For what is more insane than to keep the physician Christ away from little children, by saying that there is not in them that which He came to heal? Cicero, inveighing against the parricide of his fatherland, was defending that city which its king Romulus founded by gathering sinners from every quarter; but you, so many little children who die without holy Baptism, both cry out that they have no sin, and do not permit them to draw near to the city of the King, to whose image they were made. Pronounce that I speak the truth. 23. JULIAN: You feign that I passed over the Apostle's testimony—which can neither help you, and was not passed over by me; rather it was inserted in that order in which it had been placed by you;
and as it was faithfully recalled in the first work, so indeed in the fourth book of my work it was expounded, albeit cursorily and briefly. Likewise the mention of the Catholic Church, which you had made for this purpose—that those deceived by you might desert the Catholic faith, and that the wretched might rejoice in the appellation 'Catholic'—I did not pass over. And although there was no force of argument in words of this kind, nevertheless the heading of your statements was set forth by me no otherwise than it had been arranged by you. Read my published books and the fidelity of my reply, and looking upon that of which you accuse me as fraud, pronounce meanwhile that I speak the truth; but you, if your custom will permit, blush.
But now that the inexcusable falsehood has been exposed—which, though always base, becomes yet baser when it invades the place of a censor and reproaches its own deformity upon another's comeliness—answer: what do either the name of the Church or the Apostle's words profit Manichaean sentiments, that you should allege them to have been passed over with such great ill-will? AUGUSTINE: I have already answered above this calumny of yours, by which you charge me with the falsehood of having set down your words less than fully. But that which that snipper did, you would not so readily attribute to me, if you did not wish to be a deceiver of those who read these things. They ascribe every sin to an evil nature. 24. JULIAN:
This has always been the greatest distinction between the Manichaeans and the Catholics, and a certain very broad boundary by which the dogmas of the pious and the impious are separated from one another—nay, a great mass dividing our opinions as heaven from earth by its depth: namely, that we ascribe every sin to an evil will, but they to an evil nature. These, though they follow diverse errors, yet as flowing forth from the head of that same fountain, consequently arrive at sacrileges and disgraceful deeds; just as the Catholics, on the contrary, beginning from a good starting-point and increased by good progressions, are carried up to the height of religion, which reason fortifies and piety.
You therefore, attempting to assert a natural evil with a profane wish indeed but an ineffective intent, have usurped the testimony of the Apostle, whom by this very citation I show to have felt nothing such as you attempt to persuade; for by mutually contradictory ways you both confess him Catholic, and reckon that his sayings support the Manichaean. AUGUSTINE: Which Catholic teachers would you assert to support the Manichaean—those who understood in the apostolic words that little children draw original sin, and did not, in your insane manner, praise nature as though it were sound, but rather applied to it, to be healed, a Christian medicine? If you thought with a Christian heart, you would blush, tremble, and fall silent. All heresies fortify their inventions with the Scriptures. 25. JULIAN:
Did not the same Adimantus and Faustus (whom in the books of your Confessions you call your teacher) do this by the tradition of their heresiarch, snatching and corrupting the more obscure sentences, whether of the Gospel or of the Epistles of the Apostles, in order to defend a profane dogma by the authority of names? Yet why do I speak of the Manichaeans? Absolutely all heresies fortify their inventions—by which they have swerved from piety and faith—with the expressions and sentences of the Scriptures. AUGUSTINE: They turned obscure sentences into their own dogma; you strive to obscure plain ones by your very dogma. For what is plainer than what the Apostle says:
that sin entered into this world through one man, and through sin death, and so passed through unto all men? And if the same Apostle were compelled to prove this, he would give as witness the very misery of the human race, which begins from the wailings of little children and reaches even to the groans of the decrepit. For in no way, under the care of an omnipotent and just God, would so great a misery be inflicted upon human nature, unless in two men the whole of it were driven, by the merit of sin, from the felicity of paradise into this unhappiness. The Scriptures do not prove errors. 26. JULIAN: Shall then either the authors of the sacred Books be proved authors of errors, or shall the dignity of the Scriptures expiate the crimes of those who perish? AUGUSTINE: Say this to yourselves. God is just. 27. JULIAN:
Let the lust of undisciplined expositions therefore be extinguished; let no words be believed to do anything against the manifest justice of God; and if they are of that Person whom it is necessary to venerate, let them be defended by explanations befitting the divine equity; but if they were uttered by an author not to be feared, let them be driven off even unpurified. Now, therefore, we dispute concerning the judgement of God, of whom it is written: God is faithful, in whom there is no iniquity; just and holy is the Lord God. And again: The Lord is just, and hath loved justice; His countenance hath beheld equity. And again: All Thy judgements are equity. Innumerable are the testimonies by which the divine equity is proclaimed in the sacred Volumes;
of which, however, no one among either the Gentiles or the heretics, except the Manichaeans and the Traducianists, has doubted. AUGUSTINE: By this equity a heavy yoke is upon the sons of Adam from the day of their coming forth from their mother's womb; which he who denies original sin asserts to be altogether unjust. God cannot but be just. 28. JULIAN: For it has been so impressed upon all universally, nature teaching it, that God is just, that it is manifest that He is not God who is proved not to be just. A man, therefore, can also be just; but God cannot be anything but just. AUGUSTINE: Say this to yourself. God judges most justly. 29. JULIAN: Who, since He is this one true God whom we believe and whom we venerate in the Trinity, is beyond doubt most just in the reckoning of judgement toward all.
