Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

One critic of Augustine refused to accept such a pessimistic view of humankind. The Christian monk Pelagius taught his followers that Adam’s Fall did not directly affect his posterity at all, nor did the behavior of Adam and Eve spiritually transmit a disease to the human race. The primal parents’ sins affected only themselves. Every child born into the world is as Adam was at Creation: entirely innocent; each human being is born with the freedom to choose his or her own path in life.[1] Pelagius contends that Augustine’s doctrine of “sovereign grace” went against the biblical belief that God endowed humanity with natural goodness and free will. Even before the advent of Jesus, there were sinless and righteous human beings, “gospel men before the gospel,” such as Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, and Job.[2] We owe much of the information we have about Pelagius to his critic Augustine, who preserved the words of his adversary:

• Sin is carried on only by imitation, committed by the will, denounced by reason, manifested by the law, punished by justice. . . . If sin is natural, it is not voluntary; if it is voluntary, it is not inborn. These two definitions are as mutually contrary as are necessity and free will. Adam was created mortal and would have died whether he sinned or not sinned; the sin of Adam injured only him, not the human race; the law leads to the kingdom of Heaven, just as the gospel does; even before the coming of Christ there were men without sin; newborn infants are in the same state which Adam was before his transgression; the whole human race does not die with the death and transgression of Adam, nor does it rise again through the resurrection of Christ. . . . One can be neither praised nor blamed, neither rewarded nor condemned, except for one’s own acts and self-acquired character, which must be within the compass of one’s ability. What is innate, inherent, or infused is clearly not within the power of the will, and therefore cannot have any moral character.[3]

For Pelagius, it was wrong to convict the entire human race because of one man’s sin. On numerous occasions, Augustine felt that Pelagius’s “Judaic”[4] ideas[5] threatened to undermine the authority of the Church and the Church’s claim that it alone could liberate man from the chains of Original Sin.[6] However, Pelagius countered that the Bible teaches that nature is good, as God created it to be, and that humankind is morally free to chart its own spiritual destiny, because human beings are fashioned in the likeness of the Divine image.

Since every human being derives his or her own essential goodness from God, therefore, no newborn infant deserves to be damned because of Adam’s sin. Moral goodness or evil are potentialities that each person can choose to realize. If we act righteously, we become righteous; if wickedly, we become wicked. Numerous Scriptural injunctions make it perfectly clear that “Parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents; only for their own crimes may persons be put to death” (Deut. 24:16). This principle precludes the possibility of innate, hereditary depravity such as Original Sin.

The severity of Adam’s sin ought to be viewed in terms of the deed’s pedagogic effect. In effect, Adam becomes a poor role model for subsequent generations. Human corruption is due to the habit of evil that if left uncorrected, spreads like a contagion. Humans are born without virtue or vice, but have the capacity for either type of behavior.

Pelagius’s moral strictness is as exacting as it is demanding; his view of human nature is sober and grounded in reality. According to him, the onus of personal responsibility for all sins, both large and small, is upon each of us as individuals; hence there can be no excuse—not even for the most minor or venial of sins. It behooves everyone to know that sin involves a conscious and preventable defiance of God’s will; sin is, in the final analysis, an act of deliberate rebellion against God’s sovereignty and wisdom. Pelagius believes that even the smallest infraction—since it could be avoided—carries with it the possibility of eternal punishment.[7]

For Pelagius, God would never impose duties and responsibilities upon people that they could never possibly hope to fulfill. Without freedom of will, humankind is no better than moral idiots. The obligation to live a moral life is in accordance with individual ability. Deny a person of his freedom and capacity to act rationally, and one might just as well give license to all those who—much like the pre-converted youthful Augustine—behave with reckless abandon. After all, couldn’t he just as soon wait to “be saved” from Above after enjoying all of the tasty forbidden pleasures of this world? Why, asks Pelagius, should we bother avoiding the sins of this world if, in the final analysis, moral behavior doesn’t really matter—so long as one makes a declaration of faith in Christ? Conversely, Augustine counters that Pelagianism made the saving work of Christ unnecessary, that it undermined the central drama of the New Testament. Pelagius had made men independent of God in the sense that their salvation was entirely in their own hands.

