Against Pelagius

The Pelagian controversy, which occupied the last two decades of Augustine’s life (411–430), made him the “Doctor of Grace” (Doctor Gratiae) of the Latin West. Against the British ascetic Pelagius and his followers, who taught that human nature retained the power to fulfill God’s commands and attain righteousness by its own free will, Augustine defended the absolute necessity of divine grace, the wounding of human nature by the Fall, and the bondage of the will apart from Christ. The East stands with Augustine against Pelagius. But the form Augustine gave the doctrine — inherited original guilt, the massa damnata, grace as efficacious of itself — is where the Eastern reading begins to part from him. This file sets out the controversy; the next sets out the Eastern objection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

Pelagius and His Teaching

Pelagius (c. 354 – c. 420) was a British-born ascetic and moral teacher who came to Rome around 380 and won a reputation for the rigor of his life and the earnestness of his call to Christian perfection (Brown 2000, ch. 29; Chadwick 1986, ch. 9). His concern was moral: he was scandalized by the laxity of nominal Christians who excused their sins by pleading the weakness of human nature, and he insisted that God would not command what man could not perform. From this came the teaching that bears his name. In its developed form — pressed further by his sharper disciples Caelestius and, later, the formidable Julian of Eclanum — Pelagianism held:

that human nature was created good and remains, after Adam, uncorrupted in its essential power to choose the good;
that Adam’s sin harmed only Adam, by his bad example, and is not inherited as a guilt or corruption by his descendants — newborn infants are in the state of Adam before the Fall;
that man can, by his free will and the natural endowment of his nature, fulfill the commandments and attain sinlessness, grace being understood chiefly as the external aids of the law, the example of Christ, and the forgiveness of past sins, rather than as an inward transforming power necessary to every good act;
that, since each is responsible only for his own deliberate sins, a sinless life is possible and has in fact been attained (On the Proceedings of Pelagius; On Nature and Grace; Brown 2000, ch. 29; Chadwick 1986, ch. 9).

The controversy broke into the open around 411, when Caelestius was condemned at a synod in Carthage for denying the transmission of Adam’s sin and the necessity of infant baptism for the remission of original sin (Brown 2000, ch. 29). Augustine, who had touched these questions a decade earlier in works like To Simplician (396) — where he had already concluded that the initiative in salvation belongs entirely to God’s grace — now made them the center of his thought.

Augustine’s Doctrine of Grace

Against Pelagius, Augustine pressed the absolute and prior necessity of grace (gratia) for every step of salvation. His governing text was 1 Corinthians 4:7 — “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” — which he wielded as the refutation of all self-reliance (On the Spirit and the Letter 34; On the Predestination of the Saints 5; trans. NPNF I/5). Grace is not merely the law that tells us what to do, nor merely the forgiveness of past sins, nor merely the example of Christ; it is the inward gift of the Holy Spirit who heals the will and pours charity into the heart (Romans 5:5), enabling it both to will and to do the good it could not otherwise will or do (On the Spirit and the Letter 5, 32; On Nature and Grace 31; trans. NPNF I/5). Grace, for Augustine, must precede the good will, awakening it (“operating grace”), and accompany it, bringing it to act (“cooperating grace”) (On Grace and Free Will 17). Without it, fallen man can do nothing toward his salvation; with it, what he does is genuinely his own act, but its very willing is the gift of God.

Augustine insisted, against the Pelagian charge that he denied free will, that he did not abolish the will but healed it: grace does not destroy the will but liberates and rightly orders it, so that man freely wills what grace enables him to will (On Grace and Free Will 4; On the Spirit and the Letter 30). This affirmation that grace works with a real, restored freedom is the point Eastern readers most wish to credit in Augustine — even as they judge that his late doctrine of efficacious and predestined grace finally overwhelmed it (see Predestination and the Eastern Objection).

Original Sin and the Massa Damnata

The hardest and most contested element of Augustine’s doctrine is his account of original sin (peccatum originale). Augustine taught that in Adam the whole human race sinned and fell — reading Romans 5:12 in the Latin version “in quo omnes peccaverunt,” “in whom [Adam] all sinned” — so that all Adam’s descendants inherit not only a corrupted, weakened, death-bound nature but a real guilt (reatus), contracted in Adam and transmitted by natural generation, for which even unbaptized infants are justly condemned (On the Merits and Remission of Sins 1.9–10; On Marriage and Concupiscence; Enchiridion 26–27; trans. NPNF I/5). Fallen humanity is therefore a “condemned mass” (massa damnata, massa perditionis) — a single lump of perdition, all of whom God in strict justice could justly leave to damnation, and from which He mercifully rescues some by unmerited grace (Enchiridion 25, 27, 99; City of God 21.12; trans. NPNF). On this view the link between Adam’s sin and his posterity is transmitted through the act of generation and the disorder of concupiscence (concupiscentia) that attends it.

