SIN, GRACE, AND ANCIENT HERETICS: REVISITING PELAGIUS
Courtesy of Wikipedia. Public domain.
In the past year or so, I’ve noticed a lot of love for Pelagius in Christian circles. Pelagius, for those of you who are fortunate enough to not be historians of Christianity, was an ascetic teacher who was likely born in Britain and moved to Rome near the end of the fourth-century. He died in 418 and is now most commonly remembered as one of Augustine of Hippo’s theological opponents and as the founder of a heresy originally called Pelagianism.
However, the identification of Pelagius as a heretic is complicated when you look at the historical record. Augustine certainly wanted Pelagius condemned as a heretic because they disagreed on theological matters. But, aside from Augustine’s (kind-of) friend Jerome, not many others thought Pelagius was a heretic. He was largely praised by fellow writers and theologians for his teachings and commitment to the Christian life while he was alive – something that angered Augustine to no end.
Pelagius was only condemned for his teachings near the end of his life. First, in 417, after Augustine convinced some of his fellow bishops to write letters calling Pelagius a heretic to Pope Innocent I, who agreed and then promptly died a few months later. Innocent I’s successor, Zosimus, re-opened the case when Pelagius stated he was unfairly condemned. In response, Augustine threw a fit and convened his own council, the Council of Carthage, to declare Pelagius a heretic and exile him to Egypt in 418. Pelagius was warmly welcomed by bishop Cyril of Alexandria and continued his work there until he died a few months later.
It’s not hard to see that the common factor in Pelagius’s heresy charges was Augustine, not Pelagius’s teachings. And because he was labeled as a heretic, most of his writings have been lost to us; we’re not completely sure what the full scope of his theology was. Proponents of Pelagius, at least in modern-day church circles, point to these very real facts to say that Pelagius might not have been a heretic after all, and that it might be worth listening to what he has to say.
The good news is that some of Pelagius’s writings do survive. I want to let Pelagius’s words stand on their own, to treat him as what he was: a brother in the faith striving for the truth about God and about humanity. (1) And I want to evaluate Pelagius’s theology not against the background of Augustine’s condemnations, but to see what it might have to say to us and whether we should embrace it.
What’s attractive about Pelagius is his unabashed affirmation that human nature is good. He takes God’s affirmation that creation is very good from Genesis 1:31 and weaves it throughout his understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be Christian. Because humans were created in God’s image and declared to be excellent by their creator, Pelagius reasons that human beings must have enormous potential to live into that goodness, which they can do by freely choosing either good or evil. For Pelagius, humans decide who they are going to be via repeated action of truly free choice. God does not interfere with human affairs by bending or shaping our wills: we do that ourselves. Repeatedly following God’s law and doing good makes it easier to continue doing so, whereas repeatedly choosing evil makes doing wrong easier and good harder.
We are, for Pelagius, who we decide to be, and we have full choice in that.
Now God does interfere in human history to help humans choose the good, first by giving the Law when humanity became so tarnished it was unlikely they’d be able to ever get back to their state of created goodness, and then by sending Christ. Jesus, as Pelagius describes him, “encouraged” all of humanity “by his example to pursue perfect righteousness.” The blood of Christ does cleanse and wash human beings, enabling a warped will to be unbent and placed at “neutral,” but human beings still need to make their choices and pursue perfection in following God’s will.
A bad reading of Pelagius that has circulated for the past 1500 years or so misunderstands this conception of the Christian life to be without grace. But there’s is a lot of grace in the way Pelagius understands God’s relationship to humanity: in God’s giving of the Law, in God’s coming to us, in the cleansing and rebirth of the human will, and in Jesus’s selfless example to all humankind. God gives much to humanity, and gives them, through grace, what they need to be able to accomplish righteous living.
In this brief summary, Pelagius presents us with a lot to like. For many of us who grew up in oppressive Christian environments where the inherent sinfulness of human beings was consistently preached, the affirmation of the goodness of God’s created order is a breath of fresh air. You are good because God made you, Pelagius reminds us. And grace abounds in his theology -- God gives us what we need to follow God.
