Chapter 23: Pelagius and Augustine, or the Conception of Free Will and Predestination

Thanks to the bias of Augustine of Hippone, who fought against it, the doctrine of Pelagius enriched the Catholic dogma, then in formation, with two specifications that were important to the power that they conferred upon the Church of Rome and to the incessant quarrels that it maintained over the course of the centuries.

Augustine did indeed mark the beginning of the requirement to baptize children, who were held to be impure at birth, and the advent of the theory of predestination — much later judged to be heretical, without triggering the impossible condemnation of one of the principal “fathers” of Catholicism — which he fabricated so as to direct it against his old enemy, Pelagius.

Pelagius (340?-429?), born in Britain or Ireland, no doubt retained traces of the Celtic freedom of spirit when he reached Rome around 400. A little before the fall and sacking of the city by the Goths, who were converted to Arianism (410), Pelagius and his disciple Celestius left for Carthage, where his brilliant spirit and rhetorical talents won him the friendship of Augustine of Hippone, bishop of the city. But Augustine’s authoritarianism quickly ceased tolerating the uncertainties that Pelagius’s ideas propagated concerning the function of the Church, over which the master of Carthage intended to establish absolute hegemony. (Augustine did not hesitate to retrieve from Tyconius, who was the partisan of a type of Donatism that he anathematized, the theory of a City of God that was superior to the terrestrial city, entrusted to this impermiable power, which was precisely in decline during the Roman Empire.)

Pelagius took refuge in Palestine, in which another doctrinaire Catholic, Jerome — put on his guard by Augustine’s emissaries — persecuted him and taxed his doctrine with Manicheanism, Catholicism’s religious rival, repressed everywhere with the greatest violence. (Augustine himself was a renegade from Manicheanism. He turned his vehemence against his old coreligionists by appealing to them to abide by the rigors of the law. It was from him that came the bloody repression that struck the Manicheans and, much later, the Paulicians, the Bogomiles and the Cathars.)

Acquitted by the Synod of Jerusalem in 415, Pelagius and Celestius were excommunicated two years later by Pope Innocent I. At first, Zozime, Innocent’s successor, showed sympathy towards Pelagius, but he soon pulled himself together and definitively condemned him at the Council of Carthage in 418.

To better understand Pelagius’s teachings and Augustine’s attitude, it is fitting to situate them within the anti-Montanist reaction that was conducted with firmness by the “lax” politics of the ecclesiastical majority in the West.

If the Church reconciled itself with Greco-Roman hedonism by exiling puritan rigor to the monasteries, if it kept the sacrifical perfection of the Christ as a difficultly accessible ideal, it also acquiesed without too much difficulty to the depraved morals of many priests and faithful people, provided that its authority and sacramental function was publicly privileged.

The Spirituals or “Messalians” weren’t the only ones to turn aside the duplicity of the Church and cover, with several hastily Christianized arguments, their quite common choice to obey sexual impulses and the pleasures of existence, without preoccupying themselves with obedience or guilt.

Around 380, a certain Helvidius, apparently a disciple of Auxentius (the Arian Bishop of Milan and the predecessor of Ambroise), drew down upon himself the thunderbolts of Jerome (344?-420) for having mocked the virginity of Mary and maintained that she had had other children, since the canonical gospels mention the “brothers of the Lord.” With fervor Jerome tried to show that these brothers were merely Jesus’ cousins. He was way too attached to the word “brother,” which — in the spirit of Essenism or Nazareanism — was identical to “witness,” to martus in Greek and “martyr” in French;[304] for the Judeo-Christians, the brother or witness was simply he who participates in the same sacrifice as the “Servant of the Lord,” celebrated by the Book of Isaiah.

But Helvidius’ remark is less concerned with promoting historical exegesis than finishing with the alleged superiority of virginity over the amorous relation. This was why he rejected Tertullian, Montan and all of the Christianity of the New Prophecy.

A similar doctrine can be found in Jovianian, a disciple of Ambroise, Bishop of Milan. In Rome, where his audience was large, Jovinian argued ironically that such a virgin birth was accomplished by this fantastic being named Jesus, this angelos-christos that the Gnostics and Manicheans condemned by the Church were so proud of. To the hypocritical asceticism of the faithful, Jovinian opposed the salvational inclination to the pleasures of the table, love and the benefits of life, which were real grace accorded by divine kindness. For him, the purification of baptism was sufficient to wash away all sin and to protect oneself against the traps set by a demon anxious to spoil and corrupt the gifts of God...

Condemned by Pope Sirice and by the Council of Milan, convened in 390 at the request of Ambroise, Jovinian was exiled by imperial prescription.

Among the most persistent of Jovinian’s adversaries were Jerome, the supporter of marital viginity and author of Against Jovinian, the no-less misogynist Augustine, and Pelagius.

What divergence separated Pelagius from the puritan Augustine? A certain concept of human dignity. Pelagius did not share in the conception of a fundamental ignominy of mankind, which the Bishop of Carthage had brilliantly summarized in this finding: “Inter fesces et urinam nascimur,” “We are born between shit and piss.”

