Justified True Belief

(●) The British monk whose confidence in human nature forced the church to say exactly what it meant by grace. + Pelagius was not a wild man. He was a sober, well-read layman from Britain who settled in Rome, lived austerely, and was admired for years by people who would later fight him in print. Augustine, in the days before the quarrel, calls him a holy man and a good one. What he wanted from the baptized Christians of Rome was simple enough: that they stop making excuses. When a wealthy man pleaded that he could not master his temper or loosen his grip on his money, Pelagius told him that God would not have commanded what he could not do. Pressed hard, that instinct led somewhere the church could not follow. He came to teach that no one inherits Adam’s sin, that a newborn arrives in the world exactly as Adam arrived in it, and that what God supplies is the capacity to choose rather than the choosing itself. The church judged that this cut the nerve of the gospel, and the argument it started produced the most careful writing on grace the Latin West has ever done. Augustine wrote against him for twenty years and was still writing when he died. Three councils, at Carthage, at Ephesus and at Orange, drew a line that no branch of Christendom has since crossed. Here is the fact about him that is hardest to forget. Almost nothing he wrote survives under his own name, and yet his one full-length book came through the centuries entire: his verse-by-verse commentary on the thirteen letters of Paul. It came through because copyists put Jerome’s name on it, and monasteries read it for something like a thousand years without knowing whose it was. A word about the dates. Both ends of his life are guesswork. The year 354 is an estimate worked back from later remarks, and no source at all records his death; he simply stops appearing after 418. The "c." that keeps turning up in front of the early years is short for the Latin circa, meaning around, and it is an honest confession of ignorance rather than a flourish. Before 410, every date in his life needs one.

(●) c. 354 AD: He was born in Britain, in a province the empire was about to let go. + We do not know his town, we do not know his year within a decade, and we do not know his family. What the ancient writers agree on is his country. Augustine calls him a Briton. Prosper of Aquitaine, writing verse against the Pelagians a generation later, called him the British serpent. Jerome, who fought him hardest and least kindly, sneered at his origins and at his bulk. The Britain of the mid-fourth century was Roman and Christian, though thinly on both counts: villas with mosaic floors, a handful of bishops who turned up at continental councils, and a garrison that was being drawn away, decade by decade, to fight somewhere else. Within his lifetime the last regular troops left and the island was on its own. Whatever schooling he received was good. He writes a clean, disciplined Latin, he knows his Bible in detail rather than in slogans, and he argues like a man who has been taught how. That is not the equipment of a backwoods enthusiast, and it is worth holding on to, because the caricature of Pelagius as a crank has always been easier than the man.

(●) c. 380 AD: He came to Rome and became the conscience of the city’s wealthy Christian households. + Rome by then was officially Christian and comfortably so. Senators were baptized, their houses had chapels, and their lives ran on much as they always had. Into that arrived a layman under monastic discipline, unordained as far as anyone can tell, plain in his habits, and formidably serious. The records call him Pelagius the monk, and the synod that eventually tried him used exactly that phrase. A synod is simply a meeting of bishops called together to settle a disputed question, a dozen or two men in a room with the charges read out and a verdict at the end, and rooms like that would decide the rest of his life. He became spiritual director to some of the greatest families in the city, and he kept that standing for something close to thirty years. What he told them was not complicated. A command implies the power to keep it. If Scripture says be perfect, then perfection is possible, and the man who answers "I cannot" is very often saying "I would rather not." He wrote to one wealthy widow that the righteousness we must believe flourishes only in heaven had found a shelter on earth in her heart alone. Read warmly, that is a pastor encouraging a woman to keep going. Read coldly, it is flattery of a rich patron. At his trial thirty years later it was read coldly, and the sentence was produced in evidence against him.

