Grace for Grace: The Debates after Augustine and Pelagius

1. The Background: Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy

1 1. Portions of this chapter have previously appeared in Eugene TeSelle, “Pelagius, Pelagianism,” in ATA, 633–40, by permission; and “Grace,” in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, vol. 2, ed. Karla Pollmann and Willen Otten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), by permission of Oxford University Press. 2. Cyprian, Ep. 64 to Fidus. 1 THE BACKGROUND Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy Eugene Teselle The Pelagian controversy had its origin in two doctrinal questions.1 One concerned the effect of the sin of Adam and Eve upon their descendants. Did it cause moral weakness, mortality, or perhaps even guilt? Or were they created in the same condition as later humanity? The other concerned the ability of sinners to return to God. Was this within the power of their free will? Or were they able to do it only with divine assistance, and perhaps even because the process was initiated by divine grace? The Initial Controversy In the West there were many who followed the doctrine of Cyprian that infants are baptized not for their own sins but for the aliena peccata of Adam.2 This seemed to imply that Adam’s sin caused not only death but also a predisposition to sin in all his 2 EUGENE TESELLE descendants. In North Africa, the incipient doctrine of original sin, which they claimed was from Cyprian, became part of the authentic tradition of the Church. A different perspective, likewise controversial, was the Origenist view that souls are born in mortal bodies because of their sins in a previous existence. An alternative to both of these perspectives was set forth in Rome by Rufinus “the Syrian”—a presbyter, a member of Jerome’s monastery in Bethlehem, and the probable translator of the Pauline epistles in the Vulgate—who came to Rome in 399 as Jerome’s delegate in the Origenist controversy. His chief follower there was Caelestius, who would soon become the focus of controversy. In the background was the Syrian doctrinal tradition, stated as early as the second century by Theophilus and Irenaeus, that Adam and Eve were created neither mortal nor immortal, but with the possibility for either destiny, depending on their free choice. To put it another way, they were created mortal but could have eaten from the tree of life had they remained obedient, and thus their actual death is the consequence of sin. Among the later representatives of this tradition (Diodore, Chrysostom, Theodore) there is some uncertainty whether physical death is natural or is the result of sin, and whether various passages of scripture refer to physical or spiritual death. Rufinus the Syrian asserted unambiguously that death is natural (although Adam and Eve could have eaten from the tree of life); punishment is only for individual sins, and not because of Adam’s sin.3 Augustine in his earlier writings entertained the hypothesis that death and moral weakness are not punishment for sin but a pedagogical challenge to improvement, or that human beings were created in a state of indeterminacy between immortality and mortality .4 Later he would deny this, on the grounds that it is inappro3 . See Eugene TeSelle, “Rufinus the Syrian, Caelestius, Pelagius: Explorations in the Prehistory of the Pelagian Controversy,” AS 3 (1972): 66–73, 79–86; J.-M. Girard, La mort chez saint Augustin. Grandes lignes de l’évolution de sa pensée telle qu’elle apparaît dans ses traités (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1992), 133–38. 4. Augustine, lib. arb. 3.20.56; 3.22.64; 3.2471–73; Gn. litt. 6.19.30–39.40; cf. pecc. mer. 1.2.2–6, 6. BACKGROUND 3 priate for human beings to make themselves better than God made them (civ. Dei 12.9). The activities of Rufinus and Caelestius may be part of a cosmopolitan enlightenment correcting a provincial West. At the height of the Origenist controversy (404–5), many Westerners— including the father-in-law of Julian of Eclanum—had links with John Chrysostom in the East, and Pelagius was to make use of Chrysostom in his writings.5 A Double Movement The so-called Pelagian movement actually had two foci. One was Caelestius’s insistence on the similarity of Adam’s situation to that of contemporary humanity. If Adam’s sin affected only himself , the baptism of infants is not for the remission of sins but for entry into the realm of God and sanctification in...