Orthodoxy and heresies in the 4th and 5th centuries (2)

As for Pelagianism, the starting point of the conflict was an attempt at monastic reform by the monk Pelagius, who, in order to combat Christians who excused themselves, on the grounds of the weakness of the flesh, for not carrying out the divine law, preached that man has the strength to do good if he wishes and showed the powers of human nature; he wanted “that the soul should not be all the more relaxed and slow to virtue, the less it believes itself to have power and that it considers itself to lack what it does not know is in it” 2. This is the inspiration of Stoicism, with its confidence in virtue; but it is the denial of original sin with its hereditary transmission, since God cannot impute to us the sin of others; it is presenting the work of Christ as that of a master or a doctor who serves as a model for us, in the manner of the saints of Cynicism, not as that of a victim whose merits justify man; it is finally to deny all importance to the means of grace, to the sacraments, which the Church holds at the disposal of the faithful. To these theories, Saint Augustine opposes both the personal experience of his conversion and the effective reality of the Church; if Pelagius speaks the truth, man has neither to ask by his prayers to escape temptation, nor to pray when he falls 3; the Pelagians work to find our good in that which, in us, is not from God; if they admit that good will comes from God, it is in the same way as existence; and then God, in this case, would also be the author of bad will; or else, if we admit that he produces only the will, and if it is man himself who makes it good, it follows that what comes from us, the good, is superior to what comes from God. We know with what rigor Saint Augustine follows the consequences of his attitude: all good can come to the soul, corrupted by original sin, only from a special grace; salvation, which depends on the merits thus acquired, belongs only to those who are predestined by God from all eternity; children who die without baptism are justly damned; the Gentiles, not having been touched by the grace of Christ, have never attained virtue.

This double conflict, with the solution that Saint Augustine gives it, makes us understand the environment in which Western thought will take place: a Church henceforth assured of holding all the means of salvation for men. The work of Pope Gregory the Great will be the definitive consolidation of the spiritual power of the Church.

These conflicts touch rather on ecclesiastical politics (in the highest sense of the term) than on dogma in the Eastern sense, that is to say on the metaphysical structure of the divinity. The thought of Saint Augustine, so firm when it comes to the religious life of the human soul, is indecisive as soon as he comes to dogma properly speaking; thus in the controversy over the origin of the soul (the solution of which nevertheless seems to form an indispensable metaphysical complement to the doctrine of grace), he hesitates, without concluding, between Traducianism which makes our soul derive from that of our parents and Creationism which makes each soul a creature ex nihilo-, and he rises up strongly against those who believe that “man can discuss his own quality or entire nature, as if nothing of himself escaped him” 4.

Let us add that, from the moment when, with Gregory the Great, they seized power in an uncontested manner until the twelfth century, the popes gave no proper impetus to theological speculation; Above all politicians and jurists, they are more concerned with asserting and ensuring all the rights they want to derive from their spiritual power over souls than with taking the lead of the intellectual movement.

References

2. Ad Demetrium, cité par Harnack, Lehrbuch, in, p. 161.
   3. Augustin, Ad Marcellinum, n, chap. h.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu