CHAP. II. TRANSMISSION OF ORIGINAL SIN. 117 of inclination to good. It emancipates to a certain extent, that it may rule with a more absolute control. And as it was with Pelagius, so it is with his followers. No Pelagian ever has or ever will work a religious revolution. He who is destined for such a work must have a full conviction that God is acting directly, immediately, consciously, and therefore with irresistible power, upon him and through him. It is because he believes himself, and others believe him to be thus acted upon, that he has the burning courage to to undertake, the indomitable perseverance to maintain, the inflexible resolution to die for his religion; so soon as that conviction is deadened, his power is gone. Men no longer acknowledge his mission, he himself has traitorously or timidly abandoned his mission. the voice of God is no longer speaking in his heart; men no longer recognise the voice of God from his lips. The prophet, the inspired teacher, the all but apostle, has now sunk to an ordinary believer. He who is not predestined, who does not declare, who does not believe himself predestined as the author of a great religious movement, he in whom God is not manifestly, sensibly, avowedly working out his pre-established designs, will never be Saint or Reformer. mission of But there was another part of the Augustinian theology, which has quietly dropped from it in all its later The transrevivals, yet in his day was an integral, almost original sin. the leading doctrine of the system; and falling in, as it did, with the dominant feelings of Christendom, contributed powerfully to its establishment, as the religion of the Church. Augustine was not content to assert original sin, in the strongest language, against Pelagius, but did not scruple to dogmatize as to the mode of its transmission. This was by sexual intercourse, which he asserts in arguments, which the modesty of our present manners will not permit us to discuss, would have been unknown. but for the Fall; and was in itself essentially evil, though The whole argument of the Book de Concupiscentia et de Nuptiis. Intentio igitur hujus libri est ut... carnalis concupiscentiæ malum, propter quod homo qui per eam nascitur, trahit originale peccatum, discernamus a bonitate nuptiarum. P Sed quia sine illo malo (carnalis concupiscentiæ) fieri non potest nuptiarum bonum, hoc est propagatio filiorum, ubi an evil to be tolerated in the regenerate, for the procreation of children, themselves to be regenerate. Thus this great Oriental principle of the inherent evil of matter, as we have seen in the course of our Christian history, was the dominant and fundamental tenet of Gnosticism, lay at the root of Arianism, and will hereafter appear as the remote parent of Nestorianism; and this was the primary axiom of all Monasticism, and so became, almost imperceptibly, the first recognised principle of all Latin theology. Augustine, in this theory of the transmission of sin, betrays that invincible horror of the intrinsic evil of the material and corporeal, which had been infused into his mind by his youthful Manicheism. Most of the other leading tenets of the Manicheans, the creation of man by the antagonistic malignant power, the unreality of the Christ, the whole mystic mythology of the imaginative Orientals, Augustine had rejected with indignation, and with the practical wisdom of the West; but, notwithstanding all his concessions on the dignity of marriage, he is, in this respect, an irreclaimable Manichean. Sin and all sensual indulgence, as it was called, all, however lawful, union between the sexes, were convertible terms, or terms so associated in human thought as to require some vigour of mind to discriminate between them. It was the vice of the theology of this period, and not, perhaps, of this period alone, that it seemed to make the indulgence of one passion almost the sole unchristian a passion which is probably strengthened rather sin; ad hujusmodi opus venitur, secreta quæruntur. Hinc est quod infantes etiam, qui peccare non possunt, non tamen sine peccati contagione nascuntur, non ex hoc quod licet, sed ex hoc quod dedecet. De Peccat. Origin., c. xxvii. His standing argument is from natural modesty, which he confounds with the shame of conscious guilt. a The doctrine of original sin, as it is explicated by St. Austin, had two parents; one was the doctrine of the Encratites and some other heretics, who forbade marriage, and supposing it to be evil, thought that they were warranted to say it was the bed of sin, and children the spawn of vipers and sinners; and St. CHAP. II. APPEAL TO INNOCENT. 119 than suppressed by compelling the mind to dwell perpetually upon it. This (and on this the whole stress was laid throughout the controversy) was, the concupiscence of the flesh, inherited from Adam, which was not washed away in the sanctifying waters of baptism, but still clave to the material nature of man, and was to be kept under control only by the most rigid asceticism. Celibacy thus became not merely a hard duty, but a glorious distinction: the clergy, and those females who aspired to more perfect Christianity, not merely chose a more difficult-and therefore, if successful, a more noble career-but were raised far above those lower mortals, who, in the most legitimate and holy form, that of faithful marriage, submitted to be the parents of children. Pelagius himself, so completely was the human mind possessed with this notion, almost rivalled Augustine in his praises of virginity, which he considered the great test of that strength of free will which he asserted to be weakened only, if weakened, by the fall of Adam. Augustinian. The Augustinian