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Pelagius and Pelagianism

By Daoud Rosser-Owen

[© Daoud Rosser-Owen 1998. All Rights Reserved. This document may be used for purposes of private research without the prior written permission of the author as long as it is stored unchanged in its entirety with both headers and footers attached. It may be used for other than this as long as due and full credit is given to the author and the text is not changed in any way and the author's written consent is obtained]
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Short Version

Pelagius (c. 360 - c. 420 AD) is the originator of the heretical Christian doctrine known as Pelagianism. He was born in Britain, and settled in Rome for a while (c. 380 AD), and later preached in Africa and Palestine. He rejected the doctrines of original sin and predestination, believing in man's free will and capacity for good. These beliefs were hotly disputed by St Augustine and a series of synods. Pope Innocent I condemned them in 417 AD and excommunicated Pelagius. His teachings were finally anathematised at the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD after which the school of "semi-Pelagianism" arose, associated particularly with the name of St John Cassian, a disciple of St John Chrysostom. Semi-Pelagianism is a strong thread in the theology of Duns Scotus Erigena and St Thomas Aquinas.

Long Version

The originator of the heretical Christian doctrine known as Pelagianism was a British monk after whom it is named. He is known to us as Pelagius, which is a Greek adjective (pelagios, -a, -on) meaning "of, on, or by the sea; living in the sea" and is thought to be a translation of the Celtic name Morgan (from morigenos, "sea born"). It is usual to call him a "Scot" (i.e. a man from Ireland - it was not used of Scotland before the 9th Century) or of Gaelic origin, mostly on the basis of a vituperative remark from St Jerome that he was "swollen up with Irish porridge".

In view of it being thought that Pelagius' early education took place at Llantwit Major (i.e. Llanilltud Fawr) in Glamorgan (a reduction of Gwlad Morgannwg, "the Land of the Morgans", in South Wales), it is more than possible that we do not have a record of his real name at all; but that Pelagius simply indicates "a man of the Morgannwg". Although, as the Latinised form of the Celtic people who inhabited that region is Silures, and this may conceal a Goidelic name Sil h-Ir (which would indicate an Erainnian tribe), it is possible that the "Irish" origin of Pelagius may not be wide of the mark.

He is thought to have been born in Britain around 360 AD, to have gone to Rome about 380 AD and been there when the city was besieged and sacked by Alaric the Visigoth in 408 AD. It is suggested by various authorities that he became a monk in Rome, quite on what evidence is unclear. In Rome he made the acquaintance of Paulinus and Augustine, and acquired an acolyte in the "Irish" monk Coelestius.

The Latinism "coelestius" (or "caelestius" - 'heavenly', 'celestial'; 'divine'; 'godlike'; 'glorious'; 'a heavenly being', 'a god') may itself be a translation of a Celtic name, or part of one. It would go back into Old Celtic as nemetocos, or nemetos, 'heavenly' (Old Irish, nemde; modern Gaelic, néamhaidh): but may be derived from other related elements, such as, nemos (mod G, néamhain), 'pearl', 'gem', or 'jewel'; nemacos (mod G, néamhach) 'angel'; or be the first element in a name beginning with noibos (Old Irish nòib mod G, naomh), 'holy', 'sacred', 'consecrated'; "saint".

Together Pelagius and Coelestius crossed over the Mediterranean to Sicily and Carthage in 410 AD, and made a journey to the East in the following year.

Pelagius began his teaching in Rome, continuing it in the other places he visited. His views were hotly disputed by the orthodox, prominent among them being St Augustine of Hippo (author of (c400 AD) Confessions and (after 412 AD) The City of God) and St Jerome (translator of the Greek Septuagint version of the Holy Bible into Latin as The Vulgate), and a series of synods (notably at Carthage in 411 AD). However, at Diospolis (Lydda in Palestine) in 415 AD, Pelagius was rehabilitated.

The African bishops reacted, and at synods at Carthage and Milevis in 416 AD they repeated their condemnations and asked that the Pope add his to theirs. Seizing an opportunity to restate in a dramatic way the claimed magisterium of the Church of Rome, Pope Innocent I finally excommunicated Pelagius in 417 AD (and died the same year).

