Genetically speaking, Pelagianism was the daughter of legalism; but when it itself conceived, it brought forth an essential deism. It is not without significance that its originators were “a certain sort of monks,” that is, laymen of ascetic life. From that point of view the Divine law appears as a collection of separate commandments, moral perfection as a mere complex of separate virtues, and a distinct value as a meritorious demand on Divine approbation is ascribed to each good work or attainment in the exercises of piety. It was because this was essentially his point of view that Pelagius could regard man’s powers as sufficient to the attainment of sanctity, and could even assert it to be possible for man to do more than is required of him. But this involves an essentially deistic conception of man’s relations to his Maker. God has endowed His creature with a capacity (possibilitas) or ability (posse) for action; and it is for him to use it. Man is thus a machine, which, just because it is well made, needs no Divine interference for its right working; and the Creator, having once framed him and endowed him with the posse, henceforth leaves the velle and the esse to him.

At this point we have touched the central and formative principle of Pelagianism. It lies in the assumption of the plenary ability of man; his ability to do all that righteousness can demand—to work out not only his own salvation, but also his own perfection. This is the core of the whole theory; and all the other postulates not only depend upon it, but arise out of it. Both chronologically and logically this is the root of the system.

When we first hear of Pelagius he is already advanced in years, living in Rome in the odour of sanctity,⁸ and in the enjoyment of a well-deserved reputation for zeal in exhorting others to a good life. This zeal grew especially warm against those who, when charged with their sins, endeavoured to shelter themselves behind the weakness of nature.⁹ He was outraged by the excuses which were commonly made on such occasions,—“It is hard!” “It is difficult!” “We are not able!” “We are men!” “O blind madness!” he cried: “we accuse God of a twofold ignorance,—that He does not seem to know what He has made, nor what He has commanded,—as if forgetting the human weakness of which He is Himself the author, He has imposed laws on man which he cannot endure.”¹⁰ He himself tells us¹¹ that it was his custom, therefore, whenever he had to speak on moral improvement and the conduct of a holy life, to begin by pointing out the power and quality of human nature, and by showing what it is capable of accomplishing. For (he says) he esteemed it of little use to exhort men to do what they deem impossible: hope must rather be our companion, and all longing and effort die when we despair of attaining. So exceedingly ardent an advocate was he of man’s unaided ability to do all that God commanded, that when there was repeated in his hearing Augustine’s noble and entirely scriptural prayer—“Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt”—he was unable to endure it. With such violence did he contradict it that he almost became embroiled in a quarrel.¹² The powers of man were gifts of God; and it was, therefore (he held), a reproach against God, as if He had made man ill or evil, to believe that they were insufficient for the keeping of His law. Nay, do what we will, we cannot rid ourselves of their sufficiency: “whether we will, or whether we will not, we have the capacity of not sinning.”¹³ “I say,” he says, “that man is able to be without sin, and that he is able to keep the commandments of God.” This sufficiently direct statement of human ability is in reality the hinge of his whole system.

There were three specially important corollaries which flowed from so unmeasured an assertion of human ability, and Augustine himself recognized these as the chief elements of the Pelagian system.¹⁴ It would be inexplicable on such an assumption, if no man had ever used his ability in keeping God’s law; and Pelagius therefore consistently asserted not only that all might be sinless if they chose, but also that many saints, even before Christ, had actually lived free from sin. Again, it would follow from man’s inalienable ability to be free from sin, that each man comes into the world without entailment of sin or moral weakness from the past acts of men; and Pelagius consistently denied the whole doctrine of original sin. And still again, it would follow from the assumption of so perfect a natural ability, that man has no need of supernatural assistance in his striving to obey righteousness; and Pelagius consistently denied both the need and the reality of divine grace in the sense of an inward help (and especially of a prevenient help) to man’s weakness.

It was upon this last point that the greatest stress was laid in the controversy. Augustine was most of all disturbed that God’s grace was denied and opposed. No doubt the Pelagians spoke constantly of “grace.” But they meant by “grace” the primal endowment of man with free will, and the subsequent aid given him in order to its proper use by the revelation of the law and the teaching of the gospel, and, above all, by the forgiveness of past sins in Christ and by Christ’s holy example.¹⁵ Anything beyond this external help they utterly denied. And they denied that this external help itself was absolutely necessary, affirming that it only rendered it easier for man to do what otherwise he had plenary ability for doing. Chronologically, this contention seems to have preceded the assertion which must logically lie at its base—of the freedom of man from any taint, corruption, or weakness due to sin. It was in order that they might deny that man needed help, that they denied that Adam’s sin had any further effect on his posterity than might arise from his bad example. “Before the action of his own proper will,” said Pelagius roundly, “that only is in man which God made.”¹⁶ “As we are procreated without virtue,” he said, “so also without vice.”¹⁷ In a word, “nothing that is good or evil, on account of which we are either praiseworthy or blameworthy, is born with us,—it is rather done by us; for we are born with capacity for either, but provided with neither.”¹⁸ So his follower, Julian, plainly asserts his “faith that God creates men obnoxious to no sin, but full of natural innocence, and with capacity for voluntary virtues.”¹⁹ So intrenched is free will in nature, that, according to Julian, it is “just as complete after sins as it was before sins;”²⁰ and what this means may be gathered from Pelagius’ definition in the Confession of Faith that he sent to Innocent: “We say that man is always able both to sin and not to sin, so that we may confess that we have free will.”