(●) c. 405 AD: A prayer from Augustine’s Confessions, asking God to give what he commands, was quoted in his hearing and he contradicted it so hotly that he nearly fell out with the bishop who spoke it. + The Confessions had been out for a few years and everyone who mattered in Rome was reading them. In the tenth book Augustine turns a discussion of his own struggle for self-control into a prayer, and the prayer is nine words long: give what you command, and command what you will. Augustine tells the rest of the story himself, more than twenty years afterwards. A brother bishop quoted that line in Rome in Pelagius’s presence, and Pelagius could not bear it. He contradicted the man so hotly that the two of them nearly came to a quarrel (On the Gift of Perseverance 20.53). It is worth slowing down over why nine words could do that. Augustine was asking God to supply the very obedience that God demands, and the implication is what stung: if God has to give the obedience, then his commanding it does not by itself prove that we could manage it. To Pelagius that made the moral law a cruelty. Picture it his way. God orders a man with a broken leg to run, and then holds him guilty for standing still. Everything the two of them wrote at each other for the next quarter of a century was already in that room.

(●) c. 408 AD: He worked through all thirteen letters of Paul verse by verse, and it is the one full-length book of his that survives whole. + Somewhere in his last years at Rome, most likely between 405 and 410, Pelagius wrote a commentary on the thirteen letters that bear Paul’s name. It is brief, practical and unshowy, the work of a teacher who wants a reader to follow the apostle’s argument and then go and do something about it. Most of it would pass without comment in any century. Then he reaches Romans 5, where Paul says that sin entered the world through one man and spread to all. Pelagius reads Adam as a pattern rather than an ancestor: what passes from him to us is an example we copy, not a ruin we inherit. Long habit makes copying almost automatic, he grants, and a man raised among liars will lie. But a habit, however old, is still something a person does. The survival of the book is the strange part. It was never lost, because nobody knew it was his. Copyists attached Jerome’s name to it, revised versions travelled under other names, and Cassiodorus in the sixth century, who did know whose it was, went through the section on Romans himself and took the Pelagian passages out rather than throw the book away, leaving the other twelve letters for his monks to correct. Monastic libraries read it for roughly a thousand years. Only in the 1920s did Alexander Souter, a Scottish scholar at Aberdeen, sort out the manuscripts and print the original text. The most notorious heretic in Latin Christianity wrote a book that Christians could not tell from a saint’s.

(●) 410 AD: Alaric sacked Rome, and the refugee ships carried the argument to Africa and Palestine. + In August 410 the Gothic king Alaric took the city and his army was inside it for three days. Rome had not fallen to a foreign enemy in eight hundred years, and the shock ran through the whole Mediterranean; Augustine began the City of God because of it. Refugees crossed to Sicily and North Africa in their thousands, and among them were Pelagius and a younger friend named Caelestius, a lawyer by training and a far blunter man than his teacher. They landed near Hippo, missed Augustine, who was away, and went on to Carthage. Pelagius then sailed for Palestine. Caelestius stayed behind and applied to be ordained a priest. That application was the spark. A deacon from Milan named Paulinus objected, and a synod at Carthage, in 411 or early in 412, put the questions to Caelestius directly. Did Adam’s sin injure only Adam? Are infants born in the condition Adam was in before he fell? Caelestius would not deny either proposition. He was refused ordination and condemned, and he left for Ephesus. Pelagius, who chose his words with far more care, was still widely respected. But the propositions were now on the record with a name attached, and at every hearing for the rest of his life he would be asked whether they were his.

