Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 12 part 9/10

is set on an equal footing—as though there were nothing that could be held more rightly or more truly by one Catholic than by another Catholic in the same way—but that those who suppose these men to be saying something worthwhile may be warned how, on these matters, before the new empty prattlings of these people, the Catholic bishops followed the divine oracles; and that they may know that the right and anciently founded Catholic faith is defended by us against the recent presumption and ruinous novelty of the Pelagian heretics.

Even this arch-heretic of theirs, Pelagius, mentions with all due honour the most blessed Cyprian—most glorious too by the crown of martyrdom, and most widely known not only to the African and Western churches but also to the Eastern ones, as fame proclaimed him and his writings spread far and wide—when, writing his Book of Testimonies, he asserts that he is imitating him, saying that he 'is doing for Romanus what Cyprian did for Quirinus.' Let us see, then, what Cyprian thought concerning original sin, which entered into the world through one man. In his letter On Works and Almsgiving he speaks thus:

When the Lord at His coming had healed those wounds which Adam had borne, and had cured the ancient poisons of the serpent, He gave a law to the man now made whole, and commanded him to sin no more, lest something worse should befall the sinner. We had been hemmed in and confined within the narrow bounds of the prescript of innocence, nor would the frailty and weakness of human infirmity have any recourse, unless the divine mercy, coming again to our aid and showing forth works of righteousness and compassion, opened a certain way of guarding our salvation, so that we might wash away by almsgiving whatever defilements we contract afterward. By this testimony this witness refutes two falsehoods of these men:

the one, by which they say that the human race draws no vices from Adam that need to be cured and healed through Christ; the other, by which they say that after baptism the saints have no sin. Again in the same letter: Let each one, he says, set the devil before his eyes with his servants, that is, with the people of perdition and death, leaping forth into the midst; let him provoke the people of Christ, with Christ Himself present and judging by the scrutiny of comparison, saying: 'For these whom you see with me I neither received blows nor endured scourgings nor bore the cross nor shed my blood, nor did I redeem my household by the price of suffering and gore; but neither do I promise them a heavenly kingdom, nor do I recall them again to Paradise with immortality restored.'

Let the Pelagians answer when we were in the immortality of Paradise, and how we were driven out from there, so that by the grace of Christ we may be recalled thither. And when they cannot find what to answer here in keeping with their perversity, let them consider how Cyprian understood the saying of the Apostle: 'in whom all have sinned'; and let these Pelagians, new heretics sprung from the old Manichaean heretics, not dare to cast a slander upon any Catholic, lest they be convicted of doing so grievous a wrong even to the ancient martyr Cyprian. For thus too he speaks in the letter which bears the title On Mortality:

The kingdom of God, most beloved brethren, has begun to be at hand; the reward of life and the joy of eternal salvation and perpetual gladness and the possession of Paradise, lately lost, are now coming as the world passes away. Again in the same letter he says: Let us embrace the day that assigns each one to his own dwelling, that snatches us from here and, loosing us from worldly snares, restores us to Paradise and to the kingdom. Likewise in the letter On Patience he says: Let the sentence of God be pondered, which Adam received at the very origin of the world and of the human race, forgetful of the command and a transgressor of the law given him. Then shall we know how patient we ought to be in this world, we who are born in such a way that here we toil amid pressures and struggles.

'Because you have heeded the voice of your wife,' He says, 'and have eaten of that tree, of which alone I had commanded you not to eat, cursed shall the earth be in all your works. In sorrow and groaning shall you eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you, and you shall eat the produce of the field. In the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the earth from which you were taken. For earth you are, and into earth you shall go.' By the bond of this sentence we are all bound fast and constrained, until, death being discharged, we depart from this world. And likewise in the same letter:

For when, he says, in that first transgression of the command, the strength of the body departed together with immortality, and with death came infirmity, and strength cannot be recovered unless immortality also has been recovered, it is necessary in this frailty and weakness of the body ever to wrestle and contend. And this wrestling and contest can be sustained only by the strength of patience. Moreover, in the letter which he wrote to bishop Fidus together with sixty-six of his fellow bishops, by whom he had been consulted on account of the law of circumcision as to whether an infant might be baptized before the eighth day, this matter is so handled that, as if by divine foresight, the Catholic Church already refuted the Pelagian heretics who were to come so long after.