The new pope, Zosimus, initially held that Pelagius, Coelestius, and their followers had cleared themselves after a hearing in San Clemente. But after the African bishops kicked up a fuss (following a Council held in Carthage in 418 AD, attended by 214 bishops, which condemned Pelagius), demanding that Innocent's proscription stand, and appealed to the Emperor, Zosimus had to back down and continue the anathema. The appeal to the Emperor Honorius at Ravenna had produced a rescript on 30 April 418 AD condemning Pelagius, Coelestius, and their followers as heretics and disturbers of the peace, and banishing them from Rome.

It seems that the actions against Pelagius were precipitated when Coelestius attempted to obtain orders and his views were called into question and condemned by a Carthaginian synod. When the news of this reached Jerusalem, where Pelagius then was, a charge of heresy was brought against him by Orosius, who was supported by St Jerome.

The fanaticism of the Church of Rome's bishops in Africa may be explained by the fact that they were still waging a losing battle against Arianism and Donatism, and it had only been with the considerable help of Constantine's legions commanded by the Empire's most able general, Bellisarius, that the Church of Rome had got its way 100 years earlier (with its hallmark mass slaughter of heretics) creating the "Church of the Martyrs". According to St Jerome, Donatism became the religion of nearly all North Africa within a generation and neither force nor argument could change it. Close parallels are possible with Moorish Spain after the Reconquistà.

Some authorities state that Pelagius died in Egypt in 422 AD, but others claim that it is supposed that he finally retired to Britain. Pelagianism was again condemned and anathematised at the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD.

But while all this was going on in the Mediterranean, Pelagian doctrines were being spread in Britain, most notably by Agricola, son of the Pelagian bishop Severianus, and its remarkable popularity indicates that the British Celts saw it "as a vessel of that druidic thought so well suited to their temperament". The French historian, Dom Louis Gougaud SJ commented in 1911 that Pelagianism was in some sense the national heresy of the Britons.

It continued to flourish in the British Isles. In 639 AD, Pope John IV wrote rebukingly to the bishops of Ireland (according to Bede),

"We have learnt that the poison of the Pelagian error has reappeared among you. We urge you to reject this odious doctrine. Is it not blasphemous to claim that man can be without sin? As if this privilege had not been reserved for the mediator between God and men, the Christ who was conceived and born without sin. All other men are born with original sin and bear within them the mark of Adam's failings".

Of course, the bishops he was writing to were largely Celtic Christians and not likely to recognise that he had any authority outside his diocese of Rome. But this attitude of the Church to claim the magisterium over the whole of Christianity was always eventually backed up by military force to ensure its irreversible acceptance, initially by the legions of the Roman Empire and subsequently by whatever replacement bully boys the Papacy could find. As Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan (part iv, ch 47) "The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof". But there wasn't yet enough history for the Celts to notice the warning. Eventually the Roman way was enforced on the Scots by the Picts and the Anglo-Normans; on the Irish by the Normans and Angevins; and on the Welsh by the Angevins and Plantagenets, all with great loss of life and destruction of property and treasure.

Christianity arrived among the Celts of the western part of the British Isles very early, much earlier than in the continental parts of the Roman Empire, and it was brought here by sea direct from northern Africa and the Holy Land without the intermediation of Rome. As Gildas map Cauuos, a Strathclyde Briton resident in South Wales, wrote in the 6th Century:

Interea glaciali frigore rigenti insulae et velut longiore terrarum secessu soli visibili non proximae... tempore, ut scimus, summo Tiberii Caesaris, quo absque ullo impedimento eius propagabatur religio, comminata senatu nolente a principe morte delatoribus militum eiusdem, radios suos primum indulget, id est sua praecepta, Christus [Gildas, De Excidio Britonum, 8]

"Meanwhile, to an island numb with chill ice and far removed, as in a remote nook of the world, from the visible sun, Christ made a present of his rays (that is, his precepts),... This happened first, in the last years of the emperor Tiberius, at a time when Christ's religion was being propagated without hindrance: for, against the wishes of the senate, the emperor threatened the death penalty for informers against soldiers of God." [Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, 8]

Claudius Tiberius Caesar lived from 42 BC to 37 AD, and was Emperor from 14 AD.

