The debate between Augustine and Pelagius (and the Pelagians) on the question of original sin is one of the most important and intriguing in all of church history. To be an “Augustinian” on this issue is—almost—shorthand simply for being a traditional Christian.

Original sin, in particular the relationship between Adam and the rest of humanity, is perhaps one of the most vexing doctrines in the history of Christian thought. Henri Blocher captures it well when he refers to the doctrine as a “riddle.”¹ Often the best way to come to terms with a difficult theological issue is to come at it through a close study of a key historical controversy that surrounds the doctrine. With the doctrine of original sin, this would entail a study of the pitched theological struggle between Augustine and Pelagius (and the Pelagians). This was a literary battle, as Augustine never met Pelagius, although they both were in Rome at the same time.

In this chapter I will aim to get at the heart of the theological issue which separated Augustine and Pelagius (and the Pelagians), especially on the question of original sin. Attempting to understand Augustine—in particular, to grasp how, in some ways, his thought developed over time; and how in other ways, it remained constant over time—requires a deep immersion in several of his writings, including more than a couple dozen works spanning from near the beginning of his ministry up until the time of his death. In this chapter we will look at a number of Augustine’s works,² as well as the key works of Pelagius and the Pelagians. I will proceed along the following lines: First, I will offer some preliminary thoughts to orient our study and draw attention to the text in Confessions that appears to have triggered Pelagius’s concerns. Second, I will explore the thought of Pelagius in relation to Adam, sin, and Adam’s relationship to the rest of humanity. Third, I will proceed to explore the heart of Augustine’s concerns with, and responses to, Pelagius and the Pelagians. Fourth, I will offer some theological reflections on the significance of Pelagianism and why it is necessary to deal forthrightly with these lines of thought today. This survey of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin has covered a dozen or so works by the Bishop of Hippo, written over some 35 years from around 396 to his death in 430. Before offering a few theological reflections and conclusions, it may be helpful to briefly summarize what we have learned thus far.

Origins of the Pelagian Controversy

Pelagius’s opposition to Augustine’s teaching was triggered by a snippet he heard from the African doctor’s book of personal confessions. In his Confessions Augustine had written,

On your exceedingly great mercy rests all my hope. Give what you command, and then command whatever you will. You order us to practice continence… O Love, ever burning, never extinguished, O Charity, my God, set me on fire! You command continence: give what you command, and then command whatever you will.³ 

It was Augustine’s maxim, “Give what you command, and then command whatever you will,” that gravely concerned Pelagius. For him, Augustine seemed to be saying that the ability to obey God must somehow come from God. That is, what animated (and agitated) Pelagius, was that Augustine appeared to be saying that if a sinner were to be able to obey God’s commands, God himself must be somehow intricately related to human obedience. This is, of course, exactly what Augustine would proceed to argue throughout a lifetime of writing. Indeed, in his anti-Pelagian writings (including his writings against the so-called “semi-Pelagians”) Augustine speaks clearly, and at length, about the priority of God’s grace, the efficacy of God’s grace, and the life-transforming nature of God’s grace.

Given Pelagius’s commitment to the freedom of the will, in which a person could choose or not choose how to act, Augustine’s position was unacceptable. Behind Pelagius’s opposition lay commendable motives. As B. R. Rees comments,

He was at heart a moral reformer who, as he became familiar with Christian society in Rome at the turn of the fourth century, became also more and more critical of its moral standards and responded to the general laxity and extravagance he saw around him by preaching the need for simple and virtuous living based on man’s freedom to choose for himself what he would, and would not, do.⁴ 

For Pelagius, to wrest the responsibility from man and place it in God’s hands would lead only to more licentious living. That is, Pelagius thought Augustine’s notion that God must “grant” the ability to obey the Lord in effect was a denial of the importance of human agency in human obedience. Throughout his literary corpus Augustine circles back to this issue repeatedly (especially in his anti-Pelagian writings). In particular, Augustine often turns to key texts like Philippians 2:12–13 and Ezekiel 36:26–27 to show that God “granting” the ability to obey the Lord does not diminish human agency in obedience, but rather grounds human obedience.

