The Anti-Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396–430

The Anti-Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396–430

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

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship difficultas wrought in the human through the bond of concupiscence makes fulfilling them an impossibility without grace.60 From 7.6 to 34.20, Augustine tackles the question, to which I referred in the previous chapter, whether sinlessness in this life is attainable. His position is nuanced: sinlessness as the goal of human life is potentially possible; however, Christ is the only human to have possessed a sinless state thus far, and even the saints have lived in the tension between gradual sanctification and the continued weight of sin. The contrasting obedience and virtue of Adam and Eve before their Fall then forms the backdrop to a description of Christ as the partial inheritor of their fallen nature in the 'likeness of sinful flesh',61 before Augustine returns to the theme of the necessity of baptism for salvation. Noting the issue of the soul's origin in the final chapter, Augustine promises to deal with it in a subsequent treatise.

Having written books 1 and 2 in 412, Augustine sent them to Marcellinus but shortly afterwards recalled them,62 in order to add the final book to the work in 413. This was occasioned by his reading of Pelagius' commentary on Romans. Having concealed the identity of his opponent in the first two books, Augustine explicitly names Pelagius in the third in tandem with those 'who say that Adam, even had he not sinned, would have died; and that nothing transferred from his sin to his offspring in propagation'.63 By Pelagius' reading of Romans 5:12, if Adam's sin had been passed to all by propagation, it must therefore follow that the benefit of Christ's death flows likewise to the whole human race, including non­believers.64

Pelagius is correct in assuming that the benefits of the passion can be possessed only by believers, Augustine admits, but adds that only the baptized can be considered under such a rubric; and the necessity of baptism, as he has argued in the previous two books, is proof of the sway of Original Sin over all.65 The discussion thereafter returns to the substance of the two foregoing books, arguing for Original Sin from Scripture (p.89) and the tradition. Paragraph 3.18.10 uncomfortably faces Pelagius' protestation that, unless the soul is propagated in the same way as the flesh, its contamination by Original Sin is entirely unjust. Unable to answer the point decisively, Augustine commends it to a reverent silence, in one of the weakest passages of the book. If the mechanics by which the flesh is infected with Original Sin cannot be adequately explained, he avers, it comes as no surprise that the corruption of the soul should also remain a mystery. The work closes with a final commendation of infant baptism, and an exhortation to heed the petition of the Lord's Prayer: 'forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,' and its reminder that each day brings with it fresh sins to be remitted by the grace of God.66

As should be clear from this brief survey, De Peccatorum Meritis builds on the claim of the Ad Simplicianum that the drawing of sin from Adam involves all in the double punishment of concupiscentia carnalis. Confronting both the acts of the council of Carthage and Pelagius' Romans commentary, it finds a proof for this in both the universal tradition of baptism and the analogy of grace: incorporation in the Body of Christ must also involve disincorporation from the sinful flesh of Adam. The constancy of obedience and virtue enjoyed by Adam and Eve before their Fall is a state to which humankind cannot return, as the process of sanctification now results in the resurrection of mortal flesh. In all of this, Augustine's method is circular. Having worked out his doctrine of Original Sin in De Libero Arbitrio by observing present ignorantia and difficultas, Augustine bolstered his argument in the Ad Simplicianum by the addition of a distinctive interpretation of Scripture. In De Peccatorum Meritis, Augustine was forced to support his teaching by further citations from earlier authors, particularly Cyprian. In the absence of an explanation of the manner of humanity's propagation from Adam in Scripture, the analogy of grace and the tradition of infant baptism are therefore the principal bases on which Augustine's anti Pelagian theological anthropology stands.

De Gratia Christi et de Peccato Originale

De Gratia Christi et de Peccato Originale was written in 418 in response to a letter from Albina, Pinianus, and Melania the Younger. Having procured a written confession from Pelagius after the synod of Diospolis, in which he anathematized those who deny humankind's constant need of the grace of Christ, 'not only every hour and every moment, but also in every one of our acts',67 they had asked Augustine for his opinion.

(p.90) Augustine begins De Gratia Christi by urging caution: every other piece of evidence available suggests that Pelagius' definition of grace is seriously reductive, amounting only to a belief in the remission of sins, from which the free http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 12/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship will can of itself produce good acts. Human goodness, for Pelagius, is the result of human will and agency; only the possibility so to will and act is the gift of God, and this is granted at creation.68 Where Pelagius speaks of grace assisting human agency, it is always with the implicit proviso that the human will is able to seek and ask for it beforehand.69 In order to fulfil the Law, Augustine counters, the heart must heed the commands in love. However, love is only ever the outpouring of the Spirit, which cannot be confected by humans alone.70 Thus even hope and faith are the prior gifts of God.71 The danger of Pelagius' system lies in his attribution of merit to humans on the basis of their good willing and ensuing deeds, by which grace becomes a reward for correct choices,72 among which is the choice to have faith. At worst, Pelagius draws into question the purpose of the Incarnation, by reducing the effectiveness of Christ's death to a sign that humans may or may not choose to inspire their moral choices.73 Likewise, for Pelagius prayer is nothing more than an internal reflection on the example of Christ and the commandments, and ceases to be a true petition for grace.74 In spite of calling upon the writings of Ambrose, Pelagius continues to misunderstand what grace is, presupposing that acts that are founded upon it cease to be truly human.75

In the work's second book, De Peccato Originale, Augustine couples Caelestius and Pelagius as partners in the same heresy, first laying out their movements up to Pelagius' confrontation with Zosimus of Rome.76 The heart of their mistake, he writes, is to unbalance the relationship between Adam and Christ: the graceinspired faith of those who lived before the Incarnation comes to nothing if the sin of Adam is found to have no effect on them: For their hearts too were cleansed by the faith of the mediator, and love was poured into them by the Holy Spirit; he blows where he wills without following an individual's merits, but creates merit itself. et ipsorum enim corda eadem mundabantur mediatoris fide et diffundebatur in eis caritas per spiritum sanctum, qui ubi uult spirat non merita sequens, sed etiam ipsa merita faciens.77

The progress of salvation history, moving from slavery under the law to life at peace, is threatened if the Patriarchs are not exemplars of life under grace. Their faith was in the Incarnate Christ, the Mediator in virtue of his humanity­to­be­ assumed; this humanity is salvific for all humankind only because it is taken from the massa peccati in order to heal it.78

Thus to deny Original Sin is (p.91) to deny the Incarnation: 'Nobody, absolutely no one at all, has been, is being or will be freed, without the grace of the liberator.'79 This leads Augustine into an exposition of Romans 8:3, in which he discusses Christ's humanity as an effective sacrifice for sin. Turning from this familiar trope, Augustine once again touches on the topic of marriage—which remains good, even though concupiscence inheres in the marital bond after the forgiveness of sins—completing the book with a final reflection on the unparalleled and immaculate birth of Christ.

As will be clear, De Gratia Christi et de Peccato Originale conflates Caelestius' teaching on Original Sin and Pelagius' doctrine of grace, to form a heresy that threatens to deconstruct the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Their mistake begins innocently; '[pelagius] uses the term grace everywhere with ambiguous generality'80 is Augustine's criticism at its mildest. Beneath Pelagianism's vagueness also lies an inattentive reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers, which undermines the power and goodness of God as the creator and redeemer of all things. Setting aside the veracity of both Augustine's anti Pelagian polemic and his theology of Original Sin and grace, the central place given to the humanity of Christ in both treatises deserves further detailed comment.

Romans 8:3 from 411 to 420

De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione

De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione set the agenda for a Christological response to Pelagianism that would outlive Augustine's volteface of 415. The final chapters of the first book form an extended reflection on the relationship between Christology and theological anthropology, and provide a full treatment of the parallel between the life of grace in Christ, and that of sin in Adam. Having enumerated a large number of scriptural texts in support of his position on the transmission both of sin and of grace in the central section of the book, at Pecc. Mer. 1.55.28, Augustine moves to http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 13/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship conclude his argument. Access to eternal life, he writes, is given only through baptismal participation in Christ, and there is no middle state between damnation and salvation; although marriage begets sinful offspring, it remains a good in both the restraint of concupiscent desire and the multiplication of the race. Having set out the Pelagian arguments for baptism as reductive, Augustine proceeds to write at length of the nature of the Church as the one body of Christ, extending (p.92) from its heavenly perfection into the situation of the Church in the present, conflicted by sin even in a state of increasing grace. He briefly reviews the rite of baptism, repeats his insistence on the necessity of baptizing infants even in their state of ignorance, and finally relates this to Christ's birth in the infant state. The importance and careful execution of the Christological content that follows must be emphasized: it shows Augustine abstracting his argument for the transmission of sin to make it an integrated part of a consistent theological system. The lengthiest section, concerned with the Church as one body with Christ as its head, is flanked by what constitute two extended reflections on Romans 8:3; the first dealing with the virginal conception of Christ, the second with his death and its effects as a result of his possessing the 'likeness' of the flesh of sin.

The central section, on the nature of the Church, proceeds from a reading of John 3:1–21, Jesus's teaching to Nicodemus that a man must be born of water and Spirit to enter the Kingdom. Baptism, contrary to the Pelagian teaching, is nothing other than the beginning of full membership of Christ's humanity: All those who have to be transformed and lifted up must come together into unity with Christ, so that Christ, who came down, may also ascend, reckoning his body (which is the Church) as nothing less than himself. For of Christ and his Church the text is most truly understood: there will be two in one flesh; about this he himself said, 'Thus they are now not two, but one flesh.' nisi ergo in unitatem christi omnes mutandi leuandique concurrant, ut christus, qui descendit, ipse ascendat, non aliud deputans corpus suum, id est ecclesiam suam, quam se ipsum—quia de christo et ecclesia uerius intellegitur: erunt duo in carne una, de qua re ipse dixit: igitur iam non duo, sed una caro.81

The rationale for this lies in the mechanics of the Incarnation: in the 'unity of the person' Christ remained in heaven as Son of Man, and walked the earth as Son of God.82 The inversion of the usual categories should be noted here: the Incarnation effects the transfer of the earthly to the heavenly even before the completion of the purpose of the Incarnation in the resurrection. On this basis, Augustine can argue: Faith in more credible things arises from believing in things that are more incredible. For, if the divine substance, distant by far and by incomparable difference more sublime, could take up a human substance for us, to become one person (and as such the Son of Man who was on earth in accordance with the weakness of his flesh, at the same time also remaining in heaven by divinity participating in that flesh); how (p.93) much more credible is it that other humans, his holy and faithful ones, should also become one Christ with Christ the human? fit ergo credibiliorum fides ex incredibilioribus creditis. si enim diuina substantia longe distantior atque incomparabili diuersitate sublimior potuit propter nos ita suscipere humanam substantiam, ut una persona fieret ac sic filius hominis, qui erat in terra per carnis infirmitatem, idem ipse esset in caelo per participatam carni diuinitatem, quanto credibilius alii homines sancti et fideles eius fiunt cum homine christo unus christus.83

Cum homine Christo unus Christus: the participation of the community of the redeemed functions as the refutation of Pelagianism at its highest level. What the Pelagian position does not require to be healed need likewise not be assumed. Pelagianism raises a question against the very necessity of the Incarnation itself.

Augustine makes clear that, just as the baptized (in whom the activity, if not the guilt, of Adam's sin is still present) are truly integrated into the Incarnate humanity, so humanity must also have borne the effects of sinful nature. Prior to setting out the composite nature of the ecclesial Christ, Augustine argues that none is cleansed 'except by the flesh which is like the flesh of sin' (nisi per carnem similem carni peccati),84 who is the one Mediator born of the Virgin, 'who believed the http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 14/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship angel, and thus should bring forth a child without desire' (quae angelo credidit, ut sine libidine fetaretur).85 Behind the good use of marriage to procreate lies the unpalatable fact of lust, 'which moves disobediently in the members of this body of death, and tries to drag down the whole soul to itself',86 to which alone the conception of the Virgin mother provides the antitype: He alone was born without sin, whom the Virgin conceived without the embrace of man and without the concupiscence of the flesh, but by the obedience of her mind; from our wound, she alone gave birth to a shoot of pious stock. solus sine peccato natus est, quem sine uirili complexu non concupiscentia carnis, sed oboedientia mentis uirgo concepit; sola nostro uulnere germen piae prolis emisit.87

The corollary of Christ's birth outside the movement of concupiscent desire is, once again, his embrace of the penalty of sin, yet without any of its guilt. Augustine returns to this theme after his central meditation on the ecclesial Christ, by extending the metaphor of Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness to cure the Israelites of the serpent's bite (cf. Num. 21:6–9). So he goes on: 'Death came indeed by the serpent, who persuaded humanity to sin, and for which he merited death. However, the Lord did not carry over sin into his flesh like a serpent's poison, but only death, so that there might be in the (p.94) likeness of the flesh of sin a punishment without guilt, whereby both guilt and punishment would be dissolved in his flesh.'88

The final passages of De Peccatorum Meritis 1 provide a coda to Augustine's characterization of sin as ignorantia and difficultas in De Libero Arbitrio 3. It is perhaps no coincidence that, as Augustine was working on De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, he sent a letter to Marcellinus (Epistle 143) to keep him abreast of his progress, including the assertion that his thought had remained consistent since the writing of that early work on the freedom of choice.89

Infants, he writes at 1.67.36, give clear evidence of their sinful nature by being aliens to reason, the difficulty attendant on which is borne out by the very long period of time that must elapse before they reach the age of conscience. Spotting the potential flaw of his own argument, he anticipates the question: why, if infant life is so clearly marked by ignorance and difficulty as the result of sin, was Christ born as an infant? His response shows the symmetry of the theology he anchors on Romans 8:3 only chapters before: To this proposition I respond: Adam was not the sort of creature [born in ignorance and difficulty], because he was not created in the sinful flesh that comes from the sin of a parent. We are that kind of creature, because his sin precedes us, and so we are born in the flesh of sin. On this account Christ is the sort of creature who, in order to condemn sin by sin, was born in the likeness of the flesh of sin. huic propositioni respondemus adam propterea non talem creatum, quia nullius parentis praecedente peccato non est creatus in carne peccati, nos ideo tales, quia illius praecedente peccato nati sumus in carne peccati. christus ideo talis, quia, ut de peccato condemnaret peccatum, natus est in similitudine carnis peccati.90

In order for it to be salvific, Christ has to assume a post Adamic humanity, which is neither the pristine nature enjoyed by Adam at his first creation, nor fully conformed to sinful nature, as in the case of the rest of postlapsarian humanity.

In addition to informing Marcellinus in Epistle 143 that his work on De Peccatorum Meritis continued apace, Augustine responded to his request that he explain his views on the origin of the soul. At De Libero Arbitrio 3.21, Augustine had posited four possible models of the soul's origin: either they are propagated from a single and primal soul; they are created afresh for each new human; they are sent from preexistence into fresh bodies by God; or they sink into bodies by their own choice. To Marcellinus he reaffirmed his earlier indecision, brushing it aside in favour of: 'what I am certain of, that after the sin of the first human, other humans have been and are being born in the flesh (p.95) of sin, to heal which the Lord came in the likeness of the flesh of sin.'91 Augustine's selfdefence reechoes in the final chapter of De Peccatorum Meritis 2. It is pertinent, he writes, to ask whether the forgiveness required by the soul arises from its propagation in the http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 15/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship same manner as the flesh; if it is not propagated, its guilt may be the result that it 'is mixed' (miscetur) with the flesh of sin; if God creates souls afresh, it is valid to ask how he is not properly the author of their sin. Augustine leaves the point with a promise: 'This is a considerable question, and it requires a full discussion elsewhere.'92 Unable to define the precise way in which sinful flesh is synonymous with a sinful soul, he leaves the subject of Christ's sinlessness untouched. Neither his Epistle 167 to Jerome, arguing against a 'fresh creation' model, nor his treatise De Anima et eius Origine of 419–20 would adequately deal with this problem, leaving him open to the attack of Julian of Eclanum, as I shall later show.

De Gratia Christi et de Peccato Originale

Augustine's treatment of Romans 8:3 in the closing chapters of De Peccato Originale attempts to provide a Christological rebuttal of Pelagianism's threat to the whole order of salvation history, enlarging on the remit of De Peccatorum Meritis to refute the coupling of Christ's flesh with that of sinless, newborn infants. The central section of the book argues that Pelagius' denial of the necessity of grace for both good works and faith nullifies the prefiguration of the gospel found in the Old Testament. To deny Original Sin's effects on the will is also to deny the 'giftedness' of grace to the undeserving soul; thus the faith of the Patriarchs ceases to anticipate the gratuitousness of the Incarnation and the benefits that proceed from it.

Augustine responds first by quoting Christ: 'Abraham desired to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad' (John 8:56), proof that the Patriarchs were well aware that the salvation of humankind was to come by the sharing of the eternal Son in their own flesh.93 Melchizedek confirmed his insight, and prophesied the manner of Christ's priesthood as Mediator between God and humanity in virtue of his human nature.94 What the Patriarchs recognized is damnable for Christians to deny, as Augustine writes: Whoever maintains that human nature, in whichever age you care to mention, had no need of the physician who is the second Adam, because it was not vitiated in the first: he is convicted as an enemy of the grace of God, not on any question in which one (p.96) could doubt or be in error with a wholesome faith, but by the Rule of Faith by which we are Christians. quapropter quisquis humanam contendit in qualibet aetate naturam non indigere medico secundo adam, quia non est uitiata in primo adam, non in aliqua quaestione, in qua dubitare uel errari salua fide potest, sed in ipsa regula fidei, qua christiani sumus, gratiae dei conuincitur inimicus.95

In addition to the faith of the Old Testament Fathers, the rule of circumcision witnesses to the punishment given to Adam, for which it functions as a sign.96 The following chapter fleetingly returns to the difficult topic of the origin of the soul: the circumcision of infants is not to be attributed to God's judgement on sins committed in a past life, as some of the Platonists have taught; rather, it is because infants belong 'to the mass of perdition, and are rightly understood to have been born from Adam and condemned under the requirement of the ancient debt, unless they are no longer in such debt, having been freed by grace'.97

Augustine moves into an exegesis of Romans 8:3 immediately following, at Pecc. Orig. 37.32. While the coming of Christ brought with it a change of outward sacramentals—circumcision being superseded by baptism—his healing grace remained the same. Christian circumcision does away with the flesh of sin: The propagation of a condemned origin condemns us, unless we are cleansed by the likeness of the flesh of sin, in which he was sent without sin and who condemned sin by sin: for he was made sin for our sake. damnatae originis propagatio nos damnat, nisi mundemur similitudine carnis peccati, in qua missus est sine peccato, qui tamen de peccato damnaret peccatum: factus est enim pro nobis peccatum.

As a latterday scapegoat, the sinless humanity of Christ was offered as a sacrifice for sin, by which it is designated 'sin' http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 16/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship by representation; baptism is accordingly a circumcision into the flesh of the risen Christ, from whose clean Body the flesh of his Church is purged. Augustine's handling of the text of Romans here is reminiscent of his earlier exegesis in the Expositio Propositionum, in which the soteriological outcome of Christ's sinless death is emphasized; however, its Christological basis is not far away. In the penultimate chapter of the book, Augustine cites Ambrose's exposition of Romans 8:3 from De Poenitentia 1.3.13 in support of his teaching on Original Sin, and immediately follows this with a gloss from his commentary on Luke: Ambrose writes that it was not the embrace of a man that opened the mysterious hiddenness of the Virgin's womb; rather, the Holy Spirit poured a spotless seed into (p.97) that inviolate womb. The Lord Jesus alone is holy among those born of woman, who did not feel the contagion of earthly seduction in the novelty of his spotless birth, and expelled it by his heavenly majesty. non enim uirilis coitus, inquit, uuluae uirginalis secreta reserauit, sed inmaculatum semen inuiolabili utero spiritus sanctus infudit; solus enim per omnia ex natis de femina sanctus dominus iesus, qui terrenae contagia corruptelae inmaculati partus nouitate non senserit et caelesti maiestate depulerit.98

As in De Peccatorum Meritis, the conception and birth of Christ from a virgin womb, uninflamed by concupiscentia carnis, are the means by which Jesus inherits a humanity that is real and mortal, yet actively sinless.

Sermon 183

Both the treatises I have highlighted show a high level of reflection on the Christological implications of Augustine's anti­ Pelagian theological anthropology. While the same cannot be said for either De Spiritu et Littera or De Natura et Gratia, the years immediately following these important treatises saw Augustine deploy his Christological refutation of Pelagianism, in isolated cases, in a popular homiletic context. As evidence of Augustine's Christological handling of Pelagianism outside the formal treatises addressed to a literary, ecclesial readership, I append brief reference to his sermon 183 here.

