Fragments to Turbantius — Book 5

5.1.1Augustine reports that Julian’s introduction discussed hostility endured for the truth, and the small number of supposedly discerning people whose approval his party welcomed.

5.1.2Knowledge of the holy writings is difficult and suited to few learned people.

The aim is to establish that God, the creator of humanity and of the universe, is just, truthful, and good, and that he continually adds to his gifts to human beings.

There is one best reason for good studies: that God should be honored.

5.1.3Your position is so disgraceful and empty: it tries to attribute injustice to God, the creation of human beings to the devil, substance to sin, and consciousness without knowledge to infants.

5.1.4Simple people, who are occupied with other business and have acquired no learning, have nevertheless taken care to enter Christ’s Church through faith alone. They should not be easily frightened by obscure questions. Believing God to be the true creator of human beings, they should also hold without doubt that he is good, truthful, and just. Maintaining this understanding of the Trinity, they should embrace and praise whatever they hear agreeing with this judgment. No force of argument should tear this from them; they should reject every authority and association trying to persuade them of the contrary.

5.2.5Why, then, did shame about those members follow sin, unless an indecent movement arose there?

‘They made garments for themselves’ (Genesis 3:7).

‘Garments’ can be understood as clothing for the whole body, which belongs to the duty of modesty.

5.2.6Painters and poets have always had equal freedom to dare anything. [Horace, Art of Poetry 9–10.]

They felt nothing indecent or new there.

5.2.7If preference is given to the translation using perizomata—that is, coverings tied around the waist—I will say their sides were covered rather than their thighs.

5.3.8Augustine reports that Julian argued flesh’s disobedience should instead be praised if it is punishment for sin, calling it ‘an avenger of wickedness, and in this God’s servant.’

5.3.9If lust is punishment for sin, chastity must be cast aside, lest chastity, rebelling against God, be said to weaken the sentence he imposed.

5.3.10‘God handed them over to a depraved mind, to do what is unfitting’ (Romans 1:28).

When he attacked the crimes of the ungodly, he heightened them by using the language of punishments. Showing how deeply his heart, the dwelling of every virtue, recoiled from their shamefulness, he said that such people seemed to him not so much guilty as condemned.

How should we understand God’s handing people over? He hands them over by abandoning them.

‘They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible humanity, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles. Therefore God handed them over in the desire of their heart to uncleanness’ (Romans 1:23–24).

5.3.11They were already burning with desires for shameful deeds.

How, then, should we think they fell into such acts through the power of God handing them over?

5.3.13When they are said to have been handed over to their own desires, we should understand that they were left alone through God’s patience, not forced into sins through his power.

5.4.14The apostle says: ‘God’s kindness leads you to repentance’ (Romans 2:4).

5.4.15God hands people over so that evils occur only by showing patient goodness while they occur.

5.4.16Lust is just and should be publicly praised if, by refusing to obey him, it punished the person who did not obey God.

Nothing can be considered more praiseworthy if it avenged the injustice of the offense, vindicated the wrong done to God, and had so little partnership in sin that it assumed the office of avenger.

5.4.18‘Their foolish heart was filled with darkness’ (Romans 1:21).

We should note that he calls foolishness the cause of all evils.

5.5.19Augustine reports that Julian charged him with contradicting himself: after saying that bodily disobedience was the punishment returned to a disobedient human, Augustine immediately named other bodily members that serve the will at its command.

5.5.20When it comes to sowing children, the members created for this work serve precisely at the will’s direction. Unless impediments arise from weakness or excess, they obey the mind’s command.

This kind of movement belongs among the many things in our body that, through their own order and hidden arrangement, require the will’s consent, not its command.

Like hunger, thirst, and digestion, they require the will’s consent, not its command.

You feel ashamed — as you say — and are prevented by horror from speaking about such things, but compelled by necessity.

5.5.21The members do not follow in the direction we want if we will something their physical structure does not permit.

5.5.22Even the genitals obey the mind’s command.

They are not moved at the mind’s command, but instead await consent.

5.5.23Augustine reports that Julian regarded desire as more commendable because other bodily parts serve to excite it: eyes seeing in order to desire, and other members in kisses and embraces.

When drunken young men, excited also by flute music as often happens, were breaking down a chaste woman’s door, Pythagoras is said to have told the flute player to play a solemn spondaic rhythm. When she did, the slowness of the measures and gravity of the song quieted their raging insolence. [Cicero, On His Own Counsels, a lost work.]

It receives consent rather than commands.

It is excited by other stimuli, or broken and quieted by music.

5.6.24How fittingly Jeremiah, with the chorus of prophets and all the saints, would cry out: ‘Who will give water to my head and a fountain of tears to my eyes?’ (Jeremiah 9:1).

Glorious struggles.

The wickedness of a declining age.

The ruin of morals.

The destruction of modesty.

They say with the Manichaeans that a necessity of evil exists in their flesh.

5.7.25Augustine reports Julian interpreted his claim that desire is ‘indecent because disobedient’ as meaning that desire ‘is subject neither to body nor mind, but remains always untamed through a savage force.’

Glorious struggles.

5.7.26The Paternian heretics, also called Venustians, are like the Manichaeans. They say the devil made the human body from the loins to the feet, while God placed the upper parts upon it as though upon a base. They add that human effort requires only keeping the soul clean, which they say lives in the stomach and head. If the pubic region is smeared with the filth of every shameful act, they say this is no concern of theirs. Thus, to serve lust disgracefully themselves, they always assign it a title of independent power.

5.7.27If I concede — as you say — that desire’s evil cannot be conquered, I will profess myself an advocate of shamefulness. But if I said that I called this evil natural, yet one that could be conquered — that is, avoided —

People can avoid every sin when they can conquer the evil of desire. If lust is a natural evil and is conquered by love of virtue, all the more can the vices arising solely from the will be overcome.

5.7.29The opinion that the genitals could have served at the will’s direction in paradise is feeble and soft.

Augustine also attributes to Julian’s party the position that a human being can be without sin if he wishes.

5.7.30Augustine reports that Julian accused him of inviting people to pleasurable illicit acts by reciting the apostle: ‘I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh’ (Romans 7:18).

5.8.31For what they afterward did by propagation is the good of marriage; but what they first covered in shame is the evil of desire.

It is impossible for a good thing not to share its praise with that without which it cannot exist.

5.8.32Augustine reports Julian accused him of regularly calling fleshly pleasure ‘unconquerable.’

5.8.33The more modest parts.

Augustine reports Julian appealed again to the philosopher Balbus’s explanation that the bodily sites of digestion are removed from the senses.

5.8.34Augustine reports Julian understood his comparison involving lameness and reaching a destination as making ‘the destination’ the human being born from marital intercourse.

5.9.35Not conjugal — that is, licit and honorable — intercourse was prohibited, but the command was that the cause of this act be the will for offspring, not the pleasure of the flesh; and what cannot happen without desire should nevertheless happen not for the sake of desire.

O the depth of the riches of God’s wisdom and knowledge (Romans 11:33)! Besides the future repayment of deeds, he willed free choice in large part to fulfill the form of judgment. Most justly, the good person and the evil person are each entrusted to themselves, so that the good person may enjoy himself and the evil person suffer himself.

5.9.36There can be absolutely nothing that is both sin and punishment for sin.

Augustine reports Julian accused him of contradictory statements: that bodily intercourse was invented by the devil, and that the law of sin opposing the mind’s law was imposed by God as punishment.

5.9.39The Lord honored the glory of continence with freedom of choice, saying: ‘Let the one who can receive it receive it’ (Matthew 19:12).

5.9.40Augustine reports Julian understood the apostle’s warning not to possess one’s vessel ‘in the sickness of desire’ as referring to fornication, not marriage (1 Thessalonians 4:4–5), and denied that ‘one’s vessel’ meant one’s wife.

5.10.41Augustine reports that Julian said he had already refuted in his second book the view that Christian spouses generate children in this age so that, for the next age, those children may be regenerated in Christ.

5.10.42Nothing of that kind can be thought about during intercourse.

