To the most beloved brothers, all the bishops established throughout Gaul, Anastasius pope.
Chapter I: The Communion of Catholic Bishops; The Heresy Reported by Aeonius of Arles
1. Good and pleasant is the Davidic word: For brethren to dwell together in unity (Ps. 132:1). For although spaces of lands separate us in distance, yet by the Spirit, who must be one in all Catholics, we ought to be conjoined.
2. We have praised the solicitude of Our brother and fellow bishop of Arles, which has presented to Us, as We judge, necessary matter for preaching against a heresy that he affirms has arisen within Gaul — which would seek to persuade by this rationale, that, just as parents are to the human race, since they hand on bodies from material dross, so they also bestow the spirit of life on souls. Whom your brotherhood ought to recall by your admonitions and preachings from a vain and false persuasion.
3. For in both, what God works by His benefits up to the present time, Scripture testifies in no ambiguous assertion. Indeed He Himself who said: Increase and multiply and fill the earth (Gen. 1:28), is at work in this blessing; and again, if anyone should depart from His commandments and the law set forth, what should befall him for his evil use and the rashness of his choice, He has determined by certain precepts.
4. How therefore, against the divine sentence, with too carnal an understanding, do they think that the soul made to God’s image is poured forth and infused into man by an admixture from him who from the beginning made this — when the action itself does not cease today, as He Himself said: My Father works until now, and I work (John 5:17). Not therefore to that time alone does this operation pertain, but through all the spaces that run, through the courses of the ages. For they ought also to understand what is written: He who lives forever created all things at once (Ecclus. 18:1). If therefore Scripture, before it disposed creatures one by one in their kinds by reason, declared that He who cannot be denied, also causally, in a work pertaining to the creation of all things at once, from which works finished He rested on the seventh day, now however visibly works in a work pertaining to the course of times even until now: let them yield to sound doctrine, that He bestows souls who calls those things which are not as though they were (Rom. 4:17).
Chapter II: The Direct Knowledge of God Concerning the Unborn — Jacob and Esau, Jeremiah
5. For let them say: who sent Jacob or Esau into the world, as the prophet Malachi attests: Did He not, before they were born, hate the one and love the other? (Mal. 1:3) Who also recognized in the womb of his mother the man about to enter, as is said in Jeremiah: Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee, and before thou camest forth from the womb, I sanctified thee, and I made thee a prophet to the Gentiles (Jer. 1:5)? Unless perhaps suspicions confer themselves on the Gentile [view] of those who say there is one vital soul and another rational, when [those who hold this] ought not on the basis of certain dreams, dubious and uncertain, but on the example and truth of the divine Scriptures, to look. For when after four months it is most certain that one conceived in the womb obtains a spirit, where the office of the parents has now ceased — by which they think the limus animated by material dross is produced when, as has been said, no delight or work of father or mother exists at that point — after how much time is it said by these very women that the conceived in the womb is being vivified? We do not believe that prudence is hidden from you, since they ought in this to be made most certain, who labor with persuasions of this kind, that His operation and judgment in the choice of good and evil men is, that He leads some by foreknowledge through grace to reward, [while] others by just judgment He permits to sustain due punishment.
Chapter III: Original Sin Transmitted by Generation; The Soul Created by God
6. Therefore, dearest, I being absent in body but present with you in spirit, I wish thus to refute those who are said to have rushed forth into a new heresy: that they assert souls are handed on to the human race from the parents in the same way as a body is poured forth from the dross of matter — that they may know themselves, according to apostolic preaching, to be already dead. For thus is it said by him: For they who are according to the flesh are wise to the things of the flesh, but they who are according to the spirit are wise to the things of the spirit; for the wisdom of the flesh is death, but the wisdom of the spirit is life and peace; because the wisdom of the flesh is hostile to God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither can it be; and they who are in the flesh cannot please God (Rom. 8:5–8). Let them therefore understand, with such prudence of theirs, that, since the flesh which they think is according to the condemnation of sin in Adam died once and for all from the beginning, do they suppose the life of men is contained as if not living: namely that they may speak as not living. Indeed the apostle himself teaches them, that in his prevarication and in his sin from the beginning not only did Adam himself die, but every progeny which descends from him in the future as well — which these think they hand on as life to their offspring, the very life which Adam Himself once lost. They cannot give what they themselves do not have. Let them therefore hear the same blessed apostle saying: As by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death, and so death passed to all men, in whom all have sinned (Rom. 5:12). What can dead men say in response to this, that they may seem reasonably to claim that life passed from parents which the master of the Gentiles teaches has been lost?
Chapter IV: Christ the Second Adam; Baptism as the Recovery of Life
7. It remains therefore that, before he is reborn in Christ, every progeny appears to provide to its offspring only the death which comes to it from itself. And on this account Adam the second is received by us in being reborn, that death, which had been assumed by guilt in the first Adam, may be excluded. Let dead men understand, if any sense even a small one is in them, that they ought to be reborn through baptism, that they may recover through the second the life which they lost through the first Adam. For from the beginning also, by the reading of Genesis, let them learn how good and how clement God established all things, that life might be given by Him ever-living to those being born. And what they perhaps think they say piously and well — that souls are deservedly said to be handed on by parents, since they are entangled in sins — this distinction must be discerned by themselves wisely. For from them nothing else can be handed on, than what was committed by them as their own fault — that is, the fault and the penalty of sin, which the progeny following through generation evidently shows: that depraved and distorted men are born. In which alone, indeed, God is clearly seen to have no communion, who, lest they fall into this necessity of calamity, prohibited and foretold by the dread of death. Therefore, what is handed on by parents through generation evidently appears, and what God has either worked or works from the beginning to the end is shown.
Chapter V: The Scriptural Witness That Each Soul Is Made Directly By God; Command to the Gallic Bishops to Follow Roman Teaching
8. And lest the documents of Scripture seem too few to you of those things We have briefly said, We have read it written: Have I not made every breath? (Isa. 57:16) Do these new heretics say that this is done from the parents and not from God, as He Himself attests? Or do they wish themselves rather to be believed than the omnipotent God? Even Adam himself professes, saying that man comes to be not from himself but from God, when he says: God has placed for me seed, that is a son, in the name of Seth in place of Abel whom Cain killed (Gen. 4:25). He did not therefore say, “I placed for me,” but “God placed.” How can these contrarily say, from parents, what divine Scripture refutes? Or is there in that matter, dearest brothers, any doubtfulness, in which they could bring forward at least some color for their persuasion, when He says to Moses: Who made the mouth of man, or who fabricated the mute and the deaf, the seeing and the blind? Was it not I? (Exod. 4:11)
9. Innumerable indeed are the examples of the divine Scriptures, which whether in the prophets or in diverse books — Job, Ruth, and the others which obtain canonical authority in the Church — you may be able to find: by which perhaps your reluctant predication may be conquered while resisting. But We, amid many and diverse occupations, judge it sufficient meanwhile to have signified these things by an index-like indication: that you, as Our fellow ministers, following My voice, ought to fight in this — lest, through wretched and innovating superstitions, any blot deserving the Catholic Church’s censure or any foulness be born — crying out with the royal and Davidic voice: Know that the Lord Himself is God, that He Himself made us and not we ourselves (Ps. 99:3). We trust, in this most clear trumpet all wickedness will be quieted. May God preserve you safe, dearest brothers!
Given on the tenth day before the Kalends of September, in the year of consul Paulinus.
Footnotes
- ↩ Aeonius of Arles (494–502), metropolitan of the Gallic province whose see Leo I had centered his attention on in Letter X (the Hilary of Arles affair). The pattern Aeonius is following — reporting a doctrinal trouble in his province to Rome and seeking the pope’s authoritative response — is the same pattern that the Gallic vicariate had established under Leo. The sollicitudo Anastasius II praises is the Gallic bishop’s pastoral concern, deliberately echoing the same term Roman pontiffs used for their own universal pastoral responsibility (cf. 2 Cor. 11:28).
