Pelagius Quotes

The evangelism of Billy Graham is revered, so that if one dares to call the message of Graham the doctrine of Pelagius out of hell, as the Canons of Dordt do indeed call it, he is likely to be stoned as a blasphemer in the streets of Reformed Jerusalem. (3rd edn, p. 63)

Where Augustine struggled to bring an awareness of the action of grace into the humdrum life of his parishioners, Pelagius and his followers attacked the hypocrisy of a society which had officially adopted Christianity but which remained saturated with traditional pagan beliefs and practices – a society in which ‘giving’ often became a vehicle for the pride of the rich, in which the cult of the family and the paterfamilias remained powerful, and in which slavery and torture were still publicly unchallenged.

You will realise that the doctrines are inventions of the human mind as it tries to penetrate the mystery of God. You will realise that scripture itself is the work of human minds recording the example and teachings of Jesus. Thus, it is not what you believe that matters, it is how you respond with your heart and your actions. It is not believing in Christ that matters, it is becoming like him.

That is why you must above all lovingly study the holy scriptures, why your soul must be illuminated by divine utterances, why the dark shadows of the devil have to be dispersed by the flash of God’s word; for the devil is quick to flee from the soul which is illuminated by divine speech, which is always occupied with heavenly thoughts, in which God’s word, whose force the evil spirit is unable to endure, is constantly present. For that reason the blessed apostle compared it to a sword when listing the arms for use in the war of the spirit (Eph.6.17). It is perfectly safe, however, for the mind to become accustomed to differentiating between one thought and another - always subject, of course, to careful and watchful control - and, at the first stirring of the mind, either to approving or to disapproving of what it is thinking, so that it either nourishes good thoughts or immediately destroys bad ones. In this lie the source of good and the origin of sin, and thought is the beginning of every great offense in the heart, painting every single deed on the tablet of the heart, as it were, before doing it; for every deed and every word, whichever it may be, is laid out for inspection in advance and its future is decided by thoughtful consideration. You can see what a brief moment sometimes separates a man’s thinking each thought and his putting that thought into action, nor is anything at all done by the tongue or the hand or other limbs, unless thoughts have previously dictated it; hence the Lord also says in the gospel: Out of the heart of man come evil thoughts, adultery, fornication, murder, theft, false witness, greed, evil, trickery, unchastity, the evil eye, blasphemy, pride, folly. These are what defile men (Mt.15.19,20)

Therefore, all your care and attention must be concentrated on keeping watch, and it is particularly necessary for you to guard against sin in the place where it usually begins, to resist temptation at once the very first time it appears and thus to eliminate the evil before it can grow and spread. When something has to be feared from its smallest beginnings and is the more easily overcome the more speedily it is resisted, one must not wait for it to grow; that is why divine scripture exclaims: Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flow the springs of life (Pr.4.23). 27, 1. One has to make a distinction, however, between those of one’s thoughts which the will favors and embraces affectionately, and those which are wont to flit past the mind like an insubstantial shadow and merely show a glimpse of themselves in passing - the Greeks call them typoi, ‘impressions’ - and also those, to be sure, which offer promptings to a mind which is resistant and unwilling and as glad when they are expelled as it was sad when they were admitted in the first place. In those which show themselves only fleetingly to the mind and reveal themselves as if in flight, there is no underlying sin at all and no sign of fight; but with those which the soul struggles against for some time and which the will resists, we can expect an even contest. Either we consent to them and are conquered or we reject them and conquer them and win a victory in battle. Thus sin exists only in the thought which has given the mind’s consent to a suggestion, which flatters and fosters its own evil tendency and longs for it to erupt into action. This kind of thought, even if it is prevented from reaching any outcome and so fails to fulfill the wish that lies behind it, is nevertheless condemned as a criminal act by the Lord.

Alvarus Pelagius, a Spanish Franciscan, supported the same view in writings which gained him great consideration. “The Pope”, he wrote, “seems to those who view him with the spiritual eye, to be, not a man but a God. There are no bounds to his authority. He can declare to be right what he will and can take away from any their rights as he sees fit. To doubt this universal power leads to being shut out from salvation.

The more deeply we live, the more we feel in sympathy with Augustine, and the less with Pelagius.

