To Florus — Book 1

1.1Although I was burdened with great distress, stirred partly by indignation and partly by pity as I looked at the condition of the churches in these times, I had not abandoned my pledge. Having made myself a debtor by promising, I meant to take care to pay that debt as well. In the books I dictated against Augustine's writings, addressed to our brother Bishop Turbantius, a man distinguished by the great brilliance of his virtues, I promised that, unless some obstacle to my studies arose, I would immediately answer all the arguments of those who, following the opinion of the Manichaeans, defended the transmission of sin by descent, that is, an evil inherent in nature. Various pressing circumstances, which cannot honestly be ignored, have kept me from that task until now.

1.2As soon as I had room to breathe, however, I intended to fulfill my promises as briefly as the subject itself would allow. But you, most blessed Father Florus, wanted me to undertake a more demanding task once again. Your holiness commands such reverence that I consider it irreligious to obey your instructions sluggishly; you therefore had little difficulty persuading me to lengthen the short route I had chosen. Give your support, then, to a work undertaken at your command. I have placed your name in it chiefly so that my pen may advance more confidently and cheerfully under the protection of so weighty an instruction. There was a sound reason for the brevity I had planned. In those four books, the truth of the catholic faith, for which and with which we incur the hatred of a world in decline, had crushed almost everything invented by the Manichaeans and spoken against us by Augustine. Armed both with unanswerable arguments and with the testimony of the sacred Law, it had left almost nothing outstanding, if only we had fair judges.

1.3I had, however, passed over some scriptural testimonies from which they suppose a case can be made against us. I had promised to explain them, to show that the ambiguous words of the Law that our enemies commonly use cannot count against a clearly established truth. They must be understood in accordance with what the clearest authorities of Holy Scripture and unanswerable reasoning establish. Anyone who thinks the divine Law can authorize something that justice cannot vindicate thereby reveals himself to be an ignorant and irreverent interpreter of that Law.

1.4For if God's Law is the source and teacher of justice, its support can uphold God's fairness; it cannot attack it. The nature of things therefore does not permit injustice to draw any support from the authority of that Scripture whose sole reason for being proclaimed was to destroy injustice through its testimonies, remedies, threats, and punishments.

1.5Nothing, then, can be done through God's Law against God, the author of the Law. This single brief argument rules out whatever those in error usually object. Nevertheless, to show how rich is the truth we believe, we also bring the light of explanation to passages of Scripture whose tangled wording has veiled their meaning. Once opened up, they may retain the dignity of their origin, rather than being cut off from their sacred ancestry as though they were illegitimate or degenerate offspring.

1.6Following my usual practice, this alone was what I still intended to do: to free those portions of the divine Law that were being insulted by the interpretations of the advocates of inherited sin. I would show that they were indeed divine by showing that they were just.

1.7But you urgently requested, or rather ordered with a father's authority, that I answer the African expositor's book, which Alypius, the household slave of his sins, recently carried to Count Valerius. That is why my reply has grown longer.

1.8For he has once again produced monuments to his ability and his faith: things exceedingly hard to understand, extremely difficult to explain, and scarcely bearable to hear without horror. Yet they are very easy to refute and to pierce through with the sharpest blows; out of respect for decency, they ought to be banished into oblivion.

1.9His first book, then, the only one published before this, accuses us of being new heretics (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.1). The reason is that we oppose an opinion which, like the whitewashed tomb of the Gospel, is covered outwardly with a clean surface but packed with filth and wickedness within (Matthew 23:27). Under the guise of praising baptism, it belches out the filth of the Manichaeans and sin inherent in nature, contaminating the catholic Church's sacraments, which until now have been pure.

1.10He also praises a powerful man for throwing the weight of his high position against our petitions and preventing us from obtaining a time or place for discussion. We had cried out for nothing except judges to be appointed in so great a matter, so that actions known to have been secured by misrepresentation might be corrected rather than punished after investigation. Whether the man to whom the book is addressed actually acted as wickedly as this praise declares is for him to consider. My own little work, in which I mentioned his name honorably, made plain how much better I thought of him. That book may perhaps contain falsehoods about its patron. But it faithfully reveals what its author wants: a struggle waged by savage force and blind abuse of power against reason, against faith, and against every form of holiness in conduct and doctrine.

1.11After doing this in the opening parts of the volume, he proceeded to distinguish marriage from sexual desire, as the wording of his title had promised. Throughout the rest of the work he then displayed his skill and virtue. Driven to the last extremity between denying what he had admitted and admitting what he had denied, he publicly exposed the torments of his foul conscience.

1.12I therefore answered that earlier work in four little books, with whatever ability truth supplied. I stated at the outset that I would pass over things which plainly carried no weight in support of his doctrine and which might expose me to a charge of verbosity if I pursued every weak and empty remark. Indeed, if I had been permitted to keep that rule as I should, so that admitted absurdities did not even deserve an attack, almost all his inventions would have deserved the contempt of universal silence. But things are rushing toward the worse, a sign that the world is approaching its end; folly and depravity have gained power even in God's Church. We therefore serve as ambassadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20), bringing such help as we can, each according to his ability, to the defense of the catholic religion. Nor are we reluctant to commit to writing the remedies we prepare against the poisons of error.

1.13As I have said, I had expressly stated that in my first work I would neither discuss every form of argument for defending inherited sin nor repeat everything that his book contained. I would engage with the points in which he had placed the substance and strength of his doctrine. Any careful reader of both works, however prejudiced, will recognize that I faithfully made that promise. Confident in the integrity of my conscience, I now urge and challenge our enemy: if he thinks I have omitted any argument he advanced which even he judges to have some weight, let him bring it forward and convict me of fear and deceit.

1.14I explained some scriptural testimonies at greater length and others more briefly, because I promised to handle them fully in the work that would follow. Thus none of Augustine's arguments and propositions there remained without refutation, and I carried out nothing differently from what I had promised. I exposed many falsehoods, many absurdities, and many sacrileges in his inventions.

1.15We need not fear a reputation for arrogance because of this declaration. We acknowledge that truth was not defended by my ability; rather, the weakness of my ability was helped by the strength of truth.

1.16Since, then, it is established that these things were carried out just as I have said, I cannot sufficiently wonder at the man's shamelessness. In his recent work he accuses my books of falsehood, although he admits that they have not yet reached his hands (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.2). It is a dreadful thing that the habit of sinning produces a love of wrongdoing, but more dreadful still that it extinguishes shame. Although it was already clear that this comes from the practice of wickedness, our present dangers have taught us more about it than any of us could have supposed. When could I have believed that this Numidian's forehead had grown so brazen that in one work, indeed in one sentence, he would admit both that I had spoken falsely and that he had not read what I said?

1.17Writing to the man whose devotion to his books astonishes him, occupied as that man is with the hardships of military service, he reports that Alypius brought him some sheets headed: 'Passages from a book Augustine wrote, against which I have excerpted a few things from some books.' Augustine continues: 'Here I see that the person who sent these writings to Your Eminence wanted to excerpt them from books unknown to me, in order, as I suppose, to obtain a quicker reply and not postpone your urgent request. When I considered what books these might be, I supposed they were those Julian mentions in the letter he sent to Rome, a copy of which reached me at the same time. There he says: “They even say that the marriages now taking place were not instituted by God. This can be read in Augustine's book, which I have just answered in four little books.”' After these words Augustine adds in his own voice: 'I believe these passages were excerpted from those little books. It might therefore have been better for me to devote my attention to refuting and disproving the whole work he set out in four volumes, except that I too was unwilling to delay my reply, just as you did not delay sending the writings that required an answer' (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.2). Here, then, he shows perfectly clearly that he suspects those excerpts were hastily collected from my work. He does not know the complete books, yet dares to say that he could have answered them.

1.18He also mentions a letter which he says I sent to Rome, but from the words he quotes we have been unable to recognize which writing he means (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.2). I did send two letters on these questions to Zosimus, formerly bishop of that city, but that was at a time when I had not yet begun the books.

1.19Let him nevertheless use the evidence of the letter from which he learned, or invented, that I had set out a reply in four volumes against the new Manichaeans, since he disdains to be regarded as an old one. Why did he not take care to learn what objections we had made? Why did he not make an effort to know the person he was going to engage? Instead, driven by the most disgraceful frivolity, he entered a mighty contest with his eyes covered, like a blindfolded gladiator. He defends this behavior by saying that he wanted his hasty reply to imitate the haste with which his patron had sent the sheets. As though he could not most honorably have explained that he needed some time to obtain and read the published work! Among educated people it is disgraceful to fail in the seriousness writing demands and, through an unwillingness to deliberate, to attack something you do not know. Moreover, while planning to make us hated for the alleged cunning with which we had shortened the sequence of his words, he trusted excerpts that seem more likely to have been composed through his own falsehood and malice than through anyone on our side being innocently unskilled. Whatever the motive, and whoever the author, the occurrence supports us in two ways. It has revealed at once both the frivolity and the weakness of truth's enemy. He has shown that he cannot keep silent even when he ought not to speak, and that a few incomplete sentences, torn apart rather than assembled, drawn only from my first book, defeated and broke him so thoroughly that he tried to stir up the populace against us with thoroughly womanish cries. The course of our discussion will make this clear.

1.20Here too, however, as in my earlier work, I warn the reader that I will not quote all his words with exact completeness. I will quote the principal points whose destruction will crush the opinion that evil is inherent in nature.

1.21Although it is established that my first work fully achieved this, he has now selected certain things from just one of my books for refutation. As I said at the outset, he accuses me of having substantially mutilated the principal statements of his that I inserted. I will therefore show first that I did not do what he criticizes, and that he himself has repeatedly done it with the greatest shamelessness in this very work. Then I will prove that he has offered no substantial answers even to the short, broken sentences he inserts from the writings in which I attacked him. Those statements remain untouched, while he now admits things deserving condemnation more plainly than my earlier work had labored to explain them.

1.22Let us listen, then, in astonishment to what he has written against me. He says: 'He quoted these words from the book I sent you, which you know very well, and attempted to refute them: “They shout with the utmost malice that we condemn marriage and God's work, by which God creates human beings from males and females, because we say that those born from such a union inherit original sin. We do not deny that, whatever parents they are born from, they remain under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ (compare John 3:3–5)” (Titus 3:5)' (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.2). Augustine continues: 'From these words of mine he omitted the apostle's testimony that I had inserted, because he felt himself crushed by its great weight. For when I said that human beings inherit original sin, I immediately added: “Of this the apostle says, Through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death; and so it passed to all human beings, in whom all sinned” (Romans 5:12) (John 3:3–5). After omitting that testimony, as we have said, he joined together the other statements mentioned above. He knows how the hearts of faithful catholics commonly receive these apostolic words that he omitted, words so straightforward and shining with such light, which new heretics try to obscure and distort through dark and twisted interpretations. He then appended other words of mine where I said: “They do not notice that the good of marriage cannot be blamed because of the original evil inherited from it, just as the evil of adultery and fornication cannot be excused because of the natural good born from them. For just as sin, whether infants inherit it from the one source or the other, is the devil's work, so a human being, whether born from the one or the other, is God's work.” Here too he omitted what he feared catholic ears would hear. Before arriving at these words, we had said: “Because we say this, which is contained in the most ancient and firmly established rule of the catholic faith, these advocates of a new and perverse doctrine, who say that there is no sin in infants to be washed away in the bath of rebirth (compare Titus 3:5), slander us faithlessly or ignorantly, as though we condemned marriage and called God's work, the human being born from it, the devil's work” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.1). After these omitted words of ours come those of ours that he quoted, as written above' (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.3–4). How long will you who say these things persist in mocking the simplicity of devout hearts and uneducated ears? How far will your unbridled shamelessness flaunt itself? When you wrote this, were you not moved at all by the judgment of learned men, by reverence for the coming judgment, or by the written records themselves? Do you not see that your deceit already lies exposed, caught and held fast? Which of us do you suppose does not know what you wrote in your first and second works? I have deliberately chosen, and rightly chosen, to address you in the terms in which the eloquent consul thundered against a traitor to his country (Cicero, Against Catiline 1.1).

