反亞流神學文集 第 10 章 第 1/9 段

BOOK ONE. CHAPTER I.—1. I give thanks to God, holy brethren, John the presbyter and Venerius the deacon, by whose help you are such men that, for the grace by which we are saved, you contend with great spirit and fervour. But I have been grieved that certain of our brethren under the Christian name strive to oppose the Catholic faith: namely, transferring the gifts of God's grace to the virtue or merit of human free will; as though without God's help our effort could obey the divine precept; and as though that alone were God's part, that He command us the things to be done, and Himself not work in us what He commands; and as though, if God bestow any good upon a man, He should seem not to give but to repay.

These men so far think that the gifts of the divine goodness depend upon the quality of human acts, that they even assert that infants are so foreknown and predestined by God, that nothing of the free bestowal of heavenly grace is found in those who are chosen; and that no gratuitous mercy anticipates anyone by its condescension, but that the eternal retribution of punishment and of reward consists solely in the future action of each one's own will. 2. That absurdity also, I greatly marvel and grieve, has crept in upon certain men, whereby they do not hesitate to be so far enemies of the grace of God, asserting that infants are baptized on the merit of future works, that on the contrary they say that even to those infants who die without baptism, provision is made by the divine kindness;

so that without the grace of the sacred washing they are snatched away to punishment—those, namely, in whom they contend that God foreknew their future evils, if they had lived here somewhat longer, and in His goodness snatched them away from the course of the present life beforehand: as if anyone could, without the benefit of holy redemption, either be withdrawn from perpetual punishments, or attain to the gifts of eternal life. While therefore they obstinately contradict, they pierce themselves through with deadly depravity.

To these men it seems that of Esau and Jacob—twin brothers, namely, born of one seed and one intercourse—the merits are to be so distinguished, that, asserting Esau to have been condemned from the foreknowledge of his future works, they contend that Jacob too could have been saved not by the gratuitous gift of the divine goodness, but only by the foreknowledge of his future works: so that God may thus be recognized as just in both, and it may not be believed that anything was bestowed on either of them by gratuitous compassion.

Whereas in this question especially, which is turned upon infants, in which not the proper malice of anyone's actual sins, but the guilt of the sinful origin itself is signified, everyone who does not wish to fall away from the truth of the apostolic faith, who desires, God enlightening him, to keep with inviolate belief and confession the rectitude of Catholic doctrine, ought—every ambiguity of hesitation being removed—truly to believe and confess: that God is one, and true, and good, that is, the supreme and ineffable Trinity of one nature and essence; that He founded the whole nature of the first man as good and entire, without natural evil, and without any vice;

and that He neither created for the flesh the necessity of dying, nor implanted in the soul the stain of any sin; and therefore that human nature has from God the good of creation, but from the voluntary transgression of the first man draws original sin in those being born, and that from the wicked transgression of one, and from a most just condemnation, there flowed upon all at once both the blemish of iniquity and the punishment of death. For man, made to the image of God, received rectitude both of will and of work. CHAPTER II.—3. And so man was so created that he could both sin and not sin by his own will;

and therefore the fall of his voluntary transgression was justly punished in him, because he was constrained to sinning by no natural necessity of flesh or soul. Who, although, as the Apostle teaches (1 Tim. II, 14), he was not himself seduced, yet consenting with a depraved will to the woman who had been seduced into transgression, so improvidently inflicted upon himself a deadly wound, that in that one man—whose soul is dead through sin, and whose body is dead because of sin—all should be originally made subject to sin and to death, as many as were to be born from that first sinful man by the intercourse of male and female.

After therefore the begetter of all men sinned by his own will, and experienced the truth of the divine precept which he had heard, In whatsoever day ye shall eat of it, ye shall die the death (Gen. II, 17), and the justice of the avenging God, by one taste of the forbidden tree, because he forsook justice, he fell into punishment, and of his own accord dying spiritually in soul, he also received unwillingly the punishment of bodily death. 4. The voluntary death of the soul, therefore, brought forth the penal death of the body; and the first man, because the death of crime possessed him, the death of vengeance also immediately followed.

Hence it came to pass that his entire offspring—not only in those who could sin by their own will, but even in infants not yet using their own will—guilt bound fast; and, sin prevailing, death claimed for itself through all men both a penal passage and a reign. Wherefore the Apostle also says: By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death: and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned (Rom. V, 12). Likewise he says: Death reigned from Adam unto Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of the transgression of Adam (Ibid., 14).

Man therefore, in sinning, subjected all his offspring to his sin, when by transgressing he lost true liberty: For by whom a man is overcome, to the same is he also bound as a slave (2 Pet. II, 19); and, Everyone that committeth sin is the servant of sin (John VIII, 34). 5. From this servitude, by which infants being born are held bound fast, one only, the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, was begotten free; who, although He was born a true man, yet not with the intervening concupiscence of the flesh, nor from the intercourse of male and female, but born of the Holy Spirit, so received true flesh from the flesh of His mother, that God, being true, took not the guilt of human origin, but the nature;

and He received sins in His body not to commit them, but bore them to blot them out. For the authority of the apostolic preaching truly teaches that He did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth (1 Pet. II, 22); and, He Himself bore our sins in His body upon the tree, that, being separated from sins, we may live with justice (Ibid., 24). His mother alone, as she was a virgin before conception, so remained an inviolate virgin after childbirth: because she neither felt lust when she conceived God made man wondrously in her womb, nor any corruption while she brought forth, in the true flesh of our race, the Redeemer of the human race.

For the true God, receiving true flesh from the Virgin, took from her the perfection of a human body, yet took not from her the grace of her virginity. For it was not fitting that God, the Creator of human flesh, should grant the integrity of virginity in its condition, and that the same God, the assumer of human flesh, about to redeem what He had made, should take away virginity from the flesh of which He was being born. He is the second man from heaven (1 Cor. XV, 47), who is not said to be from heaven because He willed to bring down thence with Himself the substance of His body; but because He could have in Himself nothing of the form of a servant of earthly desire, which the God who created heaven and earth took up into the unity of His person. CHAPTER III.—6.

He did not therefore bring down a heavenly body to earth, but God raised up in Himself to heaven the true nature of an earthly body. Receiving this truth of an earthly body from the earthly body of His mother, He bore our sins in His flesh, since He had no fault either of origin or of work. For Isaiah says that He Himself bore our sins (Isa. LIII, 11). Therefore, that in men also, where sin abounded, grace might superabound, not only was that sin washed away by which the earthly man defiled the whole of his propagation; but by this grace also there is remitted to every believer whatever is found added to that original sin by the voluntary motions or works of men.

This indeed the blessed Apostle teaches, saying: For the judgment was from one unto condemnation, but grace was from many offences unto justification (Rom. V, 16). This is the grace of God which frees us through Jesus Christ our Lord, and the liberator Himself, intimating to us the work of His grace, speaks thus: If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed; and in another place: For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost (Luke XIX, 10). 7. This grace of God, by which we are saved, is given to no preceding good merit, yet is denied only to preceding evil merit. For the first man transmitted to all men the merits of his sin, whose flesh is conceived from the law of sin.

For this reason, although in little children there is no sin arising from their own will, there nonetheless dwells in the children of wrath, carnally begotten, the parental stain, which indeed does not disturb the well-ordered arrangement of the divine creation, yet by the blemish of the paternal transgression inflicts upon the newborn a hideous foulness. From that condemned mass, therefore, no one is distinguished by any foreknowledge of works to come, but is set apart by the resources and the work of the merciful potter. Thus the vessels of mercy, which from the same mass are made freely unto honour, are separated from the vessels of wrath, made unto dishonour, by the gift of a gratuitous justification. And to display

the grace which freely justifies sinners, the apostolic preaching calls them not vessels of righteousness, but vessels of mercy, as blessed Paul says: 'But if God, willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience the vessels of wrath fitted for destruction, that he might show the riches of his glory upon the vessels of mercy, which he had prepared unto glory' (Rom. 9:22-23). This mercy finds no one worthy, but finds all unworthy, and of these very ones makes worthy whom it wills. CHAPTER IV. — 8. Prevented by this mercy, Jacob was chosen before he was born, not according to the merit of any past or future human work of anyone, but according to the purpose of the God who predestines.

