One celebrated occasion of the involvement of Augustine in the battle against Pelagianism involved him in an important one of his numerous journeys. He was working with the other bishops in Numidia, successfully petitioning the Pope in Rome. As already mentioned, after the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in the year 410, Pelagius had left Rome for a year in Carthage, North Africa.
North Africa thus became the principal centre of the first Pelagian disturbances. There is no evidence that Pelagius ever met Augustine in Carthage before moving to the Holy Land. As early as the year 412 a council held at Carthage condemned the Pelagians for their attacks upon the doctrine of original sin. An earlier charge of heresy against Pelagius lapsed because it had not been successfully prosecuted by fourteen bishops in the Holy Land at the Synod of Diospolis in December 415.
This news caused alarm in North Africa. In response, the bishops of North Africa decided that a decisive step was required. In the autumn of 416, therefore, sixty seven bishops from Proconsular Africa assembled in a synod at Carthage. As well, fifty nine bishops of the ecclesiastical province of Numidia, to which belonged the diocese of Hippo that was led by Augustine, held a synod in Mileve. Augustine played a key role in the Synod of Mileve in the year 416.
In both places the doctrines of Pelagius were once again rejected as being contradictory to the Catholic faith, and Pelagius was condemned. However, in order to secure for their decisions "the authority of the Apostolic See" (and to have a papal condemnation of Pelagius), both synods wrote to Pope Innocent I to seek his supreme sanction. And in order to reinforce with Innocent their perceived seriousness of the situation, five bishops (Augustine, Aurelius, Alypius, Evodius, and Possidius) added their personal weight to the decision of the synods by sending the pope a joint letter. In it they detailed the doctrine of original sin, infant baptism, and Christian grace (Augustine: Letters 175, 176 and 177).
In three separate letters dated 27th January 417, Pope Innocent I answered the synodal letters of Carthage and Mileve, as well as that of the five bishops, to declare the excommunication of Pelagius. In Africa, where the decision was received with unfeigned joy, the whole controversy was now regarded as closed, and Augustine on 23th September 417 announced from the pulpit at Hippo, Jam enim de hac causa duo concilia missa sunt ad Sedem apostolicam, inde etiam rescripta venerunt; causa finita est - "Two synods having written to the Apostolic See about this matter; the replies have come back; the question is settled." (Sermon 131, 10)
This is the only possible source of the much-misquoted sentence that is attributed to Augustine, "Rome has spoken; the matter is closed." But, as far as the ultimate condemnation of Pelagius was concerned, Augustine was hasty with his statement. It was to turn out, to the contrary, that the matter was not yet settled at all. That took until 418, after which time Augustine had only a year before he began to interact with the most brilliant Pelagian disciple, Julian of Eclanum, the former bishop at Eclanum in Italy.
There was combat between Augustine and Julian with pen and ink for most of the remaining twelve years of the life of Augustine. When Pelagianism arose, Augustine was at the end of his intellectual life, after twenty years of constant intellectual defence of the Catholic Church with speculative theology. The battle with Julian, with all of its imperfections and possibly overheated debate, happened in the final twelve years of these two particular decades.
Pelagianism and Julian of Eclanum
Julian of Eclanum was the most persistent and most adversarial correspondent that Augustine ever experienced.Because Augustine was by then an aged person, this lengthy controversy probably took more out of him than any previous one. Julian of Eclanum was born at Eclanum in Italy in the year 380 and died in Sicily about the year 455. After the death of his wife, Julian joined the clergy of his native diocese and eventually succeeded his father as bishop. He was highly educated and skilled in philosophy and dialectics, and as well had mastery of Greek and Latin. He possessed much theological learning which, however, was tainted with Pelagian errors.
Because of his support of Pelagius, Julian himself was condemned. In 418 he was one of the eighteen bishops expelled from Italy by Pope Zosimus. To Julian is due the credit of having systematised the teachings of Pelagius. The writings of Julian were mainly pitched against the very doctrines that Augustine had defended.This made a clash between these two brilliant minds almost inevitable. Most of the works of Julian are lost. Paradoxically, they are known only through the copious quotations from them that are found in the works of Augustine.
Principal among them are the letter to Rufus, Bishop of Thessalonica, and the epistle to the Roman clergy, which Augustine, at the request of Pope Boniface, refuted in his work "Against Two Letters of the Pelagians"; the reply of Julian to what Augustine wrote in De nuptiis et concupiscentia ("On marriage and concupiscence"); and his answer to the defence by Augustine of De nuptiis et concupiscentia. When Julian of Eclanum emerged as the Pelagian champion, the controversy came to lack Christian charity.