1.23You invent the charge that I omitted the apostle's testimony, although it cannot help you and I did not omit it. I inserted it in the same order in which you had placed it. Just as I faithfully quoted it in the first book of my work, I also explained it in the fourth, though briefly and in passing (compare Augustine, Against Julian 6.75). Nor did I omit your mention of the catholic Church, which you had made so that those you deceived would abandon the catholic faith and yet, poor wretches, rejoice in the catholic name. Although words of that sort had no argumentative force, I nevertheless presented the opening of your statement exactly as you had arranged it. Read my published books; see the faithfulness of my reply, which you accuse of fraud; and for the present admit that I am speaking the truth. As for you, blush, if your habitual conduct will allow it. Your inexcusable falsehood has now been exposed. Falsehood is always disgraceful, but becomes more disgraceful when it usurps the censor's place and reproaches another person's beauty with its own ugliness. Answer, then: how does either the Church's name or the apostle's language benefit Manichaean ideas, that you should make so inflammatory a complaint about their omission?

1.24This has always been the greatest distinction between Manichaeans and catholics, the broadest boundary separating the doctrines of the devout from those of the impious, indeed a vast barrier dividing our opinions as widely as heaven is separated from earth: we assign every sin to an evil will; they assign it to an evil nature. They pursue various errors, all flowing, as it were, from this fountainhead, and consistently arrive at sacrilege and shameful deeds. Catholics, by contrast, start from a good beginning, advance through good steps, and reach the height of religion, fortified by reason and piety. You therefore tried to establish an evil inherent in nature and appropriated the apostle's testimony for an impious purpose, though to no effect. In this very work I show that the apostle held nothing like the view you are trying to persuade us to accept. You contradict yourself: you acknowledge that he was catholic, yet suppose his words support a Manichaean.

1.25Did not Adimantus and Faustus, whom you call your teacher in the books of your Confessions, do the same thing, following the tradition of their heresy's founder (Augustine, Confessions 5.6–7, 13)? They seized and gnawed away at whatever statements were more obscure, whether from the Gospel or the apostles' letters, to defend an impious doctrine through the authority of those names. But why speak only of the Manichaeans? Every heresy fortifies its own inventions, through which it has strayed from piety and faith, with the language and statements of Scripture.

1.26Will the sacred books therefore be proved to be the authors of their errors? Or will Scripture's dignity acquit those who are perishing of their crimes?

1.27Put an end, then, to the appetite for undisciplined interpretations. Let no words be thought capable of prevailing against God's manifest justice. If they come from someone whom we are bound to revere, defend them with explanations consistent with divine fairness. If they were spoken by an author who commands no such reverence, reject them even without resolving their meaning. We are now discussing God's judgment. Of him it is written: 'God is faithful, and in him there is no injustice; the Lord God is just and holy' (Deuteronomy 32:4). And again: 'The Lord is just, and he has loved justice; his face has looked upon fairness' (Psalm 11:7; LXX Psalm 10:8). And again: 'All your judgments are fairness' (Psalm 119:172; LXX Psalm 118:172). Countless testimonies in the sacred books proclaim divine fairness. Yet no one among either the nations or the heretics has doubted it, except the Manichaeans and the advocates of inherited sin.

1.28Nature's own teaching has impressed on everyone, without exception, that God is just. It is therefore clear that anyone proved not to be just is not God. A human being can be just; God cannot be anything but just.

1.29Since he is the one true God in whom we believe and whom we worship in the Trinity, he is without doubt perfectly just in his judgment of everyone.

1.30It is therefore so impossible to prove and vindicate from his laws something known to be unjust that, if it could be done, his entire divinity would lose its worth. Only someone who could prove that the Trinity in whom we believe could be deprived of divine glory could prove that a doctrine of injustice is established by the Holy Scriptures.

1.31Since neither any sound reasoning nor piety permits that, either show that imputing a sin inherent in nature to someone is possible, or that it is just, or cease contaminating the Holy Scriptures. You suppose their statements authorize what you are compelled to admit is unjust.

1.32If you will do neither of the things we have stated, and assert that you believe in this God whose ordinances you suppose to establish injustice, recognize that you, a new Manichaean, are far worse than an old one. Your God is of the very character that the Manichaean invented for the enemy of his God.

1.33What evasions, then, what cushions of lies and absurdities, such as the prophet Ezekiel charges against unfaithful Jerusalem, will you offer me here (Ezekiel 13:18)? On these cushions womanish souls may recline, retaining the names of sacred mysteries even though they have committed open sacrilege against divinity itself. Set aside every conjuring trick and the crowds of common folk you so often summon, and show that what you try to establish through Holy Scripture is just.

1.34To prevent this discussion from extending into endless volumes, let us examine here and now the genus, species, difference, measure, and quality of the things we are discussing. More carefully still, let us ask whether they exist, where they come from, where they are found, and what recognition they deserve and from whom. In this way we will not wander long through the twists of argument, and the definite position we must hold will become clear.

1.35What is at issue, then, is the relationship of Creator and creature, that is, of God and the human being. The one judges; the other is judged. Let us therefore examine the nature of justice and of guilt. Justice, as learned people commonly define it and as we can understand it, is a virtue, the greatest of all virtues, if the Stoics will allow one to be ranked above another. It carefully performs its task of restoring to each what belongs to that person, without deceit or favoritism.

1.36Suppose Zeno does not allow justice to be called the greatest. He maintains such a close connection and unity among the virtues that, where one is present, he says all are present, and where one is absent, all are absent. True virtue, he says, is perfected by this fourfold union. Even then he will give us great help by teaching that wisdom, courage, and self-control cannot exist without justice. Ecclesiastes speaks in accordance with this truth: 'Whoever sins in one thing will lose many good things' (Ecclesiastes 9:18).

1.37This majestic virtue, which settles the account of what each person deserves, flashes forth in the works of God's image, the human soul (compare Genesis 1:26–27), according to the measure and strength of the creature. In God himself, however, the Creator of all things out of nothing, it shines eternally in a boundless, brilliant sphere. Its origin is divinity; its age is eternity, an eternity that knows neither an ending in the future nor a beginning in the past. Thus its genus, by which term I mean nothing other than its origin, is God; its species appears in the proclamation of laws and the effects of judgments (Genesis 1:26–27).

1.38We may reasonably understand its difference as the varying administration suited to different times. For example, animal sacrifices were commanded in the Old Testament. Performing them then belonged to reverence for the command; now the command to refrain from them serves the justice that gives the command just as offering them did then. Its measure or fixed limit is that it commands no one to do more than that person's strength permits, and that it does not repel mercy. Its quality is understood as that through which it tastes sweet to devout minds. Justice therefore undoubtedly exists; without it there is no divinity. If it did not exist, God would not exist. But God does exist; therefore justice unquestionably exists. It is nothing other than the virtue that embraces all things and restores to each what belongs to that person, without deceit or favoritism. Its chief dwelling is in the depths of divinity.

1.39Justice deserves testimony not only from its author but also from good and wicked people alike: it has rightly exalted the former and rightly condemned the latter. When, however, it permits mercy to be generous to those who of themselves have earned neither good nor evil, it suffers no injury. For it is itself a great part of justice that God should be merciful to his own work when nothing compels him to severity.

1.40He made them because he willed to do so; he condemns them only when he is despised. If, when he is not despised, he makes them better through consecration, he suffers no loss of justice and is adorned by the generosity of his mercy.

1.41Now that we have explained these distinctions concerning justice, let us examine the definition of sin. The writings both of philosophers and of people who were catholic supply me abundantly with what we seek. But I am afraid you will object: if I summon a senate of philosophers, you will immediately stir up shopkeepers and the whole populace against us,

1.42shouting along with women, all the dogs, and the military officers to whom your colleague Alypius recently brought eighty or more horses fattened throughout Africa,

1.43that you will never accept the judgments of the learned. You will add that the apostle said, in the sense your understanding gives it, that “God has made the wisdom of the world foolish” (1 Corinthians 1:20). You can therefore safely despise our debaters, you will say, because no authority of theirs weighs upon you.

1.44What then? I will indeed yield to you. At this point I will give up everyone whose support I could use and be content with a definition which, as evidence of a good nature, escaped from your honorable mouth after you left the secret company of the Manichaeans. In the book entitled either On Two Souls or Against Two Souls, you say: “Wait; let us first define sin. Sin is the will to commit or retain something justice forbids and from which one is free to abstain. In fact, if one is not free, it cannot even be called will; but I preferred a rougher definition to a more exacting one” (Augustine, On Two Souls 15).

1.45What shining gold in a heap of dung! What could anyone, even an orthodox believer, have said more truly or more completely? “Sin”, you say, “is the will to commit or retain something justice forbids and from which one is free to abstain” (Augustine, On Two Souls 15). Ecclesiasticus shows this: “God made the human being and left him in the hands of his own decision. He placed before him life and death, water and fire; whatever pleases him will be given to him” (Sirach 15:14, 16–17; Vulgate 15:14, 17–18). And God says through Isaiah: “If you are willing and listen to me, you will eat the good things of the land. If you are unwilling and do not listen, the sword will devour you” (Isaiah 1:19–20). And the apostle: “Come rightly to your senses, and do not sin” (1 Corinthians 15:34). And again: “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked. Whatever a person sows, that he will also reap” (Galatians 6:7–8).

1.46Will, then, is a movement of the mind that has under its own control whether it runs to the left toward wrongdoing or strives to the right toward higher things.

1.47It is, however, a movement of the mind of someone who is old enough to use rational judgment. When punishment and glory, or on the other side advantage and pleasure, are set before that person, help and, as it were, an opportunity are offered; neither alternative is imposed by necessity. This will, capable of turning either way, received the source of its capacity in free choice. But it brings the actual deed into existence from itself. There is no act of will at all before a person wills, nor can a person will before being capable also of refusing. In the case of sin, a person does not possess both capacities, willing and refusing, before acquiring the use of reason. Taken together, these points show that your definition was entirely true: “Sin is the will to retain or commit something justice forbids and from which one is free to abstain” (Augustine, On Two Souls 15).