For the Apostle says that, while they were not yet born, nor had done anything good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calls, it was said to Rebecca: 'The elder shall serve the younger' (ibid., 11 and following). Therefore, that the younger brother should be preferred by God to the elder, there was neither any past merit of anyone nor of a future work, since from one lawful and righteous union the guilt of those conceived remained equal. Grace, then, wrought this out of the divine goodness: grace which was never so given as to find any good merits in a man, but so as to bestow those very merits upon those who did not have them.

For if, grace ceasing, the distinction of choosing the one and reprobating the other had been made in those little ones merely by the foreknowledge of human works, the Apostle would never have said: 'that it was said to him not of works, but of him that calls, that the elder shall serve the younger.' For without doubt the Apostle would have said 'of works,' if he had known there at least any good merits of future human works. But since he knew that in both of them there were present the merits of damnation alone, he attributed the cause of election to the purpose of the divine goodness alone.

Wherefore, of these two brothers—whom, conceived from one union of our father Isaac, the one first received in seed, the other first poured forth into the light of birth—the divine mercy alone set apart from the mass of damnation the one whom it willed: him whom the predestination of freely given gifts favoured, not the foreknowledge of merits to come. For thus the purpose of God according to election stood, so that the election should be gratuitous out of God's purpose. For the will of God is the cause of election, not election the cause of the will. And thus God was freely merciful toward the chosen one, in such a way that he was not unjust toward the rejected one. For the one he freely took up, the other he justly forsook. Indeed, 'all the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth' (Ps. 24:10). 9.

The goodness, therefore, of the God who freely shows mercy, and the severity of him who justly judges, brought it about that neither should both receive the gratuitous gift of mercy, nor should both together be allotted destruction, although the cause of both was one in origin. For this reason also, through the prophet, before it was said, 'Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,' the prophetic word made mention not of any past or future work, but only of their kinship of race; thus Malachi speaking: 'Was not Esau Jacob's brother? and Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated, says the Lord' (Mal. 1:2)?

Why then is here intimated not any diversity of works, but only the brotherhood of those being born, when rather both the good works of him who is loved and the evil works of him who is hated ought to have been recalled, so that neither in him who is loved might there be thought a respect of persons, nor in him who is reprobated an unjust condemnation? For brotherhood signifies in itself no diversity of works by which it might distinguish the one from the other by a comparison of merits.

For no other reason, therefore, without any mention of works, did God show that of two twin brothers he had loved the one and hated the other, except that we might recognize that, through the fellowship of conception and birth by which the brotherhood of both was established, each was bound by equal merit in that mass of damnation, from which merciful goodness so freely set apart the one, that just severity did not there unjustly abandon the other. But unjust would be the cause of the condemnation of any little child, if the mortal offspring had contracted no contagion of sin from the paternal root.

But the Scripture, divinely inspired, testifies that not only can no one of men be clean from defilement, even if his life upon the earth be but of one day (Job 14:4, according to the LXX); but that even the lawful and nuptial conception of the human race itself is not free from the guilt of iniquity. 10. Assuredly, let no one here think that any calumny is in any way to be raised against the truth. For we, following the doctrine of the holy Fathers, with God's help, say that the stain of original sin is in the conception of little children, not in the lawful marriage-bed, whose good we know to have been divinely instituted from the beginning of the human race.

For this reason also the apostolic teaching, without hesitation, commends marriage as honourable in all and the bed undefiled (Heb. 13:4). Therefore, although married persons, laudably endowed by God, possess offspring clean in faith and love, yet they bring forth children stained by the sin of the first man. Out of good marriage, then, it is so far a good thing that a man is born, that it is not evil even if he be born of adultery or fornication. For God has bestowed upon human nature the gift of fecundity; but the evil of lust is not the creature of God, but the penalty of sin. Accordingly, a man is not born clean out of the cleanness of marriage, because he is sown with lust intervening.

