BOOK 5
BOOK FIVE Chapter 1 ~ OW THAT WE HAVE ANSWERED your first and second books, order demands we look at the contents of the third, and, with the Lord's help, give your noxious efforts a wholesome answer. In accordance with our plan, we shall pass over irrelevant matters so that readers may learn our position with profit and without loss of time. Why need I say anything about the usual vain remarks at the beginning of your book, about how concerned you are in the cause of truth, and the lack of so-called prudent men whom you delight in pleasing? This is the cry of all heretics ancient and recent, and it is a bit shabby and worn with use. Your intense pride forces you into a role and attitude that will be your undoing. It is not necessary again to refute your insulting slanders, seemingly aimed at one man, myself, while without mentioning their names you vent your spleen or blindness upon a multitude of Catholic teachers. I think I have answered your first two books to the satisfaction of· all. (2) You exaggerate the difficulty of knowledge of holy Scripture and say it is fitting for only the learned few: 241 242 SAINT AUGUSTINE namely, that God is the Creator of men and the universe; that He is just, truthful, and good; the generous bestower of His gifts on men. As you say, 'The one and the best reason for all striving for good is that God be honored.' And your honor of Him is such that you deny He is the deliverer of infants through Christ Jesus, which means Saviour, for you say they are washed by His baptism, yet not so as to obtain salvation from this, as though they do not need Christ the Physician. Julian shrewdly inspects the vein of human origin and actually pronounces them sound. How much better to have learned nothing at all than through supposed knowledge of the Law with your unseemly boasting-surely not under the guidance of God's Law, but rather by your own vanity-to have come to this ungodly presumption, inimical both to the Christian faith and to your own soul. (3) Yau say my teaching is so deformed and groundless that it tries to ascribe injustice to God, the creation of man to the Devil, a substance to sin, and conscience without knowledge to infants. I reply briefly that our teaching is not deformed, because it proclaims One fair above the son~ ')f men to be the Saviour of all men/ and, therefore, also of infants. It is not groundless, because it says man is like to vanity and his days pass away like a shadow,2 not without reason, but through previous sin. It does not ascribe injustice to God, but justice, because it is not unjust that even infants suffer the many and great evils we constantly observe. It does not ascribe the creation of man, but the corruption of human origin, to the Devil; it ascribes to sin, not a substance, but the action, in the first men, and the contagion, in their posterity. It does not ascribe conscience 1 Cf. Ps. 44.3. 2 Cf. Ps. 143.4. AGAINST JULIAN 243 without knowledge to infants, in whom there is neither knowledge nor conscience; he in whom all have sinned knew what he was doing, and every man contracts evil from that source. (4) But you, indeed, bar the way for the multitude of the ignorant, whom you say are simple men, busy with other affairs, without instruction, who by faith alone should enter the Church of Christ, lest they be easily frightened by obscure questions. Let them believe God is the true Creator of men, and, holding firmly that He is good, truthful, and just, let them preserve this judgment about the Trinity and embrace and praise whatever they hear that is in harmony with it; let no force of argumentation pluck it from them; rather, let them detest every authority and society which tries to convince them of the contrary. If you consider these words of yours, you will find them most telling against you, and that the one reason the Christian multitude, from whose inexperienced judgment you refer us to the few you regard as most prudent and learned, detests your innovation is that they believe that God, supremely just, is the Creator of men. And, because they see the sufferings of their own infants, they know...
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