Pelagius (and fellow Pelagians) would criticize Augustine’s position in print, leading to an astonishing literary output on Augustine’s part. Interestingly, given the nature of literary exchange at the time, literary combatants would often “write past” one another, as their writings traveled from one interlocutor to the other. Augustine’s writing and thinking were honed as he responded to Pelagius and the Pelagian position, although it is probably correct to say that the essential seeds of his own position were present in 396.⁵

The Thought of Pelagius

We turn now to the writings of Pelagius himself, starting with his commentary on Romans, to understand the main contours of his thought on original sin.

Editor’s note: In the full version of this chapter, Dr. Green analyzes four of Pelagius’ books. Here, we will look at two of those, along with the summary of Pelagius’ views from the Council of Carthage (411/412). 

Pelagius’s Commentary on Romans

On the crucial text of Romans 5:12, Pelagius argues that when Paul wrote, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin,” he meant that sin entered the world “by example or by pattern.”⁶ That is, Adam was an “example” or a “pattern,” but this does not mean that we are truly and really bound up with Adam’s transgression. Pelagius makes this clear when he comments on the latter part of the verse: “and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” Pelagius writes, “As long as they sin the same way, they likewise die.” Strikingly, Pelagius even says, “For death did not pass on to Abraham and Isaac.”⁷

Pelagius makes an interesting move at Romans 5:15: “But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.” Pelagius interprets the verse to mean, “Righteousness had more power in bringing to life than sin in putting to death, because Adam killed only himself and his own descendants, but Christ freed both those who at that time were in the body and the following generations.”⁸ In other words, rather than speak in asymmetrical terms in order to highlight and magnify the superabundant and glorious and majestic nature of God’s grace, Pelagius does the opposite. He highlights the asymmetrical nature of the passage by downplaying the destructive and universal nature of Adam’s trespass. That is to say, Pelagius (rightly) picks up on Paul’s emphasis on the asymmetrical relationship of (1) Christ’s act of obedience—and accompanying life/righteousness to (2) Adam’s act of disobedience—and its consequence of death, corruption, and condemnation. But Pelagius uses the asymmetry to draw attention to the “lesser” nature of Adam’s transgression: Adam “killed only himself and his own [immediate] descendants,” but not the rest of the human race. Adam “became only the model for transgression” for the human race.⁹ Hence, Pelagius argues, “Just as by example of Adam’s disobedience many sinned, so also many are justified by Christ’s obedience.”¹⁰

Pelagius’s commentary on Romans reveals a clear articulation of the tenets of classical Pelagianism, especially that of Pelagius’s denial that Adam’s progeny is in any meaningful way bound up with Adam’s transgression. In short, for Pelagius, Adam’s sin serves simply as an example for those persons who follow Adam.

Pelagius’s Little Book of Faith

Around 417, Pelagius wrote a letter to Pope Innocent I, and included a statement of faith with it, which he called Little Book of Faith. On the whole, the statement is orthodox: Pelagius affirms the Trinity, condemns Arius and Apollinaris, and adheres to the full humanity and deity of Christ. However, he is critical of Augustine at points, the first of which occurs in section.¹¹ Pelagius pushes back against the notion in Augustine’s Confessions that God is required to enable man toward obedience; he engages again the maxim that triggered the controversy in the first place: “Give what you command, and then command whatever you will.”21 In response, Pelagius writes,

We do also abhor the blasphemy of those who say that any impossible thing is commanded to man by God; or that the commandments of God cannot be performed by any one man, but that by all men taken together they may.¹² 

In section 25, Pelagius has Augustine in view again when he writes,

Free will we do so own, as to say that we always stand in need of God’s help; and that as well they are in an error who say with Manichaeus that a man cannot avoid sin, as they who affirm with Jovinian that a man cannot sin; for both of these take away the freedom of the will. But we say that a man always is in a state that he may sin, or may not sin, so as to own ourselves always to be of a free will.¹³ 

The term “free will” is of course contested in Christian history. Some, like Augustine himself, can use the term, but define it in his own way—such that indeed man has “free will,” but that man (especially in his unregenerate state) is “free” to obey a will which is inextricably bound up with sinful desires. Pelagius can sound almost “Augustinian” when he says that “we always stand in need of God’s help.” But this statement must be interpreted in light of the context. Especially important is the end of this quotation, where Pelagius affirms, it seems, what is generally called a “libertarian” view of free will: “a man always is in a state that he may sin, or may not sin, so as to own ourselves always to be of a free will.” In short, “free will” really seems to mean for Pelagius that our act of the will (again, especially in an unregenerate state) is in no meaningful way connected to, hampered by, or bound up with a deep and intractable sin problem.

