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For after inserting the testimony from the Gospel — that unless one is born again of water and the Spirit, no one can enter the kingdom of heaven, on which point, as we have said, there arises no question for them — he went on and added, saying: 'Who is so impious as to forbid to a little one of whatever age the common redemption of the human race?' And this too is ambiguous, as to what redemption he means: whether from evil to good, or from good to better. For Caelestius also, at Carthage in his little book, confessed the redemption of little ones, and yet was unwilling to confess that sin had passed from Adam into them. But attend to what this man then adds: 'And,' he says, 'to forbid him who has been born to an uncertain life to be reborn to a perpetual and certain one?' That is:
who is so impious as to forbid him who was born to an uncertain life to be reborn to a perpetual and certain one? When we first read these words, we believed that by 'uncertain life' he meant to speak of this temporal one — although it seemed to us that he ought rather to have called it mortal than uncertain, since it is ended by certain death. Yet, so long as it is being lived, since at every moment it is undoubtedly uncertain, we supposed he meant nothing other than that he preferred to call this mortal life uncertain. And accordingly, although he was unwilling openly to confess the eternal death of little ones who depart from this life without the sacrament of baptism, yet as though by a certain reasoning our anxiety about that matter was consoled. For we were saying:
if perpetual life, as he seems to confess, cannot belong to any but those who have been baptized, then surely perpetual death will follow those who die unbaptized — which by no justice of God can befall those by whom no sins have been committed in this life, except on account of original sin. But afterwards there were not lacking brethren who admonished us that Pelagius could have said this for the reason that on this question he is reported to have been accustomed to answer inquirers in such a way as to say: 'As for little ones dying without baptism, where they do not go, I know; where they go, I do not know' — that is, I know they do not go into the kingdom of heaven;
but as for where they do go, he said, or says, that he does not know, for this reason: because he did not dare to say that those go into perpetual death whom he both perceived to have committed no evil here, and did not agree to have drawn original sin. And so these words of his too, transmitted to Rome as a great vindication of himself, are so ambiguous that they can furnish lurking-places for their doctrine, from which the heretical meaning may spring out to lie in ambush, when — no one being present who is able to answer — someone is found weak, as though in a wilderness. But now, in the book of his faith which he sent to Rome along with those very letters to the same Pope Innocent, to whom he had also written a letter, he far more evidently laid himself bare while covering himself, saying:
'We hold one baptism, which we affirm is to be celebrated in infants with the same words of the sacrament as in adults.' He did not even say 'with the same sacrament' — which, indeed, had he said it, would still be ambiguous — but 'with the same words,' he says, 'of the sacrament,' as though for infants the remission of sins were pronounced by the sound of the words, not effected by the reality of the thing. Yet he seemed for the time being to say something that agreed with the catholic faith; but he did not prevail to deceive that See to the very end.
For after the rescripts of the African council — into which province indeed that pestilential doctrine had crept by spreading, though it had not so widely seized it nor so deeply pervaded it — other writings of his too, in the city of Rome, where he had for a very long time led his life and had earlier been engaged in these very discourses and disputes, were brought to light by the care of faithful brethren and lay open. These, in the letters which he composed to be carried throughout the catholic world, Pope Zosimus appended as things to be abhorred, as you can read. There Pelagius, as though expounding the letter of the Apostle Paul to the Romans, argues and says:
'If Adam's sin harmed even those who do not sin, then Christ's righteousness also profits even those who do not believe' — and other things of this kind, all of which, with the Lord's help, have been refuted and dissolved in the books which we wrote on the baptism of little ones. And these things, indeed, in those very expositions of his, he did not dare to object in his own person; but he said this in a place where he was very well known to many, and where what he thought and said could not lie hidden — namely in those books, of the first of which I recalled something above. Not evasively, but most openly, he argues with all the force of disputation he can, that human nature in little ones be believed in no way to have been vitiated by propagation; and, by arrogating to it salvation, he begrudges it the Savior.