Very few homilies directed explicitly at Pelagian teaching are included in the extant collections; those labelled as homilies against the Pelagians by the Benedictine editors in some cases fall outside the dates when Augustine was concerned with Pelagianism, although their theological content runs in parallel with Augustine's anti Pelagian teaching. However, sermon 183 does fall within the correct time span, having been dated with some reliability to 416–17,99 thus falling between the composition of De Natura et Gratia and De Gratia Christi et de Peccato Originale.

In this short sermon, Augustine takes as his text 1 John 4:2 ('Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ came in the flesh is from God'), and from it proceeds to show that every condemned heresy functions at some level to deny the Incarnation. So it is that Arians and Eunomians deny the flesh of Christ by denying first the existence of the eternal Son as God himself; Sabellians likewise have an inadequate conception of the hypostatic identity of each of the persons of the Trinity, impairing their conception of the Word's unique assumption of humanity in the Incarnation. The Photinians make explicit the fault of all these heresies, by denying any divinity in Christ whatever. The heresy of the Donatists is 'more subtle' (subtilior), in their division of (p.98) the glorious Body of Christ by a schismatic ecclesiology. Augustine deals with the Pelagians last, as the most recent and perhaps subtlest heresy of all: the Pelagian 'seems to confess that Christ came in flesh' (videtur confiteri Christum in carne venisse), but, after all, is found to deny it as well. Augustine repeats the formula of Romans 8:3 in response: Christ's humanity is to be distinguished from that of all by the category of likeness to sinful flesh. By contrast, Pelagius attempts to equate the flesh of all infants with that of Christ. To the exhortation of the Church that one should be baptized and saved, the Pelagian responds: How are infants to be saved? It is not in baptism; our infant has nothing of vice in him, nothing from the transmission of condemnation entices him. If he is equal to Christ, why does he search for Christ? [Augustine responds:] Look; I tell you this now: the groom, the Son of God who came in the flesh, he is the Saviour of the great http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 17/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship and the small, adults and children, and he is Christ. But you say that Christ is Saviour only of the great, and not the small. That is not Christ. And if it is not him, you deny that Christ came in the flesh.

Quid salvetur? Non est in eo quod saluetur; nihil habet vitii, nihil ex traduce damnationis attraxit. Si aequalis est Christo, quare quaerit Christum? Ecce dico tibi: Sponsus Filius Dei qui venit in carne, salvator est et maiorum et minorum, salvator est et grandium et infantium, et ipse est Christus: tu autem dicis salvatorem Christum maiorum, non minorum: non est ipse. Si non est ipse, negas tu Christum in carne venisse.100

Because of its inevitable consequences for the humanity of Christ, Pelagianism must be considered alongside the classic Christological heresies condemned by the councils of the whole Church.

Julian of Eclanum and Semi­Pelagianism By the end of 418, Pelagius and Caelestius ceased to be a present threat to the Church at large. Having been excommunicated by Pope Innocent in 417, they experienced a brief period of reprieve under the papacy of Zosimus, only to have their excommunications reinstated by the same pope under pressure from the African bishops and the emperor Honorius, who exiled them in May of the following year. Pope Zosimus' Epistola Tractoria, the apparent volte­face of his own views on the nature of grace and sin, was set to seal once and for all the question of Pelagian teaching.

Once Caelestius and Pelagius had been removed from the hostile gaze of the African episcopate, Augustine's writing branched in three directions. His (p.99) long­running but reluctant interest in the origin of the soul had been piqued by his persistent and forced engagement with the theology of the transmission of sin. What had constituted pertinent asides in the composition of De Genesi ad Litteram 7 and 10 and polite enquiry between intellectual equals in his correspondence with Jerome and Marcellinus (Epistles 166 and 143) resurfaced as a fully fledged enquiry, addressed to the monk Renatus but in response to Vincentius Victor's misgivings about Augustine's public ambivalence, in De Anima et eius Origine, on which Augustine worked from 419 to 420. While this treatise was not directed explicitly at Pelagianism, it was occasioned as a result of the controversy. Its important discussion of the soul's origin will be a central datum of Chapter 6, which explores Augustine's handling of the origin of Christ's soul.

The second area of Augustine's literary activity lay in replying to Julian of Eclanum's indignant response to Zosimus' Epistola Tractoria. Together with eighteen other dissident bishops, Julian wrote to Zosimus to protest at the contents of his letter. Noting the substance of their complaint, Augustine wrote the first book of De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia in 418– 19; having read this, Julian replied to Augustine with four books entitled Ad Turbantium. Augustine shortly afterwards received a digest of this work, and completed the second book of Nuptiis et Concupiscentia by 421. At the very same time he was working on a second response to Julian for the new pope, Boniface, which was published as the Contra duas Epistolas Pelagianorum, also in 421. By 423, Augustine had read and responded to the full text of Ad Turbantium in six books, comprising the Contra Iulianum. Not content to let the disagreement lie, Julian submitted one further work against Augustine, the eight books of his Ad Florum, to which Augustine began composing his rejoinder in 428, the Ad Iulianum Liber Imperfectus. Death stopped him from completing this huge work, which, in the manner of the Contra Faustum some twenty­seven years earlier, responded to every one of Julian's propositions sequentially. It promised to be a work to compete in size with De Civitate Dei.

Thirdly, Augustine occupied himself in the 420s with the enquiries of the monks of Hadrumetum and Marseilles, later named the SemiPelagians. In 418, a copy of Augustine's Epistle 194 to the future Pope Sixtus reached the monastery at Hadrumetum; in the letter, Augustine had sketched the outlines of his doctrine of grace, merit, and predestination. In response to the questions of a number of the community, Augustine issued two major treatises clarifying his position: De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio and De Correptione et Gratia (both 426–7) were followed in 428–9 by De Praedestinatione Sanctorum and De Dono Perseverantiae, addressed to the similarly sceptical monks Hilary and Prosper, at Marseilles. It should be noted that the theological content of both sets of treatises, though related to the protological concerns of the earlier anti Pelagian works, primarily addresses the outworking of grace in the present Christian life and its relation to http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 18/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship the life to come. However, it is surprising that (p.100) in none of these treatises does Augustine return to the Christological themes he had already laid out in the anti Pelagian works; the Christological exegesis of Romans 8:3, explicit or elliptical, is entirely absent. Augustine's new refrain in these works, which I shall explore in the final chapter, was Christ, homo praedestinatus. Having set to one side the relation of the first Adam to the sinful flesh of all, it would appear that Augustine lost faith in the power of Romans 8:3 to carry forward his theology of predestination and election, which were now at the forefront of his agenda.

Whilst the Semi­Pelagian debate of the 420s moved the discussion into a new arena, Augustine's engagement with Julian remained doggedly tied to the nature of the tradux peccati and its outworking in the life of grace. Julian's criticism pivoted on finding in Augustine's conception of the denatured postlapsarian human a remnant of Manichaeism, unable to equate the adjuncts of fallen human life—desire, embodiment, and death—with a truly good God. In the concrete present, so Julian argued, Augustine's teaching functioned to abuse the good of marriage by conflating it with the repression of concupiscence, redeemable only by the procreation of children as an ancillary good. Against Augustine's by now established theology of creation and grace, Julian advanced a confidence in the persistent goodness of the created state, endowed with the capacity to choose the good and follow the example of Christ in virtuous and meritorious living: both of these constituted functions of 'grace'.101 Added to this, Julian was not slow to note Augustine's apparent inability to account for the role of the origin of the human soul in the transmission of sin. What kind of creature was the soul, to be infected by sin committed once in the body of Adam? Fredriksen argues that Julian's debate with Augustine reduces to sheer incomprehension at Augustine's insistence on the historical transmission of sin while also rejecting a materialist conception of the soul: for Julian, this failure to account for the soul's origin invalidated Augustine's whole system.102

Because Augustine's discourse with Julian involved very many of the issues at stake at the beginning of the Pelagian controversy, it comes as no surprise that he continued to deploy the Christological exegesis of Romans 8:3 alongside reiterations of his mature position on Original Sin in these late treatises. In the works against Julian, Augustine has been described as, 'if anything more sure of his ground, more trenchant, less open to self doubt and given to exploratory digression than ever before',103 a feature evident not least in his confident handling of the Christological implications of Julian's teaching.

(p.101) Romans 8:3 and the works against Julian Augustine countered Julian's anthropology with repeated reference to Romans 8:3. By far the most interesting and significant of these instances is found in Contra Iulianum 5, in a protracted passage answering Julian's criticism of the Christological extrapolation of his teaching on Original Sin. In examining it, it will be useful to bear in mind the structure of the whole work. In the first two of his six books against Julian's Ad Turbantium, Augustine reviewed the problem of Pelagianism at a general level, responding to Julian's accusation of the latent Manichaeism of his position by citing the writings of both Greek and Latin Fathers in his defence. In the third book, Augustine replied to the first book of Ad Turbantium, restating his belief in the goodness of God, and the good purpose of marriage for reproduction, the abiding presence of carnal concupiscence excepted. In book 4, Augustine moved to considering the second of Julian's books, in which he had set out a theory of virtue based on the grace of creation, grounding the present moral life in imitation of Christ. Augustine counters this: virtue cannot be exercised apart from the gift of belief, which must first be infused by God; an exemplarist Christology is likewise dangerously reductive. In the two final books, Augustine turned to examine the examples of virtuous living in Scripture, particularly between the married, and finally argued for the necessity of a belief in Original Sin on the grounds of the universal practice of infant baptism.

Book 5 of the work contains an extended treatment of all the major issues at stake in Augustine's debate with Julian in closely related succession: the origin of the soul, the nature of sex, marriage, and Adamic propagation all find their proof in a Christological formula tightly wrapped around Romans 8:3. At 5.17.4, Augustine discounts the importance of Julian's questions about the soul's origin with a repetition of his standard, ambivalent position: whether the soul is derived from the material constitution of man or tainted by its inevitable connection to man's material nature, the perpetuation of sinful flesh in humankind is dependent on the divine decree above anything else. At 5.46.12, Augustine considers Julian's insistence that, in order to have been joined in true marriage, Mary and Joseph must have had http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 19/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship intercourse. Augustine defends the perpetual virginity of Mary with reference to Matthew 1:20, in which the angel encourages Joseph to take Mary as his wife in spite of her having conceived by the Holy Spirit. The bond of marriage lies first in the vow, not in its physical consummation.

At 5.62.12, Augustine reviews Julian's Christology and finds it to be a direct equivalent of the Christology of classic Pelagianism, in the terms I have already noted in his Sermon 183: Julian threatens to remove the uniqueness of Christ's humanity by denying its separate status in the possession of the likeness of sinful flesh. Romans 8:3, which Julian claims Augustine has (p.102) misunderstood,104 must surely function as the proof of Augustine's central position: 'the flesh of Christ is not the flesh of sin, but is like the flesh of sin; what remains but for us to understand that, his flesh excepted, all of the rest of human flesh is the flesh of sin?'105 Anyone who insists that Christ and all share a flesh of the same purity is detestandus haereticus.106 Julian's contention that a God who creates every soul separately at the moment of conception would not permit it to be tainted by the sins of its earthly parents does not stand up: the existence of those with bodily deformities proves that God does not create each person in a perfect state, but rather permits the transmission of deformity by parental descent.107

Once again, Augustine uses the example of Christ to prove his argument, referring Julian to De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione 1.10, and repeating his point clearly. By means of his virginal conception, Christ assumes a nature that both is and is not shared with all: it represents humanity in the stasis of mortality, but without participating in the flow of sin's transmission and its effect on his human will: The flesh of Christ drew its mortality from the body of his mortal mother, because he found her body to be mortal. He did not draw the contagion of Original Sin from it, because he did not find there the concupiscence of one who lies with another. However, if he had taken only the substance of flesh from his mother without her mortality, not only would his flesh have been the flesh of sin, but it could not have been in the likeness of the flesh of sin.

Caro itaque Christi mortalitatem de mortalitate materni corporis traxit, quia mortale corpus eius inuenit: contagium uero peccati originalis non traxit, quia concumbentis concupiscentiam non inuenit. Si autem nec mortalitatem, sed solum substantiam carnis de matre sumpsisset, non solum caro eius caro peccati, sed nec similitudo carnis peccati esse potuisset.108

Augustine's argument is startling: Christ's assumption of the substance of flesh alone stands as a theoretical possibility. However, such a human nature would not be a response to the condition of man in need of salvation.

Julian can only understand Augustine's Christology to be a version of Apollinarianism: excluding carnal sensibility from Christ he can equate only with a denial of the assumption of a fully human soul. Augustine rejoins: 'The senses of the flesh are one thing, without which no one has been, is, or will be human living in a body; concupiscence, by which the flesh lusts against the spirit, is quite another.'109 Uncontrolled lust is not synonymous with (p.103) animate life as it ought to be, and as it was so constituted in the first humans. It is vital, however, that Christ assume a mortal human nature in order to give humans an example of suffering to which Christians can be ecclesially joined, thus, 'he experienced pains for us, but not lusts'.110

Augustine and Julian begin from different theological–anthropological assumptions. Julian, wishing to defend the continuity of the goodness of human nature throughout history, cannot accept a Christology that depends on a belief in the radical discontinuity in human nature brought about through sin. Augustine's Christ appears to be fully human: but which human? He does not spell out in the Contra Iulianum what is his underlying thought: Christ possesses a human nature that is composed of elements of humanity both before and after the Fall. Like Adam before the Fall, he is not born into the succession of transmitted, sinful desire. In the same passage cited above, Augustine makes this clear: just as Adam was made from the virgin ground, so Christ was born of the virgin womb. As a result, he has a perfect human will. By his divine will, he freely chooses to take a mortal, postlapsarian nature, and the example he leaves of dying rightly is http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 20/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship effective because it is transmitted by grace and appropriated by the Church through incorporation into himself. By Augustine's reading, Julian's Christ functions in a vacuum, offering an example of virtue to a humanity already capable of right living, which does not require incorporation into the mystical Body of the Church.

Yet Julian's criticism carries some weight. Augustine's theological anthropology knowingly fractures human nature into progressive stages of sanctification. At both a salvation–historical and individual level, humans must endure the denaturing of God's punishment for sin in mortality and the incapacity of the will to acquire its own good. In the life of grace, the defectiveness of the human will is rectified by God's selfgiving, manifested in baptism and increased in the continual outpouring of divine love; nonetheless, mortality and the fixed datum of incapacity remain, even though sin's guilt is removed. The repeated dictum 'sin and the penalty of the sin are the same' runs throughout the anti Pelagian treatises, exemplified by De Natura et Gratia 24.22: Of course, this darkening was both their penalty and punishment; but through this punishment, this blindness of the heart that comes after the light of wisdom has departed, they fell into more numerous and worse sins still … As the punishment of sin … they too were sins … utique ista obscuratio uindicta et poena iam fuit; et tamen per hanc poenam, id est per cordis caecitatem, quae fit deserente luce sapientiae, in plura et grauia peccata conlapsi sunt … et quia poena est iniquitatis, cum sit et iniquitas …

(p.104) In all of this, Romans 8:3 is central to Augustine's anti Pelagian Christology because it seemingly provides a rationale by which Christ's flesh—as flesh received from a mortal mother—can itself be mortal, while his will—conceived without concupiscence—can be free from the moral blindness concomitant with mortality. Christ thus accepts only half the penalty of sin; he is like fallen humanity, but unlike it in the possession of a perfect will to which neither the guilt nor the difficultas or ignorantia of the Fall attach.

Throughout this chapter, I have noted Augustine's increasing tendency throughout the 390s to conflate the voluntary aspect of sin with the corporeal language of Scripture: pure ignorantia becomes desideria carnis, itself later glossed as the concupiscentia carnis of the caro peccati. For the fallen human of Augustine's anti Pelagian works, guilt for Adam's sin and the present addiction to sin are both inextricably bound to the death of the flesh. In spite of Augustine's protestations to the contrary, his doctrine of Original Sin finally characterizes the condition of embodiment as the punishment for sin: being a dying thing is synonymous with being a sinner. Julian's apparently leftfield criticism of Augustine as an Apollinarian manqué lands in the central inconsistency of his Christology. For Augustine, the fallen human is the guilty soul that desires its own inevitable death. For Julian reading Augustine, a Christ who assumes mortality without this willtodeath assumes an unrecognizable, anomalous humanity, akin to neither the pristine Adam, his damned descendants, or the saints in glory, as Augustine depicts them. Without accounting for the relationship between Christ's human soul and that inherited from Adam by all sinful flesh, a Christ without a carnally concupiscent soul appears not, Julian suggests, to have any soul at all.

Conclusion This chapter began from the observation that Augustine's exegesis of Romans 8:3 constitutes the Christological refrain of his anti Pelagian anthropology. In order to access Augustine's understanding of Christ 'in the likeness of sinful flesh', I have moved backwards into his theological anthropology, to examine his prior understanding of the nature of 'sinful flesh'. Working from the assumption that the anti Pelagian works are built on the foundations laid in the Ad Simplicianum, I began by offering a close reading of the works that lead up to it: De Libero Arbitrio, the Pauline commentaries, and the Pauline exegesis found in De Diversis Quaestionibus 83. This showed Augustine move away from an abstract definition of sin as a turning from the eternally good God to inferior temporal goods, towards a more concrete and historicized account, centred on the concupiscentia carnalis of the massa peccati. The Ad Simplicianum reveals the fruition of Augustine's reflection: humankind, (p.105) propagated from Adam, shares in his double punishment of http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 21/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship mortality and uncontrollable desire. Likewise, these early works show Augustine apply Romans 8:3 as the direct corollary of his definition of sinful, concupiscent, flesh. Initially focusing on the soteriological implications of the passage in which a sinless Christ is 'made sin' on the cross as a worthy sacrifice, Augustine shifts to an emphasis on the origin of Christ's sinlessness, his conception from a woman without the taint of concupiscence. From her, he takes mortal flesh, without a sinful will; thus he inherits only part of the divine punishment for Adam's Fall.

The works of the second period, from 412 to 420, show Augustine deploy his earlier vocabulary of the concupiscent massa to Pelagianism. Initially focusing on Caelestius' denial of Original Sin in De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, after 415 De Gratia Christi et de Peccato Originale shows Augustine's shift of focus. Now a synthetic and single heresy, Pelagianism's denial of both sin and grace threatens to annul the order of salvation history and evacuate the Incarnation and death of Christ of both purpose and meaning: it removes the wounds that require divine healing. Thus, in the former work, Romans 8:3 argues for the uniqueness of Christ's humanity, whose mortal sinlessness forms the median locus between sinful mortality and God's perfectly good eternity. The latter extends the salvific potency of Christ's flesh into the Old Testament past, trusting in which the Patriarchs stood as witnesses to a redemption from Original Sin that leads to grace and peace. In both instances, the character of Christ's virginal conception remains a fixed and consistently handled datum, the origins of which Augustine partly reveals by reference to Ambrose of Milan.

In the third period, Augustine's attention divides, responding to the Semi­Pelagians with an extended treatment of grace and its relationship to predestination, and to Julian of Eclanum with lengthy repetitions of his position on Original Sin. While the works for the monks of Hadrumetum and Marseilles accordingly move away from a discussion of the sinlessness of Christ, those against Julian occasion further exposition of Romans 8:3. Julian's criticism that Augustine had failed to account for the transmission of sin to the soul by accounting for its origin revived the charge of the Liber de Fide, along with the friendly enquiries of his allies. To this, Augustine would reply only with refutations and a retreat into the profession of ignorance. A major question mark therefore remains over his understanding of Christ's soul as a component of his saving humanity, and its relationship to the indeterminately formed souls of the massa peccati.

In the next chapter, I shall argue that Augustine's exegesis of Romans 8:3 is substantially indebted to his reading of Origen. Whether Augustine adopted more of Origen's Christology than simply his exegesis of Romans is the question that will form the backdrop of the two final chapters of this book, discussing Augustine's understanding of the nature and origin of Christ's soul.

Notes:

(1) This should be taken as one indication of the composite nature of the work. Drecoll (2007b) suggests a neat division between book 1, composed 387–8, and books 2 and 3, composed 391–5. Green (1970: 207–8) suggests that book 2 was left half­finished at Rome; only later did Augustine complete the second half of book 2 and compose all of book 3 in Africa. However, the harmony of style and content between book 1 and much of book 2, and the considerable discontinuity evident within book 3, appear to argue against both analyses. Thonnard (1941: 131) posits a continuous composition of book 2, describing it as 'very logically constructed', thus coupling it more happily with book 1. Finaert (1939: 167–71) presents an attractive solution: book 2 was at least half finished in Rome, and sketched out in note form, to be finished later. This would both explain the consistency of argument between books 1 and 2, while also accounting for the new language and ideas employed at the end of book 2, which are carried through into the final book.