AUGUSTINE: Say this to yourself: and show Him to be just, in that with so manifest a misery, or unto so manifest a misery, one is born from whom no original sin is drawn. Without equity, the whole Godhead would grow worthless. 30. JULIAN: By His laws, therefore, that cannot be so proved and vindicated which is established to be unjust, so that, if this could happen, His whole divinity would grow worthless. By Him, therefore, it will be proved that a dogma of injustice is confirmed from the holy Scriptures—by Him by whom it could be approved that the Trinity, in whom we believe, could be deprived of the glory of divinity. AUGUSTINE: You speak truly: but say this to yourselves, you who contrive to take away from Christ the glory by which He heals little children. God and natural sin are not reconciled. 31. JULIAN:
Since neither any reason nor any piety sustains this, either teach that it is possible, or that it is just, that natural sin be imputed to anyone; or depart from the contamination of the holy Scriptures, by whose sentences you reckon to be sanctioned that which you are compelled to confess unjust. AUGUSTINE: You err: rather you yourselves are compelled to confess unjust the heavy yoke upon little children, if, just as they have no sin of their own, so they draw no original sin. A new Manichaean, worse than the old. 32. JULIAN: But if you will do neither of these things which we have said, and yet assert that you believe in this God by whose ordinances you reckon injustice to be fortified,
then recognize that you, the new Manichaean, are far worse than the old, in that you hold such a God as the Manichaean imagined the enemy of his own god to be. AUGUSTINE: You rage against little children worse than the Manichaeans. For they at least wish the soul—which they think a part of God—to be healed through Christ in the little child; but you, in one whom you say has no evil either in soul or in flesh, permit him to be healed by Christ in no part whatever. And you, illustrious preachers, so preach Jesus that you deny Him to be the Jesus of little children. From what source He received this name, read in the Gospel, and do not deny the Savior to unsaved little children. The common folk detest the Pelagian error. 33. JULIAN:
What roundabout evasions, then, what cushions of lies and follies—which the prophet Ezekiel imputes to fornicating Jerusalem—will you set before me here, on which womanish souls may recline, holding the names of the mysteries, while with unveiled profanity they have committed offense against the very Godhead? With all conjuring tricks removed, and the troops of common folk you so often summon to your aid, teach that to be just which you attempt to affirm through the holy Scriptures. AUGUSTINE: The troops of common folk whom you mock know the Catholic faith, which confesses that infants are saved by the Savior; and therefore they detest the error of the Pelagians, who deny this. Lest the discourse be extended into infinite volumes. 34. JULIAN:
Lest, then, the discourse be extended into infinite volumes, here, here let there be discerned the genus, species, difference, mode, and quality of the matters we are treating; nay, more carefully, whether they exist, whence they exist, where they exist, what also they merit, and from whom. For in this way there will not long be wandering through the windings of disputations, and what ought to be held for certain will appear. AUGUSTINE: For this reason you wrote eight books against my one book, because by your dialectical shortcuts you were unwilling to dispute at length. The definition of justice. 35. JULIAN: The reckoning, therefore, turns upon the Creator and the creature—that is, God and man; the One judges, the other is judged; and so let it be seen what is the nature of justice and of fault.