Yet these good things about Pelagius’s theology turn into a double-edged sword. Jesus does make things easier because humans have been given a perfect example through him, but his coming also raises the bar. Pelagius writes to Demetrias, a young woman he is providing pastoral counsel to, that:
Even before the law was given to us, as we have said, and long before the arrival of our Lord and Saviour some are reported to have lived holy and righteous lives; how much more possible must we believe that to be after the light of his coming, now that we have been instructed by the grace of Christ and reborn as better men: purified and cleansed by his blood, encouraged by his example to pursue perfect righteousness, we ought surely to be better than those who lived before the time of the law, better even than those who lived under the law.
No matter how many times I reread Pelagius, I can’t get over this passage. The consistent “be better” and “how much more” ring in my ears. Even with the affirmation of goodness and the depth of grace in Pelagius’s theology, it comes down to this: you’re only good if you can do good. Perfection in righteousness if possible, and now, with Christ, it’s required. You’re good, and so you better live up to that. These words, always feel like a cudgel to me, and I begin to wonder if a God who gives me abilities, reason, skill, and everything I need to be perfect and then leaves me to it is really one that I want to worship.
In his own life, the practical results of Pelagius’s teachings were asceticism. Because humans can achieve perfect righteousness with no divine aids other than the law and Jesus’s example, that means that the bar for Christian living is high. Demetrius is a virgin, and Pelagius writes to her in order to encourage her to continue in her abstinence from sex and her ascetic living. For Pelagius, bad habits of sin can be overcome on one’s own, with continued choices for the better. Overindulge on meat or wine? Time to abstain from it. While the asceticism that Pelagius preached and advocated was a moderate one at the time – he thought it was good for Christians to remain in the city and in the church, and did not suggest that they retreat to the desert to get away from all temptations – the practical outcomes of his theology are that all Christians must behave rightly, all the time. As Theodore de Bruyn, translator of and commentator on Pelagius, notes, Pelagius taught and called “each baptized Christian to follow the example of Christ without fail.” (2)
I willingly admit that that most of my resistance to Pelagius’s theology is that I fail at following Christ’s example often, in large and small ways. And I have tried, many times to convince myself to do better, to create new habits, and I have failed each time. Like my colleague Benjamin Wyatt wrote last month, “the tragedy of our situation is that our fallenness guarantees that we will sin ourselves.” (3) Or, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (4) Attempting to do better, to be perfect, simply doesn’t work for me.
Instead, I have come to accept that sin affects all aspects of my life in some way, and that there’s no getting around that or behind that. The many gifts God has given to me and to all of us – ways of knowing, being, relating, and existing – are just as often used for sin as they are for service. But the Good News for me is that God comes to be with us in this state of messiness in which we find ourselves, not just as an example of how to live, but to be with us. And God’s grace is found not only in the places Pelagius identified – in the giving of the law, the coming of Christ, and in our spiritual rebirth – but in God’s presence with us even in our errors, and in our being reconciled to God even while we are sinners.
Thinking about sin in my own life, I’ve found Martin Luther’s famous image of “simultaneously sinner and justified” to be useful. When understanding my life as a mixture of sin and righteousness, I can hear Pelagius’s exhortations to holiness as an invitation to think and pray for holy living, relying on God’s graciousness to direct and guide my steps as I try to live out Christ’s example. And I can understand my sinfulness as something that I am called away from, not only through my own will, but through God’s grace which pronounces me forgiven and cleansed. But in it all, I know that God is with me, not standing over me asking why I’m not better yet, and is instead alongside me, helping me at every step of the way.
Understanding myself as sinner and saint has helped me to see Pelagius in the same way. He, like Augustine and many others from church history, was my brother in the faith, who endeavored as I do to seek and tell the truth about God. His teachings are a mixture of good and bad, like my own theology is. I can take his reminder of the goodness of God’s creation and his emphasis on emulating Christ’s example while preferring other ideas about sin and the condition of human beings. And above all, I can see him as someone that God’s grace covers, just as I hope it covers me.
For this, I’ve used Pelagius’s Letter to Demetrias, translated by B.R. Rees (available here) and Theodore De Bruyn, Pelagius’s Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: Translated with Introduction and Notes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
DeBruyn, Pelagius’s Commentary on Romans, 24.
https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/7ydos1mh4u5us2jg1fml45gcf73qhw
Romans 7:15-20, NRSV.