(2) Lib. Arb. 2.53.19: Ad proprium [uoluntas] conuertitur, cum suae potestatis uult esse, ad exterius, cum aliorum propria uel quaecumque ad se non pertinet, cognoscere studet, ad inferius, cum uoluptatem corporis diligit.

(3) Lib. Arb. 2.53.19.

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8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship (5) Neither of the two speakers in the dialogue is named in the earliest MSS. For an exploration of De Libero Arbitrio as a fully impersonal experiment in philosophy on the basis of this observation, see Simon Harrison (1999).

(6) Lib. Arb. 2.4.2.

(7) Lib. Arb. 2.28.9: admonemur aduertere mortalitatem carnis huius et primum hominem ornasse, ut peccato poena congrueret, et dominum nostrum, ut peccato misericordia liberaret.

(8) Rom. 7:18; Lib. Arb. 2.51.18.

(9) Lib. Arb. 2.52.18.

(10) Lib. Arb. 2.52.18.

(11) Plumer (2003: 3).

(12) Drecoll (2007b: 255).

(13) Prop. Rom. 13–18.12f.

(14) Prop. Rom. 13–18.12f.

(15) Rom. 7:14: Scimus quia Lex spiritualis est, ego autem carnalis sum.

(16) Prop. Rom. 44.37: peccatis uincitur, dum uiribus suis iuste uiuere conatur sine adiutorio liberantis gratiae dei. Cf. Lib. Arb. 2.53.19: Ad proprium convertitur, cum suae potestatis uult esse.

(17) Prop. Rom. 45–6.38.

(18) Prop. Rom. 13–18.12.

(19) Mosher (1977: 2–20); Mutzenbecher (1975: pp. xxix–xlii).

(21) Div. Quaest. 83 66.3: 'From this we understand that there are four different [persons] in each human through whom he passes gradually, after which he will be preserved in everlasting life' (Ex quo comprehendimus quattuor esse differentias etiam in uno homine, quibus gradatim peractis in uita aeterna manebitur).

(22) Div. Quaest. 83 66.5.

(23) Retr. 1.25: sed huius operis, si perficeretur, plures libri erant futuri … cessavi alia volumina adiungere exponendo epistolam totam, ipsius autem operis magnitudine ac labore deterritus et in alia faciliora delapsus sum.

(24) Fredriksen Landes (2007: 293).

(25) Carol Harrison (2006).

(26) Ad Simpl. 1.1.4.

(27) Ad Simpl. 1.1.2.

(28) Ad Simpl. 1.1.7.

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8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship (29) Ad Simpl. 1.1.11: Non enim est haec prima natura hominis, sed delicti poena, per quam facta est ipsa mortalitas, quasi secunda natura …

(30) Ad Simpl. 1.1.10: translated as 'addiction' by Burnaby (1955).

(31) Ad Simpl. 1.1.5: 'Sin deceives with a false sweetness' (fallit peccatum falsa dulcedine).

(32) Ad Simpl. 1.2.10.

(33) Ad Simpl. 1.2.16.

(34) Rom. 9:21; Ad Simpl. 1.2.17: 'Does not the potter have power over the clay, to make from the same lump one thing a vessel for honour, another a vessel for destruction?' (Aut non habet potestatem figulus luti, ex eadem conspersione facere aliud quidem uas in honorem, aliud in contumeliam?).

(35) Prop. Rom. 54.62.

(36) Löhr (2007b: 502) argues that Rom. 5:12 is connected with 1. Cor. 15:22 here; however, it does not seem that the content of the Corinthians passage is truly reflected in the Ad Simplicianum at this point. This passage therefore stands as Augustine's earliest mature exegesis of Rom. 5:12.

(37) C. Faust. 14.5.

(38) S. 27.2.2; Rebillard (1999) places the sermon between 397 and 401; its extended exegesis of Rom. 9:14–20, very much after the style of the Ad Simplicianum, suggests a composition date close to that work.

(39) Prop. Rom. 40.48.

(40) Prop. Rom. 40.48.

(41) Cf. Retr. 1.19.8; I will discuss his move away from this important expression in detail in Chapter 6.

(42) Div. Quaest. 83 66.5.

(43) Div. Quaest. 83 66.6.

(45) Rébillard (1999: 773–2) and Hill (1993: 22 n. 2) independently date this sermon to 21 Jan. 396.

(47) Retr. 2.27: laboratum est quidem pro libero arbitrio uoluntatis humanae, sed uicit dei gratia; nec nisi ad illud potuit perueniri, ut liquidissima ueritate dixisse intelligatur apostolus: quis enim te discernit? quid autem habes quod non accepisti?

(48) The negative assertions, claimed to be Caelestius' own, run as follows in Gest. Pel. 23.11: [i]Adam mortalem factum, qui sive peccaret sive non peccaret, moriturus esset. [ii] quoniam peccatum Adae ipsum solum laeserit et non genus humanum. [iii] quoniam lex mittit ad regnum quemadmodum evangelium. [iv] quoniam ante adventum Christi fuerunt homines sine peccato. [v] quoniam infantes nuper nati in illo statu sint, in quo Adam fuit ante praevaricationem. [vi] quoniam neque per mortem vel praevaricationem Adae omne genus hominum moriatur neque per resurrectionem Christi omne genus hominum resurgat. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 24/27

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(49) Pecc. Mer. 1.2.2.

(50) Pecc. Mer. 1.5.5.

(51) Pecc. Mer. 1.7.7.

(52) Pecc. Mer. 1.10.9.

(53) Pecc. Mer. 1.20.15.

(54) Pecc. Mer. 1.21.16.

(55) Pecc. Mer. 1.26.20.

(56) Pecc. Mer. 1.29.21–30.21.

(57) Pecc. Mer. 1.31.21–32.21.

(58) Pecc. Mer. 1.40.27–54.27.

(59) Pecc. Mer. 1.57.29.

(60) Pecc. Mer. 2. 2.2.–5.5.

(61) Pecc. Mer. 2.38.24.

(63) Pecc. Mer. 3.1.1: qui dicunt adam, etiamsi non peccasset fuisse moriturum nec ex eius peccato quicquam ad eius posteros propagando transisse.

(64) Pecc. Mer. 3.2.2.

(65) Pecc. Mer. 3.4.2.

(66) Pecc. Mer. 3.22.13–23.13.

(67) Grat. Chr. 2.2: non solum per singulos horas aut per singula momenta, sed etiam per singulos actus nostros.

(68) Grat. Chr. 6.6.

(69) Grat. Chr. 7.6.

(70) Grat. Chr. 10.9.

(71) Grat. Chr. 11.10.

(72) Grat. Chr. 17.18–24.22.

(73) Grat. Chr. 42.38.

(74) Grat. Chr. 47.44.

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(75) Grat. Chr. 52.47.

(76) Pecc. Orig. 1.1–25.22.

(77) Pecc. Orig. 28.24.

(78) Pecc. Orig. 30.26–33.28.

(79) Pecc. Orig. 34.29: nemo itaque, nemo prorsus inde liberatus est aut liberatur aut liberabitur nisi gratia liberatoris.

(80) Grat. Chr. 43.39: ubicumque gratiae nomen sub ambigua generalitate commemorat.

(81) Pecc. Mer. 1.60.31.

(82) Pecc. Mer. 1.60.31: 'Indeed, through the unity of the person, by which both of the two substances are one Christ, the Son of God was walking upon the earth, whilst the same Son of Man remained in heaven' (per unitatem uero personae, qua utraque substantia unus christus est, et filius dei ambulabat in terra et idem ipse filius hominis manebat in caelo).

(83) Pecc. Mer. 1.60.31.

(84) Pecc. Mer. 1.55.28.

(85) Pecc. Mer. 1.55.28.

(86) Pecc. Mer. 1.57.29: quod igitur in membris corporis mortis huius inoboedienter mouetur totumque animum in se deiectum conatur adtrahere.

(87) Pecc. Mer. 1.57.29.

(88) Pecc. Mer. 1.61.32: a serpente quippe mors uenit, qui peccatum, quo mori mereretur, homini persuasit. dominus autem in carnem suam non peccatum transtulit tamquam uenenum serpentis, sed tamen transtulit mortem, ut esset in similitudine carnis peccati poena sine culpa, unde in carne peccati et culpa solueretur et poena.

(90) Pecc. Mer. 1.68.37.

(91) Ep. 143.5: quod certum habeo, post peccatum primi hominis natos esse atque nasci ceteros homines in carne peccati, cui sanandae uenit in domino similitudo carnis peccati.

(92) Pecc. Mer. 2.59.36: magna quaestio est aliamque disputationem desiderat.

(93) Pecc. Orig. 32.17.

(94) Pecc. Orig. 33.18.

(95) Pecc. Orig. 34.29.

(96) Pecc. Orig. 36.30.

(97) Pecc. Orig. 36.31: ad massam perditionis et iuste intellegitur ex adam natus antiqui debiti obligatione damnatus, nisi inde fuerit non secundum debitum, sed secundum gratiam liberatus. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter4?print 26/27

8/8/2015 Divine Humanity in Sin's Likeness Oxford Scholarship (98) Pecc. Orig. 47.41.

(99) Cf. Hill (1990: 334 n. 1).

(101) Cf. Lamberigts (1991: 343) nicely paraphrasing Julian: 'Christ's gift of grace is found related to our moral way of living: Christ's grace forgives our personal sins, inspires our moral activity, helps us in realizing what we must do and gives us eternal life as a reward. But this grace is in no way a correction of the created nature of human beings.'

(102) Fredriksen (1988).

(103) Evans (1981: 242).

(104) C. Iul. 5.52.15: Hanc apostolicam sententiam me non intellexisse, dixisti.

(105) C. Iul. 5.52.15: caro Christi non est caro peccati, sed similis carni peccati; quid restat ut intelligamus, nisi ea excepta omnem reliquam carnem esse peccati?

(109) C. Iul. 5.54.15: Aliud est sensus carnis, sine quo nullus fuit, aut est, aut erit in corpore vivens homo: et aliud est concupiscentia qua caro concupiscit adversus spiritum.

(110) C. Iul. 5.55.15: Ut ergo nobis patiendi praeberet exemplum, non habuit ille mala sua, sed pertulit aliena; in doloribus pro nobis, non in cupiditatibus fuit.

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The Anti­Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396­430

Dominic Keech

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN­13: 9780199662234 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001

Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3

Dominic Keech

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords

Chapter 4 analyses Augustine's Christology of Romans 8.3 as a reception of Origen's exegesis of that text. The methodology for this argument is established by reviewing the debate over Augustine's use of the term massa peccati as a reception from Ambrosiaster. Discounting Ambrose as the primary source of Augustine's theology of Christ 'in the likeness of sinful flesh', the chapter identifies parallels to Augustine's treatment of the text in Origen's homilies on Luke, exposition of Psalm 28, and commentary on Romans. This leads to the conclusion that the Christology Augustine uses to combat Pelagianism is in fact Origen's, and functions as a subtextual apology for Origen from within his anti Pelagian project. The chapter closes by suggesting that Augustine may have received an early draft translation of Origen's Commentary on Romans from Simplicianus, or from a close circle of readers gathered around him at Milan.

Keywords: Ambrosiaster, mass of sin, virginal conception, Ambrose, Ambrose, Expositio in Psalmum 37, Origen, Homilies on Luke, Origen, Commentary on Romans, C. P. Hammond Bammel, Simplicianus, Rufinus of Aquileia

In the previous chapter, I outlined the development of Augustine's theological anthropology through his early commentaries on Romans, the mature anti Pelagian treatises, and the works against Julian. In tandem, I showed how his exegesis of Romans 8:3 evolved through a broadly soteriological, to a more focused Christological, application. The Christ it describes 'in the likeness of sinful flesh' would become Augustine's counterexample against the Christological reductionism of the Pelagian heresy. Where Pelagianism denied the sinfulness of the newborn and promoted salvation

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8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship through a grace internal to created nature, Augustine's Christ bore the punishment for Original Sin in his mortality, avoiding its guilt by being born of a passionless Virgin. Augustine's consistent use of the motif against an exemplarist Christology illuminates his construction of Pelagianism as a 'total heresy', whose core doctrine promised to poison the whole of Christian teaching. While Augustine's agenda visàvis the possibility of impeccantia would shift in the midst of his anti Pelagian efforts, his fundamental position on Original Sin and its effects, countered in the 'likeness of sinful flesh', did not. Both points remain insufficiently recognized in scholarship on both Pelagianism and Augustinian Christology to date. However, I promised that the real significance of Augustine's exegesis of the verse lies in his receiving it not only from the work of Ambrose of Milan, but also—and more importantly—from Origen of Alexandria. With one eye on Chapter 2, the implications of this conclusion should be clear. Augustine continued to uphold the orthodoxy of the Origenian tradition within his attack on a heresy reputed to be the bastard of Origenism, even after his own treatment of Original Sin and impeccantia had come close to the anti Origenist fire of Rufinus the Syrian and Jerome.

This chapter will show the parallels between Augustine's exegesis of the verse and that found in the corpora of Ambrose and Origen. On the basis of close textual analysis, I will argue that the influence of Origen is both predominant and prior to that of Ambrose, and put forward a case for (p.107) Augustine's reading of Origen's commentary on Romans well in advance of its publication by Rufinus of Aquileia in the first decade of the fifth century. As a methodological prelude to this, I will explore the scholarly discussion of Augustine's reading of Ambrosiaster, eliminating his commentaries on the Pauline epistles as a potential source for Augustine's exegesis of Romans 8:3, at the same time laying out the criteria for a sound reception­critical hermeneutic to be applied to the central case at hand.

Ambrosiaster and the Massa Peccati It has been widely accepted that Augustine's understanding of the Fall, and particularly his use of the term massa peccati, was influenced by his reading of Ambrosiaster's commentary on Romans. The two most recent, authoritative Lexika in Augustinian studies both endorse this affirmative view. In the Augustin Handbuch, Eva Schulz­Flügel writes: 'Of particular importance is [Ambrosiaster's] exposition of Romans 5:12, which Augustine cites as the underlying argument for his teaching on Original Sin (cf. C. Ep. Pel. 4.7), although he attributes it to the commentary of Hilary.'1 This is seconded by David Hunter in Augustine through the Ages.2 However, neither indicates the history of scholarly controversy behind the repetition of what appears to have become an unquestioned, consensus opinion, except for providing the relevant bibliography. Before surveying this debate, I shall lay out the internal textual evidence in support of Hunter's and Schulz­Flügel's position.

In Contra duas Epistolas Pelagianorum Augustine sought to prove his teaching on the fallen state by reference to the common tradition, a technique frequently repeated elsewhere in the anti Pelagian works. At 4.7.4, he writes: For thus Saint Hilary understood what was written: 'In whom all have sinned', for he said, 'in whom (that is, Adam), all have sinned.' Then he added, it is quite clear that all have sinned in Adam as though in a single mass; as he was corrupted through sin, so all whom he bore are born under sin. nam sic et sanctus hilarius intellexit quod scriptum est: in quo omnes peccauerunt; ait enim: in quo, id est adam, omnes peccauerunt. deinde addidit: manifestum in adam omnes peccasse quasi in massa; ipse enim per peccatum corruptus, omnes quos genuit nati sunt sub peccato.

Though Augustine frequently cites Hilary of Poitiers in the anti Pelagian treatises, there is no formulation of this sort in his extant works. Ambrosiaster's commentary on Romans, however, does explain Romans 5:12 in these terms, and it has been established that a number of his commentaries have been preserved in (p.108) the earliest manuscripts under the name of Hilary.3 They also exist under the name of Ambrose (whence later the distinguishing expansion Ambrosiaster) and Augustine himself. The text, as found in his commentary, runs: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 2/26

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In whom—in Adam—all sinned. He said 'in whom' when he spoke of the woman, because it refers not to the species, but to the race. It is therefore clear that all have sinned in Adam as in one mass. Being himself corrupted through his sin, all whom he bore are born under sin. Thus from him all are sinners, because we all come from him. in quo—id est in Adam—omnes peccaverunt. ideo dixit in quo, cum de muliere loquatur, quia non ad speciem retulit, sed ad genus. manifestum est itaque omnes in Adam peccasse quasi in massa. ipse enim per peccatum corruptus quos genuit, omnes nati sunt sub peccato. ex eo igitur cuncti peccatores, quia ex ipso sumus omnes.4

The second piece of evidence for an Augustinian reception of Ambrosiaster is found in the Ad Simplicianum, where Augustine's application of the term massa peccati to his exegesis of Romans 9:21 closely reflects Ambrosiaster's parallel interweaving of Romans 5:12 and 9:21 around the same term: Therefore all humans are a kind of single mass of sin (since, as the apostle says, all die in Adam, from whom is drawn the origin of humanity's offence toward God); and they are in debt to the divine and most high justice. Whether that be exacted or remitted, there is no unrighteousness on God's part.

Therefore, since we all come from one and the same mass in our substance, and all are sinners, God righteously has mercy on one but disdains another. For the potter has a will only; but God has both a will and righteousness. sunt igitur omnes homines—quando quidem, ut apostolus ait, in adam omnes moriuntur, a quo in uniuersum genus humanum origo ducitur offensionis dei— una quaedam massa peccati supplicium debens diuinae summaeque iustitiae, quod siue exigatur siue donetur, nulla est iniquitas. ita et deus, cum omnes ex una atque eadem massa simus in substantia et cuncti peccatores, alii miseretur et alterum despicit non sine iustitia. in figulo enim sola voluntas est, in deo autem voluntas cum iustitia.(Ambrosiaster, Ad Rom. γ​ , 9.21) (Ad. Simpl. 1.2.16)

In turn, Ambrosiaster's exegesis appears to be reflected in the even earlier Quaestio 68 of De Diversis Quaestionibus 83: (p.109) Ever since our nature sinned in paradise, that same divine providence forms us by a mortal birth: not after the form of heaven, but after the form of earth; not according to the spirit, but according to the flesh; and we have all been made one mass of clay, which is the mass of sin. ex quo ergo in paradiso natura nostra peccauit, ab eadem diuina prouidentia non secundum caelum sed secundum terram, id est non secundum spiritum sed secundum carnem, mortali generatione formamur, et omnes una massa luti facti sumus, quod est massa peccati.5

As the Expositio Propositionum bears no trace of the term massa, it seems logical to date Quaestio 68 to the short space of time between writing that commentary and the completion of the Ad Simplicianum—that is, during 396.

A number of possible scenarios seem to arise from this evidence. In the first, Augustine read Ambrosiaster in 396, found the phrases in Adam quasi in massa and una atque et eadem massa attractive, and compressed them into his own term massa peccati. Ambrosiaster's neat conflation of Romans 5:12 and 9:21 further contributed to his own closely interconnected exegeses of the two passages. Having found a useful cipher that encapsulated his own theology of the Fall, Augustine deployed massa peccati with consistency thereafter, only circumstantially revealing its origin in Contra duas Epistolas Pelagianorum in an effort to prove his theological credentials. In a second scenario, massa peccati is to be attributed originally to Augustine, whose later reading of Ambrosiaster confirmed his coincidental insight and provided him with those credentials, to be produced against the Pelagians. A third finds the older Augustine with a weak memory, having read Ambrosiaster in the 390s but, by 420, forgetting the precise roots of a phrase that had by that time become a naturalized part of his vocabulary. Finally, a fourth sees him reading a lost work of Hilary during the 390s that contained the phrase, thus substantiating the accuracy of his later quotation. With the exception of the last possibility, these all constitute a valid case of reception; at some point in each, Augustine interacts with the text of Ambrosiaster's http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 3/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship commentary on Romans, with greater or lesser concentration. By examining the scholarly debate of this question in the first half of the twentieth century, I intend to fix on a number of critical judgements by which one or more of these scenarios, or another all together, can be privileged over the others.

In 1762, Jacques Morel published the earliest discussion of Ambrosiaster's influence on Augustine in his Dissertation. Claiming that Augustine nowhere else cites Ambrosiaster, he argued that the massa passage must come from a now lost work of Hilary of Poitiers, on which Ambrosiaster also drew. However, a true beginning was made at solving the question with a wholescale review of the person and work of Ambrosiaster at the turn of the twentieth (p.110) century; here, the monographs of Alexander Souter (1905) and Wilhelm Mundle (1919) were decisive. Unfortunately, their combined lack of conclusion about the identity or dates of Ambrosiaster's life offered no immediate solution to questions of his reception.6 Indeed, Souter's monograph contains no treatment of Ambrosiaster's influence whatever. However, the integrity of the Ambrosiastran corpus—including commentaries on all the Pauline letters and that to the Hebrews—was upheld by both.7 That the Pauline commentaries express a negative attitude to Damasus (366–84) suggests that Ambrosiaster flourished or was at least alive during his papacy, and on this basis Souter and Mundle conjectured that he might have been writing in Italy, or perhaps even North Africa.

