Pelagius

Overview

Pelagius (fl. early 5th century) was a British (or, by some accounts, Breton) monk whose teaching on sin, free will, and grace provoked Augustine of Hippo’s sustained opposition and was condemned as heresy by the wider church.¹ He gave his name to Pelagianism, the view that human nature was left unimpaired by Adam’s fall and that people have full natural ability to obey God and merit eternal life.

Life and Ministry

Little is known of Pelagius’s early life. Charles Hodge notes that even his origin was disputed among contemporaries: whether he was “a native of Brittany or of what is now called Great Britain… is a matter of doubt.”¹ By later tradition his family name was Morgan.² He was, in Hodge’s description, “by profession a monk, although a layman,” of “culture, ability, and exemplary character,” a judgment his opponents did not dispute even as they condemned his teaching.¹

Pelagius taught in Rome in the early fifth century, joined there by two disciples who became prominent in their own right: Coelestius, a teacher and jurist, and Julian, later bishop of Eclanum in Italy.¹ Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa,¹ became his chief theological opponent in what Bavinck describes as more than a century of struggle over the doctrine of grace.³

The controversy moved through a sequence of councils. Pelagius and his teaching were condemned at Carthage in 412, then exonerated at the Synods of Jerusalem and Diospolis in 415.⁴ A synod of sixty bishops at Carthage condemned him again in 416.⁴ Zosimus, bishop of Rome, at first sided with Pelagius and censured the African bishops’ judgment, but reversed himself once a general council of two hundred bishops at Carthage confirmed the condemnation in 418.⁴ The Eastern church added its own condemnation at the Council of Ephesus in 431.⁴

Theological Contribution

Pelagius’s own guiding conviction, as Hodge summarizes it, was “that ability limits obligation”: if a person is obligated to do something, that person must already be able to do it, since God cannot righteously demand what he does not also give the power to perform.¹ On this basis Pelagius directly rejected Augustine’s own prayer, Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis (“grant what you command, and command what you will”), calling it an absurdity, because it assumed God could demand more of a person than that person could render, receiving the rest only as an unmerited gift.¹

From that starting point Pelagius denied that Adam’s sin corrupted human nature or that guilt could be inherited: each person is born, in his own words as Hodge renders them, “sine virtute…sine vitio,” without virtue and equally without vice, in the same condition in which Adam was created.⁵ Adam’s transgression, on this account, “exerted the influence of a bad example” on his descendants and nothing more, since Adam was never the covenant representative of the human race and each person undergoes their own probation.⁶ Because human nature remains unimpaired, some individuals can live entirely without sin, and salvation is possible even apart from the gospel, since the moral law given to all people offers the same path to eternal life that the gospel does, only “rendered more easy.”⁶ Pelagius did not deny grace outright but redefined it as “everything which we derive from the goodness of God,” including the natural faculties of reason and free will themselves, rather than the Holy Spirit’s supernatural, regenerating work.⁴

Historical Significance

The system that bears Pelagius’s name did not end with his own condemnation. A. A. Hodge’s comparison of the two rival systems that emerged from the controversy places them at opposite poles of later theology: “Augustinianism completed in Calvinism” against “Pelagianism completed in Socinianism,” with Arminianism as “the system of compromises” between them, a developed Semipelagianism.² Bavinck traces the same pattern earlier in church history, in the high esteem the patristic period already gave to ascetics and monks: that tendency, he writes, “culminated in the teaching of Pelagius, who did not deny grace but understood it as a universal gift to all people,” rather than the Spirit’s particular saving work.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” in Systematic Theology, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 150. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 96-98. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩
Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” 153. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” 151. ↩
Hodge, “Chapter VIII. Sin,” 152. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