In Our Time - The Pelagian Controversy

Episode Date: April 21, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Pelagian Controversy.In the late 4th century a British monk, Pelagius, travelled to Rome, where he became a theologian and teacher, revered for his learning and ascetic lifestyle. But he soon aroused the ire of some of the Church's leading figures, preaching a Christian doctrine which many regarded as heretical. Pelagius believed that mankind was not inherently depraved, and disputed the necessity of original sin. His opinions were highly controversial and led to fierce division. Pelagius's most prominent opponent was the African bishop St Augustine of Hippo. Their dispute resulted in the persecution and eventual condemnation of Pelagius and his followers, and was to be of long-lasting significance to the future of the Church.With:Martin PalmerDirector of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and CultureCaroline HumfressReader in History at Birkbeck College, University of LondonJohn MilbankProfessor in Religion, Politics and Ethics and the Director of the Centre for Theology and Philosophy at Nottingham UniversityProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the late 4th century, a British monk arrived in Rome and began to write highly regarded and popular works of theology. But within a few years, he'd become one of the most reviled men in the Christian world,

described by the church father said Jerome, as a fat man weighed down by. Irish porridge, while another contemporary commentator called him a grotesque Goliath with a bulging forehead. The victim of these personal attacks was Pelagius. His crime was to question the doctrines of the Catholic Church. His contentious teachings about redemption, divine grace, and original sin brought him into public dispute with St. Augustine of Hippo and prompted one of the most significant theological debates of the early church. The Pelagian controversies, as became known, shaped church doctrine for centuries and its influence were still being felt a thousand years later. With me to discuss the Pelagian Controversy,

I'm Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture, Caroline Humphreys, Reader in History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and John Milbank, Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics, and the Director of the Centre for Theology and Philosophy at Nottingham University. Martin Palmer, would you set the scene for us? What was the position and status of the Catholic Church when Pelagius arrived in Rome at the end of the fourth century? Well, it had been probably the most tumultuous century of the church's history. It began that century being persecuted and Diocletian, the worst persecution that the church had experienced.

And by the end of the century, it itself, using the emperor, was persecuting those Christians that the Catholic Church decided were not proper Christians. So it had shifted quite significantly. It had also gained huge wealth. There is a wonderful story of the Council of Nicaea in 325 when the bishops who were invited to attend came in exhibiting the wounds that they had suffered under the persecution. It must have been rather a grotesque scene, but it brought home the point

that the very people who were now at the centre of power, just beginning to be at the centre of power and wealth, have been the very ones who the empire had persecuted. Constantine, of course, tolerates Christianity in the year 313 and opens the door, not just for Christianity to be recognised, but to be the recipient of huge amounts of wealth and power and land and patronage from the Emperor down. But it's also a century in which the church is coming to terms with success

and not doing that terribly well in certain ways. First of all, it's persecuting heretics, the Aryan controversy, rips it apart, the Donatist tradition in North Africa, which was about who was the purest who had not. not given up their faith during persecution, and therefore was a true Christian over against those who had compromised, was ripping apart North Africa, and deeply shaped the theology of the North African Church. But it was also a church that was in a state of angst. It had achieved what it set out to do, which was to, in a sense, conquer the Roman Empire, but at the very point at which the Roman Empire was falling apart. And the question was, was it falling apart because Rome had abandoned the old gods in favour of this new one? We're talking about a time when Christianity became, as it were, the state religion, and therefore was increasingly entwined with the politics of the state. Very much so. That really comes under Theodosius at the end of Theodore at the end of the 4th century,

where he actually starts abolishing the pagan shrines, he gives great status to Christianity, and therefore patronage becomes hugely important. If you are the local bishop, you've basically taken over many of the responsibilities that would have formerly been undertaken by the civil authority. You are sponsoring and supporting people. They're looking to you. Hence we have the whole notion of patron saints, the idea that the church could both in this life and the next life

offer you, as it were, special access. And then the dramatic event at the beginning of the 5th century, the sacking of Rome by Alaric and the Goths, Rome had not been overcome for 800 years. That must have been a tremendous shock to the Roman system. It was an enormous shock. shock, and again it really focused this question. Had Rome fallen because it had abandoned its old gods? It was only in the 381, for example, the temple, sorry, the altar to victory inside the