The first argument for Augustine's reception of Ambrosiaster built purely on linguistic parallelism is that of Giorgio Bonaiuti. His conclusion is succinct: I think that it is exactly in his theories of original sin that Augustine depends closely and in a decisive way upon Ambrosiaster, from whom he derived, 1) The formula in which he embodies the notion of our responsibility in the sin of Adam. 2) The interpretation of the most discussed Pauline passages, especially Rom. 5.12. 3) The fundamental notion of man 'servus culpae servus gratiae.' 4) The general method of positive and realistic Scriptural interpretation, which is peculiar…to Ambrosiaster.8

The two criteria for Bonaiuti's position are the parallel treatment of Romans 5:12 under the term massa and its conflation with Romans 9:21:9 Ambrosiaster's use of the word, unlike its appearances in the Vulgate, is unique in connecting it to the sin of Adam. While he argues for broader anthropological and soteriological commonalities between the two writers, he offers no further evidence in support of the claim, so that Augustine's theological shift of 396 evident in the De Diversis Quaestionibus and Ad Simplicianum rests on a single word: massa. Bonaiuti's conclusion was repeated in parenthesis in 1927, in N. P. Williams' Bampton Lectures on The Fall and Original Sin, without detailed examination.10

Apparently unaware of Bonaiuti's work, in 1918 Alfred J. Smith published the first in the series of articles on 'The Latin Sources of the Commentary of (p.111) Pelagius on St Paul's Letter to the Romans'. Here he plotted Pelagius' use not only of Origen–Rufinus' commentary, but also of Augustine's Expositio Propositionum and Ambrosiaster's work. While he found a 'strong family resemblance' between Pelagius, Origen–Rufinus, and Ambrosiaster, his study drew no fast conclusions about Augustine's use of the latter.11 Five years hence, James Baxter argued for Augustine's reception of Ambrosiaster from Epistle 82, of 405.12 Challenging Jerome's exegesis of Galatians 2:11–14 in which Peter's occlusion of his Jewishness to eat with Gentiles is viewed as a just deception (simulatio utilis), Augustine supported his variant reading by reference to his predecessor, correcting Jerome with the reminder: 'if you look up—or remember—what our Ambrose thought about this.'13 As Baxter points out, Jerome's treatment of the text is consistent with that of Origen and, unsurprisingly, Ambrose of Milan as well. By contrast, Ambrosiaster is consistent with Augustine. Therefore Augustine must have had access to his commentary, believing it to be a work of Ambrose, by 405. The usefulness of this observation aside, whether Augustine had the text in the 390s remained unresolved. Returning to his study of Ambrosiaster in 1927, Souter made the same point: even granting Baxter's analysis of the letter of 405: 'We have no certain evidence that he possessed Ambrosiaster on Romans at the time he wrote his commentaries on that epistle.'14

With Souter's article the discussion appears to reach an impasse, the majority position reflecting the absence of substantive evidence in the reticence of Souter and Smith, the difficult theological neologism of massa peccati supported http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 4/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship only by Bonaiuti's grand argument built on slim foundations. The year 1930 brought with it the apparent denouement of Bernard Leeming's article 'Augustine, Ambrosiaster and the Massa Perditionis', the first attempt thoroughly to examine the question alongside a full survey of prior scholarship. He begins by finding Morel's argument wanting: it is scarcely conceivable that Augustine lifted massa peccati from a lost Hilarian work, as the term is far from being in his style, and there is no evidence whatever that he wrote extensively on Paul. However, he concedes Morel's observation, that it is odd that Augustine quoted nothing else from Ambrosiaster's commentaries. Turning to arguments in favour of an Augustinian reception, he admits the prevalence of the term in the Ambrosiastran corpus and the similarity of Augustine and Ambrosiaster on the subject of sin's transmission, quoting Mundle: 'Ambrosiaster goes as far as to connect the sinfulness of the flesh with reproduction.'15 Leeming then airs an intermediate solution: Augustine might have been sent the relevant extract of Ambrosiaster's commentary on Romans by a wellmeaning friend wishing to support his fight against the (p.112) Pelagians in the late 410s. However, the majority of Patristic quotations in Contra duas Epistolas Pelagianorum come from a variety of texts already well evidenced in the Augustinian corpus, making such a citation of Ambrosiaster an unlikely novelty. Turning to the parallels between Ambrosiaster and the Expositio Propositionum noted by Smith, Leeming simply declines to recognize the validity of his evidence.16 Moreover, Smith's claim that Augustine had read Ambrosiaster in advance of the Expositio contradicts Bonaiuti's argument that this reception occurred after the completion of that work, but before the Ad Simplicianum. All of this, therefore, argues against a case for reception. Thankfully, Leeming makes the prior assumptions for his conclusion very clear: Augustine insisted that his doctrine on Original Sin was held by all Christians, handed down as part of the faith, so that not even heretics and schismatics held anything else. If he spoke the truth—and who can doubt it?—then we have an explanation for the origin of his opinions…He derived it…from the common teaching…17

The fact is that there are very many resemblances or parallels to be found in almost all Catholic writers of approximately the same date when they touch upon similar questions.18

All of this is related to a prior suspicion of Ambrosiaster, aired in the articulation of the 'affirmative' position at the beginning of the article: 'Augustine derived his fundamental ideas of the Fall and Original Sin not from the general tradition of the Church, but from this unknown and, as Harnack calls him, ' "not unsuspected theologian".'19

As the treatment of the issue that considers most fully the methods for proving (or disproving) a textual reception, Leeming's article is crucial. It did not, however, seal the case. Martini's 1944 monograph on Ambrosiaster's life and works states confidently: 'It is certain that Ambrosiaster exercised the primary influence on both Pelagius and Augustine', regarding which Contra duas Epistolas Pelagianorum 4.7.4 shows how 'the argument from tradition confirms his doctrine of original sin'.20 The Corpus Christianorum Latinorum edition of the Ad Simplicianum likewise footnotes 1.2.6 with its correlate in Ambrosiaster's Romans commentary.21

As with so many of the scholarly trails concerned with establishing authorship, dating, and influence that dominated Patristics in the first half of the twentieth century, a critical methodology remains only implicit and fragmented in these works. None addresses what might constitute a valid reception, or (p.113) whether there might be multiple varieties of it. I begin with Leeming's critical priorities. It is clearly anachronistic to base a case for or against reception on the grounds of a standard of 'Catholic' orthodoxy made much later (if at all) than the authors in question. Even working from a definition of orthodoxy contemporary with Augustine (however that might be construed), the case falls down, as, for example, his reception of Tyconius shows. A perception of where orthodoxy ends and heterodoxy begins would not stop any one of them from reading and thus to some extent receiving heretical texts. In any case, Ambrosiaster is nowhere pilloried as a heretic; Leeming's reference to the judgement of von Harnack is, to say the least, ironic in this regard, and contradicted by his later claim that heretics and schismatics themselves supported the 'traditional' doctrine of the Fall. This aside, the more important flaw in Leeming's article is to assume that valid verbal reception has to be coupled with the conscious and systematic adoption of the ideas surrounding the words. The obverse problem undermines Bonaiuti's article, in its presumption that the ideas surrounding an adopted verbal motif must themselves also be rooted in a source http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 5/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship text. Neither oversimplification does justice to how people read texts.

Reception occurs on a sliding scale. Vergil's reconstruction of Homeric themes in the Aeneid is clearly different from the reception of Pride and Prejudice in the film Bridget Jones's Diary. One is deeply engaged with a text and its translation into renewed ideas, the other is less so. Closer to home, Augustine's lengthy quotations of the Latin Fathers in the polemical anti Pelagian treatises are different from his elaboration, often uncited, of themes from Ambrose's Hexaemeron over forty years of preaching and writing on Genesis. Readers consciously and unwittingly allow the texts they read, hear, or catch by hearsay to make variously deeper or shallower impressions on them. This internal judgement is in part formed by the traditions of reception within which any one reader has been formed (also a largely unconscious process), by which texts are harboured as more or less resonant upon reaching a safe intellectual haven. The same conditions apply to the receiver of a receiver ad nauseam: my reading of Leeming reading Augustine reading Ambrosiaster goes on inside a dense braid of interpretations within readings. This need not end in an interpretative nihilism, as long as an interpreter makes some of her intellectual allegiances visible. I have tried to do some of this in my foreword and first chapter. Previous chapters make clear that I do not believe Augustine was an 'exclusive' reader of theological texts, ignoring those considered by his colleagues as scripta non grata, were this actually a consideration applicable to Ambrosiaster.

On a reading of the texts in question it seems uncontestable to me that there is a very marked verbal parallel between their application of the term massa. Likewise, both Augustine's and Ambrosiaster's conflation of Romans (p.114) 5:12 and 9:21 around the same term is beyond coincidence. When this reception occurred is impossible to say. Smith's case for a reading of the Romans commentary before the Expositio Propositionum was written is reasonable, accepting his further verbal parallels. This does not contradict Bonaiuti's argument for a reception of the massa complex just before the Ad Simplicianum, pace Leeming. A return to an already read text often brings with it the discovery of something that had been lost on a first (or second, or third) reading. This may be the result of simultaneous engagement with other texts that corroborate fresh discoveries in old books. In this case, it may be that Augustine's use of the term massa peccati was verbally dependent on Ambrosiaster, but theologically prompted from elsewhere. This is supported by the fact that Ambrosiaster's creationist protology is markedly different from Augustine's developing conception of the origin of humanity 'in Adam', and, unlike Augustine, he has no theology of sin's transmission by concupiscentia carnalis in the sexual act.22

Augustine's references to Hilarius and Ambrosius are complicating factors. I do not believe Augustine would have mistaken Ambrosiaster's very un Ambrosian commentaries for works by the bishop of Milan. However, I think it likely that he could creatively forget the real authorship of a work in sharp argument with Jerome, in an effort to prove his position from within a tradition they both shared. Ambrose's own reception of Hilary, coupled with Augustine's belief that the Pauline commentaries were by the bishop of Poitiers (not unreasonable, given the manuscript attributions), would have made such an elision easier still. Thus discrete identities were collapsed within a chain of readership, only to be reapportioned later at different points on the chain when circumstance demanded. In short, Augustine's twinned exposition of Romans 5:12 and 9:21, along with the term massa peccati, are his own; but his reading of Ambrosiaster, however concentrated or slight, influenced their development.

This discussion of scholarship, along with the texts of Ambrosiaster and Augustine, paves the way for the reception study of this chapter. Central to it is the conviction that 'receptions' are pluriform. An idea; an image; a collection of words; the application of a proof text: all constitute valid cases (p.115) for reading and inwardly digesting the thought of another author. The philologist should look not for evidence of consistent textual epiphanies to prove a case for theological dependence, but rather for a slow and often shadowy incorporation of unassigned fragments into new forms of thought. In what follows, I will reject some instances of potential reception because of a lack of extensive textual parallelism and accept others on the basis of what is, by comparison, a very slight parallelism. I believe this is reasonable because readers are inconsistent, and influenced by more than just the texts they receive; the traditions of reception in which they operate have to be explored alongside a basic comparison of texts. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 6/26

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Ambrosiaster on Romans 8:3 Having established that Augustine's reading of Romans 5:12 was worked out in dialogue with Ambrosiaster's Romans commentary, I shall begin by investigating the same work for the roots of his exegesis of Romans 8:3. I first submit a reminder of the threestep development of Augustine's exegesis. In the Expositio Propositionum Romans 8:3 is treated soteriologically, attention being given to the second half of the verse, et de peccato damnauit peccatum in carne. Here, because he dies in the 'likeness of sinful flesh', Christ becomes a redemptive example of a mortality put to a holy and redeeming end. In De Diversis Quaestionibus 83, the emphasis shifts: Christ is born sine carnali delectatione, the means whereby his death can have exemplary, and thus redemptive, power. Sermon 273, given in 396, paves the way for Augustine's mature reading. His now pervasive use of the term concupiscentia carnis is applied to the text, so that the sexless conception of Christ sets his flesh fully apart: For he was not born from the seed of man, or from the concupiscence of male and female. But how then? By the annunciation of the Father.

Sed tamen ille carnem in similitudinem carnis peccati, nos carnem peccati. Non enim ex virili semine, aut ex masculi et feminae concupiscientia: sed quid? Nuntio Patris.23

Christ is born without seed and without parental passion. De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, written sixteen years later, repeats the consistent refrain: He alone was born without sin, whom the Virgin conceived without the embrace of man and without the concupiscence of the flesh, but by the obedience of her mind. solus sine peccato natus est, quem sine uirili complexu non concupiscentia carnis, sed oboedientia mentis uirgo concepit.24 (p.116) Ambrosiaster interprets the passage as follows: This is the 'likeness' of flesh, because, although it is the same flesh as ours, it was not made in the womb and born like our own: it was sanctified in the womb and born without sin, and he never sinned in it. For thus the virgin womb was chosen to give birth to the Lord, so that his flesh might differ from ours in its holiness. On account of this [Paul] says the same thing: because he was not born from the same substance of flesh as us, therefore the body of the Lord was not subject to sin. The flesh of the Lord was thus purified by the Holy Spirit so that he could be born in the kind of body Adam had before his sin, the judgement against Adam alone remaining on it. haec est similitudo carnis, quia quamvis eadem caro sit quae et nostra, non tamen ita facta in utero est et nata sicut et caro nostra; est enim sanctificata in utero et nata sine peccato, et neque ipse in illa peccavit. ideo enim virginalis uterus electus est ad partum dominicum, ut in sanctitate differret caro dominica a carne nostra. in causa enim similis est, non in qualitate peccati substantiae. propterea ergo similem dixit, quia de eadem enim substantia carnis non eandem habuit nativitatem, quia peccato subiectum non fuit corpus domini. expiata est enim caro domini a sancto spiritu, ut in tali corpore nasceretur, quale fuit Adae ante peccatum, sola tamen sententia manente data in Adam.25

While Ambrosiaster, like Augustine, makes the connection between the virginal conception and Christ 'in the likeness of sinful flesh', there is no mention of the role played by reproduction in the transmission of sin to infants, or any counter example to it found in the conception of Christ. Further, where Augustine is careful to apply only the punishment of sin in mortality to Christ, Ambrosiaster is less circumspect: his Christ remains under the (unspecified) sententia against Adam. Whether this applies to his humanity before or after its purgation is left unspecified.26 The clearest apparent parallel between the language of Augustine and Ambrosiaster occurs in their respective descriptions of the election of the Virgin. While Augustine first treats of the creation of Mary as a unique 'grace' from the mid390s, it is not until 412 that he http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 7/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship employs the language of election to describe this. In De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione, he writes: Therefore it was given to the Virgin Mother to bring forth a holy seed by her pious faith, not according to the law of the flesh of sin (which is to say, without conceiving by the movement of carnal concupiscence); he created her in order to choose her, so that he could choose to be created from her.

Ideo uirginem matrem non lege carnis peccati, id est non concupiscentiae carnalis motu concipientem, sed pia fide sanctum germen in se fieri promerentem, quam eligeret creauit, de qua crearetur eligit.27 (p.117) The formula quam eligeret creauit, de qua crearetur eligit, also appears in a sermon from after 425, showing the persistence of the phrase.28 In any case, the parallel between Ambrosiaster and Augustine runs only to a shared use of the verb eligo with reference to Mary; for Augustine, her election is intimately connected to her role in conceiving Christ outside of the carnal bond, which, as I have indicated, is absent from Ambrosiaster's thought. Moreover, Augustine applies the word to her simultaneous creation and election to fulfil this role; Ambrosiaster refers only to the election of her womb. To posit a creative reworking of Ambrosiaster therefore hinges on a single verb attached to the Virgin's role in Christ's conception and birth: eligere. Neither the early (soteriological) nor mature, Christological exegeses of the verse given by Augustine substantially concur with Ambrosiaster at the level of either verbal or theological parallelism. I therefore believe Ambrosiaster's Romans commentary should be ruled out as a source for Augustine's reading of Romans 8:3.

Ambrose of Milan Augustine's debt to Ambrose is beyond doubt. By his own admission, encountering the figurative exegesis of the bishop of Milan formed a milestone in his gradual reconciliation to the Church.29 The relationship between Augustine's early interpretation of Scripture and the method of Ambrose has been extensively researched; likewise, Ambrose's attention to Mariology and Christology is well documented.30 In the words of Huhn: 'Ambrose expressed the causal connection between the virginal conception and the sinlessness of Christ more often in his writings, with such clarity and determination, than any other Church Father before him.'31 We might, therefore, expect to find some relationship between Ambrose's exegesis of Romans 8:3 and that of Augustine, which views the text in precisely the terms of the relationship between the virginal conception and Christ's sinlessness 'in the likeness of sinful flesh' as a basis for attacking Pelagian anthropology.

It has been impossible for me to investigate the entire Ambrosian corpus for Mariological and Christological references focusing on Christ's sinlessness and the mode of his conception. Instead, I have relied for this on the exhaustive third volume of the Corpus Marianum Patristicum.32 This approaches the works of Ambrose thematically, finding in them 203 separate, (p.118) Mariological passages. This method naturally elides the fact that many of these apparently isolated pericopes are fragmented from longer, continuous texts. Nonetheless, on my reading only one passage makes reference to Romans 8:3, Ambrose's Explanatio Psalmi 37.5. In addition to this, I have searched the Ambrosian corpus for exegeses of Romans 8:3 using the Patrologia Latina database, finding a further five detailed and considered treatments of the verse made outside a directly Mariological context. I will briefly detail these here.

Ambrose's treatment of Romans 8:3 shares a common objective with that of Augustine, in distinguishing the unique human nature possessed by Christ from that owned by humanity in general. Augustine's refrain throughout his treatment of the text in his explicitly antiheretical writings appears prefigured in Ambrose's De Poenitentia 1.3.12: 'He does not say it was the "likeness of flesh", for Christ took up true human flesh, not its likeness.'33 This affirmation of the reality of Christ's humanity, in contradistinction to a Docetic Christology, is elementary and well established in other Patristic treatments of the verse.34 In a further two texts, Ambrose refers to Romans 8:3 in contexts entirely alien to anything found in Augustine's work. First, at De Fide 3.4.30, Ambrose describes Elijah as a prefiguration of Christ on account of his power to resurrect the dead. Secondly, at De Ioseph Patriarcha 3.9, he counts Joseph as a type of Christ, as both were sent by their Father to their brothers. With both, the fulfilment is distinct from the prefiguration: the forerunners possess http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 8/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship sinful flesh, their fulfilment only its likeness.

In the Expositio Psalmi 118, Ambrose exposits Romans 8:3 in a similarly distinctive manner: 'His flesh was "sin" because it was condemned by a hereditary curse; it was "sin" as the allurement to and servant of sin. The Lord Jesus came in a flesh subject to sin, and exercised in it the warfare of virtue.'35 Although he makes clear at an earlier stage of the Expositio that the Father sent Christ in flesh that is not sinful like that of other humans, Ambrose's expression 'in a flesh subject to sin' (in carne peccato obnoxia) is infelicitous, and stands in marked contrast to Augustine's much clearer definition of carnal nature, contrasted with the likeness of sinful flesh; and the insistence throughout his treatment of that text that only the residual punishment for sin in mortality extends to the humanity of Christ. The same can be said for the final words of Ambrose's exegesis of the verse at De Incarnatione 6.60: 'he assumed for us the taking up of the carnal body of (p.119) sin, subject to its weakness, not by the nature or working of sin when he was made the likeness of the flesh of sin, but so that our sin might be crucified in his flesh' (non natura operationeque peccati, utpote in similitudinem carnis peccati factus, sed ut peccatum nostrum in sua carne 'crucifigeret', susceptionem pro nobis infirmitate obnoxii iam 'corporis peccati' carnalis adsumpsit). While this text suggests a family likeness between Augustine and Anbrose in their understanding of the relationship between the similitudo carnis peccati and the atonement, and in Ambrose's subsequent reference to Luke 1:35, Ambrose tends towards identifying the flesh of Christ with the attributes of sinful flesh. As even short citations from these works show, Ambrose's exegesis stands within a broader Patristic handling of the text in its anti Docetic application, is typically 'Ambrosian' in its systematic allegorical application, and is somewhat imprecise in a specifically Pauline Christological context. None of these examples significantly reflects Augustine's treatment of the verse.

By far the most substantial Ambrosian interpretation of Romans 8:3 occurs in his Explanatio Psalmi 37. In chapter 5 of the sermon, Ambrose introduces the Pauline quotation with the usual distinction: Christ has a true human nature, in addition to the likeness to sinful flesh. I include here the continuation of the text, tabulated against its Augustinian correlates: (5.2) Our flesh is the flesh of sin because it has been filled with the deceit and poison of the serpent. After it was made subject to sin, it was also made the flesh of death, because it was in debt to death. Christ has taken up the likeness of the guilt of this flesh and the judgement under which it stands because, although he took up the natural substance of this flesh, he did not however take up any contagion with it, Death came indeed by the serpent, who persuaded humanity to sin, and for which he merited death. However, the Lord did not carry over sin into his flesh like a serpent's poison, but only death, so that there might be in the likeness of the flesh of sin a punishment without guilt, whereby both guilt and punishment would be dissolved in his flesh. (Pecc. Mer. 2.61.32.) nor was he conceived in iniquities or born in sin; for he was born not from blood nor from the will of the flesh or by the will of man, but by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin.

His flesh, not born of carnal delight, was not the flesh of sin, although there was in it the likeness of the flesh of sin because it was mortal. By sin alone did Adam deserve death.

(5.3) What therefore does it mean, "He condemned sin by sin, in the flesh?" Whether from the likeness of the flesh of sin, or because Christ took up the quality but not the practice of our sin (thus it was not by misdeeds but by the mystery of his mercy that he was made sin for us, who himself never committed sin); or indeed because in that flesh of sin, our flesh, subject to sin and the judgement under which it stands, he condemned sin in the flesh, teaching us how we ought to walk: not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit, although we are situated in the flesh?

What then did the Lord do? He condemned sin in the flesh by sin itself, by taking the flesh of man the sinner, and teaching now we should live; he condemned sin in that very flesh, so that it might not be lead captive into conspiracy with libido, but instead burn with a love of things eternal. In this way, he says, the righteousness of the law may be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

(5.6) Therefore his taking up of sins was done out of mercy, not because of any misdeed of his own.

(Div. Quaest. 83 66) But indeed, that death of the Lord came about out of loving condescension, not because of any debt. (Prop. Rom. 48) (5.2) facta enim erat fraude et ueneno infusa serpentis caro nostra caro peccati. postquam est obnoxia facta peccato, facta erat caro mortis, quia erat morti debita. huius carnis iam reae, iam praeiudicatae similitudinem a serpente quippe mors uenit, qui peccatum, qui mori mereretur, homini persusasit. dominus autem in carnem suam non peccatum transtulit tanquam uenenum http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 9/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 ­ Oxford Scholarship

Christus in sua carne suscepit, quia, etsi naturalem substantiam huius susceperat carnis, non tamen contagia ulla susceperat serpentis, sed tamen transtulit mortem ut esset in similitudine carnis peccati poena sine culpa, unde in carne peccati et culpa soveretur et poena. (Pecc. Mer. 2.61.32.) nec in iniquitatibus conceptus et natus est in delictis, qui non ex sanguinibus neque ex uoluntate carnis neque ex uoluntate uiri, sed de spiritu sancto natus ac uirgine est. non enim caro peccati erat, quae non de carnali delectatione nata erat, sed tamen inerat in ea similitudo carnis peccati, quia mortalis caro erat. mortem autem non meruit adam nisi peccato.

(5.3) quid ergo est: de peccato peccatum damnauit in carne? utrum de similitudine carnis peccati an quia peccata nostra Christus non usu, sed qualitate suscepit: non crimine, sed suae misericordiae sacramento, et peccatum pro nobis factus sed quid fecit dominus? de peccato damnauit peccatum in carne, est qui peccatum ipse non fecit; an uero quia etiam de ista carne peccati, hoc est, nostra hac obnoxia et praejudicata damnavit peccatum in carne, id est suscipiendo carnem hominis peccatoris, et docendo quemadmodum uiueremus, peccatum in ipsa carne damnauit, ut aeternorum caritate spiritus flagrans non duceretur captiuus in docendo quemadmodum in carne positi non secundum carnem ambulemus, sed secundum spiritum? consensionem libidinis. ut iustitia, inquit, legis impleretur in nobis, qui non secundum carnem ambulamus, sed secundum spiritum. (Div. Quaest. 83 66) (5.6) Ergo pietatis est susceptiopeccatorum ista, non criminis. At illa uero mors domini dignationis fuit, non debiti. (Prop. Rom. 48) (p.120) (p.121) The clearest wholetext to wholetext parallel appears in De Diversis Quaestionibus 83 66, where the flow of Augustine's argument, his verbal structures (quemadmodum uiueremus), his vocabulary (de delectatione…nata erat), and his use of Scripture (non secundum carnem…) indicate at least an acquaintance with, though more likely a close reading of, the Explanatio. The text from Expositio Propositionum 48 appears to be structurally similar to Ambrose, although the vocabulary is decidedly different and, once again, Ambrose's Christ assumes sins (susceptio peccatorum), where Augustine's assumes death (mors). Similarly, the apparent parallels between the homily and De Peccatorum Meritis reveal a kinship of thought, without sharing significant vocabulary or verbal structure. In different texts, Augustine exhibits both a theological and a verbal reception of the Explanatio.

While I would argue for the significance of the correlation between the two writers in connecting Romans 8:3 with both the virginal conception and the sinlessness of Christ, the single sermon of Ambrose cannot fully account for the prevalence of this motif in the Augustinian corpus. Huhn's study of Ambrose's Mariology proves useful in unpicking this conundrum once again. While Ambrose was the first Father to state the connection between Christ's sinlessness and his conception outside the bond of sex with 'clarity and particularity', his own formulation was itself dependent on a reading of Origen, whose work provides the locus classicus of this motif in his Romans commentary when interpreting Romans 8:3. Huhn acknowledges an apparent relationship between Origen and Augustine in the exegesis of this passage, and explains it thus: 'The agreement between the two passages can only be explained by a dependence on Ambrose.'36 I believe that, far from absorbing Origen through Ambrose alone, Augustine independently read a number of Origen's works in which he handles the virginity­sinlessness motif, in some cases with clear reference to Romans 8:3.

Origen, Ambrose, and Augustine Ambrose's statement of the relationship between the virginal conception and Christ's sinlessness in his Explanatio Psalmi 37 is found in very similar form in his work, the Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam.37 The passage in question (p.122) is recognized as a direct borrowing from Origen's fourteenth homily on Luke.38 The two texts are comparable, as follows: It was not the embrace of a man which opened the mysterious hiddenness of the Virgin's womb; rather, Then the Mother's womb was opened, from which she brought forth a child; it was a holy womb and held in reverence before the birth of Christ because a http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 10/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship the Holy Spirit poured a spotless seed into it. The Lord Jesus alone is holy among those born of woman, who did not feel the contagion of earthly seduction in the novelty of his spotless birth, and expelled it by his heavenly majesty. male had in no way touched it. I dare to say that what is written in Scripture applies to it: The Spirit of God will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; He will be the cause of insemination and conception, and he will cause a new infant to grow within the womb, without opening it first. non enim uirilis coitus uuluae virginalis secreta reserauit, sed immaculatum semen inuiolabili utero spiritus sanctus infudit; solus enim per omnia ex natis de femina sanctus dominus Iesus, qui terrenae contagia corruptelae immaculati partus nouitiate non senserit et caelesti maiestate depulerit. (Exp. Evang. Luc. 2. 556)

Matris uero Domini eo tempore uulua reserata est, quo et partus editus, quia sanctum uterum et omni dignatione uenerandum ante natiuitatem Christi masculus omnino non tetigit. Audeo quid loqui, quia et in eo, quod scriptum est: Spiritus Dei ueniet super te, et uirtus altissimi obumbrabit te, principium seminis et conceptus fuerit, et sine uuluae reseratione nouus in utero foetus adoleuerit. (Hom. Luc. 14.8.)

The quotation is short, but forms part of a larger re­appropriation of Origen's homilies on Luke in Ambrose's commentary.39 Weighing up the level of Ambrose's actual dependence of on Origen, Eusebius and Hilary in that work, Tissot writes, 'He records and retains their expressions, but in the meantime he has followed his own thought and arrived —with the same words, but constructing quite a different argument.'40 However, as should be clear in this instance, Ambrose follows Origen's phrasing and his theology very closely.

It is therefore highly significant that Augustine also cites the homilies on Luke in their original Origenian form found in Jerome's translation, quoting text which does not feature in Ambrose's commentary, and in support of the (p.123) Christological extrapolation of his anti Pelagian theology focussed on the sinlessness of the virginally conceived Christ. These quotations relate closely to his exegesis of Romans 8:3, and can be the result of nothing other than a close and persistent reading of the Lucan homilies over a considerable period of time. In turn, this conclusion draws sharply into question the supposition that Augustine's exegesis of the verse is dependant solely on a reading of Ambrose's Explanatio Psalmi 37.

Before proceeding to these passages, I submit a note about dating. Jerome translated Origen's homilies on Luke partly in a flourish of one­upmanship in response to the publication of Ambrose's commentary. The prologue to his translation contains his famous mean­spirited aside against the bishop of Milan, reporting that he could 'hear that ill­omened crow croaking; in wonderful style it gleams with colours taken from all the other birds, but in reality it is black all over'.41 He dedicated the work to two of his Roman patronesses, Paula and Eustochium; its final publication has been dated to 390 by Quasten, and by Fournier to some time before 392.42 We cannot know the precise date of Augustine's reception of any of Jerome's translations of Origen, except to note the letter of 394 (Epistle 28), in which Augustine tried to persuade Jerome to continue his work of translating the Greek Fathers, and Origen in particular.

De Consensu Evangelistarum (400) and Homily 28 Augustine's earliest adaptation of the Lucan homilies is found in De Consensu Evangelistarum, which freely reworks Origen's treatment of the genealogy of Christ in Homily 28. Origen draws attention to the difference between the respective lineages of Christ found in Matthew and Luke. In contrast to the latter, Matthew is specifically concerned to highlight Christ's descent from a family of sinners, exemplifying his coming to redeem sinful humanity: Because our Lord and Saviour came in order to take up the sins of humanity, he was also 'made sin for us, who committed no sin'. On account of this, God came down into the world and assumed a person from sinful and corrupt humanity…

Quia enim Dominus noster atque Saluator ad hoc uenerat, ut hominum peccata susciperet, et eum, qui non fecerat peccatum, pro nobis peccatum fecit. Deus, propterea descendens in mundum assumpsit peccatorum hominum uitiosorumque personam…43 (p.124) This idea is repeated in Augustine's work of about 400, De Consensu Evangelistarum, neatly tied into an http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 11/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship exegesis of Romans 8:3.: In the genealogy of Matthew, the taking up of our sins by the Lord Christ is signified; in that of Luke, the wiping out of our sins by Christ our Lord. Thus the former relates his genealogy in descending order, the latter in ascending order. For the apostle says, 'God sent his son in the likeness of sinful flesh', which is the taking up of sins. To this he adds: 'In order that he might condemn sin in the flesh', which is purification from sin. quapropter in generationibus matthei significatur nostrorum susceptio peccatorum a domino christo, in generationibus autem lucae significatur abolitio nostrorum peccatorum a domino christo. ideo eas ille descendens enarrat, iste ascendens. quod enim dicit apostolus: misit deus filium suum in similitudinem carnis peccati, haec est susceptio peccatorum; quod autem addit: ut de peccato damnaret peccatum in carne, haec est expiatio peccatorum.44

In an inversion of Tissot's analysis of Ambrose, Augustine here repeats Origen's thought, if not his precise words, in an interpretation of Romans 8:3 prior to, but in continuity with, his use of the text in the anti Pelagian works.

Epistle 140 (De Gratia Novi Testamenti) (412) and Homily 14 Epistle 140 was written at the beginning of 412 in response to a letter from Augustine's friend Honoratus. The letter handles a number of exegetical queries as a prelude to an exposition of the nature of grace; in part, this forms a theological reflection on the place of the recent Sack of Rome in the divine providence.45 In chapter 8, Augustine quotes directly from Origen's fourteenth homily on Luke, in close connection with the virginal conception–sinlessness motif he has built around Romans 8:3: On account of this he likens himself to a worm and says, 'I am a worm, not a human.' Humankind is accustomed to birth from a man and a woman, but I was not born of male and female, according to the rite of humans and of nature; I was born after the pattern of the worm. Their origin comes not from the seed of another, but from themselves and of themselves, and in their own bodies are their offspring formed.

From this [text] comes the more discriminating interpretation of our predecessors: Christ wished to be foretold under the name ['worm'], because the worm is born without fleshly intercourse; and in this way also Christ was born of the Virgin… unde assimilat se uermi et dicit: ego sum uermis et non homo. Ex mare quippe ac femina homo nasci solet, ego uero non ex masculo et femina, secundum ritum hominum atque naturam, sed in exemplum uermis natus sum, cuius non aliudne semen, sed in ipsis et ex ipsis, in quibus coalescit corporibus, origo est. (Origen, Hom. Luc. 14.8) dictus est hinc sensus elegantissimus a prioribus, ideo se hoc nomine christum praenuntiari voluisse, quia uermis de carne sine concubitu nascitur, sicut ille natus est de uirgine… (Augustine, Ep. 140.21.8) (p.125) I have been unable to find a parallel exegesis of Psalm 21:6 in the writings of Ambrose, a fact all the more surprising given its memorable vividness. Describing the exegesis as the 'most judicious sense given by our forebears' (sensus elegantissimus a prioribus),46 Augustine privileges it as both theologically and aesthetically (that is, hermeneutically) authoritative; it is consciously deployed as a reception at the level of both words and ideas.47

While this is the only direct citation from Homily 14 in the works of Augustine, the broader theological content of Homily 14 cannot have been lost on him, so complete and synthetic is its reflection on the relationship between the humanity of Christ, the sinfulness of all, and the necessity of baptismal grace. Its similarity to Augustine's anti Pelagian theology demands brief consideration.

Origen's text is Luke 2:21–4, the account of the purification of the Virgin in the Temple. He begins his sermon by observing that, while sinless, Christ died for sinners so that, having fallen in Adam, they might hope to rise with him. Likewise, sinners partake in him of a spiritual circumcision prefigured by his own circumcision in the flesh. After this event, he and the Virgin both went up to be purified together at the Temple, as the evangelist records it as 'the day of their purification' (dies purgationis eorum).48 Everyone in the body is counted as soiled, and Jesus of his own will was 'soiled, because he had assumed a human body for our salvation' (sordidatum propria uoluntate, quia pro salute nostra http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 12/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship humanum corpus assumpserat).49 By contrast, some people attempt to deny the embodiment of Christ, advancing instead the theory that his body was constituted of heavenly matter. However, it was quite fitting—as the (p.126) evangelist shows—that Christ should offer himself for the salvation of all dressed in the sordidis uestimentis of the body. The effects of this are offered in the sacrament of baptism, to be administered to infants, as he goes on: Little children are baptized for the remission of sins. Whose sins? When have they sinned? How can that washing apply to infants, except in that sense in which Paul spoke beforehand: 'Nobody is clean of filth, not even if his life on earth lasts but one day?' Since this filth is put off through the mystery of the birth of baptism, children also are baptized; for unless one is reborn of water and the Spirit, one cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Paruuli baptizantur in remissionem peccatorum. Quorum peccatorum? Uel quo tempore peccauerunt? Aut quomodo potest illa lauacri in paruulis ratio subsistere, ni iuxta illum sensum, de quo Paulo ante diximus: nullus mundus a sorde, nec si unius quidem diei fuerit uita eius super terram? Et quia per baptismi sacramentum natiuitatis sordes deponatur, propterea baptizantur et paruuli: nisi enim quis renatus fuerit ex aqua et spiritu, non poterit intrare in regnum coelorum.50

However, it should be borne in mind that, just as the humanity of Christ was purified only through his self­offering, so the purification of all will be accomplished only after the resurrection: baptism entrusts to its recipients a promise to be fulfilled eschatologically. From this baptismal excursus, Origen returns to the Lucan narrative. Typifying the Christian reply to the deniers of Christ's flesh, Jesus is offered under the Law; as Paul says, God 'sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law'.51 In contrast to the command of the Law that sons born of the conjugal bond should be brought to be offered to the Lord, the womb of Mary was opened only by the exit of Christ and not by the entrance of a man; Christ grew from the seed of the Spirit alone, and thus can be compared to the self­sowing worm. This novelty can be seen reflected in the birds offered before the altar to redeem the Christ child, as they constitute scriptural figures of the presence of the Spirit and the human contemplation of the divine respectively.

Although Origen nowhere cites Romans 8:3 in the course of the homily, the characteristic features of Augustine's treatment of this text are all present, not least in the clear connection of baptism to the purification of Christ's own representative humanity through the sacrifice of the cross. Origen's description of the humanity of Christ identified with that of all humans under sin is instead configured around Galatians 4.4, with its two propositions 'born of a woman' and 'born under the Law' corresponding to 'sent' and 'in the likeness of sinful flesh' in the passage from Romans. And, where Origen verges on equating the possession of a sinful nature with embodiment itself, his exegesis is evidently amenable to an Augustinian interpretation of the same passage in (equally ambiguous) terms of the 'flesh of sin', with its implication that bodiliness and sinfulnessness are synonymous. All these (p.127) features suggest that Augustine received the text into his thought on the relationship between the humanity of Christ and the baptism of infants, a conjecture supported by direct citation from the homily immediately before the outbreak of the Pelagian controversy, in Epistle 140. It can be no coincidence that chapter 6 of the same letter contains an extended reflection on Romans 8:3.

Sermons 361 and 192 and the Commentarioli in Psalmos One further example of Augustine's use of Origen deserves brief analysis. In 396, Augustine dictated the first thirtytwo Enarrationes in Psalmos. In the first Enarratio on Psalm 18, he treats the verse briefly with reference to the virginal conception of Christ: He is like a groom coming forth from his chamber, coming forth from the virginal womb, where God has coupled himself to a human nature, like a groom to his bride. He has leapt like a giant to run his course. He has leapt with great strength, outrunning other humans by his incomparable power, not to dwell on, but to run his course… et ipse tamquam sponsus procedens de thalamo suo et ipse procedens de utero uirginali, ubi deus naturae humanae tamquam sponsus sponsae copulatus est. exsultauit sicut gigas ad currendam uiam. exsultauit sicut http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 13/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship fortissimus, et ceteros homines incomparabili uirtute praecedens, non ad habitandam, sed ad currendam uiam.52

In Sermons 361 (winter 410–11) and 192 (after 412) Augustine exposits the verse of the psalm in a similar vein, but much more fully, and with reference to Romans 8:3:53

Therefore our Lord Jesus Christ bore his divinity with him, but assumed mortality from us. This he received in the womb of the Virgin, joining himself, the Word of God, to a human nature; like a groom to his bride in the virginal chamber, so he came forth from her chamber… Mortality came to all from sin; in the case of the Lord, it came from mercy, but even then it was real: for as such it was real flesh, and truly mortal, being the likeness of the flesh of sin.

Lest anyone disparage the truth, because it arose from the earth, when he came forth like a groom from the chamber (which is to say, from the Virgin's womb), when the Word of God coupled himself to a human creature by an inexpressible kind of marriage; lest anyone disparage this, and not believe that, although Christ was marvellously born, and marvellous in his words and deeds, he was no more than a human on account of possessing the likeness of the flesh of sin: when the psalm says, 'Like a groom coming forth from the chamber, he leaps out like a giant, to run his course,' this is subject to the meaning of the following line: 'From the highest heaven is his going out.'

Ergo Dominus noster Iesus Christus divinitatem secum attulit, mortalitatem autem a nobis assumpsit. Hanc accepit in utero virginis Mariae, coniugens se ipsum Verbum Dei humanae naturae, tanquam sponsus sponsae in thalamo virginali, ut ipse tanquam sponsus procederet de thalamo suo…Mortalitas de peccato venit in omnes homines: in Domino autem de misericordia erat, et tamen vera erat; quia talis caro vera erat, et vere mortalis erat, similitudinem habens carnis peccati. (S. 361.17)

Ne vero quisquam contemneret veritatem, quia de terra orta est, cum sicut sponsus processit de thalamo suo, id est, de utero virginali, ubi Verbum Dei creaturae humanae quodam ineffabili coniugio copulatum est: ne hoc ergo quisquam contemneret, ne quamvis mirabiliter natum, et dictis factisque mirabilem, tamen propter similitudinem carnis peccati nihil amplius Christum quam hominem crederet: cum dictum esset, Tanquam sponsus procedens de thalamo suo, exsultavit ut gigas ad currendum viam. (S. 192.3) (p.128) Both sermons were delivered in the early stages of the Pelagian controversy, around the time Augustine began to write De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione. The close reproduction of the exegesis of the psalm in both is noteworthy. On first sight, it is tempting to read these passages as a reception of Ambrose, whose exegesis of Psalm 18:6 (tanquam sponsus procedens de thalamo suo, exsultavit ut gigas ad currendam viam) resulted in the compression 'the giant of twinned substance' (geminae gigas substantiae). As an anti Arian catchphrase stressing the two complete natures belonging to the person of Christ, this was popularized in the fourth century by Ambrose's hymn 'Intende, qui regis Israel', of which strophe 5 runs: He comes forth from his chamber, the regal hall of modesty, a giant of twinned substance swift as he runs his course.54

Confessiones 9.15.7 reports Augustine's experience of Ambrosian hymnody in Milan during a period of Catholic persecution by the Arian royal family, and the phrase appears in several works of Augustine thereafter.55 However, (p.129) Ambrose's Christological shorthand is not present in the Enarratio or Sermons 361 and 192, and a closer reading reveals that these two latter texts are particularly concerned with the first half of Psalm 18:6, the spousal procession of Christ from the bridal bed or chamber (thalamus): the point emphasized is not a confusion or reduction of Christ's two natures, or his 'leaping forth', but his conception of virginal flesh.56

The only extant exegesis that consistently reflects these sermons, and to a lesser extent the Enarratio, is found in another of Jerome's works, the Commentarioli in Psalmos of 390. This is counted among his translations of Origen, as a highly compressed summary of his homilies on the psalms that are no longer extant except in fragmentary form. Sadly, no Greek fragment exists of Psalm 18:6, against which the content of Jerome's translation might be checked. It runs: God has pitched his tabernacle in the sun, and like a groom he comes forth from the chamber. 'In the sun': in the http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 14/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship womb of the Virgin. Mary [Maria] is interpreted as the star of the sea [maris], for the light of the sun shines more brightly than that of the stars…That sun has lit up the star, which is to say, Mary, so that she may be like the sun. Therefore he placed his tabernacle in the sun, when he assumed a body from her womb…The groom is the Word of the Father, the bride, human flesh; since by it he went forth from the chamber, the womb of the Virgin.

