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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.
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