Word: pelagius
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Much of Augustine's energy as a bishop was spent resisting heretics and schismatics, which led him to insist on the hierarchical church as the authoritative teacher and sole channel of salvation. Though this view later buttressed papal powers, Augustine defied Pope Zosimus when the Pontiff tolerated Pelagius, whose theology was so optimistic that humanity scarcely seemed to need a Saviour...
...doctrine. For years around the turn of the 4th century, the Mediterranean basin was torn by a dispute about the necessity for divine grace in man's salvation. The bishops of North Africa, led by St. Augustine, insisted that human beings could do nothing without divine help. Pelagius, a theologian from foggy Britain come south to preach reform in Rome, believed that man is born spiritually free. God's grace may give him a push, but essentially he can find his own way to heaven. Augustine's writings were crucial in labeling Pelagius a heretic. Still...
Total Society. Augustine, indeed, is a thorn in Johnson's side. For Johnson sees Christian history largely as a pendulum, swinging between the repressive "total society" envisioned by Augustine and the individualistic, more private Christianity espoused by Pelagius and like-minded successors-particularly the great irenic humanist of the early Reformation, Erasmus of Rotterdam. The political analogies are not coincidental. Johnson believes that men can be self-governing. He sympathizes with the views of Erasmus and Pelagius. Indeed, he argues, the essential optimism of such humanists is closer to the message of the Apostle Paul than the deep pessimism...
Burgess, in fact, sees the key moral conflict of our age as an extension of the argument that took place between the heretic Pelagius and St. Augustine some 1,600 years ago. Man, preached Pelagius, is untainted by original sin and is thus perfectible through his own efforts. The cynical saint disagreed and ran Pelagius out of Rome. But this humane heretic's views now dominate society, Burgess suggests, through the delusive notion that men are essentially creatures of their environment whose actions must be controlled by benign behaviorists. Disaster, says Burgess. No original sin, no evil. No evil...
...lies in the fact that the Puritan ethos not only posits the fall of man, it also implies the existence of an Elect of God. America has presumed itself to be God's chosen remnant, to the point where it very nearly subscribes to the anthropocentric heresy of Pelagius, the 5th century Christian ascetic who argued that man could gain salvation without divine grace by his efforts alone. Put in secular terms, the Pelagianism of America means an unshakable faith in the righteousness of the U.S. "We tend to think," argues Roman Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak, "that...