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  AUGUSTINE & THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY
  by Benjamin B. Warfield
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Warfield's scholarly examination of Augustine's theological battle against
Pelagianism, analyzing the development of Augustine's doctrines of sin, grace,
and predestination in response to Pelagius's denial of original sin and
assertion of human moral ability.

  Chapters: 4

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. Part I: The Origin & Nature of Pelgagianism
    2. Part II: The External History
    3. Part III: Augustine's Part in The Controversy
    4. Part IV: The Theology of Grace

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  CHAPTER 1: PART I: THE ORIGIN & NATURE OF PELGAGIANISM
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Part I: The Origin & Nature of Pelagianism

It was inevitable that the energy of the Church in intellectually realizing and
defining its doctrines in relation to one another, should first be directed
towards the objective side of Christian truth. The chief controversies of the
first four centuries and the resulting definitions of doctrine, concerned the
nature of God and the person of Christ; and it was not until these theological
and Christological questions were well upon their way to final settlement, that
the Church could turn its attention to the more subjective side of truth.
Meanwhile she bore in her bosom a full recognition, side by side, of the freedom
of the will, the evil consequences of the fall, and the necessity of divine
grace for salvation. Individual writers, or even the several sections of the
Church, might exhibit a tendency to throw emphasis on one or another of the
elements that made up this deposit of faith that was the common inheritance of
all. The East, for instance, laid especial stress on free will: and the West
dwelt more pointedly on the ruin of the human race and the absolute need of
God's grace for salvation. But neither did the Eastern theologians forget the
universal sinfulness and need of redemption, or the necessity, for the
realization of that redemption, of God's gracious influences; nor did those of
the West deny the self-determination or accountability of men. All the elements
of the composite doctrine of man were everywhere confessed; but they were
variously emphasized, according to the temper of the writers or the
controversial demands of the times. Such a state of affairs, however, was an
invitation to heresy, and a prophecy of controversy; just as the simultaneous
confession of the unity of God and the Deity of Christ, or of the Deity and the
humanity of Christ, inevitably carried in its train a series of heresies and
controversies, until the definitions of the doctrines of the Trinity and of the
person of Christ were complete. In like manner, it was inevitable that sooner or
later some one should arise who would so one-sidedly emphasize one element or
the other of the Church's teaching as to salvation, as to throw himself into
heresy, and drive the Church, through controversy with him, into a precise
definition of the doctrines of free will and grace in their mutual relations.
This new heresiarch came, at the opening of the fifth century, in the person of
the British monk, Pelagius. The novelty of the doctrine which he taught is
repeatedly asserted by Augustine,2 and is evident to the historian; but it
consisted not in the emphasis that he laid on free will, but rather in the fact
that, in emphasizing free will, he denied the ruin of the race and the necessity
of grace. This was not only new in Christianity; it was even anti-Christian.
Jerome, as well as Augustine, saw this at the time, and speaks of Pelagianism as
the "heresy of Pythagoras and Zeno";3 and modern writers of the various schools
have more or less fully recognized it. Thus Dean Milman thinks that "the greater
part" of Pelagius' letter to Demetrias "might have been written by an ancient
academic";4 and Bishop Hefele openly declares that their fundamental doctrine,
"that man is virtuous entirely of his own merit, not of the gift of grace,"
seems to him "to be a rehabilitation of the general heathen view of the world,"
and compares with it Cicero's words:5 "For gold, lands, and all the blessings of
life, we have to return thanks to the Gods; but no one ever returned thanks to
God for virtue."6 The struggle with Pelagianism was thus in reality a struggle
for the very foundations of Christianity; and even more dangerously than in the
previous theological and Christological controversies, here the practical
substance of Christianity was in jeopardy. The real question at issue was
whether there was any need for Christianity at all; whether by his own power man
might not attain eternal felicity; whether the function of Christianity was to
save, or only to render an eternity of happiness more easily attainable by man.7
Genetically speaking, Pelagianism was the daughter of legalism; but when it
itself conceived, it brought forth an essential deism. It is not without
significance that its originators were "a certain sort of monks;" that is,
laymen of ascetic life. From this point of view the Divine law is looked upon as
a collection of separate commandments, moral perfection as a simple complex of
separate virtues, and a distinct value as a meritorious demand on Divine
approbation is ascribed to each good work or attainment in the exercises of
piety. It was because this was essentially his point of view that Pelagius could
regard man's powers as sufficient to the attainment of sanctity - nay, that he
could even assert it to be possible for a man to do more than was required of
him. But this involved an essentially deistic conception of man's relations to
his Maker. God had endowed His creature with a capacity (possibilitas) or
ability (posse) for action, and it was for him to use it. Man was thus a
machine, which, just because it was well made, needed no Divine interference for
its right working; and the Creator, having once framed him, and endowed him with
the posse, henceforth leaves the velle and the esse to him. At this point we
have touched the central and formative principle of Pelagianism. It lies in the
assumption of the plenary ability of man; his ability to do all that
righteousness can demand - to work out not only his own salvation, but also his
own perfection. This is the core of the whole theory; and all the other
postulates not only depend upon it, but arise out of it. Both chronologically
and logically this is the root of the system. When we first hear of Pelagius, he
is already advanced in years, living in Rome in the odour of sanctity,8 and
enjoying a well-deserved reputation for zeal in exhorting others to a good life,
which grew especially warm against those who endeavoured to shelter themselves,
when charged with their sins, behind the weakness of nature.9 He was outraged by
the universal excuses on such occasions - "It is hard!" "it is difficult!" "we
are not able!" "we are men!" - "Oh, blind madness!" he cried: "we accuse God of
a twofold ignorance - that He does not seem to know what He has made, nor what
He has commanded - as if forgetting the human weakness of which He is Himself
the Author, He has imposed laws on man which He cannot endure."10 He himself
tells us11 to that it was his custom, therefore, whenever he had to speak on
moral improvement and the conduct of a holy life, to begin by pointing out the
power and quality of human nature, and by showing what it was capable of doing.
For (he says) he esteemed it of small use to exhort men to what they deemed
impossible: hope must rather be our companion, and all longing and effort die
when we despair of attaining. So exceedingly ardent an advocate was he of man's
unaided ability to do all that God commanded, that when Augustine's noble and
entirely scriptural prayer - "Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou
wilt" - was repeated in his hearing, he was unable to endure it; and somewhat
inconsistently contradicted it with such violence as almost to become involved
in a strife.12 The powers of man, he held, were gifts of God; and it was,
therefore, a reproach against Him as if He had made man ill or evil, to believe
that they were insufficient for the keeping of His law. Nay, do what we will, we
cannot rid ourselves of their sufficiency: "whether we will, or whether we will
not, we have the capacity of not sinning."13 "I say," he says, "that man is able
to be without sin, and that he is able to keep the commandments of God;" and
this sufficiently direct statement of human ability is in reality the hinge of
his whole system. There were three specially important corollaries which flowed
from this assertion of human ability, and Augustine himself recognized these as
the chief elements of the system.14 It would be inexplicable on such an
assumption, if no man had ever used his ability in keeping God's law; and
Pelagius consistently asserted not only that all might be sinless if they chose,
but also that many saints, even before Christ, had actually lived free from sin.
Again, it follows from man's inalienable ability to be free from sin, that each
man comes into the world without entailment of sin or moral weakness from the
past acts of men; and Pelagius consistently denied the whole doctrine of
original sin. And still again, it follows from the same assumption of ability
that man has no need of supernatural assistance in his striving to obey
righteousness; and Pelagius consistently denied both the need and reality of
divine grace in the sense of an inward help (and especially of a prevenient
help) to man's weakness. It was upon this last point that the greatest stress
was laid in the controversy, and Augustine was most of all disturbed that thus
God's grace was denied and opposed. No doubt the Pelagians spoke constantly of
"grace," but they meant by this the primal endowment of man with free will, and
the subsequent aid given him in order to its proper use by the revelation of the
law and the teaching of the gospel, and, above all, by the forgiveness of past
sins in Christ and by Christ's holy example.15 Anything further than this
external help they utterly denied; and they denied that this external help
itself was absolutely necessary, affirming that it only rendered it easier for
man to do what otherwise he had plenary ability for doing. Chronologically, this
contention seems to have preceded the assertion which must logically lie at its
base, of the freedom of man from any taint, corruption, or weakness due to sin.
It was in order that they might deny that man needed help, that they denied that
Adam's sin had any further effect on his posterity than might arise from his bad
example. "Before the action of his own proper will," said Pelagius plainly,
"that only is in man which God made."16 "As we are procreated without virtue,"
he said, "so also without vice."17 In a word, "Nothing that is good and evil, on
account of which we are either praiseworthy or blameworthy, is born with us - it
is rather done by us; for we are born with capacity for either, but provided
with neither."18 So his later follower, Julian, plainly asserts his "faith that
God creates men obnoxious to no sin, but full of natural innocence, and with
capacity for voluntary virtues."19 So intrenched is free will in nature, that,
according to Julian, it is "just as complete after sins as it was before
sins;"20 and what this means may be gathered from Pelagius' definition in the
"Confession of Faith," that he sent to Innocent: "We say that man is always able
both to sin and not to sin, so as that we may confess that we have free will."
That sin in such circumstances was so common as to be well-nigh universal, was
accounted for by the bad example of Adam and the power of habit, the latter
being simply the result of imitation of the former. "Nothing makes well-doing so
hard," writes Pelagius to Demetrias, "as the long custom of sins which begins
from childhood and gradually brings us more and more under its power until it
seems to have in some degree the force of nature (vim naturae)." He is even
ready to allow for the force of habit in a broad way, on the world at large; and
so divides all history into progressive periods, marked by God's (external)
grace. At first the light of nature was so strong that men by it alone could
live in holiness. And it was only when men's manners became corrupt and
tarnished nature began to be insufficient for holy living, that by God's grace
the Law was given as an addition to mere nature; and by it "the original lustre
was restored to nature after its blush had been impaired." And so again, after
the habit of sinning once more prevailed among men, and "the law became unequal
to the task of curing it,"21 Christ was given, furnishing men with forgiveness
of sins, exhortations to imitation of the example and the holy example itself.22
But though thus a progressive deterioration was confessed, and such a
deterioration as rendered desirable at least two supernatural interpositions (in
the giving of the law and the coming of Christ), yet no corruption of nature,
even by growing habit, is really allowed. It was only an ever-increasing
facility in imitating vice which arose from so long a schooling in evil; and all
that was needed to rescue men from it was a new explanation of what was right
(in the law), or, at the most, the encouragement of forgiveness for what was
already done, and a holy example (in Christ) for imitation. Pelagius still
asserted our continuous possession of "a free will which is unimpaired for
sinning and for not sinning;" and Julian, that "our free will is just as full
after sins as it was before sins;" although Augustine does not fail to twit him
with a charge of inconsistency.23 The peculiar individualism of the Pelagian
view of the world comes out strongly in their failure to perceive the effect of
habit on nature itself. Just as they conceived of virtue as a complex of
virtuous acts, so they conceived of sin exclusively as an act, or series of
disconnected acts. They appear not to have risen above the essentially heathen
view which had no notion of holiness apart from a series of acts of holiness, or
of sin apart from a like series of sinful Acts 24:1-27 Thus the will was
isolated from its acts, and the acts from each other, and all organic connection
or continuity of life was not only overlooked but denied.25 After each act of
the will, man stood exactly where he did before: indeed, this conception
scarcely allows for the existence of a "man" - only a willing machine is left,
at each click of the action of which the spring regains its original position,
and is equally ready as before to reperform its function. In such a conception
there was no place for character: freedom of will was all. Thus it was not an
unnatural mistake which they made, when they forgot the man altogether, and
attributed to the faculty of free will, under the name of "possibilitas" or
"posse," the ability that belonged rather to the man whose faculty it is, and
who is properly responsible for the use he makes of it. Here lies the essential
error of their doctrine of free will: they looked upon freedom in its form only,
and not in its matter; and, keeping man in perpetual and hopeless equilibrium
between good and evil, they permitted no growth of character and no advantage to
himself to be gained by man in his successive choices of good. It need not
surprise us that the type of thought which thus dissolved the organism of the
man into a congeries of disconnected voluntary acts, failed to comprehend the
solidarity of the race. To the Pelagian, Adam was a man, nothing more; and it
was simply unthinkable that any act of his that left his own subsequent acts
uncommitted, could entail sin and guilt upon other men. The same alembic that
dissolved the individual into a succession of voluntary acts, could not fail to
separate the race into a heap of unconnected units. If sin, as Julian declared,
is nothing but will, and the will itself remained intact after each act, how
could the individual act of an individual will condition the acts of men as yet
unborn? By "imitation" of his act alone could (under such a conception) other
men be affected. And this carried with it the corresponding view of man's
relation to Christ. He could forgive us the sins we had committed; He could
teach us the true way; He could set us a holy example; and He could exhort us to
its imitation. But He could not touch us to enable us to will the good, without
destroying the absolute equilibrium of the will between good and evil; and to
destroy this was to destroy its freedom, which was the crowning good of our
divinely created nature. Surely the Pelagians forgot that man was not made for
will, but will for man. In defending their theory, as we are told by Augustine,
there were five claims that they especially made for it.26 It allowed them to
praise as was their due, the creature that God had made, the marriage that He
had instituted, the law that He had given, the free will which was His greatest
endowment to man, and the saints who had followed His counsels. By this they
meant that they proclaimed the sinless perfection of human nature in every man
as he was brought into the world, and opposed this to the doctrine of original
sin; the purity and holiness of marriage and the sexual appetites, and opposed
this to the doctrine of the transmission of sin; the ability of the law, as well
as and apart from the gospel, to bring men into eternal life, and opposed this
to the necessity of inner grace; the integrity of free will to choose the good,
and opposed this to the necessity of divine aid; and the perfection of the lives
of the saints, and opposed this to the doctrine of universal sinfulness. Other
questions, concerning the origin of souls, the necessity of baptism for infants,
the original immortality of Adam, lay more on the skirts of the controversy, and
were rather consequences of their teaching than parts of it. As it was an
obvious fact that all men died, they could not admit that Adam's death was a
consequence of sin lest they should be forced to confess that his sin had
injured all men; they therefore asserted that physical death belonged to the
very nature of man, and that Adam would have died even had he not sinned.27 So,
as it was impossible to deny that the Church everywhere baptized infants, they
could not refuse them baptism without confessing themselves innovators in
doctrine; and therefore they contended that infants were not baptized for
forgiveness of sins, but in order to attain a higher state of salvation.