REFLECTION: SACRED SOUL WORDS OF AWARENESS You have been graced with the dignity of divine birth, says Pelagius. Live this dignity in your life, safeguard it in one another, and protect it in every human being. (Reflect for a brief time on the ways this wisdom applies to your life.) PRAYER OF AWARENESS Awake, O my soul, And know the sacred dignity of your being. Awake to it in every living soul this day. Honor it, defend it, In heart and mind, in word and deed.

If Pelagius had solved the problem of sin and human responsibility by arguing that humans are perfectly capable of doing whatever they want, Augustine solved it by saying that humans deliberately act against the good ideals that they don’t know and are selfish, greedy, lustful, stubborn, and proud. In his words, people are non posse non peccare, “not able not to sin,” because even the good things that we do are not out of love for God but for some lesser purpose.

Pelagius's doctrine of salvation was grounded in human freedom. Electing grace, he maintained, is offered equally to all because God is no respecter of persons.

Pelagius, who was active in Rome at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century, took a decidedly optimistic view of human nature and of the human capacity to attain perfection. While God gets the ultimate credit for having made us so that we are capable of doing what we should, “we have the power of accomplishing every good thing by action, speech and thought.” Humanity did not need redemption, only inspiration. This meant that Pelagius did not regard Christ as Savior who died for the sins of humankind, but as master and model whom we are called to emulate.

The leader of the Christian army—Cardinal Pelagius himself—had warned the friar from Assisi that it would be folly to traverse the battlefield between the two armies to seek out this Sultan Malik al-Kamil.

The Princeton theologian Charles Hodge would later say that he was more afraid of the ghost of semi-Pelagius than he was of Pelagius.

Made in the image of the God of love, Augustine argued that we are always motivated by love—and that is why Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They sinned because they loved something else more than him. That also means that merely altering our behavior, as Pelagius suggested, will do no good. Something much more profound is needed: our hearts must be turned back.

Sin, the Fall, salvation, grace, election-how is it that they loom so large in the vocabulary of a movement which should have been Platonist, should have been theocentric? It is due, I think, to the overmastering influence of one man, St. Augustine. A Platonist if ever there was one, yet Fenelon quarried no material from him in writing the Maximes des saints. St. Augustine was a man in whom the moral struggle had become inextricably entwined with the search for God; further, he had to enter the lists against the great heresy of Pelagius, which sought to by-pass the mystery of redemption. Consequently, the doctrine of grace became a major preoccupation with him, and he darkened in, perhaps too unsparingly, the outlines of St. Paul's world-picture. Moreover, he sought to pluck the heart out of a mystery by his theory of the two rival delectations. If you avoided sin, it was only because conscious love for God then and there neutralized the attraction of it; your decision was made on a balance of motives. Exaggerated now from this angle, now from that, St. Augustine's theology has provided, ever since, the dogmatic background of revivalism.

So then, why does one person believe and another person doesn’t? Pelagius would say it’s because man has options: to embrace Christ or not to embrace Him; to obey God or not. It is within the power of a human being to obey God at every turn without any assistance from God’s grace. But Augustine would say man is dead in his sins. He has no desire for Christ, and the only way he will ever choose Christ is if God softens his stone-cold, recalcitrant heart and puts in him a desire for Christ.

Pelagius claimed that Adam’s sin injured only Adam; there was nothing passed on to Adam’s posterity. Adam’s sin was merely a bad example. Augustine, on the other hand, maintained that Adam’s sin affected not only Adam but the whole human race.

In reference to Mary, Pelagius is nearer the present Roman Catholic view than Augustine, who exempts her only from actual sin, not from original...in other passages he affirms the conception of Mary in sin. Jerome, with all his reverence for the blessed Virgin, does not even make this exception but says, without qualification, that every creature is under the power of sin and in need of the mercy of God.

Pelagius (c. AD 360–418) later espoused the view that we could earn salvation by our works, which Augustine (AD 354–430) and the church rightly deemed a heresy.

It seems that Palladius had already made a name for himself as a culture warrior, taking a stand against the spread of the Pelagian heresy in Britain. Pelagius, for whom the heresy was named, was himself of British birth, though he had left for Rome by AD 390. He denied Original Sin and taught that human beings were perfectible, and his heresy was a very hot topic in Patrick’s era. In 429 Palladius, then a deacon, convinced Pope Celestine to send the bishop Germanus of Auxerre (the same Germanus who, according to tradition, trained Patrick) to put Britain back on the straight and narrow. According to Prosper, Germanus “routed the heretics and directed the Britons to the Catholic faith.