This sin, which has been shown to be nothing but will, plainly receives its genus, that is, its very origin, from one's own desire. Its species is then found in each individual, those who are called indivisibles. Its difference lies in the variety of faults and the circumstances of times. Its measure is its very lack of measure. For if the proper measure is to serve the one you ought to serve, whoever neglects this sins by crossing the true limit. Yet one may make the subtle point that sin has a measure because no one sins beyond what he can do. For even if someone sins beyond his powers with an ineffectual will, he was still capable of that very act of willing alone. To vice we must assign a quality through which it shows the bitterness it brings, whether through disgrace or pain. Sin therefore exists; if it did not, you would not pursue your errors. It is nothing other than a will leaving the path on which it ought to remain and from which it is free not to turn aside. It arises from desire for forbidden things, and it exists nowhere except in a person who both had an evil will and could have refrained from having one.

1.48Sin deserves both the abhorrence of honorable people and lawful condemnation from the justice that is the whole subject of our present inquiry. With all the curtains drawn back, bring into the open at last the grounds on which you teach that sin is inherent in nature. Surely nothing we established above, either in praise of divine justice or in defining guilt, was false. Show, then, that these two things can hold together in infants. If there is no sin without will, no will where freedom has not developed, and no freedom where there is no ability to choose through reason, by what monstrosity is sin found in infants, who have no use of reason? They therefore have no capacity for choice and consequently no will; and once these undeniable points are granted, they have no sin whatsoever. Pressed by these massive arguments, let us see where you break out. You say: “Infants are weighed down by no sin of their own, but by another's” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.22).

The evil of your view is not yet clear. We suspect that you have introduced this point to arouse hostility toward some man whose injustice you wish to portray with your African rhetoric. In whose court, then, did someone else's crime burden unstained innocence? Who was that barbarous enemy, so mindless, so savage, so forgetful of God and fairness, who sentenced these infants as guilty? We certainly praise your talent; your education shows! You could not otherwise have depicted some judge, or rather tyrant, as deserving the hatred of the human race than by swearing that he spared not only no one who had committed no sin, but not even those who could not have sinned. Before a suspicious mind, a good conscience commonly labors in its own defense against the possibility that it did wrong, since it at least could have done wrong. But someone defended by the very impossibility of the act is completely cleared of the charge.

Reveal, then, who this condemner of innocents is. You answer: “God.” You have indeed struck my mind a blow. But since so great a sacrilege scarcely deserves belief, let us hesitate over what you have said. We know that this name can be applied to different beings: “There are many gods and many lords; for us, however, there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:5–6). Which God, then, are you charging with a crime? Here you, most religious priest and most learned rhetorician, breathe out something more dreadful and horrible than the valley of Amsanctus or the pit of Avernus, indeed something more criminal than the worship of idols committed in those places (compare Virgil, Aeneid 7.565).

You say: “God himself, who commends his love toward us (Romans 5:8), who loved us and did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us (Romans 8:32), judges in this way. He himself is the persecutor of newborn children. He hands infants over to eternal fires for an evil will, although he knows they could have had neither a good nor an evil will.” After this statement, so monstrous, so sacrilegious, so deadly, if we had sane judges I ought to answer with nothing but abhorrence of you. With just and commendable seriousness I would judge you unworthy of discussion. You have fled so far from religion, from education, and finally from ordinary human understanding that you consider your Lord a criminal, something scarcely any barbarian would do.

1.49The Manichaean invented and believed that the god of light fought with the prince of darkness; he added that this god's substance is held captive in this world. But he tries to excuse so great a misfortune under an appearance of piety, asserting that his god fought like a good citizen for his homeland and exposed his limbs to danger rather than lose his kingdom. You learned these things. Consider how much progress you made by abandoning them, even for a time! You say that God was not forced to undergo war but committed an unjust judgment; that he is not subject to dark enemies but to plainly evident crimes; and finally that he did not part with his own substance but violated eternal justice. I leave others to judge which of you is worse. This much is clear: you arrive at one and the same wicked opinion. The Manichaean assigns injustice to his god when he says that on the last day his god will condemn the members he himself surrendered. You too declare God miserable, because he ruins the glory that made him renowned and, by persecuting the innocence he created, loses the justice that made him supremely holy. The god your teacher invented therefore surpasses the God you introduce by just as much as defeat in battle is more excusable than defeat by vice.

1.50Away with you, then, and this God of yours from the midst of the churches! He is not the one in whom the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles believed, in whom the church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven has hoped and still hopes (Hebrews 12:23). He is not the one whom rational creatures believe to be their judge, whom the Holy Spirit declares will judge justly. No sensible person would ever have shed his blood for such a Lord. He would not deserve the affection of love that could place on anyone the burden of suffering for him. Finally, if the one you introduce existed anywhere, he would be proved a defendant, not a god: someone to be judged by my true God, not someone to judge in God's place.

Learn, then, the first foundations of faith. Our God, the God of the catholic Church, is unknown to us in his substance and likewise beyond our sight, “whom no human being has seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16). As he is eternal without beginning, so he is holy and just without fault: supremely powerful, supremely fair, supremely merciful, made known only by the radiance of his virtues. He is the maker of all that did not exist, the ruler of all that exists, and on the last day the examiner of all who exist, will exist, or have existed. He will shake earth, heaven, and all the elements together; he will raise the ashes and restore bodies. But everything we have named he will do for justice alone (compare Hebrews 12:26–27; John 5:28–29) (Hebrews 12:26–27; John 5:28–29).

1.51For this God of mine, whom all creation and Holy Scripture proclaim to me as I believe him to be, I said I would act more rightly if I did not consider you worthy even of a contest in books. But holy men, the confessors of our time, have assigned this task particularly to me: to examine what weight and reason your statements contain. It was therefore appropriate to show first that you do not believe in the God who has always been proclaimed in the Church of the catholics and will continue to be proclaimed wherever that Church is found, until the end.

1.52I will now go on to examine the testimonies by which you try to establish what the faith of the devout demolishes. But since I have undertaken to answer your second book, the one Alypius brought, I must answer a few more things before my discussion reaches the apostolic testimony on which you think you can chiefly rely. Otherwise the sequence of my reply would become confused. To the words I quoted above you add the following: “In what he omitted, then, he feared this point, because it addresses every heart in the catholic Church. It calls out, as it were, in a clear voice to the faith itself, handed down and firmly established from ancient times, and stirs it powerfully against them: we said that ‘they say there is no sin in infants to be washed away in the bath of rebirth (compare Titus 3:5)’ (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.1). Everyone hurries to the Church with infants for no other reason than that original sin, contracted through the generation of their first birth, may be cleansed through the regeneration of their second birth. Then he returns to our earlier words, which I do not know why he repeats: ‘We say that those born from such a union inherit original sin, and we do not deny that, whatever parents they are born from, they remain under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ (compare John 3:3–5)’ (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.1). He had quoted these words of ours a little earlier. Then he adds what we said about Christ: ‘Who did not wish to be born from that same union of the two sexes.’ But here too he omitted what I wrote: ‘So that through his grace, rescued from the power of darkness, they may be transferred into the kingdom of him who did not wish to be born from that same union of the two sexes.’ See, I beg you, what words of ours he avoided, as a complete enemy of God's grace, which came through Jesus Christ our Lord (compare John 1:17). For he knows that it is utterly wicked and impious to exclude infants from the apostle's statement about God the Father: ‘Who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son’ (Colossians 1:13). That is undoubtedly why he preferred to omit those words rather than quote them” (John 1:17) (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.4–5).

Am I an enemy of God's grace, you most shameless of all men? In my first book, from which you snatched these statements away from their context so that you could chatter without reason, I condemned with a pure and complete confession that mouth of yours, dripping with the mysteries of the Manichaeans and your own (Titus 3:5) (John 3:3–5).

1.53For there I set out the following sequence of words, after saying that God is the author of heaven and earth and everything in them, and therefore also of human beings, for whose sake all things were made (compare Genesis 1:1; Exodus 20:11). I said: “I am aware that when we say these things, a report will be spread about us that we do not think Christ's grace necessary for infants. Such a statement rightly and deeply offends Christian people. If only they did not suppose us responsible for a saying that is wicked in itself! Then they would not incur guilt by believing falsehoods about their brothers, and they would show their devotion to the love of the faith. We must therefore defend this position against the assault of empty talk and sew up the mouths of our detractors with a brief confession.

We acknowledge that the grace of baptism is beneficial to every age, so completely that we pronounce an eternal anathema on all who think it unnecessary even for infants. But we believe this grace to be rich in spiritual gifts. Abundant in its many favors and worthy of reverence for its powers, it heals the different kinds of weakness and the different conditions of human beings by one power that bestows both remedies and gifts. When it is administered, it does not need to be changed to suit particular cases: it distributes its own gifts according to the capacity of those who approach. No craft itself suffers loss or gain because of the different materials it takes up to work on; remaining always the same and in the same condition, it is adorned by a variety of effects. In the same way, according to the apostle, there is ‘one faith, one baptism’ (Ephesians 4:5). These multiply and expand in their gifts, yet are not changed in the order of their mysteries.

But this grace, which washes away the stains of injustice, does not oppose justice. It does not create sins but cleanses them; it acquits the guilty, not falsely accuses the innocent. Christ, the redeemer of his own work, increases his benefits toward his image with continual generosity. Those whom he made good by creating them he makes better by renewing and adopting them” (quoted also in Augustine, Against Julian 3.8 and following). Through this grace, pardon for the guilty, spiritual illumination, adoption as God's children, citizenship in the heavenly Jerusalem, sanctification, incorporation into Christ's members, and possession of the kingdom of heaven are given to mortals. Anyone who thinks this grace should be denied to anyone deserves the abhorrence of all good people (compare Ephesians 1:5; Ephesians 2:19; Hebrews 12:22–23; 1 Corinthians 12:13) (Exodus 20:11) (Ephesians 1:5) (Hebrews 12:22–23) (1 Corinthians 12:13) (Genesis 1:1; Exodus 20:11) (Ephesians 1:5; Ephesians 2:19; Hebrews 12:22–23; 1 Corinthians 12:13).

1.54Having defended these points as far as the present passage allowed, let us return to where we left off. We will discuss this very subject more fully wherever an opportunity arises. See with what a clear confession I rejected both those who would deny baptism to infants and you who dare to stain God's justice by what you claim baptism presupposes. I testified that I hold nothing other than this: the established mysteries must be administered at absolutely every age in the same words in which they were handed down, and must not be changed to suit different cases. But the sinner becomes completely good from being evil, while the innocent person, who has no evil of his own will, becomes better from being good, that is, becomes best. Both are consecrated and pass into Christ's members (compare 1 Corinthians 12:13), but one is found in an evil life and the other in a good nature. The former corrupted by wrongdoing the innocence he received at birth. The latter, without praise or blame attaching to his will, has only what he received from God his Creator. Happier in the unpainted freshness of his earliest age, he has been unable to spoil the goodness of his simplicity. He has earned nothing through deeds but retains only what the kindness of so great a maker gave him (1 Corinthians 12:13).

