The Heresy of Human Innocence: Pelagius Reconsidered
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| Pelagius at a "thin" place |
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" expresses a Romantic faith in the innocence of a newborn child, not a foreign idea today, but one that in 418 earned the Celtic teacher Pelagius excommunication and condemnation by the Roman Emperor. Augustine of Hippo's victory over Pelagius gave us the heresy Pelagianism and a dark side of orthodoxy that emerged full blown in Calvinism. What infuriated Augustine was Pelagius' "Letter to Demetrias," which affirmed free will and the inherent goodness of humanity independent of the sacraments. This contradicted emerging doctrines of Augustine--original sin, dependence on ecclesiastical grace, and predestination--doctrines that externalized religion as a function of the church, not of the individual's love of God.
Augustine's doctrine of Original Sin is expressed as hereditary guilt (or merely the irresistible urge to sin) transmitted sexually to all humanity from Adam after he ate bad fruit in Eden c. 6000 BCE. A consensus of archeology, geology, and biology--indeed all reality-based research--points to human existence millions of years earlier, so, at best, what we have is a just-so story of how things came to be. Such myths can be instructive, but they're open to interpretations, Original Sin being one that emerged centuries after the story was written. So it comes down to which interpretation best fits experience: Augustine's view that we can't even really want to be good without miraculous intervention or Pelagius' that we do naturally try to be good but fail and then need miraculous intervention. These two, like many alternate theories, describe the same basic situations: people predictably doing bad things but being reformed or reconciled. They denote identical circumstances, but imply opposite world-views.
The difference isn't just relevant to believers. Even a non-believer recognizes that God hates X devalues X, and, if she grew up believing God hates X, it will color her attitudes even if she becomes an atheist. Are we birth-citizens of hell who, with luck, can be naturalized to heaven by grace, or are we birth-citizens of heaven striving to be repatriated? If, like Adam, we are born good but free to err, Pelagius is right. If our inherited bad nature allows us no freedom, Augustine is. This assessment of human nature carries over in purely secular terms. It matters whether you see people (and, by extension, society) as inherently bad with exceptions or as inherently good with exceptions--even if the exceptions cancel out and the people are objectively identical. Attitudes color perceptions. Whenever an attitude is deeply held, confirmation bias creates a reality to match, inherently evil or good. This may be why the evangelical communities I grew up in--preaching total depravity, the Calvinist extreme of original sin--tend to be conservative. They don't trust people in general to do the right thing.
A key to Augustine's view is the second chapter of his Confessions, which obsessively analyzes an act of vandalism he participated in when he was sixteen. It's a strange centerpiece for a pivotal chapter of his autobiography, a childish prank he recalls twenty-seven years after the fact and anguishes over as the act of "a depraved soul, falling away . . . to destruction in itself" (2.4.9). One night, Augustine and his friends shook the pears off a tree at the edge of town and fed them to hogs. Besides the obvious echo of Adam's fruit, this memory horrified Augustine because he had been attracted sin for its own sake, stolen for the thrill of stealing. The boys weren't hungry, and he barely tasted a pear, so this night was seared into his memory as an instance of his inherent desire to sin, his being "gratuitously wicked, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself" (2.4.9). With such a corrupt will, what hope was there without divine grace? Elsewhere in his vast corpus of writings, fifty volumes in a recent edition, Augustine goes further to suggest that we have no control over whether we are saved or not--that all our actions were predestined before time began and that only souls selected by God can be saved.
Original Sin was not yet orthodox in 413, and Pelagius argued against it in a published letter of spiritual advice to Demetrias, a young nun from a noble Roman family in Palestine. Augustine counterpunched and had Pelagius excommunicated five years later, his name attached to a heresy that caricatured his teachings. Pelagianism was said to deny any importance to grace, to assert that human beings were perfectible without it, thus that Christ's sacrifice was irrelevant. It was all theoretical. Pelagius never claimed any Christian ever had achieved perfection, but, to Augustine, a theoretical possibility that people could freely choose the good implied this heresy. Ai Bonner, author of The Myth of Pelagianism (Oxford University Press, 2018), argues that Augustine and his allies "presented their hearers and readers with an either/or choice between God's grace and human free will, and they placed Pelagius on the free-will side of this choice, constructing a fictitious 'Pelagianism'." The man's name was pinned to a straw heretic.