That sin in such circumstances was so common as to be well-nigh universal, was accounted for by the bad example of Adam and the power of habit, the latter being conceived as simply the result of imitation of the former. “Nothing makes well-doing so hard,” writes Pelagius to Demetrias, “as the long custom of sins which begins from childhood and gradually brings us more and more under its power until it seems to have in some degree the force of nature (vim naturæ).” He is even ready to allow for the force of habit, in a broad way, on the world at large; and so divides all history into progressive periods, marked by God’s (external) grace. At first the light of nature was so strong that men by it alone could live in holiness. And it was only when men’s manners became corrupt and tarnished nature began to be insufficient for holy living, that by God’s grace the law was given as an addition to mere nature; and by it “the original lustre was restored to nature after its blush had been impaired.” And so again, after the habit of sinning once more prevailed among men, and “the law became unequal to the task of curing it,”²¹ Christ was given, furnishing men with forgiveness of sins, exhortations to imitation of His example and the holy example itself.²² Thus a progressive deterioration was confessed, and such a deterioration as rendered desirable at least two supernatural interpositions—in the giving of the law and the coming of Christ. Yet no corruption of nature, even by growing habit, was really allowed. It was only an ever-increasing facility in imitating vice which arose from so long a schooling in evil. And all that was needed to rescue men from it was a new explanation of what was right (in the law), or, at the most, the encouragement of forgiveness for what was already done, and a holy example (in Christ) for imitation. Pelagius still asserted our continuous possession of “a free will which is unimpaired for sinning and for not sinning;” and Julian, that “our free will is just as full after sins as it was before sins”—although Augustine does not fail to twit him with a charge of inconsistency.²³

The peculiar individualism of the Pelagian view of the world comes out strongly in their failure to perceive the effect of habit on nature itself. Just as they conceived of virtue as an agglomeration of virtuous acts, so they conceived of sin exclusively as an act, or mass of disconnected acts. They appear not to have risen above the essentially heathen view which had no notion of holiness except as a series of acts of holiness, or of sin except as a like series of sinful acts.²⁴ Thus the will was isolated from its acts, and the acts from each other, and all organic connection or continuity of life was not only overlooked but denied.²⁵ After each act of the will, man stood exactly where he did before: indeed, this conception scarcely allows for the existence of a “man”—only a willing machine is left, at each click of the action of which the spring regains its original position, and is equally ready as before to perform its function. In such a conception there was no place for character: freedom of will was all. Thus it was not an unnatural mistake which they made, when they forgot the man altogether, and attributed to the faculty of free will, under the name of “possibilitas” or “posse,” the ability that belongs rather to the man whose faculty it is and who is properly responsible for the use he makes of it. Here lies the essential error of their doctrine of free will. They looked upon freedom in its form only, and not in its matter; and, keeping man in perpetual and hopeless equilibrium between good and evil, they allowed for no growth of character and permitted no advantage to accrue to the man himself from his successive choices of good. It need not surprise us that the type of thought which thus dissolved the organism of the man into an aggregation of disconnected voluntary acts, failed to comprehend the solidarity of the race. To the Pelagian, Adam was a man, nothing more; and it was simply unthinkable that any act of his that left his own subsequent acts uncommitted, could entail sin and guilt upon other men. The same alembic that dissolved the individual into a succession of voluntary acts, could not fail to separate the race into a heap of unconnected units. If sin, as Julian declared, is nothing but will, and the will itself remained intact after each act, how could the individual act of an individual will condition the acts of men as yet unborn? By “imitation” of his act alone could, under such a conception, other men be affected. And this carried with it the corresponding view of man’s relation to Christ. Christ could forgive us the sins we had committed; He could teach us the true way; He could set us a holy example; and He could exhort us to its imitation. But He could not touch us to enable us to will the good, without destroying the absolute equilibrium of the will between good and evil. And to destroy this was to destroy the freedom of the will, which was the crowning good of our divinely created nature. Surely the Pelagians forgot that man was not made for will, but will for man.