- ↩ The Latin is ab ipsis mulieribus. The reference is to the empirical observation, available to women in the period through their own experience of pregnancy, of fetal quickening at approximately four months. The doctrinal point is that quickening — the manifestation of a living, animated spirit in the womb — occurs at a point when the parents are no longer actively contributing anything to the conception, ruling out a continuing parental role in the soul’s generation.
- ↩ The Latin is Adam secundus a nobis in renascendo suscipitur — Christ as the second Adam (1 Cor. 15:45–47). The whole anthropological argument is structured around the contrast: by Adam the first, all inherit the death; by Adam the second received in baptism, the life that Adam lost is recovered. The reader should observe that Anastasius II is articulating, in 498, the same Adam-typology that Paul had set out and that Augustine had developed at length in the early 410s — Catholic doctrine taught in continuity through the Roman See and confirmed in the medieval and Tridentine settlements as one and the same teaching.
- ↩ This is the precise doctrinal pivot of the letter. The traducianists could appeal to Romans 5:12 and the universal transmission of original sin: if all sin in Adam, must not the soul itself come from Adam through the parents? Anastasius II answers no: what is transmitted by generation is not the soul itself but the inheritance of Adam’s penalty (culpae poenaque peccati). The soul is created by God; the body is generated by the parents; original sin is transmitted through the generation of the body, not through any direct causal contribution of the parents to the soul’s substance. This solution preserves both the universality of original sin and the direct creation of each soul by God — the position Augustine had favored without committing to definitively, here being articulated by the Roman pontiff with full doctrinal weight.
- ↩ The Latin is qui in Ecclesia canonicam obtinent auctoritatem. The phrase is significant: Anastasius II is invoking the canonical authority of these books — Job, Ruth, and others — as a settled matter within the Church. The reference to Job (a wisdom book outside the Hebrew canon as it would later be defined by Protestants) and Ruth (a deuterocanonically situated book in some lists) shows the Roman pontiff using the broader Western canon as a doctrinal resource. The phrase is not a formal canonical definition, but it is an operative invocation of canon-of-scripture authority for books some traditions would later dispute.
- ↩ The Latin is conministri — fellow ministers — a term Anastasius II uses for the Gallic bishops. The word is significant: the bishops are addressed as sharers in Anastasius II’s ministry, not merely as recipients of his teaching. The structure is collegial in form, hierarchical in operation: the Roman pontiff teaches, the bishops as fellow ministers follow his voice. The collegial register coexists with the explicit instruction that they follow the pope’s voice — fraternal address in service of clear papal teaching.
- ↩ The Latin is foeditas ulla nascatur — that no foulness be born. The verb is striking: in a letter on whether the soul is “born” from the parents, Anastasius II uses the verb of generation for the heresy itself. Heresy is not to be born within the Catholic Church.
- ↩ The Latin is in hac clarissima tuba — “in this most clear trumpet.” The royal and Davidic voice — the Psalm proclaiming that God made us and not we ourselves — is the trumpet whose clarity will silence all wickedness. The image is Pauline (1 Cor. 14:8) and prophetic; Anastasius II is figuring the Roman pontiff’s teaching as a trumpet-call that the Gallic bishops are to amplify and follow.
- ↩ 23 August. The consular dating Paulino v. css. in the manuscript is corrupt; Thiel’s apparatus suggests fl(avio) Paulino v(iro) c(larissimo) c(on)s(ule) — “Flavius Paulinus, most distinguished man, consul.” The year is 498, the consulate of Paulinus in the West (with John the Scythian in the East). This dating places the letter approximately three months before Anastasius II’s death on 19 November 498. It is the latest substantial doctrinal letter of his pontificate, and very likely his final theological work in the corpus.
Historical Commentary