It is precisely here that the East and West diverge most sharply — not over whether the Fall harmed human nature (the East affirms this strongly) but over the Latin reading of Romans 5:12 and the doctrine of inherited guilt. The Greek text of Romans 5:12 reads “eph’ hō pantes hēmarton” — most naturally “because all sinned,” referring to the personal sins of Adam’s descendants — rather than the Latin “in quo,” “in whom.” On this difference much of the East–West divergence on the Fall turns [Disputed: the Eastern tradition, following the Greek text of Romans 5:12 (*eph' hō*, "because" / "in that" all sinned) and Fathers such as John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria, holds that humanity inherits from Adam **mortality and corruption** and a weakened, passible nature — the *ancestral sin* — but not the personal *guilt* of Adam's transgression, which Augustine's Latin reading of "*in quo omnes peccaverunt*" affirmed; this is the classic distinction between the Eastern doctrine of "ancestral sin" and the Augustinian-Western doctrine of "original sin" as inherited guilt. The translation question (whether the Latin *in quo* renders the Greek correctly) is itself part of the dispute. See [Ancestral vs Original Sin](../../orthodoxy/03-dogmatic-theology/ancestral-vs-original-sin.md).]

The Bound and Liberated Will

Augustine’s psychology of the will, sharpened in the Pelagian controversy, distinguishes the states of human freedom across the history of salvation. Adam before the Fall was able not to sin (posse non peccare) and able not to die; fallen man, apart from grace, is not able not to sin (non posse non peccare) — free to choose among earthly things but bound in his deepest orientation, unable not to sin in the sense that matters for salvation; the redeemed under grace are progressively freed to will the good; and the blessed in glory will enjoy the highest freedom, not able to sin (non posse peccare) (On Rebuke and Grace 33; Enchiridion 105; trans. NPNF I/5). Liberty, for Augustine, is not the bare power of choice (liberum arbitrium) but the liberated power to love and do the good (libertas), and that liberation is the work of grace. The “free will” the Pelagians boasted, Augustine argued, is in the fallen state free only to sin until grace heals it (On the Spirit and the Letter 52; Enchiridion 30). This recovered the analysis of the divided will already drawn in Confessions 8 (see The Garden at Milan).

The Conciliar Condemnation of Pelagianism

The Church, East and West, condemned Pelagianism — and this is the firm ground on which Augustine and the Eastern tradition stand together. After complex proceedings (including a synod at Diospolis in Palestine in 415 that controversially acquitted Pelagius on his own profession, and the intervention of successive bishops of Rome), the African councils, above all the Council of Carthage of 418, definitively condemned the Pelagian denials: it anathematized those who said that Adam was created mortal apart from sin, that newborn infants need no baptism for the remission of original sin, that grace only forgives past sins rather than aiding against future ones, and that grace merely makes obedience easier rather than enabling it (Council of Carthage 418, canons; Brown 2000, ch. 29). The Council of Ephesus in 431 — the Third Ecumenical Council — also condemned Pelagianism (associating Caelestius’s cause with the Nestorian party it judged), giving the condemnation ecumenical standing in the East as well (Ephesus 431; the canons against the Pelagians). Pelagianism is thus reckoned a heresy by the whole Church, Eastern and Western alike.

What the councils condemned was the Pelagian denial of original sin and of the necessity of grace — and on that the East fully concurs. What the councils did not do was canonize the whole of Augustine’s developed doctrine, in particular his teaching on inherited guilt, irresistible grace, and predestination, which remained his theological achievement and his private opinion rather than conciliar dogma, and which the East would receive with reserve. The distinction between the dogma (Pelagianism is heresy; grace is necessary) and the theologoumenon (the specifically Augustinian construction of original guilt and predestination) is essential to the Orthodox reading and is the subject of the next file.

References

Augustine of Hippo. Anti-Pelagian Writings — On the Spirit and the Letter, On Nature and Grace, On the Merits and Remission of Sins, On Grace and Free Will, On Rebuke and Grace, Enchiridion. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 5. 1887. (1 Cor 4:7 at Spirit and Letter 34; the fourfold state of the will at Rebuke and Grace 33 and Enchiridion 105; original sin and massa damnata at Enchiridion 25–27, 99.)
Council of Carthage (418) and Council of Ephesus (431). Canons against the Pelagians.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Chs. 29–30 on the Pelagian controversy.)
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Ch. 9.)