Are We All Pelagians Now?

Of all the pesky questions that have arisen over time to bedevil the human intelligence, perhaps the most persisting has been to ask about the twin mysteries of human freedom and divine grace. Just what is the relation between the two? Between, that is, God’s gracious will to redeem and our right to refuse?  

Such is the “terrifying compliment,” as described by C.S. Lewis, which God has paid us in bestowing an ultimate seriousness upon the choices we make. Leaving us entirely free, as it were, to take ourselves to Hell, turning His grace into our grief.

“In his will is our peace,” Dante tells us in Canto III of the Paradiso. But suppose someone were to decide that he really didn’t want God’s peace? Or that he could procure it himself—quite easily, in fact—without recourse to grace?

That was the position taken by a certain upstart monk from Britain, Pelagius, who settled in Rome back in the early fifth century, provoking a massive retaliatory strike by no less a figure than the Doctor of Grace himself, St. Augustine, which went on for years and years. It was the last great controversy of Augustine’s life, whose outcome fixed not only the parameters of the problem but the solution as well. Leaving poor Pelagius to languish among the arch-heretics, where he remains to this day despite the efforts of some to rehabilitate him.

For Augustine, whose interest in the matter was far from academic, the two poles of any reasonable position were, on the one hand, the wretchedness of man without God, left to his own sinful devices and, on the other, the unforeseen efficacy of divine foreknowledge and grace, disposing a man to accept the most stunning offer of all, to wit, God’s free gift of salvation. The sheer grandeur to which we have been called over against the misery in which we have long been sunk. And between the two bookends there stands the staggering witness of Augustine’s own life, which forbade him ever to forget God’s merciful deliverance from a life of sin and death. 

So, of course, Pelagianism would have to be fought, resisted, and overthrown because it represented a full-frontal assault upon the central mystery of faith, which is our having been redeemed by Christ. It was the decisive experience of Augustine’s own life, a teachable moment he would spend the rest of his life imparting to others. For if the exercise of free will alone, even when harnessed to high human endeavor, were enough to place virtue and its heavenly reward within the reach of anyone, which was the teaching of Pelagius, why would we need Christ at all? 

Why teach us the Our Father, with its petition for forgiveness from present sin, or to be spared temptation from committing future sin, if we’re doing just fine without Him? He would be no more than a fifth wheel, altogether superfluous in keeping the car on the road since human nature alone would be enough to fire the engine. And if there is to be any grace at all, let it remain purely cosmetic, providing a smooth sheen to an otherwise perfect model of the moral life.

Which, for Pelagius and his many followers both then and now, is finally what Christianity is about: namely, moralism. Getting into Heaven is nothing more than a self-help enterprise, the result of simply willing the good, bypassing the need for grace along the way. We are not saved by baptismal immersion in the mystery of Christ, who washes away a soul steeped in the filth of Original Sin. We are saved by making the right choices, steeling ourselves over and over to conform to the lofty example set by Christ, whose standard of holiness is perfectly possible for anyone bent on doing it himself.  

“Pelagius had no patience with the confusion that seemed to reign on the powers of human nature,” recounts Peter Brown in his superb biography of St. Augustine. Never mind, of course, that our intellects are fallible, or that our wills remain wayward; such impediments cut no mustard with those who, like Pelagius, are always at the top of their game.    

He and his supporters wrote for men “who want to make a change for the better.” He refused to regard this power of self-improvement as having been irreversibly prejudiced; the idea of an “original sin” that could make men incapable of not sinning even more, struck him as quite absurd. 

Here, then, was the point of deepest contention between the two. Here is the place where Augustine would locate “the hidden, horrendous poison” squirreled away in the Pelagian purse, the sly imputation that what finally saves is the human example of Christ and not His divine person. While for Augustine, the fact that we are fallen creatures, who, in Adam’s fall we sinned all, renders us incapable of never sinning again. Non posse non peccare, he would insist in the face of an ever-expanding Pelagian optimism that, like a runaway train, refuses to take notice of the abyss looming before it.   

The example of Julian of Eclanum is wonderfully illustrative of the point. An early enthusiast of Pelagian excess, he became the most relentless critic of Augustine in his old age. He actually believed that by simply willing it, one could easily recover the bliss of Adam before the Fall.  “Only a thin wall of corrupt manners,” Brown tells us, “stood between Julian and the delightful innocence of man’s first state.” As if excellence in the moral life were merely a matter of education, or perhaps even a good diet along with plenty of fresh air and outdoor sports. 

Augustine, meanwhile, is moving in a very different direction, which is one of sober realism regarding our prospects. Faced with the proverbial worm in the apple, the germ of whose evil reaches deep down into the human fruit, infecting both flesh and spirit, no amount of self-will or social engineering will make the slightest difference in the absence of grace. And grace, far from being a mere facilitator in the life of virtue, is precisely the action required to jumpstart the whole process. Becoming, in an Augustinian calculus, the very ground of freedom itself. “The grace of God,” he writes, “far from destroying the human will, grace renders it good.”

And so, at every turn, we find ourselves dependent upon grace, much as the soil is dependent upon water, the flowers of the field upon the light of the sun. Such power as we have to shape our lives can only finally derive from a source we cannot shape but may only receive. Peter Brown has given it concise expression in his concluding analysis of the Pelagian project. He writes,

The idea that we depend for our ability to determine ourselves on areas that we cannot ourselves determine, is central to Augustine’s “therapeutic” attitude to the relation between “grace” and “free will”…The healing process by which love and knowledge are reintegrated, is made possible by an inseparable connection between growing self-determination and dependence on a source of life that always escapes self-determination. 

Which means, of course, that the perfection we seek will not happen overnight but only as a result of a long and arduous process of healing, reaching all the way down to the bottom of one’s being. And the outcome, if it is to be a happy one, will turn on the mystery of grace.

Thus, for Augustine, the free man is finally he in whom both the need and the attraction for grace have been most intimately joined. In his defense of which Augustine will dismantle the entire Pelagian edifice, cemented in place by the “enemies of the grace of Christ.” We should be grateful.