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THE great opponent of the doctrine of Original Sin was Pelagius.
He holds the same place in the controversy about the Fall that Arius does in
the controversy about the Incarnation;
but he was a better man than Arius.
Pelagius was a British monk (some say he was Irish, relying on a rude remark
of St. Jerome, who calls him " stuffed with Scotic "? i.e., Irish, " porridge
").
He went to Rome about 400, and spent many years there.
He thought that his neighbours did not sufficiently emphasize the free will
of man and his power to resist temptation; as a monk, he was too optimistic
about the real character of human society, and as a layman he had no pastoral
responsibility.
He put forward his doctrinal system in the interest of morality.
This system consisted of the following seven doctrines:
There is, according to Pelagius, no such thing as "original sin";
and man has no need of grace in order to attain salvation.
This system is very attractive to the ordinary man of independent will and
common-sense religion and morals;
and particularly to the Englishman.
Probably 90 per cent of the English laity
(that is, practising members of Christian congregations)
are unconscious Pelagians.
[Admiral Hawkins' exclamation in Westward Ho! is
typical:
They ministers may preach till they'm black in the face, works is the trade!
Faith can't save, nor charity neither! ]
It is for this reason that they find it so hard to under'stand and accept
the doctrine of the Church and Sacraments.
The average Englishman is an individualist,
therefore he does not easily accept the doctrine
that the Church is a body of which he is a member;
he is a Pelagian, therefore he feels no need of Divine help,
and no need of sacraments to convey that help to him.
The moral ideal set before children is often thoroughly Pelagian.
Kipling's If, which is given to Boy Scouts and others as an ideal,
and is not without its own grandeur, is nevertheless not Christian,
because it advises us to rely wholly on ourselves,
not on the power and love of God.
Pelagianism is "fundamentally irreligious, so far as it tends to destroy
in the heart of man the feeling of childlike dependence on his Maker" [N.
P. Williams, Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin, p. 356.].
We have not got the unlimited power of free will asserted by Pelagius;
man is weaker and more vicious than that sheltered monk knew.
The discoveries of Freud, even though we accept them with great qualifications,
at least show that there are vast depths of evil in the subconscious mind of
man, of which he is usually quite unaware.
Pelagius accepted the New Testament, and he did not deny that Christ died
for men, or that grace (that is, the help of God) was needed by those who had
sinned.
But he maintained that men can keep from sin by their own power,
and that if they do this, they have no need either of Christ's saving death
or of the power of the Holy Ghost.
It is not surprising that the Pelagians were closely connected with the Nestorians;
some think that Pelagius' ideas were originally derived from Theodore of Mopsuestia
(a Briton and a Syrian might easily meet in Rome).
A Christ who is no more than a man externally connected with the Word of God
is sufficient for those who are able to overcome temptation by their own power: "the
Nestorian Christ is a fitting Saviour for the Pelagian man".
And so Pelagianism was formally condemned, not only by various Latin provincial
councils (Carthage, 411 and 418), but also by the Council of Ephesus, which
in its first and fourth canons associated Caelestius, the leading follower
of Pelagius, with Nestorius.
Since Pelagius set hardly any limits to the power of free will, he laid upon
human nature a burden that it could not bear.
For, according to his theory,
our inborn weakness and the power of habit do not exist, and therefore give
us no excuse:
our smallest sins are exaggerated, and a sensitive conscience
may easily be overwhelmed by them, since every one of them is an expression,
not of human weakness, but of wilful defiance of God.
[N. P. Williams, Ideas
of the Fall and Original Sin, p. 357.]
We must admit that man would be subject to physical death, even if he had
never fallen;
but death would in that case have been different from death as
we know it;
it would not have been the punishment of sin.
That the fall of man does not affect his descendants is a doctrine which must
be rejected;
we are not bound to believe that we inherit evil as a transmitted
character, but only that the loss of grace caused by the Fall is common to
all human beings, apart from the restoration of it through the resurrection
of Christ.
Hence we must deny that children start life as God meant them to.
They inherit the weakness which is due to the loss of grace,
and which is called ORIGINAL SIN.