Since these things are so, and since it is now established that a pestilential dogma and a heretical error have arisen — which, with the Lord's help, the Church now more openly avoids, these two men, namely Pelagius and Caelestius, being either reduced to a place of repentance or, if they refuse it, altogether condemned, who are either reported or even proved to be the authors of this perversity, or at least, if they are not the authors but learned it from others, are nonetheless its assertors and teachers, through whom it might creep more widely and grow — and since by their words and their writings, and by competent evidence, and by the report rising and increasing out of all these things, they are bandied about:
what remains, except that every catholic, according to the strength which he receives from the Lord, should refute this plague and vigilantly resist it, so that, when out of the necessity of answering — without zeal for contention — one contends for the truth, the untaught may be instructed, and thus what the enemy contrived for ruin may be turned to the profit of the Church, according to that saying of the Apostle: 'There must also be heresies, that they who are approved may be made manifest among you'?
Wherefore, after the many things which, in writing against this error hostile to the grace of God — which He bestows through Jesus Christ our Lord upon small and great alike — we have been able to argue by way of disputation, it is now fitting to sift out this: that, wishing craftily to avoid the odium of heresy, they assert 'that this is a question apart from any peril to the faith' — so that, evidently, if they should be convicted of having gone astray in it, they might appear to have erred not criminally, but as it were civilly. For thus Caelestius spoke at Carthage in the ecclesiastical proceedings: 'Now,' he said, 'concerning the transmission of sin I have already spoken, for I have heard many established within the catholic Church deny it, and others too affirm it; though this is a matter of question, not of heresy.
I have always said that infants need baptism and ought to be baptized. What more does he seek?' Thus he said this, as though he wished to signify that it would then have been a matter to be judged heresy, if he denied that infants ought to be baptized; but now, since he confesses that they are to be baptized, even if he does not state the cause of their baptism which the truth holds — but a cause which does not pertain to the faith — he does not judge himself to be erring, and therefore not to be judged a heretic.
Likewise, in the little book which he gave at Rome, when he had set forth his faith — from the Trinity of one Godhead down to the resurrection of the dead, of what sort it will be (about which no one had questioned him and about which no question was being raised against him), as much as it pleased him to state — when his discourse came to the matter at hand, 'But if,' he says, 'any questions have arisen apart from the faith, on which there is contention among very many, I have not, as though the author of some dogma, laid this down by defined authority; but the things which I have received from the fountain of the prophets and apostles, I offer to the judgment of your apostleship to be approved, so that, if perchance, as befalls men, some error of ignorance has crept in, it may be corrected by your verdict.' Surely you perceive that he did this by prefacing this preliminary statement, so that, if any error should appear in him, he might seem to have erred not in the faith, but in questions which are apart from the faith — where, even if the error is to be corrected, it is nevertheless not corrected as a heresy, and he who has not been corrected is said to err in such a way that he is nonetheless not judged a heretic.
But this opinion greatly deceives him. Those questions, which he judges to be apart from the faith, are far otherwise than those in which, with the faith by which we are Christians kept safe, either what is true is unknown and the definitive verdict is suspended, or it is conjectured otherwise than it is by a human and feeble surmise — as when it is asked what paradise is like, or where it is, where God placed the man whom He formed from the dust, though the Christian faith does not doubt that that paradise exists; or when it is asked whether Elijah or Enoch are now there or somewhere else, though we do not doubt that they live in the bodies in which they were born;
or when it is asked whether the Apostle was caught up into the third heaven in the body or out of the body — although it is a shameless inquiry on the part of those who wish to know what he to whom this was granted testifies that he himself, with the faith assuredly kept safe, does not know; or how many heavens there are, into the third of which he records that he was caught up; or whether the elements of this visible world are four or more; what causes the sun or the moon to fail in those eclipses which astronomers, by a fixed reckoning of the times, are accustomed to foretell; why the men of old lived as long as Holy Scripture testifies, and whether, in proportion to their longer age, they began to beget children at a late puberty;
where Methuselah could have lived, who was not in the ark — who, as the years are reckoned in most codices, both Greek and Latin, is found to have survived the flood; or whether one ought rather to believe the fewer copies, which are very rarely found, in which the number of the years is so recorded that he is shown to have died before the flood. For who does not perceive that in these and questions of this kind — various and innumerable, pertaining either to the most obscure works of God or to the most hidden recesses of the Scriptures, which it is difficult to comprehend and define by any certain method — many things are unknown with the Christian faith kept safe, and error occurs here and there without any crime of heretical dogma?