Senate House had been removed as a pagan shrine. And the question was, you know, we've given our allegiance to this God, this Christian god, and our city falls. Have we made a monumental mistake? And Christianity then has to respond. Catholic, Western Christianity has to respond to this and say, okay, how do we deal with the question of, in a sense, undeserved evil and punishment, or have we deserved it? Which brings us John Milbank to Augustine. Can you tell us about who he was in around 410? But before that, where he came from, why he's so eminent, and away we go. Well, Augustine was born in what is modern day, Algeria, and he had sort of burger blood inside him as well as Latin blood. Yes, Berber blood. And he was the child of a pagan father

and a Christian mother, Monica. And to her great horror, he became a Manichaean in his youth, which meant it was a form of very dualistic Gnosticism that believed matter is evil and so forth. So can you just unravel that for a second. We need a rush past manicism. It's fascinating. Yes. So he became a manichist, which meant that? The manichies thought that the material realm is bad, but that there are sparks of spiritual light trapped in that material world that have to be freed.

And really the whole of religious practice is directed towards that. And it was as Augustine developed a sense of self-responsibility, this of ethical responsibility, that he started to move away from Manichaeanism towards simultaneously, both Neoplatonism and, Christianity. And he also moved away. He'd been a professor of rhetoric. He was, and that's very important, he's a sort of continued concern with language. But he, he becomes a Christian, and he becomes a kind of monk, and eventually he becomes the bishop of hippo in North Africa. He

returns to Africa from Milan, where he'd been practicing as a professor of rhetoric. That's a terrific encapsulation. But could you go back a bit and tell us about the confession, about his life, but on, which became the Confessions, which has been described, I think, by Martin as the first great self-psychological study. Yes, I mean, I think that's an analysis of how he feels he's abandoned his mother's faith and returned to it. And the Confessions is full of the sense that he's been unable at the time

to recognize what he later comes to see as sins. and how he's been sort of unaware of himself and how he's judged other people and failed to apply the truth to himself. And indeed, yes, it's the first real sense that you are your narrative, you are what has happened to you, that he's internalised all that has happened to him.

So we're still talking about the beginning of fifth century. Let's use a fall of Rome 4'10 because of sack of Rome because it's easy to remember. It's true to say we have this brilliant young man, excuse me, brilliant new man, a brilliant lawyer, eventually converts to Christianity and quickly becomes Bishop of Hippo in North Africa.

What were the foundations on which his own position as a theologian were founded? Well, I think that you could sum this up by saying that Augustine moves to a position where Christianity becomes definitely for the whole community and for the imperfect, you know, although he himself lived a monastic life, there's an enormous stress in his theology on the power of grace.

And the idea that all of us are sinners, everything is a bit of a muddle, but that there is hope for ordinary imperfect people. And so tremendous emphasis on the importance of the objective sacraments and that sacraments don't have to be administered by people who are perfect, or necessarily leading a good life. So this sense that of the importance of the objective community, and yet at the same time, this massive sense of interiority.

And really, I think the key thing with Augustine is asking, how could he both stress the collective and the inherited, almost in a rather kind of African tribal kind of way, and yet also have this massive sense of self-awareness? And I myself think the key there is relationality, that he's always thinking in terms of personal relations. So he's not thinking of a kind of abstract structure for a community, nor is he thinking of a simply isolated self. This is why he has the sense that I am my narrative. It's always relationality and friendship.

