Augustine in His Own Words
Against the Pelagians 393
Christ the Pediatrician
After the tribunal, Marcellinus wrote Augustine, asking him to respond to Caelestius's assertions. Augustine replied with On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins and On Infant Baptism. Note three points: First, Augustine did not initiate the controversy; his close friends and colleagues did. We need to appreciate to what degree Augustine's role was thrust upon him. Second, the controversy at this juncture was anti-Caelestian. The condemnation of Caelestius said nothing about Pelagius. Only in retrospect would Augustine see this as his first anti-Pelagian treatise. Third, while Caelestius took a stand on infants, Pelagius (at least in his surviving writings) shows no interest in them. This highlights what scholars now emphasize: Pelagianism is not a single, coherent body of ideas, even if Augustine treated it as such, but rather "a loose confederation of theologies taking their name, but not necessarily their inspiration, from the British moralist."45 In this initial work, Augustine focuses on two issues that came up during Caelestius's trial. The first is original sin and its implications for infant baptism. As Augustine sees it, the underlying yet central theological issue is Christology.46 To declare infants innocent implicitly denies that Christ is the one and only Savior of the world. Note how Augustine gives his stock image of Christ the Doctor a new twist: that Jesus is also a baby doctor, a pediatrician. From On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins and On Infant Baptism, Book 1:
(18.23) Those people raise a question and seem to offer something worth considering and discussing: They say that little ones, newly born from their mothers' wombs, receive baptism not for the remission of sin, but in order that, through "spiritual procreation," they may be created in Christ and become partakers of the kingdom of heaven and, by this, children and "heirs of God, co-heirs with Christ" (Rom 8:17).47 Yet when one asks them whether those who are not baptized and not made co-heirs with Christ and partakers of the kingdom of heaven have the benefit of eternal salvation at the resurrection of the dead, they labor furiously but find no way out. After all, would any Christian allow it to be said that one can attain eternal salvation without being reborn in Christ? Christ willed that rebirth to take place through baptism when he established just such a sacrament for regenerating us for the hope of eternal salvation. For this reason, the Apostle said: "Not because of any righteous deeds we have done but according to His mercy, He saved us through the bath of rebirth" (Ti 3:5). . . . Who would dare claim that without
45. James Wetzel, "Snares of Truth: Augustine on Free Will and Predestination," in Dodaro and Lawless, Augustine and His Critics, 126.
46. Burns, Development, 96. 47. "Not for the remission of sin, but . . . partakers of the kingdom": Augustine is here quoting nearly word-for-word Rufinus's text. It is possible either that Augustine had the text or that Caelestius had quoted it in the documents that he formally submitted on the occasion of the ecclesiastical tribunal.