Justice is—as it is wont to be defined by the learned, and as we ourselves can understand it—the virtue (if it be permitted, according to the Stoics, to prefer one to another) greatest of all virtues, diligently discharging its office of rendering to each his own, without fraud, without favor. AUGUSTINE: Say then, by what justice the heavy yoke of so great and manifest a misery is repaid to little children; say by what justice one little child is adopted in Baptism, another dies without this adoption; why this honor is not common to both, or estrangement from this honor, since the cause—whether good or bad—is common to both. You do not say, because, more a Pelagian than a Christian, you have taste for neither the grace of God nor the justice of God. True virtue is that which is perfected by a fourfold conjunction.
36. JULIAN: But if Zeno will not allow it to be called the greatest—Zeno who affirms so great a bond and unity of the virtues that where one has been, he says all the virtues are present, and where one has not been, all are absent, and that that is true virtue which is perfected by this fourfold conjunction—then also he will furnish us with very much help, when he has taught that neither prudence, nor fortitude, nor temperance can be maintained without justice; according to which truth Ecclesiastes also pronounces: He who sins in one thing shall lose many good things. AUGUSTINE: Hear the same Ecclesiastes saying: Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity; what abundance has a man in all his labor, wherewith he labors under the sun? and so forth.
And tell me, why has man too been made like unto vanity, who had been made like unto truth? Or do you except from this the little children, whom we see, by growing and—if they be well educated—by advancing, diminishing so great a vanity as that with which they were born, nor being wholly free of it until all the days of vanity shall have passed away like a shadow? God is the origin of justice. 37. JULIAN: This august virtue, therefore, the assessor of each one's merits, in the works of the image of God—that is, of the human soul—gleams intermittently according to the measure and powers of the creature itself; but in God Himself, the Founder from nothing of all that exists, it shines forth immense and bright throughout the eternal orb.
Its origin is divinity, its age is eternity, and eternity knows neither to cease nor to have begun, this way or that. As, therefore, its genus (by which name I wish nothing else to be understood than its origin) is God, so its species appears in the promulgation of laws and in the effects of judgements. AUGUSTINE: If God is the origin of justice, as you confess, why do you not confess that justice is given to man by Him, and rather wish justice to be the free choice of the human will than the gift of God—so that you are among those of whom it is said: Being ignorant of God's justice, and wishing to establish their own, they have not submitted themselves to the justice of God? Blush at length, I beseech you, and demand justice from Him who is, as you have been compelled to confess, the origin of justice.
The difference, mode, and quality of justice. 38. JULIAN: But its difference we can not absurdly understand to be its varied dispensation according to the opportuneness of the times. For example, sacrifices of animals had been commanded in the Old Testament. To fulfill that then pertained to reverence for the command; but now the ceasing of them, being enjoined, so serves the justice that commands, as then the offering served it. Its mode is either its stability—that it enjoins upon no one more than his powers can bear—or that it does not blunt mercy. But its quality is understood to be that by which it tastes sweetly to pious minds. There is, therefore, beyond doubt, justice, without which there is no deity; which if it were not, God would not be;
but God exists, and so without ambiguity justice exists. And it is nothing other than the virtue containing all things and rendering to each his own, without fraud, without favor. But it consists chiefly in the depth of divinity. AUGUSTINE: You have defined justice to be the virtue containing all things and rendering to each his own, without fraud, without favor. Accordingly we see that it, without fraud, rendered a denarius to those who had labored throughout the whole day in the work of the vineyard; for this had pleased them, this had been agreed upon, and they could not deny that they had been hired for this wage. But tell me, I ask you, how without favor did it give just as much to those who were only one hour in that work? Had it perhaps lost its justice? Restrain yourself, therefore, rather.
For divine justice defrauds no one, but grace bestows many things upon those who do not merit them. But why to this one thus, and to that one thus, look at what you subjoin following. For you say most truly that it consists chiefly in the depth of divinity. In this depth is that which belongs neither to him that wills, nor to him that runs, but to God that shows mercy. In this depth is that one little child is adopted into honor through the laver of regeneration, another is left in contumely, not to be admitted to the Kingdom; whereas of neither is there any merit toward either side through the choice of the will. Clemency is a great part of justice. 39. JULIAN:
But justice deserves testimony, as from its author, so also from either the good or the wicked, in that it has both justly advanced the former and justly condemned the latter. But when, toward those who merit neither anything good nor anything evil of themselves, it permits mercy to be liberal, it feels no injury; because this very thing—that God should be clement to His own work, when He is not compelled into severity—is a great part of justice. AUGUSTINE: Attend at least to the name of mercy, and consider whence it is named. What need, then, is there of mercy where there is no misery? Moreover, if you say there is no misery in little children, you deny that mercy is to be shown them; if you say there is any, you show an evil merit. For under a just God no one can be miserable unless he deserves it.