But in the case of two men — by one of whom we were sold under sin, by the other we are redeemed from sins; by one we were cast down into death, by the other we are set free unto life, since the one lost us in himself by doing his own will and not the will of Him by whom he was made, while the other saved us in himself by not doing his own will but the will of Him by whom he was sent — in the case, then, of these two men the Christian faith properly consists. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Since there is no other name under heaven given among men in which we must be saved, and in Him God has determined faith for all, raising Him from the dead.
And so without this faith — that is, without faith in the one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus; without faith, I say, in His resurrection, which God has determined for all, and which assuredly cannot be truly believed without His incarnation and death:
without faith, then, in the incarnation and death and resurrection of Christ, Christian truth does not doubt that not even the ancient righteous, in order to be righteous, could have been cleansed from sins and justified by the grace of God — whether among those righteous whom Holy Scripture mentions, or among those whom it indeed does not mention, but who are nevertheless to be believed to have existed, whether before the flood, or from then until the giving of the Law, or in the time of the Law itself, not only among the children of Israel, as were the prophets, but even outside that same people, as was Job. For their hearts too were cleansed by the same faith in the mediator, and love was poured out in them through the Holy Spirit, who breathes where He wills — not following merits, but even making the merits themselves.
Although, therefore, death reigned from Adam until Moses — because neither could the Law given through Moses conquer it (for a Law was not given which could give life, but one which should show that the dead, for whose making-alive grace was necessary, were laid low not only by the propagation and dominion of sin, but were also convicted by the added transgression of the Law itself; not that anyone should perish who even then understood this within the mercy of God, but that a man, destined through the reign of death to punishment, being made manifest even to himself through the transgression of the Law, might seek the help of God, so that where sin abounded, grace might much more abound, which alone frees from the body of this death) — although, therefore, not even the Law given through Moses could take away the reign of death from any man, yet there were, even in the time of the Law, men of God, not under the Law that terrifies, convicts, and punishes, but under grace that delights, heals, and frees;
there were those who would say: 'Behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins did my mother nourish me in the womb'; and: 'There is no peace in my bones in the face of my sins'; and: 'Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within my inmost parts'; and: 'Strengthen me with a princely spirit'; and: 'Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.' There were those who would say: 'I believed, therefore have I spoken.' For they too were cleansed by the same faith by which we also are; whence the Apostle also says: 'Having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, for which cause I have also spoken; we also believe, for which cause we also speak.' Out of that same faith it was said:
'Behold, a virgin shall conceive in her womb and shall bear a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which is interpreted, God with us.' Out of that same faith it was said concerning Him: 'And He, as a bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, hath rejoiced as a giant to run the way; His going forth is from the height of heaven, and His circuit even to the height of heaven; and there is none that can hide himself from His heat.' Out of that same faith it was said to Him: 'Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever; the rod of righteousness is the rod of Thy kingdom. Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore God, Thy God, hath anointed Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy fellows.' By the same spirit of faith these things future were seen by them, by which they are believed by us as accomplished.
For neither were they themselves not partakers of those things, who by faithful love were able to prophesy them to us. And whence is it that the Apostle Peter says: 'Why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But through the grace of the Lord Jesus we believe that we shall be saved, even as they'? — unless because they too were saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, not through the Law of Moses, through which was made not the healing but the knowledge of sin, as the Apostle teaches, saying: 'For by the Law is the knowledge of sin; but now without the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the prophets.' If, then, it has now been manifested, it existed even then, but hidden.
Its concealment the veil of the temple signified, which — to signify its revelation — was rent when Christ died. And so even then this grace of the one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, was among the people of God, but as rain in a fleece — which God, not as a debt but as a free gift, sets apart for His inheritance — it was present, lying hidden. But now, as though that fleece has been dried, that is, the Jewish people having been rejected, it is seen lying open among all the nations, as upon the threshing-floor.