(●) 415 AD: Fourteen bishops at Diospolis heard the charges against him and pronounced him a Catholic. + Two hearings in Palestine in one year, and both went badly for the prosecution. In July a young Spanish priest named Orosius, sent east by Augustine, laid the accusations before John, bishop of Jerusalem. The business was conducted in Greek and the Latin charges had to be carried across by an interpreter, which suited nobody, and John was not inclined to condemn a man of Pelagius’s reputation on the word of a visiting junior. In December came the real trial, at Diospolis, the old town of Lydda on the coastal plain, before a synod of fourteen bishops under Eulogius of Caesarea. The two Gallic bishops who had brought the charges, Heros and Lazarus, sent their indictment in writing and then failed to appear, so Pelagius answered a paper rather than a prosecutor. He answered it well. Where the propositions of Caelestius were read out, he replied that they were not his, and he pronounced anathema on anyone who held them or ever had. To pronounce anathema on an opinion is to curse it formally and to declare anyone holding it cut off from the church, which was the strongest thing a man could say in such a room, and it was meant to end all doubt about where he stood. Where a saying was attributed to him that he denied writing, he condemned that too, but he called the men who held it fools rather than heretics, on the ground that a piece of foolishness is not a doctrine and there was nothing in it for a synod to condemn. And where his own words were read out, words he did not deny, he explained what he had meant by them. The verdict of the synod runs: since he gives his consent to the pious doctrines, and even anathematizes everything that is contrary to the church’s faith, we confess him to belong to the communion of the Catholic Church. Catholic there is not the name of a denomination. It means the universal church, the whole body of Christians everywhere, and to be confessed a member of its communion was to be told, in the plainest words the fifth century had, that you were still inside. Augustine got hold of the acts, read them closely, and wrote a whole book about them (On the Proceedings of Pelagius). His conclusion was careful and it has largely stood: the man was acquitted, the doctrine was condemned, and the acquittal was bought by disowning the doctrine.

(●) 418 AD: Carthage, the emperor and Rome condemned him within a few months, and then he vanishes. + The African bishops did not accept Diospolis, and they had the patience to do something about it. In 416 councils at Carthage and at Milevis wrote to Innocent I in Rome, and a private letter from five bishops, Augustine among them, went by the same post. Innocent condemned Pelagius and Caelestius on 27 January 417, and was dead by the middle of March. Then the ground shifted under the Africans, as it often does in a long dispute. His successor Zosimus reopened the case, read the statement of faith Pelagius had sent from the East, found nothing wrong with it, and wrote to Africa complaining of their haste. So Africa went to work in earnest. On 1 May 418 more than two hundred bishops met at Carthage and passed a set of canons, meaning short numbered rulings by which a council fixes what the church will and will not say, and these left no room for interpretation: Adam was not created mortal, infants are baptized for the remission of sin and not merely for admission to the kingdom, and the grace of Christ does not only show us what to do but gives us the power to do it. The day before, on 30 April, the emperor Honorius had issued a rescript from Ravenna, a written imperial ruling carrying the force of law, expelling Pelagius and Caelestius from Rome. Zosimus reversed himself and sent out a circular letter, the Tractoria, condemning them both. Eighteen Italian bishops refused to sign it. Their leader was a young bishop named Julian of Eclanum, who would argue with Augustine for the rest of Augustine’s life and outlive him by more than twenty years. After that, silence. One report has Pelagius driven out of Palestine; no source records where he went, when he died, or where he is buried. Historians write "after 418" and some guess at about 420. For a man whose name became a permanent word in Christian theology, the end of the life is simply blank.

What He Taught

(T1) Human nature came from God’s hand good, and its power to go either way is his gift. + Pelagius liked to put it agriculturally. God has planted in every human being a single root that can grow in either direction, and what comes up out of the ground, flowers or brambles, is settled by the one doing the gardening rather than by the root. He was answering a real worry, and it helps to know whose. Late Roman Christianity was full of people who explained their sins by their make-up: I was born this way, the flesh is weak, the stars were wrong, what can anyone do. Some of that talk had a religion behind it. Manichaeism, the faith Augustine himself had belonged to for nine years before his conversion, taught that a human being is a battlefield between two eternal substances, light and dark, so that the evil in you is not finally you at all. Pelagius thought the whole way of speaking was an alibi with a theology attached, and he went at its root: sin is not a thing you are made of, it is a thing you do. Christians agree with him further here than they usually notice. Nature as God made it is good, God is not the author of evil, and sin is not a substance but a falling away from good, which is precisely what Augustine also taught. The parting comes one step later, over whether that good nature is still in working order.