Finally, they conceived that if it was admitted that souls were directly created
by God for each birth, it could not be asserted that they came into the world
soiled by sin and under condemnation; and therefore they loudly championed this
theory of the origin of souls. The teachings of the Pelagians, it will be
readily seen, easily welded themselves into a system, the essential and
formative elements of which were entirely new in the Christian Church; and this
startlingly new reading of man's condition, powers, and dependence for
salvation, it was, that broke like a thunderbolt upon the Western Church at the
opening of the fifth century, and forced her to reconsider, from the
foundations, her whole teaching as to man and his salvation. Proceed to the
second article in this series.

Notes to Part I. 1 The following essay was originally published in A Select
Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905, pp. 13-71). 2 "On the Merits and Remission
of Sins," iii. 6, 11, 12; "Against Two Letters of the Pelagians," iv. 32; "The
Unfinished Work Against Julian," i. 2; "On Heresies," 88; and often elsewhere.
Jerome found roots for the theory in Origen and Rufinus (Letter 133.3), but this
is a different matter. Compare "On Original Sin," 25. 3 Preface to Book i.v. of
his work on Jeremiah. 4 "History of Latin Christianity," 1899, i. p.166, note 2.
5 "De Natura Deorum," iii. 36. 6 "A History of the Councils of the Church,"
(E.T.) ii. p. 446, note 3. 7 Compare the excellent statement in Thomasius' "Die
Christliche Dogmengeschichte," i. p. 483. 8 "On the Proceedings of Pelagius,"
46; "on the Merits and Remission of Sins," iii. 1; "Epist." 186, etc. 9 "On
Nature and Grace," 1. 10 Pelagius' "Epistle to Demetrias," 16. 11 Ibid., 2. 12
"On the Gift of Perseverance," 53. 13 "On Nature and Grace," 57. 14 "On the Gift
of Perseverance," 4; "Against Two Letters of the Pelagians," iii. 24; iv. 2 sq.
15 "On the Spirit and Letter," 4; "On Nature and Grace," 53; "On the Proceedings
of Pelagius," 20, 22, 38; "On the Grace of Christ," 2, 3, 8, 31, 42, 45;
"Against Two Letters of the Pelagians," iv. 11; "On Grace and Free Will," 23-26,
and often. 16 "On Original Sin," 14. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 "The Unfinished Work
Against Julian," iii. 82. 20 Do. i. 91; compare do. i. 48, 60; ii. 20. "There is
nothing of sin in man, if there is nothing of his own will." "There is no
original sin in infants at all." 21 "On Original Sin," 30. 22 "On the Grace of
Christ," 43. 23 "The Unfinished Work," i. 91; compare 69. 24 "Dr. Matheson
finely says (Expositor, i. ix. 21, 1879), "There is the same difference between
the Christian and the Pagan idea of Prayer as there is between the Christian and
Pagan idea of sin. Paganism knows nothing of sin, it knows only sins: it has no
conception of the principle of evil; it comprehends only a collection of evil
acts." This is Pelagianism too. 25 Compare Schaff, "History of the Christian
Church," iii. 804; and Thomasius' "Die Christliche Dogmengeschichte," i. p.
487-488. 26 "Against Two Letters of the Pelagians," iii. 25, and iv. at the
beginning. 27 This belongs to the earlier Pelagianism; Julian was ready to admit
that death came from Adam, but not sin.


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  CHAPTER 2: PART II: THE EXTERNAL HISTORY
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Part II: The External History of the Pelagian Controversy

Pelagius seems to have been already somewhat softened by increasing age when he
came to Rome about the opening of the fifth century. He was also
constitutionally averse to controversy; and although in his zeal for Christian
morals, and in his conviction that no man would attempt to do what he was not
persuaded he had natural power to perform, he diligently propagated his
doctrines privately, he was careful to rouse no opposition, and was content to
make what progress he could quietly and without open discussion. His methods of
work sufficiently appear in the pages of his "Commentary on the Epistles of
Saint Paul," which was written and published during these years, and which
exhibits learning and a sober and correct but somewhat shallow exegetical skill.
In this work, he manages to give expression to all the main elements of his
system, but always introduces them indirectly, not as the true exegesis, but by
way of objections to the ordinary teaching, which were in need of discussion.
The most important fruit of his residence in Rome was the conversion to his
views of the Advocate Coelestius, who brought the courage of youth and the
argumentative training of a lawyer to the propagation of the new teaching. It
was through him that it first broke out into public controversy, and received
its first ecclesiastical examination and rejection. Fleeing from Alaric's second
raid on Rome, the two friends landed together in Africa (A.D. 411), whence
Pelagius soon afterwards departed for Palestine, leaving the bolder and more
contentious Coelestius behind at Carthage. Here Coelestius sought ordination as
a presbyter. But the Milanese deacon Paulinus stood forward in accusation of him
as a heretic, and the matter was brought before a synod under the presidency of
Bishop Aurelius. Paulinus' charge consisted of seven items, which asserted that
Coelestius taught the following heresies: that Adam was made mortal, and would
have died, whether he sinned or did not sin; that the sin of Adam injured
himself alone, not the human race; that new-born children are in that state in
which Adam was before his sin; that the whole human race does not, on the one
hand, die on account of the death or the fall of Adam, nor, on the other, rise
again on account of the resurrection of Christ; that infants, even though not
baptized, have eternal life; that the law leads to the kingdom of heaven in the
same way as the gospel; and that, even before the Lord's coming, there had been
men without sin. Only two fragments of the proceedings of the synod in
investigating this charge have come down to us; but it is easy to see that
Coelestius was contumacious, and refused to reject any of the propositions
charged against him, except the one which had reference to the salvation of
infants that die unbaptized-the sole one that admitted of sound defence. As
touching the transmission of sin, he would only say that it was an open question
in the Church, and that he had heard both opinions from Church dignitaries; so
that the subject needed investigation, and should not be made the ground for a
charge of heresy. The natural result was, that, on refusing to condemn the
propositions charged against him, he was himself condemned and excommunicated by
the synod. Soon afterwards he sailed to Ephesus, where he obtained the
ordination which he sought. Meanwhile Pelagius was living quietly in Palestine,
whither in the summer of 415 a young Spanish presbyter, Paulus Orosius by name,
came with letters from Augustine to Jerome, and was invited, near the end of
July in that year, to a diocesan synod, presided over by John of Jerusalem.
There he was asked about Pelagius and Coelestius, and proceeded to give an
account of the condemnation of the latter at the synod of Carthage, and of
Augustine's literary refutation of the former. Pelagius was sent for, and the
proceedings became an examination into his teachings. The chief matter brought
up was his assertion of the possibility of men living sinlessly in this world;
but the favour of the bishop towards him, the intemperance of Orosius, and the
difficulty of communication between the parties arising from difference of
language, combined so to clog proceedings that nothing was done; and the whole
matter, as Western in its origin, was referred to the Bishop of Rome for
examination and decision. Soon afterwards two Gallic bishops-Heros of Arles, and
Lazarus of Aix-who were then in Palestine, lodged a formal accusation against
Pelagius with the metropolitan, Eulogius of Caesarea; and he convened a synod of
fourteen bishops which met at Lydda (Diospolis), in December of the same year
(415), for the trial of the case. Perhaps no greater ecclesiastical farce was
ever enacted than this synod exhibited. When the time arrived, the accusers were
prevented from being present by illness, and Pelagius was confronted only by the
written accusation. This was both unskilfully drawn, and was written in Latin
which the synod did not understand. It was, therefore, not even consecutively
read, and was only head by head rendered into Greek by an interpreter. Pelagius
began by reading aloud several letters to himself from various men of reputation
in the Episcopate-among them a friendly note from Augustine. Thoroughly
acquainted with both Latin and Greek, he was enabled skillfully to thread every
difficulty, and pass safely through the ordeal. Jerome called this a "miserable
synod," and not unjustly: at the same time it is sufficient to vindicate the
honesty and earnestness of the bishops' intentions, that even in such
circumstances, and despite the more undeveloped opinions of the East on the
questions involved, Pelagius escaped condemnation only by a course of most
ingenious disingenuousness, and only at the cost both of disowning Coelestius
and his teachings, of which he had been the real father, and of leading the
synod to believe that he was anathematizing the very doctrines which he was
himself proclaiming. There is really no possibility of doubting, as any one will
see who reads the proceedings of the synod, that Pelagius obtained his acquittal
here either by a "lying condemnation or a tricky interpretation" of his own
teachings; and Augustine is perfectly justified in asserting that the "heresy
was not acquitted, but the man who denied the heresy," and who would himself
have been anathematized had he not anathematized the heresy. However obtained,
the acquittal of Pelagius was yet an accomplished fact. Neither he nor his
friends delayed to make the most widely extended use of their good fortune.
