Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/494

472 PELAGIUS until in 415 Orosius, a Spanish priest, came from August ine to warn Jerome against him. The result was that in June of that year Pelagius was cited before John, bishop of Jerusalem, and charged with holding that man may be without sin, if only he desires it. This prosecution broke down, and in December of the same year Pelagius was summoned before a synod of fourteen bishops at Diospolis (Lydda). The prosecutors on this occasion were two Gallican bishops, Heros of Aries and Lazarus of Aix, but on account of the illness of one of them neither could appear. The proceedings, being conducted in various lan guages and by means of interpreters, lacked certainty, and justified Jerome s application to the synod of the epithet " miserable." But there is no doubt that Pelagius repu diated the assertion of Coelestius, that " the divine grace and help is not granted to individual acts, but consists in free will, and in the giving of the law and instruction." At the same time he affirmed that a man is able, if he likes, to live without sin and keep the commandments of God, inasmuch as God gives him this ability. The synod was satisfied with these statements, and pronounced Pelagius to be in agreement with Catholic teaching. Pelagius natur ally plumed himself on his acquittal, and provoked August ine to give a detailed account of the synod, in which he shows that the language used by Pelagius Avas ambiguous, but that, being interpreted by his previous written state ments, it involved a denial of what the church understood by grace and by man s dependence on it. The North- African church as a whole resented the decisions of Dios polis, and sent up from their synods of Carthage and Mileve (416) an appeal to Innocent, bishop of Rome, who decided the question in favour of the African synods on " the broad, popular, and unanswerable ground that all Christian devotion implies the assistance of divine grace, that it is admitted in every response of the service, in every act of worship." And, though his successor Zosimus wavered. for a time, influenced partly by his Greek training, which led him to consider the points in dispute as idle, and partly by the Confession of Faith which Pelagius had addressed to the see of Rome, he at length fell in with what he saw to be the general mind of both the ecclesiastical and the civil powers. For, simultaneously with the largely attended African synod which finally condemned Pelagian- ism in the West, an imperial edict was issued at Ravenna on 30th April 418, peremptorily determining the theological question and enacting that not only Pelagius and Coelestius but all who accept their opinions shall suffer confiscation of goods and irrevocable banishment. Thus prompted, Zosimus drew up a circular inviting all the bishops of Christendom to subscribe a condemnation of Pelagian opinions. To this document signature was refused by nineteen Italian bishops, among whom was Julian of Ec- lanum (Apulia), a man of good birth, approved sanctity, and great capacity, who now became the recognized leader of the movement. But not even his acuteness and zeal could redeem a cause which was rendered hopeless when the Eastern Church (Ephesus, 431) confirmed the decision of the West. Pelagianism. The system of Felagius is a consistent whole, each part involving the existence of every other. Starting from the idea that " ability limits obligation," and resolved that men should feel their responsi bility, he insisted that man is able to do all that God commands, and that there is, and can be, no sin where the will is not absolutely free, able to choose good or evil. The favourite Pelagian formula, "Si necessitatis est, peccatum non est; si voluntatis, vitari potest," has an appearance of finality which imposed on superficial minds. The theory of the will involved in this fundamental axiom of Pelagianism is that which is commonly known as the " liberty of indifference," or "power of contrary choice," a theory which affirms the freedom of the will, not in the sense that the individual is self- determined, but in the sense that in each volition and at each moment of life, no matter what the previous career of the indi vidual has been, the will is in equipoise, able to choose good or evil. We are born characterless (non pleni), and with no bias towards good or evil (ut sine virtute, ita et sine vitio). It follows that we are uninjured by the sin of Adam, save in so far as the evil example of our predecessors misleads and influences us (non propagine sed exemplo). There is, in fact, no such thing as original sin, sin being a thing of will and not of nature ; for if it could be of nature our sin would be chargeable on God the creator. This will, capable of good as of evil, being the natural endowment of man, is found