And after much correction by teaching, or teaching by correcting, Job answering the Lord said: 'Why am I judged, being warned and rebuked by the Lord, hearing such things when I am nothing?' Such too was Zacharias, a man without complaint, worthy of the honor of men, worthy of the testimony of the Scriptures, whom, as I think, some inflation from this already tickled, and he began to trust reputation more than conscience; he is convicted of the mark of unbelief through the rebuking angel, and is chastised with a temporary silence. Whence Paul also says: 'And so, let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.' And, as it were a pattern for men, he himself pronounces concerning himself, saying: 'I chastise my body and bring it into subjection: lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway.'
Thus, that anyone is called 'without crime' and 'without complaint' is not a testimony of perfection but an example of conduct. But concerning the 'undefiled,' wherever Scripture pronounces — as David says, 'Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord' — I think it handed down by sound doctrine, that truly blessed are those who are undefiled in the way, that is, those walking by perfect faith in the truth, not turning aside by heretical perversity either to the right or to the left. The Way is Christ, who through the Holy Spirit leads to the Father. Therefore he who, without stain and leprosy, and uncorrupted by those whose word creeps like a cancer, hears, believes, and understands the glory of the venerable Trinity, stands blessed in faith and undefiled.
From which it is also said to Abraham: 'Walk before me and be without stain.' For necessarily Abraham — who believed God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness; that he might be in him in whom he believed, saw, and rejoiced — is warned to be perfect and without stain, being appointed the father of many nations in faith, and the bosom of the faithful, that we all may be at rest, who hope in God with faithful Abraham. 'Blessed are the undefiled in the way,' it is written; for by faith we walk, not by sight. But indeed, if you wish to hear about the 'undefiled' such as David in prayer seeks, lay aside the vain confidence of your capacity, and, prostrate in prayers, join yourself with the prophet in supplication, weeping likewise and saying: 'Who understands his faults?'
'Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord, and from those of others spare your servant. For if they have not dominion over me, then shall I be undefiled.' Wretched man that I am, when shall I avoid the faults which I do not yet understand? Peter loves Christ and never declines from love; by the testimony of the Lord's love he is now established as the rock of the Church's foundation, now is depraved by the name of Satan. To him who always works one and the same thing, it is now said: 'Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven'; now again it is cast at him: 'You do not savor the things that are of God, but the things that are of men.' The apostle was chosen by loving, and confounded by loving, having sin on account of his excessive love.
For indeed, when the Lord announced concerning his Passion, in the impatience of love he had said: 'Be it favorable to you, Lord; this shall not be to you.' O the misery of the wretched! If Peter in any respect sinned by loving Christ, who understands faults? The prophet cries, and cries in the Holy Spirit, he cries of whom the Lord had said: 'My hand shall help him, and my arm shall strengthen him, and the enemy shall profit nothing against him' — and attend to what he cries: 'Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord.'
That David, chosen according to God's heart, he whom God promised would do all his wills, he whom he anointed as king, he whom he endowed with the sanctification of the prophetic spirit, astonished at the creeping-in of sins, cries to the Lord and implores that he be cleansed from his secret faults; and it is said to him by the Lord in another place: 'You shall not build a house to my name, because you are a man of war and have shed blood,' as though by the abolition of all defilements he could not so cleanse him as to prepare one worthy for a worthy work. David is not cleansed even to death, but, his son being preferred to him in the building of the temple, he himself condemns himself; and the Goliath, with his armor-bearer, slanders me, asking why the Lord does not do in him what he never did in any age!