5.10.43Augustine reports that Julian compared parents with murderers of their children, on the ground that they cause their children to be born under condemnation.

5.11.44It would have been better for that man not to be born (Matthew 26:24).

5.11.45The ancient holy fathers did not devote themselves to producing offspring with the intention of generating guilty children to be cleansed by baptism, because the baptism through which we are now adopted had not yet been instituted.

5.12.46Augustine reports that Julian argued that, because intercourse was absent, Mary and Joseph’s relationship was not a marriage.

Whatever was otherwise would seem evil.

5.12.47Joseph was regarded by everyone as though he were her husband.

5.12.48She received the name ‘wife’ from the pledge of betrothal.

The first spouses were established so that they would be spouses without the union of the two sexes.

5.13.49Human beings are created by God.

‘You joined me together with bones and sinews; you granted me life and mercy’ (Job 10:11–12).

5.14.51A thing existing in a subject cannot exist without the thing in which it inheres. Therefore the evil in a parent, existing in that subject, cannot transmit guilt to another thing—the offspring—to which it has not passed.

5.15.52Augustine reports that Julian argued that Christ’s flesh, born from Mary whose flesh descended from Adam like everyone else’s, cannot be distinguished from other human flesh in the interpretation of ‘the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Romans 8:3). Julian’s conclusion, as Augustine restates it, is that no flesh is sinful, so that Christ’s flesh will not be sinful either.

You have not understood this apostolic statement.

5.15.53Even if newborns could draw some evil from their parents, it would be cleansed by God’s hands, because he himself forms them in their mothers’ wombs.

God’s works are hidden (compare Sirach 3:22–23).

This pronouncement exposes the emptiness of those who think nature’s depths can be comprehended by some investigation.

‘I do not know how you appeared in my womb’ (2 Maccabees 7:22).

Why are children not cleansed by the very act of their making, so that the maker’s majesty purifies them from the alleged pollutions of their parents?

5.15.54Augustine reports Julian cited his earlier statement that Adam ‘corrupted in himself everyone to come from his stock,’ as an argument about Christ’s descent from Adam.

5.15.55The error of Apollinaris, who denied that Christ possessed bodily sensation.

5.15.56Augustine reports Julian accused him of placing ‘those regenerated back under the necessity of crimes, while God bestows gifts of virtues.’

5.15.57A dissimilar nature could not provide an example.

‘He committed no sin’ (1 Peter 2:22).

Notice that the apostle judged it sufficient to show there was no sin in Christ by saying he committed no sin, teaching that someone who did not commit it could not possess it.

5.15.58Remove the reason of his example, and you will also remove the reason for his becoming a ransom for us.

We hurry to faith’s defenses in the hope of being free from evil. Yet we do not become free from what is inborn: male sexual capacity itself remains after baptism.

5.16.59Sins are not born from something free from sin.

5.16.60When it serves married people for producing offspring, lust is then honored.

Using lust always entails guilt.

Adulterers sin less than married people, because lust serves married people so that they sin, while it commands adulterers.

If lust is evil, it binds married people whom it serves with greater guilt than adulterers whom it rules.

5.16.61We know that its excess can be held within permitted limits by the mind’s power.

We testify that virgins and those practicing continence possess complete disdain for it.

5.16.62Marriage is nothing other than the union of bodies.

Propagation is impossible without mutual desire and the natural act.

5.16.63Augustine reports Julian accused him of offering shameful and criminal people an excuse: after committing unspeakable and unclean acts, they could say they acted against their will and therefore had no sin.

5.16.64Guilt cannot be born from an act that has no guilt.

5.16.65You praised continence in the Christian age not to kindle people toward virginity, but to condemn the good of marriage established by God.

If you sincerely invite people to pursue continence, then you acknowledge that those who will it can maintain chastity’s virtue, so that whoever wishes may be holy in body and spirit (compare 1 Corinthians 7:34).

5.16.66Augustine reports Julian applied to him the apostolic condemnation of heretics ‘forbidding marriage’ (1 Timothy 4:3), alleging that his position was: ‘After Christ’s coming, marriages are shameful.’

A human being is sufficient to lay down laws for his inborn impulses.