Deus in sole posuit tabernaculum suum, et ipse tanquam sponsus procedens de thalamo suo. 'In sole' in utero sanctae Mariae virginis. Maria interpretatur stella maris. Lumen solis magis lucet quam stellarum…Illuminavit sol iste stellam, id est, Mariam, ut esset sicut sol. Ideo posuit tabernaculum suum in sole, quando corpus assumpsit de utero suo…Sponsus, Verbum Patris, sponsa caro humana: cum qua de thalamo processit, id est, de utero virginis.57

Once again, the parallel with Augustine is uncanny, although difficult to prove conclusively. Granted, Augustine does not repeat Origen's meditation on the relationship between the sunlight of Christ and the derivative starlight of the Virgin. Yet, there is a clear compression of in utero sanctae Mariae virginis into in utero virginis Mariae (S. 361) and de utero virginali (En. Ps. 18.I.6; S. 192); similarly, Sponsus, Verbum Patris, sponsa caro humana surfaces in sponsus sponsae copulatus est (En. Ps. 18.I.6) and sponsus sponsae in thalamo virginali (S. 361). An early acquaintance with the broad outline of Origen's treatment of the psalm in the 390s laid the foundation for a later and more exacting interpretation, once in possession of, or rereading, the Commentarioli (p.130) in Psalmos. Delivering Sermons 361 and 192 in the 410s, Augustine tied the psalm text to the text of Romans 8:3, suggesting that he found in Origen's articulation of the doctrine of the virginal conception of Christ a vital complement to his own understanding of Christ's humanity in relation to the economy of sin.

All these examples reveal Augustine receiving and redeploying the work of Origen after 400, in a close reproduction of verbal motifs and a creative reworking of their theology. All of them are connected to texts in which Augustine gives consideration to the humanity of Christ, in some cases with explicit reference to the text of Romans 8:3, in others reflecting the theology he had developed around that text elsewhere. His exegesis of this verse is partly rooted in a reception of Ambrose's Explanatio Psalmi 37. However, the earliness of the works in which verbal parallels with this text are most apparent, coupled with the persistence of Romans 8:3 in Augustine's early Christological and later anti­ Pelagian writings, together argue against a dependence solely on the Explanatio. On the contrary, I believe Augustine's exegesis of the passage is directly lifted from Origen's Romans commentary, and that this took place in the mid­390s. As a prelude to establishing this claim, I will survey the extant scholarship dealing with Augustine's reception of the commentary in the 410s, before making an alternative case for my earlier dating.

Augustine and Origen's commentary on Romans According to the scholarly consensus, Rufinus of Aquileia translated Origen's great work on Romans in around 405–6. In spite of challenging the established chronology of Rufinus' translations in her important article of 1977, C. P. Hammond retained this dating for the commentary, while admitting it to be 'conjectural.'58 A sign of the ineffectiveness of Pope Anastasius' proscription of the works of Origen, the translation was made in response to the genuine interest of a broader readership.59 Hammond errs on the side of caution, suggesting the lapse of some time between Rufinus' circulation of the translation among his friends and its eventual leakage outside his circle. However, it is known that Pelagius used the translation in the construction of his own commentary on the epistle,60 whose composition De Bruyn has most recently dated from 405–6 to 410.61 Hammond argues that Pelagius (p.131) must have received Rufinus' translation at some point between its completion and his flight to North Africa in 410.62 As I observed in Chapter 2, Pelagius and Rufinus were connected by bonds of acquaintance in Rome, and on this basis it seems reasonable that he might have been among the first to receive Rufinus' most recent work in 405–6.

In 1992, Bammel (née Hammond) advanced the thesis—developed during her work on a new edition of Rufinus' translation—that Augustine directly quoted from Origen's commentary on Romans in De Peccatorum Meritis and De Spiritu et Littera.63 In this she went beyond the research of Altaner, Theiler, and Courcelle, whose analyses of the http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 15/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship relationship between Origen and Augustine had jointly been accepted as the standard orthodoxy. She offers four passages from De Peccatorum Meritis and two from De Spiritu et Littera that show traces of dependency on six passages from the commentary on Romans. One supports my thesis that Augustine had read closely Origen's fourteenth homily on Luke, and integrated it into his anti Pelagian position: at De Peccatorum Meritis 2.15, Augustine supports his argument for the sinfulness of all with reference to Job 14:4–5;64 advancing the same point in the commentary at book 5.9.12–13, Origen not only cites the same text from Job, but also refers to the purification in the Temple as an act of representative offering, and connects it to the apostolic tradition of baptising infants. His exegesis here closely complements Homilia in Lucam 14, and it is difficult not to see Augustine appreciating the convergence between the two texts, reworking the theology of the homily alongside a verbal citation of the Romans commentary in De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione.

With regard to their respective interpretations of Romans 8:3, Bammel highlights the following passages: That he said, 'In the likeness of the flesh of sin' shows us that we have the flesh of sin, but that the Son of God had the likeness of the flesh of sin, not the flesh of sin itself. For all of us who are conceived from the seed of man, coming together with a woman, necessarily say with David: 'I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins my mother conceived me.' Truly, he who came to a spotless body (who was not born of the contagion of a man but from the coming of the Holy Spirit over the Virgin, who overshadowed her with the power of the Most High), he indeed possessed the nature of our body; but he did not possess in any way the pollution of sin which is passed to those who are conceived by the motion of concupiscence.

He held a certain 'middle place' also in his birth of flesh. On this account, we are born in the flesh of sin, but he is born in the likeness of the flesh of sin; we, not only from flesh and blood, but also of the will of man and the will of the flesh…Therefore it was given to the Virgin Mother to being forth a holy seed by her pious faith, not according to the law of the flesh of sin (which is to say, without conceiving by the movement of carnal concupiscence); he created her in order to choose her, so that he could choose to be created from her.

Quod dixit: 'in similitudine carnis peccati;' ostendit nos quidem habere carnem peccati, filium uero Dei similitudinem habuisse carnis peccati non carnem peccati. Omnes enim nos homines qui ex semine uiri cum muliere conuenientis concepti sumus illa necessario utimur uoce qua dicit David: 'quoniam in iniquitatibus conceptus sum et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.' Uerum qui ex nulla uiri contagione sed solo Spiritu Sancto super uirginem ueniente et uirtute alitissimi obumbrante uenit ad corpus immaculatum naturam quidem corporis nostri habuit, pollutionem tamen peccati quae ex concupiscentiae motu conceptis traditur omnino non habuit. (Comm. Rom. 6.12.4) tenuit quondam et in carnis natiuitate medietatem, ut nos quidem nati essemus in carne peccati, ille autem in similitudine carnis peccati, nos non solum ex carne et sanguine, uerum etiam ex uoluntate uiri et uoluntate carnis…ideo uirginem matrem non lege carnis peccati, id est non concupiscentiae carnalis motu concipientem, sed pia fide sanctum germen in se fieri promerentem, quam eligeret creauit, de qua crearetur elegit. (Pecc. Mer. 2.38.24) (p.132) The characteristic features of Augustine's interpretation are all present in Origen's text: Christ possesses a humanity that is in a median position between sinful flesh and the flesh both before sin and after the resurrection; he possesses this on account of his being born outside the carnally concupiscent bond, for which the Virgin was 'electively created' to bear him. Words and ideas are both here reproduced in a dense reception of Origen's commentary.

I want fully to accept the substance of Bammel's findings, but also to question whether Augustine did in fact receive this text only in the months running up to the composition of De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione. The caveat at the beginning of her article is worth pondering: 'The translations of Jerome and other writers only became available to [Augustine] after his own earliest writings, and perhaps paradoxically his thought is closest to Origen in this early period.'65 Augustine uses Romans 8:3 in the second book of De Peccatorum Meritis within a continuum of exegesis that I have tried to show stretches back to his very early engagement with Paul. Indeed, several examples of this earlier exegesis are closer in vocabulary to Origen–Rufinus than the (p.133) passage cited from that work. This is most obvious in the unexpected peroration of Sermon 273,66 with its close connection of the virginity–sinlessness motif to Romans 8:3 and suggestion of Luke 1:35, all highly reminiscent of the above passage from OrigenRufinus. The sermon dates from 21 January 396: He had flesh in the likeness of the flesh of sin; we however have the flesh of sin. He was not born of the seed of men, or from the concupiscence of male and female. But how then? By the annunciation of the Father. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 16/26

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Sed tamen ille carnem in similitudinem carnis peccati, nos carnem peccati.

Non ex virili semine, aut ex masculi et feminae concupiscentia: sed quid? Nuntio Patris.67

Elements of Origen's text are reproduced here with only very slight alteration: his carnis peccati non carnem peccati becomes carnis peccati, nos carnem peccati; semine uiri becomes virili seminae; ex semine uiri cum muliere conuenientis; ex nulla uiri contagione, and ex concupiscentiae motu conceptis become non ex uirili semine, aut ex masculi et feminae concupiscentia. Origen's citation and expansion of the text of Luke 1:35 are compressed into the neat Nuntio Patris. By contrast, the text of Ambrose's Explanatio Psalmi 37 refers to the process of reproduction elliptically by echoing John 1.13 ('nor was he conceived in iniquities or born in sin; for he was born not from blood nor from the will of the flesh or by the will of man, but by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin'),68 entirely lacking the crucial term concupiscentia common to both Augustine and Origen, and recalling the text of the creed of Nicaea more closely than that of Luke 1:35.

A number of significant implications arise from my reading of this early sermon as a reception of Origen's commentary on Romans. The first is that all Augustine's exegeses of Romans 8:3 after 396, focusing on the virginal conception of the sinless Christ in a consistently Origenian manner, should also be considered a result of this primary reception. Whether Augustine's broader conception of concupiscentia carnis is also a consequence of reading the commentary I leave as an open possibility; Origen's treatment of the relationship between reproduction and sin may or may not have influenced an idea already nascent in Augustine's thought. However, applying the term to the humanity of Christ with reference to Romans 8:3 without doubt constitutes an Origenian borrowing. It can, therefore, be argued that Augustine's mature conception of the humanity of Christ, formulated after 396, is in good part Origenian.

Secondly, this requires a reconsideration of the standard dating of Rufinus' translation of the commentary. Unfortunately, the evidence available for constructing a new publication history for that work is very sparse indeed. It (p.134) is simply impossible to uncover the stages of translation and editing through which Rufinus put the text prior to its public circulation in the first ten years of the fifth century. I offer one initial reflection before proceeding to examine circumstantial evidence for a translation in the mid­390s. Rufinus translated the fifteen books of Origen, condensing them into a still substantial ten, the arduousness of which he remarks on in the work's preface. Irrespective of specific dating, this would have taken a considerable time. The circulation—against his will—of parts of Augustine's De Trinitate illustrates the appetite of enthusiastic readers for parts of lengthy works still unfinished; in the case of the Romans commentary, and bearing in mind Rufinus' standing as the gatekeeper of the Origenian corpus in the West at the turn of the fifth century, it is not difficult to imagine him indulging his audience with fragments of a 'work in progress'.

Making a reasonable case for an Augustinian reception of parts of the commentary in the 390s brings with it a new perspective on the motivation behind the Ad Simplicianum, also of 396/7. By his own account, Augustine's anti­ Pelagianism was occasioned in part as a defence of the theology of sin and grace laid out in that work.69 In Chapter 2, I argued that Augustine would have read Rufinus the Syrian's Liber de Fide as an attack on his protology as a permutation of Origenism; this protology finds classic expression in the Ad Simplicianum. The suggestion that this important work might have been occasioned by a reflection on Origen's Pauline theology therefore further strengthens my broader argument, that Augustine's construction of the Pelagian heresy in response to the attack of Jerome and Rufinus the Syrian is both a self­vindication and a defence of his reception of Origen of Alexandria. Establishing the possibility that Origen's commentary on Romans could have been available to Augustine well in advance of 410 will, therefore, occupy the remainder of this chapter.

Heidl and Augustine's secret library That Augustine could not have had access to any work by Origen before the 390s, in virtue of his lack of good Greek and the paucity of Latin translations within his ambit, was the standard argument of those investigating this issue throughout the twentieth century. In his study of 2003, Heidl has argued that Augustine must have had access to Origen's homilies and commentary on the Song of Songs in the mid380s, in their translation by Jerome made in 383. Through an http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 17/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship analysis of Augustine's allusions to the text of the Song of Songs in (p.135) his early works written at Cassiciacum and Milan, he argues further that the libri pleni described by Augustine as the impetus to his reading of Paul and subsequent conversion at Contra Academicos 2.2.5 included these works of Origen, and not solely the writings of Porphyry or Plotinus. Heidl detects allusions to Origen's works in the Contra Academicos, De Beata Vita, and De Ordine; most significantly, he argues that Augustine's account of 'picking up and reading' Paul at Confessiones 8.29.12 is a pastiche of Origen's interpretation of Abraham's vision at the oaks of Mamre, given in his commentary.70 By this time, however, Augustine had come to realise the danger of quoting too frequently or clearly from Origen, as Heidl writes, 'The silence of the Confessions about Origen and the Origenian books which made a great influence on Augustine in Milan is understandable. Augustine was cautious and wanted to avoid accusations of being an Origenist.'71 His argument reflects very closely my general observations about Augustine's passive but nonetheless evident interest in the Origenist controversy in his correspondence with Jerome in Chapter 2, as does his observation that the exchange between the two men reveals a feigned and ironic ignorance of Origen on the part of Augustine, deployed to challenge Jerome into stating his position in the controversy more clearly.

Of considerable importance to my thesis is Heidl's argument that Augustine may have had access to Latin translations of Origen circulating in Italy before those made by Jerome and Rufinus. He notes as evidence for this the Tractatus Origenis,72 and posits the credible possibility that selecta of Origen's works suffered from the Anastasian anathema alongside the vagaries of book publication and conservation in Late Antiquity. One possible source of some of these translations, Heidl proposes, was Simplicianus of Milan. Augustine records having visited the Milanese cleric at Confessiones 8.3.2, giving an account of his approval of Augustine's reading of the libri Platonicorum translated by Victorinus, but also encouraging him to remember the humility of Christ, exemplified in the life of Victorinus himself. Heidl continues: Is it possible that Augustine had not merely heard about Origenian ideas from Simplicianus, but that the respected master and possible admirer of Origen had also given the young man some of the writings by the Alexandrian? On the one hand, reconstructing the stages of the conversion, I have pointed out that the encounter with (p.136) the libri pleni followed the reading of Plotinus' books and Scripture. On the other hand, the meeting with Simplicianus can be dated between the two events, since both De Beata Vita and the Confessions place it after the comparative reading of the Plotinian/Platonic books and the Scripture. After conferring with Simplicianus, Augustine may not have left emptyhanded. Presumably, either Simplicianus or someone else from the master's circle gave Augustine a collection from Origen's writings which a certain Celsinus termed libri pleni.'73

Heidl's consciously speculative argument, while attractive, requires that Simplicianus' identity first be established as fully as possible. What little is known about him comes to us through the works of Ambrose, Augustine, and Paulinus of Milan. The four letters in the Ambrosian corpus to Simplicianus all discuss exegesis, and reveal little about their recipient.74 In Epistle 2, Ambrose refers to Simplicianus' travels 'throughout the whole world' (totum orbem peragraueris),75 raising the possibility that Simplicianus knew the Greek East and its literature. Elsewhere Ambrose refers to him as his spiritual father,76 which might indicate some influence on Ambrose's own reading of Greek authors. Unfortunately, the exegetical discussion in these letters is not traceable to any prior problem in Greek or Latin scriptural interpretation.

Augustine draws a picture of Simplicianus as an authoritative and sympathetic figure in Confessiones 8, calling him a 'father in the reception of grace' (pater in accipienda gratia),77 for his role in the baptism of Ambrose; Augustine turned likewise to him for counsel in his progress towards baptism. A close friend of Marius Victorinus, Simplicianus had read both Scripture and Christian literature with him and attended his final, public profession of Christianity. In addition, he praised Augustine's reading of the libri Platonicorum, congratulating him 'that [he] he had not fallen in with the writings of other philosophers, which are full of falsehood and deceits, according to the elements of this world; whereas in [the Platonic books] God and his Word are everywhere implicit'.78 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 18/26

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On the death of Ambrose in 397, Simplicianus succeeded him as bishop of Milan, remaining in office until his own death in late 400;79 the installation is recorded by Paulinus in his Vita Ambrosii.80 In his continuation of Jerome's De Viris Illustribus (c.495) Gennadius includes a mysterious entry on Simplicianus, comparing his relationship with Augustine to that of Origen with his patron, Ambrose: 'Simplicianus…exhorted Augustine…to stir up his (p.137) natural gifts, and to free up time for the exposition of Scripture; thus he seemed to be for Augustine like a new Ambrose, the task­master of Origen.'81 The comparison is a suggestive one, bringing Simplicianus and Origen into literary relationship with one another.

On the basis of Simplicianus' acquaintance with Marius Victorinus, Mutzenbecher situates him within the theological camp represented above all by Clement of Alexandria, which affirmed Neoplatonic philosophy as the pagan 'preparation' for the Christian gospel: 'All we can establish is that Simplician, because of his close relationship to Victorinus, was a direct witness to the "combination of genuine Neo­Platonism and ultra­orthodox Christianity, under the banner of Paulinism," as Harnack calls it.'82 Origen might well be counted among the same milieu. Madec goes further, taking Augustine's claim that he discovered 'God and his Word' everywhere in the Platonic books (Conf. 8.2.3) as an indication of Simplicianus' own interests and subsequent influence on Augustine's reading: 'They permit us to guess that Simplicianus not only highlighted the singularity of Platonism in comparison with other practices of philosophy, but also attracted the attention of Augustine to the Prologue to John, which offers at the same time a synopsis of Christian doctrine and a foundation for discernment about Platonism.'83 Simplicianus' attachment to the Prologue to John is further detailed in De Civitate Dei 10, where Augustine records his injunction that the opening words of the gospel should be inscribed in a prominent place in every church.84 As an exponent of a dialectical 'Johannine Platonism', Simplicianus could well have situated himself in the tradition of exegesis mastered by Origen's Commentary on John.

The most substantial text that indicates Simplicianus' theological interests remains the Ad Simplicianum. Unfortunately, this gives no detailed account of precisely what preconceptions about the text of Romans Augustine's petitioner was entertaining in order to seek a second opinion. Mutzenbecher asserts that Augustine's response has a clear 'indirect relationship' to Origen's exposition of Romans 7–9 in his commentary, so heavily did this work influence all further treatments of the epistle. While I would argue for a closer engagement with the commentary than Mutzenbecher might allow, her assertion raises the possibility that an interest in Origen's exegesis of Romans was shared by both men, prompting Simplicianus' request for a fresh exegesis of the epistle.