Therefore, according to Gildas' testimony, the teachings of Christ were brought here sometime after 30 AD. As Christ's Temptation in the Wilderness (the effective beginning of his mission) is conventionally dated to 30 AD, and the Crucifixion to 33 AD, then it is possible that the Message arrived during his mission and thus came direct from the Teacher himself. This might go some way to explaining why the Celtic Christians were so reluctant to accept the Church of Rome's revised (or Orwellian) version.

And further,

Mansit namque haec Christi capitis membrorumque consonantia suavis, donec Arriana perfidia, ... transmarina nobis evomens venena ... ac sic quasi via facta trans oceanum omnes omnino bestiae ferae mortiferum cuiuslibet haeresos virus horrido ore vibrantes letalia dentium vulnera patriae novi semper aliquid audire volenti et nihil certe stabiliter optinenti infigebant. [Gildas,De Excidio Britonum, 12]

"This pleasant agreement between the head and limbs of Christ [after the Diocletian persecution - author] endured until the Arian treason, ... vomited its foreign poisons upon us... And as though there were a set route across the ocean there came every kind of wild beast, brandishing in their horrid mouths the death-dealing venom of every heresy, and planting lethal bites in a country that always longed to hear some novelty - and never took firm hold of anything". [Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, 12]

It is interesting that "foreign" to Gildas was transmarina, 'across the open sea'. Presumably 'every heresy' refers to the beliefs of the Ebionites, Priscillians and Donatists, among others from the East, including Arianism. These could only have been sea-borne, as the land route through Italy and Gaul would have not only ensured effective filtering, but also would have in any case taken much longer for them to reach Britain than they seem to have needed.

It is, thus, against the backdrop of Celtic Christianity that Pelagius' work and teachings (and his 'heresy') needs to be set. No wonder he was in opposition to the Roman authorities, such as St Augustine, a 'Father of the Church' who prided himself on knowing no Greek.

According to Professor Jean Markale, a Breton academic authority on the Celts, [in Christine Hauch's translation]

"Pelagianism has been regarded as an attempt on its author's part to syncretize Christian teaching with druidism which had no concept of sin and saw individual freedom as the basic principle of its tradition... Certainly Pelagianism is not druidism; far from it. But there is no denying that this doctrine with its basis in total human freedom, is very clearly Celtic in its leanings. It is also distinctly anti-Mediterranean since it emphasizes the solitude of man... The very concept of grace is Graeco-Latin in origin, being an extension of the superstitious belief that man was incapable of acting alone and required the help of some impartial numen or divine will. By denying the power of grace Pelagius was fighting against that superstition, re-establishing the notion that man is entirely responsible for his own acts and restoring to human dignity a respect which the early Christian leaders with their erroneous ideas of evangelical humility sought to remove. It was not long before the Church Fathers retaliated, chief of Pelagius' critics being Saint Augustine who began a violent attack on his former friend in 412..." [Jean Markale, Les Celtes et la Civilisation Celtique, Éditions Payot, Paris 1976; translated by Christine Hauch as Celtic Civilisation, Gordon and Cremonesi, London, 1978, pp. 138-143].

"Grace" is the Greek charis and the Latin gratia, and is never used by Christ. It is, however, quite often used by St Paul. Modern Church theologians try and claim that it is represented by several Hebrew words; that fact alone shows that it is an unusual concept in an Abrahamic religion. And these words already have a semantic load that is different from the Graeco-Latin "grace": for example, the Hebrew h-n-n, which they often cite as one of the correspondences, means 'to be moved with pity'; and r-h-m, another, means 'mercy'.

According to Markale (Mme Hauch's translation):

"The essence of Pelagian doctrine is that there is no such thing as original sin. Being created mortal Adam was subject to concupiscence. Human nature has not been corrupted, the will of man is unimpaired and he is capable of doing good when he wills it. Baptism washes away no original sin, since none exists, but only the actual sins committed by those receiving the sacrament (in the early days only adults were baptized). Baptism is however a prerequisite for entering the flock, a trial of initiation which Christ himself underwent. "Grace" denotes only those natural good things God gave to man, particularly his freedom, together with the teachings provided by the revelation and the words of Jesus Christ.

