To Turbantius — fragments in Against Julian — Book 4
Julian of Eclanum (c. 386–c. 455) was bishop of Eclanum in southern Italy until 418, when he was deposed and exiled for refusing to condemn Pelagius. The most learned Pelagian controversialist, he pursued Augustine across a decade of pamphlet war.
None of Julian's works survives directly; what remains is preserved in the long quotations of Augustine, who answered him book by book. Reconstructed from those hostile pages, Julian emerges as a formidable defender of free will, marriage, and the goodness of creation.
This volume gathers the surviving arguments: the six books To Florus with the earlier fragments and letter material, each with its source locator.
© 2026 SaneApps. This translation is free to share and adapt, even commercially, as long as you credit SaneApps. Draft translation, prepared with AI assistance and not yet independently reviewed. Verify against the original before citing.
He said that, on the apostle’s testimony, marital chastity is God’s gift.§§4.1.2–4.2.11
4.1.2He said that, on the apostle’s testimony, marital chastity is God’s gift.
4.1.3They are prepared for the devil’s kingdom.
4.1.4Marital intercourse was devised by the devil.
The union of bodies arose through the evil of transgression.
4.1.5It follows that God’s gift causes harm if a human being is born with evil, since no one is born except by God’s gift.
4.2.6We should pray for the power to have intercourse.
4.2.7I will strike at the other side of his definition.
If sexual warmth, the servant of honorable marriage, is restrained from excessive outbursts both by the effort of believers and by the power of the gift, and is curbed rather than extinguished by grace, it is commendable in its kind and within its proper measure; only its excesses are blameworthy.
4.2.8If sexual warmth could be evil by nature, it should be rooted out, not regulated.
4.2.11It should be entirely removed by the mind’s effort. This should have happened if it were evil.
Moderating a thing that harms by its very nature does nothing to advance innocence. Desire produces seed.§§4.2.12–4.3.23
4.2.12Moderating a thing that harms by its very nature does nothing to advance innocence.
Desire produces seed.
4.2.13Thanks should be given for either the control or the origin of desire.
4.3.14I pursue the points in his argument that seem clever to him.
Eagerly blaming the substance, he praises its gifts.
4.3.15A person is helped to attain perfection.
A human being is stirred toward something praiseworthy by the impulses of a noble heart.
Human nature is good, since it deserves the help of such grace.
I thought he called the achievement of the human will heavenly gifts.
4.3.16People outside the faith abound in virtues. In them there is only the good of nature, without the help of grace, although that nature is enslaved to superstitions. Through the powers of inborn freedom alone they are often found to be merciful, modest, chaste, and sober.
4.3.18“Everyone who competes in a contest exercises self-restraint in everything” (1 Corinthians 9:25).
4.3.19The origin of every virtue lies in the rational soul. All the dispositions through which we are good, either fruitfully or fruitlessly, have their foundation in our mind: prudence, justice, self-control, and courage. Although the power of these dispositions is naturally present in everyone, it does not hasten toward the same goal in everyone. Instead, according to the judgment of the will whose direction they obey, they are directed either toward eternal things or toward temporary things. When this happens, they differ neither in what they are nor in what they do, but only in what they deserve. They therefore cannot suffer any loss of their name or their kind; they are simply enriched by the greatness of the reward they sought, or disappointed by its smallness.
4.3.23“Gentiles who do not have the law are a law to themselves. They have the work of the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:14–15).
“They naturally do what the law requires” (Romans 2:14).
“Everything that is not from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23).§§4.3.24–4.6.36
4.3.24“Everything that is not from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23).
4.3.26Will those in whom there was true righteousness therefore be in everlasting condemnation?
4.3.27If someone says that the chastity of unbelievers is not chastity, with the same shamelessness one will say that pagans’ bodies are not bodies, that pagans’ eyes have no power to see, and that grain growing in pagans’ fields is not grain—and many other things so absurd that they can make people who understand laugh.