We know nothing about the fate of unbaptized infants;
what we do know is, that infants ought to be baptized,
in order that they may have the saving power of God
and the privilege of membership in His Church, as early as possible.
That mankind neither died with Adam nor rose with Christ is directly contrary
to the teaching of St. Paul (Rom.v.17; I Cor.xv.22).
Those who lived righteously before our Lord came
were saved, not by their own merits, but by His death,
as truly as Christians are.
That any human being was ever sinless (except our Lord)
is a belief for which we have no evidence,
and which is contrary to the teaching of St. Paul (Rom. iii. 16)
and to the experience of history.
top
The great adversary of Pelagius was Augustine;
and the Church owes him a vast debt for his defence of the doctrine of original
sin and of the need of grace.
But his particular system is not part of the
Catholic faith, in spite of its enormous influence in Latin and Reformed
Christendom.
St. Augustine had wandered long in various forms of religious and moral error,
and had been converted to the Christian faith by a marvellous act of Divine
grace, which is second only to the conversion of St. Paul.
He was therefore well aware of those sides of human life, which Pelagius ignored;
and he was horrified by the attempts of Pelagius, with whom he was personally
acquainted, to deny the need of that grace to which he himself, as he knew
very well, owed everything.
But St. Augustine went far beyond the defence of original sin
and the necessity of Divine grace.
He believed, of course, that the story of Adam was historical:
so did nearly all the Fathers.
But he also believed in the theory of original righteousness in its most extreme
form:
he held, without any evidence, that Adam before his fall was not liable to
sickness or to the weakness of old age (de Gen. ad lift. ix. 6), and
that his brain was as far superior to those of the greatest philosophers among
his descendants as a bird is swifter than a tortoise (contra Julianum, v.
i).
He taught that the consequences of the Fall were the complete loss of free
will, and the transmission to all the descendants of Adam of hereditary moral
disease (vitium) and guilt in the sight of God (reatus).
This
moral disease he called concupiscence (a word which seems to have been invented
by Tertullian);
he identified it almost entirely with sexual passion, holding
that since the Fall human beings are so far corrupted that they cannot beget
or bear children without sin. Hence every child is "born in sin",
as the result of generation. Moreover, he taught that all men sinned "in
Adam"
(as the Epistle to the Hebrews says that Levi paid tithes to Melchizedek "in
Abraham": Heb. vii. 9-10);
and were therefore justly condemned to hell,
a fate from which only the baptized, saved by the inscrutable decree of God,
could escape: even infants, if unbaptized, would go to hell with the rest.
It followed that no unbaptized person could display any virtue or good works;
for this reason the Anglican Article 13 declares that "good
works done before justification" (such as a gift by a Jew to a hospital) "have
the nature of sin". [Men strongly influenced by St.
Augustine drew up the Articles.]
Further, since man had lost his power of free will, and was born morally diseased
and guilty in the sight of God, he was totally corrupt.
This view was intended
to emphasize the love of our Lord in dying for such creatures, and the power
of grace that can restore to union with God such a mass of corruption.
The teaching of St. Augustine did not prevail everywhere:
it seems to have had little influence in Eastern Christendom at any time;
in the West there was a school of thought which was strongly opposed to it,
led by St. John Cassian and St. Vincent of Lerins, who were monks at L?ins
(an island off Cannes in the Gulf of Lions).
In this region the doctrine known as Semi-Pelagianism became prevalent;
according to this doctrine, the grace of God and the will of man co-operate
in the baptized, and in some cases the first impulse to goodness arises from
the human will, apart from the grace of God.
Semi-Pelagianism was condemned in 529 by the Second Council of Orange, which,
however, was careful to avoid the extreme opinions peculiar to St. Augustine,
and in particular declared that though human free will was weakened by the
Fall, it was not destroyed.
Nevertheless the system of St. Augustine, who was undoubtedly the greatest
of the Latin Fathers, was extremely powerful in Latin Christendom for many
centuries, but the thinkers of the Middle Ages modified his teaching.
