(p.87) 4. There were no sinless humans before the Incarnation of Christ.
8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship a forensic investigation of the doctrine of Original Sin gives way to an exposition of the dependence of right moral agency on the prior gift of grace. To avoid tardiness in outlining Augustine's thought in this period, I will offer a reading of the single most important anti Pelagian treatise before 415, De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, in which baptism, Original Sin, and the sinlessness of Christ are treated synthetically and at length. Passing over De Spiritu et Littera and De Natura et Gratia, whose focus is almost exclusively on the nature of grace in the abstract, I will offer a second reading of De Gratia Christi et de Peccato Originale of 418, in which the two aspects of Augustine's anti Pelagian project are brought together. This text is especially worthy of attention for being addressed to Pinianus and Melania the Younger, with whom Augustine was involved along with Pelagius as a member of Rufinus of Aquileia's circle.
De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione
Behind the first two books of De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione stand the 'six breviates' brought against Caelestius by the council of Carthage. Augustine's argument is built upon their obverse, which I construe as follows:
1. Adam was not created mortal; he would not have died had he not sinned. 2. The sin of Adam has harmed the whole human race. 3. The Law does not lead to the Kingdom in the same way as the gospel. (p.87) 4. There were no sinless humans before the Incarnation of Christ. 5. Infants are born into the state of Adam after his transgression. 6. Just as the whole human race dies through the transgression of Adam, so the whole race shall rise through the resurrection of Christ.48
Book 1 opens with a discussion of the first proposition: Adam would not have died had he not sinned, but been granted a spiritual body for eternity;49 he and Eve were created mortal (mortalis) but not bound to die (moriturus).50 Although the grace of Christ does not immediately remove the body's condemnation to death, it nonetheless draws the spirit towards that state of immortality promised at the resurrection, and is thus the ground of hope for humanity's eventual life at peace.51 At 9.9, Augustine turns to the transmission of sin from Adam. Responding to Caelestius' understanding of sin as voluntary imitation of the first transgression, Augustine concedes that every human sin contains an element of imitation, but that this is the case only because humans have inherited a fixed disposition from Adam from which such sinful acts proceed.52 Chapters 11–19 draw out the parallels between the gift of grace and the inheritance of sin, justifying the latter on the basis of the former: just as righteousness can spring only from incorporation in Christ, so sin results only from human identity 'in' Adam, which is transmitted from parent to child in the process of reproduction.53 Where Caelestius proposes that baptism 'upgrades' the state of deceased infants from a vague place of blessedness to full entry into the Kingdom, Augustine insists that unbaptized infants must receive eternal punishment, albeit of the mildest kind.54 The fact that only the baptized are invited to the Eucharistic table is further proof that redemption awaits only the sacramentally cleansed.55 Why it is that some infants are baptized and others are not brings Augustine to the inscrutability of providence: God alone can judge to whom he will give grace, and this judgement is above the minds of mortals.56
Turning to the content of Rufinus the Syrian's Liber de Fide, he refutes any suggestion that souls are thrust into bodies as punishment for sins committed in a prior existence: such a theory makes grotesque the justice and goodness of God in the light of the present existence of the disabled alongside the mentally and physically gifted.57 Following a catena of scriptural testimonies in support (p.88) of both Original Sin and its remission in baptism,58 Augustine touches briefly on the good of marriage in spite of the evil inherent in the mode of begetting children.59 The book ends in an extended Christological reflection, in which the grace flowing from the Mystical Body is once again underlined as the gate of salvation through baptism, and the appearance of Christ in the 'likeness of sinful flesh' provides the means whereby 'sinful flesh' is liberated. I shall return to this important passage in my discussion of the Christology of the anti Pelagian works that follows.
The second book advances on the first by arguing that, although God commands nothing impossible, the ignorantia and http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 11/27