Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/839

 Christ rise again. (5) The Law introduces men into the kingdom of heaven, just in the same way as the Gospel does. (6) Even before the coming of Christ there were some men sinless, i.e. men as a matter of fact without sin. (7) Infants, even though not baptized, have eternal life.

Coelestius endeavoured to explain away some of his assertions; but his explanations were judged evasive and his doctrines condemned as unscriptural and contrary to the Catholic faith. A sentence of excommunication was passed upon him and his followers. He shortly afterwards sailed to Ephesus. The prevalence of these opinions and the efforts made to diffuse them led Augustine to denounce them. In three or four sermons delivered at this time (170, 174, 175) he devoted himself to refuting the innovating doctrines, though he does not mention their chief upholders by name. His first written treatise on the controversy was called forth by a letter from his friend Marcellinus, who was troubled by daily assaults of Pelagian disputations. The work originally consisted of two books. The first established the positions that death in man was the penalty of sin, and not a mere condition of his natural constitution; that the whole offspring of Adam was affected by his sin, and that baptism of infants was for the remission of original sin, the guilt of which they bear from their birth. In the second book Augustine argued that the first man might have lived without sin by the grace of God and his own free will; that as a matter of fact no living man is wholly free from sin, for no man wills all that he ought, to do, owing to his ignorance of what is right or his want of delight in doing it; that the only man absolutely without sin is Christ, the God-man and Mediator. Augustine added to this treatise as a third book a letter he wrote to Marcellinus when, a very few days after the compilation of the two books, he became acquainted with some fresh arguments against original sin advanced in the exposition of the Epistles of St. Paul by Pelagius, who, however, put the arguments in the mouth of another and did not avowedly express them as his own. In bks. i. and ii. Augustine never, mentions Pelagius or Coelestius by name, possible hoping they might yet be won back to orthodoxy; in bk. iii., while arguing strongly against the views of the nature of original sin propounded by Pelagius, he speaks of Pelagius with marked respect, calling him a signally Christian man, a highly advanced Christian ("vir ille tam egregie Christianus," de Pecc. Mer. iii. 6; "non parvo provectu Christianus," ib. iii. 1).

Pelagianism continued to propagate and assert itself and found many upholders in Carthage. It claimed the authority of the Eastern churches, whose tendency had always been to lay stress on the power of the human will, and, boldly retorting the accusation of innovation, it declared that the views of Augustine and the dominant party in Africa were a departure from the old orthodoxy. This roused the indignation of Augustine. In a sermon preached June 27, 413, he dealt with infant baptism and refuted some new phases of Pelagian opinion. From it we learn that the Pelagians now taught that infants were baptized, not because they needed any remission of the guilt of original or actual sin, from which they were wholly free, but that they might enter the kingdom of God and thereby obtain salvation and eternal life. The critical passage in Rom. v. 12, "By one man sin entered into the world," they interpreted to mean that Adam sinned by an act of free choice and so caused all his descendants to sin by the imitation of his example. If, they scoffingly asked, men are born sinners from a sinful parent, why are not men born righteous from believing parents who have been justified by baptism? If Adam's sin hurt those who had not sinned, why, by parity of consequence, should not the death of Christ profit those who have not believed on Him? Towards the close of his sermon Augustine read to the congregation from the epistle of their martyred bishop St. Cyprian, written 255, a passage in which the judgment of the church of his day was emphatically pronounced that baptism was administered to infants for the remission of sin which they had contracted through their birth, and ended by making an earnest appeal to his opponents not to continue to maintain opinions which, being hostile to such a fundamental point of church doctrine and practice as infant baptism, must be disowned by the church as heretical. He entreated them, as friends, to see the error into which they were drifting and not to provoke a formal sentence of condemnation. About the same time he received a letter from Pelagius, who was still in Palestine, and replied in friendly and affectionate terms. This letter is preserved in Augustine's treatise de Gestis Pelagii (c. 52), where Augustine points out the unfair use which Pelagius endeavoured to make of it at the synod of Diospolis.

The condemnation of Pelagianism by the synod of Carthage deterred its more prominent upholders from the continued open assertion of its doctrines, but a quiet and secret circulation of them continued. Adherents increased so greatly that Augustine professed alarm as to where the evil might break out afresh (Ep. 157). Tidings of such a fresh outbreak came in 414 from Sicily, where one Hilary wrote to him that some Christians at Syracuse were asserting that man can be without sin and easily keep the commandments of God, if he will; that an unbaptized infant overtaken by death cannot possibly perish deservedly, as he is born without sin. Other opinions mentioned by Hilary as held by these Syracusans exhibit a fresh development of Pelagian thought, if they really originated from the same source. These were that a rich man cannot enter the kingdom of God unless he sell all he has, arid that it cannot avail him to keep the commandments of God if he still retains and uses his riches. Such an assertion of the need of renouncing private property as a condition of religious life was probably an exaggeration of the real teaching of the monks, Pelagius, and Coelestius. Augustine elaborately replied to Hilary, repeating many of the arguments he had before employed. About the same time he learnt that two young men of good birth and liberal education, Timasius and James, had been induced