And one of his most powerful arguments is that Christianity is not anti-Civic. it's actually more favours the Commonwealth because it's seeking processes of peace, forgiveness and reconciliation. So that takes it into political area. But before then, Caroline Humphreys, what about Pelagius? What do we know about him in his early life? Well, we know that Pelagius was born roughly at the same time as Augustine,

but whereas Augustine was early 350s, Augustine's 354, but whereas Augustine is a small town boy from North Africa, we know that Pelagius probably came from Britain, possibly from Wales or from Scotland. Later, writers refer to him as Celtic. Bede refers to him as a Celtic thinker. But I think the important thing about Pelagius is, yes, he's the first known theological writer from Britain, but his theology, his ideas about moral responsibility, about Christian ethics, were forged in Rome.

So we know that by the early 380s, Pelagius had travelled to the city of Rome, And there he found what one church historian has described as an ecclesiastical Billingsgate. So, you know, these thinkers about Christianity, these doers, these ascetics, setting out their stalls and preaching different types of ways of being Christian. So you have an institutional church, you have the bishop of Rome, you have clerics, but you also have this sort of seething mass of ascetics who are going out, particularly offering themselves to the very high class elite members of Roman society. We know that Pelagius acted as an advisor, particularly to elite high-class women. There was this wonderful sort of metaphor of them, taking their Bibles and sitting, reading with Pelagius and discussing what it means to be morally responsible in a Christian context. What might seem like very rarefied theological questions for Pelagius were part of his day-to-day activity in preaching to encouraging and teaching these elite members of the aristocracy. We also know that in the 380s, 390s, Rome really was a hotbed of theological debate.

So there is what later historians refer to as the originist controversy. There is a monk called Jovinian who preached that to be a Christian meant belonging to a Christian community, which was quite radical. You had to discipline yourself. You had to be perfect. Pelagius entered into this environment. He possibly came into conflict with the very famous. later monk from Bethlehem Jerome. But Pelagius, in a sense, took what Jovinian was preaching and said, yes,

if you become a member of a Christian community, you do belong to an elite, authentic, perfect band of Christians, but it does matter how you behave. Once you are baptized and you join that Christian community, you must be perfect. And God actually gives you the capabilities to perfect yourself. So this is quite a radically different. message from the one that we find with Augustine.

Can we talk a bit about his asceticism? Absolutely. Aceticism, in a way, that question brings out all of the issues to do with Pelagius. I mean, it relies upon a view of human nature, which teaches that humans can actually make themselves perfect, that if we try hard enough after we've received baptism, God has already given us the gifts to be able to be those perfect authentic Christians and to lead a life like Christ's in the gospel. So for Pelagius, his asceticism really is part and parcel of his whole theological outlook,

and it brings in all kinds of questions about the role of God's grace, about what happened in the Garden of Eden, about questions of free will and human determinism. So it's not just about disciplining the body. But it is also about disciplining the body. Absolutely, very importantly. Yes. And that's to do with eating, drinking, chastity and so on.

Yeah, eating, drinking, chastity. Even about reforming your thoughts, particularly in Pelagius's case, although I think not because Pelagius himself pushed it in this direction, the debate came to settle on what Augustine would refer to as concupiscence, so sexual lust.

But concupiscence could also mean lust of the eyes. If you go to a gladiatorial game and you really enjoy watching the gladiators seen in the gory blood, then that's the lust of your eyes. You're drawn in, you can't tear your eyes away. Lust for food, lust for eating, gluttony, pride, the idea that you would put yourself above God.

That's all part of concupiscence. And he was writing at this time, wasn't he? Absolutely. He was circulating pamphlets, and there's a wonderful pamphlet that we know Pelagius gave the title of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart. So there he takes an Old Testament story, obviously about Moses and the Exodus and how Pharaoh hardened his heart and wouldn't let the Israelites go, to show that actually Pharaoh is there exercising free will, that he could decide what to do for himself. So that's part of the free will. He also wrote letters. We have examples of two letters that he wrote to Christian bishops. So he wasn't just an isolated ascetic. He also had contacts with the institutional church. Martin Palmer, let's get to this argument.

Can you outline the essential differences in the versions of Christianity between Augustine and Pelagius? And we still have a background of the sacrobin of a lot of people thinking we've been defeated because we've turned Christian and a lot of the Christians thinking. As you said at the beginning of the programme, what are we going to do about this? But at the top story is, what are they arguing about?

Well, they're arguing essentially about the role of grace and whether human beings have any contribution that they can make to their own salvation and redemption. And as Caroline's very beautifully put it, this notion of becoming perfected. And it really goes back to a fundamental disagreement about the story of Adam and Eve. For much of the early church,

the story of Adam Eve was literally that, just a story. It was a useful metaphor. Origin talks about it as being, you know, not terribly helpful, but it's part of our heritage. And there was, of course, quite a major movement in the early church. to ignore the Old Testament altogether as being slightly awkward and confusing. But the issue comes down to really Augustine's interpretation

of one particular sentence in the epistle of Romans, Romans 5, verse 12, which he reads in a particular Latin translation as meaning that because of Adam's sin and death entering the world as a result of that, every single human being is marked for death by that sin. In other words, Adam's action is universal and transcends history.

It affects everybody. We are all damned already because of Adam. What Pelagius argues is, no. Adam is an example of what goes wrong when you forget to follow the will of God. It was a moment, it's a story, it's helpful, but each of us has the capacity to work our own redemption in relationship with God,

responding to God's grace. Nothing is predetermined. We have the power and the free will to make our indecision. In other words, he rejects original sin, the idea that we are all marred. As Augustine puts it, we are a mass of sin. And he says, no, we're made in the image of God. That image gets clouded, it gets disturbed,

but through grace it can be cleaned. Well, those are the headline points. Let's go into them in more detail. John Milbank, we have, Augustine, teachings on original sin. Now, what was his argument and what did he derive it from? Well, I think he derived it from the Bible, and not so much Genesis as the book of the prophet Hasea,

and that in ancient Israel, you know, sin was often thought of as collective and objective, and then we get in Deuteronomy the beginning of a sense of personal responsibility. And in a way, Hasea was trying to combine both those things by saying, well, we are influenced by the past. we can't really escape the past. And I think that's the most crucial thing that Augustine is a realist about this. When he's talking about infant baptism,

he says we make promises on behalf of other people just as those children have inherited a sinful background. And this can sound, of course, shockingly biological. But I think the real point is Augustine doesn't make the division that some Greeks made between culture and nature. And in that way, it makes him very modern. This is a transmission that's going on yes, through a biological legacy, but also through a cultural legacy, that we just, we can't start

all over again. You know, we're within language, we're within our corporeal inheritance. You know, we don't have a blank slate. And I think that's the real division with Pelagius. And I also think Augustine doesn't make a division between grace and free will. In many ways, free will or true desire is the gift of grace. And that Pelagius, the problem is he's just a very crude metaphysician who thinks there's a sort of zero-sum game between our will and God's action, whereas Augustine's

sense of God's absolute transcendence is that, you know, God is working inside us, luring us forward. And it's a great stress on, it's the idea of Willers' desire rather than Willers' self-control. Plagius thinks in terms of Willis self-control.

Caroline, this business of original sin, they won't go away. Pelagist did dispute it, didn't he? It is the sort of becomes the big force, doesn't it, throughout Christianity then, and a lot of people ever since. What does he think it means? Well, I think if we go back for a moment,

because original sin, I think, can make more sense if we put it first back into its fifth-century context because ideas about original sin and what the term means had been floating around in early church writings earlier than Augustine, but Augustine's the first person to really put them together and Pelagius is the first person to really stand against that Augustinian formulation. So if we go back to the Garden of Eden and Genesis 3 in the story of Adam and Eve and the expulsion from paradise,

part of what drives this debate is a fundamental difference in terms of where souls come from and how that fits into God's plan for human salvation. So just to explain that, there are basically three different options in the early church for thinking about where souls come. from. The first is usually associated with the third century theologian origin, and that's the idea that souls pre-exist somewhere, you know, in heaven or somewhere else. And when the body is created by the parents, the soul that already exists is placed within that body, and the child is born. The second option, which is the one that Pelagius defends, is the idea of creationism. So this is the notion that when the parents, you know, when the conception happens, God individually crafts and creates each soul and it gets fused with the body at the point of conception.