Pelagius himself was jubilant. Accounts of the synodal proceedings were sent to
the West, not altogether free from uncandid alterations; and Pelagius soon put
forth a work In Defence of Free-Will, in which he triumphed in his acquittal and
"explained his explanations" at the synod. Nor were the champions of the
opposite opinion idle. As soon as the news arrived in North Africa, and before
the authentic records of the synod had reached that region, the condemnation of
Pelagius and Coelestius was re-affirmed in two provincial synods-one, consisting
of sixty-eight bishops, met at Carthage about midsummer of 416; and the other,
consisting of about sixty bishops, met soon afterwards at Mileve (Mila). Thus
Palestine and North Africa were arrayed against one another, and it became of
great importance to obtain the support of the Patriarchal See of Rome. Both
sides made the attempt, but fortune favored the Africans. Each of the
North-African synods sent a synodal letter to Innocent I., then Bishop of Rome,
engaging his assent to their action: to these, five bishops, Aurelius of
Carthage and Augustine among them, added a third "familiar" letter of their own,
in which they urged upon Innocent to examine into Pelagius' teaching, and
provided him with the material on which he might base a decision. The letters
reached Innocent in time for him to take advice of his clergy, and send
favorable replies on Jan. 27, 417. In these he expressed his agreement with the
African decisions, asserted the necessity of inward grace, rejected the Pelagian
theory of infant baptism, and declared Pelagius and Coelestius excommunicated
until they should return to orthodoxy. In about six weeks more he was dead: but
Zosimus, his successor, was scarcely installed in his place before Coelestius
appeared at Rome in person to plead his cause; while shortly afterwards letters
arrived from Pelagius addressed to Innocent, and by an artful statement of his
belief and a recommendation from Praylus, lately become bishop of Jerusalem in
John's stead, attempting to enlist Rome in his favour. Zosimus, who appears to
have been a Greek and therefore inclined to make little of the merits of this
Western controversy, went over to Coelestius at once, upon his profession of
willingness to anathematize all doctrines which the pontifical see had condemned
or should condemn; and wrote a sharp and arrogant letter to Africa, proclaiming
Coelestius "catholic," and requiring the Africans to appear within two months at
Rome to prosecute their charges, or else to abandon them. On the arrival of
Pelagius' papers, this letter was followed by another (September, 417), in which
Zosimus, with the approbation of the clergy, declared both Pelagius and
Coelestius to be orthodox, and severely rebuked the Africans for their hasty
judgment. It is difficult to understand Zosimus' action in this matter: neither
of the confessions presented by the accused teachers ought to have deceived him,
and if he was seizing the occasion to magnify the Roman see, his mistake was
dreadful. Late in 417, or early in 418, the African bishops assembled at
Carthage, in number more than two hundred, and replied to Zosimus that they had
decided that the sentence pronounced against Pelagius and Coelestius should
remain in force until they should unequivocally acknowledge that "we are aided
by the grace of God, through Christ, not only to know, but to do what is right,
in each single act, so that without grace we are unable to have, think, speak,
or do anything pertaining to piety." This firmness made Zosimus waver. He
answered swellingly but timidly, declaring that he had maturely examined the
matter, but it had not been his intention finally to acquit Coelestius; and now
he had left all things in the condition in which they were before, but he
claimed the right of final judgment to himself. Matters were hastening to a
conclusion, however, that would leave him no opportunity to escape from the
mortification of an entire change of front. This letter was written on the 21st
of March, 418; it was received in Africa on the 29th of April; and on the very
next day an imperial decree was issued from Ravenna ordering Pelagius and
Coelestius to be banished from Rome, with all who held their opinions; while on
the next day, May 1, a plenary council of about two hundred bishops met at
Carthage, and in nine canons condemned all the essential features of
Pelagianism. Whether this simultaneous action was the result of skillful
arrangement, can only be conjectured: its effect was in any case necessarily
crushing. There could be no appeal from the civil decision, and it played
directly into the hands of the African definition of the faith. The synod's nine
canons part naturally into three triads. The first of these deals with the
relation of mankind to original sin, and anathematizes in turn those who assert
that physical death is a necessity of nature, and not a result of Adam's sin;
those who assert that new-born children derive nothing of original sin from Adam
to be expiated by the laver of regeneration; and those who assert a distinction
between the kingdom of heaven and eternal life, for entrance into the former of
which alone baptism is necessary. The second triad deals with the nature of
grace, and anathematizes those who assert that grace brings only remission of
past sins, not aid in avoiding future ones; those who assert that grace aids us
not to sin, only by teaching us what is sinful, not by enabling us to will and
do what we know to be right; and those who assert that grace only enables us to
do more easily what we should without it still be able to do. The third triad
deals with the universal sinfulness of the race, and anathematizes those who
assert that the apostles' (I John i. 8) confession of sin is due only to their
humility; those who say that "Forgive us our trespasses" in the Lord's Prayer,
is pronounced by the saints, not for themselves, but for the sinners in their
company; and those who say that the saints use these words of themselves only
out of humility and not truly. Here we see a careful traversing of the whole
ground of the controversy, with a conscious reference to the three chief
contentions of the Pelagian teachers. The appeal to the civil power, by
whomsoever made, was, of course, indefensible, although it accorded with the
opinions of the day, and was entirely approved by Augustine. But it was the ruin
of the Pelagian cause. Zosimus found himself forced either to go into banishment
with his wards, or to desert their cause. He appears never to have had any
personal convictions on the dogmatic points involved in the controversy, and so,
all the more readily, yielded to the necessity of the moment. He cited
Coelestius to appear before a council for a new examination; but that heresiarch
consulted prudence, and withdrew from the city. Zosimus, possibly in the effort
to appear a leader in the cause he had opposed, not only condemned and
excommunicated the men whom less than six months before he had pronounced
"orthodox" after a `mature consideration of the matters involved,' but, in
obedience to the imperial decree, issued a stringent paper which condemned
Pelagius and the Pelagians, and affirmed the African doctrines as to corruption
of nature, true grace, and the necessity of baptism. To this he required
subscription from all bishops as a test of orthodoxy. Eighteen Italian bishops
refused their signature, with Julian of Eclanum, henceforth to be the champion
of the Pelagian party, at their head, and were therefore deposed, although
several of them afterwards recanted, and were restored. In Julian, the heresy
obtained an advocate, who, if aught could have been done for its re-instatement,
would surely have proved successful. He was the boldest, the strongest, at once
the most acute and the most weighty, of all the disputants of his party. But the
ecclesiastical standing of this heresy was already determined. The policy of
Zosimus' test act was imposed by imperial authority on North Africa in 419. The
exiled bishops were driven from Constantinople by Atticus in 424; and they are
said to have been condemned at a Cilician synod in 423, and at an Antiochian one
in 424. Thus the East itself was preparing for the final act in the drama. The
exiled bishops were with Nestorius at Constantinople in 429; and that patriarch
unsuccessfully interceded for them with Coelestine, then Bishop of Rome. The
conjunction was ominous. And at the ecumenical synod at Ephesus in 431, we again
find the "Coelestians" side by side with Nestorius, sharers in his condemnation.
But Pelagianism did not so die as not to leave a legacy behind it. "Remainders
of Pelagianism" soon showed themselves in Southern Gaul, where a body of
monastic leaders attempted to find a middle ground on which they could stand, by
allowing the Augustineian doctrine of assisting grace, but retaining the
Pelagian conception of our self-determination to good. We first hear of them in
428, through letters from two laymen, Prosper and Hilary, to Augustine, as men
who accepted original sin and the necessity of grace, but asserted that men
began their turning to God, and God helped their beginning. They taught that all
men are sinners, and that they derive their sin from Adam; that they can by no
means save themselves, but need God's assisting grace; and that this grace is
gratuitous in the sense that men cannot really deserve it, and yet that it is
not irresistible, nor given always without the occasion of its gift having been
determined by men's attitude towards God; so that, though not given on account
of the merits of men, it is given according to those merits, actual or foreseen.
The leader of this new movement was John Cassian, a pupil of Chrysostom (to whom
he attributed all that was good in his life and will), and the fountain-head of
Gallic monasticism; and its chief champion at a somewhat later day was Faustus
of Rhegium (Riez). The Augustineian opposition was at first led by the vigorous
controversialist, Prosper of Aquitaine, and, in the next century, by the wise,
moderate, and good Caesarius of Arles, who brought the contest to a conclusion
in the victory of a softened Augustineianism. Already in 431 a letter was
obtained from Pope Coelestine, designed to close the controversy in favor of
Augustineianism, and in 496 Pope Gelasius condemned the writings of Faustus in
the first index of forbidden books; while, near the end of the first quarter of
the sixth century, Pope Hormisdas was appealed to for a renewed condemnation.
The end was now in sight. The famous second Synod of Orange met under the
presidency of Caesarius at that ancient town on the 3d of July, 529, and drew up
a series of moderate articles which received the ratification of Boniface II. in
the following year. In these articles there is affirmed an anxiously guarded
Augustineianism, a somewhat weakened Augustineianism, but yet a distinctive
Augustineianism; and, so far as a formal condemnation could reach,
semi-Pelagianism was suppressed by them in the whole Western Church. But
councils and popes can only decree; and Cassian and Vincent and Faustus, despite
Caesarius and Boniface and Gregory, retained an influence among their countrymen
which never died away.


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  CHAPTER 3: PART III: AUGUSTINE'S PART IN THE CONTROVERSY
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Part III: Augustine's Part in The Controversy

Both by nature and by grace, Augustine was formed to be the champion of truth in
this controversy. Of a naturally philosophical temperament, he saw into the
springs of life with a vividness of mental perception to which most men are
strangers; and his own experiences in his long life of resistance to, and then
of yielding to, the drawings of God's grace, gave him a clear apprehension of
the great evangelic principle that God seeks men, not men God, such as no
sophistry could cloud. However much his philosophy or theology might undergo
change in other particulars, there was one conviction too deeply imprinted upon
his heart ever to fade or alter-the conviction of the ineffableness of God's
grace. Grace-man's absolute dependence on God as the source of all good-this was
the common, nay, the formative element, in all stages of his doctrinal
development, which was marked only by the ever growing consistency with which he
built his theology around this central principle. Already in 397-the year after
he became bishop-we find him enunciating with admirable clearness all the
essential elements of his teaching, as he afterwards opposed them to Pelagius.
It was inevitable, therefore, that although he was rejoiced when he heard, some
years later, of the zealous labours of this pious monk in Rome towards stemming
the tide of luxury and sin, and esteemed him for his devout life, and loved him
for his Christian activity, he yet was deeply troubled when subsequent rumours
reached him that he was "disputing against the grace of God." He tells us over
and over again, that this was a thing no pious heart could endure; and we
perceive that, from this moment, Augustine was only biding his time, and
awaiting a fitting opportunity to join issue with the denier of the Holy of
holies of his whole, I will not say theology merely, but life. "Although I was
grieved by this," he says, "and it was told me by men whom I believed, I yet
desired to have something of such sort from his own lips or in some book of his,
so that, if I began to refute it, he would not be able to deny it." Thus he
actually excuses himself for not entering into the controversy earlier. When
Pelagius came to Africa, then, it was almost as if he had deliberately sought
his fate. But circumstances secured a lull before the storm. He visited Hippo;
but Augustine was absent, although he did not fail to inform himself on his
return that Pelagius while there had not been heard to say "anything at all of
this kind." The controversy against the Donatists was now occupying all the
energies of the African Church, and Augustine himself was a ruling spirit in the
great conference now holding at Carthage with them. While there, he was so
immersed in this business, that, although he once or twice saw the face of
Pelagius, he had no conversation with him; and although his ears were wounded by
a casual remark which he heard, to the effect "that infants were not baptized
for remission of sins, but for consecration to Christ," he allowed himself to
pass over the matter, "because there was no opportunity to contradict it, and
those who said it were not such men as could cause him solicitude for their
influence." It appears from these facts, given us by himself, that Augustine was
not only ready for, but was looking for, the coming controversy. It can scarcely
have been a surprise to him when Paulinus accused Coelestius (412); and,
although he was not a member of the council which condemned him, it was
inevitable that he should at once take the leading part in the consequent
controversy. Coelestius and his friends did not silently submit to the judgment
that had been passed upon their teaching: they could not openly propagate their
heresy, but they were diligent in spreading their plaints privately and by
subterraneous whispers among the people. This was met by the Catholics in public
sermons and familiar colloquies held everywhere. But this wise rule was
observed-to contend against the erroneous teachings, but to keep silence as to
the teachers, that so (as Augustine explains ) "the men might rather be brought
to see and acknowledge their error through fear of ecclesiastical judgment than
be punished by the actual judgment." Augustine was abundant in these oral
labours; and many of his sermons directed against Pelagian error have come down
to us, although it is often impossible to be sure as to their date. For one of
them (170) he took his text from Phil. iii. 6-16, "as touching the righteousness
which is by the law blameless; howbeit what things were gain to me, those have I
counted loss for Christ." He begins by asking how the apostle could count his
blameless conversation according to the righteousness which is from the law as
dung and loss, and then proceeds to explain the purpose for which the law was
given, our state by nature and under law, and the kind of blamelessness that the
law could produce, ending by showing that man can have no righteousness except
from God, and no perfect righteousness except in heaven. Three others (174, 175,
176) had as their text I Tim. i. 15, 16, and developed its teaching, that the
universal sin of the world and its helplessness in sin constituted the necessity
of the incarnation; and especially that the necessity of Christ's grace for
salvation was just as great for infants as for adults. Much is very forcibly
said in these sermons which was afterwards incorporated in his treatises. "There
was no reason," he insists, "for the coming of Christ the Lord except to save
sinners. Take away diseases, take away wounds, and there is no reason for
medicine. If the great Physician came from heaven, a great sick man was lying
ill through the whole world. That sick man is the human race" (175, 1). "He who
says, `I am not a sinner,' or `I was not,' is ungrateful to the Saviour. No one
of men in that mass of mortals which flows down from Adam, no one at all of men
is not sick: no one is healed without the grace of Christ. Why do you ask
whether infants are sick from Adam? For they, too, are brought to the church;
and, if they cannot run thither on their own feet, they run on the feet of
others that they may be healed. Mother Church accommodates others' feet to them
so that they may come, others' heart so that they may believe, others' tongue so
that they may confess; and, since they are sick by another's sin, so when they
are healed they are saved by another's confession in their behalf. Let, then, no
one buzz strange doctrines to you. This the Church has always had, has always
held; this she has received from the faith of the elders; this she will
perseveringly guard until the end. Since the whole have no need of a physician,
but only the sick, what need, then, has the infant of Christ, if he is not sick?