Ecclesiastes also says: 'Nothing new under the sun, nor is anyone able to say: behold this is recent; for it has already gone before in the ages that were before us'; and the instructor of new doctrines affirms: 'It can come to pass, what has never been done! Do not inquire whether it has been, since you do not doubt that it can be.' God wished a house to be built to his name, but on this condition, that none but an innocent and well-undefiled one should erect it. For this two kings are chosen with all their powers, each for help; concerning protection it is promised to both. For to David God says: 'My truth and my mercy shall be with him.' But concerning Solomon he testifies: 'Him I have chosen for myself as a son, and I shall be to him as a father.' Of these two, one prepares the temple of the Lord, the other builds it;
the old man prepares, the youth completes. For it is fitting that a holy one should build the holy temple of the Lord. The old man prepares, as I said, but as it were after he ceased to sin; the youth completes, but almost while he had not yet begun to sin. The one sinned before, the other afterward. The one, because of much sin, did not deserve to build; the other, by sinning much, abandoned what he had built. And amid these things the holy ordination wonderfully arranged for itself that, between the two ages, what could not be perpetual in a man, it might find according to the capacity of the time. Each at some time did not sin, yet each could not be without sin: that God may be true, but every man a liar, as it is written; vain are the sons of men, the sons of men are liars in the balances.
Having indeed the grace and help of God, yet to be without sin neither could David obtain nor Solomon avail to keep; and the son of Jovinian hopes that almighty God, for his own sake and his disciples', should change so great an order of things! And if perchance it has not come to pass, shall he accuse God of impossibility? 'A man can,' he says, 'be without sin, yet with the help of God.' What shall I do? Shall I meanwhile tolerate a new patch joined to an old garment, until a worse rent lays open the falsity of a wretched mending? For I grant that, against the leader of speaking truth, when he has said 'a man can if he will,' he may seem to have said 'a man can with the help of God.'
Now at last my discourse must be recalled, as it were, to the beginning of my proposition, and, the grief of injury being laid aside for a little while, with reverence of disputing we must return to the loftiness of the Head. For our Head is Christ Jesus, whom, as the Apostle says, 'God set forth as a propitiation through faith in his own blood, for the showing of his righteousness, for the remission of preceding faults, in the forbearance of God, and for the showing of his righteousness at this time, that he himself might be just and the justifier of him who is of the faith of Jesus.' Therefore the propitiator, set forth through faith in his own blood for the showing and pattern of righteousness, is himself the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus.
Of whom John, brought in almost to the very inaccessible light, cries out: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him.' And shortly after, having set forth the truth of the divine work, he adds: 'And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.' Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; who, as a lamb before the shearer, so opened not his mouth, when he was scourged, crucified, and died; who tamed the sting of death; who rose from the dead; who, leading captivity captive, ascended into the heavens.
This is the only-begotten in the Father, the firstborn among many brethren; in whom is all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. This Lord Christ, then, this, I say, Son of God, in the power of the Father and the glory which in the beginning he founded and in the midst redeemed, will also at the last judge. And so, after the founding of the whole creation, which came into being according to his will, he imposed a measure upon the established things, so that what had been made rational should subsist by reason, and what he had endowed with free will, lest it should run out into the license of perdition, he restrained by the law of precept: so that when the creature
should recognize the Creator and the gift of the Lord, and the stability of the precept, and, having fallen in subjection, looking forward to liberty, should desire to use that very liberty only for this — that through it, deemed worthy by a worthy judgment, it might choose the servitude by which it would be governed; so that from prudent servitude it might merit defense, and from free will it might merit reward, as the Apostle confirms, who says: 'For if I do this willingly, I have a reward.' 'Let there be made two great lights' — almighty God said, and they were made, and he commanded that they should divide the day and the night and be for signs and seasons and days and years.
Does not this once-decreed distinction continue even to the present day? And yet these very things, which are borne along by so ordered a motion, the power to change them at his will was present in the Creator, if reason did not restrain it: since in all things the reason of God's power is conjoined. For if there were in the Creator a changing of his works, how could the observance of his commandments be expected from the creature? It was commanded by God that the earth should bring forth grass, hay, and the fruit-bearing tree. This even now, in yearly turns, it keeps with unceasing bringing-forth; and yet very often God, being angry, diminishes the fruits of the earth by denying the abundance of rains, and what he could have taken away entirely he preferred to chastise, that both the plague might show correction and nature might keep its order.
God made man of the slime of the earth, and, made living by the in-breathing of the vital spirit, placed him in the paradise of delights; moreover he endowed him with free will and bound him with a command midway between immortality and death; although those assert (who have sucked more abundant venoms from your breast) that he was made mortal and that no harm befell him from the transgression of the precept. But indeed, when man transgressed, the earth is cursed, the man himself is burdened with labors and pains, he is commanded to gain bread in the sweat of his face, he is circumscribed by the mark of death, until he return into the earth from which he was taken; Adam is cast out of paradise, he begets sons drawing with them the original sin of unfaithful seed; the human race sins;
God too repented that he had made man on the earth. O Lord, bear with my foolishness a little while, until he who seems to himself wise and prudent may blush and perceive his imprudence! When one man sinned, from whom dire contagions passed into the whole succession and the reign of death prevailed over all, you repent, you are angry, you grieve, and you are moved until the Word made flesh has need of suffering, cross, and death. Perhaps it had been better that the one sinner be at once destroyed and another soon be substituted by a second forming, whence a progeny free and undefiled from all filth might descend. Or do we, almighty God, because we acknowledge that you did not do this, believe that you could not?
O Peter, upon which rock Christ founded his Church, and O Paul, who laid the foundation, besides which no other can anyone lay, which is Christ — blessed apostles, pillars and supports of the truth, do you at least answer this man (who is a counselor to God and a mediator) with sacred discourses! Peter says: 'Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has regenerated us unto a hope of life through the resurrection from the dead of our Lord Jesus Christ, unto an incorruptible and undefiled inheritance, reserved in heaven for us, who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation prepared to be revealed in the last time.'
Then Paul, the vessel of election, brings forth saving treasures and says: 'Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places in Christ, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without stain in his sight in charity, in which he predestined us unto the adoption of sons through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the purpose of his will, unto the praise of his glory, wherein he made us pleasing in the Beloved, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of his grace, which superabounded in us in all wisdom and prudence:'
'that he might make known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in him, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, to restore all things in Christ, both which are in the heavens and which are on the earth.' Peter says salvation is 'prepared to be revealed in the last time'; Paul too testifies that 'he purposed in him, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, to restore all things in Christ'; and now there emerges to us I-know-not-who, like a frog out of the mire, and croaks loudly: 'What is it to me to await the time, to await the judgment? If God can, he can always: if he can always, he is no respecter of persons!'
He can, then, and even now he can, and in you he would truly be proved a respecter of persons, if what he can do in all and is assuredly going to do in its own time, he were to do in you alone before the time — which he did not do even in Moses, to whom he reproached only one sin in this life, and yet remitted it before death, whom for this fault he commanded to die so that he should not enter the land of promise. Let him therefore hear Solomon testifying concerning the ordering of times and the constitution of God: 'All things have their time, and all things under heaven pass by their own spaces. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal.' Then in another place he says:
'I saw under the sun, in the place of judgment impiety, and in the place of righteousness iniquity, and I said in my heart: God will judge the just and the impious, and then shall there be a time for every matter.' Wherefore, O empty man, if you have any confidence, patiently await the order of God, which the Lord himself, who made it, deigned also to await: made under the law, who had made the law. Hear him himself saying to you: 'It is not yours to know the times which the Father has placed in his own power.' Or if you wish to receive the testimony more openly, that although God can, yet for the sake of his own ordinance he does not do it, he says to Peter: 'Do you think that I cannot now ask my Father, and he will furnish me more than twelve legions of angels?'
'But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be done?' You see, then, that the worker of time tempers his powers, and the reason of his arrangement mingles patience with potency. Then the Lord says: 'Put up the sword into its sheath. For it cannot be that I should not drink the cup which the Father has given me.' And yet there is nothing that God cannot do, nor is there anything that he does not do, except perhaps what he wills not, what is not fitting, what he does not purpose. Paul speaks to the Thessalonians, signifying concerning the coming of Antichrist: 'Do you not remember that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now you know what withholds, that he may be revealed in his own time.'
So great is the force of God's decree and so irrevocable the state of things constituted in their several causes of times, that for the sake of his elect the Lord said the days of the age would be shortened, not taken away; that he might make a fullness of the appointed times for his majesty, a brevity for his mercy, and at once mercy might take its abridgment and the world fulfill its number.