St. Anselm (1033-1109) ignored his doctrine of original guilt, and emphasized
our lack of original righteousness.
Abelard (1079-1142) rejected altogether the theory that man deserves punishment
for the sin committed by Adam.
St. Thomas Aquinas, among other important changes, refused to believe that
unbaptized infants go to hell;
he placed them in the "limbo of children" (limbus
puerorum), where, according to later speculators, they might attain to
the utmost natural happiness, but not the Beatific Vision of God reserved for
the saints in heaven.
He taught that mankind lost supernatural grace at the
Fall, and was reduced to a merely natural condition, but that this did not
mean the complete loss of free will. His rival, Duns Scotus, took an even milder
view of the Fall.
top
The Reformation was in one aspect a return to the severity of St. Augustine;
it has been called "the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of Grace
over Augustine's doctrine of the Church".
Luther and Calvin, like St. Augustine and St. Paul,
had been through the experience of conversion.
Both denied the existence of free will in fallen man
(Luther had a violent controversy with Erasmus on this point),
but it was Calvin who worked out the teaching of St. Augustine
into a ruthlessly logical scheme.
St. Augustine's teaching on the Fall had never been quite consistent with his
firm adherence to the visible Church and her sacraments.
Calvin had no such difficulty,
for he rejected the existing visible Church, both in theory and in practice;
he held that the universal Church was the invisible company of those who are
predestined by God to salvation, and whose names are known only to God;
and he laid no emphasis on the necessity of baptism,
which to St. Augustine, as to all the Fathers, was necessary to salvation.
This belief that the Church is invisible,
and that baptism, though it may be scriptural and desirable,
is not universally necessary,
is still the distinguishing mark of the heirs of Calvin.
The following dogmas were known as the Five Points of Calvinism :
Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white
With prayer, the broken-hearted nun,
The martyr, the wan acolyte,
The incense-swinging child?
undone Before God fashioned star or sun! )
Calvin rejected the existing Church (corrupt as it undoubtedly was),
and set up in opposition to it a new organization
based on what he mistakenly believed to be the model of the apostolic Church.
His doctrine of man is directly contrary to the New Testament,
and to the teaching of the Church in all ages.
It is only fair to say that most modern Calvinists have dropped the worst parts
of Calvin's system;
but while it lasted, its cruelty drove multitudes, who
believed it to be orthodox Christianity (as even John Ruskin did), away from
the Christian faith.
John Calvin (Jean Chauvin) was a Frenchman from Picardy,
who settled in the independent republic of Geneva,
and organized it in accordance with his own ideas.
(Geneva was not part of Switzerland in the time of Calvin,
or for 250 years afterwards,
and the French form of the Reformation established by Calvin
is not to be confused with its Swiss form, established by Ulrich Zwingli.)
Calvin's system is expounded in his Institutes,
written in Latin when he was twenty-seven years old.
It displays the ruthless logic and the organizing power of the French character.
The intolerable tyranny set up by Calvin at Geneva,
by which the smallest details of men's private lives were inquired into by
paid spies and severely punished, was regarded as a model by Puritans in many
other countries:
it became completely dominant in Scotland and New England;
the establishment of it in England was the object of the Puritan party for
100 years, and was only frustrated by the Restoration of the Church and Monarchy
in 1660.
The most important confessions of the Calvinist faith were the Confessio
Gallicana, adopted by the first National Synod of the French Reformed
Church in 1559;
the Confessio Belgica and the Heidelberg Catechism, which were accepted
by the Synod of Dort in 1618 as the official formularies of the Dutch Reformed
Church;
and the Westminster Confession (1643).
top
The English bishops in the reign of Elizabeth, many of whom had been in exile
under Mary and had brought back Calvinist ideas, for the most part accepted
the teaching of Calvin about the Fall, but not about the Church.
The Anglican Articles, finally revised during that period, are highly Augustinian,
but they do not commit the Church of England to the doctrines peculiar to Calvin.
Thus Article 9, after rejecting Pelagianism, tells us that "original sin
is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man that naturally is ingendered
of the offspring of Adam", and that "the flesh, in every person born
into this world, deserveth God's wrath and damnation", which is St. Augustine's
theory of original guilt. But though man is "very far gone from original
righteousness", he is not totally corrupt.