(Q) "It resembles, as I may say, a fruitful and fecund root which yields and produces diversely according to the will of man, and which is capable, at the planter’s own choice, of either shedding a beautiful bloom of virtues, or of bristling with the thorny thickets of vices." + Source: Pelagius, In Defence of Free Will I, quoted in Augustine, On the Grace of Christ 19 (Holmes translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Pelagius wrote four books in defence of free will in about 416, and every one of them is lost. What survives are the passages his opponent copied out in order to answer them, so his most quoted words reach us through the hand of the man refuting him (T1). Augustine’s objection follows immediately: Jesus said that a healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit (Matthew 7:18), and one root cannot be the source of both crops.

(T2) No one is born guilty, and sin is something a person does rather than something a person inherits. + Stand at a font and watch a priest baptize a baby eight days old. Ask what exactly is being washed off, and you have the question that broke the peace of the fourth-century church. The church’s answer had a name for the condition: original sin. That phrase does not mean the baby has committed a crime. It means that every human being descends from Adam into a family already out of order, so that the pull toward wrong is there before any choosing begins, and a person needs rescuing before he needs instructing. Pelagius answered that a newborn has nothing of Adam’s about him at all. He never denied that infants should be baptized, and he said so plainly when he was challenged on it; he simply denied that there was any inherited guilt for the water to deal with. Adam harmed us, on his account, the way a bad father harms a household, by going first. We copy him, and the copying hardens into custom, and custom in a fallen society is close to universal. But universal is not the same as inherited, and a habit, however old and however deep, is still a thing that somebody is doing. It would be a mistake to treat this as frivolous. It is genuinely hard to say how the guilt of one man’s act can belong to people not yet born, and Pelagius was not the last to feel the difficulty. Paul, though, does not present Adam as a bad example to be avoided. He presents him as a head under whom a whole race stood and fell: "For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous" (Romans 5:19). Take away the first half of that sentence and the second half loses its footing, because the way we are saved in Christ is being described by the way we were lost in Adam.

(Q) "Everything good, and everything evil, on account of which we are either laudable or blameworthy, is not born with us but done by us: for we are born not fully developed, but with a capacity for either conduct; and we are procreated as without virtue, so also without vice; and previous to the action of our own proper will, that alone is in man which God has formed." + Source: Pelagius, In Defence of Free Will I, quoted in Augustine, On Original Sin 14 (Holmes translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Augustine produces this sentence for a particular purpose. At Diospolis, Pelagius had pronounced anathema on anyone who said that infants are born in the state Adam was in before he fell. Here, in his own book, is a sentence that says it: nothing is in the newborn but what God formed there. Augustine’s charge is not that Pelagius held a strange opinion, but that he had condemned his own opinion in front of judges who could not check.

(T3) God never commands what a person cannot do, so a sinless life must be possible. + Nobody orders a man with no legs to stand up. A command that cannot be obeyed is not a command; it is mockery, and if the one giving it then punishes the failure, it is cruelty. That is the whole of the argument, and its moral force is real. Scripture is full of imperatives, and one of them is "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). Pelagius was careful about what he was and was not claiming, and his critics have not always returned the favour. He insisted the question was about possibility, not about anybody in particular. Asked at Diospolis to explain himself, he said that a man could be without sin and keep God’s commandments if he wished, since God had given him that capacity, but that he had never said any such man could actually be found, from infancy to old age. He was arguing that the door is not locked, not that anyone has walked through it. Augustine agreed with the premise and denied the conclusion, and the way he did it is worth having. God does command nothing impossible, he answers, but the command tells you to do what you can and to ask his help for what you cannot. Then he reaches for the man in the parable who fell among robbers and was left half dead by the roadside (Luke 10:30). Augustine’s point about him is exact: he was perfectly able to get himself into that ditch, and he is not able to get himself out of it. Falling took nothing but his own two feet. Standing again waits on somebody else coming down the road.

(Q) "I once more repeat my position: I say that it is possible for a man to be without sin. What do you say? That it is impossible for a man to be without sin? But I do not say ... that there is a man without sin; nor do you say, that there is not a man without sin. Our contention is about what is possible, and not possible; not about what is, and is not." + Source: Pelagius, On Nature, quoted in Augustine, On Nature and Grace 8 (Holmes translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The three dots stand where Augustine has inserted two words of his own, "he adds," into the middle of the sentence he is copying. On Nature is lost, like almost everything else Pelagius wrote. It reached Augustine in about 415 by way of two young men who had been persuaded by it and then had second thoughts, and Augustine answered it line by line. This passage is Pelagius setting the terms of the debate, and on his own terms he is difficult to beat, which is exactly why Augustine spends the rest of the book refusing them.

