Ashes Under Uricon
Chapter 26. Pelagius (400)
By Mihangel
Cuius bonum ita generaliter cunctis institutum est, ut in gentilibus quoque hominibus, qui sine ullo cultu Dei sunt, se nonnunquam ostendat ac proferat. Quam multos enim philosophorum et audivimus et legimus et ipsi vidimus castos, patientes, modestos, liberales, abstinentes, benignos, et honores mundi simul et delicias respuentes, et amatores iustitiae non minus quam scientiae! Unde, quaeso, hominibus alienis a Deo placent? Unde autem haec illis bona nisi de naturae bono?
Goodness of nature is so universally established that it is often evident even in pagans who do not worship God. How many wise men have we heard and read and even seen for ourselves, who are chaste, tolerant, modest, generous, abstemious and kindly, who reject the glory and delights of the world, who love justice no less than knowledge! Where, I ask you, do these good qualities come from which so appeal to men who are strangers to God? Where can they come from except from goodness of nature?
Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias
We took the question instead to our friend Florentius the lawyer. He had a name for steering clear of the corruption in the courts, and we could not hold it against him that he had not defended Maglocunus. When we suggested that he could tell us more, and more clearly, about Christianity than Christians could themselves, he chuckled sombrely.
"I admit I've long been fascinated by it. Time was when I even considered adopting it. But I'm cursed with a logical way of thinking which I picked up from Papias, and I've always been put off by the hypocrisy and arrogance and intolerance so many Christians show, and by their wishful thinking -- dare I say their woolly thinking? You're puzzled by their attitude to sin, that they live so blatantly badly in this world while still presumably hoping -- even expecting -- to be saved in the next. And I'm puzzled too. That's where their thinking seems particularly woolly. But this is how I see it.
"Baptism means that, by the grace of God, your past sins are cleared away. But you can only be baptised once. Over what happens once you've been baptised, beliefs vary. Novatianists like our old friend Chrysanthus hold that no sin after baptism can be forgiven by man, because only God has the power to forgive. But the catholic line is that the church too can forgive. Confess subsequent sins to a priest and perform penance -- public and humiliating penance -- and they too will be cleared. But penance, like baptism, can only be done once. Therefore many Christians make little effort to be as good as they're supposed to be. They spend their lives feathering their own nests, on the excuse that the flesh is weak and man is naturally sinful. They rely on divine mercy -- baptism, that is, and penance -- to wipe the slate clean. And for that reason most of them postpone baptism and penance until their deathbed."
"But what about battle?" asked Bran. "You don't know if you're going to be killed. Risk dying unforgiven? Or be forgiven beforehand and have to keep your nose spotlessly clean if you survive? Tricky."
"Perhaps," I suggested, "that's why so few soldiers are Christian."
But Florentius was in no mood for frivolity.
"Either way, assuming there really is a heaven and a hell to which souls are sent on the day of judgment, I'm afraid that a lot of Christians are in for a nasty shock. The trouble is that most of them, at least in Viroconium, are Christians only in the sense that they call themselves Christians. They've been misled by their leaders. Not by Felix -- he's a mouse, and his voice is too quiet to be heard. But they were misled by Viventius."
"That's no surprise," I remarked. "How?"
"As far as I can see, he did not insist that repentance must be genuine. They got it into their heads that all they have to do is say that they repent. So they think that if their priest forgives them, then God forgives them. But priests are easily hoodwinked. What's more, they're easily bought. They're readier to forgive a penitent his sins if he sweetens the church -- and his own conscience -- with a gift of money. Forgiveness is being sold. Not, I think, by Felix, but it was by Viventius. Human forgiveness, that is; which they think is the same as divine forgiveness. But at the same time -- how woolly can you get? -- they believe that everything is predestined. So it doesn't matter how dirty a life they live, does it?"
"And they're stuck with this nonsense? At least till we get a better bishop?"
"Actually, no. Not necessarily. There are a few people -- not here, not yet -- who're beginning to question the nonsense. They're asking whether, after all, their own efforts can help them towards heaven. My old friend Pelagius -- did you ever meet him? He was Papias' pupil too -- is making quite a mark in Rome these days. Stirring up a regular hornet's nest, in fact. He sends me copies of what he's been writing."
"And what does he say?"
"Well . . . I'll try to summarise it. But first I'd better fill you in on the background."