This lust indeed the honourableness of marriage by no means loves, but the necessity of mortal propagation tolerates it within marriage. It itself defiles those conceived, even though it cannot draw and hurl faithful parents into the effect of unlawful intercourse. For this reason holy David, born of a lawful and faithful union, not without grievous sorrow thus laments the stain of carnal generation: 'For behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in offences (al. sins) did my mother nourish me in the womb' (Ps. 51:5). CHAPTER V. — 11. Since these things are so, it cannot be that anyone who is conceived in iniquities should be born without the bond of iniquity.

That Jacob might be absolved from this, Esau being reprobated, there were no merits of man, but the grace of the divine goodness. Both indeed were circumcised in the body with a visible circumcision, which was in earlier time divinely bestowed upon our fathers 'for a seal of the righteousness of faith' (Rom. 4:11). But the circumcision of the heart, which is in the spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is not of men but of God (Rom. 2:29), Jacob alone received, freely justified by God; Esau, however, although he too was circumcised in the flesh, was nevertheless not exempted by the gift of divine love and election from the mass of perdition. In him indeed the circumcision was carnal;

but it profited him nothing, because spiritual circumcision by no means delivered him from the prudence of the flesh, which is enmity against God (Rom. 8:7). In Esau, therefore, before the ages, God hated the wickedness of the earthly man that would abide, and justly appointed him to punishment. But in his brother he foreknew no good works that were to come from the man, in order to choose and love him; rather, before the ages he prepared for him the grace of justification, through which he might bestow on him not only the beginning of a good will, but also the effect of good work. Nor did he find good merits in him, but he set him free by the gratuitous benefit of mercy. For he says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy.'

'Therefore it is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God that shows mercy' (Rom. 9:15-16; Exod. 33:19). CHAPTER VI. — 12. Freely, therefore, God bestows his grace upon the one born, because he had freely prepared it for the one to be born. For whatever good the good have in will or work, God bestows, who also keeps guard over what he has bestowed. But upon the wicked and impious God could neither at any time prepare nor give evil works, by which they should damnably serve sin; nor did he implant in them evil wills, by which they should culpably will unjust things; but he prepared for them the punishment of eternal fire, that they might feel avenging justice in eternal burning. The evil will of men, therefore, is not from God;

and therefore the just judge punishes it in men, because the good Creator does not recognize in it the order of his own creation; and (al. but) the perseverance of iniquity and the obstinacy of a proud neck, since it is not had from the bounty of God, is on that account condemned by God the avenger. But to those whom God makes heirs of his kingdom, he freely prepares a good will, freely gives it, and to them also supplies perseverance. For freely he prepared the merits of gifts, mercifully to be bestowed, by which he might justly requite the gifts of merits. 13. Moreover, there is no doubt that a figure of two peoples went before in those two brothers: namely, of the one to be saved, and of the other to be damned.

Yet salvation was not so rendered to this people for works, as condemnation was requited to the other for works; but the one received the saving gift of grace which it did not merit, the other received according to merit the destruction of just condemnation. In the one, merits of damnation were found; to the other, merits of glorification were conferred by gratuitous justification. The one had in himself that whereby he might displease; the other, however, received from him whom he was to please that whereby he might please God. In all, therefore, who are handed over to the fire of hell, just severity finds an evil merit which it may punish—in some drawn from the origin, in some also added by the fault of their own will.

For with the exception of little children, in whom there cannot yet be a free choice of will for choosing righteousness and fleeing sin, because in their tender age reason lies dormant and drowsy, all the rest who can use reason, when the guilt of their own will is added, either do not come to the faith, or depart from the faith. But that anyone should be made righteous from being impious, a friend of God from being an enemy, absolved from being guilty—whatever age of body he may be passing through, from the very rising of his birth to decrepit old age—no one is found worthy of justification, but the unworthy is justified by gratuitous goodness;