1.55Thus infancy, when renewed, that is, advanced by the power of the renewing mystery, proclaims Christ's mercy. But when infancy is accused or burdened with guilt, it exposes the judge's injustice and the disgrace of his justice.

1.56The unity of the sacrament therefore does not show infancy to be guilty. Rather, a true judgment proves infancy to be nothing but innocent.

1.57The sequence of reasoning obliges me to linger over explaining the condition of infants, because it does not allow matters joined by its own law to be divided. Otherwise the loss of newborn children would be easier to bear if divine majesty itself were not endangered along with them. Clear God, then, and accuse the infant. Show that what he does is just, since he cannot be God without justice, and let any person you please undergo punishment. As things stand, however, quite apart from their sacrilege, the claims you think fit together fiercely contradict one another. You say that because idolaters, murderers of their own kin, and infants are initiated through the same mysteries, all can be proved wicked. Then you add something far more absurd: that the author of this sacrament we are discussing imputes other people's sins to the innocent. This is the contradiction I named. The nature of things does not permit God at one and the same time to be so merciful that he forgives each person who confesses that person's own sins, and so cruel that he fastens someone else's sins upon an innocent person. Grant either one and you have removed the other. If he gives pardon to the guilty, he does not falsely accuse the innocent. If he falsely accuses the innocent, he never spares the guilty.

1.58I therefore passed over nothing in your words because fear compelled me, as you say. For what could I have feared in the monuments of so refined a talent, except perhaps this alone: the horror I endure in attacking your obscenity?

1.59Hear, then, a brief reply to what you said. The hearts your speech addresses are not those of the catholic Church if they are at odds with piety and reason. They offend against both when they neither think rightly about God's fairness nor understand the wisdom and riches of the mysteries they malign. This is no faith handed down and established from ancient times, except in councils of evildoers: inspired by the devil, proclaimed by Mani, celebrated by Marcion, Faustus, Adimantus, and all their followers, and now belched out by you into Italy, to our profound grief.

1.60There is no sin in a human being if there is nothing of that person's own will or consent. Everyone with even a little sense agrees with me on this without hesitation. You, however, grant that there has been nothing of an infant's own will. It is reason, not I, that draws the conclusion: therefore there is no sin in infants. They are certainly not brought to the Church to be defamed, or rather to defame God. They are brought to praise God, whom they acknowledge as the author both of the goods of nature and of spiritual gifts.

1.61But if original sin is contracted through the generation of the first birth, it may indeed condemn marriage, which God established, but it cannot be removed from infants. For something inborn remains until the end of the being to which it has belonged from its originating causes.

1.62We therefore bring no false accusation when we say that you condemn marriage and call the human being born from it the devil's work. We neither make this charge faithlessly nor reach this conclusion ignorantly. We simply and carefully observe what your statements entail. Bodily marriage never exists without sexual union. You say that everyone born from that union belongs to the devil. You are undoubtedly declaring that marriage belongs under the demon's authority.

1.63You say that sin is inherited through the condition of nature, while claiming that this evil arose from the first human being's will. I postpone here the reply that will convict you of shameless lying. For the present issue, however, I draw this conclusion, trusting reasoned understanding: you unambiguously define nature as diabolical. For if that through which a human being is possessed by the devil exists in nature or comes through nature, then that by which the devil could claim God's image for himself indisputably belongs to the devil (compare Genesis 1:26–27). Indeed, something that is in the devil's kingdom by its very birth is not even God's image (Genesis 1:26–27).

1.64If you read my work, then, you will stop wondering why I returned to words of yours that I had quoted earlier. I had promised to prove from your writings that, caught between the impiety you had drunk in and the hatred it aroused that you feared, you had said both what catholics and what Manichaeans usually maintain. Here, then, is the sequence of words I placed next to your opening statement, which you now, with a false accuser's effrontery, have lied about my altering: “I know I have made a great promise: to prove from my opponent's words both that those who deny that human beings are God's work are rightly condemned, and that this man himself, who acknowledges them to be God's work, does nothing except establish that whatever comes from the fruitfulness of marriage is the devil's property. In this way the Manichaeans' opinion will be destroyed even by the principles of its own defense. But the whole opening of his book has made this plain. For he says that human beings born from marriage, that is, from males and females, are God's work. By this statement he overturns everything he was about to argue and agrees with us that those who dare to deny it are impious. One part is therefore already settled; it remains for me to show that he builds up what he had just attacked.” (John 3:3–5)

After saying this, I returned to the part of your opening statement where you had said: “We say that those born from such a union inherit original sin, and we do not deny that, whatever parents they are born from, they remain under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ (compare John 3:3–5) and, rescued through his grace from the power of darkness, are transferred into the kingdom of him who did not wish to be born from that same union of the two sexes” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.1). Why, then, do you think you can be cleared of Manichaean error because you dared to insert a statement with which you were struggling with all the powers of your mind? This does not defend your error; it testifies to your extraordinary foolishness. You imagine, like Calliphon, that your speech can bring virtue and vice, justice and injustice, into an alliance. As for the apostle's words, “Who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13), read the fourth book of my work, and then you will learn what the Teacher of the Nations meant.

1.65I criticized, and rightly criticized, your abject and feeble inconsistency. It led you first to say that you did not condemn marriage, and then to say that human beings are transferred into the devil's legal possession because of the union of man and woman. That union plainly belongs to marriage's condition and nature; indeed, as far as our present dispute is concerned, in that alone lies the reality of marriage.

1.66You tried to make this union seem so accursed that you would have us understand that Christ chose to be born of a virgin mother, not for the splendor of the sign, but to condemn the union of the sexes (compare Matthew 1:18–23; Luke 1:34–35). What could anyone ever have said more wickedly or shamelessly than this? You distinguished two apparent kings contending for the possession of humanity, and their two kingdoms, by saying that whatever marriage produced belonged to the devil, while only what the Virgin bore belonged to God. What else does this do but represent the one who made the Virgin fruitful as utterly impoverished by the smallness of his share, and deny that he is the Creator of human beings who come from marriage? Let the careful reader retain the written acknowledgment supplied by your own words, then, and know that you, a faithful disciple of the Manichaeans and leader of the advocates of inherited sin, have condemned nothing other than the union of lawful marriage (Matthew 1:18–23) (Luke 1:34–35) (Matthew 1:18–23; Luke 1:34–35).

1.68These matters were discussed at greater length in my first work. Yet you do not speak clearly about which death you mean when you say that its body did not exist in paradise before sin, since in the books published under Marcellinus's name you acknowledged that Adam was made mortal (Augustine, On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1.3–4). As for your addition that the business of marriage is a disease, that can be heard calmly if you say it only about your own parents. Perhaps you know of some hidden disease of your mother's, whom you recorded in the Confessions as having been called, to use the very word, a wine-tippler (Augustine, Confessions 9.18). But in the marriages of the saints and of all honorable people there is no disease whatsoever. Nor did the apostle allow a disease as a remedy when, through respect for marriage, he protected the people of the Church from the disease of fornication (compare 1 Corinthians 7:2). Near the end of my first book I show how completely that meaning wipes out both your effrontery and your doctrine. I also explained it throughout the whole body of that reply as the occasion arose (1 Corinthians 7:2).

1.69“To arrive at this mention of human misery and divine grace, the apostle had said earlier: ‘I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind and taking me captive in the law of sin’ (Romans 7:23). After these words he exclaimed: ‘Who will rescue me from the body of this death? God's grace through Jesus Christ our Lord’” (Romans 7:24–25). It is indeed established that after the preceding words you quoted, the apostle added: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from the body of this death? God's grace through Jesus Christ our Lord.” But at present we are not asking whether the apostle said this. We are asking with what belief, meaning, and reasoning he said it. By the law in his members he meant an evil habit that, through the practice of shameful deeds, rebels against holy intentions, at least in the beginning of amendment. Even learned people of this world commonly call habit a second nature.

A little earlier, addressing his readers reproachfully, he had said: “I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. Just as you presented your members to serve impurity and lawlessness leading to lawlessness, so now present your members to serve righteousness leading to sanctification” (Romans 6:19). To show that by “flesh” he figuratively meant vices, not this body whose causes lie in seed, he adds perhaps two passages later: “When we were in the flesh, the passions of sins which are disclosed through the Law worked in our members to bear fruit for death” (Romans 7:5). He said, “When we were in the flesh”, as though he were not in the flesh at the time he was speaking. But whoever knows Scripture recognizes this manner of expression. Where a shared use of words creates a difficulty, therefore, apply the rule of reason, and let what seemed bent be straightened against its level.

Faustus, bishop of the Manichaeans and your teacher, relies especially on this testimony of the apostle against us. He says that by these words about a law dwelling in the members and resisting the mind's purpose, the apostle meant nothing other than an evil nature. Nothing, therefore, was less appropriate for you than to understand this passage as they explain it. Otherwise, as you follow the same twisted lines Faustus drew, you seem not to have argued a case but to have recited old lessons.

1.70To gather up what we have established: I did not deal fraudulently with your words, and you produced nothing you could cover with even a faint appearance of piety, much less prove by scriptural testimony. The apostle did not mean what you think. Nor was the condition of sexual union in paradise different from what now occurs in marriages. God has made abundantly clear that he established marriage, both by the constitution of the sexes and the character of their bodily members, and by his repeated blessing (compare Genesis 1:27–28; Genesis 9:1). Once these points are settled, it is clear that all whom you deceive deserve anger more than mercy. At your prompting they defame birth to excuse the crimes they commit by an evil will, rather than amend their conduct (Genesis 1:27–28) (Genesis 9:1) (Genesis 1:27–28; Genesis 9:1).

1.71But enough of this; I will now take up what follows. “In the body of this death, then, a body such as certainly did not exist in paradise before sin, another law in our members fights against the law of our mind. Even when we do not will it, do not consent to it, and do not offer our members for it to accomplish what it desires, it nevertheless dwells in them and troubles the mind that resists and fights back. Even if the conflict itself does not merit condemnation, because it does not carry out injustice, it is still a miserable struggle because it has no peace” (Romans 7:23) (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.6; compare Romans 7:23).

The universal testimony of humanity teaches us that the pleasure of all the senses is natural. That this pleasure and desire existed in paradise before sin is shown by the fact that desire was the route to the offense. After the fruit's beauty excited the eyes, it also stirred up the hope of a pleasant taste (Genesis 3:6). This desire sins when it fails to keep its proper measure, but when it stays within the bounds of what is allowed, it is a natural and innocent feeling. It cannot, I say, have been a fruit of sin when it is shown to have been an occasion of sin, not through its own fault but through the will's. Read my second book on this too; you will find that what we say can convince even your mind.