Now, I'll come back in a moment as to why that's so important. The third idea is tradition. So you've got this notion that the body and the soul are created at the same time at the same moment of conception. Now put very basically, if like Pelagius, you believe in creationism that the soul goes in. to the body that is pre-created by God, then that makes the inheritance of sin not possible. Whereas if, like Augustine, you believe that the soul and the body are created at the same moment in conception, this opens the way for the inheritance of death from Adam, also for the inheritance of Adam's sin, for the inheritance of the fault in Adam's will, his ability to choose

correctly becomes inherited, but also the guilt that accrued to Adam can be inherited too. So Augustine's position is incredibly logical if you adopt this traditionalist position. And of course, the whole framework is salvation, because this has really big implications, because for Pelagius, God has given humans all the gifts they need to be able to reform themselves and perfect themselves after baptism. Whereas for Augustine, this just isn't possible because we inherit this long-standing fault and this long-standing guilt from Adam. Martin, can we take that, can you take that up? What was Augustine's response to this? Maybe you would say what you think briefly about Pelagius' position

and then tell us what you think of Augustine's response. I think Pelagia's position, as Caroline's pointed out, was frankly part of the fairly orthodox world of Christianity in the 4th century. You earlier in your introduction said he was opposing the Catholic Church. No, in a sense, Augustine is the innovator and the creator of something novel. As Caroline says, pulling together strands that had been there about original sin, but articulating them for the first time and really in a sense riding fairly roughshod

over a heritage that goes back into the earliest stages of the church which is this debate about what is our relationship to salvation. If we look at something like the Nicene Creed, there is no mention there of original sin or of the fall of Adam. It's simply not a theological issue. So Pelagius is basically saying,

look, we have been taught that God is able to become man in order that humanity can a, a godly status. It can become again a child of God and the image of God is restored. His response to Augustine is that Augustine is the sense making us divorced from that divine relationship with that possibility of being a child of God. And he argues quite strongly with this. And I think one of the problems with this whole debate is that this goes on for something like 10 or 15 years. And Augustine gets more and more tetchy and Pelagius gets more and more.

defensive and various other fairly unsavory characters like Jerome weigh in as well, who's not the happiest man in the universe, and it becomes a very bitter debate and dispute. And I think what we end up with is in fact a polemic rather than necessarily a theological argument. But Augustine brought in the notion of predestination. Yes, he did. And that I think is one of the great, I would argue, one of the great stumbling blocks that enters Christianity at this point, because predestination basically says, how do we reconcile God's justice and God, love. This is a fundamental dilemma for Christianity. How do we understand a God who can be both loving and sent his son and grace and forgiveness, but who also has to judge us if we are sinful?

And so predestination, Augustine arrives at eventually, basically says, look, the mystery is solved. You were chosen before you were even born. Before the world was created, God decided certain number of people were going to be saved, regardless. And those are the predestined. everybody else is damned and it doesn't matter how nice you are, how many hospitals you fund, how many charity runs you do, it's not going to make an iota of difference. And Pelagius says, then what is the point of believing? Where do you come in on that debate, John? Well, I agree with Martin that predestination is problematic if we're talking about the sort of the damnation of the reprobate.

But I think that's, you know, Augustine's position doesn't, necessarily have to go in that direction. And I would want to come back to the point that he has a far stronger sense that we're all connected and that we're connected to the historical past. I don't think it's true that he invents the doctrine of original sin. I think he just develops it. I think that all Christians did already, including Oregon, have a notion of the fall. Sometimes they thought it was a fall from a kind of pre-existent state. So it doesn't completely map on to these theories of the soul that Carra is very well described. And in fact, Augustine sort of hesitates about traducianism, although on the whole he seems to favour that position. But I think