If he is well, why does he seek the physician through those who love him? If,
when infants are brought, they are said to have no sin of inheritance (peccatum
propaginis) at all, and yet come to Christ, why is it not said in the church to
those that bring them, `take these innocents hence; the physician is not needed
by the well, but by the sick; Christ came not to call the just, but sinners'? It
never has been said, and it never will be said. Let each one therefore,
brethren, speak for him who cannot speak for himself. It is much the custom to
intrust the inheritance of orphans to the bishops; how much more the grace of
infants! The bishop protects the orphan lest he should be oppressed by
strangers, his parents being dead. Let him cry out more for the infant who, he
fears, will be slain by his parents. Who comes to Christ has something in him to
be healed; and he who has not, has no reason for seeking the physician. Let
parents choose one of two things: let them either confess that there is sin to
be healed in their infants, or let them cease bringing them to the physician.
This is nothing else than to wish to bring a well person to the physician. Why
do you bring him? To be baptized. Whom? The infant. To whom do you bring him? To
Christ. To Him, of course, who came into the world? Certainly, he says. Why did
He come into the world? To save sinners. Then he whom you bring has in him that
which needs saving?" So again: "He who says that the age of infancy does not
need Jesus' salvation, says nothing else than that the Lord Christ is not Jesus
to faithful infants; i.e., to infants baptized in Christ. For what is Jesus?
Jesus means saviour. He is not Jesus to those whom He does not save, who do not
need to be saved. Now, if your hearts can bear that Christ is not Jesus to any
of the baptized, I do not know how you can be acknowledged to have sound faith.
They are infants, but they are made members of Him. They are infants, but they
receive His sacraments. They are infants, but they become partakers of His
table, so that they may have life." The preveniency of grace is explicitly
asserted in these sermons. In one he says, "Zaccheus was seen, and saw; but
unless he had been seen, he would not have seen. For `whom He predestinated,
them also He called.' In order that we may see, we are seen; that we may love,
we are loved. `My God, may His pity prevent me!' " And in another, at more
length: "His calling has preceded you, so that you may have a good will. Cry
out, `My God, let Thy mercy prevent me' (Ps. lviii. 11.). That you may be, that
you may feel, that you may hear, that you may consent, His mercy prevents you.
It prevents you in all things; and do you too prevent His judgment in something.
In what, do you say? In what? In confessing that you have all these things from
God, whatever you have of good; and from yourself whatever you have of evil"
(176, 5). "We owe therefore to Him that we are, that we are alive, that we
understand: that we are men, that we live well, that we understand aright, we
owe to Him. Nothing is ours except the sin that we have. For what have we that
we did not receive?" (I Cor. ix. 7) (176, 6). It was not long, however, before
the controversy was driven out of the region of sermons into that of regular
treatises. The occasion for Augustine's first appearance in a written document
bearing on the controversy, was given by certain questions which were sent to
him for answer by "the tribune and notary" Marcellinus, with whom he had
cemented his intimacy at Carthage, the previous year, when this notable official
was presiding, by the emperor's orders, over the great conference of the
catholics and Donatists. The mere fact that Marcellinus, still at Carthage,
where Coelestius had been brought to trial, wrote to Augustine at Hippo for
written answers to important questions connected with the Pelagian heresy,
speaks volumes for the prominent position he had already assumed in the
controversy. The questions that were sent, concerned the connection of death
with sin, the transmission of sin, the possibility of a sinless life, and
especially infants' need of baptism. Augustine was immersed in abundant labours
when they reached him: but he could not resist this appeal, and that the less as
the Pelagian controversy had already grown to a place of the first importance in
his eyes. The result was his treatise, On the Merits and Remission of Sins and
on the Baptism of Infants, consisting of two books, and written in 412. The
first book of this work is an argument for original sin, drawn from the
universal reign of death in the world (2-8), from the teaching of Rom. v. 12-21
(9-20), and chiefly from the baptism of infants (21-70). It opens by exploding
the Pelagian contention that death is of nature, and Adam would have died even
had he not sinned, by showing that the penalty threatened to Adam included
physical death (Gen. iii. 19), and that it is due to him that we all die (Rom.
viii. 10, 11; I Cor. xv. 21) (2-8). Then the Pelagian assertion that we are
injured in Adam's sin only by its bad example, which we imitate, not by any
propagation from it, is tested by an exposition of Rom. v. 12 sq. (9-20). And
then the main subject of the book is reached, and the writer sharply presses the
Pelagians with the universal and primeval fact of the baptism of infants, as a
proof of original sin (21-70). He tracks out all their subterfuges-showing the
absurdity of the assertions that infants are baptized for the remission of sins
that they have themselves committed since birth (22), or in order to obtain a
higher stage of salvation (23-28), or because of sin committed in some previous
state of existence (31-33). Then turning to the positive side, he shows at
length that the Scriptures teach that Christ came to save sinners, that baptism
is for the remission of sins, and that all that partake of it are confessedly
sinners (34 sq.); then he points out that John ii. 7, 8, on which the Pelagians
relied, cannot be held to distinguish between ordinary salvation and a higher
form, under the name of "the kingdom of God" (58 sq.); and he closes by showing
that the very manner in which baptism was administered, with its exorcism and
exsufflation, implied the infant to be a sinner (63), and by suggesting that the
peculiar helplessness of infancy, so different not only from the earliest age of
Adam, but also from that of many young animals, may possibly be itself penal
(64-69). The second book treats, with similar fulness, the question of the
perfection of human righteousness in this life. After an exordium which speaks
of the will and its limitations, and of the need of God's assisting grace (1-6),
the writer raises four questions. First, whether it may be said to be possible,
by God's grace, for a man to attain a condition of entire sinlessness in this
life (7). This he answers in the affirmative. Secondly, he asks, whether any one
has ever done this, or may ever be expected to do it, and answers in the
negative on the testimony of Scripture (8-25). Thirdly, he asks why not, and
replies briefly because men are unwilling, explaining at length what he means by
this (26-33). Finally, he inquires whether any man has ever existed, exists now,
or will ever exist, entirely without sin-this question differing from the second
inasmuch as that asked after the attainment in this life of a state in which
sinning should cease, while this seeks a man who has never been guilty of sin,
implying the absence of original as well as of actual sin. After answering this
in the negative (34), Augustine discusses anew the question of original sin.
Here after expounding from the positive side (35-38) the condition of man in
paradise, the nature of his probation, and of the fall and its effects both on
him and his posterity, and the kind of redemption that has been provided in the
incarnation, he proceeds to answer certain cavils (39 sq.), such as, "Why should
children of baptized people need baptism?"-"How can a sin be remitted to the
father and held against the child?"-"If physical death comes from Adam, ought we
not to be released from it on believing in Christ?"-and concludes with an
exhortation to hold fast to the exact truth, turning neither to the right nor
left-neither saying that we have no sin, nor surrendering ourselves to our sin
(57 sq.). After these books were completed, Augustine came into possession of
Pelagius' Commentary on Paul's Epistles, which was written while he was living
in Rome (before 410), and found it to contain some arguments that he had not
treated-such arguments, he tells us, as he had not imagined could be held by any
one. Unwilling to re-open his finished argument, he now began a long
supplementary letter to Marcellinus, which he intended to serve as a third and
concluding book to his work. He was some time in completing this letter. He had
asked to have the former two books returned to him; and it is a curious
indication of his overworked state of mind, that he forgot what he wanted with
them: he visited Carthage while the letter was in hand, and saw Marcellinus
personally; and even after his return to Hippo, it dragged along, amid many
distractions, slowly towards completion. Meanwhile, a long letter was written to
Honoratus, in which a section on the grace of the New Testament was
incorporated. At length the promised supplement was completed. It was
professedly a criticism of Pelagius' Commentary, and therefore naturally
mentioned his name; but Augustine even goes out of his way to speak as highly of
his opponent as he can, -although it is apparent that his esteem is not very
high for his strength of mind, and is even less high for the moral quality that
led to his odd, oblique way of expressing his opinions. There is even a half
sarcasm in the way he speaks of Pelagius' care and circumspection, which was
certainly justified by the event. The letter opens by stating and criticising in
a very acute and telling dialectic, the new arguments of Pelagius, which were
such as the following: "If Adam's sin injured even those who do not sin,
Christ's righteousness ought likewise to profit even those who do not believe"
(2-4); "No man can transmit what he has not; and hence, if baptism cleanses from
sin, the children of baptized parents ought to be free from sin;" "God remits
one's own sins, and can scarcely, therefore, impute another's to us; and if the
soul is created, it would certainly be unjust to impute Adam's alien sin to it"
(5). The stress of the letter, however, is laid upon two contentions-1. That
whatever else may be ambiguous in the Scriptures, they are perfectly clear that
no man can have eternal life except in Christ, who came to call sinners to
repentance (7); and 2. That original sin in infants has always been, in the
Church, one of the fixed facts, to be used as a basis of argument, in order to
reach the truth in other matters, and has never itself been called in question
before (10-14). At this point, the writer returns to the second and third of the
new arguments of Pelagius mentioned above, and discusses them more fully
(15-20), closing with a recapitulation of the three great points that had been
raised; viz., that both death and sin are derived from Adam's sin by all his
posterity; that infants need salvation, and hence baptism; and that no man ever
attains in this life such a state of holiness that he cannot truly pray,
"Forgive us our trespasses." Augustine was now to learn that one service often
entails another. Marcellinus wrote to say that he was puzzled by what had been
said in the second book of this work, as to the possibility of man's attaining
to sinlessness in this life, while yet it was asserted that no man ever had
attained, or ever would attain, it. How, he asked, can that be said to be
possible which is, and which will remain, unexampled? In reply, Augustine wrote,
during this same year (412), and sent to his noble friend, another work, which
he calls On the Spirit and the Letter, from the prominence which he gives in it
to the words of 2 Cor. iii. 6. He did not content himself with a simple, direct
answer to Marcellinus' question, but goes at length into a profound disquisition
into the roots of the doctrine, and thus gives us, not a mere explanation of a
former contention, but a new treatise on a new subject-the absolute necessity of
the grace of God for any good living. He begins by explaining to Marcellinus
that he has affirmed the possibility while denying the actuality of a sinless
life, on the ground that all things are possible to God-even the passage of a
camel through the eye of a needle, which nevertheless has never occurred (1, 2).
For, in speaking of man's perfection, we are speaking really of a work of
God-and one which is none the less His work because it is wrought through the
instrumentality of man, and in the use of his free will. The Scriptures, indeed,
teach that no man lives without sin, but this is only the proclamation of a
matter of fact; and although it is thus contrary to fact and Scripture to assert
that men may be found that live sinlessly, yet such an assertion would not be
fatal heresy. What is unbearable, is that men should assert it to be possible
for man, unaided by God, to attain this perfection. This is to speak against the
grace of God: it is to put in man's power what is only possible to the almighty
grace of God (3, 4). No doubt, even these men do not, in so many words, exclude
the aid of grace in perfecting human life-they affirm God's help; but they make
it consist in His gift to man of a perfectly free will, and in His addition to
this of commandments and teachings which make known to him what he is to seek
and what to avoid, and so enable him to direct his free will to what is good.
What, however, does such a "grace" amount to? (5). Man needs something more than
to know the right way: he needs to love it, or he will not walk in it; and all
mere teaching, which can do nothing more than bring us knowledge of what we
ought to do, is but the letter that killeth. What we need is some inward,
Spirit-given aid to the keeping of what by the law we know ought to be kept.
