Pelagius

We're not each of us Adam.

That was the heresy of Pelagius.

way back in the late fourth century.

He said that each one of us is Adam and each one of us has the opportunity to do what Adam did.

And that's not true.

He just ignored and sort of defined out of existence what Paul said in Romans 5 that I just read for you.

I know this because I've read Pelagius' commentary on Romans.

When he gets to passages that he doesn't like, he just explains them away.

And then get a reward, but it's not the teaching of the church.

The Pelagius was condemned for that teaching.

We're saved by grace.

However, I picture it this way, like...

For if he had died first, he would in some sense not have known, and if one may so say, not have felt his punishment, but he tasted it in another, in order that he might perceive the due reward of his contempt, and doomed to death himself, might be the more sensibly touched by the apprehension of it.

But this curse that came of transgression, which the first man had by natural propagation transmitted to posterity, was denied by one Pelagius, who so set up the heresy which goes by his name, and which the Catholic faith, as is known, at once banished from its bosom.

So the human race that sprang from the first man, and mightily increased and multiplied, broke into strife, stirred up wars, and became the heir of earthly misery, because it had lost the joys of paradise in its first parent.

Yet were there not a few of mankind whom the giver of grace set apart for himself, and who were obedient to his will, and though by desert of nature they were condemned, yet God, by making them partakers of the hidden mystery, long afterwards to be revealed, vouchsafed to recover fallen nature.

Why that it matters is because it emerges from the conflict of another competing worldview which he identifies coming out of the Augustinian tradition as Pelagian.

And what this refers to is, like, a very interesting, um, church schism and scandal of Pelagius who fought against this idea of eternal damnation and original sin, and therefore was on the side of what you might call in Goldmann's sense, like, rudimentary Marxism.

Yeah.

And you see, you see what they've done is they've given us a way to see a dialectic of worldview conflict that plays itself out at different stages of history whereby the Pelagian universalist position is about, yes, human redemption and human freedom is realizable in the world.

And that was their position.

And it was Augustine's position until this thing with Pelagius.

And I think it was just, I honestly think he was just couldn't bear to lose an argument, right? And it was the infant baptism situation.

And his only out was to retreat back to, um, to that.

Charlemagne was invited to interfere and drive out the usurper.

The Spanish chroniclers make Alfonso, king of the Asturias and heir of Pelagius, summon the Frankish emperor to his aid, but there is more reason to believe that the invitation came from certain disappointed Muslim chiefs who could not brook the authority of Abd al-Rahman the Umayyad, and who were ready to submit even to the sworn enemy of Islam rather than recognize the new ruler.

The moment of the appeal was propitious.

Charlemagne had just completed, as he thought, the subjugation of the Saxons.

When first they had felt the shock of the Muslim invasion, their rout had been utter and complete.

They had fled to the mountains of the Asturias, where their trifling numbers and the inaccessibility of their situation gave them safety from the Mohammedan attack.

Pelagius, the old Pelayo of the ballad, had but thirty men and ten women with him in the cave of Covadonga, which became the refuge of the Gothic Christians, and the Arabs did not think it worthwhile to hunt down the little remnant of the refugees.

Here, in the recesses of the cave, which was approached through a long and narrow mountain pass and entered by a ladder of ninety steps, a handful of men might have set an army at defiance.