Let us not, therefore, like Pelagius and his disciples, divide the ages, saying that 'first the righteous lived from nature, then under the Law, thirdly under grace — from nature, that is, from Adam through so long an age, in which the Law had not yet been given; for then,' they say, 'the Creator was known by way of reason, and how one ought to live was carried written in men's hearts, not by a law of the letter, but of nature. But when morals were corrupted,' they say, 'when nature, now grown discolored, began to be insufficient, the Law was added to it, by which, as the moon, when its former brightness has been worn away by rust, might be restored.'
'But after too great a habit of sinning had prevailed,' as they argue, 'to heal which the Law had too little power, Christ came, and, as though for a most desperate disease, He Himself, the physician, came to the rescue, not through disciples, but through Himself.' By arguing these things they attempt to exclude the ancient righteous from the grace of the mediator, as though the man Christ Jesus had not been the mediator of God and those men, because — the flesh not yet having been taken from the virgin's womb — He was not yet man, at the time when those righteous men existed. But if this were so, the Apostle would by no means say: 'By a man came death, and by a man the resurrection of the dead.'
For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive — whereas those ancient righteous, according to the empty talk of these men, being sufficient unto themselves by nature, had no need of the man Christ as mediator, through whom they might be reconciled to God, nor shall they be made alive in Him, since they are shown not to belong to His body and members according to that which, for men's sake, He was made man. But if...
Since through his apostles the Truth speaks—'As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive'; for through that one man came death, and through this one man the resurrection of the dead—what Christian would dare to doubt that even those righteous men who, in more recent times of the human race, pleased God, shall for this reason come into the resurrection of eternal life and not of eternal death, because they shall be made alive in Christ; and that they are made alive in Christ because they belong to the body of Christ; and that they belong to the body of Christ because for them too Christ is the Head; and that Christ is their Head too because there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus?
This would not have been theirs, unless they had believed in his resurrection through his grace. And how could this have come to pass, had they not known that he was to come in the flesh, and had they not from this faith lived justly and devoutly? For if the incarnation of Christ did not profit them because it had not yet taken place, then neither does the judgment of Christ over the living and the dead profit us, because it has not yet taken place. But if we shall stand at Christ's right hand through faith in this judgment which is not yet done but is to come, then surely they are members of Christ through faith in his incarnation, which was then not yet done but was to come. For it must not be thought that only the divinity of Christ, which always was, and not also his humanity, which as yet was not, once revealed, profited the ancient righteous.
For that saying of the Lord Jesus—'Abraham longed to see my day, and he saw it and was glad'—if by 'his day' he meant his own time to be understood, then he certainly bore witness of Abraham that he was steeped in faith of his incarnation; for it is according to that incarnation that he has a time, whereas his divinity transcends all time, since through it all times were made. And even if anyone should think this must be taken of the eternal Day, which is bounded by no morrow and preceded by no yesterday—that is, of that very eternity in which he is coeternal with the Father—how could Abraham truly long for this, unless he had known the coming mortality of him whose eternity he sought?
Or if someone confines the sense of these words to this, saying that nothing is to be understood in the Lord's saying 'he sought my day' except 'he sought me, who am the abiding Day, that is, the unfailing Light'—just as when we speak of the life of the Son, of which the Gospel speaks, saying, 'so he gave to the Son also to have life in himself,' where we understand not that he is one thing and his life another, but that the Son himself is that same Life, he who said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life,' and of whom it is said:
'This is the true God and eternal life'—so that Abraham may be supposed to have desired to see this divinity of his, equal to the Father, without any foreknowledge whatever of his incarnation, just as certain philosophers also sought after him who learned nothing of his flesh—yet what then of this: that Abraham commands his servant to place his hand under his thigh and swear by the God of heaven? Is anyone going to interpret this rightly except by supposing that Abraham knew that from that thigh would be propagated the flesh in which the God of heaven was to come?
Of which flesh and blood, when he blessed Abraham himself, Melchizedek also brought forth a testimony most well known to faithful Christians, so that so long afterward it might be said of Christ in the Psalms—a thing not yet done but still to come, yet the same one faith of the fathers, which is ours, sang it: 'You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.' For to those who find death in Adam, Christ profits by this, that he is mediator unto life; but he is not mediator by that whereby he is equal to the Father. For by that he is as far distant from us as the Father is. And how shall there be a midpoint, where the distance is the very same? Therefore the Apostle did not say, 'one mediator of God and men, Christ Jesus,' but 'the man Christ Jesus.'
Therefore he is mediator in that he is man; inferior to the Father in that he is nearer to us, superior to us in that he is nearer to the Father. And this is said more plainly thus: inferior to the Father, because in the form of a servant; superior to us, because without stain of sin. Wherefore whoever contends that human nature at any age has no need of a physician in the second Adam, because it was not corrupted in the first Adam, is convicted of being an enemy of God's grace—not in some question in which one may doubt or err with faith unharmed, but in that very rule of faith by which we are Christians. But what sort of thing is it, that by these men that nature of men which existed before the Law is praised as though not yet corrupted by worse morals?
They do not consider that men were then overwhelmed by sins so great, as if intolerable, that—with the exception of one man of God and his wife and three sons and as many daughters-in-law—by the just judgment of God, as the small region of Sodom was afterward destroyed by fire, so the whole world was destroyed by a flood. From that time, therefore, when through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and so it passed upon all men, in whom all sinned, surely the whole mass has been made a mass of perdition, the possession of the destroyer. And so no one, no one at all, has been, is, or shall be freed from it, except by the grace of the Redeemer.
And before Abraham, indeed, whether the righteous or their little ones were marked by any bodily and visible sacrament, Scripture does not state. Abraham himself, however, received the sign of circumcision, the seal of the righteousness of faith; and he received it in such a way that thenceforth he was commanded to circumcise even all the little ones of his household, the newest from their mothers' wombs, on the eighth day of their birth, so that even these, who could not yet believe with the heart unto righteousness, might nevertheless receive the seal of the righteousness of faith. And this was commanded under such great terror that God said that soul should perish from his people whose foreskin had not been circumcised on the eighth day.
If the justice of so terrible a penalty be inquired into, will not all the argumentation of these men—however subtle—about free will and the praiseworthy soundness and purity of nature be struck back and, shattered, fly apart? For what evil, I ask, did the infant commit by his own will, that, when another neglects and does not circumcise him, he himself should be condemned with a condemnation so severe that that soul should perish from his people? For it was not the terror of temporal death that was struck into them, since concerning the righteous, when they died, it was rather said, 'and he was gathered to his people,' or 'he was gathered to his fathers,' since henceforth no temptation is to be feared by a man which might separate him from his people, if his people is itself the people of God.
What then does so great a condemnation mean, for nothing committed by one's own will? For it is not, as some suppose according to the Platonists, that this is repaid to the soul of each infant for what it committed by its own will before this life, when before this body it had free choice of living well or ill—since the Apostle Paul most plainly says that those not yet born have done nothing good or evil. Whence then is the infant rightly punished by that perdition, unless because it belongs to the mass of perdition and is justly understood, as born of Adam, to be condemned by the obligation of the ancient debt, unless from thence it be freed not according to debt but according to grace?
And what grace is this but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, whom, among the other sacraments of the ancients, this very circumcision of the foreskin also prophesied? For the eighth day, in the recurring weeks, is the Lord's Day, on which the Lord rose again; and the Rock was Christ. Whence the knife of circumcision was of stone, and the flesh of the foreskin was the body of sin.
The sacraments accordingly being changed after he came who was signified as being to come, yet with the mediator's aid not changed—he who even before he had come in the flesh set free his ancient members by faith in his incarnation—we too, when we were dead in trespasses and in the uncircumcision of our flesh, were made alive together with Christ, in whom we were circumcised with a circumcision not made by hand, which the circumcision made by hand prefigured, that the body of sin might be done away, with which we are born of Adam. The propagation of a condemned origin condemns us, unless we be cleansed in the likeness of sinful flesh, in which was sent without sin he who nevertheless from sin might condemn sin; for he was made sin for us. Whence the Apostle says:
'We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. Him who knew no sin he made to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.' God therefore, to whom we are reconciled through him, made him to be sin for us—that is, a sacrifice by which our sins might be remitted—since sacrifices for sins are called sins. And indeed he himself was immolated for our sins, having no fault, alone among men, such as was sought even then in cattle, whereby was signified that one without fault would come to heal our faults.