As for the supposedly clever distinction you made, that the law of sin is indeed in our members but involves sin only when we consent to it, while when we do not consent it merely starts a battle and inflicts misery by disturbing peace, what sensible person would not see the contradiction? If the law of sin, that is, sin and the necessity of sin, is naturally implanted in our members, what good is it not to consent to it, when one must undergo punishment simply because it exists? Or if it is indeed the law of sin but does not sin when I do not consent to it, then the human will has an immeasurable power: if the absurdity may be uttered, it forces sin itself not to sin! But we return to the fact that your statement cannot hold together. If it does not sin, it is not the law of sin. If it is the law of sin, it sins. And if it sins simply by existing, how can one resist it so that sin does not occur, when it cannot be driven away so that sin's activity may cease?

1.72Or what good is moderation in something whose very presence accuses it? See where your clever distinctions take you. First, nature sins without will, which is impossible. Second, it is sin and does not sin: the same thing both is and is not. Next, when it disturbs peace it is miserable, but is not punished for so great a crime as destroying tranquillity; when it carries out injustice, however, it merits condemnation. Yet the law of sin, just as it itself deserves torment, excuses the human will. A law that compels, is natural, and never departs certainly cannot be overcome by will; no one is guilty for what he could not avoid. But the law itself does not sin either, because it could not do anything else. God, however, counts unavoidable things as guilt, and no one compels him to commit so great an evil. Everyone else is therefore acquitted, and he alone is found guilty: with astonishing effrontery he imputes necessity to others while himself doing wrong without necessity.

Well done for your wise virtue, most noble debater! By the steps of African dialectic, to commend gifts you have overturned judgments; to pretend grace you have overthrown justice; to defame nature you have accused humanity's Creator. You have accused him in such a way that your God appears more guilty not only than some sinner but than the very law of sin. After this you most profanely insult catholic priests, saying that they deny the grace of Christ whose fairness they defend. We praise the mercy of the remedies, but maintain the justice of the laws (compare Romans 7:23) (Romans 7:23).

1.73Let us now proceed to my words, which he lifted out of the preface and proposed to attack. “I have therefore given sufficient warning that this man chose to set my words before himself for apparent refutation in such a way that in some places he interrupted statements by removing their middle, and in others shortened them by not adding their ending. I have also sufficiently shown why he did this. Now let us see what words of his he set against those of ours that he presented as he wished. For his words now follow. As the person who sent you the sheet explained, he first copied something from the preface, undoubtedly the preface to those books from which he made a few excerpts. It runs as follows: ‘The teachers of our time, most blessed brother, and the authors of the wicked revolt that is still raging, have resolved to reach the abuse and destruction of men whose holy efforts inflame them, through the ruin of the whole Church. They do not understand how much honor they have bestowed on those whose glory they have shown could not be torn down except together with the catholic religion. For if anyone says that human beings have free choice or that God is the Creator of newborn children, he is called a follower of Caelestius and Pelagius. To avoid being called heretics, people become Manichaeans. Fearing a false disgrace, they incur a real crime, like wild animals surrounded by feathers to force them into nets. Lacking reason, they are driven by an empty fear into actual destruction’” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.6–7).

I recognize my words, but you have not quoted them intact. Although the substance of our dispute does not lie in these words, because they come from a preface, let your carelessness be made plain. “Most blessed brother” is not placed there but in the very first line of the book. Again, after saying, “to reach the abuse and destruction of men whose holy efforts inflame them”, I added, “since no other route lay open, they resolved to do so through the ruin of the whole Church.” After that I also said: “Because anyone who acknowledges free choice and God as Creator is called a follower of Caelestius and Pelagius, simple people, terrified by this unjust language, abandon even sound faith to escape the hatred of the name. They will undoubtedly come to believe both that human beings have no free choice and that God is not the Creator of newborn children, once they have abandoned the two claims they had previously affirmed.” You omitted all of this. After it come the words you quoted; it will not be difficult to prove how true and unassailable they are. I therefore omitted nothing from your statements, while you did not even reproduce the first passage in the order in which I had arranged it. I emphasize this so that the African author's seriousness may stand out.

1.74Let us hear, then, what you wrote in reply to these words of mine: “It is not as you say, whoever said this; it is not so. You are greatly mistaken, or planning to mislead. We do not deny free choice. But Truth says: ‘If the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free’ (John 8:36). You begrudge this liberator to the captives to whom you attribute an empty freedom. ‘For whatever has overcome someone has made him its slave’, as Scripture says (2 Peter 2:19). No one is released from this bond of slavery except through the liberator's grace, and no human being is exempt from it. ‘For through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death; and so it passed to all human beings, in whom all sinned’” (Romans 5:12; Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.8).

The cause we defend has the greatest dignity, as consideration and weighing of the matters themselves show, and as your fear also shows. You fight to shed our people's blood by pouring out money, giving away estates, sending horses, stirring up the populace, and corrupting officials. Yet you are ashamed to profess the faith of yours that we attack, and take refuge in the language of our position, from which you have strayed.

1.75What Babylon's shameful betrayal has undertaken is so wicked that, when we charge you with it, you deny it. What we believe is so holy that you wish to hide in its shade, though your minds oppose it. For when I drew out what was scattered throughout the parts of your argument and compressed the issue into a brief statement, so that the extent and character of the cause of the Church's division would appear without smoke or mist, I said that you deny both free choice and God as the Creator of newborn children, while we defend both. That is why you raise an empty din in uneducated ears about the names of catholic men who struggle alongside us for the apostolic faith we defend. Those afraid of being called Caelestians by you lose the dignity of heavenly faith; those terrified of being called Pelagians plunge into the sea of Manichaeism. Uneducated people come to think they cannot be called Christians if the advocates of inherited sin have called them Pelagians. Sensible people, by contrast, decide that they must endure any hatred or insult attached to names rather than abandon the catholic faith.

But do not boast that even this type of abuse was invented by your ingenuity. Remember that all heretics commonly give us different names. At the council of Rimini it became especially clear what wickedness an ambiguous word or the threat of a new label can achieve in leaden minds. Under an Arian ruler, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, a man of great steadfastness and thoroughly sound faith, resisted after almost the whole world had slipped away from the apostles' faith and the times had become impious. For this he was driven into exile. Out of six hundred and fifty bishops, as the report goes, scarcely seven were found who valued God's commands more than the king's: they would neither agree to Athanasius's condemnation nor deny the confession of the Trinity. Besides fear of mistreatment, the entire crowd of those broken spirits was deceived chiefly either by the threatening label “Athanasian” or by a cunning question.

1.76The Arians, who held power at that time, put the question: “Do you wish to follow ‘of one substance’, or Christ?” They immediately answered, as though devoutly loyal to the name, that they followed Christ; they rejected “of one substance”. And so they left rejoicing as though they believed in Christ, whom they had already denied by rejecting “of one substance”, that is, of one substance with the Father. In the same way you now manufacture deceit and frighten uneducated ears, so that if people do not want to be stained with the names of men who struggle for the faith, they must deny both free choice and God as humanity's Creator. This is plainly the charge I made in that passage. The present discussion will openly show how true it was. You therefore answered: “We do not deny free choice”, and added nothing further of your own. Consistency required you to complete your statement without evasion. Having begun by saying that you did not deny freedom of choice, you should have added: “Rather, we confess that the freedom of choice given by God remains in human nature.”

1.77By this statement you would have established something definite. If you had then spoken against it, you would have appeared exceedingly shameless; if you had consistently maintained it throughout, you might have appeared corrected, even if belatedly. But now you say that I deceive, although I prove my charge through your own words; and you immediately lie in what you think you have constructed consistently. You say: “We do not deny free choice”, and append the Gospel's testimony: “But Truth says, ‘If the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free’” (John 8:36). Yet it is established that our Lord Jesus did not utter those words in that passage against free choice. Let us postpone their explanation a little and use definitions and distinctions to make clear what each of us means. According to the teaching of all learned people, a discussion ought to begin with a definition.

1.78For, as the author says, “Every discussion of a subject undertaken rationally ought to begin with a definition, so that what is being discussed may be understood” (Cicero, On Duties 1.7). Thus, just as we discussed the definitions of justice and sin above, let us now consider what definition belongs to freedom of choice, so that it may be clear which of us agrees with it and which opposes it. Freedom of choice, by which God gave the human being independence, consists in the capacity to commit sin and to abstain from sin.

1.79For the human being was made a rational, mortal living being, capable of virtue and vice. Through the capacity granted to him, he could either keep God's commands or transgress them, or by nature's teaching preserve the law of human fellowship. He was free to will either alternative; in this lies the substance of sin and justice. For when he draws something according to virtue for those in need, either from the springs of mercy or from the breasts of justice, it is justice itself working outwardly, which a holy will conceived and brought forth within.

1.80Likewise, on the opposite side, when someone resolves to act wrongly to others' injury and becomes unjust or cruel, the act by which he harms others comes outward from the wickedness that an evil will sowed and generated within. But when the means are lacking by which the force of the hidden will may break out against one's neighbors, the character of kindness or malice is nevertheless complete in that will alone, when it has accomplished something good or evil not through a brief impulse but through deliberate thought and desire.

1.81The capacity for good and the capacity for evil are therefore both good. Being able to do good is the palace of virtue; being able to do evil is the testimony of freedom.

1.82A person can therefore possess a good that is his own precisely because he also has the capacity to do evil. The entire fullness of divine judgment is so closely bound up with this human freedom that whoever recognizes one knows both. Consequently, whoever violates one violates both. Let the freedom of human choice therefore be preserved just as divine fairness is preserved. This is the understanding of free choice that has subjected belief in fate, the calculations of Chaldean astrologers, and the fantasies of the Manichaeans to the Church's truth. This is the understanding that shows you too, along with those we have listed, to be strangers to Christ. Freedom of choice, then, is the capacity either to commit or to avoid sin, free from compelling necessity. It has within its own authority which of the alternatives that arise it follows: either the steep and rugged heights of the virtues or the sunken marshes of pleasures.

1.83To state it briefly, it is a capacity whose sole watchful task is to ensure that no one is either driven into sin or dragged away from sin by someone else while the will is held captive. That the will cannot be captured unless it chooses to surrender is shown by courage, whose strength in despising pain has constantly shone forth among both pagans and Christians.

1.84If, then, as reason has disclosed, freedom of choice excludes compulsion, so that no one is either good or evil without being free to be the opposite, how could you acknowledge free choice while about to use a testimony suited to captives? Or how could you append such a testimony after acknowledging free choice? You say: “We do not deny free choice. But Truth says, ‘If the Son sets you free, then you will be truly free’” (John 8:36). It is clear that in that passage Christ addressed a captive conscience. He showed it to be not free, but subject to the punishment that condemns sins committed by free will. You misunderstand that statement, that is, you do not understand it, or perhaps you understand it as applying to yourself, but drag it here against its own nature. You have put it in a place where its whole proper meaning conflicts with your words. Let us join the words themselves: what is set free is captive; what is captive is not free; what is free is not captive.

1.85Simply acknowledge whichever of these you choose, then, and stop quibbling. Either say with us that choice is free, and remove the testimony that was appropriately spoken in its own setting, or say, as in those books you have now sent to Boniface through Alypius, that the choice we call free is captive, and stop denying that you are a Manichaean.