Mere knowledge slays: while to lead a holy life is the gift of God-not only
because He has given us will, nor only because He has taught us the right way,
but because by the Holy Spirit He sheds love abroad in the hearts of all those
whom He has predestinated, and will call and justify and glorify (Rom. viii. 29,
30). To prove this, he states to be the object of the present treatise; and
after investigating the meaning of 2 Cor. iii. 6, and showing that "the letter"
there means the law as a system of precepts, which reveals sin rather than takes
it away, points out the way rather than gives strength to walk in it, and
therefore slays the soul by shutting it up under sin-while "the Spirit" is God's
Holy Ghost who is shed abroad in our hearts to give us strength to walk
aright-he undertakes to prove this position from the teachings of the Epistle to
the Romans at large. This contention, it will be seen, cut at the very roots of
Pelagianism: if all mere teaching slays the soul, as Paul asserts, then all that
what they called "grace" could, when alone, do, was to destroy; and the upshot
of "helping" man by simply giving him free will, and pointing out the way to
him, would be the loss of the whole race. Not that the law is sin: Augustine
teaches that it is holy and good, and God's instrument in salvation. Not that
free will is done away: it is by free will that men are led into holiness. But
the purpose of the law (he teaches) is to make men so feel their lost estate as
to seek the help by which alone they may be saved; and will is only then
liberated to do good when grace has made it free. "What the law of works enjoins
by menace, that the law of faith secures by faith. What the law of works does is
to say, `Do what I command thee;' but by the law of faith we say to God, `Give
me what thou commandest.' "(22). In the midst of this argument, Augustine is led
to discuss the differentiating characteristics of the Old and New Testaments;
and he expounds at length (33-42) the passage in Jer. xxxi. 31-34, showing that,
in the prophet's view, the difference between the two covenants is that in the
Old, the law is an external thing written on stones; while in the New, it is
written internally on the heart, so that men now wish to do what the law
prescribes. This writing on the heart is nothing else, he explains, than the
shedding abroad by the Holy Spirit of love in our hearts, so that we love God's
will, and therefore freely do it. Towards the end of the treatise (50-61), he
treats in an absorbingly interesting way of the mutual relations of free will,
faith, and grace, contending that all co-exist without the voiding of any. It is
by free will that we believe; but it is only as grace moves us, that we are able
to use our free will for believing; and it is only after we are thus led by
grace to believe, that we obtain all other goods. In prosecuting this analysis,
Augustine is led to distinguish very sharply between the faculty and use of free
will (58), as well as between ability and volition (53). Faith is an act of the
man himself; but only as he is given the power from on high to will to believe,
will he believe (57, 60). By this work, Augustine completed, in his treatment of
Pelagianism, the circle of that triad of doctrines which he himself looked upon
as most endangered by this heresy, - original sin, the imperfection of human
righteousness, the necessity of grace. In his mind, the last was the kernel of
the whole controversy; and this was a subject which he could never approach
without some heightened fervour. This accounts for the great attractiveness of
the present work-through the whole fabric of which runs the golden thread of the
praise of God's ineffable grace. In Canon Bright's opinion, it "perhaps, next to
the `Confessions,' tells us most of the thoughts of that `rich, profound, and
affectionate mind' on the soul's relations to its God." After the publication of
these treatises, the controversy certainly did not lull; but it relapsed for
nearly three years again, into less public courses. Meanwhile, Augustine was
busy, among other most distracting cares (Ephesians 145, 1), still defending the
grace of God, by letters and sermons. A fair illustration of his state of mind
at this time, may be obtained from his letter to Anastasius (145), which
assuredly must have been written soon after the treatise On the Spirit and the
Letter. Throughout this letter, there are adumbrations of the same train of
thought that filled this treatise; and there is one passage which may almost be
taken as a summary of it. Augustine is so weary of the vexatious cares that
filled his life, that he is ready to long for the everlasting rest, and yet
bewails the weakness which allowed the sweetness of external things still to
insinuate itself into his heart. Victory over, and emancipation from, this, he
asserts, "cannot, without God's grace, be achieved by the human will, which is
by no means to be called free so long as it is subject to enslaving lusts." Then
he proceeds: "The law, therefore, by teaching and commanding what cannot be
fulfilled without grace, demonstrates to man his weakness, in order that the
weakness, thus proved, may resort to the Saviour, by whose healing the will may
be able to do what it found impossible in its weakness. So, then, the law brings
us to faith, faith obtains the Spirit in fuller measure, the Spirit sheds love
abroad in us, and love fulfils the law. For this reason the law is called a
schoolmaster, under whose threatening and severity `whosoever shall call on the
name of the Lord shall be delivered.' But `how shall they call on Him in whom
they have not believed?' Wherefore, that the letter without the Spirit may not
kill, the life-giving Spirit is given to those that believe and call upon Him;
but the love of God is poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is
given to us, so that the words of the same apostle, `Love is the fulfilling of
the law,' may be realized. Thus the law is good to him that uses it lawfully;
and he uses it lawfully, who, understanding wherefore it was given, betakes
himself, under the pressure of its threatening, to liberating grace. Whoever
ungratefully despises this grace by which the ungodly is justified, and trusts
in his own strength for fulfilling the law, being ignorant of God's
righteousness, and going about to establish his own righteousness, is not
submitting himself to the righteousness of God; and therefore the law is made to
him not a help to pardon, but the bond of guilt; not because the law is evil,
but because `sin,' as it is written, `works death to such persons by that which
is good.' For by the commandment, he sins more grievously, who, by the
commandment, knows how evil are the sins which he commits." Although Augustine
states clearly that this letter is written against those "who arrogate too much
to the human will, imagining that, the law being given, the will is, of its own
strength, sufficient to fulfil the law, though not assisted by any grace
imparted by the Holy Ghost, in addition to instruction in the law,"-he refrains
still from mentioning the names of the authors of this teaching, evidently out
of a lingering tenderness in his treatment of them. This will help us to explain
the courtesy of a note which he sent to Pelagius himself at about this time, in
reply to a letter he had received some time before from him; of which Pelagius
afterwards (at the Synod of Diospolis) made, to say the least of it, an
ungenerous use. This note, Augustine tells us, was written with "tempered
praises" (wherefrom we see his lessening respect for the man), and so as to
admonish Pelagius to think rightly concerning grace-so far as could be done
without raising the dregs of the controversy in a formal note. This he
accomplished by praying from the Lord for him, those good things by which he
might be good forever, and might live eternally with Him who is eternal; and by
asking his prayers in return, that he, too, might be made by the Lord such as he
seemed to suppose he already was. How Augustine could really intend these
prayers to be understood as an admonition to Pelagius to look to God for what he
was seeking to work out for himself, is fully illustrated by the closing words
of this almost contemporary letter to Anastasius: "Pray, therefore, for us," he
writes, "that we may be righteous-an attainment wholly beyond a man's reach,
unless he know righteousness, and be willing to practise it, but one which is
immediately realized when he is perfectly willing; but this cannot be in him
unless he is healed by the grace of the Spirit, and aided to be able." The point
had already been made in the controversy, that, by the Pelagian doctrine, so
much power was attributed to the human will, that no one ought to pray, "Lead us
not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." If he was anxious to avoid
personal controversy with Pelagius himself in the hope that he might even yet be
reclaimed, Augustine was equally anxious to teach the truth on all possible
occasions. Pelagius had been intimate, when at Rome, with the pious Paulinus,
bishop of Nola; and it was understood that there was some tendency at Nola to
follow the new teachings. It was, perhaps, as late as 414, when Augustine made
reply in a long letter, to a request of Paulinus' for an exposition of certain
difficult Scriptures, which had been sent him about 410. Among them was Rom. xi.
28; and, in explaining it, Augustine did not withhold a tolerably complete
account of his doctrine of predestination, involving the essence of his whole
teaching as to grace: "For when he had said, `according to the election they are
beloved for their father's sake,' he added, `for the gifts and calling of God
are without repentance.' You see that those are certainly meant who belong to
the number of the predestinated.... `Many indeed are called, but few chosen;'
but those who are elect, these are called `according to His purpose;' and it is
beyond doubt that in them God's foreknowledge cannot be deceived. These He
foreknew and predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order
that He might be the first born among many brethren. But `whom He predestinated,
them He also called.' This calling is `according to His purpose,' this calling
is `without repentance,' "etc., quoting Rom. v. 28-31. Then continuing, he says,
"Those are not in this vocation, who do not persevere unto the end in the faith
that worketh by love, although they walk in it a little while.... But the reason
why some belong to it, and some do not, can easily be hidden, but cannot be
unjust. For is there injustice with God? God forbid! For this belongs to those
high judgments which, so to say, terrified the wondering apostle to look upon."
Among the most remarkable of the controversial sermons that were preached about
this time, especial mention is due to two that were delivered at Carthage,
midsummer of 413. The former of these was preached on the festival of John the
Baptist's birth (June 24), and naturally took the forerunner for its subject.
The nativity of John suggesting the nativity of Christ, the preacher spoke of
the marvel of the incarnation. He who was in the beginning, and was the Word of
God, and was Himself God, and who made all things, and in whom was life, even
this one "came to us. To whom? To the worthy? Nay, but to the unworthy! For
Christ died for the ungodly, and for the unworthy, though He was worthy. We
indeed were unworthy whom He pitied; but He was worthy who pitied us, to whom we
say, `For Thy pity's sake, Lord, free us!' Not for the sake of our preceding
merits, but `for Thy pity's sake, Lord, free us;' and `for Thy name's sake be
propitious to our sins,' not for our merit's sake.... For the merit of sins is,
of course, not reward, but punishment." He then dwelt upon the necessity of the
incarnation, and the necessity of a mediator between God and "the whole mass of
the human race alienated from Him by Adam." Then quoting I Cor. iv. 7, he
asserts that it is not our varying merits, but God's grace alone, that makes us
differ, and that we are all alike, great and small, old and young, saved by one
and the same Saviour. "What then, some one says," he continues, "even the infant
needs a liberator? Certainly he needs one. And the witness to it is the mother
that faithfully runs to church with the child to be baptized. The witness is
Mother Church herself, who receives the child for washing, and either for
dismissing him [from this life] freed, or nurturing him in piety.... Last of
all, the tears of his own misery are witness in the child himself.... Recognize
the misery, extend the help. Let all put on bowels of mercy. By as much as they
cannot speak for themselves, by so much more pityingly let us speak for the
little ones,"-and then follows a passage calling on the Church to take the grace
of infants in their charge as orphans committed to their care, which is in
substance repeated from a former sermon. The speaker proceeded to quote Matt. i.
21, and apply it. If Jesus came to save from sins, and infants are brought to
Him, it is to confess that they, too, are sinners. Then, shall they be withheld
from baptism? "Certainly, if the child could speak for himself, he would repel
the voice of opposition, and cry out, `Give me Christ's life! In Adam I died:
give me Christ's life; in whose sight I am not clean, even if I am an infant
whose life has been but one day in the earth.' ""No way can be found," adds the
preacher, "of coming into the life of this world except by Adam; no way can be
found of escaping punishment in the next world except by Christ. Why do you shut
up the one door?" Even John the Baptist himself was born in sin; and absolutely
no one can be found who was born apart from sin, until you find one who was born
apart from Adam. "`By one man sin entered into the world, and by sin, death; and
so it passed through upon all men.' If these were my words, could this sentiment
be expressed more expressly, more clearly, more fully?" Three days afterwards,
on the invitation of the Bishop of Carthage, Augustine preached a sermon
professedly directed against the Pelagians, which takes up the threads hinted at
in the former discourse, and develops a full polemic with reference to the
baptism of infants. He began, formally enough, with the determination of the
question in dispute. The Pelagians concede that infants should be baptized. The
only question is, for what are they baptized? We say that they would not
otherwise have salvation and eternal life; but they say it is not for salvation,
not for eternal life, but for the kingdom of God.... "The child, they say,
although not baptized, by the desert of his innocence, in that he has no sin at
all, either actual or original, either from him self or contracted from Adam,
necessarily has salvation and eternal life even if not baptized; but is to be
baptized for this reason-that he may enter into the kingdom of God, i.e., into
the kingdom of heaven." He then shows that there is no eternal life outside the
kingdom of heaven, no middle place between the right and left hand of the judge
at the last day, and that, therefore, to exclude one from the kingdom of God is
to consign him to the pains of eternal fire; while, on the other side, no one
ascends into heaven unless he has been made a member of Christ, and this can
only be by faith-which, in an infant's case, is professed by another in his
stead. He then treats, at length, some of the puzzling questions with which the
Pelagians were wont to try the catholics; and then breaking off suddenly, he
took a volume in his hands. "I ask you," he said, "to bear with me a little: I
will read somewhat. It is St. Cyprian whom I hold in my hand, the ancient bishop
of this see. What he thought of the baptism of infants-nay, what he has shown
that the Church always thought-learn in brief. For it is not enough for them to
dispute and argue, I know not what impious novelties: they even try to charge us
with asserting something novel. It is on this account that I read here St.
Cyprian, in order that you may perceive that the orthodox understanding and
catholic sense reside in the words which I have been just now speaking to you.