Although historically Augustine’s view became normative theology for the next millennium and longer, still and all, Thomas Aquinas did not fully accept Augustine’s dim view of human nature. While it is true that human sinfulness weakens our innate capacity to live virtuously—sin, argues Aquinas, cannot eradicate the fact we are, in the final analysis, rational beings. Our human goodness cannot be fully extinguished. In the case of Adam, Original Sin causes him to lose the special gifts that enable him to sublimate and control his lower bodily functions.

Prior to his sin, Adam’s rational faculties were perfect. That being said, it is possible that this gift can be restored to us by supernatural grace alone for our human efforts to obtain salvation would always fall short of the divine benchmark. Naturally, reasons Aquinas, this infusion of special grace could never happen without the assistance of the Catholic Church and its rich sacramental system. Aquinas understands the implications of his doctrine, and how he virtually hedges on Pelagian teaching. Without the assistance of the Church, its capacity to function as an intermediary agency would have been undermined; its ecclesiastical ability would not have been able to function.[8]

Jewish thinkers concur with Pelagius’s position that no human being is tainted by the sins of Adam—but only by his own sinful deeds. Human nature was not at all corrupted, nor did a human being become an inherently immoral, “evil” creature, outside the realm of “grace” by merely being born. Each of us, through acts of will, freely decides our moral and spiritual destinies. Even when a person has sinned, that breach in his relationship with God is repairable through sincere penitence. Rather than pointing to human depravity, the rabbis sought to encourage their followers to adopt an optimistic approach, thus awakening the capacity for human goodness. The human instinct for pleasure and power becomes a problem only when it runs amok. There is no inherited predisposition that prevents us from becoming virtuous and pious. Only the quality of our behavior can determine whether the light of the Divine image will ever find its reflection in us.

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Notes:

[1] Notes: Like Pelagius before him, Immanuel Kant attacked the old Augustinian and Protestant view of Adam’s fall from grace, and said that the belief that sinfulness is passed on to a person’s posterity was nothing more than a superstition.

[2] See Augustine’s work The Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1:30, 58; On the Baptism of Sins 4:24.31; 51.129.

[3] Translated by Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1 The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), 315. Cf. Anti-Pelagian Writings 11:23 published in Vol. V of the Early Church Fathers Nicene–Post/Nicene Part I (New York: T. & T. Clark, 1887).

[4] Aside from some of the other Early Church Fathers, Pelagius’s views may have also been shaped by his encounters with rabbinic teachers from the Jewish community as he travelled through the Holy Land before settling in Rome. Jerome, who was also a contemporary of Pelagius, learned Hebrew from a rabbi in Palestine. It would seem that despite the polemically-charged era both faiths lived in, Jewish and Christian scholars exchanged theological views of the Bible in the spirit of fellowship and open-mindedness—millennia before the advent of modern Jewish-Christian interfaith relations.

[5]Augustine, ECF 2.5.0.0.3.3.

[6] Luther and Calvin understood original sin as “a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature” See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, (Edinburgh 1865, II .i.8). Unlike Augustine, Calvin relates Original Sin not so much to heredity, as to an ordinance of God, a heavenly decree from God passed on all humankind.

[7] With the exception of the Qumran Jewish community, Saadia Gaon and possibly Ramban, no other major Jewish theologian subscribed to the doctrine of “eternal damnation” or more precisely, “the soul that sins shall be cut off from its people” (Num. 15:30). See Ramban’s commentary on Leviticus 18:29.

[8] Thomas Aquinas, The Basic Writings of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. A. C. Pegis, 2 vols. ii. (New York: Random House, 1945); Summa Theologica, Part 1 Q. 81, Art. 1; Q. 85 Art. 2; Q. 85 Art. 3. See also F. C. Copleston, Aquinas (New York: Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 156-98.