(T4) God supplies the ability; the willing and the doing belong to us. + A father who buys his daughter a piano has given her something real, and something she could never have provided for herself. He has not thereby practised her scales. On Pelagius’s account that is roughly the division of labour between God and a human being, and he set it out with a precision that makes the whole controversy visible in a single paragraph. He distinguished three things and ranked them. First there is posse, the ability, the raw capacity to act well, which is planted in human nature and comes from God alone. Then velle, the willing, the actual decision. Then esse, the doing, the deed as it lands in the world. The first belongs to God. The other two, he says, must be referred to man, because they flow out of the fountain of the will. Notice what this does to the word grace. Pelagius never denied grace and grew angry at the suggestion that he had. He located it. Grace is the creation of a nature capable of good; grace is the law, which tells us what good is; grace is the teaching and the example of Christ, which show us good in a human life; grace is the forgiveness of sins in baptism, which wipes the slate. All of that is genuine and all of it is from God. What is missing from the list is God working inside a person to produce the willing itself, and that omission is the hinge on which everything turns. It is also where the New Testament will not cooperate. Paul tells the Philippians to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, which sounds like Pelagius, and then gives the reason, which does not: "for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13). Both to will and to work. The two items Pelagius assigned to man are the two Paul assigns to God, and Augustine noticed.

(Q) "We distinguish three things, arranging them in a certain graduated order. We put in the first place 'ability;' in the second, 'volition;' and in the third, 'actuality.' The 'ability' we place in our nature, the 'volition' in our will, and the 'actuality' in the effect. The first, that is, the 'ability,' properly belongs to God, who has bestowed it on His creature; the other two, that is, the 'volition' and the 'actuality,' must be referred to man, because they flow forth from the fountain of the will." + Source: Pelagius, In Defence of Free Will III, quoted in Augustine, On the Grace of Christ 5 (Holmes translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Augustine breaks the opening clause with two words of his own, "says he," which are left out here. Augustine copies the passage out at length, and then he says why he has bothered. Once the three-way distinction is on the table, every later sentence in which Pelagius grants the help of grace can be read without guessing, because a reader now knows which of the three things he means God to be helping (T4). It is a fair piece of argument, and it is the reason a lost book is still quotable sixteen centuries later.

(Q) "This is what I also believe; let him be anathema, who declares that a man is able, without God’s help, to arrive at the perfection of all virtues." + Source: Pelagius, speaking at the hearing before John of Jerusalem in July 415, as John reported it to the synod of Diospolis; quoted in Augustine, On the Proceedings of Pelagius 37 (Holmes translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Sentences like this one are why fourteen bishops let him go, and why the West would not. Every word of it can be taken two ways depending on what "God’s help" is allowed to mean, and if help means the bare capacity he ranked first among his three things (T4), the sentence commits him to nothing he did not already hold. The whole controversy after 415 is an argument about which reading he intended.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Augustine spent his last twenty years answering him, and the Western doctrine of grace took its shape in the answer. + Count the books. On the Merits and Remission of Sins and On the Spirit and the Letter in 412, On Nature and Grace in 415, On the Proceedings of Pelagius in 417, On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin in 418, On Grace and Free Will and On Rebuke and Grace in the mid-420s, On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance at the very end, and the enormous unfinished work against Julian of Eclanum that was still on his desk when the Vandals besieged Hippo in 430. A controversy that began as a quarrel over a sentence produced a shelf. What came out of it was not merely a set of denials. Augustine pressed the point that grace goes before, the point later theology would file under the word prevenient: God does not wait at the end of a road we walk toward him, he starts us walking. He argued that grace heals rather than merely instructs, because the trouble with us is not chiefly ignorance, and that a will set free is a will healed rather than a will left alone. And he kept praying the sentence Pelagius could not bear, because to him it was not a complaint about human weakness but a confession that God is generous enough to give what he asks for. Christians have argued ever since about how far Augustine’s own answers should be pressed, particularly on predestination and on how grace and freedom fit together. That argument runs between people who agree entirely that Pelagius was wrong, and it is a family conversation rather than a re-opening of this case.

