Tractates on the Gospel of John
20 ST. AUGUSTINE had a particular appeal to the Roman upper classes who were undergoing a "crisis of piety"*^^ and who found the perfectionism of Pelagius attractive. Augustine came to be gradually more and more involved with this heresy until about 418 he was the leading defender of the established teachings, the fundatissima fides. Against Manichaean determinism he had established firm tenets about the nature of evil, man's freedom of will, and the entire relationship between man and God; now he had to re-examine and further refine his thought.
(26) Augustine did not doubt the existence of the will and that very existence reasonably demanded that the will be free to choose. Pelagius held that Adam's sin was a strictly personal sin; Augustine, building an explicit theory of original sin upon Paul and various earlier Fathers, held that this sin was a universal sin, a defect of the human soul, passed on by the head of the human family to his descendents. As evil is deficiency or privation, so this original sin is a deficiency or defect in man's spiritual nature. Consequently, since Adam's original sin, the human race has suffered from serious imperfection; a dislocation of human consciousness,*^^ a deficiency and lack of order,*^^ and a disordered love,*^" have rendered the person incapable of carrying to fulfillment even the good which he wills.
(27) Since God is totally self-sufficient, even man's being and his very will itself are a grace, a free, unmerited gift of God; man's perfection before the Fall was such a grace. In this sense man can do nothing without grace; in this sense even his free will is conditioned by grace. Yet with this kind of grace man still has the free will to choose good or evil, love of God or hatred; this freedom of will is a gift of grace. Since the Fall, however, the disorder that afflicts man renders his free choice (Lausanne, 1943); and J. Ferguson, Pelagius. A Historical and Theological Study (Cambridge, 1956).
63. Brown, Augustine, 348. 64. See Epistula 166.8.25 (PL 33-73 1; and CSEL 44.580); and Brown, Augustine, 354. 65. Brown, Augustine, 261. 66. See Gilson, 148. 67. See Hardy, 93-109.