In Article 13, "works done before justification" "have the nature
of sin" (whatever that means), but they are not said to be sin, as in
Calvinistic confessions.
Article 17, on predestination, avoids saying that men are predestined to damnation,
and the last two sentences of it, which appeal to the general sense of Scripture,
are a protest against the Calvinistic habit of arguing from proof-texts taken
out of their context.
But the surest proof that the Articles are not Calvinistic (though they were
so drawn that moderate Calvinists could accept them) is that thoroughgoing
Calvinists were never satisfied with them.
In 1595 Archbishop Whitgift tried to get a formula, known as the Nine Lambeth
Articles, imposed on all the clergy of the English Church. His object was to
conciliate the Puritan clergy, who, he hoped, would consent to submit to episcopal
government, and to the use of the surplice, the sign of the cross in baptism,
and the ring in marriage, if their favourite doctrines were made compulsory.
These articles were a somewhat expanded form of the Five Points of Calvinism.
Fortunately the English Church was saved from the Lambeth Articles by the personal
intervention of Queen Elizabeth.
The famous saying attributed to Pitt, that the English Church has "a
Popish liturgy and Calvinistic articles", is completely misleading in
both its parts. [What Pitt really said was, "We have a Calvinistic creed, a
Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy".]
The English Church is
not, and never was, Calvinist.
It is true that Calvinism was very powerful, and sometimes dominant, for a
century after the Reformation.
But since the Restoration it has been growing steadily weaker.
There was a revival of Calvinism by the Evangelicals in the early part of the
nineteenth century, but it has died down, and even the Evangelical party no
longer teaches the doctrine of Calvin.
It is vain to suggest, as a distinguished Congregationalist has recently done,
that the English Church should return to the Calvinism of her Articles for
the sake of union with the heirs of Calvin;
for the Articles were never Calvinistic,
and Calvinism is probably weaker in the English Church now than it has been
for 300 years.
The Anglican clergy and laity are far more inclined to Pelagianism than to
Calvinism;
and the Articles favouring St. Augustine's system (9-18) (to which,
as to the other Articles, the clergy now only give a general assent) are precisely
those that are least in accordance with the mind of the Church now.
The Westminster Confession, the doctrinal formulary of all British Presbyterians,
was drawn up in 1643 by a committee of divines appointed by the rebel section
of the Long Parliament to negotiate with the representatives of the Scottish
Presbyterians.
It is a strictly Calvinistic document.
It has, of course, no authority whatever in the English Church, and even in
Scotland, though still legally binding, it is not interpreted rigidly, except
by the smaller Presbyterian bodies.
top
The Reformation in the Roman Communion did not check the decline of St. Augustine's
influence.
The Council of Trent adopted an intermediate position between the teaching
of St. Thomas Aquinas and the teaching of Duns Scotus.
It accepted the canons of Carthage condemning Pelagianism,
and those of Orange condemning Semi-Pelagianism;
it asserted the free will of man,
and denied that good works "done before justification" are in any
way sinful,
while it retained the belief in "original guilt"
(without which, as we have seen,
the later dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin is meaningless).
The word "concupiscence" is used by St. Augustine to mean the natural
desires of the flesh.
He did not deny that these were created good, but he
held that since the Fall they were wholly corrupted.
The same view was taken by Calvin;
from him comes what is commonly called the Puritan attitude towards the body.
The Anglican Ninth Article teaches that concupiscence, "as the Apostle
doth confess, hath the nature of sin" (rationem peccati).
The Council of Trent admitted that St. Paul sometimes called it sin,
but denied that it was, properly speaking, sinful.
The Council of Trent seems to have been right;
the Anglican Article, intended to keep the Puritans within the Church (which
it failed to do), goes farther than Scripture warrants.
The natural desires of the body, when not excessive or misused, are free from
sin.
top
After the Council of Trent, the influence of St. Augustine declined still
further, because the Jesuits dominated the policy of Rome, and through the
reforms of Trent the power of Rome was now almost irresistible.
There was, however, one attempt to restore the system of St. Augustine in all
its rigour?
the movement known as Jansenist,
though its adherents always repudiated the name.
The founders of this movement were Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres, and
his friend Jean du Verger de Hauranne, titular abbot of St. Cyran (by which
name he is commonly known), and director of the famous convent of Port Royal,
near Paris.
Jansen, who is said to have read the entire works of St. Augustine
thirty times, wrote a large book, the Augustinus, which was published
in 1640, two years after his death.
The Jesuits at once attacked it, and in
1653 Pope Innocent X condemned as heretical five propositions that he declared
to have been taken from the Augustinus. These were the following:
The party of Port Royal did not deny that these propositions (which are not
far from the Five Points of Calvinism) were false, but only that they were
to be found in Jansen's book.
Whether they were really there or not is still disputed:
certainly no references for them have ever been officially given.
[Isaac Barrow, who was in France at the time, asked, "Why does
not the Pope say where in the Augustinus the propositions are to be
found ?"]
Both the Pope and the King of France required unconditional surrender, and
the long persecution of St. Cyran and Port Royal was due solely to their refusal
to make that surrender.
It was not a question of right belief, but of the demands of despotism.
The struggle of the Augustinian party against the Jesuits was given literary
immortality by the Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal.
In 1713 the controversy entered a new stage, when Pope Clement XI in the famous
Bull "Unigenitus" condemned the Moral Reflexions on the New Testament, by
Pasquier Quesnel, as containing 101 false and heretical propositions.
Le Tellier, the Jesuit confessor of Louis XIV, was jealous of Archbishop de
Noailles, who had given his sanction to this book, and by using the diplomatic
pressure of the French Government, he forced the Pope to condemn it.
Opposition to the "Unigenitus" became mixed up with the struggle
between the French Crown and the lawyers.
It was even possible, at one time,
that a large part of the French Church might separate from Rome and unite itself
with Canterbury.
However, the opposition was crushed;
and the only schism which resulted was
the separation of the dioceses of Holland, led by the Chapter of Utrecht.
The Pope refused to allow the consecration of a successor to Archbishop Codde,
who died in 1710:
in 1723 Cornelius Steenoven was duly consecrated Archbishop
of Utrecht,
[The consecrator was a French missionary bishop,
Dominique Marie Varlet.]
and his successors have remained independent
of Rome, and have been since 1932 in full communion with Canterbury.
The adherence of the Chapter of Utrecht to the party of Port Royal, and its
refusal to admit the Five Propositions to be Jansen's, and to accept the Bull
Unigenitus, were one of the causes that led to the quarrel.
We are not called upon to maintain that the Jansenists, so called, were right
in their contentions;
but their claim that the system of St. Augustine, as
interpreted by themselves, was tenable within the Roman Communion (which was
all that they demanded) ought to have been settled by free discussion, not
by persecution.
top
In conclusion, we are bound to reject both Pelagianism and Calvinism.
Of the two, Pelagianism is by far the more dangerous, at least in England,
because it is so attractive to the English character.
Calvinism in its original form is almost dead;
Pelagianism is very much alive.
The teaching of St. Augustine goes beyond Scripture, and since the discoveries
of modern anthropology, psychology, and Biblical criticism, is very difficult
to accept.
We can no longer believe that we are guilty in God's sight because of sins
committed by our ancestors.
But though we reject "original guilt",
we must continue to retain belief in original sin,
which both Scripture and experience show us to be true.
We are not what God meant us to be, even at the moment of birth;
we have a weakness which needs curing by the power bestowed through baptism:
that power comes from the death and resurrection of our Lord,
without whom we can do nothing that is good,
and cannot even start on the road that leads to God.
The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith proves false, I find:
For our 'Essays and Reviews' debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso's words have weight.
I still, to suppose it true, for my part,
See reasons and reasons: this, to begin:
'Twas the faith that launched point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie: taught Original Sin,
The corruption of man's heart. '
robert browning: "Gold Hair, a Story of Pornic".