A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Pelagius’s views have often been presented as rather amiable, in contrast to the fierce pessimism in Augustine’s view of our fallen state. This misses the point that Pelagius was a stern Puritan, whose teaching placed a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of every human being to act according to the highest standards demanded by God. The world which he would have constructed on these principles would have been one vast monastery.46 It would have been impossible to sustain the mixed human society of vice and virtue which Augustine presents in the ‘City of God’, where no Christian has the right to avoid everyday civic responsibilities in this fallen world, even to be a magistrate who is responsible for executing other human beings, precisely because we are all caught up in the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden.