80. Council of Carthage (418), Canons 1–5 (CCL 149:69–71); my trans.
Against the Pelagians 415 the divine commandments without it, let him be anathema. For when the Lord spoke about the fruits of the commandments, He did not say "Without me you can do so, but only with more difficulty," but rather said: "Without me you can do nothing" (Jn 15:5).80 !
Phase Three: The Debate with
Julian of Eclanum (418–430)
Anguishing over Infants
From an early date, Augustine refused to take a stand on one of the burning philosophical questions of his age: the origin of the soul. Two common views at that time were "traducianism" and "creationism." Traducianists argued that we get our souls passed down to us from our parents just as we get our bodies passed down from them. This view could have supported Augustine's view of original sin, but he rejected it because it implied that the soul, like the body, was material. Creationists argued that God created a new soul for each new person. This view, favored by Jerome, did not square well with the idea of an inherited original sin. Augustine eventually published a book-length treatise, On the Soul and Its Origin (De anima et eius origine), defending his agnosticism. Before this, in 415, Augustine wrote a long letter to Jerome discussing the question of the soul's origin and, in the process, expressed his personal anguish over his own teaching that God justly condemned unbaptized infants. He also anguished over the sufferings of infants. While convinced that his teaching was, in its fundamentals, correct, he sought some way of articulating how all this squared with God's goodness and justice. He begged Jerome for an answer to these anguishing questions. Jerome never answered. From Letter 166: (4.10) Teach me, I beg of you, what I am to teach. Teach me what I am to hold, and tell me, if souls are individually created today for individuals at birth, how these souls commit sin in infants so as to need the remission of sin in the sacrament of Christ since they sin in Adam from whom the flesh of sin is derived; or, if they do not sin, how can it be just of the Creator to bind them by another's sin when they are joined to mortal bodies descended from him so that damnation is their lot unless help is given them by the Church since it is not in their power to be helped by the grace of baptism? What kind of justice is it that so many thousands of souls should be damned because they departed from their bodies by death in infancy, without the grace of the
80. Council of Carthage (418), Canons 1–5 (CCL 149:69–71); my trans.