According to this doctrine, then, man has complete freedom. If he has a duty to avoid sin it is because he is able by nature to do so. It would therefore be unjust to impute to him any sin he personally is not able or obliged to avoid. If the sin of Adam is to rebound on those who have not themselves sinned, the justice of Christ must also extend to those who do not believe. In short, if we are a part of evil without committing any fault then we ought also to be a part of good without having to deserve it.

These far-reaching ideas were taken up and expanded by Celstius [sic] who stated, "Sin is not born with man. It is an act of will which he may be led to commit by his individual imperfection, but it is not a necessary result of the essential imperfection of mankind". Celstius did not want children to be baptized for fear that the administration of the sacrament would be taken as recognition of the mistaken notion that "man is wicked by his very nature before he has committed any evil" a notion insulting to the Creator. Any grace which may exist in the form of supernatural succour can only influence the intelligence and not the will...

But Pelagius was not alone. Apart from his disciple Celstius, he had a number of sympathizers including Julian bishop of Eclanum who began to spread his doctrine and mounted a skilful attack on Augustine... Arguments between the two sides acquired a more theological turn. Pelagius' supporters laid their emphasis on the total autonomy of man's free will, thereby obviating any responsibility for the origin of sin being attributed to God. The Lord's Prayer, after all, contains the very ambiguous phrase "Lead us not into temptation", and unless we are to conclude that the word "Lead" in this context means that God himself is making us do wrong, we must assume that He is merely presenting us with situations in which we can exercise our free will to choose between good and evil. Grace is only the primordial, divine light which enables us to acquire knowledge of good and evil.

Augustine's response was that this argument was morally wicked since it invites the individual to take pride in his good deeds. To impute all responsibility for good to man is to adopt the stoic ethics of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetes. If original sin is not passed on into each new person, then baptism is unnecessary, and the incarnation and redemption occurred to no purpose. As Saint Paul argued, man does not receive grace because of the good in him, rather he has good in him because he has received grace. Certainly our will must act in accordance with that grace but it can do so only if we have faith. And faith is the gift of God..."

Augustine's position is the typical one adopted by the Church of Rome down the centuries, which is to assume the veracity and universal applicability of its own theology (which has clearly deviated some considerable way from the simple teachings of Christ, and even of St Paul, contained in those favourable books of the New Testament that the Church of Rome allowed to survive after the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD), use this assumption as the datum point, and then judge the proposition by reference to it. When the proposition shows the Church's theology to be wrong, it is the proposition that is wrong because the Church's position is right (why is it right? Because the Church says it is). By this means no dissenter can win an argument. The same antics are visible in Bede's account of the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD as Professor J. T. MacNeill has indicated.

The "semi-Pelagians" arose after the Council of Ephesus (431 AD), and were those who attempted a reconciliation between the doctrines of free will and predestination and election; but the times in which they lived were not favourable to compromises. The position was upheld by St John Cassian, a disciple of St John Chrysostom, and Faustus, the (Breton) bishop of Riez, and by Vincent, abbot of Lérins, who fiercely refuted Augustinian beliefs in predestination, according to Professor Markale. Cassian and Faustus claimed at the Council of Arles, in 472 AD, that there was no other incorporeal being than God. Through semi-Pelagianism, Celtic ideas kept reappearing in the Graeco-Latinising theology of the Church. But, finally, at Orange in 529 AD and Valence in 530 AD, semi-Pelagianism received official Papal condemnation. Nevertheless, Pelagianism has never really ceased to influence the Church. Duns Scotus Erigena and St Thomas Aquinas both held more or less Pelagian views; in Aquinas' case this is of great importance, because most of the Church's present theology is Thomist in inspiration.

Pelagianism: A Summary

Pelagianism may be summarised as:

History | MainMenu | Pluralism

© Daoud Rosser-Owen 1998. All Rights Reserved.
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