that original sin can sound as if this is a very gloomy doctrine and it doesn't allow us any responsibility. But in fact, Augustine says, you know, we're responsible for the sin of Adam in the way that the hands of a murderer are responsible. But as regards to our own individual freedom, we can sort of break with that legacy. And Pelagius is far more pessimistic than Augustine, because Pelagius thinks that only to some extent by your own will can you control the sort of bad passions. He's very like a stoic in some ways. Whereas Augustine, by saying through grace, we can get a true desire, thinks we can really replace these bad passions. We can transform. We can redirect them. So he's far more optimistic about a wholesale

transformation that is, to some degree, available to everybody. We can all re-react. We can all reorientate our desires towards the truly lovable which is God. Do you want to say something briefly? Yes, if I mean briefly, I think if one looks at the idea of what happens to an unbaptised child, we get a very clear picture of the difference

between Pelagius and Augustine. Augustine's view is that because of the sin of Adam, because we are original sin, if a child dies before baptism, they go to hell. End of story. Pelagia says, no, come on, you cannot judge an innocent child who simply has been born into this world,

has committed no sin of their own, of their volition, and therefore he comes up with what eventually becomes the theory of limbo, that children, babies who die before baptism, are not damned and judged. And I think that does capture quite sharply the difference of understanding of both grace and, if you like, of humanity of the two. I would disagree with John. I think Augustine, as he gets towards the end, goes towards predestination very powerfully, and I think often contradicts his own teachings.

Caroline, would you know what you're going here? Yeah, I just pick up on the idea of baptism because I think this is absolutely crucial, infant baptism and adult baptism in terms of sorting out the differences between Pelagius and Augustine. So for Pelagius to be baptised is almost to put a sort of glass wall between the man from the past and the man from the present. So a glass wall in a sense that you can look back on what you were, but you can't access it because you're radically clothed in the new

and it's up to you now exercising your free will to make the right choices. Whereas for Augustine, baptism is, you know, coming into the community of Christ, belonging to, you know, the church. But it's also, it doesn't get rid of what you were before. It actually enables you to cope better with what you were before. So if we go back to the confessions, in that the confessions itself is structured. One scholar describes it as a dialogue with only one voice. It's Augustine talking to God and saying, I looked for you everywhere, but actually, you know, behold, you were within me already. So Augustine's idea of that is that God's grace is infused

in us and at baptism we receive that and then we have to work every single day afterwards. So Julian O'Claanum said that Augustine had the idea of baptism, that it was like shaving sin. So, you know, you shave and you get a nice, clean, smooth surface, but then the stubble grows back every day and it's that everyday maintenance. That's essential. Can I ask you where we are at this point, Mark, Martin, with regard to the political background against with this has been played. You've given the debate, we've given the debate some time, and we've shown different sides to it. But this is in the context of the saccharom of Christianity, feeding itself, and it might have felt itself.

Perhaps I'm exaggerating to be on trial. These arguments about grace, arguments about free will arguments about original sin, which may seem far distant and not important now, being very, very important then. And how is it playing into the political situation? Well, it's playing into the political situation, particularly in North Africa, and I think we have to come back to this, because of the Donatist split, this tradition, which was actually the dominant church in North Africa at the time of Augustine, had argued that if in any sense you had betrayed the church during persecution,

you had pretended not to be a Christian, you'd handed over a sacred text or whatever, then your orders were no longer valid, and you had no way. right to ordain clergy or to be in charge. And that sharpens the whole debate for Augustine, because his major argument is with the Donatists. And he's saying, look, the grace of God can work through anybody. It doesn't have to be through the person who you think is absolutely perfect. And that sharpens Augustine's thinking.

As John has said, about this community, this bigger community. At the same time, he is grappling with the fact that Rome has fallen. the empire is tottering. And he is trying to answer this, and he does so, of course, in the city of God, his great monumental work, in which he basically says, look, yes, the human city is one that we dwell in,

but it is not where we are destined for. And so what Augustine does is he deals with the fact that a hundred years before him, nothing could have excited Christian leaders more than being in control and power, and essentially having the ear of the emperor, having the power that comes with that. With the fall of Rome, with the huge uncertainties there,

with the enormous corruption that comes in, which then triggers the monastic movement as a counter movement to this, which he's deeply attracted to, he begins to say no. Our kingdom, God's kingdom, is not of this world. John Milamak, can you take that on, this idea of that they're fighting for the way the church, now a power?