Julian accused Augustine of being a Manichee, a detestable African Aristotle, one who sought an argument, one who like an infant used words without meaning, one who spoke slander, and one who gave bribes. Against De nuptiis et concupiscentia that was written by Augustine, Julian directed the four books of his work, Ad Turbantium in the year 419. Its main thought is the natural goodness of human beings in the divine creation. Augustine wrote a second treatise, De nuptiis et concupiscentia. Julian answered by addressing eight books to Florus, Libri viii ad Florum contra Augustine librum secundum de nuptiis ("Eight books to Florus against Augustine's book about marriage"). This was to be the most important writing by Julian. Even though it was full of personal, passionate, and spiteful polemics against Augustine, it also contained dialectical acuteness and logical sequence of thoughts. It forms the proper source for the knowledge of the theology of Julian. Though composed shortly after 421, it did not come to the notice of Augustine until 427.
The written rebuttal by Augustine quotes Julian sentence by sentence and refutes them. It was completed only as far as the sixth section of the book by Julian, and hence is cited in subsequent Patristic literature as Opus imperfectum contra Iulianum ("The uncompleted work against Julian.") A comprehensive account of Pelagianism, which brings into strong relief the diametrically opposed views of the author, was furnished by Augustine in 428 in the final chapter of his work, De haeresibus ("About heresies.")
The last writings by Augustine published before his death in August 430 were no longer aimed against Pelagianism, but against what is now called Semi-Pelagianism. Augustine thus spent much time and thought during the last twelve years of his life defending his interpretations against the claims of Julian of Eclanum. The latter had seen theory of original sin by Augustine as a departure of orthodox Christian thought. Julian asserted that in this matter Augustine was still Manichaean. Julian said Augustine denied the goodness of creation and the freedom of will.
This was the very heresy that Augustine had admired in his youth but later had attacked once he had become a baptised Christian. Augustine won the theological battle against Julian in that the views of Augustine largely prevailed. The theological vision of Augustine concerning human nature - and, indeed, the entire world view of Augustine - became fundamental to medieval culture. It has affected ever since the Western religious and cultural attitudes about the reason for suffering and death.
The intellect of Augustine was certainly still sharp in his old age, but did he lose some of his sense of perspective? As he aged, his vision narrowed, certainly, but some scholars hold that this in itself is inadequate as an explanation for his final writings against Pelagianism. When approaching his sixtieth year, Augustine found one final great theological challenge for himself. A few say that he did not find it but, rather, that he manufactured it, or at least inflated it.
Upset by the implications of the teachings of Pelagianism, Augustine gradually worked himself up to a polemical fever-pitch over ideas that Pelagius and various of his followers may or may not have accepted. Other scholars of the time were perplexed and reacted with caution to the vigour of the attacks of Augustine on Pelagian thought, but he persisted. It was almost as if he was feeling the need of defending himself personally. Possibly the old age of Augustine partially prompted this reaction.
At the time of his death, Augustine was at work on a vast and unclear attack on the last and most urbane of his Pelagian opponents, the Italian bishop Julian of Eclanum. Of considerable intellectual resources, Julian had, among other things, accused Augustine of holding views indistinguishable from those of the Manicheans whom Augustine had first joined but subsequently opposed so many years before.
In this tiring and frustrating controversy with the Pelagians over a period of fifteen years, Augustine saw one of his own earlier writings on the human will cited by his opponents as evidence that he himself once advocated the view he had now come so vehemently to oppose. (See Augustine: Retractationes I.9.3-6) One of the early writings by Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, had been written against the Manichaeans. This book later used by the Pelagians to support their view of radical free will. Augustine was forced to point out in his Retractions that even though he had argued that humans can fall into sin of their own free will, he had held that they cannot rise up to relationship with God on the same basis. Perhaps the cruel irony is this: during the Protestant Reformation eleven centuries later, when the Church to which Augustine had devoted his life was to split in a manner that still in the twenty-first century shows minimal signs of reconciliation, both sides would appeal to Augustine as an authority on questions of doctrine. Leaving aside the relative merits of these accusations and appeals, their mere existence is only possible because of the great diversity and range of the thought and writing of Augustine during his long life.
Read more about the theological topic of Pelagianism by clicking on the following selected links below. Be advised that the following authors come from different streams of Christian theology.
Pelagius and Pelagianism. From the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911.http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11604a.htm
Pelagianism defined. These issues of human freedom and divine grace have remained central topics of debate throughout the history of Christian theology. http://mb-soft.com/believe/txc/pelagian.htm
Pelagius. From Britannica.com. http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/p/Pelagius.html
Augustine and Pelagius. An essay by R. C. Sproul. http://www.leaderu.com/theology/augpelagius.html
Augustine and the Pelagian controversy. A detailed coverage by Mark Ritchie. http://www.ritchies.net/p2wk6.htmAN1211