| #### 3. ST. AUGUSTINE AND THE HERESY OF PELAGIUS |

| #### #### Donatism, for all the importance of the questions it raised as to the nature of the Church and the validity of sacraments, had been, in itself, a purely local matter. It was hardly disposed of by the imperial decree of 412 when there came to Africa a more far-reaching trouble. This was a new theory of the relation in which the restored humanity of the Christian stood to its Restorer, a theory so far-reaching, indeed, that it involved nothing less than a revolution in the traditional idea of the redeeming activity of Jesus Christ. The author of the theory was the British monk Pelagius, important hitherto not so much as a scholar or theologian, for all his learning, but as a director of souls. He was a man of holy life, given to ascetic practices and held in high esteem at Rome, where he lived during the closing years of the fourth century. With him were associated another Briton, Celestius, and, later on, an Italian bishop, Julian of Eclanum, who organised the ideas of Pelagius into a reasoned system of thought. [ ] #### Man, according to the new theory, was by his nature free to do evil or not. Whatever his activities they were his alone, and they were the only source of what merit he possessed in the sight of God, his only title to any reward. The human will is all- powerful, and there is nothing to hinder the man who so chooses from living a life of perfection. The traditional Catholic doctrine that the sin of the first man Adam had, for one of its effects, the loss to all Adam's descendants of certain of the privileges with which he was created, and for another the sowing in their souls of an inclination to sin, was rejected. Adam's sin, the Pelagians maintained, affected his progeny as a bad example indeed, but not otherwise. Human nature itself had not in any way suffered by his lapse. As Adam was created so were his descendants, who, therefore, stood in no need of any special divine aid to heal their nature. Nor did they stand in need of any special help in order to act rightly. For this, the free will of their unimpaired human nature was all-sufficient. Divine intervention could make the right choice in action easier, but the choice itself was within the capability of all. Men, since Adam had chosen to choose wrongly, had shown themselves depraved; but, since the nature of man remained unimpaired, no restoration of human nature was called for, no new life needed to replace an old thing tainted and vitiated, no regeneration. Baptism then was not a new birth. The divine action of the Redeemer upon the souls of the baptised, whether in the redeeming action of His death or in His subsequent glorified life, is not a principle animating man from within his very soul, but a thing wholly external -- the stimulus of a moral lesson, enforced indeed by the most powerful of all examples, but nothing more. The mystery of the Redemption, if Pelagius was right, was emptied of its main significance, the Incarnation became a wonder wholly out of proportion with its object. Finally, if in the work of his salvation man can succeed without the divine assistance, what place is there in the scheme of things for religion at all? God becomes a mere inspector of man's chart of duties, any inter-relation of love, confidence, gratitude disappears. Prayer is a non-sense. The theory was, in fact, a most radical deformation of the very essence of Christianity, and it must produce inevitably in all who held it a corresponding deformation of character. The Pelagians, for whom humility was an impossibility, were, in their spiritual life, really cultivating themselves. Their own spiritual achievement was the chief object of their attention, and with their theory all the old harsh pride of the Stoics returned to the Christian Church. #### It was as refugees fleeing before Alaric that, in the year of the sack of Rome (410), Pelagius and Celestius came to Africa, Pelagius halting there but for a moment on his way to the East, Celestius staying to seek admission into the presbyterate of Carthage. Carthage, Jerusalem and Rome are the theatres of the different crises of the next ten years. #### Celestius, apparently, made no secret of his views and when he applied for ordination found himself denounced to the bishop as a heretic (411). There was an enquiry, Celestius was asked to abjure a series of propositions that summed up his theory, and when he refused he was excommunicated. Whereupon he too left Africa for the East, and, at Ephesus, succeeded in obtaining the ordination he sought. He left behind him in Africa a great number of disciples, drawn chiefly from the better educated classes and from those dedicated to the higher life of asceticism. It was in the endeavour to undo this work of Celestius that St. Augustine first came into the controversy, exposing the tendencies of the theory in private letters, in sermons and in books. #### Pelagius himself, meanwhile, was well established in Jerusalem and thanks to the severity of his life, to his powerful friends, and to the Greek ignorance of Latin, he pursued his way unhindered. There was, however, another Latin ascetic in Palestine, a much greater man than Pelagius, and, even in his old age, an utterly tireless hunter-out of novel untraditional theories. This was St. Jerome, and it was only a matter of time before he turned upon Pelagius all the attention of his acute mind -- and his biting pen. The Bishop of Jerusalem, Pelagius' patron, was forced into action, and his protege summoned before a synod to explain himself. He evaded the points at issue by using phrases whose ambiguity was not apparent to the Easterns, inexperienced in the tierce and quart of this particular controversy, and the synod, without condemning Pelagius, recommended that the matter be referred to Rome (July, 415). #### St. Jerome was left to prepare his next move. This time he was reinforced by allies from the West -- two bishops of Gaul, exiled through a political revolution, and a young Spanish priest, Orosius, sent by St. Augustine. The Bishop of Jerusalem had proved fallible. The appeal was now made to his superior, the Metropolitan of Cesarea. A new synod was called to meet at Diospolis, and at Diospolis (December, 415) the comedy of the earlier synod was repeated. The bishops from Gaul were kept away by illness; Pelagius again had his skilfully ambiguous submission to offer; and, yet again, the bishops found it satisfactory. Orosius returned to Africa with the news of his failure; and