And do you now wish — behold, I speak with the grief of mercy — do you, I say, O man like myself, wish that men, in this present time, should answer you that anyone is without sin (a thing nowhere said before to be found in the sacred volumes), and, if perchance they agree to this, should subscribe it as of a day and a moment, while you construct a new engine of slander, so that what we say does not come to pass we may seem to have said cannot come to pass, and in that very thing in which we chiefly proclaim the Omnipotent as working in the arrangement which he established, we may be judged to defame his impotence impatiently? Cast away, I beseech you, your vain fury, since this very thing tends to sin, concerning the wiping away of which you seem to have thought of the possibility of time, not the clemency of the judge.
Thus far let it suffice to have spoken of the power of God, which we proclaim and worship, and of that fore-appointing of the times which are fixed by His most profound counsel. Concerning this, even if there were not the many writings of the saints which do exist, the reply of the demons alone would suffice, who, condemned by their own conscience, cry out to the Lord: 'What have we to do with thee, Son of God? Art thou come to destroy us before the time?' Since you understand that these confess concerning the constitution of the judgment, take from this the most certain example against yourself. If you understand that those demons, caught in the oppression of a wretched man, were then condemned at the last judgment, receive also yourself, here to be purged by an unshakable cleansing;
but if, as is written, the patience of God still grants them free choice, then believe that you also are still to be tested. Now I pass briefly to another question, which you are said often to brandish against all the catholics. For even in that most laboriously polished letter of yours we could scarcely understand this very thing. Thus, I say, you, a most bashful man, did not blush to write these things to Demetrias, a girl who, as I hear, is consecrated and holy, teaching, as I believe, reverence for chastity under the figure of Joseph and his wanton mistress, where you said: 'The mistress, often spurned, lays nearer snares for the youth; in a secret place and without witnesses she seizes him with shameless hand,' weaving in an unfitting story with most obscene speech;
although this thing, which is said neither aptly nor decently, we ought not to impute to you, to whom neither did birth grant that you should be trained in more honorable studies, nor did it come to you by nature that you should be wise, but rather to those dictators of yours, who write down a wretched meaning in most wretched speech and expose you to be read with guffaws, as if a placard of confusion. Among these things, therefore, you belched forth in that same letter, in undigested words, a meaning of this sort: that very many of our people would say that God created the evil nature of man. This too that Phineas of yours tried, step by step, to press upon us; whence I first briefly profess my position, then reply.
Let him not be worthy to stand at the right hand among the lambs of God before the tribunal of Christ, nor deserve to see the Lord in the land of the living, nor let the life of Jesus be made manifest in his mortal body in the glory of the resurrection — whoever says that God created any evil nature, whether of man or of any other thing, or whoever takes away free choice in anything, when he shall have read what is written: 'All things whatsoever God made are very good.' And concerning the free choice of man it is written: 'God created man imperishable, and left him in the hand of his own counsel.'
O blind and malicious man — for in no other way can I speak to you, who have neither a sense of the Lord's authority, nor a sense of your own frailty, nor a sense of common understanding — we say that the nature of man is weak, not evil. For if it were evil, it would in no way take hold of the good; but now, since with inborn affection it desires the good and clings to the good and altogether flees the evil, where in it is an evil substance to be said to be? The Lord cries: 'The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.' Abraham cries: 'But I am earth and ashes.' Job cries: 'Man is rottenness, and the son of man a worm.' Isaiah cries: 'O wretched me, for I am pierced with remorse, because, being a man and having unclean lips, I dwell also in the midst of a people having unclean lips.'
Jeremiah cries: 'My soul is in straits, and my anxious spirit cries to thee: behold, O Lord, and have mercy.' Habakkuk cries: 'Guard me, for my belly was afraid at the voice of my prayers, and my frame was troubled within me.' David cries: 'Hear me in thy righteousness, and enter not into judgment with thy servant, for in thy sight shall no living man be justified.' All the apostles cry, troubled by the fear of their weakness: 'Lord, save us, we perish.' John cries: 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.' James cries: 'For in many things we all offend.' Paul cries: 'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.'