He was asked whether an infant ought to be baptized before he was eight days
old, seeing that by the ancient law no infant was allowed to be circumcised
unless he was eight days old. A question arose from this as to the day of
baptism-for concerning the origin of sin there was no question; and therefore
from this thing of which there was no question, that question that had arisen
was settled." And then he read to them the passage out of Cyprian's letter to
Fidus, which declared that he, and all the council with him, unanimously thought
that infants should be baptized at the earliest possible age, lest they should
die in their inherited sin, and so pass into eternal punishment. The sermon
closed with a tender warning to the teachers of these strange doctrines: he
might call them heretics with truth, but he will not; let the Church seek still
their salvation, and not mourn them as dead; let them be exhorted as friends,
not striven with as enemies. "They disparage us," he says, "we will bear it; let
them not disparage the rule [of faith], let them not disparage the truth; let
them not contradict the Church, which labours every day for the remission of
infants' original sin. This thing is settled. The errant disputer may be borne
with in other questions that have not been thoroughly canvassed, that are not
yet settled by the full authority of the Church-their error should be borne
with: it ought not to extend so far, that they endeavour to shake even the very
foundation of the Church!" He hints that although the patience hitherto
exhibited towards them is "perhaps not blameworthy," yet patience may cease to
be a virtue, and become culpable negligence: in the mean time, however, he begs
that the catholics should continue amicable, fraternal, placid, loving, long
suffering. Augustine himself gives us a view of the progress of the controversy
at this time in a letter written in 414. The Pelagians had everywhere scattered
the seeds of their new error; and although some, by his ministry and that of his
brother workers, had, "by God's mercy," been cured of their pest, yet they still
existed in Africa, especially about Carthage, and were everywhere propagating
their opinions in subterraneous whispers, for fear of the judgment of the
Church. Wherever they were not refuted, they were seducing others to their
following; and they were so spread abroad that he did not know where they would
break out next. Nevertheless, he was still unwilling to brand them as heretics,
and was more desirous of healing them as sick members of the Church than of
cutting them off finally as too diseased for cure. Jerome also tells us that the
poison was spreading in both the East and the West, and mentions particularly as
seats where it showed itself the islands of Rhodes and Sicily. Of Rhodes we know
nothing further; but from Sicily an appeal came to Augustine in 414 from one
Hilary, setting forth that there were certain Christians about Syracuse who
taught strange doctrines, and beseeching Augustine to help him in dealing with
them. The doctrines were enumerated as follows: "They say (1) that man can be
without sin, (2) and can easily keep the commandments of God if he will; (3)
that an unbaptized infant, if he is cut off by death, cannot justly perish,
since he is born without sin; (4) that a rich man that remains in his riches
cannot enter the kingdom of God, except he sell all that he has;... (5 ) that we
ought not to swear at all;" (6) and, apparently, that the Church is to be in
this world without spot or blemish. Augustine suspected that these Sicilian
disturbances were in some way the work of Coelestius, and therefore in his
answer informs his correspondent of what had been done at the Synod of Carthage
(412) against him. The long letter that he sent back follows the inquiries in
the order they were put by Hilary. To the first he replies, in substance, as he
had treated the same matter in the second book of the treatise, On the Merits
and Forgiveness of Sins, that it was opposed to Scripture, but was less a heresy
than the wholly unbearable opinion that this state of sinlessness could be
attained without God's help. "But when they say that free will suffices to man
for fulfilling the precepts of the Lord, even though unaided to good works by
God's grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit, it is to be altogether
anathematized and detested with all execrations. For those who assert this are
inwardly alien from God's grace, because being ignorant of God's righteousness,
like the Jews of whom the apostle speaks, and wishing to establish their own,
they are not subject to God's righteousness, since there is no fulfilment of the
law except love; and of course the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, not
by ourselves, nor by the force of our own will, but by the Holy Ghost who is
given to us." Dealing next with the second point, he drifts into the matter he
had more fully developed in his work On the Spirit and the Letter. "Free will
avails for God's works," he says, "if it be divinely aided, and this comes by
humble seeking and doing; but when deserted by divine aid, no matter how
excellent may be its knowledge of the law, it will by no means possess solidity
of righteousness, but only the inflation of ungodly pride and deadly arrogance.
This is taught us by that same Lord's Prayer; for it would be an empty thing for
us to ask God `Lead us not into temptation,' if the matter was so placed in our
power that we would avail for fulfilling it without any aid from Him. For this
free will is free in proportion as it is sound, but it is sound in proportion as
it is subject to divine pity and grace. For it faithfully prays, saying, `Direct
my ways according to Thy word, and let no iniquity reign over me.' For how is
that free over which iniquity reigns? But see who it is that is invoked by it,
in order that it may not reign over it. For it says not, `Direct my ways
according to free will because no iniquity shall rule over me,' but `Direct my
ways according to Thy word, and let no iniquity rule over me.' It is a prayer,
not a promise; it is a confession, not a profession; it is a wish for full
freedom, not a boast of personal power. For it is not every one `who confides in
his own power,' but `every one who calls on the name of God, that shall be
saved.' `But how shall they call upon Him,' he says, `in whom they have not
believed?' Accordingly, then, they who rightly believe, believe in order to call
on Him in whom they have believed, and to avail for doing what they receive in
the precepts of the law; since what the law commands, faith prays for." "God,
therefore, commands continence, and gives continence; He commands by the law, He
gives by grace; He commands by the letter, He gives by the spirit: for the law
without grace makes the transgression to abound, and the letter without the
spirit kills. He commands for this reason-that we who have endeavoured to do
what He commands, and are worn out in our weakness under the law, may know how
to ask for the aid of grace; and if we have been able to do any good work, that
we may not be ungrateful to Him who aids us." The answer to the third point
traverses the ground that was fully covered in the first book of the treatise On
the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins, beginning by opposing the Pelagians to Paul
in Rom. v. 12-19: "But when they say that an infant, cut off by death,
unbaptized, cannot perish since he is born without sin-it is not this that the
apostle says; and I think that it is better to believe the apostle than them."
The fourth and fifth questions were new in this controversy; and it is not
certain that they belong properly to it, though the legalistic asceticism of the
Pelagian leaders may well have given rise to a demand on all Christians to sell
what they had, and give to the poor. This one of the points, Augustine treats at
length, pointing out that many of the saints of old were rich, and that the Lord
and His apostles always so speak that their counsels avail to the right use, not
the destruction, of wealth. Christians ought so to hold their wealth that they
are not held by it, and by no means prefer it to Christ. Equal good sense and
mildness are shown in his treatment of the question concerning oaths, which he
points out were used by the Lord and His apostles, but advises to be used as
little as possible lest by the custom of frequent oaths we learn to swear
lightly. The question as to the Church, he passes over as having been
sufficiently treated in the course of his previous remarks. To the number of
those who had been rescued from Pelagianism by his efforts, Augustine was now to
have the pleasure of adding two others, in whom he seems to have taken much
delight. Timasius and James were two young men of honorable birth and liberal
education, who had, by the exhortation of Pelagius, been moved to give up the
hope that they had in this world, and enter upon the service of God in an
ascetic life. Naturally, they had turned to him for instruction, and had
received a book to which they had given their study. They met somewhere with
some of Augustine's writings, however, and were deeply affected by what he said
as to grace, and now began to see that the teaching of Pelagius opposed the
grace of God by which man becomes a Christian. They gave their book, therefore,
to Augustine, saying that it was Pelagius', and asking him for Pelagius' sake,
and for the sake of the truth, to answer it. This was done, and the resulting
book, On Nature and Grace, sent to the young men, who returned a letter of
thanks in which they professed their conversion from their error. In this book,
too, which was written in 415, Augustine refrained from mentioning Pelagius by
name, feeling it better to spare the man while not sparing his writings. But he
tells us, that, on reading the book of Pelagius to which it was an answer, it
became clear to him beyond any doubt that his teaching was distinctly
anti-Christian; and when speaking of his own book privately to a friend, he
allows himself to call it "a considerable book against the heresy of Pelagius,
which he had been constrained to write by some brethren whom he had persuaded to
adopt his fatal error, denying the grace of Christ." Thus his attitude towards
the persons of the new teachers was becoming ever more and more strained, in
despite of his full recognition of the excellent motives that might lie behind
their "zeal not according to knowledge." This treatise opens with a recognition
of the zeal of Pelagius, which, as it burns most ardently against those who,
when reproved for sin, take refuge in censuring their nature, Augustine compares
with the heathen view as expressed in Sallust's saying, "the human race falsely
complains of its own nature," and which he charges with not being according to
knowledge, and proposes to oppose by an equal zeal against all attempts to
render the cross of Christ of none effect. He then gives a brief but excellent
summary of the more important features of the catholic doctrine concerning
nature and grace (2-7). Opening the work of Pelagius, which had been placed in
his hands, he examines his doctrine of sin, its nature and effects. Pelagius, he
points out, draws a distinction, sound enough in itself, between what is
"possible" and what is "actual," but applies it unsoundly to sin, when he says
that every man has the possibility of being without sin (8-9), and therefore
without condemnation. Not so, says Augustine; an infant who dies unbaptized has
no possibility of salvation open to him; and the man who has lived and died in a
land where it was impossible for him to hear the name of Christ, has had no
possibility open to him of becoming righteous by nature and free will. If this
be not so, Christ is dead in vain, since all men then might have accomplished
their salvation, even if Christ had never died (10). Pelagius, moreover, he
shows, exhibits a tendency to deny the sinful character of all sins that are
impossible to avoid, and so treats of sins of ignorance as to show that he
excuses them (13-19). When he argues that no sin, because it is not a substance,
can change nature, which is a substance, Augustine replies that this destroys
the Saviour's work-for how can He save from sins if sins do not corrupt? And,
again, if an act cannot injure a substance, how can abstention from food, which
is a mere act, kill the body? In the same way sin is not a substance; but God is
a substance-yea, the height of substance, and only true sustenance of the
reasonable creature; and the consequence of departure from Him is to the soul
what refusal of food is to the body (22). To Pelagius' assertion that sin cannot
be punished by more sin, Augustine replies that the apostle thinks differently
(Rom. i. 21-31). Then putting his finger on the main point in controversy, he
quotes the Scriptures as declaring the present condition of man to be that of
spiritual death. "The truth then designates as dead those whom this man declares
to be unable to be damaged or corrupted by sin-because, forsooth, he has
discovered sin to be no substance!" (25). It was by free will that man passed
into this state of death; but a dead man needs something else to revive him-he
needs nothing less than a Vivifier. But of vivifying grace, Pelagius knew
nothing; and by knowing nothing of a Vivifier, he knows nothing of a Saviour;
but rather by making nature of itself able to be sinless, he glorifies the
Creator at the expense of the Saviour (39). Next is examined Pelagius'
contention that many saints are enumerated in the Scriptures as having lived
sinlessly in this world. While declining to discuss the question of fact as to
the Virgin Mary (42), Augustine opposes to the rest the declaration of John in I
John i. 8, as final, but still pauses to explain why the Scriptures do not
mention the sins of all, and to contend that all who ever were saved under the
Old Testament or the New, were saved by the sacrificial death of Christ, and by
faith in Him (Matthew-50). Thus we are brought, as Augustine says, to the core
of the question, which concerns, not the fact of sinlessness in any man, but
man's ability to be sinless. This ability Pelagius affirms of all men, and
Augustine denies of all "unless they are justified by the grace of God through
our Lord Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (51). Thus, the whole discussion is
about grace, which Pelagius does not admit in any true sense, but places only in
the nature that God has made (52). We are next invited to attend to another
distinction of Pelagius', in which he discriminates sharply between the nature
that God has made, the crown of which is free will, and the use that man makes
of this free will. The endowment of free will is a "capacity;" it is, because
given by God in our making, a necessity of nature, and not in man's power to
have or not have. It is the right use of it only, which man has in his power.
This analysis, Pelagius illustrates at length, by appealing to the difference
between the possession and use of the various bodily senses. The ability to see,
for instance, he says, is a necessity of our nature; we do not make it, we
cannot help having it; it is ours only to use it. Augustine criticises this
presentation of the matter with great sharpness (although he is not averse to
the analysis itself)-showing the inapplicability of the illustrations used-for,
he asks, is it not possible for us to blind ourselves, and so no longer have the
ability to see? and would not many a man like to control the "use" of his
"capacity" to hear when a screechy saw is in the neighbourhood? (55); and as
well the falsity of the contention illustrated, since Pelagius has ignored the
fall, and, even were that not so, has so ignored the need of God's aid for all
good, in any state of being, as to deny it (56). Moreover, it is altogether a
fallacy, Augustine argues, to contend that men have the "ability" to make every
use we can conceive of our faculties. We cannot wish for unhappiness; God cannot
deny Himself (57); and just so, in a corrupt nature, the mere possession of a
faculty of choice does not imply the ability to use that faculty for not
sinning. "Of a man, indeed, who has his legs strong and sound, it may be said
admissibly enough, `whether he will or not, he has the capacity of walking;' but
if his legs be broken, however much he may wish, he has not the `capacity.' The
nature of which our author speaks is corrupted" (57). What, then, can he mean by
saying that, whether we will or not, we have the capacity of not sinning-a
statement so opposite to Paul's in Rom. vii. 15? Some space is next given to an
attempted rebuttal by Pelagius of the testimony of Gal. v. 17, on the ground
that the "flesh" there does not refer to the baptized (60-70); and then the
passages are examined which Pelagius had quoted against Augustine out of earlier
writers-Lactantius (71), Hilary (72), Ambrose (75), John of Constantinople (76),
Xystus-a blunder of Pelagius, who quoted from a Pythagorean philosopher,
mistaking him for the Roman bishop Sixtus (57), Jerome (78), and Augustine
himself (80). All these writers, Augustine shows, admitted the universal
sinfulness of man-and especially he himself had confessed the necessity of grace
in the immediate context of the passage quoted by Pelagius. The treatise closes
(82 sq.) with a noble panegyric on that love which God sheds abroad in the
heart, by the Holy Ghost, and by which alone we can be made keepers of the law.