“The soul and body, and every good thing naturally implanted in soul and body, are God’s gifts even in sinners, since God made these things, not they themselves. But of the things they do it was said: Everything that is not from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23).
4.3.28I am amazed that such an outstanding intellect did not see how much he helped us in this too, when he said: “Some sins are overcome by other sins.”
Therefore a human being can very easily be free from sins through the pursuit of holiness, which God assists. For if sins are overcome by sins, how much more can sins be overcome by virtues?
4.3.30If a pagan clothes a naked person, is it a sin because it is not from faith?
If a pagan clothes a naked person, rescues someone in danger, tends a sick person’s wounds, spends their wealth in honorable friendship, and cannot be forced even by torture to give false testimony…
4.4.34Children are under the devil’s power because they are born from the union of bodies.
4.5.35Since we are composed of unequal goods, the soul ought to rule the body. We share the one with the gods and the other with beasts. Therefore the better part—the soul endowed with virtue—rightly commands both the body’s members and its desires.
4.6.36He has said, in a ridiculous contradiction, that some are guilty from a good act and others holy from an evil act.
“Unbelievers turn the good of marriage into evil and sin by using it without faith; in the same way, believers’ marriages turn the evil of desire to a righteous use.”
If someone could be created evil, they could never pass into goodness through washing.§§4.7.37–4.8.47
4.7.37If someone could be created evil, they could never pass into goodness through washing.
4.7.38Demons instituted marriage.
They instituted the union of seed between the two sexes.
Marital intercourse for the purpose of conceiving children is the devil’s work.
Demons would catch married people in intercourse and, finding them engaged in their own work, would not allow them to conceive children who were to be freed by rebirth.
4.7.39Adultery and other sexual wrongdoing should therefore be committed so that children may be conceived.
4.8.40Under the name of grace, they say that people become good through the necessity of fate.
4.8.41He says that no effort should be expected from the human will, contrary to the Gospel, where the Lord says: “Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; whoever seeks finds; and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:7–8).
4.8.42[The door is opened to those who knock by him] “who wants all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).
4.8.46What does not happen on the basis of merit happens by fate.
4.8.47Free will is denied if grace is praised; and, in turn, grace is denied if free will is praised.
When those books themselves begin to be examined, the ungodliness of those statements will be exposed and pierced.
It contributes nothing to the praise of grace if it gives its own people what sins bestow on the ungodly.§§4.8.48–4.9.55
4.8.48It contributes nothing to the praise of grace if it gives its own people what sins bestow on the ungodly.
4.8.49The joining of married people’s sexual organs is evil.
Its offense goes unpunished through religion.
“Let us do evil so that good may come” (Romans 3:8).
In Christian spouses, do you call the pleasure of intercourse chastity or unchastity?
4.8.50If, because of this evil of desire, guilty offspring are brought forth even from Christian spouses, it follows that virgin chastity brings happiness. And since it is found among the ungodly, unbelievers raised high by the virtue of chastity surpass Christians polluted by the stain of desire.
Among them, faith allows crime to go unpunished.
4.8.51If someone commits murder while their conscience is afraid, they are guilty because they were afraid. But if they commit some crime with triumphant boldness, as though believing that they do their evil deed from faith, they escape guilt.
4.8.52Natural desire is therefore good. When kept within its proper measure, it is stained by no taint of evil.
4.9.53“Were not the first spouses, whose marriage God blessed by saying, ‘Increase and multiply’ (Genesis 1:28), naked and unashamed (Genesis 2:25)? Why, then, did shame about those organs follow sin, unless an indecent movement arose there, which marriage would certainly not have had if human beings had not sinned?”
4.9.54In the fact that the first human beings, ashamed after their sin, covered the organs where desire is present, he found a way to persuade people that God had established marriages made of air.
That without which nature does not exist is not natural.
4.9.55His position is a bedbug: alive it causes trouble, and crushed it gives off a stench.
I am ashamed to crush him by defeating him.
As though defeated, he has fled to filthy places, and recoil from following and killing him.