On the Deeds of Pelagius

Having surveyed a number of works from Pelagius, we turn now to the results of the Council of Carthage (411/412). The council offered a helpful seven-point summary of the views of one of the key Pelagians—Caelestius, a fourth-century, contemporary follower of Pelagius and one of the key proponents of his views. A certain Paulinus saw seven key errors in Caelestius, which were debated at the Council of Carthage. Augustine lists them in his On the Deeds of Pelagius:¹⁴

1. “Adam was created mortal so that he would die whether he sinned or did not sin.”
2. “The sin of Adam harmed him alone and not the human race.”
3. “The law leads to the kingdom just as the gospel does.”
4. “Before the coming of Christ there were human beings without sin.”
5. “Newly born infants are in the same state in which Adam was before his transgression.”
6. “The whole human race does not die through the death or transgression of Adam.”
7. “. . . nor does the whole human race rise through the resurrection of Christ.”

These seven axioms or principles reveal the inner logic and nature of Pelagianism.

Summary

It is perhaps worth summarizing some of the key tenets of Pelagius and the Pelagians before moving to Augustine’s response. First, Pelagius is quite clear that persons subsequent to Adam (i.e., Adam’s descendants) follow Adam by imitation rather than by propagation. This is central to understanding Pelagius: there is no real connection to Adam, in the sense that Adam’s act of disobedience fundamentally shapes or marks those who follow him.

Second, Pelagius tends to emphasize that there is a fundamental continuity between pre-fall man (Adam before the fall) and post-fall man (all of Adam’s descendants). To grasp this is to begin truly to understand Pelagius’s theology and mindset. Pelagius can look at pre-fall man and post-fall man and see a real and fundamental continuity. There is no fundamental rupture as one moves from the pre-fall era of history to the post-fall era of history.

Third, Pelagius has a lower view of what man was before the fall. This is tied to the previous point. Pelagius sees all man’s current failures and sins as not fundamentally a rupture in man. That is, since there is not a pre-fall realm from which Adam tragically fell—and with Adam, his progeny—there is in a sense a “lower” view of man in his very nature. Not to get too far ahead of things, but one might say that with Augustine there is a grandeur and a magnificence of man that is simply absent in Pelagius. When man—in the present—sins, it is as if Pelagius believes, “Well, this is simply what man does. Sometimes he obeys, sometimes he disobeys.”

Fourth, Pelagius, in his attempt to secure man’s freedom or liberty, perhaps constructs his anthropology so as actually to render incomprehensible a meaningful understanding of human freedom and nature. On this point, B. B. Warfield makes a penetrating observation, suggesting that one of Pelagius’ chief errors was his emphasis on

1. each individual act of man over against, or at the expense of,
2. man’s character.

As Warfield writes, “[Pelagius] looked upon freedom in its form only, and not in its matter.”¹⁵ Likewise, with Pelagius, “the will was isolated from its acts, and the acts from each other, and all organic connection or continuity of life was not only overlooked but denied.”¹⁶

Fifth, Pelagius’s way of reading the old covenant and new covenant (only briefly touched on here) reveals a fundamental hermeneutical weakness. It appears that there was virtually no sense of a historical-redemptive reading of Scripture in Pelagius. The great biblical tensions of the already–not yet, and of the law’s holiness, righteousness, and goodness, combined with its pedagogical role which culminates in Christ, the end of the law, are strangely missing in Pelagius. The idea that the old covenant was good, but had a fading glory, while the new covenant is truly better, with an unfading glory, seems to have no purchase in Pelagius’s theologizing.

Augustine’s Response to Pelagius and Pelagianism

Editor’s note: In the full version of this chapter, Dr. Green analyzes around a dozen of Augustine’s works in which he responds to Pelagius. Here, we will look at three of those. 

The Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins and the Baptism of Little Ones

Augustine wrote this volume in 412. It consists of an Introduction plus three “books” (essentially modern-day chapters). The work was a response to a certain Marcellinus, who had written to Augustine with questions about Pelagianism. One of the ways in which Augustine attempts to critique Pelagius and the Pelagians is by a discussion of infant baptism, and the Pelagian position on original sin in relationship to infant baptism. Augustine returns to this theme of infant baptism at a number of points in his writings. There are three key lines of (Pelagian) argument to which Augustine responds.¹⁷

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