Yes. The church is now up. I'm trying to keep these things together. really, the church now power should be formed. Yes, I would take a slightly different line to Martin. I would see Augustine as constructing an interesting via media, sort of neither refusing Rome or secular life, nor sort of over-sacralising it in the way that Eusebius had done before him.

So in a sense, he's beginning to secularise political power. And at the same time, he's saying that there's a society that lies beyond merely the political and the church is that society. It's about more than simply law and coercion. It's about processes of reconciliation. One could almost say that Augustine invents the idea of the social space as not reducible to the political space.

So I think you can exaggerate how far he thinks he's being otherworldly. To be sure, he thinks our destiny is in heaven. but that is in itself conceived by him as the real society. But he says, you know, the church is on, the heavenly cities on pilgrimage in this world. And the pilgrimage does matter. But I think he thinks both in terms of society

and has a new sense of the temporality of our social existence, which exceeds the mere rise and fall of empires. Caroline, can I just again, how is this, how important is this to, Roman citizens. How important it is to the people who are running the state. And when the attempt begins to condemn Pelagius as a

heretic and as it were to pursue him through the courts, is this a political issue as well as a religious issue? Well, I think it probably helps if we go back to the sequence of events and just quickly run through them. Because you've got, in 4-11, it's Chilestius, that associate of Pelagius, who's condemned by the church council in Carthage. Augustine tells us later very carefully and in a very stylized manner that when Pelagius was in North Africa, he didn't speak to Augustine. Augustine's sort of caught glimpses of him across a crowded room.

Pelagius moves quite quickly to the eastern half of the empire. He goes to Jerusalem. He's accused by Western bishops, so bishops from Gaul of being a heretic before the Bishop of Jerusalem. He's put on trial there and acquitted. He's then on trial again before a church synod in Diozphaly. and diocesphal. On trial for propagating heretical opinions. And actually, one of Pelagius' answers to this charge is extremely interesting.

What's the key heretical opinion that is accused of propagating? One of the main ones is the idea that it's possible for humans to be sinless. That, you know, if we really, really try hard, we can be without sin. And response to that charge, Pelagius says, you know, actually, I don't accept that that's a heretical proposition. I say that the people who preach this are foolish, but they're not heretical because there's no settled doctrine on this issue. So I think it's very important to remember when we're thinking about all these ecclesiastical trials and processes, that part of what Pelagius was on trial for were for issues that the church hadn't really decided yet. I mean, he was being accused of breaking rules that hadn't yet been made.

We then find the movement, and he's acquitted by the Synod of Diospolis. The action then goes back to North Africa. he's again tried by two synods in Carthage who condemn him. The Pope, the synods in North Africa then contact the Pope in Rome. One Pope refuses to condemn Pelagius. Another Pope does condemn him. This creates riots in the city of Rome in 417. And at this point, the emperor, looking down from Ravenna,

because we should remember the seat of empire is actually in Ravenna now, not in Rome, condemns Pelagius first for his heretical opinions. second for promoting sedition in the streets. So there we get this lovely mixture of the political and the religious. And third, in this particular law, there's an implication that the emperor is condemning Pelagius for just thinking that he's better than everyone else. There's a little sentence which says,

Pelagius thinks he's so perfect. And this coming from the highest member of the elite in Rome, I think also shows what a threat, the Pelagian preaching, that asceticism that you rightly underscored before. How much of a threat this could be to the elite? And it was by no means just these two or three theologians. There were many involved, as I think Martin said earlier on,

it was a hotbed of its theological disputes intermingling with the politics at the time. When Pelagius was pursued through the courts, was this Augustine's doing, or was there also other people joining in? Was Augustine urging this on? He was obviously a powerful operator as well as everything else. No, by no means. There were bishops who were very concerned, both for and against the practice of

infant baptism, for example. Augustine was only one player in a sense it's retrospectively because he's such a huge theologian that we talked about him more than anybody else, although obviously he wrote the key polemical writings.

