D
djeter
Guest
is one of America’s major historians and certainly the dean of Late Antique studies in the American academe.
Isn’t this just a wonderful overview of the Pelagian Controversy:
Augustine And The Pelagian Controversy
"For Augustine the convert emerged as a person sheathed in the will of God “For He hath made me and not we ourselves…” indeed we had destroyed ourselves but He who made us, made us anew. Augustine never doubted this about himself or others. The grace of God worked on the heart, “as it were as speck of gold in the hands of a master craftsman, “hammering the fragile, discontinuous will into an ever firmer, finally victorious resolve.
This was no abstract doctrine for Augustine. The life of the Catholic Church, as he saw it, was made up of countless small victories of grace. To those who had learned to pray with a humble heart, God would always give the grace which fired the will to follow His commands….
Not every ascetic Christian in this age of great converts was comfortable with such a view. When the Confessions were read out, in the company of Paulinus, Pelagius, a devout layman from Britain, walked out of the room. For Pelagius and his many supporters, the “grace” of God did not work in this manner.
God’s “grace” consisted rather in God’s decision to create human nature in such a way that human beings could follow his commands through the exercise of their own free will. This was grace enough. Human beings had never lost their original, good nature. Everyone was free to choose the good.
Once the accretion of evil habits, contracted through contact with the “world”, had been washed away through the transformative rite of baptism, every Christian believer was both able and obliged to reach out for perfection. For Pelagius, the Christian was the master craftsman of his or her own soul."
That is from *The Rise of Western Christendom *by Peter Brown You will find more reading selections here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/03/24/reading-selections-from-the-rise-of-western-christendom-by-peter-brown/
more on Augustine, Gregory The Great and Islam.
dj
Isn’t this just a wonderful overview of the Pelagian Controversy:
Augustine And The Pelagian Controversy
"For Augustine the convert emerged as a person sheathed in the will of God “For He hath made me and not we ourselves…” indeed we had destroyed ourselves but He who made us, made us anew. Augustine never doubted this about himself or others. The grace of God worked on the heart, “as it were as speck of gold in the hands of a master craftsman, “hammering the fragile, discontinuous will into an ever firmer, finally victorious resolve.
This was no abstract doctrine for Augustine. The life of the Catholic Church, as he saw it, was made up of countless small victories of grace. To those who had learned to pray with a humble heart, God would always give the grace which fired the will to follow His commands….
Not every ascetic Christian in this age of great converts was comfortable with such a view. When the Confessions were read out, in the company of Paulinus, Pelagius, a devout layman from Britain, walked out of the room. For Pelagius and his many supporters, the “grace” of God did not work in this manner.
God’s “grace” consisted rather in God’s decision to create human nature in such a way that human beings could follow his commands through the exercise of their own free will. This was grace enough. Human beings had never lost their original, good nature. Everyone was free to choose the good.
Once the accretion of evil habits, contracted through contact with the “world”, had been washed away through the transformative rite of baptism, every Christian believer was both able and obliged to reach out for perfection. For Pelagius, the Christian was the master craftsman of his or her own soul."
That is from *The Rise of Western Christendom *by Peter Brown You will find more reading selections here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/03/24/reading-selections-from-the-rise-of-western-christendom-by-peter-brown/
more on Augustine, Gregory The Great and Islam.
dj
