§ 156. ANSWERS TO PELAGIAJS OBJECTIONS. 839
2. If evil is nothing substantial, we should expect that the baptized and regenerate, in whom its power is broken, would beget sinless children. If sin is propagated, righteousness should be propagated also.
But baptism, according to Augustine, removes only the guilt {reatus) of original sin, not the sin itself {concupiscenfia). In procreation it is not the regenerate spirit that is the agent, l)Qt the nature which is still under the dominion of the cotttcupiscentia. " Regenerate parents produce not as sons of God, but as children of- the world." All that are born need therefore regeneration through the same baptism, which washes away the curse of original sin. Augustine appeals to analogies; especially to the fact that from the seed of the good olive a wild olive grows, although the good and the wild greatly differ.'
3. But if the production of childi-en is not possible without Heshly lust, must not marriage be condemned ? '
1^0 ; marriage, and the consequent production of children, are, like nature, in themselves good. They belong to the mutual polarity of the sexes. The blessing: "Be fruitful and multiply," and the declaration : " Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and tiiey shall be one flesh," come down from paradise itself, and generation would have taken place even without sin, yet " sine uUa libidine," as a " tranquilla motio et conjunctio vel commixtio membrorum." Carnal concupiscence is subsequent and adventitious, existing now as an accident in the act of generation, and concealed by nature herself with shame ; but it does not annul the blessing of marriage. It is only through sin that the sexual parts have become pudenda / in themselves they are honorable. Undoubtedly the regenerate are called to
' De pcccat. mer. et remiss, ii. cap. 9 and c. 25 ; De n>>ptiis et concup. i. c. 18 ; Contra Julian, vi. c. 5.
^ Comp. against this especially the first book De nuptiis et concupiscentia (torn. X. f. 279 sqq.), written 418 or 419, in order to refute this objection. Julian angwered this in a work of four books, which gave Augustine occasion to compose tha second book De nuptiis et concup., and the six books Contra Julianum, a. d. 42L Julian published an answer to this again, which Augustine in turn refuted in bid Opus imperf., a. d. 429, during the writing of which he died, a. d. 430.
840 THIED PESIOD. A.D. 311-590.
reduce concupiscence to the mere service of generation, thai tliej may produce children, who shall be children of God, and therefore born again in Christ. Such desire Augustine, with reference to 1 Cor. vii. 3 if., calls " a pardonable guilt." But since, in the present state, the concupiscentia carnis is inseparaole from marriage, it would have been really more consistent to give up the " bonum nuptiarum," and to regard marriage as a necessary evil; as the monastic asceticism, favored by the spirit of the age, was strongl}'' inclined to do. And in thie respect there was no material difference between Augustine and Pelagius. The latter went fully as far, and even farther, in his praise of virginity as the highest form of Ciiristian virtue ; his letter to the nun Demetrias is a picture of a perfect virgin who in her moral purity proves the excellency of human nature.
4. It contradicts the righteousness of God, to suppose one man punished for the sin of another. We are accountable only for sins which are the acts of our own will. Julian appealed to the oft-quoted passage, Ezek. xviii. 2-4, where God forbids tlie use of the proverb in Israel : " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth arc set on edge," and where the principle is laid down : " The soul that einneth, it shall die." '
On the individualizing principle of Pelagius this objection is very natural, and is irrefragable; but in the system of Augustine, where mankind appears as an organic whole, and Adam as the representative of human nature and as including all his posterity, it partially loses its force. Augustine thus makes all men sharers in the fall, so that they are, in fact, punished for what they themselves did in Adam. But this by no means fully solves the difficulty. He should have applied his organic view differently, and should have carried it farther. For if Adam must not be isolated from his descendants, neither must original sin be taken apart from actual sin. God does not punish the one without the other. He always looks upon the life of man as a whole ; upon original sin ag
' Aug. Opus imperf. iii. 18, 19 (torn. x. 1067, 1069). Augustine's answer if visatinfactorj.