The Deadly Error of the Pelagians

At any rate, we think one fact ought not to be left out, which was special and peculiar to the heresy mentioned above that sprang from the error of Pelagius. In saying that Jesus Christ had lived as a mere man without any stain of sin, they actually went so far as to declare that people too could be without sin if they wanted to. They imagined it followed that if Jesus Christ, being a mere man, was without sin, then all people could also be, without the help of God, whatever he could be as a mere man without sharing in the Godhead. And so they made out that there was no difference between any man and our Lord Jesus Christ, since any man could gain by effort and striving just what Christ had gained by his earnestness and efforts. [a]

From this they broke out into a still more serious and unnatural madness. They said that our Lord Jesus Christ had come into this world not to bring redemption to mankind but to give an example of good works: namely, that people, by following his teaching and walking along the same path of virtue, might arrive at the same reward of virtue. In this way they destroyed, as far as they could, all the good of his sacred coming and all the grace of God’s redemption, since they declared that people could gain by their own lives just what God had accomplished by dying for man’s salvation. They added as well that our Lord and Savior became the Christ after his baptism, and God after his resurrection, tracing the first to the mystery of his anointing and the second to the merits of his suffering.

That is why this new author of a heresy that is not new, who declares that our Lord and Savior was born a mere man, sees that he is saying exactly what the Pelagians said before him. He grants that it follows from his error that, since he asserts that our Lord Jesus Christ lived as a mere man entirely without sin, he must hold in his blasphemy that all people can be without sin by themselves. Nor would he admit that our Lord’s redemption was needed, but only his example, since people can, as they say, reach the kingdom of heaven by their own efforts. There is no doubt about this, as the thing itself shows us. This is why he encourages the complaints of the Pelagians by stepping in on their behalf, and brings their case into his writings. He cleverly, or to speak more truly, cunningly, takes them under his protection, and by his wicked fondness for them commends their harmful teaching, which is akin to his own. For he knows well that he is of the same opinion and the same spirit, and so he is distressed that a heresy akin to his own has been cast out of the church, since he knows it is wholly allied to his own in wickedness.