them off finally as too diseased for cure. Jerome also tells us that the poison was spreading in both the East and the West, and mentions particularly as seats where it showed itself the islands of Rhodes and Sicily. Of Rhodes we know nothing further; but from Sicily an appeal came to Augustin in 414 from one Hilary, setting forth that there were certain Christians about Syracuse who taught strange doctrines, and beseeching Augustin to help him in dealing with them. The doctrines were enumerated as follows: “They say (1) that man can be without sin, (2) and can easily keep the commandments of God if he will; (3) that an unbaptized infant, if he is cut off by death, cannot justly perish, since he is born without sin; (4) that a rich man that remains in his riches cannot enter the kingdom of God, except he sell all that he has;…(5) that we ought not to swear at all;” (6) and, apparently, that the Church is to be in this world without spot or blemish. Augustin suspected that these Sicilian disturbances were in some way the work of Cœlestius, and therefore in his answer informs his correspondent of what had been done at the Synod of Carthage (412) against him. The long letter that he sent back follows the inquiries in the order they were put by Hilary. To the first he replies, in substance, as he had treated the same matter in the second book of the treatise, On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, that it was opposed to Scripture, but was less a heresy than the wholly unbearable opinion that this state of sinlessness could be attained without God’s help. “But when they say that free will suffices to man for fulfilling the precepts of the Lord, even though unaided to good works by God’s grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit, it is to be altogether anathematized and detested with all execrations. For those who assert this are inwardly alien from God’s grace, because being ignorant of God’s righteousness, like the Jews of whom the apostle speaks, and wishing to establish their own, they are not subject to God’s righteousness, since there is no fulfilment of the law except love; and of course the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, not by ourselves, nor by the force of our own will, but by the Holy Ghost who is given to us.” Dealing next with the second point, he drifts into the matter he had more fully developed in his work On the Spirit and the Letter. “Free will avails for God’s works,” he says, “if it be divinely aided, and this comes by humble seeking and doing; but when deserted by divine aid, no matter how excellent may be its knowledge of the law, it will by no means possess solidity of righteousness, but only the inflation of ungodly pride and deadly arrogance. This is taught us by that same Lord’s Prayer; for it would be an empty thing for us to ask God ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ if the matter was so placed in our power that we would avail for fulfilling it without any aid from Him. For this free will is free in proportion as it is sound, but it is sound in proportion as it is subject to divine pity and grace. For it faithfully prays, saying, ‘Direct my ways according to Thy word, and let no iniquity reign over me.’ For how is that free over which iniquity reigns? But see who it is that is invoked by it, in order that it may not reign over it. For it says not, ‘Direct my ways according to free will because no iniquity shall rule over me,’ but ‘Direct my ways according to Thy word, and let no iniquity rule over me.’ It is a prayer, not a promise; it is a confession, not a profession; it is a wish for full freedom, not a boast of personal power. For it is not every one ‘who confides in his own power,’ but ‘every one who calls on the name of God, that shall be saved.’ ‘But how shall they call upon Him,’ he says, ‘in whom they have not believed?’ Accordingly, then, they who rightly believe, believe in order to call on Him in whom they have believed, and to avail for doing what they receive in the precepts of the law; since what the law commands, faith prays for.” “God, therefore, commands continence, and gives continence; He commands by the law, He gives by grace; He commands by the letter, He gives by the spirit: for the law without grace makes the transgression to abound, and the letter without the spirit kills. He commands for this reason,—that we who have endeavoured to do what He commands, and are worn out in our weakness under the law, may know how to ask for the aid of grace; and if we have been able to do any good work, that we may not be ungrateful to Him who aids us.” The answer to the third point traverses the ground that was fully covered in the first book of the treatise On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, beginning by opposing the Pelagians to Paul in Rom. v. 12–19: “But when they say that an infant, cut off by death, unbaptized, cannot perish since he is born without sin,—it is not this that the apostle says; and I think that it is better to believe the apostle than them.” The fourth and fifth questions were new in this controversy; and it is not certain that they belong properly to it, though the legalistic asceticism of the Pelagian leaders may well have given rise to a demand on all Christians to sell what they had, and give to the poor. This one of the points, Augustin treats at length, pointing out that many of the saints of old were rich, and that the Lord and His apostles always so speak that their counsels avail to the right use, not the destruction, of wealth. Christians ought so to hold their wealth that they are not held by it, and by no means prefer it to Christ. Equal good sense and mildness are shown in his treatment of the question concerning oaths, which he points out were used by the Lord and His apostles, but advises to be used as little as possible lest by the custom of frequent oaths we learn to swear lightly. The question as to the Church, he passes over as having been sufficiently treated in the course of his previous remarks.

To the number of those who had been rescued from Pelagianism by his efforts, Augustin was now to have the pleasure of adding two others, in whom he seems to have taken much delight. Timasius and James were two young men of honorable birth and liberal education, who had, by the exhortation of Pelagius, been moved to give up the hope that they had in this world, and enter upon the service of God in an ascetic life. Naturally, they had turned to him for instruction, and had received a book to which they had given their study. They met somewhere with some of Augustin’s writings, however, and were deeply affected by what he said as to grace, and now began to see that the teaching of Pelagius opposed the grace of God by which man becomes a Christian. They gave their book, therefore, to Augustin, saying that it was Pelagius’, and asking him for Pelagius’ sake, and for the sake of the truth, to answer it. This was done, and the resulting book, On Nature and Grace, sent to the young men, who returned a letter of thanks in which they professed their conversion from their error. In this book, too, which was written in 415, Augustin refrained from mentioning Pelagius by name, feeling it better to spare the man while not sparing his writings. But he tells us, that, on reading the book of Pelagius to which it was an answer, it became clear to him beyond any doubt that his teaching was distinctly anti-Christian; and when speaking of his own book privately to a friend, he allows himself to call it “a considerable book against the heresy of Pelagius, which he had been constrained to write by some brethren whom he had persuaded to adopt his fatal error, denying the grace of Christ.” Thus his attitude towards the persons of the new teachers was becoming ever more and more strained, in despite of his full recognition of the excellent motives that might lie behind their “zeal not according to knowledge.” This treatise opens with a recognition of the zeal of Pelagius, which, as it burns most ardently against those who, when reproved for sin, take refuge in censuring their nature, Augustin compares with the heathen view as expressed in Sallust’s saying, “the human race falsely complains of its own nature,” and which he charges with not being according to knowledge, and proposes to oppose by an equal zeal against all attempts to render the cross of Christ of none effect. He then gives a brief but excellent summary of the more important features of the catholic doctrine concerning nature and grace (2–7). Opening the work of Pelagius, which had been placed in his hands, he examines his doctrine of sin, its nature and effects. Pelagius, he points out, draws a distinction, sound enough in itself, between what is “possible” and what is “actual,” but applies it unsoundly to sin, when he says that every man has the possibility of being without sin (8–9), and therefore without condemnation. Not so, says Augustin; an infant who dies unbaptized has no possibility of salvation open to him; and the man who has lived and died in a land where it was impossible for him to hear the name of Christ, has had no possibility open to him of becoming righteous by nature and free will. If this be not so, Christ is dead in vain, since all men then might have accomplished their salvation, even if Christ had never died (10). Pelagius, moreover, he shows, exhibits a tendency to deny the sinful character of all sins that are impossible to avoid, and so treats of sins of ignorance as to show that he excuses them (13–19). When he argues that no sin, because it is not a substance, can change nature, which is a substance, Augustin replies that this destroys the Saviour’s work,—for how can He save from sins if sins do not corrupt? And, again, if an act cannot injure a substance, how can abstention from food, which is a mere act, kill the body? In the same way sin is not a substance; but God is a substance,—yea, the height of substance, and only true sustenance of the reasonable creature; and the consequence of departure from Him is to the soul what refusal of food is to the body (22). To Pelagius’ assertion that sin cannot be punished by more sin, Augustin replies that the apostle thinks differently (Rom. i. 21–31). Then putting his finger on the main point in controversy, he quotes the Scriptures as declaring the present condition of man to be that of spiritual death. “The truth then designates as dead those whom this man declares to be unable to be damaged or corrupted by sin,—because, forsooth, he has discovered sin to be no substance!” (25). It was by free will that man passed into this state of death; but a dead man needs something else to revive him,—he needs nothing less than a Vivifier. But of vivifying grace, Pelagius knew nothing; and by knowing nothing of a Vivifier, he knows nothing of a Saviour; but rather by making nature of itself able to be sinless, he glorifies the Creator at the expense of the Saviour (39). Next is examined Pelagius’ contention that many saints are enumerated in the Scriptures as having lived sinlessly in this world. While declining to discuss the question of fact as to the Virgin Mary (42), Augustin opposes to the rest the declaration of John in 1 John i. 8, as final, but still pauses to explain why the Scriptures do not mention the sins of all, and to contend that all who ever were saved under the Old Testament or the New, were saved by the sacrificial death of Christ, and by faith in Him (40–50). Thus we are brought, as Augustin says, to the core of the question, which concerns, not the fact of sinlessness in any man, but man’s ability to be sinless. This ability Pelagius affirms of all men, and Augustin denies of all “unless they are justified by the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (51). Thus, the whole discussion is about grace, which Pelagius does not admit in any true sense, but places only in the nature that God has made (52). We are next invited to attend to another distinction of Pelagius’, in which he discriminates sharply between the nature that God has made, the crown of which is free will, and the use that man makes of this free will. The endowment of free will is a “capacity;” it is, because given by God in our making, a necessity of nature, and not in man’s power to have or not have. It is the right use of it only, which man has in his power. This analysis, Pelagius illustrates at length, by appealing to the difference between the possession and use of the various bodily senses. The ability to see, for instance, he says, is a necessity of our nature; we do not make it, we cannot help having it; it is ours only to use it. Augustin criticises this presentation of the matter with great sharpness (although he is not averse to the analysis itself),—showing the inapplicability of the illustrations used,—for, he asks, is it not possible for us to blind ourselves, and so no longer have the ability to see? and would not many a man like to control the “use” of his “capacity” to hear when a screechy saw is in the neighbourhood? (55); and as well the falsity of the contention illustrated, since Pelagius has ignored the fall, and, even were that not so, has so ignored the need of God’s aid for all good, in any state of being, as to deny it (56). Moreover, it is altogether a fallacy, Augustin argues, to contend that men have the “ability” to make every use we can conceive of our faculties. We cannot wish for unhappiness; God cannot deny Himself (57); and just so, in a corrupt nature, the mere possession of a faculty of choice does not imply the ability to use that faculty for not sinning. “Of a man, indeed, who has his legs strong and sound, it may be said admissibly enough, ‘whether he will or not, he has the capacity of walking;’ but if his legs be broken, however much he may wish, he has not the ‘capacity.’ The nature of which our author speaks is corrupted” (57). What, then, can he mean by saying that, whether we will or not, we have the capacity of not sinning,—a statement so opposite to Paul’s in Rom. vii. 15? Some space is next given to an attempted rebuttal by Pelagius of the testimony of Gal. v. 17, on the ground that the “flesh” there does not refer to the baptized (60–70); and then the passages are examined which Pelagius had quoted against Augustin out of earlier writers,—Lactantius (71), Hilary (72), Ambrose (75), John of Constantinople (76), Xystus,—a blunder of Pelagius, who quoted from a Pythagorean philosopher, mistaking him for the Roman bishop Sixtus (57), Jerome (78), and Augustin himself (80). All these writers, Augustin shows, admitted the universal sinfulness of man,—and especially he himself had confessed the necessity of grace in the immediate context of the passage quoted by Pelagius. The treatise closes (82 sq.) with a noble panegyric on that love which God sheds abroad in the heart, by the Holy Ghost, and by which alone we can be made keepers of the law.

The treatise On Nature and Grace was as yet unfinished, when the over-busy scriptorium at Hippo was invaded by another young man seeking instruction. This time it was a zealous young presbyter from the remotest part of Spain, “from the shore of the ocean,”—Paulus Orosius by name, whose pious soul had been afflicted with grievous wounds by the Priscillianist and Origenist heresies that had broken out in his country, and who had come with eager haste to Augustin, on hearing that he could get from him the instruction which he needed for confuting them. Augustin seems to have given him his heart at once; and, feeling too little informed as to the special heresies which he wished to be prepared to controvert, persuaded him to go on to Palestine to be taught by Jerome, and gave him introductions which described him as one “who is in the bond of catholic peace a brother, in point of age a son, and in honour a fellow-presbyter,—a man of quick understanding, ready speech, and burning zeal.” His departure to Palestine gave Augustin an opportunity to consult with Jerome on the one point that had been raised in the Pelagian controversy on which he had not been able to see light. The Pelagians had early argued, that, if souls are created anew for men at their birth, it would be unjust in God to impute Adam’s sin to them. And Augustin found himself unable either to prove that souls are transmitted (traduced, as the phrase is), or to show that it would not involve God in injustice to make a soul only to make it subject to a sin committed by another. Jerome had already put himself on record as a believer in both original sin and the creation of souls at the time of birth. Augustin feared the logical consequences of this assertion, and yet was unable to refute it. He therefore seized this occasion to send a long treatise on the origin of the soul to his friend, with the request that he would consider the subject anew, and answer his doubts. In this treatise he stated that he was fully persuaded that the soul had fallen into sin, but by no fault of God or of nature, but of its own free will; and asked when could the soul of an infant have contracted the guilt, which, unless the grace of Christ should come to its rescue by baptism, would involve it in condemnation, if God (as Jerome held, and as he was willing to hold with him, if this difficulty could be cleared up) makes each soul for each individual at the time of birth? He professed himself embarrassed on sucha supposition by the penal sufferings of infants, the pains they endured in this life, and much more the danger they are in of eternal damnation, into which they actually go unless saved by baptism. God is good, just, omnipotent: how, then, can we account for the fact that “in Adam all die,” if souls are created afresh for each birth? “If new souls are made for men,” he affirms, “individually at their birth, I do not see, on the one hand, that they could have any sin while yet in infancy; nor do I believe, on the other hand, that God condemns any soul which He sees to have no sin;” “and yet, whoever says that those children who depart out of this life without partaking of the sacrament of baptism, shall be made alive in Christ, certainly contradicts the apostolic declaration,” and “he that is not made alive in Christ must necessarily remain under the condemnation of which the apostle says that by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation.” “Wherefore,” he adds to his correspondent, “if that opinion of yours does not contradict this firmly grounded article of faith, let it be mine also; but if it does, let it no longer be yours.” So far as obtaining light was concerned, Augustin might have spared himself the pain of this composition: Jerome simply answered that he had no leisure to reply to the questions submitted to him. But Orosius’ mission to Palestine was big with consequences. Once there, he became the accuser of Pelagius before John of Jerusalem, and the occasion, at least, of the trials of Pelagius in Palestine during the summer and winter of 415 which issued so disastrously, and ushered in a new phase of the conflict.