nor is anyone snatched from the power of darkness and translated into the kingdom of the Son of God's love, save whom the Lord shall have deigned to prevent with the gratuitous gift of glory—he who freely saves and justly condemns. The merciful and just Lord justly punishes a depraved will which he does not mercifully correct, because he finds in it a depravity which he himself did not make. But a good will he himself freely prepares, freely gives, himself assists, himself brings to completion. CHAPTER VII. — 14. Let us therefore hold most certainly that all men, by themselves, can attain not only no perfection, but not even the beginning of righteousness;

but that all who become good are prevented by divine justification, and that, once a good will has been received, they may not fall away, progress and perseverance are granted them by the help of God; and that grace is given by no past or future merits of men, but by the gift and aid of grace itself all the good merits of men are both begun and perfected. But the wicked, who in their iniquity are left to the just judgment of God, even if they be said to lack the sin of original guilt through the reception of the sacrament, are yet, by the merit of subsequent, that is, of their own sins, rolled down to the torment of eternal fire.

For God, merciful and just, justly punishes the sins of human origin and will, whether in little children or in grown men, which he does not mercifully wash away: because he himself is the good and true God, who made man, but did not create sin in man; who in all men never finds good merits and works for which he might save them, but himself changes both their wills and their works in them, when he justifies them by gratuitous compassion. He, by the sure and unchangeable firmness of his foreknowledge, foreknew in the vessels of mercy nothing but the gift of his own grace, which he knew was to be bestowed by himself both in the merits of gifts and in the gifts of merits.

For he both gives to the human will a gratuitous goodness, and assists the good will in its works. He also foreknew in the vessels of wrath those works of human malice which without doubt were to follow in effect. 15. According, therefore, to the right faith and to manifest truth, as regards a little child who is taken from this life without the benefit of the second birth: just as it must be confessed that God foreknew the future death of the child, which was truly to come, so it is absurdly said that God foreknew the future sins of the child, which were not to come. For God, the founder of all things, would not have foreknown as to be done the things that were not to be done.

For we know that God's foreknowledge is so true and unchangeable that the things which he foreknows as future truly are future; nor does he foreknow anything as to be done which is not done according to his foreknowledge. But only the mutability of the creature receives future things in itself, which by no means falls into the unchangeableness of the Creator. Therefore to God nothing is past or future, to whom all things which he foreknows as to be done are so present, that after they have been done they cannot be past to him (al. to God): since just as he knows past things, so also he knows future things. For whatsoever things are changed with time and pass away (al. or), in his knowledge they abide without any transit or mutability of time.

But that God has the foreknowledge of things not that are not to be, but that are to be done, the book of the prophet Daniel testifies in these words: 'O God, who art the knower of hidden things, who knowest all things before they come to pass' (Dan. 13:42). God therefore knows in his prior knowledge of another that which is future, so that it may come to pass in deed. CHAPTER VIII. — 16. Absurdly, then, is it said that he foreknew that a little child, if he lived, would be impious, whom assuredly he foreknew would be no more than he lived: whom indeed he foreknew would not come to the age at which he might live impiously, because he truly knew that he was to be taken from the world in infant age.

And in whom no sinful age was foreknown, how could it come about that the iniquity of an age which was not to be should be foreknown, when the age of a reborn little child can be altogether without the act of sin, but the act of human sin cannot exist in any age whatever? For the works, whether good or evil, of a future age are not absurdly said to be foreknown; but the foreknowledge of any human work is absurdly asserted in an age in which the future man himself is shown not to exist. And as we rightly say that God foreknew only the beginnings of things to be conceived, so only the actual sins of men who are to live. Of those works, therefore, is God rightly said to be foreknowing, whose effect in consummation is not denied to follow. 17.

But whoever thinks God foreknowing of future works which nevertheless were not to be future, it remains for him to reckon—which be far from us—that there is some falsehood in the foreknowledge of God, which he assuredly does not deny to be true. For it is false that anything should be future which will not be present. But the knowledge of God can have nothing false in itself, because falsehood cannot be present in truth. The foreknowledge of truth, therefore, which does not receive falsehood in itself, just as it foreknows as to be done that which is to be done, so foreknows as not to be done that which is not to be done. God therefore foreknew no sins in a little child, which before the child died he did not commit. For if he had foreknown them as to be done, they would assuredly be done.