(†) Three councils drew the line, and every branch of the church has kept it. + Carthage in 418 put the matter in canons: Adam was not made mortal apart from sin, infants are baptized for the remission of sin and not merely to be admitted to the kingdom, and the grace of Christ does not only reveal what we ought to do but supplies the power to do it. Ephesus in 431 was an eastern council called about a quite different dispute, over how to speak of Christ as God and man, and it confirmed the condemnation of the Pelagians almost in passing. The brevity is misleading, because that is the moment the judgment stopped being a Latin family matter and became the whole church’s. Orange in 529 dealt with the long aftermath in southern Gaul, teaching that even the first stirring of faith is God’s gift, and taking care at the same time to reject any notion that God predestines anyone to evil. That line has held across every later division, which is worth pausing on, because these are traditions that have agreed on very little else. Catholic teaching at Trent, the Reformation confessions, the Articles of the Church of England and the Orthodox tradition of synergy, which insists that God and the believer genuinely work together, all begin from the same refusal: grace is not a reward for a start we made on our own. Christians who will not share a communion table with one another find themselves standing on the same side of this one, and the reason is that the alternative empties the cross. If a person can climb out of the ditch unaided, then, as Paul says, Christ died for no purpose (Galatians 2:21).

(†) His commentary on Paul was copied and read for a thousand years under other men’s names. + There is something almost comic in what happened to his books. The four volumes he wrote defending free will are gone, the treatise On Nature is gone, and the letters to his Roman patrons mostly survive as extracts in the files of the men prosecuting him. Meanwhile the long commentary that came through the centuries intact travelled under the name of Jerome, who had called him every insult he could think of. Cassiodorus, the Roman statesman who turned his estate at Vivarium into a working library in the sixth century, knew perfectly well whose commentary it was. He did not burn it. He worked over the section on Romans himself to remove what he called the blots of Pelagian heresy, and kept the rest for his monks to use and to correct as they went, because it was good. Medieval readers went on quoting it as Jerome’s, and only in 1922 to 1931 did Alexander Souter publish the text under its real author’s name. Something of the man’s moral seriousness came through with it. The main line of Christian teaching never conceded that grace makes effort unnecessary; James had already written that faith apart from works is dead (James 2:26), and the councils that condemned Pelagius were not defending laziness. What they denied was where he put the starting point, not that there is work to be done.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the wound we are born with, the grace that comes first, and the help we cannot supply. + He asked a fair question and gave three answers Scripture will not carry. - The condition we are born into. On his account a newborn stands where Adam stood before he fell. David says otherwise about himself: "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Psalm 51:5). Paul says we were by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), and traces our standing to Adam’s one act rather than to our imitation of it (Romans 5:19). - What grace does. He allowed grace to create us, to instruct us, and to forgive us, but not to work the willing. Paul puts the willing itself on God’s side of the ledger (Philippians 2:13), calls salvation a gift and not a result of works (Ephesians 2:8-9), and God promises through Ezekiel to replace the heart of stone rather than to lecture it (Ezekiel 36:26). - Whether we can mend ourselves. Pelagius held that the capacity is intact and needs only to be used. Paul reports from the inside that it is not: "For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out" (Romans 7:18). Jesus states the limit without qualification: "apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). - What Christ came to be. If the disease is only bad example, a good example cures it, and the cross becomes the most extreme teaching aid in history. The angel tells Joseph something else: "you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21). A physician comes for the sick (Matthew 9:12). None of that makes his question a bad one. The demand for perfection really is in the text, and a faith that treats God’s commands as decorative has lost something Pelagius was right to want back. The church’s answer was never that the commands are impossible. It was that the God who commands is also the God who supplies, which is what Augustine’s nine words had said all along.