In reality, Pelagius' position was both/and, a synthesis of grace and free will. He objected that the doctrine of Original Sin let individual Christians off the hook. If my sins aren't my own fault, but Adam's, I needn't hold myself to a high standard. Why not wallow in sin a bit longer? The flesh is weak. Hell, I can repent later and receive free grace. Add predestination into the mix, and you get fatalism: Why even try if God's going to do whatever he wants to me anyway? In support of his conviction that moral behavior matters, Pelagius cites scriptures, "which everywhere lay upon sinners the heavy weight of the charge of having used their own will and do not excuse them for having acted only under constraint of nature" (7). He hopes he can spare Demetrias "from being embarrassed by something in which the ignorant majority is at fault for lack of proper consideration, and so from supposing, with them, that man has not been created good simply because he is able to do evil" (3.1). So Original Sin was not only an ignorant doctrine, but ill considered. Pelagius' attack was personal. No wonder the Bishop of Hippo was pissed to have his earnest theological reasoning excoriated by a lay brother from Britain.
In the letter to Demetrias, Pelagius marshals pages of argument for an innate human sense of the good. Less than a century after Constantine the Great, the conversion of the empire was still in progress, and Pelagius referenced virtuous pagans, especially philosophers of the past. "If even men without God can show what kind of creatures they were made by God, consider what Christians are able to do . . . who are assisted by the aid of divine grace as well" (3. 2). Even the guilty blush at their guilt, and murderers are punished by their consciences while the innocent enjoy peace of mind. Pelagius cites scriptural examples of good men prior to Christ: Noah said to be "a righteous man, blameless in his generation;" Lot, "righteous in his seeing and hearing;" and on through Abraham, Joseph, and, of course, Job, "a man against whom there is no complaint, a true worshipper of God, keeping himself away from all evil" (3-6). If human nature was corrupt before Christ's grace, these scriptures are nonsense.
Pelagius allows that habitually sinful men, if they reform, can be saved by grace--a benefit of the Christian faith--but he cites Matthew 7:21 to say that conversion is void without moral reform. "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father, who is in heaven, he shall enter the kingdom himself" (10.2).
Pelagius' calling Augustine and his allies shameless and ignorant made him a obvious target, but he was also caught, Bonner argues, a broader conflict between popular asceticism that predated Constantine and the subsequent impulse to Christianize the Empire and incorporate hoards of half-hearted converts. Pelagius belittled the authority of scripture and church to justify lax believers: "You will realize that scripture itself is the work of human hands, recording the example and teaching of Jesus. Thus it is not what you believe that matters; it is how you respond in your heart and your actions. It is not believing in Christ that matters; it is becoming like him" (Van de Weyer, 48).
Pelagius' strict morality and insistence on individual responsibility put him at odds with the imperial bishops and their orthodoxy, even though his thought (and his writings under pseudonyms) continued to influence monasticism for centuries after the fourth century, when, in Bonner's words, "The attempt to create a society that lived according to Christ's injunctions was abandoned."
Pelagius' faith in humanity persisted in the Celtic church, a tradition independent of Rome until the Synod of Whitby in 664, two hundred and fifty years after Pelagius' excommunication. J. Philip Newell traces the Pelagian tradition of God's active presence in human nature and the natural world through centuries of Celtic spirituality that escaped orthodox suppression. This includes a sense that there are "thin" places in nature--including the faces of newborns--where God's grace shines through like a shaft of light. Pelagius, a Celtic monk, wrote, "There is no creature on earth in whom God is absent" (Van de Weyer, 71).
Almost 1600 years later, George MacCleod, elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, showed that this local spirit survived in a his 1985 prayer:
Almighty God . . .
Sun behind all suns,
Soul behind all souls . . .
Show us in everything we touch
And in everyone we meet
The continued assurance of thy presence round us,
Lest ever we should think thee absent. (Quoted in Newell, p. 87)
You need not be a believer to feel that seeing God-in-everything (and everyone) is a positive attitude the world could use more of, a positive that was discarded when the politicized Roman church condemned Pelagius.
Sources
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Albert C. Outler. Edited by Mark Vessey. Barnes and Noble, 2007.
Bonner, Ali. "In Praise of Pelagius," Church Times, 31 August 2018.
Newell, J. Philip. Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality. Paulist Press, 1997.
Pelagius. "A Letter from Pelagius (413)" Receiver: Demetrias. Medieval Women's Latin Letters. Epistolae. https://epistolae.ctl.columbia.edu/letter/1296.html
Van de Weyer, Robert, editor. The Letters of Pelagius, Arthur James, 1995.
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