the African bishops determined on a formal joint appeal to Rome. Two great councils were held, at Milevis and at Carthage, and with their exposition of the traditional doctrine there were sent also to the pope -- Innocent I, 402-417 -- letters from the two Gallic bishops, the minutes of Celestius' condemnation in 411 and a letter, drawn up by St. Augustine, explaining the controversy: all this was some time in the late summer, or autumn, of 416. In March of the new year the pope's reply arrived. The African doctrine was approved and the excommunication of Pelagius and Celestius ratified. [ ] #### So far the controversy had progressed along the accustomed lines, according to the normal procedure in cases of a charge of heresy. If progress was slow that was but natural, considering the distance which separated the protagonists. But now, in 417, there came into the affair, to add very much to its complexity, the old trouble of ecclesiastical politics, of episcopal ambitions and jealousies. The death of the pope (March 12, 417) was its opportunity. #### The new pope, Zosimus, was, for some reason or other, very much under the influence of Proclus, Bishop of Arles, the city which was, at the moment, the most important city of the Western Empire, the seat of government of the day's one strong man, the future Emperor Constantius III. Proclus had helped Constantius and Constantius had made him bishop, and upon the Bishop of Arles the new pope now heaped privilege upon privilege, making him to all intents and purposes a vice-pope in southern Gaul-despite the protests of the other bishops. One urgent motive of their protests was their poor opinion of this favourite of both pope and emperor. Proclus had been installed as bishop in the place of a bishop uncanonically thrust out to make room for him. That predecessor was still alive -- was none other than the chief accuser of Pelagius at the synod of Diospolis! Now, thanks to Proclus' influence with the new pope, the most active adversaries of Pelagius in the East were themselves excommunicated. The hopes of the Pelagian party rose, and Celestius himself went to Rome, offering submission to Zosimus and offering, too, an acceptance of the doctrine of Pope Innocent's letter to Africa, though he still refused to abjure the propositions for maintaining which he had been condemned in 411. #### Pelagius, too, made a kind of submission, sending to the pope a long treatise on the freedom of the will in which, more haeretico, carefully chosen ambiguities masked what was new in his teaching. #### Influenced by these reasoned protestations Zosimus reopened the case, and wrote to Africa what amounted to a panegyric of Pelagius and Celestius, in which they figured as the calumniated victims of the malice of the bishops! (November, 417). The African bishops sent an elaborate reply, detailing the shiftiness of Pelagius' habitual mode of procedure and the pope (letter of March 21, 418) thereupon capitulated. His letter reached Carthage just as a great council of two hundred and more bishops was about to open. Of this assembly St. Augustine was the soul. It drew up a statement of the faith against Pelagius in nine canons and sent these to Zosimus with a letter asking his approval. Also, to leave no stone unturned, the African bishops approached the emperor, Honorius, and obtained a rescript ordering the pursuit and suppression of Pelagius wherever found. The pope now acted with decision and in a document called the Tractoria [ ] definitely condemned Pelagius and Celestius and their doctrines. About the same time an eastern council, too (at Antioch, in 418), condemned Pelagius, and with this he disappears from history. #### Pelagianism was now an officially proscribed heresy, and orders went forth from the government that all the bishops should formally sign a prescribed form of condemnation. In Africa there was nothing but willing support for the measure, but in Italy, while there was no objection to condemning Pelagius, there was a certain reluctance to sign the condemnation if in so doing the signatory was taken as approving the theories of St. Augustine. This was especially the case in southern Italy, among the bishops who were immediately subject to the pope. Eighteen of them openly repudiated what they styled "the African Dogma", and the pope promptly deposed them. With this resistance a new phase of the heresy begins, its leader one of the eighteen, Julian, Bishop of Eclanum. #### Julian was a scholar, a master of logic -- an Aristotelian it is interesting to note -- a controversialist, perhaps, rather than a theologian. He it was who worked the ideas of Pelagius into an ordered system, and the history of Pelagianism is, very largely, the history of Julian's controversy with St. Augustine. With Julian, who was personally well known to the saint, as his father had been before him, the whole character of the movement changes. It is no longer merely defensive, resorting to one subterfuge after another in its furtive endeavour to escape condemnation. Henceforward it is a bold and vigorous attack on St. Augustine in the name, of course, of a more primitive and truer faith. #### But Julian found himself isolated. He went to the East, as Pelagius had done, and in the East, too, he found hardly a supporter except in the old Bishop of Mopsuestia, Theodore, with the tendencies of whose naturalistic theology [ ] -- he was the real father of the Nestorian heresy soon to trouble the East -- Julian's theories of grace accorded well. In Theodore of Mopsuestia, then, Pelagianism found its last patron, and in far off Cilicia the main movement gradually faded from sight. Julian survived until 454, never reinstated, despite his efforts, as Bishop of Eclanum. #### The only other country where, after the condemnation of 418, Pelagianism survived in any force, was Britain. Here, since the Roman general Constantine had led away the legions to assist him in his desperate bid for the imperial throne nine years before, the imperial mandates could safely be ignored. More than one bishop was openly Pelagian, and the heresy seemed likely to prosper. That it ultimately failed, and that its followers were rallied to the Roman faith, was due to Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, whom in 429, and again in 447, the pope, St. Celestine I (422-432), sent to Britain for this purpose. With this triumph of St. Germanus in Pelagius' native country the history of his heresy, as an organised anti-Catholic thing, comes to an end. ####  |