Ambrose of Mediolanum, we heard, that beacon of the Christian firmament, was now dead, and two brilliant new stars had risen in his place. In the east, a certain Jerome was pontificating from his monastery at Bethlehem. But it was Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in Africa, who was dominating the west. The message he was radiating to the faithful was that Adam, the first man, sinned, and that his sin is inherited by the whole of humankind. Without baptism, everyone -- even the newborn babe -- is damned, and only the continuous outpouring of God's grace -- God's personal and gratuitous gift -- offers any hope of salvation. None the less, God has already decided who is capable of being saved and who is not. Their number is fixed, and no poor soul who is listed as incapable, however blameless his life, has a hope.
Bran and I rolled our eyes at each other. "That's old hat, though. That's the line that's always bugged us."
"True, it's all been said before by someone or other. What's new is that it's an authoritative and inflexibly harsh version of the old. More than almost anyone before him, Augustine sees man as irredeemably weak, the world as irredeemably evil."
We were sitting with Florentius in his garden. In the glowing evening light we looked at the world we could see, from the scarlet of the roses and the crimson of the creeper to the honesty in our host's eyes and the love in our own, and we found it unquestionably beautiful. The goodness of God -- the goodness of the gods, the goodness of nature, call it what you will -- cried out through all creation. There might be a veil dividing heaven from earth, but it was pierced by shafts of divine light.
"And who," Bran asked, "does this Augustine see as the most evil threat to the world?"
Florentius snorted. "Not, as you might think, the inveterate sinner or the hardened criminal. Not the outright pagan, the likes of you and me, even if we're held to be already damned. Noreven the Pict or Saxon or German who slaughters Christians but still receives a measure of respect. No, in Augustine's unrelenting eyes it's the enemy within who betrays the fortress, who does more harm than the church's open enemies. It's the Christian who questions and dares to step out of line. It's the heretic who is the most accursed. And here is Pelagius, not merely stepping out of line but throwing down a gauntlet at the establishment. If he's not already accounted a heretic, he soon will be. And I'm proud of him."
We thought back to our sole meeting with this podgy son of Viroconium, this unexpected and unprepossessing rebel.
"What is his message, then?"
"In a nutshell, he's a passionate supporter of human freedom. He rejects predestination and original sin. He insists that everyone can rise above sin and crime by deliberate choice. That everyone has free will, and should use it. That everyone's capable of hauling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Every man and every woman. He doesn't distinguish between them. To him, women aren't weaker or inferior."
"Music to our ears. All of it."
"To mine, too. He starts with the assumption that God is just. It's a necessary premise. A just God is central to what the scriptures say. Even the establishment admits it, though you mightn't always think so from their outpourings. And if God was arbitrary and unjust, like slave-owners who misuse their slaves or corrupt judges who favour the rich, then mankind would be in servitude, helpless victims of God's whim. What's so funny?"
Bran and I were grinning at each other. "We recognise a bit of us in that. We were talking about it to Pelagius, oh, twenty years ago. About slaves and free will."
"Oh, of course, you've both been slaves, haven't you? Anyway, he goes on to ask what exactly Adam's sin was, the root and origin of all sins. You know how God forbade Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge? Before, Adam had been innocent. His sin, on the face of it, was simple disobedience in eating the fruit he had been told not to eat. Once he had done so, evil was in him. It's a metaphor applicable to every human being. But Augustine has to see eating the fruit not only as literal history but also as an image for having sex with Eve. That's nonsense. If sex was sin, how could God have told his creatures to be fruitful and people the earth?"
Florentius chuckled. He was a happily married man.
"And it would be utterly unjust for God to punish the whole human race with death and damnation because of one man's sin. It was Adam's sin, nobody else's, and God is not unjust. Anyway, Adam would have died whether he'd sinned or not. Death isn't a punishment for sin at all. It's a necessity of nature, of creation. Every living thing dies. Are flowers and trees, and bees and ants, and frogs and mice, and horses and cattle, punished with death because of Adam's sin? Of course not. And no more is man.
"As for damnation, everyone is born without sin. Newborn children are in the same state as Adam before his fall. They're innocent. If we came already rotten into the world it would be unjust, and God is not unjust. Infants dying unbaptised go straight to heaven. And if baptism is merely to wash sins away, there's no point in baptising babies who're too young to have sinned. Christ ordered that children should be allowed to come to him freely. He never asked if they were baptised or not. No, Pelagius says the purpose of baptism is to welcome us into the church and into life. We arrive innocent, and membership of the church, and its blessing, helps us keep our innocence."