The treatise On Nature and Grace was as yet unfinished, when the over-busy
scriptorium at Hippo was invaded by another young man seeking instruction. This
time it was a zealous young presbyter from the remotest part of Spain, "from the
shore of the ocean,"-Paulus Orosius by name, whose pious soul had been afflicted
with grievous wounds by the Priscillianist and Origenist heresies that had
broken out in his country, and who had come with eager haste to Augustine, on
hearing that he could get from him the instruction which he needed for confuting
them. Augustine seems to have given him his heart at once; and, feeling too
little informed as to the special heresies which he wished to be prepared to
controvert, persuaded him to go on to Palestine to be taught by Jerome, and gave
him introductions which described him as one "who is in the bond of catholic
peace a brother, in point of age a son, and in honour a fellow-presbyter-a man
of quick understanding, ready speech, and burning zeal." His departure to
Palestine gave Augustine an opportunity to consult with Jerome on the one point
that had been raised in the Pelagian controversy on which he had not been able
to see light. The Pelagians had early argued, that, if souls are created anew
for men at their birth, it would be unjust in God to impute Adam's sin to them.
And Augustine found himself unable either to prove that souls are transmitted
(traduced, as the phrase is), or to show that it would not involve God in
injustice to make a soul only to make it subject to a sin committed by another.
Jerome had already put himself on record as a believer in both original sin and
the creation of souls at the time of birth. Augustine feared the logical
consequences of this assertion, and yet was unable to refute it. He therefore
seized this occasion to send a long treatise on the origin of the soul to his
friend, with the request that he would consider the subject anew, and answer his
doubts. In this treatise he stated that he was fully persuaded that the soul had
fallen into sin, but by no fault of God or of nature, but of its own free will;
and asked when could the soul of an infant have contracted the guilt, which,
unless the grace of Christ should come to its rescue by baptism, would involve
it in condemnation, if God (as Jerome held, and as he was willing to hold with
him, if this difficulty could be cleared up) makes each soul for each individual
at the time of birth? He professed himself embarrassed on sucha supposition by
the penal sufferings of infants, the pains they endured in this life, and much
more the danger they are in of eternal damnation, into which they actually go
unless saved by baptism. God is good, just, omnipotent: how, then, can we
account for the fact that "in Adam all die," if souls are created afresh for
each birth? "If new souls are made for men," he affirms, "individually at their
birth, I do not see, on the one hand, that they could have any sin while yet in
infancy; nor do I believe, on the other hand, that God condemns any soul which
He sees to have no sin;" "and yet, whoever says that those children who depart
out of this life without partaking of the sacrament of baptism, shall be made
alive in Christ, certainly contradicts the apostolic declaration," and "he that
is not made alive in Christ must necessarily remain under the condemnation of
which the apostle says that by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to
condemnation." "Wherefore," he adds to his correspondent, "if that opinion of
yours does not contradict this firmly grounded article of faith, let it be mine
also; but if it does, let it no longer be yours." So far as obtaining light was
concerned, Augustine might have spared himself the pain of this composition:
Jerome simply answered that he had no leisure to reply to the questions
submitted to him. But Orosius' mission to Palestine was big with consequences.
Once there, he became the accuser of Pelagius before John of Jerusalem, and the
occasion, at least, of the trials of Pelagius in Palestine during the summer and
winter of 415 which issued so disastrously, and ushered in a new phase of the
conflict. Meanwhile, however, Augustine was ignorant of what was going on in the
East, and had his mind directed again to Sicily. About a year had passed since
he had sent thither his long letter to Hilary. Now his conjecture that
Coelestius was in some way at the bottom of the Sicilian outbreak, received
confirmation from a paper which certain catholic brethren brought out of Sicily,
and which was handed to Augustine by two exiled Spanish bishops, Eutropius and
Paul. This paper bore the title, Definitions Ascribed to Coelestius, and
presented internal evidence, in style and thought, of being correctly so
ascribed. It consisted of three parts, in the first of which were collected a
series of brief and compressed "definitions," or "ratiocinations" as Augustine
calls them, in which the author tries to place the catholics in a logical
dilemma, and to force them to admit that man can live in this world without sin.
In the second part, he adduced certain passages of Scripture in defence of his
doctrine. In the third part, he undertook to deal with the texts that had been
quoted against his contention, not, however, by examining into their meaning, or
seeking to explain them in the sense of his theory, but simply by matching them
with others which he thought made for him. Augustine at once (about the end of
415) wrote a treatise in answer to this, which bears the title of On the
Perfection of Man's Righteousness. The distribution of the matter in this work
follows that of the treatise to which it is an answer. First of all (1-16), the
"ratiocinations" are taken up one by one and briefly answered. As they all
concern sin, and have for their object to prove that man cannot be accounted a
sinner unless he is able, in his own power, wholly to avoid sin-that is, to
prove that a plenary natural ability is the necessary basis of
responsibility-Augustine argues per contra that man can entail a sinfulness on
himself for which and for the deeds of which he remains responsible, though he
is no longer able to avoid sin; thus admitting that for the race, plenary
ability must stand at the root of sinfulness. Next (17-22) he discusses the
passages which Coelestius had advanced in defence of his teachings, viz., (1)
passages in which God commands men to be without sin, which Augustine meets by
saying that the point is, whether these commands are to be fulfilled without
God's aid, in the body of this death, while absent from the Lord (17-20); and
(2) passages in which God declares that His commandments are not grievous, which
Augustine meets by explaining that all God's commandments are fulfilled only by
Love, which finds nothing grievous; and that this love is shed abroad in our
hearts by the Holy Ghost, without whom we have only fear, to which the
commandments are not only grievous, but impossible. Lastly, Augustine patiently
follows Coelestius through his odd "oppositions of texts," explaining carefully
all that he had adduced, in an orthodox sense (23-42). In closing, he takes up
Coelestius' statement, that "it is quite possible for man not to sin even in
word, if God so will," pointing out how he avoids saying "if God give him His
help," and then proceeds to distinguish carefully between the differing
assertions of sinlessness that may be made. To say that any man ever lived, or
will live, without needing forgiveness, is to contradict Rom. v. 12, and must
imply that he does not need a Saviour, against Matt. ix. 12, 13. To say that
after his sins have been forgiven, any one has ever remained without sin,
contradicts I John i. 8 and Matt. vi. 12. Yet, if God's help be allowed, this
contention is not so wicked as the other; and the great heresy is to deny the
necessity of God's constant grace, for which we pray when we say, "Lead us not
into temptation." Tidings were now (416) beginning to reach Africa of what was
doing in the East. There was diligently circulated everywhere, and came into
Augustine's hands, an epistle of Pelagius' own "filled with vanity," in which he
boasted that fourteen bishops had approved his assertion that "man can live
without sin, and easily keep the commandments if he wishes," and had thus "shut
the mouth of opposition in confusion," and "broken up the whole band of wicked
conspirators against him." Soon afterwards a copy of an "apologetical paper," in
which Pelagius used the authority of the Palestinian bishops against his
adversaries, not altogether without disingenuousness, was sent by him to
Augustine through the hands of a common acquaintance, Charus by name. It was not
accompanied, however, by any letter from Pelagius; and Augustine wisely
refrained from making public use of it. Towards midsummer Orosius came with more
authentic information, and bearing letters from Jerome and Heros and Lazarus. It
was apparently before his coming that a controversial sermon was preached, only
a fragment of which has come down to us. So far as we can learn from the extant
part, its subject seems to have been the relation of prayer to Pelagianism; and
what we have, opens with a striking anecdote: "When these two petitions-`Forgive
us our debts as we also forgive our debtors,' and `Lead us not into
temptation'-are objected to the Pelagians, what do you think they reply? I was
horrified, my brethren, when I heard it. I did not, indeed, hear it with my own
ears; but my holy brother and fellow-bishop Urbanus, who used to be presbyter
here, and now is bishop of Sicca," when he was in Rome, and was arguing with one
who held these opinions, pressed him with the weight of the Lord's Prayer, and
"what do you think he replied to him? `We ask God,' he said, `not to lead us
into temptation, lest we should suffer something that is not in our power-lest I
should be thrown from my horse; lest I should break my leg; lest a robber should
slay me, and the like. For these things,' he said, `are not in my power; but for
overcoming the temptations of my sins, I both have ability if I wish to use it,
and am not able to receive God's help.' You see, brethren," the good bishop
adds, "how malignant this heresy is: you see how it horrifies all of you. Have a
care that you be not taken by it." He then presses the general doctrine of
prayer as proving that all good things come from God, whose aid is always
necessary to us, and is always attainable by prayer; and closes as follows:
"Consider, then, these things, my brethren, when any one comes to you and says
to you, `What, then, are we to do if we have nothing in our power, un


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  CHAPTER 4: PART IV: THE THEOLOGY OF GRACE
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Part IV: The Theology of Grace The theology which Augustine opposed, in his
anti-Pelagian writings, to the errors of Pelagianism, is, shortly, the theology
of grace. Its roots were planted deeply in his own experience, and in the
teachings of Scripture, especially of that apostle whom he delights to call "the
great preacher of grace," and to follow whom, in his measure, was his greatest
desire. The grace of God in Jesus Christ, conveyed to us by the Holy Spirit and
evidenced by the love that He sheds abroad in our hearts, is the centre around
which this whole side of His system revolves, and the germ out of which it
grows. He was the more able to make it thus central because of the harmony of
this view of salvation with the general principle of his whole theology, which
was theocentric and revolved around his conception of God as the immanent and
vital spirit in whom all things live and move and have their being. In like
manner, God is the absolute good, and all good is either Himself or from Him;
and only as God makes us good, are we able to do anything good. The necessity of
grace to man, Augustine argued from the condition of the race as partakers of
Adam's sin. God created man upright, and endowed him with human faculties,
including free will; and gave to him freely that grace by which he was able to
retain his uprightness. Being thus put on probation, with divine aid to enable
him to stand if he chose, Adam used his free choice for sinning, and involved
his whole race in his fall. It was on account of this sin that he died
physically and spiritually, and this double death passes over from him to us.
That all his descendants by ordinary generation are partakers in Adam's guilt
and condemnation, Augustine is sure from the teachings of Scripture; and this is
the fact of original sin, from which no one generated from Adam is free, and
from which no one is freed save as regenerated in Christ. But how we are made
partakers of it, he is less certain: sometimes he speaks as if it came by some
mysterious unity of the race, so that we were all personally present in the
individual Adam, and thus the whole race was the one man that sinned; sometimes
he speaks more in the sense of modern realists, as if Adam's sin corrupted the
nature, and the nature now corrupts those to whom it is communicated; sometimes
he speaks as if it were due to simple heredity; sometimes, again, as if it
depended on the presence of shameful concupiscence in the act of procreation, so
that the propagation of guilt depends on the propagation of offspring by means
of concupiscence. However transmitted, it is yet a fact that sin is propagated,
and all mankind became sinners in Adam. The result of this is that we have lost
the divine image, though not in such a sense that no lineaments of it remain to
us; and, the sinning soul making the flesh corruptible, our whole nature is
corrupted, and we are unable to do anything of ourselves truly good. This
includes, of course, an injury to our will. Augustine, writing for the popular
eye, treats this subject in popular language. But it is clear that he
distinguished, in his thinking, between will as a faculty and will in a broader
sense. As a mere faculty, will is and always remains an indifferent thing -
after the fall, as before it, continuing poised in indifferency, and ready, like
a weathercock, to be turned whithersoever the breeze that blows from the heart
("will," in the broader sense) may direct. It is not the faculty of willing, but
the man who makes use of that faculty, that has suffered change from the fall.
In paradise man stood in full ability: he had the posse non peccare, but not yet
the non posse peccare; that is, he was endowed with a capacity for either part,
and possessed the grace of God by which he was able to stand if he would, but
also the power of free will by which he might fall if he would. By his fall he
has suffered a change, is corrupt, and under the power of Satan; his will (in
the broader sense) is now injured, wounded, diseased, enslaved, - although the
faculty of will (in the narrow sense) remains indifferent. Augustine's criticism
of Pelagius' discrimination of "capacity" (possibilitas, posse), "will"
(voluntas, velle), and "act" (actio, esse), does not turn on the discrimination
itself, but on the incongruity of placing the power, ability in the mere
capacity or possibility, rather than in the living agent who "wills" and "acts."