The austerity of Pelagius was related to that Seneca and even to that of the Nineteenth Century atheistic moralists, nay, even the freethinkers who [today] thrash the debauchery of the clergy. Pelagius estimated that mankind makes use of a force of will that was sufficient to attain virtue and goodness. There was no need for divine aid or the mediation of the Church if one wished to follow the ethical rules that were prescribed everywhere. All virtues resides in germ-form in each individual; it was sufficient to bring these seeds to fruition if one wished to fight the temptations of evil.

One could not trace the roads of public morality any better by avoiding the detour of the Church.

The Church [according to Pilage], reduced to a congruous portion, only intervened through the sacraments, so as to guarantee the salvation of the soul when terrestrial life accomplished its destiny according to the precepts of moral law.

Our freedom was as total as that of Adam and Eve, before they misused it, thereby condemning themselves to downfall. By teaching the privileges of moral will from infancy, men would obey God’s designs, and baptism (which was not given to children at the time) simply placed the Church’s seal as a pass to eternal beautitude.

Many citizens of the Empire — including those who prized moral rigor or Stoic or Epicurean philosophy — practiced such principles without needing to give them a Christian coloration. Even among the Catholics, Theophrone of Cappadoccia said that the omniscience of God knew all that would be produced, but did not positively know it as an accomplished fact, [thus] leaving to mankind the freedom to act beyond all determinations. In the spirit of Theophrone, it was a question of reconciling the absolute power of God and human freedom, which the Church, called upon to get out of the dead-end of Augustinian predestination, would call “free will.”

And so, at the time that Pelagius was recalling the principles of a lay morality, Augustine (calculating the decline of imperial unity and his stranglehold over the West) prepared for the advent of a pontifical authority that would cover the entire world with traps, the tangled stitches of which the City of God and the terrestrial city would [combine to] ceaselessly tighten.

Augustine launched a machine of doctrinal war against Pelagius. To the freedom defended by his adversary, Augustine opposed a theory that, much later, would be regurgitated by Calvinism and Jansenism: predestination.

The fate of mankind was traced out in all eternity by God who, as absolute master, decided upon the salvation or damnation of his creatures. A terrible doctrine, which, setting human beings to fear and trembling, reduced their pride, abandonned them pantingly to the consolations of a Church that recalled their indignity to them.

To break the Pelagians’ excessive confidence in mankind, Pope Honorius subjected them, and the philosopher Julian of Eclane, to the penalties prescribed for heretics. Pelagius and Celestius died in exile, one believes, shortly thereafter.

Predestination also revealed a banality that was even more embarrassing to the Church than the freedom left in mankind’s own hands. If the fate of each being was determined according to the caprice of God, what good were the protections of the Church, the priests and the sacraments? It would take Thomas Aquinas’ laborious arguments to accord to the all-powerful divinity the freedom to choose salvation or damnation in a conscious and willful manner called “free will.”

Augustine never incurred the least reprobation; he had done too much for the grandeur and enrichment of the Church. But, in 475, the Council of Arles would condemn as a heretic one Lucida, who supported the idea that, the freedom of mankind having been annihilated by the fall into sin, each person fell under the blow of a predestination required by God and by virtue of which destiny led each, irremediably, to damnation or eternal life.

The amplified function of original sin and the impurity imputed to new-born infants gave the [Church’s] dogma a response that aimed at annihilating the hopes that Pelagius had in rendering mankind perfect. The Montanists, in their horror of nature and life (although such a repulsion had already animated Essene zeal), were the first to recommend the baptism of infants, at a time when the custom was not widespread. Augustine held up to mankind, capable of raising itself towards virtue (so says Pelagius), an inverse portrait: man was a wretched creature, imbecilic, prey to all temptations of the flesh and quite incapable of resisting them. Why? Because the original stain of the sin of Adam penetrates him from his birth. Only baptism washed him of the infamy that the Church tolerates only when it welcomed the faithful into its sanctuary.

Once the baptism of children was erected as a necessity, the new-born was consecrated to the Catholic faith from the very first hours of its life. Unbaptized children would die like animals; the others would live in repudiated errors and innocence. The profitable market in pentitence and redemption — gifts, emoluments, alms, submission — took root in the Augustinian doctrine of the intrinsic weakness of the body and the spirit.

No one had the force of character great enough to successfully resist all temptation. One sinned by pride if one estimated oneself able to thwart [all] the demoniac ruses of nature. So! Man, this miserable and negligible being, succumbed to sin — because Rome authorized him to redeem himself, to regain his salvation, not in the ways [le chef] of Augustine, but in the comforting bosom of the Church. Much later, the skillful arrangement of responsibilities and free will would establish a mathematics of salvation and damnation that would open on to the trade in indulgences and absolutions at a price.

The credit of Augustine in the matter was merited, as long as one excused his doctrinal lapses into the black ride of predestination.