This is simply the killer blow against Pelagianism: the very fact of human behaviour, throughout history and across cultures. We who live in the wake of the horrors of the terrible 20^th century ought to know this more than anyone in history. As critic George Steiner once said: “We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.”

How bad are human beings? It would have to be admitted that the obvious answer is ‘well, pretty bad’.

But anyone who is a parent knows that a key tactic in helping children to behave is to expect better of them. Somehow, they will rise to meet the standard expected of them.

Aren’t human beings as a whole like this? If we simply say ‘It’s no good: they’re simply evil and always will be’ won’t we get what we expect? Doesn’t it make sense to say to people, ‘not only is doing good something you ought to do; it is also something you can do’?

This very debate was circulating it amongst Christians some 1500 years ago.

Pelagius was a British theologian who took morality – and the moral responsibility of human beings – seriously. And he lived through a time in which a great civilization was decaying around him. He would have been witness to tremendous and brutal evils in his time, living as he did around the sack of Rome in the early 5th Century.

His teaching was not that human beings are naturally good – that doctrine would have had no purchase at all amongst those who had seen limbs hacked off and heard the screams of the rape victims. Rather, he held that man and woman were free to choose the right or the wrong. Each of us could and should and would be held fully accountable for our actions. We ought to hear the full impact of God’s address to his people ‘Be holy, as I am holy’, or as Jesus said: ‘You must therefore be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’.

For Pelagius: this means what it says. Surely Jesus would not have said it if was not a moral possibility. He would not have given us a task we could not accomplish, difficult though it may be. Moral pessimism is insulting to the creator of human beings, who created not puppets or beasts, but persons.

This is how Pelagius described it. Think about what happens when you do anything. There are three aspects to it: your ability, or power to do the act; your intention to do it; and the actual moment when you put your power and your intention together and realize the action. As Pelagius thought of it, the power that we have to act comes from God. But our intentions and the realization of our actions belong to us. When we choose to do the right, in order words, we can count on power from God to aid us. But it is we who choose it. The first step is ours.

It isn’t too hard to see what made and still makes Pelagianism attractive. First, like most decent heresies, it could appeal to Biblical sources. The commands of the law and of Jesus were surely commands that could be carried out and ought to be taken seriously.

Second, it was the remarkable lives of holiness that Christians had lived in the first years of the Christianity that had been perhaps the most remarkable testimony to the truth of their cause. Pelagianism was a call to return to this source of strength in the face of social chaos.

Third, Pelagianism is a theology that seems to treat us like individuals and like adults. It demands that we put aside childish excuses, and take responsibility each for our own actions. It requires of us discipline and hard work; it calls us to virtue.

Fourth, it is positive about humankind in a way that seems to honour the creator’s stamp on us.

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