He himself adopts an essentially similar distribution, with only this
correction; and thus keeps the faculty of will indifferent, but places the power
of using it in the active agent, man. According, then, to the character of this
man, will the use of the free will be. If the man be holy he will make a holy
use of it, and if he be corrupt he will make a sinful use of it: if he be
essentially holy, he cannot (like God Himself) make a sinful use of his will;
and if he be enslaved to sin, he cannot make a good use of it. The last is the
present condition of men by nature. They have free will; the faculty by which
they act remains in indifferency, and they are allowed to use it just as they
choose: but such as they cannot desire and therefore cannot choose anything but
evil; and therefore they, and therefore their choice, and therefore their
willing, is always evil and never good. They are thus the slaves of sin, which
they obey; and while their free will avails for sinning, it does not avail for
doing any good unless they be first freed by the grace of God. It is undeniable
that this view is in consonance with modern psychology: let us once conceive of
"the will" as simply the whole man in the attitude of willing, and it is
immediately evident, that, however abstractly free the "will" is, it is
conditioned and enslaved in all its action by the character of the willing
agent: a bad man does not cease to be bad in the act of willing, and a good man
remains good even in his acts of choice. In its nature, grace is assistance,
help from God; and all divine aid may be included under the term, - as well what
may be called natural, as what may be called spiritual, aid, Spiritual grace
includes, no doubt, all external help that God gives man for working out his
salvation, such as the law, the preaching of the gospel, the example of Christ,
by which we may learn the right way; it includes also forgiveness of sins, by
which we are freed from the guilt already incurred; but above all it includes
that help which God gives by His Holy Spirit, working within, not without, by
which man is enabled to choose and to do what he sees, by the teachings of the
law, or by the gospel, or by the natural conscience, to be right. Within this
aid are included all those spiritual exercises which we call regeneration,
justification, perseverance to the end, - in a word, all the divine assistance
by which, in being made Christians, we are made to differ from other men.
Augustine is fond of representing this grace as in essence the writing of God's
law (or of God's will) on our hearts, so that it appears hereafter as our own
desire and wish; and even more prevalently as the shedding abroad of love in our
hearts by the Holy Ghost, given to us in Christ Jesus; therefore, as a change of
disposition, by which we come to love and freely choose, in co-operation with
God's aid, just the things which hitherto we have been unable to choose because
in bondage to sin. Grace, thus, does not make void free will: it acts through
free will, and acts upon it only by liberating it from its bondage to sin, i.e.,
by liberating the agent that uses the free will, so that he is no longer
enslaved by his fleshly lusts, and is enabled to make use of his free will in
choosing the good; and thus it is only by grace that free will is enabled to act
in good part. But just because grace changes the disposition, and so enables
man, hitherto enslaved to sin, for the first time to desire and use his free
will for good, it lies in the very nature of the case that it is prevenient.
Also, as the very name imports, it is necessarily gratuitous; since man is
enslaved to sin until it is given, all the merits that he can have prior to it
are bad merits, and deserve punishment, not gifts of favour. When, then, it is
asked, on the ground of what, grace is given, it can only be answered, "on the
ground of God's infinite mercy and undeserved favour." There is nothing in man
to merit it, and it first gives merit of good to man. All men alike deserve
death, and all that comes to them in the way of blessing is necessarily of God's
free and unmerited favour. This is equally true of all grace. It is
pre-eminently clear of that grace which gives faith, the root of all other
graces, which is given of God, not to merits of good-will or incipient turning
to Him, but of His sovereign good pleasure. But equally with faith, it is true
of all other divine gifts: we may, indeed, speak of "merits of good" as
succeeding faith; but as all these merits find their root in faith, they are but
"grace on grace," and men need God's mercy always, throughout this life, and
even on the judgment day itself, when, if they are judged without mercy, they
must be condemned. If we ask, then, why God gives grace, we can only answer that
it is of His unspeakable mercy; and if we ask why He gives it to one rather than
to another, what can we answer but that it is of His will? The sovereignty of
grace results from its very gratuitousness: where none deserve it, it can be
given only of the sovereign good pleasure of the great Giver, - and this is
necessarily inscrutable, but cannot be unjust. We can faintly perceive, indeed,
some reasons why God may be supposed not to have chosen to give His saving grace
to all, or even to the most; but we cannot understand why He has chosen to give
it to just the individuals to whom He has given it, and to withhold it from just
those from whom He has withheld it. Here we are driven to the apostle's cry, "Oh
the depth of the riches both of the mercy and the justice of God!" The effects
of grace are according to its nature. Taken as a whole, it is the recreative
principle sent forth from God for the recovery of man from his slavery to sin,
and for his reformation in the divine image. Considered as to the time of its
giving, it is either operating or co-operating grace, i.e., either the grace
that first enables the will to choose the good, or the grace that co-operates
with the already enabled will to do the good; and it is, therefore, also called
either prevenient or subsequent grace. It is not to be conceived of as a series
of disconnected divine gifts, but as a constant efflux from God; but we may look
upon it in the various steps of its operation in men, as bringing forgiveness of
sins, faith, which is the beginning of all good, love to God, progressive power
of good working, and perseverance to the end. In any case, and in all its
operations alike, just because it is power from on high and the living spring of
a new and re-created life, it is irresistible and indefectible. Those on whom
the Lord bestows the gift of faith working from within, not from without, of
course, have faith, and cannot help believing. Those to whom perseverance to the
end is given must persevere to the end. It is not to be objected to this, that
many seem to begin well who do not persevere: this also is of God, who has in
such cases given great blessings indeed, but not this blessing, of perseverance
to the end. Whatever of good men have, that God has given; and what they have
not, why, of course, God has not given it. Nor can it be objected, that this
leaves all uncertain: it is only unknown to us, but this is not uncertainty; we
cannot know that we are to have any gift which God sovereignly gives, of course,
until it is given, and we therefore cannot know that we have perseverance unto
the end until we actually persevere to the end; but who would call what God
does, and knows He is to do, uncertain, and what man is to do certain? Nor will
it do to say that thus nothing is left for us to do: no doubt, all things are in
God's hands, and we should praise God that this is so, but we must co-operate
with Him; and it is just because it is He that is working in us the willing and
the doing, that it is worth our while to work out our salvation with fear and
trembling. God has not determined the end without determining the appointed
means. Now, Augustine argues, since grace certainly is gratuitous, and given to
no preceding merits, - prevenient and antecedent to all good, - and, therefore,
sovereign, and bestowed only on those whom God selects for its reception; we
must, of course, believe that the eternal God has foreknown all this from the
beginning. He would be something less than God, had He not foreknown that He
intended to bestow this prevenient, gratuitous, and sovereign grace on some men,
and had He not foreknown equally the precise individuals on whom He intended to
bestow it. To foreknow is to prepare beforehand. And this is predestination. He
argues that there can be no objection to predestination, in itself considered,
in the mind of any man who believes in a God: what men object to is the
gratuitous and sovereign grace to which no additional difficulty is added by the
necessary assumption that it was foreknown and prepared or from eternity. That
predestination does not proceed on the foreknowledge of good or of faith,
follows from its being nothing more than the foresight and preparation of grace,
which, in its very idea, is gratuitous and not according to any merits,
sovereign and according only to God's purpose, prevenient and in order to faith
and good works. It is the sovereignty of grace, not its foresight or the
preparation for it, which places men in God's hands, and suspends salvation
absolutely on his unmerited mercy. But just because God is God, of course, no
one receives grace who has not been foreknown and afore-selected for the gift;
and, as much of course, no one who has been foreknown and afore-selected for it,
fails to receive it. Therefore the number of the predestinated is fixed, and
fixed by God. Is this fate? Men may call God's grace fate if they choose; but it
is not fate, but undeserved love and tender mercy, without which none would be
saved. Does it paralyze effort? Only to those who will not strive to obey God
because obedience is His gift. Is it unjust? Far from it: shall not God do what
He will with His own undeserved favour? It is nothing but gratuitous mercy,
sovereignly distributed, and foreseen and provided for from all eternity by Him
who has selected us in His Son. When Augustine comes to speak of the means of
grace, i.e., of the channels and circumstances of its conference to men, he
approaches the meeting point of two very dissimilar streams of his theology -
his doctrine of grace and his doctrine of the Church - and he is sadly deflected
from the natural course of his theology by the alien influence. He does not,
indeed, bind the conference of grace to the means in such a sense that the grace
must be given at the exact time of the application of the means. He does not
deny that "God is able, even when no man rebukes, to correct whom He will, and
to lead him on to the wholesome mortification of repentance by the most hidden
and most mighty power of His medicine." Though the Gospel must be known in order
that man may be saved (for how shall they believe without a preacher?), yet the
preacher is nothing, and the preachment is nothing, but God only that gives the
increase. He even has something like a distant glimpse of what has since been
called the distinction between the visible and invisible Church - speaking of
men not yet born as among those who are "called according to God's purpose,"
and, therefore, of the saved who constitute the Church - asserting that those
who are so called, even before they believe, are "already children of God
enrolled in the memorial of their Father with unchangeable surety," and, at the
same time; allowing that there are many already in the visible Church who are
not of it, and who can therefore depart from it. But he teaches that those who
are thus lost out of the visible Church are lost because of some fatal flaw in
their baptism, or on account of post-baptismal sins; and that those who are of
the "called according to the purpose" are predestinated not only to salvation,
but to salvation by baptism. Grace is not tied to the means in the sense that it
is not conferred save in the means; but it is tied to the means in the sense
that it is not conferred without the means. Baptism, for instance, is absolutely
necessary for salvation: no exception is allowed except such as save the
principle - baptism of blood (martyrdom), and, somewhat grudgingly, baptism of
intention. And baptism, when worthily received, is absolutely efficacious: "if a
man were to die immediately after baptism, he would have nothing at all left to
hold him liable to punishment." In a word, while there are many baptized who
will not be saved, there are none saved who have not been baptized; it is the
grace of God that saves, but baptism is a channel of grace without which none
receive it. The saddest corollary that flowed from this doctrine was that by
which Augustine was forced to assert that all those who died unbaptized,
including infants, are finally lost and depart into eternal punishment. He did
not shrink from the inference, although he assigned the place of lightest
punishment in hell to those who were guilty of no sin but original sin, but who
had departed this life without having washed this away in the "laver of
regeneration." This is the dark side of his soteriology; but it should be
remembered that it was not his theology of grace, but the universal and
traditional belief in the necessity of baptism for remission of sins, which he
inherited in common with all of his time, that forced it upon him. The theology
of grace was destined in the hands of his successors, who have rejoiced to
confess that they were taught by him, to remove this stumbling-block also from
Christian teaching; and if not to Augustine, it is to Augustine's theology that
the Christian world owes its liberation from so terrible and incredible a tenet.
Along with the doctrine of infant damnation, another stumbling-block also, not
so much of Augustineian, but of Church theology, has gone. It was not because of
his theology of grace, or of his doctrine of predestination, that
Augustinetaught that comparatively few of the human race are saved. It was,
again, because he believed that baptism and incorporation into the visible
Church were necessary for salvation. And it is only because of Augustine's
theology of grace, which places man in the hands of an all-merciful Saviour and
not in the grasp of a human institution, that men can see that in the salvation
of all who die in infancy, the invisible Church of God embraces the vast
majority of the human race - saved not by the washing of water administered by
the Church, but by the blood of Christ administered by God's own hand outside of
the ordinary channels of his grace. We are indeed born in sin, and those that
die in infancy are, in Adam, children of wrath even as others; but God's hand is
not shortened by the limits of His Church on earth, that it cannot save. In
Christ Jesus, all souls are the Lord's, and only the soul that itself sinneth
shall die (Ezek. xviii. 1-4); and the only judgment wherewith men shall be
judged proceeds on the principle that as many as have sinned without law shall
also perish without law, and as many as have sinned under law shall be judged by
the law (Rev. ii. 12). Thus, although Augustine's theology had a very strong
churchly element within it, it was, on the side that is presented in the
controversy against Pelagianism, distinctly anti-ecclesiastical. Its central
thought was the absolute dependence of the individual on the grace of God in
Jesus Christ. It made everything that concerned salvation to be of God, and
traced the source of all good to Him. "Without me ye can do nothing," is the
inscription on one side of it; on the other stands written, "All things are
yours." Augustine held that he who builds on a human foundation builds on sand,
and founded all his hope on the Rock itself. And there also he founded his
teaching; as he distrusted man in the matter of salvation, so he distrusted him
in the form of theology. No other of the fathers so conscientiously wrought out
his theology from the revealed Word; no other of them so sternly excluded human
additions. The subjects of which theology treats, he declares, are such as "we
could by no means find out unless we believed them on the testimony of Holy
Scripture." "Where Scripture gives no certain testimony," he says, "human
presumption must beware how it decides in favor of either side." "We must first
bend our necks to the authority of Scripture," he insists, "in order that we may
arrive at knowledge and understanding through faith." And this was not merely
his theory, but his practice. No theology was ever, it may be more broadly
asserted, more conscientiously wrought out from the Scriptures. Is it without
error? No; but its errors are on the surface, not of the essence. It leads to
God, and it came from God; and in the midst of the controversies of so many ages
it has shown itself an edifice whose solid core is built out of material "which
cannot be shaken."


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/augustine-the-pelagian-controversy/
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