Because I am forced to speak about the sexual organs, my modesty, like a temple keeper, has excluded from free expression the parts of my argument that would crush or destroy him.
If there is no marriage without desire, and you condemn desire in general, you condemn marriage too. That…§§4.10.56–4.14.73
4.10.56If there is no marriage without desire, and you condemn desire in general, you condemn marriage too.
That without which marriage does not exist cannot be called a disease. Marriage can exist apart from sin; but the apostle calls disease sin.
4.12.58Balbus, in Cicero, discussed the matter truthfully and carefully with Cotta.
I quote a few things to increase his shame: under the teaching of the sacred law he has failed to understand things that pagans could grasp through reason alone.
Balbus touches on the working of the sexes under the subject of animals because, for the sake of propriety, he passed over it in describing human beings.
He portrays the human being in words: the stomach lies below the gullet as a receptacle for food and drink; the lungs and heart draw breath from outside; many things in the stomach are wonderfully fashioned from sinews; its many folds and windings hold and contain what it receives, whether dry or liquid.
The remaining food is expelled as the intestines alternately contract and relax.
4.12.59Our Maker himself acknowledged no fault in his craftsmanship when he hid our vital organs so carefully.
So that they would neither perish nor cause horror if exposed.
4.13.62I ask modest ears to forgive me, and to share my distress rather than be indignant at my necessity.
If the male organ could move before, then sin introduced nothing new.
4.13.63If this desire was in the fruit of that tree, it is shown to have been made by God and is therefore defended as good as well.
4.13.64When the apostle John said, “Everything in the world is the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and worldly ambition, which is not from the Father but from the world” (1 John 2:16), he was not condemning this world—that is, heaven and earth and all the things that substantially exist in it, the world made by the Father through the Son.
[The desire of the flesh that is not from the Father] should be understood as excess.
4.14.65It follows that we must confess that our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch were given to us by the devil rather than by God, if we concede that the desire of the flesh against which we struggle through self-restraint was not in paradise before sin, but arose from the first sin which the devil persuaded the first human being to commit.
4.14.73Let drunkenness not condemn wine, or overeating condemn food, or obscenity discredit desire.
Its excess is blameworthy.
Imitating animals is always sinful.§§4.14.74–4.16.83
4.14.74Imitating animals is always sinful.
4.15.75All the philosophers who tried to work out anything about the causes of natural things—even though they taught otherwise in their schools yet worshiped idols with the common people—have nevertheless touched, as it were, some parts of truth amid the many empty notions in their thinking. Empty though they are through their darkness, they can rightly be preferred to this doctrine we are opposing.
Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages; then Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Leucippus, Democritus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Melissus, Plato, and the Pythagoreans.
4.16.79It is now time to show, beyond nature’s testimony, by some authority of the sacred law as well, that our members were formed so that some enjoy modesty and others freedom. To confirm this, let the Teacher of the Gentiles be summoned, who says in writing to the Corinthians: “Our body is not one member, but many” (1 Corinthians 12:14).
Since he had named a few members of the whole body, and out of his own propriety did not wish to name the sexual organs directly…
4.16.80“Much more, the members of our body that seem weak are necessary. Those members of the body which we think less honorable we surround with greater honor; and our modest parts have greater dignity, while our presentable parts need nothing. But God has arranged the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, so that there may be no division in the body, but its members may have the same care for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:22–25).
Look at the true interpreter of God’s work! Look at the faithful herald of his wisdom! “Our modest parts,” he says, “are covered with greater dignity.”
4.16.81Human beings were naked at first because making coverings for themselves was a task for human skill, which they did not yet possess.
It was not, therefore, because they had sinned that they made the sexual organs either diabolical or shameful. Rather, because they were afraid, they covered organs that remained in the same honorable condition in which they had first existed.
4.16.82Why did Adam and his wife hide when they heard God walking in paradise, when those loincloths could have been enough if they had been ashamed of their naked sexual organs? (Genesis 3:7–10)
4.16.83We must reject the opinion that the devil created anything in human beings’ members or in the senses of those members.