in the heathen as well as in the Christian, and the heathen may therefore perfectly keep such law as they know. But, if all men have this natural ability to do and to be all that is required for perfect righteousness, what becomes of grace, of the aid of the Holy Spirit, and, in a word, of Christianity ? Pelagius vacillates considerably in his use of the word "grace." Sometimes he makes it equivalent to natural endowment. Indeed one of his most careful statements is to this effect : " We distinguish three things the ability, the will, the act (posse, velle, esse). The ability is in nature, and must be referred to God, who has bestowed this on His creature ; the other two, the will and the act, must be referred to man, because they flow from the fountain of free will " (Aug., De Gr. Christ! , c. 4). But at other times he admits a much wider range to grace, so as to make Augustine doubt whether his meaning is not, after all, orthodox. But, when he speaks of grace "sanctifying," " assisting," and so forth, it is only that man may " more easily " accomplish what he could with more difficulty accomplish without grace. A decisive passage occurs in the letter he sent to the see of Rome along with his Confcssio Fidei : " We main tain that free will exists generally in all mankind, in Christians, Jews, and Gentiles ; they have all equally received it by nature, but in Christians only is it assisted by grace. In others this good of their original creation is naked and unarmed. They shall be judged and condemned because, though possessed of free will, by which they might come to the faith and merit the grace of God, they make an ill use of their freedom ; while Christians shall be rewarded because, by using their free will aright, they merit the grace of the Lord and keep His commandments" (ib., c. 33, 34). Pelagius allowed to grace everything but the initial determining movement towards salvation. He ascribed to the unassisted human will power to accept and use the proffered salvation of Christ. It was at this point his departure from the Catholic creed could be made apparent : Pelagius maintains, expressly and by implication, that it is the human will which takes the initiative, and is the determining factor in the salvation of the individual ; while the church maintains that it is the divine will that takes the initiative by renewing and enabling the human will to accept and use the aid or grace offered. Scmi2xlayianism. It was easy for Augustine to show that this was an "impia opinio " ; it was easy for him to expose the defective character of a theory of the will which implied that God was not holy because He is necessarily holy ; it was easy for him to show that the positions of Pelagius were anti-Scriptural (see AUGUSTINE) ; but, though his arguments prevailed, they did not wholly convince, and the rise of Semipelagianism an attempt to hold a middle course between the harshness of Augustinianism and the obvious errors of Pelagianism is full of significance. This earnest and conciliatory movement discovered itself simultaneously in North Africa and in southern Gaul. In the former church, which naturally desired to adhere to the views of its own great theologian, the monks of Adrumetum found themselves either sunk to the verge of despair or provoked to licentiousness by his predestinarian teaching. When this was reported to Augustine he wrote two elaborate treatises to show that when God ordains the end He also ordains the means, and if any man is ordained to life eternal he is thereby ordained to holiness and zealous effort. But meanwhile some of the monks themselves had struck out a via media which ascribed to God sovereign grace and yet left intact man s responsibility. A similar scheme was adopted by Cassian of Marseilles (hence Semipolagians are often spoken of as Massilians], and was afterwards ably advocated by Vincent of Lerins and Faustus of Rhcgium. These writers, in opposition to Pelagius, maintained that man was damaged by the fall, and seemed indeed disposed to purchase a certificate of ortho doxy by the abusive epithets they heaped upon Pelagians (ranae, nmscje moriturse, &c.). The differentia of Semipelagianism is the tenet that in regeneration, and all that results from it, the divine and the human will are co-operating (synergistic) coefficient factors. After finding considerable acceptance, this theory was ultimately condemned, because it retained the root-principle of Pelagianism, that man has some ability to will good nnd that the beginning of salvation may be with man. The councils of Orange and Valence (529), however, which condemned Semipelagianism, did so with the significant restriction that predestination to evil was not to be taught, a restriction so agreeable to the general feeling of the church that, three centuries after, Gottschalk was sentenced to be