Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Against the Pelagians 423 make? "What," you ask, "does the devil recognize there as his own if he made neither what is made nor what it is made from?" Clearly, what is made is the human being; what one is made from is the human seed. Both are good. The devil made neither, but sowed the seed's defect. The devil does not recognize there some good of his because the good we both praise is not his, but he recognizes his own evil against which we both fight. And it is not right that what we both fight against is praised by just one of us. Look carefully at the very matter you asked me about: "Among so many good things, where does the evil in infants come from?" And you are silent about what I put in that very same book you are answering. And among the words you are now rebutting, there is what the Apostle says: "Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death, and thus it was passed to all human beings, in whom all have sinned" (Rom 5:12). You do not want anyone to hear or read this passage—there where it matters most—lest they recognize their own faith and hold your arguments in contempt.
(23.53) If the goodness of marriage were only the good use of a good, we might well wonder how evil can be derived from it. But since the goodness of marriage is the good use of an evil, it does not surprise us that the evil that is original sin is derived from the evil of concupiscence, which the goodness of marriage uses well. . . . Marital union was not instituted, as you think, for the sake of carnal concupiscence, but for the sake of the good which is made from that evil. This good would exist without that evil if no one had sinned, but, as it is, this good cannot exist without that evil; yet the good is not therefore evil. Conversely, there can be no evil without some good; yet evil is not therefore good, for the work of God in nature is a good, without which, however, there cannot be an evil will. Just as adultery cannot exist without the good of nature, yet adultery is not therefore good, so marriage cannot now exist without the evil of concupiscence, yet it does not follow that marriage is evil. Even if we should grant you that "every cause of evil is destitute of good," this does not apply to marriage, which is not a cause of evil. Marriage did not produce the evil of concupiscence, but only found it there to be used well.94
A Lifelong Struggle
From Confessions onward, Augustine wrote against any false optimism of born-again Christianity, as if conversion and baptism marked the cessation of one's inner troubles. In the Pelagian controversy, he came to articulate the often tedious, lifelong struggles that remained in the convert on the far side of baptism. From Against Julian, Book 2:
94. Contra Julianum 3.13.26–23.53 (PL 44:715–30); my trans., based on Schumacher, FOTC 35:129–55.
(9.31) Now let us sum up as best we can what we have discussed throughout this whole book. . . . You say:
If God creates human beings, they cannot be born with any evil. If marriage is good, nothing evil arises from it. If all sins are forgiven in baptism, those born of the reborn cannot contract original sin. If God is just, He cannot condemn in the children the sins of the parents, since He forgives the parents their sins as well. If human nature is capable of perfect justice, it cannot have natural faults.
To this we reply: [1] that God is the Creator of human beings, that is, of both soul and body; and [2] that marriage is good; and [3] that through the baptism of Christ all sins are forgiven; and [4] that God is just; and [5] that human nature is capable of perfect justice. Yet although all these are true, human beings are born subject to the vitiated origin which is contracted from the first human being, and therefore go to damnation unless they are reborn in Christ. And this we have proved by the authority of Catholic saints who assert what we say about original sin and also confess that all five of these statements are true.
(9.32) Blessed Ambrose says that only that man, the "mediator between God and human beings" (1 Tm 2:5), because He was born of a virgin and did not experience sin in His birth, was not subject to the chains of the bound generation. But all human beings are born under sin, and their very origin is in evil, because they are formed in the pleasure of concupiscence, as the law of sin, in the body of this death, wars against the law of the mind, so that not only all the good and faithful but also the great strength of the Apostle fought against it, so that the flesh being subjected to the spirit by the grace of Christ may be brought back into harmony, because through the transgression of the first man discord was brought about between these two who were first created without sin. Who is it that says this? Ambrose, a man of God, a Catholic, and a most keen defender of the Catholic truth against heretics, even risking his life, one so highly praised by the testimony of your teacher that he said, "Not even an enemy would dare find fault with his faith and his clear understanding of the Scriptures."95 . . . Ambrose placed human justice in this life in a kind of warfare and battle not only against the hostile [demonic] powers of the air, but also against our own lusts, through which those external enemies strive to overthrow us or enter into us. In this war, he says, the flesh itself is a dangerous adversary, whose nature as it was first created would have remained in harmony with us if it had not been vitiated by the sin of the first man, but it now strives against us in a kind of sickness. In this
95. "Your teacher": Pelagius. Augustine is quoting here from Pelagius's Pro libero arbitrio, Book 3; also cited in gr. et pecc. or. 1.42.46.