1.86These two things you join together, free and not free, that is, free and captive, cannot both fit the thing under discussion. But they testify that you possess extraordinary foolishness, a new shamelessness, and an old impiety.

1.87It is now time to discuss the Gospel's statement. The evangelist John says: “Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples; you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’” (John 8:31–32). That is, our Lord Jesus was telling those who believed in him not to rejoice in worldly nobility or claim glory from Abraham's descent, but to strive and labor for virtue and, after recognizing Christ, to serve no sins. They would thereby retain true freedom with a joyful conscience and, through hope in things that are certain, that is, eternal, be freed from desire for everything else, which because of its fragility is frequently called empty and false.

Then the Jews, not understanding what freedom Jesus meant, answered him: “We are Abraham's offspring and have never been anyone's slaves. How can you say, ‘You will be free’?” (John 8:33). “Freedom” is commonly used in many senses. Here it means holiness. In the apostle it means resurrection, when he says that creation is to be freed from slavery to corruption into the glorious freedom of God's children (Romans 8:21). In its better-known sense it is spoken of in contrast to slavery. The same name is also used for freedom of choice. Let us therefore distinguish the cases, so that things far apart are not confused because they share a name. Here the Lord does not say that freedom of choice needs to be set free. Rather, while it remains intact, he calls on the Jews to receive forgiveness and be freed from guilt, obtaining the freedom that is greatest in God's sight: to begin to owe no debt for crimes.

The evangelist continues: “Jesus answered them, ‘Amen, amen, I tell you: everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. If, then, the Son sets you free, you will be truly free’” (John 8:34–36).

1.88He made plain the slavery of which he was speaking: “Everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin” (John 8:34). How forcefully this very statement opposes your error! He says that no one is a slave of sin except someone who has himself committed sin, and that sin cannot cling to anyone unless the person in question has personally committed it, either in action or even by will alone. How clearly he also shows that the whole human race cannot now be possessed by the devil, when he distinguishes between slave and son, that is, between the just and the unjust! Here Christ separated not only himself but each of the saints from the condition of slaves. Such people existed both before and during the Old Testament; he declares that they remain in his Father's house and rejoice at his table (Luke 13:28–29). This whole kind of exhortation would have been pointlessly spoken if he were not addressing people with free choice.

1.89To make you understand that he reproaches their lives rather than their nature, he continues: “I know that you are Abraham's children” (John 8:37). There is the dignity of descent on account of which they had declared themselves free. Now he shows the slavery to which they are subject: “You seek to kill me, because my word finds no room in you. I speak what I have heard with my Father; and you do what you have seen with your father” (John 8:37–38).

1.90See how different the accounts of nature and will are. Jesus did not deny that their flesh belonged to Abraham's offspring. But he presses upon them that through an unjust will they had moved to the devil as their father, who is called their begetter because he is shown to be their teacher in crimes. “The Jews answered and said to him, ‘Abraham is our father.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were Abraham's children, you would do Abraham's works. But now you seek to kill me, a man who has spoken to you the truth I heard from God. Abraham did not do this; you do the works of your father’” (John 8:39–41). Do you see the distinctions Wisdom makes in its language? He denies that they are Abraham's children after saying above that they were Abraham's children. But because nature and will require different treatment, he shows that the ancestor of their innocent flesh is one person, and the deceiver of their wretched will another.

1.91Here, then, when the Lord said, “If the Son sets you free, you will be truly free” (John 8:36), he promised forgiveness to guilty people who, by sinning, had lost not freedom of choice but a righteous conscience. Free choice remains as complete after sins as it was before sins. Indeed, it is through its action that many renounce the hidden things of shame and, casting away the filth of disgraceful deeds, clothe themselves in the distinctions of virtue (2 Corinthians 4:2).

1.92Stop making yourself impious, then, if any distinction between right and wrong still remains for you, by explaining Christ's words as though he had denied free choice. Without that choice remaining intact, the fairness of his own judgment cannot stand.

1.93Listen to where he shows the power of human freedom: “I came in my Father's name, and you did not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him” (John 5:43). And again: “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad” (Matthew 12:33). And again: “If you are unwilling to believe me, believe the works” (John 10:38). Most forcefully of all, he says that his intention was hindered by human will: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I wanted to gather your children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling!” (Matthew 23:37). He does not then add, “But I gathered you against your will.” Rather: “Your house will be left to you desolate” (Matthew 23:38). Thus he shows that they are rightly punished for their evil action, but ought not to have been forced away from their own intention by any compulsion. In the same way he had spoken through the prophet: “If you are willing and listen to me, you will eat the good things of the land. If you are unwilling and do not listen, the sword will devour you” (Isaiah 1:19–20). How, then, do you not deny free choice, when you pronounced it unfree, not indeed in your own wording but through the Gospel's testimony as interpreted by you?

1.95This grace, then, which in baptism not only forgives sins but along with that gift of pardon also advances, adopts, and consecrates us, changes what the guilty deserve. It does not create free choice, which we receive when we are created and use when we acquire the power to distinguish good and evil. We therefore do not deny that countless forms of divine help assist a good will. But this does not mean that these forms of help construct a freedom of choice that had been destroyed, or that at some time freedom is excluded and a necessity of either good or evil is thought to lie upon anyone. Rather, every help cooperates with free choice.

1.96It is solely because of this free choice, the Teacher of the Nations writes, that we must be revealed before Christ's judgment seat, so that each may receive what belongs to the body's deeds, according to what he has done, whether good or evil (2 Corinthians 5:10). Catholics acknowledge this free choice, but you deny it, not only with Mani but also with Jovinian, whom you dare to pin on us. Your denial takes a different form but involves similar impiety. To make this clearer, let us examine the distinctions. We say that a person's sin changes not the state of nature but the character of what the person deserves. That is, in the sinner the nature of free choice remains the same: through it he can cease from sin, just as through it he was able to depart from righteousness.

1.97The Manichaean says that an evil will is inspired by a nature that cannot will good, while a good will is poured in by a nature that cannot will evil. Thus he imposes on the natures of each kind of thing a necessity such that their own wills cannot will the opposite. There is certainly a great gulf between him and us. Let us now see how far you have departed from him. You say that the will is free, but only to do evil; it is not free to cease doing evil unless a necessity of willing good is imposed on it by that nature which, to use your words, “cannot will evil” (Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 1.7). You therefore define the human race as doing nothing through free choice except sinning, and as unable to do anything else. By this you declare outright that human nature always desires only one thing, evil, and cannot will the opposite. God's nature, however, cannot will evil; therefore, unless it makes evil human nature share in its own necessity, no good action can exist in human nature. After this, God may see in the secrecy of your heart whether you have little love for Mani. But as far as the kinship of your doctrines shows, you have done absolutely nothing except change the order and establish the same thing he asserted.

1.98You are joined to Jovinian on one point. In the second book of his work he says that a baptized person cannot sin, while before baptism a person can both sin and refrain from sin. With you, then, he thinks that from the time of baptism a necessity of good is imposed on human beings. This is just as false as your belief that before baptism human beings possess a necessity of doing evil. For when you say, “A human being cannot will anything good unless helped by the one who cannot will evil” (Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 1.7), you mean that through sharing in grace and a good nature a person obtains the capacity to do good; you say, however, that this can happen from the time of baptism. Caught between impiety and fear, you have therefore fled to Jovinian's company, but have not yet left Mani's brothel. Yet Jovinian is as much more innocent than you as Mani is more profane than Jovinian.

To gather up our argument still more briefly: the Manichaean says, “In all human beings the nature of darkness, which inspires the evil will, sins and cannot do anything else.” You say, “In all human beings nature, infected by the darkness of the first sin and therefore the author of an evil will, sins and cannot will good.” Jovinian says, “The human will does indeed sin, but only up to baptism; afterward it can will nothing but good.” Catholics, that is, we, say that from beginning to end there is no compulsion from anything belonging to nature. In each person it is the will that sins, including before baptism; at the very time it sins it has the power to depart from evil and do good, so that freedom remains a reality.

None of you therefore possesses true doctrine. Nevertheless, since you set out from a single starting point of error, it would at least have been less dishonorable to accept the consequences. Since you say with Mani that sin occurs through an evil nature, that is, through defective freedom, you should also have said with him that it cannot be cleansed in any way. You do affirm this elsewhere; but you should have added its necessary consequence, that it therefore has no need of baptism's sacraments. Or if you assert with Jovinian that good desires are imprinted from the time faith is received, you should have said with him that nature was good even before baptism: although it had the capacity for evil, it did not have its necessity, and so by consecration it reached an unmistakable good. In this way, even if you opposed reason, at least you would not contradict the doctrines of those you follow.

1.99As it is, however, faithless to everyone, you say that a necessity of sin has arisen in the nature of the flesh,

1.100so that, having lost the possession of eternity, which it plainly never possessed by its origin, the will would be bent continually upon seeking wrongdoing. And you add: “The will that is free in evil is not free in good.” With a declaration of foolishness no less than of profanity, you call something free while saying it can will only one thing.

1.101Although you are consistent in no respect, let the sensible reader consider what you have advanced. Let us agree that a will unable to will good can be called free. You assert that this will is freed in baptism. I ask: in what way is it freed? Is it compelled always to will good and unable to will evil? Or can it desire either? If you answer, “It is compelled always to will good”, you yourself recognize how much of a Jovinianist you are. If, however, you say, “How can a will be free if it is compelled always to will good?”, I answer, “How was it called free before, if it was compelled to will only evil?” If you therefore reply that after baptism the will becomes free in the sense that it can both sin and refrain from sin, you thereby declare that there was no free choice when it could not do both. You are enclosed on every side by the snares of your own argument. If choice was free before baptism, it had the capacity to do good just as it had the capacity to do evil; and the whole stage set of your doctrine, by which you urge an evil inherent in nature, collapses.

1.102But if it was not free for good before, and after baptism became free in the sense that it could not do evil, then it never possessed freedom of choice. It is shown to have sinned without guilt before and afterward to possess the glory of holiness without effort.

1.103Once this is established, you are proved to deny your own doctrine outright when you promise that you do not deny free choice, which you overthrow first by the necessity of evil and afterward by the necessity of good.

1.104Recalling our earlier definitions, however, also helps demolish your doctrine completely. If sin is nothing but the will to retain and commit what justice forbids and from which one is free to abstain, then on your account no sin can be found anywhere in reality.

1.105For if justice imputes only what one is free to abstain from, and before baptism there is a necessity of evil, since the will, as you said, is not free to do good and consequently can do nothing but evil, then the very necessity it suffers defends it against the disgrace of evil. It cannot be burdened with its deeds before that justice which imputes no evil except what one is free to abstain from. After baptism, however, if there is a necessity of good, there certainly cannot be any sin. See, then, how impossible it is to find in seed what reason shows sin to be, when according to your definitions it can no longer be found even in conduct.