For neither did he who had consulted doubt whether those being born drew original sin which they would wash away by being reborn—far be it that the Christian faith should ever have doubted this!—but he doubted whether the laver of regeneration, by which he did not doubt that original sin was to be loosed, ought to be administered before the eighth day. Answering this inquiry, the most blessed Cyprian says: But as far as pertains to the case of infants, whom you said ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after they are born, and that the law of ancient circumcision ought to be considered, so that you thought one who is born should not be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day—to our whole council it seemed far otherwise.

For in this, which you thought ought to be done, no one agreed; but we all rather judged that to no human being once born should the grace of the merciful God be denied. For since the Lord in His Gospel says: 'The Son of Man came not to destroy souls, but to save them,' as far as lies in us, if it can be done, no soul is to be lost. And a little after he says: Nor ought any of us to shrink from that which the Lord has deigned to do.

For even though an infant is still newly come from birth, yet it is not such that anyone ought to shrink from kissing it in the granting of grace and the making of peace, since in the kiss of an infant each one of us, according to his own religious sense, ought to think of the very hands of God, still fresh, which in a man just formed and newly born we in a manner kiss when we kiss that which God has fashioned. Likewise a little after: But if, he says, any human thing could hinder anyone from attaining grace, then rather the grown, the advanced, and the elder could be hindered by graver sins.

But further, if to even the gravest offenders, who long before had sinned much against God, remission of sins is granted when afterward they have believed, and no one is barred from baptism and grace, how much more ought an infant not to be barred, who, newly born, has committed no sin, except that, being born carnally after Adam, he has contracted by his first birth the contagion of the ancient death—an infant who comes to receive the remission of sins the more easily for this very reason, that there are remitted to him not his own, but another's sins! What will they say to these things, they who are not only deserters of the grace of God, but also its persecutors? What will they say to these things? On what terms is the possession of Paradise restored to us? How are we restored to Paradise, if we were never there?

Or how were we there, except that we were in Adam? And how do we pertain to the sentence pronounced against the transgressor, if we draw no guilt from the transgressor? Finally, he judges that infants should be baptized even before the eighth day, lest the souls of the little ones perish through the contagion of the ancient death contracted in their first birth. How do they perish, if those who are born even of faithful parents are not held by the devil until they are reborn in Christ and, rescued from the power of darkness, are translated into His kingdom? And who says that the souls of those being born, unless they be reborn, will perish?

Surely he who so praises the Creator and the creature, the Maker and the work, that he restrains and corrects the human sense of revulsion—by which men disdain to kiss little ones newly from the womb—by interposing veneration of the Creator Himself, saying that in the kiss of that age the fresh hands of God are to be thought of. Did he therefore, in confessing original sin, condemn either nature or marriage? Did he, because to the guilty one born of Adam he applied the cleansing of regeneration, on that account deny that God is the Author of those being born?

Did he, because—fearing lest the souls of any age should perish—he judged, together with the council of his colleagues, that they should be delivered by the sacrament of baptism even before the eighth day, on that account accuse marriage, seeing that in the infant, whether of wedlock or of adultery, yet because a human being is born, he showed the fresh hands of God to be worthy even of the kiss of peace? If, then, the holy bishop and most glorious martyr Cyprian could judge that original sin in infants was to be healed by the medicine of Christ, with the praise of the creature preserved and the praise of marriage preserved, why does this newfangled pestilence—since it dares not call Cyprian a Manichaean—think that a charge belonging to another is to be cast at the Catholics who defend these truths, in order to cover its own?

Behold, this most renowned expositor of the divine oracles, before even the faintest whiff of the Manichaean pestilence had touched our lands, without any disparagement of the divine work and of marriage, confesses original sin—not saying that Christ was sprinkled with any stain of sin, nor yet comparing to Him the flesh of sin in the rest of those being born, to whom, through the likeness of sinful flesh, He affords the aid of cleansing; nor is he terrified by the obscure question of the origin of souls, so as not to confess that those who are freed by the grace of Christ return to Paradise. Does he say that from Adam the condition of death passed into men without the contagion of sin?

For not on account of avoiding the death of the body, but on account of the sin which through one man entered into the world, does he say that aid is brought through baptism to little ones, however newly from the womb. And now, how Cyprian proclaims the grace of God against these men, where he discourses on the Lord's Prayer, appears plainly. For he says: We say, 'Hallowed be Thy name,' not that we wish for God that He be hallowed by our prayers, but that we ask of God that His name be hallowed in us. For by whom is God hallowed, who Himself hallows? But because He Himself has said: 'Be holy, for I also am holy,' this we ask and entreat, that we who have been sanctified in baptism may persevere in that which we have begun to be.

And in another place in the same letter he says: We add also and say, 'Thy will be done in heaven and on earth,' not that God may do what He wills, but that we may be able to do what God wills. For who withstands God, that He should not do what He wills? But because we are withstood by the devil, that our mind and act should not in all things obey God, we pray and ask that the will of God be done in us. And that it may be done in us, there is need of the will of God, that is, of His help and protection, because no one is strong by his own powers, but is kept safe by the indulgence and mercy of God. Likewise in another place: Now we ask that the will of God be done in heaven and on earth, both of which pertain to the completion of our safety and salvation.

For since we possess a body from the earth and a spirit from heaven, we ourselves are earth and heaven in both, that is, in body and spirit; and we pray that the will of God may be done. For there is between the flesh and the spirit a struggle, and a daily conflict of things at variance one against another, so that we do not do the very things that we would, while the spirit seeks heavenly and divine things, and the flesh craves earthly and worldly things. And therefore we ask that, by the help and aid of God, concord may be made between these two, so that while the will of God is carried out both in the spirit and in the flesh, the soul which is reborn through Him may be preserved. This the Apostle Paul openly and manifestly declares in his own words: 'The flesh,' he says, 'lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh;

for these are contrary the one to the other, so that you do not do the very things that you would.' And a little after he says: It can also be understood thus, most beloved brethren, that—since the Lord commands and teaches us to love even our enemies and to pray also for those who persecute us—we should ask also for those who are still earth and have not yet begun to be heavenly, that toward them too the will of God may be done, which Christ perfected by preserving and restoring man. And likewise in another place he says: We ask that this bread be given us daily, lest we who are in Christ and daily receive the Eucharist as the food of salvation, being separated by the intervention of some graver offense—while, held back and not communicating, we are debarred from the heavenly bread—be cut off from the body of Christ.

And somewhat later in the same letter he says: But when we pray that we may not come into temptation, we are admonished of our infirmity and weakness, in so praying, lest anyone insolently exalt himself, lest anyone proudly and arrogantly presume anything to himself, lest anyone count the glory of confession or of suffering as his own, since the Lord Himself, teaching humility, has said: 'Watch and pray, that you enter not into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak,' so that, while a humble and submissive confession goes before and all is given to God, whatever is asked suppliantly with fear and honour of God may be granted by His own mercy. Likewise in To Quirinus, in which work Pelagius wishes to be seen as his imitator, he says in the third book:

That we must glory in nothing, since nothing is our own. To this proposition, subjoining divine testimonies, he set down among the rest that apostolic saying by which especially the mouths of these men are to be shut: 'For what have you that you did not receive? But if you received it, why do you glory as if you had not received it?' Likewise in the letter On Patience he says: For this virtue is common to us with God; thence patience begins, thence its brightness and dignity take their head, the origin and greatness of patience proceeds with God as its author. Does this saint, so memorable an instructor of the churches in the word of truth, deny that free will exists in men, because he ascribes wholly to God whatever we do rightly?

Does he blame the law of God, because he signifies that man is not justified by it, seeing that he declares that what the law commands must be obtained from the Lord God by prayers? Does he under the name of grace assert fate, although he says 'that we must glory in nothing, since nothing is our own'? Does he, like these men, believe the Holy Spirit to be the helper of virtue in such a way that the virtue itself, which is thus helped, arises from us—when, asserting that nothing is our own, he recalls that on this account the Apostle said: 'For what have you that you did not receive?'—and does he say that the most excellent virtue, that is, patience, does not begin from us and thereafter is helped by the Spirit of God, but takes its head, takes its origin, from Him?

Finally, he confesses that neither a good purpose, nor zeal for virtue, nor good minds begin to exist in men without the grace of God, when he says 'that we must glory in nothing, since nothing is our own.' What is so set within free will as that which the law says: that an idol must not be worshipped, that adultery must not be committed, that murder must not be perpetrated? But these and crimes of this kind are such that, if anyone commits them, he is removed from the communion of the body of Christ. And yet, if the most blessed Cyprian had reckoned that our will suffices for not committing these, he would not so understand what we say in the Lord's Prayer:

Give us this day our daily bread—so that he affirms we ask this, lest, by the intervention of some graver offense, while, held back and not communicating, we are debarred from the heavenly bread, we be cut off from the body of Christ. Let the new heretics answer for certain: what good merits precede in men who are enemies to the Christian name? For not only do they not have any good, but they even have a most evil merit. And yet even so Cyprian understands what we say in the prayer, 'Thy will be done in heaven and on earth,' to mean that we should pray also for those very men who on this account are understood to be earth. We pray therefore not only for those who are unwilling, but also for those who resist and assail us.

What then do we ask, but that the unwilling be made willing, that the resisting become consenting, that the assailing become loving? By whom, if not by Him of whom it is written: 'The will is prepared by the Lord'? Let those who disdain to be Catholics learn, if they do no evil and if they do any good, to glory not in themselves but in the Lord. Now let us look at that third point which no less makes every member of Christ and His whole body shudder in these men, because they contend that there are, or have been, in this life righteous persons having absolutely no sin. By this presumption they most openly contradict the Lord's Prayer, in which all the members of Christ cry with a truthful heart and with daily voices: 'Forgive us our debts.'

Let us see, then, what Cyprian, most glorious in the Lord, thought also on this point—what, for the instruction of the churches (not of the Manichaeans, to be sure, but of the Catholics), he not only said but also committed to writing and to memory. In the letter On Works and Almsgiving he says: Let us acknowledge, most dear brethren, the wholesome gift of the divine indulgence, and let us cure our wounds with spiritual medicines, for the cleansing and purging of our sins—we who cannot be without some wound of conscience. Nor let anyone so flatter himself with a pure and spotless breast that, relying on his own innocence, he thinks no medicine is to be applied to his wounds, since it is written:

'Who will boast that he has a chaste heart, or who will boast that he is clean from sins?' And again in his letter John lays it down and says: 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.' But if no one can be without sin, and whoever calls himself blameless is either proud or foolish, how necessary, how kind is the divine mercy, which, knowing that certain wounds do not fail to remain even in those healed, has given saving remedies for wounds to be cured and healed anew! Again in the same letter he says: And since daily there cannot fail to be that whereby sin is committed in the sight of God, daily sacrifices were not lacking by which sins might be wiped away.

Likewise in the letter On Mortality he says: With avarice, with unchastity, with anger, with ambition we have a struggle; with carnal vices, with worldly enticements there is a constant and troublesome wrestling. The mind of man, besieged and on every side hemmed in by the assault of the devil, scarcely meets each foe, scarcely resists. If avarice is laid low, lust rises up; if lust is checked, ambition succeeds; if ambition is despised, anger exasperates, pride inflates, drunkenness allures, envy breaks concord, jealousy severs friendship; you are compelled to curse, which the divine law forbids; you are constrained to swear, which is not lawful. So many persecutions the soul daily suffers, by so many perils the breast is pressed:

and does it delight to stand long here amid the swords of the devil, when rather it should be desired and longed for to hasten to Christ by the swifter aid of death? Likewise in the same letter he says: The blessed Apostle Paul in his letter lays it down and says: 'To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,' counting it the greatest gain to be no longer held by worldly snares, to be no longer liable to any sins and vices of the flesh. Likewise in On the Lord's Prayer, expounding what we ask when we say, 'Hallowed be Thy name,' he says among other things: For we have need of daily sanctification, that we who daily fall into fault may purge away our faults by continual sanctification. Again in the same, when he expounded what we say, 'Forgive us our debts':

How necessarily, he says, how providently and wholesomely are we admonished that we are sinners, we who are compelled to pray for our sins, so that, while pardon is sought from God, the mind may recall its own conscience to remembrance! Lest anyone please himself as though innocent, and by exalting himself perish the more, he is instructed and taught that he sins daily, since daily he is commanded to pray for his sins. So finally John also in his letter admonishes, saying: 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just who will forgive us our sins.'

Deservedly too, in To Quirinus, he set forth on this matter his most absolute proposition, to which he might subjoin divine testimonies: 'That no one is without defilement and without sin.' There too he set down those testimonies by which original sin is confirmed—which these men try to twist into I know not what other new and perverse senses—whether that which holy Job says, that no one is without defilement, nor is anyone whose life is of one day upon the earth; or that which is read in the psalm: 'In iniquity was I conceived, and in sins did my mother nourish me in the womb.' To these testimonies, on account also of those who are already saints of a more advanced age, since not even they are without defilement and sin, he added also that of the most blessed John, which in many other places too he often recalls:

'If we say that we have no sin,' and the rest of the same sentence, which is not passed over in silence by all Catholics against these men, who deceive themselves and in whom the truth is not. Let the Pelagians say, if they dare, that this man of God was perverted by the error of the Manichaeans, because he so praises the saints that yet he confesses that no one in this life attains to so great a perfection of righteousness as to have absolutely no sin—confirming his opinion by the clear truth and divine authority of the canonical testimonies.

For does he deny 'that in baptism all sins are remitted,' because he confesses that frailty and infirmity remain, whence he says we sin after baptism and, right up to the end of this life, have an unceasing conflict with the vices of the flesh? Or did he therefore not remember what the Apostle had said 'about the spotless Church,' because he commanded that no one ought so to flatter himself with a pure and spotless breast that, relying on his own innocence, he thinks no medicine is to be applied to his wounds? I suppose that the new heretics will grant that this Catholic man knew 'that the Holy Spirit aided good minds even in ancient times,' nay rather, even what they themselves are unwilling to grant—that men could not have good minds except through the Holy Spirit.

I suppose that Cyprian had known 'that all the prophets and apostles, or whatever saints have pleased the Lord at any time whatever, were righteous not in comparison with the wicked'—as these men slanderously allege that we say—'but by the rule of the virtues,' as they boast that they themselves say; Cyprian, who nevertheless says: No one can be without sin, and whoever calls himself blameless is either proud or foolish. Nor does he understand it written for any other reason: 'Who will boast that he has a chaste heart, or who will boast that he is clean from sins?' I suppose that Cyprian did not need to be taught by these men what he knew excellently well, 'that in the time to come there is a reward for good works, but for evil ones punishment;

but that no one can accomplish there the commandments which he has despised here.' And yet even the Apostle Paul himself, who was certainly no despiser of the divine commandments, Cyprian understands and asserts to have said, 'To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,' for no other reason than that he reckoned it the greatest gain to be, after this life, no longer held by worldly snares, no longer liable to any sins and vices of the flesh.

The most blessed Cyprian therefore perceived, and in the truth of the divine Scriptures discerned, that even the life of the apostles themselves, however good, holy, and righteous, suffered some entanglements of worldly snares, was liable to some sins and vices of the flesh; and that they therefore desired death, so that they might be rid of these evils and might attain to that perfect righteousness which would not endure such things, and which is now not to be accomplished in a commandment but to be received in a reward. For when there shall come that which we pray for, saying, 'Thy kingdom come,' there will not be in that kingdom of God any lack of righteousness, since the Apostle says: 'For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.'

Surely these three, among the other divine commandments, are enjoined. Here righteousness is enjoined upon us when it is said, 'Do righteousness'; peace is enjoined when it is said, 'Have peace among yourselves'; joy is enjoined when it is said, 'Rejoice in the Lord always.' Let the Pelagians therefore deny that these things will be in the kingdom of God, where we shall live without end; or else, if they please, let them so rave as to contend that righteousness, peace, and joy will be there such as they are here in the righteous.

But if they both will be and will not be such, assuredly the exercise of them is here to be tended in the commandment, and their perfection is there to be hoped for in the reward, where—held back by no worldly snares and liable to no sins and vices of the flesh (on account of which the Apostle, as Cyprian received this testimony, said that death was gain to him)—we shall perfectly love God, whose contemplation shall be face to face; and shall perfectly love our neighbour too, when, the thoughts of the heart being made manifest, no suspicion of any evil of any man about any man can trouble anyone. But now, to refute these men more abundantly, let us add to the most glorious martyr Cyprian the most blessed Ambrose. For Pelagius