theology, exactly to the extent to which it coincided with Latin Christianity, would, no doubt, harmonise with the opinions of one so Innocent completely representing that Christianity as Inno- 417. Jan. 27. cent I. When the African Churches, in their councils at Carthage, and at Milevis in Numidia, addressed the Pontiff on this momentous subject, the character, as well as the station of Innocent, might command more than respectful deference. Had they felt any jealousy as to their own independence, under the absorbing passion, the hatred of Pelagianism, they would have made any sacrifice to obtain the concurrence of the Bishop of Rome. The letters inform Innocent that the Africans had renewed the unregarded anathema pronounced against this wicked error, especially of Celestius, which had been issued five years before. They assert the power of Innocent to summon Pelagius to Rome to answer for his guilt, and to exclude him from the communion of the faithful. They implore appeal to the dignity of the Apostolic throne, of the successor of St. Both parties Peter, to complete and ratify that which is Rome. wanting to their more moderate power." Pelagius himself, even if he did not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the tribunal, endeavoured to propitiate the favour of the judge he addressed an explanatory letter, and a profession of faith, to the Bishop of Rome.* Yet Augustine and the Africans were not without solicitude as to the decision of Innocent. Since Pelagius, they knew, lived in Rome, undisturbed by the inquisitive zeal of the bishop, Augustine, in a private letter, signed by himself and four bishops, informed the Pope that some of these persons boasted that they had won him to their cause, or, at least, to think less unfavourably of Pelagius.' The answer of Innocent allayed their fears." He did not pass by the opportunity of asserting, as an acknowledged maxim, the dignity of the Apostolic See, the source of all episcopacy, and the advantage of an appeal to a tribunal, which might legislate for all Christendom. On the Pelagian question he places himself on the broad, popular, and unanswerable ground, that all Christian devotion implies the assistance of divine grace; that it is admitted in every response of the service, in every act of worship. He pronounces the opinions anathematised by the African bishops to be heretical; and declares that the unsound limb must be severed without remorse, lest it should infect the living body." Africa, and all those who held the opinions of Augustine, triumphed in what might seem the unqualified sentence of the Bishop of Rome. Ut statutis nostræ mediocritatis, etiam apostolicæ sedis adhibeatur auctoritas, pro tuendâ salute multorum et quorundam etiam perversitate corrigendâ, -Epist. Conc. Carthag. ad Innocent. Labbe, ii., p. 1514. Augustin, de Grat. Christ., cap. 30. De Pecc. Origin., 17, 21, &c. Quidam scilicet quia vos talia persuasisse perhibent.-Ibid. Qui ad nostrum referendum approbastis esse judicium, scientes quid Apostolicæ sedi (cum omnes hoc loco positi ipsum sequi desideremus Apostolum) debeatur, a quo ipse episcopatus et tota auctoritas nominis hujus emersit.—Innocent. Epist. ad Episc. Afric. Ut per cunctas orbis totius ecclesias, quod omnibus prosit, decernendum una esse deposcitis. Ibid. The lines of Prosper, who has written a long poem on this abstruse subject, have been referred to this decree of Innocent I.— In causam fidei flagrantius Africa nostra Juris Apostolici solio, fera viscera belli СНАР. ІІ. DEATH OF INNOCENT I. 121 At this period in the controversy, and before the arrival of the letter from Pelagius, died Pope Inno- Death of cent I. Innocent. So far the Bishop of Rome had floated onwards March 12. towards supremacy on the full tide of dominant opinion; his decrees were so acceptable to the general ear, that the tone of authority in which they began to be couched, jarred not on any quivering chord of jealousy or suspicion. The secret of that power lay in Rome's complete impregnation with the spirit of the age; and this lasted, almost unbroken, till the Reformation. It were neither just nor true to call this worldly policy, or to suppose that the Bishops of Rome dishonestly conformed, or bent their opinions to their age for the sake of aggrandising their power. Their sympathy with the general mind of Christianity constituted their strength; from their conscious strength grew up, no doubt, their bolder spirit of domination; but they became masters of the Western Church by being the representative, the centre, of its feelings and opinions. It was not till a much later period that the claim to personal infallibility, to the sole dictatorship over the Christianity of the world, was either advanced or thought necessary; the present infallibility was but the expression of the universal, or at least predominant sentiment of mankind. Once at this period, and but for a short time, the Bishop of Rome threw himself directly across the stream Zosimus. of religious opinion. Zosimus, the successor of 417, Mar. 18. Innocent, was by birth a Greek," and seemed disposed to treat the momentous questions agitated by the Pelagian controversy with the contemptuous indifference of a Greek. Whether from this uncongeniality of the Eastern mind with these debates; whether from the pride of the man, which was flattered by the submission of both these dangerous heresiarchs to his authority; whether from an earnest and well-intentioned, but mistaken hope, of suppressing what appeared to him a needless dispute, Zosimus annulled at one blow all the judgments of his predecessor, Innocent; and absolved the men, whom Innocent, if he b Anastasius Bibliothec., c. 42. VOL. I. K |