1.106With this conclusion of our discussion sealed in the sensible reader's mind, let us examine how your baptism, which you say was provided solely because of the stirring of the genitals, performs its entrusted task. It professes to cleanse human beings from sins. But when the will's case is heard before justice, a will that could not will otherwise is not pronounced guilty. When the accusation of guilt vanishes, the display of pardon vanishes too: one cannot forgive what one cannot rightly impute. Thus it fails to fulfill its promise. It finds no crimes whose forgiveness might earn it praise, nor anyone indebted to it for the benefit by which the bonds of sins are loosed, because it cannot convict those sheltered in the sanctuary of necessity of an evil will. All this shows it to be superfluous.

But the grace provided by Christ is not superfluous. Let us retain a rational account of its generosity, by which the sinner's will is proved guilty, since it could certainly have willed good just as it willed evil. The entire fiction of necessity therefore vanishes. Consequently, there is no sin from the condition of nature; free choice remains in human nature. You deny it with the Manichaeans; we acknowledge it with the apostles and all catholics.

1.107Your explanation of the apostle Paul's words would deserve to be passed over with a laugh if it did not frighten those unfamiliar with Scripture. The apostle says: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness” (Romans 6:20). He certainly could not have said “freed”. The language of liberation is fittingly and properly used when a person is freed from harmful things. Those who resolve to owe nothing to the virtues, however, can be called free from virtues. A person can therefore be called free either from good or from evil when, serving one, he aims to owe nothing to the other. But a person can be called freed only from evil, because the word “liberation” contains a sign of the distress that is driven away. What difficulty, then, could be raised here about the apostle's words when, following ordinary human usage, he called them free from good and freed from evil?

He says: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness. What fruit did you then have in those things of which you are now ashamed?” (Romans 6:20–21). But lest you suppose that we become slaves of sin through nature, hear the apostle himself speaking in the same passage: “Do you not know that when you present yourselves as slaves to obey someone, you are slaves of the one you obey, whether of sin or of obedience to righteousness?” (Romans 6:16). He says that you presented yourselves as slaves to sin, so that you would understand him to impute sin to will, not birth. He therefore called them free from righteousness solely because they had refused to keep its commands.

1.108He immediately adds that they are slaves of righteousness in the same way that they had previously been slaves of sin. You may now, if you wish, call them free from sin when they serve righteousness, just as he called them free from righteousness when they served wrongdoing. Most foolishly, then, you wanted to bring an accusation against the apostle's straightforward language. He did not, as you think, very carefully indicate the point you imagine; rather, you are very sleepily examining what he said. You argue that he preferred to say “freed” rather than “free” so that we would understand that freedom of choice enables evil but cannot bring about good. Yet the very order of his words resists you. If he had thought as you do, that freedom produced only sin, he should have said, “You were free for sin”, not “You were free for righteousness” (Romans 6:20), so that a person would be called free with respect to what that freedom accomplished. If we are to weigh even the force of grammatical cases, he said that they were free “for this righteousness”, not free “from this righteousness”. His phrasing would therefore help us more consistently, if we too wished to press such slight matters. Far be it from us! We understand the apostle's meaning and are content with the service of words straightforwardly spoken.

The Teacher of the Nations meant nothing other than: “You were free; you did not serve righteousness. You have been freed; you have received forgiveness of sins.” Freedom of choice remains, through which they could obey sin before and righteousness afterward.

1.109He shows what his exhortation contains by saying first: “I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. Just as you presented your members to serve impurity and lawlessness leading to lawlessness, so now present your members to serve righteousness leading to sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness” (Romans 6:19–20). With perfect consistency he says that those whom he had urged to keep their members in complete sanctification had been free from righteousness.

We have spent no little time here proving the complete certainty of what I said earlier in section 73: people terrified by your speech would deny free choice and be driven by empty fear into real destruction; and you are the chief denier of free choice. Let us therefore return to the book addressed to Valerius, to prove that at first you denied God as Creator, while now you deny him in some places and in others acknowledge him far more wickedly than you denied him. How absolutely you denied God as humanity's Creator in that earlier book of yours became sufficiently clear when it was examined. You said that the devil rightly plucked the human race like the fruit of a shrub he himself had planted (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.26). You added many other things, offered as arguments, that support this error. In this second book, although your doctrine as a whole pursues the same course, you attempt to amend your former statement in a more destructive way.

1.110Let us briefly complete, however, the reply owed to the passage of yours quoted above in section 74. I answer firmly and faithfully that we do not begrudge human beings their liberator, the Lord Jesus Christ. We urge them not to believe you and be crushed by despair of amendment, abandoning Christ's teaching as though he commanded things that mortal nature could not grasp because it was burdened by an inborn evil.

1.111Rather, let them run to the one who cries: “My yoke is gentle and my burden light” (Matthew 11:30). With immeasurable generosity he both grants pardon to an evil will and, through renewal and adoption, makes better the innocence that he creates good.

1.112I therefore wonder that you dared to quote the testimony: “Whatever has overcome someone has made him its slave” (2 Peter 2:19). This most plainly supports us, who maintain that no one can be subject to the devil except someone who, after a contest of will, has been overcome by a base surrender. You should not have appropriated it, since it strongly opposes your attempt to persuade us that newborn children belong to the devil's kingdom. Without a will of their own, they could neither have been defeated nor have sinned.

1.113Seeing that this weighs heavily against you, you act as though the testimony itself had asked: “How, then, are infants in the kingdom of the hostile power, if we believe Scripture that each person becomes the victor's slave when he is defeated, and if infancy, without the use of reason and will, plainly could neither fight nor surrender?” (Psalm 101:1;) You add: “For through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death; and so it passed to all human beings, in whom all sinned” (Romans 5:12). You continue: “God is the Creator of newborn children in such a way that all go from the one into condemnation unless he becomes their liberator through rebirth. For he is called ‘the potter making from the same lump one vessel for honor according to mercy, another for dishonor according to judgment’ (Romans 9:21), to whom the Church sings, ‘Mercy and judgment’” (Psalm 101:1; LXX Psalm 100:1; Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.8).

As for your statement that sin entered through one human being, the apostolic testimony by which you have stirred many hearts, though uneducated ones, I briefly showed in my fourth book how it should be understood. Yet with Christ's help we will explain it more fully in this work. In the second book we will set other things aside and discuss that apostolic passage most fully in its own context (see below, Book II, section 20).

1.114Here I would briefly warn that it cannot support you in establishing an opinion which all learning, all reason, and God's Law convict of being utterly unjust. Let the attentive reader therefore notice your declaration that God is the maker of evil people, and creates people of such a kind that, without anything deserved by a will of their own, absolutely all of them go into condemnation.

1.115So that we could not miss the period you mean, you declare that from Adam, who you say was all people in one, until the end, those who have not been baptized are found liable to condemnation and subject to the devil. By this opinion you try to cure yourself far more destructively than you previously wounded yourself. For to remove the hostility rushing upon you because you called the devil humanity's Creator, you correct yourself by acknowledging God as Creator, but of the sort of people the Manichaean assigns to the prince of darkness.

1.116Believing human beings evil by the condition of birth, the Manichaean assigned them an author through whom the blame for the evil work could be kept away from the good God. Since he had erred in the definition of sin, thinking natural something that can only be voluntary, he consistently went on to invent an evil maker for an evil origin. In this he was more reverent toward God and more defiant toward nature. You, however, say that people are born evil, but that God is the author of the evil: you are more defiant toward God and more respectful toward nature. For nature is defended by its author's majesty, while its author is accused by the ugliness of his work.

1.117You did not fear, most wicked man, to apply to God something for which the Manichaean invented another creator precisely to avoid attributing it to him. Both of you are enemies of the truth, but before you it was thought impossible to surpass him in impiety.

1.118You, however, have “justified your sister Sodom”, as the prophet says (Ezekiel 16:48, 51, 55). The Manichaean will seem acquitted if compared with your blasphemies. In the first book of my work I had boasted that I was attacked by the mouth from which the apostles too had suffered injury. Now I am awed by the greatness of my good fortune: I am reviled by someone who brings charges against God.

1.119How did I come to deserve the dignity of so great an insult? By praising me you could have bestowed nothing like it. You say my views deserve rejection, but God's works deserve condemnation. You declare that I argue badly, but that God creates wickedly. You shout that I err, but that he is cruel. You assert that I do not know the Law, but that God does not know justice. You cry out that I am not catholic because I say Christ calls people in order to save them; but you swear that God creates people to condemn them, and brings them into being for no other reason than that all should go into condemnation (compare Romans 5:18) (Romans 5:18).

1.120I therefore see a great distance produced by the progress of your learning between you and Mani, the progenitor of your ideas. Although he introduced two authors, he left hope of salvation on the side on which he said that the good God was utterly removed from injustice and cruelty. You, however, by speaking of one good God who is also the Creator of evil people, have utterly abolished both reverence for divinity and hope of salvation.

1.121For no one remains to help the guilty when the one who alone is God, from a desire to create misery, punishes even those in whom he recognizes nothing except what he himself made.

1.122Having surveyed the abyss of your impiety, though nothing more profane could ever be found, a brief discussion will nevertheless show how powerless it is and what follows from the things you added. God, who wished to be called by this name, is believed to be supremely just as well as supremely powerful. If one of these is absent, neither will be present. He is humanity's most kindly Creator and the most equitable assessor of what each deserves. Everything he makes is very good (Genesis 1:31). Consequently, no one is evil by nature; whoever is guilty is accused for conduct, not origins.

1.123Evil is therefore not inherent in nature, and God cannot create guilty people or place them in the devil's kingdom. These conclusions show you to be a Manichaean, indeed worse than a Manichaean. They also make clear that humanity enters this world without sin, that the fruit of human fertility is under God's authority rather than the devil's, and that nature is innocent.

1.124With this established, consider what follows from your course of argument. The prophets and patriarchs and all the saints of the Old Testament plainly did not receive baptism, yet were created by God and afterward shone with their own virtues. They must therefore, against the Law's testimony, be believed to belong to the devil's kingdom and be destined for eternal punishments, because you declare that all are created from Adam for condemnation (compare Romans 5:18) (Romans 5:18).

1.125If you say this, even your patrons will be able to acknowledge how openly Manichaean you are. But if you recognize so great an army of the true King fighting against your opinion, and realize that you cannot harm their standing, admit that what you built has been destroyed. Consequently, not everyone goes from one into condemnation (Romans 5:16), but only those who, rebellious against God's will, are overtaken by their final end without repentance or correction.

1.126You should never have mentioned that God is called “the potter making from the same lump one vessel for honor and another for dishonor” (Romans 9:21). For as we explain it consistently, it wholly opposes you. When some are said to be made for honor and others for dishonor, this supports the catholic understanding that the different outcomes of the vessels correspond to the differences in human will.

1.127But you, who had said above that everyone goes into condemnation, with what effrontery did you quote a testimony declaring that one goes to honor and another to dishonor?