Behold, two little children lie here: one of them baptized, the other unbaptized, breathes his last; to which of them do you say God was clement? If to the one, show the evil merit of the other—you who deny that there is original sin; if to both, show any good merit of the baptized—you who deny grace, where there is no respect of persons; and say, if you can, why He was unwilling to adopt both—He who certainly founded both after His own image. Or is He so just that He is not omnipotent, if He willed and could not? Where certainly neither of them was unwilling, lest you refer the impediment of the divine power to the merit of the human will; here certainly God can say to neither of them: I willed, and you were unwilling.
Or if the infant is unwilling for the reason that he cries when he is baptized, then let both be left, for both are unwilling; and yet one is taken up and the other is left, because great is the grace of God, and true the justice of God. But why this one rather than that one: Inscrutable are the judgements of God. Justice and grace. 40. JULIAN: For those whom He made because He willed, He condemns only when despised; if, when He is not despised, He should make them better by consecration, He suffers no detriment of justice, and is adorned by the munificence of His compassion. AUGUSTINE: You who condemn only when despised, say whether He despises His own image except when despised. But if you dare not, say whence He despises those little children whom He does not adopt, by whom you will not find Him despised, unless you find them in Adam.
Where at once you will find that, in order for them to be despised, it is owed to all through justice, and yet that not all are despised, on account of the ineffable and inscrutable grace. God chooses the weak things. 41. JULIAN: These divisions of justice, therefore, which we have set forth, being expounded, let us discuss what is the definition of sin. Indeed, the writings both of the philosophers and of those who were Catholics supply me abundantly with what we seek; but I fear lest you resist, and, if I have summoned the senate of philosophers, you should straightway kindle against us the stool-bound craftsmen and all the common crowd. AUGUSTINE: You are contumelious against the weak things of the world, which God chose that He might confound the strong. Finally, these very ones confound those who trust in their own strength. Whereupon what shall I say: You are they?
Absolutely, though I am silent, you appear, since you are not silent. Either a liar or reckless. 42. JULIAN: Bawling with the women, and with all the dogs and tribunes, for whom your colleague Alypius lately brought from all Africa eighty or more fattened horses. AUGUSTINE: Either you calumniate, or you know not what you say; and therefore, either a liar or reckless, you speak these things. But what is more worthless than you, if you yourself invented these things? What is more stupid, if you believed those who invented them? But now, in that you even dared to write them, and did not fear lest your books should reach those places which received my colleague Alypius as he passed or came by land and sea—where your falsehoods can most plainly be read, not without derision of you, or rather detestation;
to what shall it be compared—I will not say of impudence, but of madness? You despise those who teach original sin. 43. JULIAN: By no means do you acquiesce in the opinions of the learned, so that you should add that, according to what suits your understanding, the Apostle said that God made foolish the wisdom of the world; but that our disputants can be despised by you without fear, because you are pressed by no authority of such men. AUGUSTINE: You despise those who, by their teaching original sin, so resist you that you moreover accuse them as Manichaeans, naming me, signifying them. The definition of sin which is only sin. 44. JULIAN: What then?
Shall I acquiesce to you outright, and here make forfeit of all those helps I might use, and be content with the definition which, to the indication of a good nature, escaped from the mouth of your honesty after the secret of the Manichaeans? In that book, then, whose title is either On the Two Souls or Against the Two Souls, you speak thus: 'Wait, let us first define sin. Sin is the will to admit or retain what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain. Although, if one is not free, it cannot even be called will; but I preferred to define more coarsely than too scrupulously.' AUGUSTINE: Here sin has been defined which is only sin, not that which is also the penalty of sin.
For it was of this that we had to treat, when the origin of evil was being sought—of what sort was committed by the first man before any evil of man. But you either cannot understand, or will not. Augustine's definition is gold. 45. JULIAN: O gold shining in dung! What truer, what fuller, could be said by anyone, even orthodox? Sin, you say, is the will to admit or retain what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain. Ecclesiasticus shows this: God, it says, made man, and left him in the hand of his own counsel; He set before him life and death, water and fire; whatever shall please him shall be given him. And through Isaiah God: If you be willing, He says, and will hear Me, you shall eat the good things of the land.
If you be unwilling, and will not hear, the sword shall devour you. And the Apostle: Awake righteously, and sin not; and again: Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatever a man shall sow, that shall he also reap. AUGUSTINE: These testimonies were said on account of that will, in which each one does what he wills; so that if it be not had, it may be asked of Him who works in us even to will; but if it be had, let works of justice be done, and to Him who has worked it let thanks be given. Right hand and left. 46. JULIAN: The will, therefore, is a motion of the mind, having it in its own right whether it runs down leftward to depraved things, or strives rightward to lofty things. AUGUSTINE: What then is: Turn not aside to the right hand, nor to the left?
The origin, species, difference, mode, and quality of sin. 47. JULIAN: But it is the motion of the mind of him who can now, by reason of age, use the judgement of reason; to whom, when penalty and glory are shown, or on the contrary advantage or pleasure, a help and, as it were, an occasion is offered, not a necessity imposed upon either of the two sides. This will, therefore, which alternates, received the origin of its possibility in free choice; but it takes upon itself from itself the existence of the deed itself, nor is there a will at all before it wills, nor can it will before it has also been able to be unwilling; nor does it have either in the sphere of sin—that is, to will and to be unwilling—before it attains the use of reason. From which things gathered, it appears that you defined most truly:
Sin is the will to retain or admit what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain. This sin, then, which has become clear to be nothing besides the will, is established to have received its genus—that is, its very origin—from proper appetite. Its species is now found in each single one of what are called atoms. But its difference is both in the variety of faults and in the reckonings of times. Its mode is immoderation itself; for if the mode is to serve him whom you ought, he who neglects this offends by the transgression of the true mode. Yet here it can be subtly said that there is a mode of sin, because no one offends more than he can; for if beyond one's powers, one sins with an ineffective will; this very thing could come to pass by the will alone.
But let quality be ascribed to the vice, through which is shown what of bitterness it brings, whether by disgrace or by pain. There is, then, sin, because if it were not, neither would you follow errors; but it is nothing other than a will exceeding beyond that path on which it ought to press, and from which it is free not to deviate. But it comes to be from the appetite of things not permitted; and it is nowhere except in that man who both had an evil will and could have not had it. AUGUSTINE: He is Adam himself, whom that definition of ours, which pleased you, was regarding, when I said: Sin is the will to retain or attain what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain.
For Adam, when he sinned, had absolutely nothing of evil in himself by which, though unwilling, he might be urged to do evil, and on account of which he might say: Not the good that I will do I do, but the evil that I will not, that I do. And by this he did, in sinning, that which justice forbade, and from which it had been free for him to abstain. For to him who says, The evil that I will not, that I do, it is not free to abstain therefrom. And by this, if you distinguish these three things, and know that sin is one thing, the penalty of sin another, and both a third—that is, so a sin that it is also the penalty of sin—you understand which of these three pertains to that definition, where there is a will to do what justice forbids, and from which one is free to abstain.
For sin was in this way defined, not the penalty of sin, not both. But these three genera have also their own species, concerning which it would now be long to dispute. If indeed examples of these three genera be sought, that of the first genus occurs in Adam without any knot of question. For there are many evils which men do, from which they are free to abstain; but to none is it so free as it was to him who stood before his God, by whom he had been created upright, depraved by absolutely no vice. But of the second genus, where there is only the penalty of sin, the example is in that evil which anyone in no part does, but only suffers;
as when, for his own crime, he who has sinned is killed, or is tortured by any other bodily penalty whatever. But the third genus, where there is the sin itself and the penalty of sin, can be understood in him who says: The evil that I will not, that I do. To this pertain also all those things which through ignorance, when evils are done, are not thought evils, or are even thought goods. For blindness of heart, if it were not sin, would be unjustly reproved; but it is justly reproved, where it is said: Blind Pharisee! and in very many other places of the divine eloquences. And again the same blindness, if it were not the penalty of sin, it would not be said: For their own malice blinded them; and if this came not from the judgement of God, we should not read:
Let their eyes be darkened that they see not, and bow down their back always. Who, moreover, is blind in heart willingly, when no one wishes to be blind even in body? Accordingly, original sin pertains neither to that which we placed in the first place, where there is the will to do evil, from which one is free to abstain—otherwise it would not be in little children, who do not yet use the choice of the will; nor to that which we mentioned in the second place. For we are now treating of sin, not of the penalty, which is not sin, although it follows by the merit of sin; which indeed even little children suffer, because there is in them a body dead on account of sin. Yet the death of the body itself is not sin, nor are any bodily torments whatsoever;