The Role of Augustine of Hippo with rRegards to the Pelagian Controversy

Augustine was born on 13th November 354. He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was the child of a small-town parents of Numida now the large village of Souk-Ahras in Algeria not far from Tunisia border. Augustine did not travel about much during his time as a layman at Thagastic; if he did go about visiting, he was careful to avoid any town where they needed a new bishop since pressure might suddenly be upon him. Early in 391, however he visited the harbour town of Hippo Regius, forty miles away second Fiddle to Carthage among Africa cities.

Augustine was determined not to abandon his monastic dedication after moving to Hippo. Valerius offered Augustine a garden by the church as a building-site for a small monastery, to which the Thagaste community sent a few brothers including Euodius and, for a time, Alypius to start it off. Henry Chadwick. Augustine’s theology was profoundly challenged by the popularity of a rival Christian Pelagius. And the controversy between Augustine and Pelagius secured Augustine’s reputation as one of the predominant intellectuals on the Christian scene, it led to the triumph of Augustine’s theology which was accepted by church councils and radified by the Imperial state.

Pelagius was attached to the Italian aristocratic circle. Highly educated he become the defender of free will and of perfection. By reading the book called the confessions he concluded that there was something wrong with the book, something he didn’t agree with in Augustine’s theology. The argument between them was over the question of original sin. Pelagius couldn’t understand how humans could be responsible for the sins of those who were before them? How could they inherit a sinful nature? And this theological question comes to a concrete practice which almost crystallised the problem. If baptism is our cleansing sin, is it necessary to baptise infants? Well Pelagius said no because they don’t inherit sinful nature.

And Augustine said yes because they are born into the flesh. In the fifth century infant baptism was there but not practised, but it deeply held ritual by many Christians and Augustine used it to explain his theology outlook saying that yes humans inherit the flesh. Yes, every human is sinful but not every human has the possibility of not sinning. You should see in Pelagianism certain similarities to monasticism. Indeed, similarities more broadly with the radical tradition of Christian discipleship. Pelagius sees the gospel as a call to perfection.

Pelagianism is a reaction against the conversion of society. Pelagius says that the actual sin in the garden of Eden didn’t change human nature. Every individual still chooses good or evil on their own. People are responsible for their sin and their responsible for their salvation. This massive controversy that lasted two decades of Augustine’s life becomes an empire of intellectual war with letter sent across the Empire to bishops, philosophers, emperors and it helped Augustine refine his theology and express that totality of his ideas ever more clearly and ultimately see them triumphant.

To Augustine, sin is beyond choice it’s inevitable it’s part of our nature and so is salvation, it’s something beyond our own choice. People can’t save themselves they require external grace. To Pelagius, the story of Adam and Eve disobeying God in the garden is an example of what every person does, all people are born the way Adam and Eve were first created in the garden with free will to either obey or to disobey God. And to be sinful or to be righteous and every person is born and given freedom to choose.

To Augustine this was something that changed the course of history people were created with perfectly free natures. But when they sinned, and disobeyed, this corrupted their flesh, first they realised their nakedness and covered themselves and their new corrupted nature was transmitted through the seed of Adam all generations each inherits the twisted will of Adam. Augustine above all attacked the simplistic psychology of Pelagianism.

For Pelagius it’s the way we act (“don’t sin means don’t sin”). For Augustine what motivates us. (we may come to good). Augustine says if you do good because you fear hell, then you don’t love what is good you’re just afraid of fire. Augustine’s morality is about transformation of the will. Augustine reaches back deeply into the Christian ethics back to the sermon on the mountain where the message is that morality is transformation.

Augustine isn’t against free will, he thinks it’s more complicated than Pelagius allows. He thinks that a person’s will can be more or less free. Augustine thinks that true freeman is one in whom reason and emotion become united into one who does good because he loves the good.

These two very powerful and diametrically opposed theological positions worked out in the controversy between Augustine and Pelagius. And Augustine won. His psychology is far more powerful, he’s reading of Christian morality taps directly into the message of Jesus and Paul and his doctrine is accepted in church councils. Pelagius is condemned. Both church and empire accept Augustine’s view. Dr Kyle Harper.  www.kyleharper.net

Although the Pelagian controversy meant a battle on the opposite front from Manichaeism, Augustine never moves from the view of evil adopted in his early writings. He continues to see evil as a consequence of a freely chosen, uncaused neglect of the good; as non-being which is also a defect of goodness; and as a consequence of man’s ignorance and difficulty. Ignorance and difficulty were originally a natural created state of man’s infancy in the struggle upwards, and therefore in no sense the result of sin, but because of freely chosen neglect they pass into a panel condition of blindness to the truth and of ceaseless toil. The young Augustine is emphatic that scene is in the will, not in nature. Nevertheless, he allows that the goodness of a created nature can be diminished. Because of ignorance, ‘Carnal habit’ has almost become nature, so that man’s will, under a driven penalty, is not now free to choose right, and indeed man has lost the power to know just what right is.

Even here, as late as 409, there is no question of divine foreknowledge being causative. The Pelagian controversy pushed him to attribute to God and active preparatory part in bringing man to faith. To him Pelagius and his friends seemed to present man as an essentially good being who, with some wise rules and commands, has the will and power to Pull his socks up and to please God by holiness of life. The man Augustine sees lies in an active omnipotence coming to the rescue. Assisting grace is not enough; it must also be controlling from start to finish, since if there is any point at which the will is unassisted in welcoming assistance, the final in is cast into doubt. Just as the Donatist controversy Augustine comes to feel that the problem is insoluble without a form of coercion, so here he believes that the salvation of man cannot be achieved if there is a point at which man is left to himself. If anything can go wrong, it will.

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