(p.138) Other factors remain that serve to strengthen this otherwise somewhat elliptical case for Simplicianus' role as a mediator of Origen to Augustine. The first lies in the figure of Paulinus of Milan. A notary of Ambrose, he was asked by Augustine to write a memoir of the bishop after his death.85 Described as deacon of Milan by Augustine,86 he remained in episcopal service after Simplicianus' accession to the seat in 397 before his move to Florence. Paulinus describes Simplicianus' accession to the episcopate in the simplest terms, adding nothing to our picture of his character or interests. However, the eighth chapter of the Vita praises Ambrose in the following way: 'God, who set up the wall of his Catholic Church against his enemies, and raised up David to be a tower against the face of Damascus (that is to say, the treachery of the heretics), hindered [Ambrose's] flight.'87 As Angelo Paredi has pointed out, Paulinus is here quoting from Rufinus of Aquileia's continuation of Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica, in which he describes Ambrose as a strong wall.88

Paulinus expands this by citing Song of Songs 4.4, 'he raised up David to be a tower' (turrem erigebat David). The wall of the catholic Church which resists heretics and is associated with Ambrose is, put in other words, the teaching of orthodoxy which resists falsehood. It can be no coincidence that, in his Commentarius in Canticis Canticorum, Origen writes of the wall of the house of God as the 'steadfastness of dogmas' (dogmatum firmitas).89 I believe the Vita thus reveals a double reception, not only of the Historia Ecclesiastica, but also of Origen's commentary in Rufinus' translation. It therefore appears that Paulinus should be counted among the Rufinian circle in Italy, of which Augustine was also a part in Africa. Ambrose's reading of Origen is well known; Paulinus' is indicated here. Given both these factors and Simplicianus' association with Christian Platonism, it becomes reasonable to extrapolate his place in the same community of Origenian readership. Augustine's friendship with Simplicianus, built in part on common literary http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 19/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship interests, was clearly continued by letter after Augustine's move to Africa. Given the possibility that both men were part of the same community of readers, it becomes conceivable that Simplicianus would have kept Augustine appraised of Rufinus' recent works in the 390s, even sending him texts in which both shared a common interest.

Supporting this sketch of Simplicianus' place in Augustine's circle of friends is the single most important datum of my case: the synodical proscription of (p.139) Origen's books issued by Anastasius of Rome in 40090 was published in a letter to Simplicianus. Although the letter is outwardly polite and unexceptional, it can be no coincidence that the head of the diocese of Milan should have been the immediate recipient of the condemnation in the West.

All of this points to a new picture of Augustine's reception of Origen. Beginning in Milan, Augustine's acquaintance with Ambrose brought him into contact with the allegorical exegesis that was to be instrumental in his acceptance of scriptural authority. Ambrose's debt to Origen would have been no secret to Augustine. Augustine found a second spiritual patron in Ambrose's friend Simplicianus, which further embedded his reconciliation to the Church in a network deeply sensitive both to the interaction of Catholic Christianity with the traditions of Platonism, and also to the pre­eminent figure of Origen within that dialogue. Whether at the initiative of Ambrose, Simplicianus, Paulinus, or someone else, the cathedral at Milan tapped into the literary activity of Rufinus of Aquileia in the 380s, providing Augustine's entrée into his network. After leaving Milan, Augustine continued to correspond with Simplicianus, and maintained his acquaintance with other members of Rufinus' readership—among them Pinianus, Melania the Younger, and Paulinus of Nola. In response to the reinvigorated study of the Pauline corpus in the last twenty years of the fourth century in the Latin world, Augustine's approach to the epistles was eclectic. Freely drawing on Ambrosiaster in his early commentaries, Augustine changed his approach in 396. Reviewing the theology of Original Sin, election, and predestination, the Ad Simplicianum laid out the classic Augustinian formulation: the Fall of Adam involves all humanity in a common guilt and debt to God; the divine judgement justly decrees the punishment of all, but gratuitously elects for salvation a set number irrespective of their incapacity for good. In turn, this election endows the elect with merit, by which they are saved. The eschatology of the work is not characteristic of Origen, but was worked out in dialogue with his commentary on Romans. Both the Ad Simplicianum, and the Origenian material behind it, have their roots in Simplicianus of Milan. From him, I believe Augustine received extracts of Rufinus' commentary on Romans, including his translation of Origen's exegesis of Romans 8:3. Identifying this with the familiar exegesis of Ambrose of Milan in his Explanatio Psalmi 37 ensured its adoption into Augustine's Christological vocabulary, while also further increasing his interest in the works of Origen. On receiving the Liber de Fide when pursuing the prosecution of Caelestius, Augustine identified in his work a veiled criticism of his doctrine of Original Sin as a reworking of Origen's belief in a fall of souls from a pre­mundane life. To bolster his self­defence, and to ensure the silence of Caelestius on matters doctrinal, Augustine turned once (p.140) again to his Milanese friends, enlisting Paulinus to push his case at the council of Carthage. The choice was a shrewd one: not only was Paulinus sympathetic to Augustine through their mutual acquaintance, but he also understood which aspects of Augustine's intellectual development he preferred to leave in the shade. This was a success, until the publication of Jerome's Epistle 133, in 415.

Conclusion This chapter began by asking what constitutes a valid case of reception in the work of a Patristic author. This followed on from my argument in Chapter 2 for a maximal assessment of Augustine's knowledge of the writings of Origen, and its implications for his construction of Pelagianism in the wake of the Origenist controversy. I focused on the scholarly discussion surrounding his reception of the Pauline commentaries of Ambrosiaster, in order to lay out a more detailed methodology for a study of reception focusing on Augustine's exegesis of Romans 8:3, the subject of Chapter 3. Ruling out critical judgements on reception arising from a prior (and anachronistic) conception of 'orthodoxy' by which the Fathers would have directed their reading, and similarly discounting accounts of reception that leave the distinction between verbal and theological parallels unclear, I presented an alternative. Reception, I suggested, occurs on a sliding scale: a reader of a text can be more or less engaged with its words, ideas, or both. Wholescale quotation, minor allusion, and the repetition of verbal motifs all indicate real reception. On this basis, I accepted that Augustine's treatment of Romans 5:12 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 20/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship in the light of 9:21, and his use of the figure massa peccati, came to him through a reception of Ambrosiaster. Turning to Romans 8:3, I found that Augustine's exegesis of the verse in both the early and the later works lacks a necessary verbal or theological common ground with that of Ambrosiaster. I therefore rejected his commentaries as the source of Augustine's much repeated reference to the 'likeness of sinful flesh'.

The commonplace of Augustine's debt to Ambrose prompted an examination of his exegeses of Romans 8:3 that refer explicitly to the virginal conception of Christ as the instrumental cause of his human sinlessness. Finding this only in his Explanatio Psalmi 37, I highlighted both verbal and theological parallels to it in Augustine's early works, the Expositio Propositionum and De Diversis Quaestionibus 83. Noting the kinship between Explanatio Psalmi 37.5 and Ambrose's commentary on Luke 2:55–6, I looked for a common source for both in Origen's Homilies on Luke. Finding that Augustine cites these homilies in a number of works in support of other aspects of his Christology, I argued that his apparently 'Ambrosian' exegesis of Romans 8:3 should rather (p.141) be situated within a broader reading of Origen on Luke, which a reception of Explanatio Psalmi 37 merely served to confirm. Of prime importance in this process was Origen's treatment of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin in Homily 14, in which he argues for the baptism of infants from the representative cleansing of the infant Christ in the Temple. While Origen comes close to suggesting that an actual sinlessness inhered within the human nature of Christ in this homily, the phrasing of Romans 8:3 provided Augustine with the necessary distinction between sinfulness and its likeness by which he could receive the text, and its concomitant insistence on the necessity of baptism for salvation.

This reception, I suggested, took place in the early to mid­390s. In order to support my contention that the same period saw Augustine absorb a genuinely Origenian reading of Romans 8:3, I turned to Bammel's work of 1992. While this found parallels between De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione and Origen's Romans commentary, it left unattended the consistency of Augustine's treatment of Romans 8:3 from 396 through to 412. Taking Bammel's description of the publication date of the commentary in 405–6 as 'conjectural' at face value, I probed evidence for other sources by which Augustine might have received the text of the commentary. Developing the suggestion of Heidl, that Simplicianus of Milan was responsible for providing Augustine with a set of Origenian libri pleni, I examined Simplicianus' literary interests and his situation within an Origenian readership in Milan. From this, I believe it is possible to reconstruct Augustine's early reception of Origen as an inheritance of his time at Milan; and to construe his Ad Simplicianum as a broadly conceived response to a reception of parts of Origen's commentary on Romans. Within this reception stands his exegesis of Romans 8:3, and its description of the sinlessness of Christ following on the virginal conception. A constant of his Christology after 396, the deployment of the text and its interpretation against Pelagian Christological exemplarism result in a surprising picture: Augustine fought the heresy of Pelagius with the orthodox exegesis of Origen.

Notes:

(2) Hunter (1999: 19–20).

(3) Souter (1927: 40). In addition to the commentary on Romans discussed here, there remain commentaries on all of the Pauline epistles with the exception of Hebrews (usually considered Pauline in Patristic exegesis); in A Study of Ambrosiaster Souter (1905) argued for Ambrosiaster's authorship of the Quaestiones Novi et Veteri Testamenti, previously considered a spurious work of Augustine, and bound together with his work in the supplement to the Patrologia Latina. The Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (50, 1908) reissued the work, edited by Souter, under the name of Ambrosiaster.

(4) Ad Rom. γ​ 5.12. 2–3.

(5) Div. Quaest. 83 68.3. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 21/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship (6) As many as five known authors were at different times identified as Ambrosiaster, including Decimus Hilarianus Hilarius, governor of Africa and later prefect of Rome; Tyconius the Donatist; Isaac the Jew, a convert and opponent of the Damasian papacy; Nicetas of Ramesiana, and Evagrius of Antioch. Souter began (1905) by supporting his suggestion of Decimus, but moved in his work of 1927 to approving Evagrius as the author.

(7) The corpus is exceptionally well preserved, the commentary on Romans being extant in three full recensions.

(8) Bonaiuti (1917: 168).

(9) Bonaiuti (1917: 169).

(10) Norman P. Williams (1927: 328): 'By virtue of its intimate saturation with "concupiscence" and "original guilt", the human stock constitutes a single massa peccati or "lump of sin" (this terrible phrase was presumably suggested by Ambrosiaster's words, "all have sinned in Adam as in a lump").'

(11) Smith (1918: 168).

(12) Baxter (1923: 187).

(13) Ep. 82.34: si quaeras uel recolas quid hinc senserit noster Ambrosius.

(14) Souter (1927: 198).

(15) Mundle (1919: 66) cited Leeming (1930: 69).

(16) These find parallel treatments of Rom. 1:7, 1:24, 2:5, 4:15, 5:20, 8:19–23, 8:29, and 8.38 in Augustine's Expositio Propositionum and Ambrosiaster's commentary. To deny seeing a parallel noted by another is obviously facile without also providing criteria to substantiate such a judgement, as Leeming fails to do.

(17) Leeming (1930: 74).

(18) Leeming (1930: 89).

(19) Leeming (1930: 59).

(20) Martini (1944: 45).

(21) Mutzenbecher (1970: 31 n. 201).

(22) Hunter (1989) has provided a useful corrective to reading Ambrosiaster on Romans in too Augustinian a manner, by exposing the sexual politics of Ambrosiaster's Quaestiones veteris et novi Testamenti. Q. 127, De peccato Adae et Evae, reveals Ambrosiaster's suspicion of the asceticism represented by Jerome in its 'sophisticated defense [sic] of human relations' (p. 287): they are part of the 'unified order of creation' (p. 288). Against a picture of Eden as a pristine and sexless state, Ambrosiaster 'wishes to sever any connection between sexual relations and sin. He does so by arguing that human reproduction neither caused nor was affected by the first sin…Although he does refer to the body as having been "stained" (maculatum) by sin, there is no reference to the presence of any disordered desire or concupiscence' (pp. 291–2). In his vocabulary, massa figuratively indicates the identity of humanity under the divine judgement; the association of the term with copulation and childbearing belongs to Augustine.

(24) Pecc. Mer. 1.57.29. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 22/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship (25) Ad Rom. γ​ 8.3.

(26) In both points, Ambrosiaster's Christology is consistent with his theology of original sin; see n. 22 above.

(27) Pecc. Mer. 2.38.24.

(28) S. 69.3. For a fuller examination of this theme, see Ch. 6.

(30) An excellent introduction to this issue with bibliography can be found in Huhn (1988).

(32) Alvarez Campos (1970: 74–146).

(33) Poen. 1.3.12: non in similitudinem carnis ait, quia Christus ueritatem suscepit carnis humanae, non similitudinem.

(34) Cf., e.g., Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 5.5.14; Hilary of Poitiers, Cont. Const. 21; cf. Schelkle (1956: 273).

(35) Exp. Ps. 118 21.6: peccatum erat caro secundum illud, quia haereditario erat damnata maledictio, peccatum erat inlecebra et ministra peccati. uenit dominus Iesus et in carne peccato obnoxia militiam uirtutis exercuit.

(37) Quasten (1986: 164) suggests as the most conservative dating of the contents of the work 377–89, a period spanning most of Ambrose's episcopate; other proposals include 377–8 and 385–9. Whether Ambrose wrote the commentary before or after the homily on Ps. 37 seems largely irrelevant, as we know that Ambrose maintained his engagement and interest in Origen consistently over a long time span.

(38) Schenkl (1902: 72, note to l. 12); Crouzel (1962: app. 563–4), quoting in turn Tissot (1955).

(39) Tissot (1955 (1): index) notes forty­two parallels between the Ambrosian commentary and the text of Origen's homilies in Jerome's translation alone; there are a further twenty­one parallels between the commentary and the homilies in their Greek fragments. The standard reference work on the Commentary and its influence on Augustine remains that of Rollero (1958), which contains a similar register of Ambrosian–Origenian parallels.

(40) Tissot (1955 (1): 17).

(41) Hom. Luc. Prol.: oscinem coruum audiam crocitantem, et mirum in modum de cunctarum auium ridere coloribus, cum totus ipse tenebrosus sit.

(42) Quasten (1986: 230); F. Fournier in Crouzel (1962: 78).

(43) Hom. Luc. 28.3.

(44) Cons. Ev. 2.12.4.

(46) Elegans has a double sense: discerning or discriminating in conjunction with matters of intellectual judgement, and http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 23/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship elegant in connection with matters of taste; in both, rightness of choice (namely, the root lego, lectio) is the defining factor. For an Augustinian Platonism in which truth and beauty both derive from the transcendent goodness of God, the concept of 'elegance' has considerable potential.

(47) Altaner (1967e: 241–2) notes Augustine's use of Origen, Hom. Luc. 14.8 in Ep. 140; however, he offers no suggestion as to the date of Augustine's reception of the homilies, merely agreeing with Quasten on the date of their completion.

(48) Hom. Luc. 14.3; emphasis added.

(49) Hom. Luc. 14.4.

(50) Hom. Luc. 14.5.

(53) Ps. 19:6 in Hebrew numbering.

(54) Procedat de thalamo suo, | pudoris aula regia, | geminae gigas substantiae | alacris ut currat viam; cf. Fontaine (1992: 273–5).

(55) En. Ps. 18.6 1 and 2; En. Ps. 44.3; En. Ps. 77.10; Cons. Ev. 1.46.30; Tr. Ioh. 1.2; Tr. Ioh. 2.3; Tr. Ioh. 59.3; Tr. Ioh. 78.3; C. Ser. Arr. 8.6; cf: Ghellinck (1914: 419) and Daley (1993). Madec (1989: 191–2) points out that Augustine uses the phrase geminae gigas substantiae alongside an exegesis of the 'bounding' of the giant (exsultavit), read from both Ambrose on Ps. 118 and Hippolytus on the Song of Songs; that focus is soteriological and, once again, not fully engaged with the virginal conception.

(56) Madec (1989: 191–2) gives a useful survey of the geminae gigas motif in Augustine's work, with a short bibliography, tracing its dependence on Ambrose; he does not note variant readings of the psalm text that concentrate on the virginal conception, and are better connected to Origen.

(57) Comm. Ps. 28.

(58) Hammond (1977: 399).

(59) Hammond (1977: 400): 'He was making available only what was generally acknowledged to be valuable', and thus, by implication, in some kind of demand.

(60) This has been accepted since at least 1919; cf. Smith (1918: esp. 56); this was further affirmed by Souter (1927: 225– 30).

(61) De Bruyn (1993: 11).

(62) Hammond (1977: 426 n. 64).

(63) Bammel (1992: 341–6).

(64) Bammel (1992: 366).

(65) Bammel (1992: 341).

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8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 ­ Oxford Scholarship

(68) Cf. the Latin text, p. 120 above.

(69) Praed. Sanct. 8.4.

(70) Comm. Cant. 2.4.28–30.

(71) Heidl (2003: 73).

(72) A collection of twenty homilies preserved under the name of Origen; they were discovered in 1900 by Wilmart and Battifol and subsequently reclassified as the work of Novatian or Gregory of Elvira. On the basis of parallels between Origen's commentary on Genesis extant in the Greek and the Tractatus, Heidl (2003: 237–72) argues that its content must be dependent on a reading of Origen in Latin translations other than those of Rufinus and Jerome.

(73) Heidl (2003: 35).

(74) Ep. 7, 10, 2, and 3.

(77) Conf. 8.3.2. quoting Col. 2:8.

(78) Conf. 8.3.2: quod non in aliorum philosophorum scripta incidissem plena fallaciarum et deceptionum secundum elementa huius mundi, in istis autem omnibus modis insinuari deum et eius uerbum.

(79) Paulinus of Nola's Ep. 20.3, of 27 Nov. 400, refers to the nouus episcopus of the diocese.

(81) Uir. Ill. 52.36: Simplicianus…hortatus est Augustinum…agitare ingenium, et expositionibus Scriptarum uacare, ut etiam nouus quidam Ambrosius, Origenis ἑργοδιωκτης uideretur.

(82) Mutzenbecher (1970: pp. xxii–xxiii).

(83) Madec (1989: 42).

(84) Civ. Dei 10.29.2: quod initium sancti euangelii, cui nomen est secundum iohannem, quidam platonicus, sicut a sancto sene simpliciano, qui postea mediolanensis ecclesiae praesedit episcopus, solebamus audire, aureis litteris conscribendum et per omnes ecclesias in locis eminentissimis proponendum esse dicebat.

(85) Vita 1 and 56.

(86) Pecc. Orig. 3.3.

(87) Vita 8: Deus enim qui ecclesiae suae catholicae murum parabat adversus inimicos suos, et turrem erigebat David contra faciem Damasci, hoc est, contra perfidiam haereticorum, fugam illius impedivit. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter5?print 25/26

8/8/2015 Augustine, Origen, and the Exegesis of Romans 8:3 Oxford Scholarship (88) Paredi (1963); cf. Eusebius, H.E. 11.15.

(89) Comm. Cant. 3.14.14: Sic ergo et 'paries' nunc pars quaedam domus huius est, quae potest indicare dogmatum firmitatem, sub qua 'stare' dicitur sponsus et in quibus tam magnus et excelsus est, ut emineat omne aedificium et 'prospiciat' sponsam, id est animam.

(90) Anastasius, Ep. 2, preserved as Jerome, Ep. 95.

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8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ ­ Oxford Scholarship

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The Anti­Pelagian Christology of Augustine of Hippo, 396­430

Dominic Keech

Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN­13: 9780199662234 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2013 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001

Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ

Dominic Keech

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords

Chapter 5 examines Julian of Eclanum's accusation that Augustine's definition of inherited sin must deny his Christ a fully human soul. First surveying Augustine's understanding of Apollinarianism, it then finds his broader conception of human will and knowledge problematic, where it repeats Origen's confusion between fully intentional acts and the first stirrings of sinful desire; and where his conception of concupiscence pushes these stirrings into the bodily realm, of the autonomy of the genitals and ecstasy of orgasm. This results in an uneven Christology: Augustine characterizes Christ as a human with a perfect divine will, omniscient throughout his earthly life; yet he also suggests that Christ exercises a distinctively human will that requires salvation, and is similar to the will of sinful humanity in the life of grace. Julian's claim is found to have some weight, leading to the question of the origin of Christ's soul in Augustine's thought.

Keywords: Julian of Eclanum, Apollinarianism, Stoicism, De Civitate Dei, carnal concupiscence (concupiscentia carnalis), impassibility (ἀπαθεια), passions, human knowledge, first movements (κινηματα), Arianism

In the previous chapter, I set out the case for reading Augustine's anti Pelagian Christology, centred on the exegesis of Romans 8:3, as a reception of the Pauline exegesis of Origen of Alexandria. This chapter moves away from this reception historical concern, to examine Augustine's Christology of 'the likeness of the flesh of sin'. I begin with Julian of Eclanum's attack on Augustine's theology of Original Sin, in which he castigates Augustine for failing to explain the connection between the Fall of Adam, present sinful desire, and the propagation of infants. Behind this lies the confusion

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8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship of Augustine's mature designation caro peccati, combining the language of the will (concupiscentia) with that of the body (carnalis); Julian therefore reads Augustine's description of sinfulness as an account of embodiment, a reification of a category of the will amounting to a latent Manichaeism. From this, Julian proceeds to question the logic of Augustine's claim that Christ has a mortal body characteristic of fallen humanity, assumed together with a sinless soul. Augustine had defined the twofold punishment for sin as bodily mortality, together with the will's addiction to self. As a result, his 'sinless mortal', manifestly dying on the cross, cannot be in possession of a soul that is truly human. His Christ is an anomaly, approximate neither to Adam in his unfallen state, immortal and sinless, nor to that of humanity, in need of redemption and in love with its own inevitable death. On this basis, Julian labels Augustine an Apollinarian, who must necessarily place the Word in the position of Christ's absent soul to account for his experience of the affections.