Martin, Augustine's reputation and power went on and still goes on in that. But certainly was powered its way up to us through the Middle Ages. Pelagius rather disappeared in that then. Where did he do we know anything? Did he

really disappear? Do people like knew where he... We don't even know when he died. We don't even know when he died. We think he probably died somewhere in Palestine. I think probably still revered, living an aesthetic life. Slightly bewildered, I think as Caroline's put it very well, by all the controversy that had gone on about issues which were still under debate. But I think his influence, and we have, Bede tells us that, for example, in the year 428, St. Germanicus from Gaul comes to Britain

to oppose the Pelagian Church here, to argue with the bishops and the priests and so forth, St. David, in his legends, argues with him. I would argue to a certain extent Pelagianism kind of goes underground and becomes a sub-theme within Christianity with Augustine, as it were, as the official lair that you kind of give a nod to, but Pelagianism is actually how it's possible to live. and try and be a goodly person. I think what's really interesting,

that if one looks at the Renaissance period, one can see the legacy of both Augustine and Pelagius, leading to two different models of individuality, that the Plagium model, which is very really close to a Stoic model, has the idea that we have a sort of absolute control of our will, and a sort of, we're equally balanced between good and evil, and it's all about self-control. But in a sense, every individual, according to Plagia,

should be aiming for the same. same ideal of controlling their passions. And that, when can see a reinvocation of that at the end of the Middle Ages in the Renaissance. And yet it's very significant that Petrarch is really looking more towards Augustine, because Augustine's sense that we all share a common grace goes along with a tremendous emphasis that we receive that grace differently. So it's an Augustine that we get the sense of the emergence of something like modern character differentiation. So there's a common grace, but we all have access to it in very, very different ways. And in a sense, it's Augustine who's much more radically pointing to our contemporary sense as it is to be a person or an individual.

To go back to Augustine's verdict on all those early ecclesiastical trials against Pelagius, he said something very interesting where he said that Pelagius was acquitted, but Pelagianism was condemned. And I think that this is something which has then echoed down through the ages. So just like there are different ways of looking at Augustine and Augustinianism. So too, what Pelagius preached and thought and taught and wrote is very different from later Pelagianism. So we have all the semi-Pelagianist disputes that occurred after Augustine sort of had died in the 430s. We then have, in the debate that gets played out at the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, supposedly, you know, when they condemn Pelagius, it actually looks nothing like Pelagianism from the early 5th century.

And then you find in the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau being accused of being Pelagian simply because they acknowledge human free will and stress human rationality. So I think this notion that Pelagianism is a kind of many-headed hydra and can be looked at

and it does become that kind of paradigm of a heresy and it's something which you can hurl at your opponents. I think in many ways the problem later is that you get this idea that free will or grace are an alternative. And that's the sort of the disease of early modern thought. You know, the more you stress God, the less you stress the human and so on.

And I think equally we get the idea that sort of either we're by nature completely good or by nature we're completely greedy or self-seeking or something. And political liberalism is divided between those two options. It's either Russo or Locke. And I think what's interesting about Augustine is that he avoids either. Because, you know, by nature, we were created good, but there's this deep-seated and obscure tendency to evil. And, you know, we can't say that, you know, the answer is simply private property or sexual, you know, problems or something. There isn't one single source of evil.

And in a sense, original sin preserves an agnosticism about the human tendency to do bad, which we all know about. and this is why it's actually a profoundly sort of realistic and yet hopeful political doctrine, I think. Finally, Martin Palmer. Well, I think Caroline's point about Pelagianism being used as a term of, in a sense, abuse for those you oppose, can perhaps be best captured by the fact that when the Church of England produced its new prayer book, common prayer, it was reviewed as essentially a manual of Pelagianism. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, John Milbank, Caroline Humphress, and Martin Palmer. and next week we'll be talking about Descartes

and around his famous statement, Cogito Ergo Summer. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.