1.128Nothing is more contradictory than saying “all” (Romans 9:21) and “not all”. You say that God the potter makes everyone for condemnation. The apostle says that not everyone is for condemnation and not everyone for honor. I will explain the worth of this statement in its proper place. Even in the wording of the statement, however, there is plainly a great disagreement between you. The potter who shapes everyone for condemnation is not the same as the one Paul says fashions some for honor. You do not believe in the one proclaimed by that admirable teacher, because your potter shapes everyone for condemnation, while the apostle's potter shapes very many for glory (compare Romans 9:21).

1.129I have said this to make it immediately apparent that you possess extraordinary ignorance or shamelessness, using statements opposed to you as though they were your own. Piety and reason, however, will explain that my God forms no one for dishonor,

1.130but creates his image, that is, all human beings, good (compare Genesis 1:26–27). Even when they have been ruined by perverse pursuits, he desires to restore them through the generosity of his remedies. To him the Church indeed sings “mercy and judgment” (Psalm 101:1; LXX Psalm 100:1) (Genesis 1:26–27). He is kind to those who have done no wrong, and by a just judgment punishes those who, created good by God, sinned by their own will and rejected the help of mercy. This is the mercy and this the judgment sung by the Church of the catholics. In your church, however, nothing of the kind can resound, since it says that God, the Creator of evil people, without justice, judgment, or mercy, forms those whom he will punish, and punishes them because he himself formed them from Adam (Psalm 101:1;).

1.131Let the dignity of the apostolic statement now be defended, lest it be thought that he meant about some people what you supposed about all. The apostle Paul, debating the objections of Jews who swelled with pride in the dignity of their ancestry and disdained believers from the nations being made equal to them, commends both God's justice and his grace. He argues that their generosity accounts both for the knowledge of the Law that first ennobled the Jews and for the preaching of Christ that afterward also admitted the nations. For there is one Creator of both peoples, who will judge the former through the Law, the latter without the Law, and the former in the Law (Romans 2:12; Romans 3:29–31). He is not the God of Jews alone but also of the nations (Romans 3:29), returning to each what belongs to that person without deceit or favoritism, that is, without partiality toward anyone. This is the sense of “favor” (Romans 2:6) in the definition of justice (compare Romans 2:6, 11).

Thus he rightly condemns those descended from Abraham when they live wickedly and drives them from his inheritance, just as he does Gentiles found acting similarly. Conversely, he rewards the good wills, true faith, and upright deeds of either people with eternal joys. The Teacher of the Nations therefore restrains Jewish pride and shows that the difference lies not in human seed but in conduct. They must recognize that unless they take care to be faithful, no privilege of circumcised ancestry will defend them. Jacob and Esau, after all, were conceived through one reception of seed and delivered through one act of giving birth, yet experienced very different outcomes because of the difference in what they deserved (compare Genesis 25:21–26; Romans 9:10–13) (Romans 2:11) (Genesis 25:21–26) (Romans 9:10–13) (Genesis 25:21–26; Romans 9:10–13).

1.132For Esau, profane and sexually immoral, sold his birthright for a single meal. He sought the blessing he had despised and did not obtain it, although he begged for it with tears (Hebrews 12:16–17; Genesis 25:29–34; Genesis 27:34–38). Jacob, however, quiet and gentle, obedient to his parents' instructions and most eager for holy blessings, advanced so far that among the holy people God was called the God of Jacob as well as of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 25:27; Genesis 27:8; Exodus 3:6; Matthew 22:32).

All examples therefore establish that by a just judgment God does not withhold his mercy from good minds in any nation, while allowing no nobility of ancestry to defend evil minds. The Jews should understand that they must not despise the nations' faith. Just as Israelite ancestry does not defend crimes, so Gentile descent is no obstacle to virtues. The apostle pursues all this in that debate. In some passages, however, to bow down the pride of the circumcised, he settles the issue on God's power alone under the name of grace (Genesis 25:29–34) (Genesis 27:34–38) (Genesis 25:27) (Genesis 27:8).

1.133They boasted of observing ceremonies and sacrifices, and therefore supposed that other nations, consecrated by none of the Law's rites, neither could nor should suddenly be admitted to fellowship with them. He would tell them that even if the whole of righteousness had consisted in those observances, God would still have had power to make a change among the peoples, rejecting whom he wished and taking whom he wished. In answer to this meaning, a reply is made in the person of the Jews: nothing should now be demanded from the human will, since God “has mercy on whom he wills and hardens whom he wills” (Romans 9:18). To this the apostle replies: “O human being, who are you to answer back to God?” (Romans 9:20). He introduces the prophet Isaiah's testimony: “Does what is molded say to the one who molded it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” (Isaiah 45:9; Romans 9:20). He adds in his own words: “Does the potter not have power over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?” (Romans 9:21).

The meaning is this: “Because I commended God's will and explained the authority of his grace, saying that he grants mercy to whomever he has mercy on, you, O Jew, raised a false accusation against me. You acted as though my commendation of divine will and power involved the destruction of divine justice. Because I said, ‘He does what he wills’, you argued that nothing should any longer be demanded of human will if God does everything according to his own will. Yet the dignity of the person concerned left no room for that objection. If I had said, ‘God does what he ought, according to the laws of his justice which judges each person's deserts’, you certainly would not have raised the objection you now raise. But because I said, ‘God does what he wills’, you thought I had stolen something from justice's dignity. Both statements, then, mean the same thing. When I say of God, ‘He does what he wills’, I say nothing other than, ‘He does what he ought’, because I know that he wills nothing other than what he ought. Where will is inseparably joined to fairness, whichever of them I name, I have indicated both.”

1.134That pride wished to remain idle and cover its laziness with an appearance of necessity, so as to protest against the Gospel's reception of the nations. It therefore hears: “Even if matters were as you imagine, you should nevertheless petition God, not stir up a revolt.” With these words Paul checks the man's wickedness. Seizing upon ambiguous language, that man tried to attribute to divine necessity the difference in deserts that comes from the character of the will. He wanted to establish that one of two things must follow: either the nations do not enter into fellowship in the promise, or, if God is permitted to admit them, the tasks of free will are abolished.

But this did not suffice for the issue. Such a teacher could not commend God's authority while leaving his justice undefended. Most consistently, then, Paul adds that vessels made for dishonor and those made for honor receive this as the wages of their own will: “If God, wishing to show his wrath and make his power known with great patience in vessels of wrath completed for destruction, and to make known the riches of his glory in vessels of mercy which he prepared for glory, whom he also called, namely us, not only from Jews but also from the nations” (Romans 9:22–24). Here he certainly clears up what the previous debate had concealed: God brings wrath only upon vessels completed for destruction, while glory is given to those prepared for it. By whom such vessels are prepared to receive the things we have named, the apostle's own words disclose: “In a great house there are not only gold and silver vessels but also wooden and earthenware ones, some for honor and some for dishonor. If, then, anyone cleanses himself from these, he will be a vessel sanctified for honor, useful to the Lord, prepared for every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21).

1.135See the task of free will: “If anyone cleanses himself” from association with cheap vessels, a name that denotes vices, “he will be a vessel sanctified for honor, useful to the Lord, prepared for every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21). These vessels are therefore prepared for either wrath or glory through their own pursuits. God makes his power known in both cases, either by displaying severity toward the impious or by bestowing blessing on the faithful. It is therefore clear that this statement of the outstanding teacher has given no aid to Manichaean views; on the contrary, it has consistently armed us.

1.136Consequently, it strongly opposed you too by saying that not everyone is formed for the condemnation into which you declare everyone goes. You habitually make the utterly absurd argument: “But those who are afterward freed are not formed for condemnation.” Yet not even the surface of the apostle's words can agree with you in that way. When you say, “Everyone is created for condemnation by the law of birth, but some, though very few, are freed from it through the mysteries”, you do not assert what he does. He proclaims not only that people are freed from among the condemned, but that not everyone is formed for condemnation: some are formed for dishonor, others for honor.

1.137Just as it has become clear that the apostle said this about conduct, so it is apparent how desperately you lack the Law's testimonies. Against reason's thunderbolts you seek help from statements that disdain to assist you, indeed cannot assist you by their very nature.

1.139In its historical meaning, then, this passage contains the following sense, as God speaks to the people: “I did not hand you over to captivity out of hatred, nor have I now released you from the bonds of Babylonian captivity through forgetfulness of judgment. As far as it lay with me, I was ready to cherish you with constant goodwill, but I owed it to my justice both to hand over sinners to their enemies and to restore and free those who had suffered. Someone skilled in farming does not always devote himself to one task, merely breaking the fields with the plowshare; he prepares the land in different ways for the fruitfulness he desires (Isaiah 28:24–29). So I too vary the turns of my dealings, so that by distress at one time and comfort at another I may fit your will for the fruits of righteousness.

To make you understand how fairly I deal with you, I could disregard your complaints on the strength of my power: just as something molded cannot say to its potter, ‘What have you done?’ (Isaiah 45:8–13), I could impose the weight of silence on you. Nevertheless, contrary to these examples, I invite you to question me about my sons and daughters, that is, yourselves and the works of my hands, and to learn that I have done everything justly and never anything cruelly.”

1.140Both the prophet and the apostle therefore introduced the potter as an example to serve only as a comparison, not to indicate that human beings are as worthless in God's sight as clay is in potters' kiln and wheel. Having completed the explanation just given, we point out that according to the recent translation another meaning shines out in the same passage: “Drop dew, heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the righteous one. Let the earth open and bring forth the Savior, and let righteousness arise together with him. I, the Lord, created him. Woe to one who contradicts his maker, a potsherd among the earth's earthenware! Does the clay say to its potter, ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘Your work has no hands’?” (Isaiah 45:8–9).

Although historically these words describe King Cyrus, prophetically they describe the Savior's incarnation. Since he was to be born of the Virgin, the stubbornness of Jews and all unbelievers is challenged, so that they may not be enemies of trustworthy signs. For after saying, “Let the earth open and bring forth the Savior, and let righteousness arise together with him”, he said: “I, the Lord, created him.”

1.141The earth opens to bring forth a shoot before it receives seed through the cultivator's work. This is fulfilled in the Virgin's childbirth: through the gift of motherhood she preceded and excluded the function of a wife. Almighty God promises to do what was not customary. Foreseeing the multitude of unbelievers, he adds: “Woe to one who contradicts his maker, a potsherd among the earth's earthenware!” (Isaiah 45:9). That is: “Woe to those who, despite God's promise, insist that a virgin could not become pregnant! Although every one of them is shaped in a mother's womb from seeds established by God, with God's power intervening, they obstinately insist that flesh could not have been fashioned from the Virgin's flesh without a man's service” (compare Luke 1:34–35).

“You stubborn people, when you think I could not do this and prescribe limits to me because of its difficulty, although you yourselves were plainly made by my hands, you are like clay that, while being worked by its potter, said to him, ‘You have no hands’, the very hands then shaping it into a vessel. So you who ask who gave the Virgin a son without a man's seed must recognize that it is the same one who made you from seed.”

But since Holy Scripture permits varied interpretation, and both explanations have harmonized in a devout and reverent way, let the first book now end. Let its ending nevertheless remind the reader to believe that God is the maker of newborn children, the protector of the innocent, the rewarder of catholics, and the condemner of Manichaeans.