And that the weakness of all in general may cry out, the Holy Spirit cries in the saints: 'All flesh is grass, and the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass is withered, the flower is fallen; but the word of the Lord abides forever.' Against these so splendid and clear clouds of the divine testimonies, let the whole world, laboring in its groaning, hear Pelagius crying out in contradiction, and resisting the humble truth not only with the impudence of his words but also with the brands of his writings. For he says in the letter which we named above: 'But on the contrary, with slack and disdainful spirit, after the manner of proud and worthless servants, we cry back against the mouth of the Lord, and say: It is hard, it is arduous, we cannot;
we are men, we are surrounded by frail flesh' — and, O blind madness! and, O profane rashness! — we accuse the Lord of knowledge of a twofold ignorance, so that He should seem not to know what He made, not to know what He commanded, and, as if forgetful of human frailty, of which He Himself is the author, to have laid upon man what man cannot bear. What, I ask, is more deadly than this presumption? What more perverse than this reproach? You reproach the catholic Church, whose members we are, that she seems as it were to speak in despair, namely, that God the author of man laid upon man what he cannot bear:
yet most faithful is her profession, both in mouth and in humility, that God first commanded all things as possible, and yet — since no one fulfills those possible things, on which account the whole world becomes subject to God — afterward lightened the weight of the commandment by the indulgence of grace substituted in its place. Nevertheless thou, wicked and malicious servant, who strivest to exact from thy fellow servants what thy lord remitted to thee — first I examine thy own meaning, and afterward, if it seem good, I explain my own. Thou who chargest that certain men have said the burden of the law cannot be borne — dost thou then trust that thou thyself canst bear it? O wretched man, who, according to what is written, sayest in thy heart:
'I am rich and have grown wealthy and have need of nothing,' and knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. Did Christ ever say to thee, 'Verily I say to thee, flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven'? Did He ever say to thee, 'Thou shalt be called Cephas'? Did He ever promise thee, 'Upon this rock I will found my Church'? For attend to what the apostle Peter, taught by the Holy Spirit, admonishes, who says: 'Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we ourselves were able to bear? But by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ we believe that we shall be saved, even as they.'
The apostle Peter says that he truly tempts God who now contrives to lay the burden of the law upon man; but you, on the contrary, object and threaten that he accuses God of injustice who, through the confession of his own weakness, flees to the grace of the Spirit from the letter that kills. Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Zechariah, all the saints, whether judges or kings or prophets, are without doubt our fathers; and Peter affirms that none of the fathers, nor even they themselves — that is, the apostles, when they were Jews — were able to bear the burden of the law, but were saved by faith in Christ according to the hope of grace. Or perhaps, according to you, all these holy fathers had not the help of God?
Behold, Peter rebukes those who tried to lay the yoke upon the neck of the disciples; you, on the contrary, to the scandal of Peter, rebuke those who flee to the faithful mercy of God and distrust that by themselves they can bear the burden of the law. But you perhaps have a special confidence in carrying the burden, because, nourished by baths and banquets, you bear broad shoulders and a sturdy neck, displaying even on your brow your fatness, as it is written: 'For he stretched out his hand against God and was strengthened against the Almighty. He ran against him with neck erect and was armed with a fat neck. Fatness covered his face, and grease hangs down from his flanks.'
But such as these cannot be, those to whom Christ ever speaks in the heart: 'Strive to enter by the narrow way; for wide is the way that leads to death.' And the apostle Paul admonishes: 'Make not provision for the flesh in its lusts.' The truth of Christ is in me, for I grieve much for us. For according to the saying of my blessed father Augustine, it is not the confidence of a healthy man but of a sick one. Concerning one and the same first precept I question you, if you deign. In the law the Lord commands through Moses, which Christ also affirms in the Gospels: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and with all thy strength; and the second like to it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'
I beg you, answer not me but God, not with your voice but with your conscience: whether you so love God with your whole heart that you never admit in it any thought which could be understood apart from the fear and love of God; whether you so follow Him with your whole soul that, having once taken up the cross, you yield to no delight at all, with any momentary pleasure indulged; whether you so burn in all your inward parts with the heat of charity that you yield not at all, through pretexts of necessity, to weak lusts or desires; then, since it is written: