The Anatomy of Melancholy

Why should we Gentiles pray to God and thank him for his mercies and benefits, when he has condemned us all, though innocent, for Adam’s offence—one person’s offence, one small offence, eating an apple? Why should we acknowledge as our ruler one who has entirely neglected our souls’ salvation, despised us and sent no prophets or teachers to instruct us, as he has the Hebrews? So Julian the Apostate objects.

Why should these Christians, Caelius argues, reject us and claim God exclusively for themselves—that God of theirs alone, and so on? But to return to our counterfeit Caelius. At last he reaches this position: that those who never heard of or believed in Christ may be saved by their unaided natural powers, along with the Pelagians; and he supports it from Origen and others.

Those who have never heard God’s word, says Origen, are to be excused for their ignorance. We must not think God so hard, angry, cruel or unjust as to condemn anyone without a hearing. Only those who refuse Christ’s mercy and grace when it is offered, he holds, are in a state of damnation.

He concludes that many worthy Greeks and Romans—good, moral, upright people who kept the law of nature and treated others as they wished to be treated—are as certainly saved as those who lived uprightly before the law of Moses. They were acceptable in God’s sight, as Job was: the Magi, the Queen of Sheba, Darius of Persia, Socrates, Aristides, Cato, Curius, Cicero, Seneca and many other philosophers who lived uprightly. Whatever someone’s religion or nation, as with Cornelius, provided he lives honestly, calls on God, trusts him and fears him, he will be saved.

This opinion was formerly maintained by the Valentinian and Basilidian heretics, revived recently in Turkey in a sect whose patron was Rustan Pasha, defended by Galeatius Martius and some ancient Church Fathers, and in later times favoured by Erasmus and by Zwingli in his Exposition of the Faith to the King of France. Bullinger defends Zwingli’s position, and Gualter supports it in a full defence with many arguments.

Many Jesuits follow these Calvinists on this point: Franciscus Buchsius of Mainz, Andradius at the Council of Trent, and many scholastic theologians who are firmly persuaded from Romans 5:18–19 that the Gentiles’ good works so pleased God that they might merit eternal life and ultimately be saved.

Sesellius, Benedictus Justinianus in his commentary on the first chapter of Romans, Mathias Ditmarsh the political writer and many others take a middle position: these people may be not unworthy of salvation, but they will not pronounce on it absolutely. Hofmannus, a Lutheran professor at Helmstedt, and many of his followers, together with most of our Church and the Roman Catholics, firmly oppose it.

Franciscus Collius has fully examined all the opinions in his five books On the Souls of Pagans after Death, and discussed this question at length; anyone who wishes may consult them.