Augustine in His Own Words
Against the Pelagians 375 spiring spiritual guide.7 Rome's elite had been among the last in the Empire to come over to the Christian faith. Pelagius and his circle had little patience with their often lukewarm, politically correct conversions: "If it pleases you to be a Christian, then perform the works of Christ and adopt the name of Christian deservedly. Or perhaps you do not wish to be a Christian, but just to be called one!"8 He railed against a growing gap in moral expectations, a two-tier morality with one standard for monks and another for the average Christian: "I have said and I will repeat: In the matter of righteousness we all have the same obligations: virgins, widows, or married women, men of high, middle, or low class, are equally bidden to obey the commandments."9 Pelagius's high standards and moral egalitarianism had momentous implications. As Peter Brown has noted, "the stream of perfectionism which," in the ascetic movement, "had flowed in a concentrated jet, will be widened by Pelagius and his followers into a flood into whose icy puritanism they would immerse the whole Christian community."10 Gerald Bonner has added: "The Pelagians did not build monasteries. Rather, they sought to make the Christian Church one great monastery."11
Like Augustine, Pelagius had meditated at length on Paul's letters. His longest surviving work is a verse-by-verse commentary.12 Like Augustine of the 390s, Pelagius positioned himself as an opponent of the Manichees and worried greatly about Manichean denial of moral freedom. Pelagius laid great stress on free will, on our power of choice, whether for good or for ill. He knew of Augustine's early anti-Manichean treatise, On Free Will, and quoted it to buttress his own views.13 But what he knew of Augustine's later writings left him uneasy. He nearly came to blows with a bishop who quoted Confessions to him (see below). Pelagius's controversial treatise, On Nature,
7. On this aristocratic social context, see the classic studies of Peter Brown, "Pelagius and His Supporters: Aims and Environment," and "The Patrons of Pelagius: The Roman Aristocracy between East and West," in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, 183–226.
8. Pelagius, De vita christiana 1.1–1.2 (PL 40:1033); trans. B. R. Rees, Pelagius: Life and Letters (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1991), 2:108. Some have disputed the attribution of this work to Pelagius; for a discussion, see Robert F. Evans, Four Letters of Pelagius (New York: Seabury Press, 1968), 18–20; Rees, Pelagius, 105– 6. If not by Pelagius himself, the work is certainly from his circle and articulates core Pelagian concerns and spirituality.
9. Pelagius, Ad Demetriadem 10 (PL 30:25); trans. Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 42. 10. Brown, "Pelagius and His Supporters," 194. 11. Bonner, Augustine and Modern Research, 14. 12. Pelagius, Expositiones XIII epistularum Pauli. For the text, see A. Souter, Pelagius's Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St. Paul, Texts and Studies 9.2 (Cambridge, 1926), reprinted in PLS 1:1110–374; for a partial translation, see Theodore DeBruyn, ed., Pelagius's Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, OECS (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
13. Pelagius in De natura quoted Augustine's De libero arbitrio 3.18.50 (CCL 29:304). Augustine strongly defended himself in nat. et gr. 67.80–81 (BA 21:400–406) against what he saw as Pelagius's biased editing. Bonner, Modern Research, 41–42, has argued that this quotation proved a turning point in Augustine's view of Pelagius.