In order to assess Julian's claim, I first investigate the understanding of Apollinarianism that Augustine inherited from his Latin predecessors, finding it to be primarily concerned with the error of monophysitism and characterized by a lexicon that confuses the terms mens, anima, and animus. I then turn to his treatment of the soul in its pre­ and postlapsarian states, as described in both De Civitate Dei 9 and 14, and Confessiones 10. Here Augustine is at his most expansive, technically precise and fully engaged in the emotional theory of Stoicism, in order to reconfigure it around a Christian Platonist scheme in (p.143) which the emotions are redeemed by the activity of grace. However, alongside this Augustine takes from the Origenian tradition the conflation of prepassion with passion, whereby culpability for sin is projected back into the first stirrings of immoral desire. This finds its logical outworking in his definition of concupiscentia carnalis, in which the flesh itself overpowers the conscious and semi­conscious world of desire, enslaving humanity as its agent in the act of reproduction. Moving into Augustine's depiction of the inner life of Christ reveals multiple layers of inconsistency. The first lies in a failure to apply his general theory of mind and the affections to the humanity of Christ. The second arises in his seeming inability to decide on the source of Christ's perfect will in either his human or his divine natures. The third is rooted in his insistence on the full, beatific knowledge of Jesus, which exceeds the vision of even the saints. In the absence of any clear statements to the contrary, Julian's allegation of a latent Apollinarianism appears from these observations to stand on worryingly solid ground. Finally uncovering the relation of the soul of Jesus to the indwelling Word must await the following chapter, in which I examine Augustine's understanding of the genesis and embodiment of the soul, sinful in the massa peccati but sinless in the human Christ.

Julian and the issue of seeds In Chapter 2, I surveyed Augustine's developing exegesis of Romans 8:3, noting its crucial importance in providing a Christological counterattack on both the theological anthropology and the exemplarist Christology of Pelagianism. I noted that the prevalence of this exegesis declined in the early to mid420s, in response to the different theological questions raised by the SemiPelagian monks of Hadrumetum and Marseilles; and that it returned to prominence once Augustine had resumed the debate about the Fall and its effects in dialogue with Julian of Eclanum. Reviewing this literary contretemps, I referred to Fredriksen's observation that Julian simply could not understand Augustine's theology of Original Sin: for him, there is no logic in twinning sex with dispositional vice. As she remarks: 'Sex to Julian is reproductive biology; sex to Augustine is eroticism';1 hence Julian's insistent question, exemplified at Contra Iulianum 6.24.9: 'How can you muddle a matter of the will with the circumstances of insemination?' (Qui fieri potest, ut res arbitrii conditioni seminum misceatur?). Put more fully, how can a historic act of sin committed by an individual be transmitted to humanity in perpetuity, at the level not only of a vitiated human flesh, but also of an (p.144) incapacitated will? Twinning the one with the other must imply a view of human biology that embraces both the flesh and the soul in a single movement of propagation. Augustine had himself wrestled with the problem of the justice of infants being inflicted with the deserts of sin, of which Julian was aware; but his own central criticism stepped back behind the problem of divine justice to ask whether Augustine's theology of creation could sustain his ethics. Augustine's response to Julian on the matter has clear implications for any judgement made on the consistency of his anti Pelagian theology. More importantly in the context of this study, Augustine's articulation of the relationship between the physical and appetitive aspects of reproduction either promises to consolidate his axiomatic treatment of the sinlessness of Christ 'in the likeness of sinful flesh', or threatens to undermine it. Upholding the fate—and hope—of the massa peccati requires Augustine to provide both a biological and a theological account of the origin and character of Christ's sinless soul. This chapter therefore http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 2/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship begins by looking at Augustine's reply to Julian, as a prelude to examining his claim that Augustine's theology of Original Sin necessarily implicates his Christology in the heresy of Apollinaris of Laodicaea.

Throughout the Contra Iulianum Libri Sex and Contra Iulianum Liber Imperfectus, Augustine's most common response to this frequently repeated question is figurative. He finds a suitable analogue to human reproduction in the propagation of olive trees: even when a new tree is propagated from a cultivated olive, a wild olive is initially the result; in just the same way, the children of baptized parents are brought to birth in a state of sin.2 In Contra Iulianum 5, Augustine attempts a philosophically informed reply. In a passage of questionable logic, he affirms with Julian that the evil adhering to a parent has the status of an Aristotelian accident, and that accidents cannot be passed on from one person to another by propagation.3 However, the authority of Romans 5:12 trumps that of Aristotelian category theory, with the result that Augustine confects a curious theologoumenon: 'What you have heard on this matter is indeed true. Those things that are in a subject are like qualities; they would not exist apart from the subject in which they inhere; thus there is in a body of the subject colour or form. But those things are passed on by working upon their subject, not by crossing over into it.'4

However, he leaves the distinction between 'working upon' a thing (afficiendo) and 'crossing over into it' (emigrando) unexplained. His subsequent illustrations are, to say the least, inconclusive: the blackness of Ethiopians 'works upon' their children; it (p.145) is not passed on in the manner of a tunic given from one person to another. Corporeal qualities can be seen to work upon incorporeal states, as when they are held in the memory; likewise, the opposite process is proved in the striped sheep born of Jacob's ewes when exposed to the striped rods he placed before them when mating (Gen. 30. 37–40).5 Reporting from the doctor and 'most noble writer' Soranus, he cites the story of a certain king—Dionysius—who had placed an image of a handsome man in front of his wife when impregnating her, in order to avoid passing on his own ugliness to the child conceived. Augustine's method here is confused, lacking the forensic examination of the body–soul relationship in the process of reproduction Julian demands.

The immediate corollary of Julian's question lies in his designation of Augustine as a Traducianist, repeating the condemned error of both Mani and Tertullian that understands the soul as a physical entity, transmitted with flesh from parent to child. His point has been given a generous hearing in recent years, not least in the important articles of Gillian Evans and Elizabeth Clark.6 Augustine was well aware of the problem of trying to incorporate a Traducianist account of procreation into Christian discourse, and had discussed this openly with friends in letters and tractates.7 By his own account, he had had to overcome a materialist conception of God on his passage back to the Church, aided finally by the reading of the libri Platonicorum.8 Had he been guilty of subconsciously retaining a materialist notion of the soul, a confused inheritance of a Manichaean past? Julian puts the question in the following way: 'If you do not believe that a part of the soul is joined to the seed, how can you write so brazenly that all humans were once simply Adam, not least because a human cannot exist without having a body and a soul at the same time?'9 Augustine's response is unconvincing, turning from the example of Adam to that of Christ. In a seemingly diversionary tactic, Augustine reminds Julian he is bound to confess that, although he possessed a rational soul, Christ is called man when he was laid in the tomb, where he was only as a body. Likewise, Adam is said by Scripture to have been man, although God had just formed him from the dust of the earth (Gen. 2.7). He rounds off the thought with a curious disavowal: 'Well then; in whatever way or in whatever part all have been born from him, they were one in him; whether just in the body, or some other part of his humanity. I confess I don't know; nor does it embarrass me (p.146) to admit that I don't know, as it does you.'10 The result is disappointingly blunt; equivocating on all sides, Augustine seems either unable or simply unwilling to tackle the question with the seriousness demanded by his opponent. To state that a soulless human remains definable as a human says nothing for or against the passing of the soul from parent to offspring.

The central point of Julian's critique here had been known to Augustine long before his composition of the Contra Iulianum Liber Imperfectus in 430. As I argued in Chapter 2, writing De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione to Marcellinus in around 412, Augustine had read Rufinus of Syria's Liber de Fide, the document later admitted by Calestius to have been formative in his own opinion on the doctrine of Original Sin.11 In the course of denouncing a series of 'false' protologies, Rufinus comes close to Julian's own criticism, though without the benefit of either a philosophical vocabulary competent to deal with the distinction between material and spiritual natures, or a knowledge of Augustine's mature http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 3/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship position. Scripture, Rufinus insists, makes no mention of the transmission of the soul (materially understood or otherwise) from Adam to any of his descendants. Quite to the contrary, Genesis 2.23 is explicit: Eve is bone from Adam's bones and flesh from his flesh: 'If human flesh had not been created from underlying matter, as the flesh of Adam and Eve was; and if the soul was not made for humans thereafter from underlying matter, as was also the case of Adam and Eve, the prophet Zachariah would not have said: "He creates the human spirit within him."'12 With regard to the ethics of Original Sin, his thought is even clearer: those who propound the transmission of sin 'either proclaim that God is unjust, or certainly reckon that the devil is stronger than God, that he had the power to make that nature bad through the transgression of Adam and Eve, which God created good'.13 While Augustine wrestled extensively with the latter issue, the former remained cloudy to him. In the treatise prompted in part by the Liber de Fide, he alluded to the difficulty of offering an account of the transmission of sin that was both biologically sound and did justice to the righteousness of God: (p.147) Concerning the soul the question arises whether it also is propagated in the same way [as the flesh] and constrained by the same guilt, for which it receives forgiveness. For we cannot say that it is only the flesh of the infant, and not his soul as well, which has need of a Saviour and Redeemer…If it is not propagated in the same way as the flesh, we may ask whether, by the very fact of it being mingled with and weighed down by the flesh of sin, it still needs the remission of its own sin, and a redemption of its own, God being judge through his great foreknowledge which infants deserve to be absolved from that guilt which we are discussing (even though they are as yet unborn and have done nothing good or evil anywhere in a life which properly belongs to them). The question also arises, how we would avoid seeing God as the author of that guilt, on account of which redemption by the sacrament is necessary for the soul of the infant, even if He did not create souls by natural propagation. That is a great question… de anima uero, utrum et ipsa eodem modo propagata reatu, qui ei dimittatur, obstricta sit—neque enim possumus dicere solam carnem paruuli, non etiam animam indigere saluatoris et redemptoris est…an etiam non propagata eo ipso, quo carni peccati aggrauanda miscetur, iam ipsius peccati remissione et sua redemptione opus habeat, deo per summam praescientiam iudicante, qui paruulorum ab isto reatu non mereantur absolui, etiam qui nondum nati nihil alicubi propria sua uita egerunt uel boni uel mali, et quomodo deus, etiamsi non de traduce animas creat, non sit tamen auctor reatus eiusdem, propter quem redemptio sacramenti necessaria est animae paruuli, magna quaestio est…14

In the light of the unclear evidence offered by the Scriptures on this point combined with the sensitivity of the issue, Augustine mused, a separate treatise on this very topic ought to be attempted, some other time. This finally appeared in 419–20, in the form of De Anima et eius Origine; yet, as I shall show in the following chapter, the work raises more questions than it resolves. Ten years after its publication, Augustine would still be repeating his uncertainty of 412, that souls are 'either drawn from a person already tainted, or corrupted as one thing by another—as if in a tainted vessel' (aut utrumque vitiatum ex homine trahitur, aut alterum in altero tanquam in vitiato vase corrumpitur).15

Julian's Christological critique As I observed in Chapter 2, Augustine's Christological defence of his position on Original Sin lay in his exegesis of Romans 8:3: the Saviour responds to the needs of humanity in sinful flesh by coming, dying, and rising in its likeness. Julian's criticism, that Augustine had failed to reconcile the vitiation of a transmitted flesh with that of an uncertainly propagated soul, found a counterpart in his accusation that Augustine's Christology amounts to plain (p.148) Apollinarianism. By Julian's reading of Augustine, humans receive their souls by propagation through a reproductive act that necessarily implicates them in the sinful agency of the flesh: their embodiment is synonymous with their sinfulness. If, as Augustine himself conceded, Christ has truly human flesh, in what sense can his humanity have evaded the double punishment of mortality and concupiscence, as much one in the other as body and soul? Merely to cite the virginal conception as the mode by which Christ's soul bypassed propagation along with the flesh ignores the fact that, once embodied, it must inevitably be implicated in the confines of fleshly concupiscentia carnalis. Augustine must either explain the unique origin and character of this soul, or admit that the Word himself, as bodily agent, overcame the mortal http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 4/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ Oxford Scholarship will of its body.

Julian's extended criticism of Augustine's Christology is found in chapters 45–65 of Contra Iulianum Liber Imperfectus 4. Julian begins by referring to De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia 2.14.5, where Augustine had contrasted the general state of humanity, in thrall to the concupiscence of the flesh, with a Christ untainted by such concupiscence. Consistent with his own opinion that such desire, rightly used, is an inherently good part of created nature, Julian argues that excluding Christ from concupiscence must be to say his body also lacked physical sensibility: 'Having bound up the body in the terminology of concupiscence, you want to remove the sense of the eyes from Christ as much as you do that of his innards!'16 Differently put, to remove one part of Christ's desire impairs every other part, reducing his affections and physical desires together in one move. Augustine, by Julian's reading, is thus a crypto Apollinarian: Apollinaris is reported to have thought at first that the Incarnation appeared to be an assumption of the body alone from human substance, and in the place of the soul there was only divinity; and that Christ did not appear to have taken up a human, but only a cadaver. Once he was compelled by authority…he said that there was indeed a human soul in Christ, but that there was no sense in his body; and he announced that Christ had existed impassible to each and every sin.

Apollinaris quippe primo talem incarnationem Christi induxisse fertur, ut diceret solum corpus de humana substantia assumptum videri, pro anima vero ipsam fuisse deitatem; Christusque non hominem, sed cadaver videretur hominis suscepisse…Cum ergo auctoritate…eversus fuisset…dixit, animam quidem humanam in Christo fuisse, sed sensus in eo corporis non fuisse, atque impassibilem eum pronuntiavit universis exstitisse peccatis.17

In order to isolate Christ from sin, Augustine (in company with Apollinaris) has had to sever the reproductive capacity of the flesh from Christ's human affections. In effect, this denies him a full human soul by separating his (p.149) appetitive and affective capacities.18 Consequently, Christ's exemplary character collapses, so that Julian questions what would be the salvific power of his resisting temptation, when the nature of his humanity precluded the reality of temptation.19 This extends not only to his chastity but also to his fasting, as the desire to nourish oneself and to satisfy the sexual impulse are both, from Julian's perspective, integrated for the good in human nature. In addition, Augustine's Christ is in no sense passive as a human would usually be, where passivity is the corollary of both the affections and physical appetite. Julian therefore draws Augustine's understanding of the crucifixion (and thus also the resurrection) into question.20

In his response to Julian, Augustine initially fails to grasp his central point: that his own understanding of the fallen, concupiscent will, propagated to the whole human race, is biologically problematic. Instead, he quotes the Anakephaleosis, his major source in the writing of De Haeresibus: Epiphanius, of blessed memory bishop of Cyprus, in the little book he published about heresies, wrote that certain Apollinarians had said the body of Christ was consubstantial with his divinity; others denied that he had taken up a soul at all; still others argued that he had not taken his flesh from created flesh, which is to say from Mary, but (citing 'and the Word was made flesh'), they argued that the Word was made into flesh. After all that, I really do not know what they thought by saying that he had not taken up a mind. What you claim the Apollinarians asserted —that there was no 'sense' in Christ, and that they proclaimed him to be impassible—I have read that nowhere but in your book, nor have I heard it ever, from anyone.

Sanctae memoriae Cyprius episcopus Epiphanius in opusculo quod de haeresibus edidit, dixit Apollinaristarum quosdam in Domino Jesu Christo divinitati corpus consubstantiale dixisse; alios autem negasse quod animam sumpserit; alios propter quod dictum est, Verbum caro factum est (Joan. I, 14), contendisse non eum carnem sumpsisse de creata carne, id est, Mariae, sed Verbum carnem factum; postea vero nescio quid cogitantes dixisse quod non sumpserit mentem. Quod ergo affirmas Apollinaristas asseverasse in Christo sensus corporis non fuisse, eumque illos pronuntiasse impassibilem; nec uspiam legi, nisi in hoc libro tuo, nec aliquando ab aliquo audivi.21 http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 5/35

8/8/2015 Apollinaris Redux? Augustine and the Psychology of Christ ­ Oxford Scholarship

As I observed in Chapter 2, Augustine's attitude to the Anakephaleosis was a careful and critical one, typified by his rejection of Ps. Epiphanius' description of Origenism. The Anakephaleosis proposes two models of Apollinarianism: the first amounts to a version of monophysitism, the second posits an assumption of a truncated humanity, bereft of any soul (anima). Augustine counters a third variant, in which Christ is conceived as having no mind (mens), by suggesting that a flesh consubstantial with divinity, though without (p.150) an anima, would still possess a mens.22 Turning from the Anakephaleosis to Julian, Augustine applies the point: even a monophysite Christ without an anima would still have bodily sense, presumably because he would still have a mens. Yet Augustine misses Julian's fundamental criticism, that a Christ who is genuinely mortal but whose soul is actively sinless cannot be truly human, where humanity is defined as a mortal creature, and whose death proceeds from its possession of a soul condemned to persistent, sinful desire.

Throughout his response to Julian in Contra Iulianum Liber Imperfectum 4, Augustine fails to meet Julian's argument: Christ could have experienced concupiscent carnality had he willed it; coming in the likeness of sinful flesh, he simply did not.23 Without doubt, he sensed the physical realities of the world and was able to desire the objects available to all other humans—including that of generation—but his desire was not 'against the spirit' as it is for fallen humanity.24 Augustine cannot concede that this situates Christ in a human nature—and having a human soul—which no longer has any relation to that possessed by all other people, either before or after the Fall. Augustine's reply is further undermined by the looseness of his vocabulary, in which the terms mens, anima, and sensus are used inconsistently. Offering no detailed treatment of the denaturing effects of the Fall on the soul further hinders the effectiveness of his counterattack. This is not a novelty to the anti Julianic works: all the anti Pelagian treatises advance the punishment of sin in mortality and concupiscentia carnalis from a catena of scriptural texts, observations from nature and pure theological speculation. Because of this, Julian's startling accusation of an Apollinarianism latent in Augustine's Christology, together with Augustine's technically ambiguous response, demands analysis. If accurate, his criticism stands to draw the whole of Augustine's mature theological agenda into question. I shall, therefore, proceed to examine Augustine's treatments of this important heresy elsewhere in his corpus, before returning to Julian's criticism.

Augustine against Apollinaris Before setting out, I want to underline the obvious: whatever Augustine's perception of Apollinarianism, it need not have been a historically accurate one. The same is true of Epiphanius, the compiler of the Anakephaleosis, and Julian himself. In a sense, the precise content of Apollinaris' writings is irrelevant to a survey of the reception of his heresy by ecclesiasical writers of (p.151) the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Their understanding of whatever was left of an Apollinarian corpus will have been formed in the light of its conciliar condemnation.25 While this frees the commentator on Augustine from investigating the nuances of Apollinaris' actual thought, it confronts her with a variety of highly fluid understandings of Apollinarianism in circulation around Augustine. Floating free of Apollinaris' works, these are accountable to no one, and are consequently more difficult to compare with one another.

To date, a full appraisal of Augustine's reception of the Apollinarian heresy remains to be written; Studer's recent Augustinus Lexikon article attempts to demarcate his developing perception (and by extension, description) of the heresy and his sources for both.26 However, it makes no substantial attempt to measure the engagement of Augustine's own Christology with the issue of Christ's sinlessness, which Apollinarianism raises by excising the voluntary and therefore peccable aspect of Christ's humanity. We are left with the openended appraisal: 'On the question of the sinlessness of Jesus he not only holds fast…to Christ's full humanity and its connection by reproduction with Adam; he also surpasses his predecessors in discussions of human freedom and the true righteousness of humanity.'27 More interesting still is Studer's lack of certainty about Augustine's early acquaintance with a definition of Apollinarianism. Damasus, Ambrose, Hilary, Ambrosiaster, and possibly Jerome are cited as potential sources, together with general Milanese and Roman oral traditions on the topic, which are particularly indebted to Damasus. He suggests that Augustine's soteriological evaluation of the distinction between anima and mens in Christ finds its origin in the writings of Damasus, while the perception that Apollinarians argued for a conflation of divinity and human soul is drawn from Ambrose's De Incarnationis Dominci Sacramento. I begin with Studer's first sourcecritical claim. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.scihub.org/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199662234.001.0001/acprof9780199662234chapter6?print 6/35

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