In defending their theory, as we are told by Augustine, there were five claims that they especially made for it.²⁶ It allowed them to praise as was their due, the creature that God had made, the marriage that He had instituted, the law that He had given, the free will which was His greatest endowment to man, and the saints who had followed His counsels. By this they meant that they proclaimed the sinless perfection of human nature in every man as he was brought into the world, and opposed this to the doctrine of original sin; the purity and holiness of marriage and the sexual appetites, and opposed this to the doctrine of the transmission of sin; the ability of the law, as well as and apart from the gospel, to bring men into eternal life, and opposed this to the necessity of inner grace; the adequacy of free will to choose the good, and opposed this to the necessity of divine aid; and the perfection of the lives of the saints, and opposed this to the doctrine of universal sinfulness. Other questions, concerning the origin of souls, the necessity of baptism for infants, the original immortality of Adam, lay more upon the skirts of the controversy. As it was an obvious fact that all men died, they could not admit that Adam’s death was a consequence of sin lest they should be forced to confess that his sin had injured all men; they therefore asserted that physical death belonged to the very nature of man, and that Adam would have died even had he not sinned.²⁷ So, as it was impossible to deny that the Church everywhere baptized infants, they could not refuse them baptism without confessing themselves innovators in doctrine; and therefore they contended that infants were not baptized for forgiveness of sin, but in order to attain a higher state of bliss than that which naturally belongs to innocence. Finally, they conceived that if it were admitted that souls are directly created by God for each birth, it could not be asserted that they come into the world soiled by sin and under condemnation; and therefore they loudly championed the creationist theory of the origin of souls.

The teachings of the Pelagians, it will be readily seen, easily welded themselves into a system, the essential and formative elements of which were entirely new in the Christian Church. It was this startlingly new reading of man’s condition, powers, and dependence for salvation that broke like a thunderbolt upon the Western Church at the opening of the fifth century, and forced her to reconsider, from the foundations, her whole teaching as to man and his salvation.

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Footnotes

1. On the Merits and Remission of Sins, iii. 6, 11, 12; Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, iv. 32; Against Julian, i. 4; On Heresies, 88; and often elsewhere. Jerome found roots for the theory in Origen and Rufinus (Letter 133, 3), but this is a different matter: compare Augustine, On Original Sin, 25. ↩

2. Preface to Book iv. of his work on Jeremiah. ↩

3. Latin Christianity, i. 166, note 2. ↩

4. Trois Prem. Siècles, ii. 375. ↩

5. De Natura Deorum, iii. 36. ↩

6. History of the Councils of the Church (E. T.), ii. 446, note 3. ↩

7. Compare the excellent statement in Thomasius’ Dogmengeschichte, i. 483. ↩

8. On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 46; On the Merits and Remission of Sins, iii. 1; Epistle 186, etc. ↩

9. On Nature and Grace, i. ↩

10. Epistle to Demetrias, 16. ↩

11. Do. 2 and 19. ↩

12. On the Gift of Perseverance, 53. ↩

13. On Nature and Grace, 49. ↩

14. On the Gift of Perseverance, 4; Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, iii. 24; iv. 2 sq. ↩

15. On the Spirit and Letter, 4; On Nature and Grace, 53; On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 20, 22, 38; On the Grace of Christ, 2, 3, 8, 31, 42, 45; Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, iv. 11; On Grace and Free Will, 23-26, and often. ↩

16. On Original Sin, 14. ↩

17. Ibid. ↩

18. Ibid. ↩

19. The Unfinished Work, iii. 82. ↩

20. Do. i. 91; compare do. i. 48, 60; ii. 20. “There is nothing of sin in man, if there is nothing of his own will.” “There is no original sin in infants at all.” ↩

21. On Original Sin, 30. ↩

22. On the Grace of Christ, 43. ↩

23. The Unfinished Work, i. 91; compare 69. ↩

24. Dr. Matheson finely says (Expositor, i. ix. 21), “There is the same difference between the Christian and Pagan idea of prayer as there is between the Christian and Pagan idea of sin. Paganism knows nothing of sin, it knows only sins: it has no conception of the principle of evil, it comprehends only a succession of sinful acts.” This is Pelagianism too. ↩

25. Compare Schaff, Church History, iii. 804; and Thomasius, Dogmengeschichte, i. 487-8. ↩

26. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, iii. 25, and iv. at the beginning. ↩

27. This belongs to the earlier Pelagianism; Julian was ready to admit that death came from Adam, but not that sin did. ↩