We nodded. All that made infinitely more sense than the standard message.
"Then he asks if divine grace is the only lifeline that can save us, however virtuously we may live. Yes and no, is the answer. Yes, because grace is a gift which God has given to all of us. No, because it doesn't in itself make us do right. It's nothing more nor less than our conscience, which allows us to distinguish good from bad and choose between them. It doesn't make us do anything. It's free will. Adam had it, we all have it. We're all completely free and equally ready to do either good or bad. And this freedom couldn't exist if our will was already inclined to evil because of somebody else's sin, or if it had to be strengthened by help from somebody else. Grace is indeed this help from somebody else -- from God -- but its function is to help the human will to do what it can do by itself. It offers the strength to choose rightly. It's given in proportion to our merits. Do too much wrong, and we're likely to slide downhill. Do our best, and God will do the rest."
"Deep waters," I commented.
"Yes, but the original's deeper still. I'm simplifying a lot. And another point Pelagius makes will be of special interest to you: that all of this applies to pagans too. Everyone has an inborn goodness of nature, not just Christian believers or those baptised. It's easier, he admits, for Christians to do good because they have Christ's example to follow. But what it boils down to is that if there is a last judgment, it can't be a judgment of God's grace. It can only be a judgment of what every man has done with the grace he's been given. When the day comes, it's for our own actions that we'll answer, not for God's."
Better and better.
"Pelagius asks about predestination too -- does it exist? -- and the number of the chosen -- is it already fixed beyond change? Nonsense, he says, to both. What we do with our life is up to us. Where we end up is up to us. Nothing is fore-ordained, and nobody is chosen. It's not a case of a certain number already saved and the rest of us eternally lost -- if we were, what would be the point of trying to live well? It's natural for man to try, and keep trying. It's good to feel obliged to earn our own salvation, not to wait like a beggar with hand held out expecting others to see us through.
"Finally -- and I find this very interesting -- Pelagius actually wonders if Adam's sin was really so bad after all. Disobedience isn't always negative. If God had instructed him to eat the fruit and he had obeyed, Adam would have been acting like an unthinking child. So God forbade it, which meant that Adam had to make a decision. Just as a child in defying his parents grows to maturity, so Adam in defying God grew to maturity too -- maturity in God's image, because he now shared his knowledge of good and evil."
Yes. Childish innocence was all very well, up to a point. But maturity, if one survived that long, was another necessary fact of life, another fact of nature. I had grown up, Bran had grown up, our love had grown up, and a very good thing too.
"And Pelagius thinks," Florentius finished, "that the more of God's image in us, the better. 'The presence,' he says, 'of God in all living things is what makes them beautiful.'"
Well, well, well. We were not Christians and never likely to be, but at last one reading of Christianity did strike a chord. Even if we did not recognise the Christian God, we were British and Irish, and as such we recognised the beauty and authority of nature. We did believe in grace in the sense of benevolent and strengthening gifts from the gods. We did understand the merit of trying to live a good life. We did see a healthy interdependence between all of these. We hoped we had an inborn goodness of nature. We felt we had an inborn sense of justice and fairness.
"Brilliant," said Bran. "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. Lucky the man who can understand why things happen."
We must have been among the first in Viroconium to hear of Pelagius' teachings. But before long they became common knowledge, and over the next few years the voices of his followers began to be raised in protest against the inequalities and injustices and cruelties of society. For that reason alone, his message found a ready audience, not among the diehard catholics but among those Christians who thought for themselves, and even among people who were not, or hardly, Christians at all. In the market and taverns, Pelagius' name was on everyone's lips. And another unexpected factor came into play.
Pelagius, the establishment spluttered with predictable fury, was denying the supernatural order, explaining away the mystery of predestination, and making God a mere spectator in the drama of human salvation. For the man in the street, theological subtleties passed largely over his head. What tipped the scales for him was that the catholics habitually described the Pelagians as inimici gratiae, enemies of grace. They meant it, of course, as the fiercest condemnation. But it was a naive and astonishing blunder which bounced back into their face; for, unlike them, the man in the street did not automatically understand gratia, grace, to mean God's gift to man. To him, in his everyday speech, gratia was the bog-standard word for judicial corruption and favouritism. And if Pelagians were the enemies of corruption and favouritism, then they were the friends of every ordinary man.
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