Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
written sometime between 406 and 410, marked his measured response to high-pitched theological debates that had raged in the city of Rome for two decades, debates on marriage and virginity and our capacity for moral excellence.14 In Pelagius's mind, human nature and moral exhortation were intimately linked. As he stressed in a letter to one of his aristocratic advisees:
Whenever I have to discuss principles of morality and the conduct of the life of holiness, it is my approach to begin first by demonstrating the power and quality of human nature, to show what it is capable of. And from this I then encourage the soul of my hearer to various kinds of virtues. It would do no good to call a person to something when one strongly presumes it to be impossible, for we would never set out on the road to virtue unless hope were our guide and companion. Despairing of reaching it otherwise undermines every effort in pursuing it.15
Like a coach of elite athletes, Pelagius called those he directed to re-imagine and exploit to the full their untapped God-given potential. Yet the choices were stark, and the stakes were high:
The Lord of justice wanted human beings to act freely and not under compulsion. It was for this reason He left each person in the hands of his or her own counsel. He placed before them life and death, good and evil. Whatever pleased one, one was given (Sir 15:14–17). Thus we read in Deuteronomy: "I have set before your face blessing and curse. Choose life that you may live" (Dt 30:19).16
The consequences for failure were also clear: "On the day of judgment no mercy will be shown to the wicked and the sinners, but they will be consumed in the eternal fires."17
Pelagius held a definite, if circumscribed, theology of grace.18 First, he stressed that creation itself is graced. In particular, God had gifted the human person with great powers, inscribing them into the marrow of our Godimaged nature. Adam's sin, Pelagius argued, hurt only Adam, not human nature. We do not inherit original sin; we imitate the original sinner. Second, Pelagius emphasized the Law as a gift of God's beneficence. The history of human sin had drawn "a dark veil, as it were, over human reason." The Law "filed off" a corrosive "rust of ignorance," restoring our nature's "primordial
14. This has been traditionally dated later, around 413 or 414. Yves-Marie Duval, "La date du De Natura de Pélage," Revue des Études Augustiniennes 36 (1990): 257–83, has argued in an influential study for the earlier date, placing this work in the aftermath of the Jovinian controversy. On this, see below.
15. Pelagius, ep. ad Demetriadem 2 (PL 30:17); my trans. 16. Pelagius, ep. ad Demetriadem 2 (PL 30:17); my trans. 17. Pelagius, quoted in Augustine, De gestis Pelagii 3.9 (BA 21:450). At his trial at Diospolis in 415, Pelagius acknowledged that the sentence was drawn from one of his writings.
18. For a fair-minded overview of Pelagius's theology, see Robert Evans, Pelagius: Inquiries and Reappraisals (New York: Seabury, 1968), esp. 90–121.