Turning off the Highway to Hell?: Pelagianism Has Become Catholic Common Sense

Consider the following series of questions. Why is it that you are a follower of Christ (regardless of your degree of lived fidelity to Christ’s truth and way)? Chances are that you can recall particular moments in which you made some decisive choices to follow Christ. These choices may resemble the vivid turnabout of a Damascus Road encounter. Or they may be quieter transformations, undergone in adulthood or more likely in childhood, more quotidian than extraordinary to the outside observer. In any case, the choices continue, for every new day puts the question to you of whether you will choose life or death for your spirit. These decisions always entail a small crucifixion of one modus vivendi in order to raise another. Had you not made these decisions, continually, you would not now be a follower of Christ and would not be on the path towards the vision of God promised to those who walk the way of the Lord.

Now, certainly you did not make this choice in a vacuum. There are always reasons, and no man is an island. There were models to imitate, persons of virtue and piety whose life stirred something in you. The Gospel was proclaimed in your presence, and it sounded to you not like the word of men but like the word of God. A religious image from childhood, once received only as so much saccharine kitsch, suddenly warmed your heart with a knowledge—and urgency. All these are the gifts of God’s grace, without which no one can be saved. Whatever the external conditions, however, none of these could have been effective for conversion had you yourself not made the choice to act from their influence. Upon reflection, it appears that the decisive condition for your initial or deepening conversion was your choice, and so your freedom to choose.

Let us contemplate another scenario. This one does not concern you, but another, who for our purposes is nameless but is nonetheless a type oft-encountered. He does not walk the Way. But this is not for lack of opportunities to start on the road. The same conditions are present: word, image, model, and more besides. There is the peculiar coincidence of circumstance, the externally manifest pernicious effects of a life of vice and sin, the charity and patience of an embracing community. Yet to no avail. Why is it that this person is not a follower of Christ? It appears that the same answer must be given here as above. This one is not converted because he refuses to be. He puts obstacles in the way of grace precisely by choosing against it. Here too, then, explanations bottom out at freedom.

Such is the tragedy of created freedom, but also its grave and mysterious high calling. As C.S. Lewis puts it in The Problem of Pain, it is the sign of God’s incomprehensible omnipotence that God can create creatures that can act against God’s purposes, both for the universe and for themselves.[1] Like an author who, mirabile dictu, writes characters who can oppose her plot, God writes us as free, and it is up to us how our story, and the world’s story, will end. For some, regrettably, it concludes in eternal loss, with the doors of hell “locked from the inside,” in Lewis’ memorable phrasing.[2] For the remainder who took the narrow road, however, there awaits what no author can relate, for eye has not glimpsed it nor ear heard tell.

If you found yourself agreeing with the answers suggested to the questions posed in the paragraphs above, then you share in the common sense understanding of conversion, salvation, and damnation prevalent in contemporary Catholic culture. This common sense understanding can be found in the average lay person as well as in the more theologically educated—laity, clergy, or theologian alike. It has much to recommend it, both phenomenologically and in terms of theological authorities who support it. So self-evident is it that many would not know how to question it; indeed, it is taken to be part and parcel of the Gospel message itself. Regrettably, however, it is Pelagian through and through.

“Pelagianism” Defined and Controverted

By calling this understanding of salvation “Pelagian,” I refer to that doctrine of salvation to be discerned in the thought of the early Christian writer Pelagius (ca. 354-418), a monk whose theology of original sin, human capacity, and grace was condemned at the ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431) and the influential provincial Second Council of Orange (529), whose teachings appear regularly in the contemporary Latin Catholic Catechism. But Pelagianism as a discernible theological account of salvation is recognized today—if and when it is—through the diagnostic writings of its most powerful opponent, St. Augustine of Hippo, whom the Catholic Church christens “the doctor of grace”[3] precisely on account of his battles with Pelagius’ thought.

Although there were several facets to the historical Pelagius’ theology, it is not difficult to reduce Pelagianism to one basic error: the idea that the final explanation for the salvation of any sinner is their own created freedom. For Augustine, such an understanding of salvation as due ultimately to the sinner’s choice made a hash of the meaning of grace. Grace, after all, means “gift,” and a gift is precisely what one does not acquire for oneself. It is that unmerited gift that actualizes our “yes” to God. The key to transcending Pelagianism is grasping that grace precedes and brings about our every exercise of created freedom towards God. When we spontaneously think that God’s grace is efficacious for our salvation precisely because we responded to it, we render ourselves the ultimate cause of our conversion and make grace merely the context of that fateful choice. Bestowals of divine grace in our life become in that case something like the billboards on the highway that suggest and plead that we “turn here” and “get off on this exit,” but without any power to effect what they implore. But in Augustine’s thought, and in subsequent Catholic magisterial teaching on grace, if we ever turn off the highway to hell it is because God’s grace causes it.

The Catechism expresses the work of grace well in a section calling back to Augustine’s theology, even employing one of his preferred biblical verses in the anti-Pelagian writings: “The human heart is heavy and hardened. God must give man a new heart. Conversion is first of all a work of the grace of God who makes our hearts return to him: ‘Restore us to thyself, O LORD, that we may be restored!’ [Converte nos Domine ad te et convertemur; Lamentations 5:21].”[4] Pelagius took it that Adam’s sin had left human willingness for the good basically intact: each person is as equally inclined to good or evil as Adam in his original state was. What Pelagianism misses, then, is any sense of original sin as impairing persons’ inclination to effectively choose the good.[5] The same error is repeated in contemporary commonsense Pelagianism any time that we articulate the Gospel as the story of the gentlemanly God knocking at the heart, hoping that our freedom will unlatch the door. If the doctrine of original sin is true, and Pelagius is wrong, then we simply do not have the strength to turn the lock.

Yet perhaps one will grant that the initial work of conversion is indeed God’s, and through this “operative grace” in which God is the primary actor, our desires are reoriented heavenward. Through this operative grace, God works within us and without us. But this does not obviate the obvious, namely that we still have to consent to this converting grace over the course of a lifetime. Where God’s operation ends, our cooperation must begin. Commonsense Pelagianism reminds us that God cannot “force” any person’s free love, and that the coordination of the divine and human wills in any sinner depends, ultimately, on the sinner’s choice. It is simple: God respects human freedom. True, God wills all persons to be saved (1 Tim 2:4) and so God provides sufficient grace for salvation to all. Still, we can and do set up obstacles to divine grace, and so whether this sufficient grace becomes “efficacious” is up to us. This has a certain intuitive appeal: God makes the first move to change our desires, but then the ball is in our court. Still, this idea remains vintage Pelagianism. Taking up the mantle of Augustine’s theology of grace, St. Thomas Aquinas clarifies that even our first acceptance of grace is itself a gift from God: “God does not justify us without ourselves, because while we are being justified we consent to God’s justification by a movement of our free-will. Nevertheless this movement is not the cause of grace, but the effect; hence the whole operation pertains to grace.”[6]

Granted. But still, in the subsequent course of Christian life, it is quite evident that we put up obstacles to God’s grace through our sin. We fail to cooperate with God’s gifts, and this sets a real limit on whether that initial sufficient grace will prove efficacious throughout our lifetime. Again it appears that our freedom is the final explanation for how things turn out for us. Here is one contemporary Catholic theologian’s articulation of this view:

The work of salvation must begin with the grace of God, an operative grace. However, man can block the effect intended by that grace through his own resistance, through which that first grace fails to progress as cooperative grace. Therefore, it is not absurd for God to reprobate man who does not have grace, precisely because he has culpably resisted cooperating with God’s gratuitous gift, and for that very reason does not have grace so as to be saved.

Aquinas himself speaks of our ability to set up obstacles to grace through our sin. Yet in reply to an objector who says that it is “the error of Pelagius” to make the effectiveness of grace dependent on our free will’s acceptance of it, Aquinas grants the point but clarifies his meaning. He does not deny that we place obstacles to grace, but if we ever remove them, that itself is God’s doing: “the very fact that a person places no obstacle [to grace] is due to grace. Hence, if anyone places an obstacle and his heart is moved to remove it, this is due to the gift of God’s grace calling by his mercy.”[7] Our freedom is always susceptible to God’s operation, and so our salvation never has its ultimate condition in our choices. Both operative and cooperative graces are necessary for salvation, and both the initial reception of grace and subsequent cooperation with it are effects of grace itself. Our first conversion, as well as all subsequent turnabouts, are equally “received.” We require not only converting but also sustaining grace, the grace of perseverance that keeps us on the way of Christ until our earthly end.[8] Salvation, in the final analysis, is the work of the Lord.

Abolishing Free Will?

This account of grace sounds counterintuitive enough to contemporary ears to provoke charges that a Calvinism has been surreptitiously substituted for the genuine Catholic article. In the context of a commonsense Pelagianism, reading this account will spontaneously provoke the question of whether grace abolishes free will. But the concern that grace cancels our freedom betrays a more profound confusion concerning the nature of God’s causality in relation to created causality. It is a truism of Catholic thought today that God’s causality is “non-competitive” with the causality of creatures, since God is the one who makes creatures be at all. But the commonsense Pelagianism in Catholic culture prevents this insight from being applied to the question of human free choices, especially as regards conversion and salvation. Augustine, however, understood that God’s activity “on” the human will is not like that of one finite agent extrinsic to another. God is the “one who knows how to work interiorly in the hearts of human beings.”[9] And God does this by shifting the weight of our loves: pondus meum amor meus. What we love most we will choose, and so God transforms our freedom from within by reconfiguring our ordo amoris.

Of course we have free will, says Augustine—if this were not the case, the Scriptural injunctions to avoid evil and do good would be meaningless. But we must also realize that these injunctions only do us good if the Spirit is working within us, that is, if grace is at work. Otherwise, the law (which Pelagius considered to be “grace”) would only work to increase concupiscence in us, as St. Paul himself teaches in Romans. (Recall Augustine’s account of the stealing of the pears in Confessions, where he steals the pears simply because the act is unlawful.) Indeed, if we did not need grace in order to exercise our freedom for the good, then why does the Lord teach us to pray not to enter into temptation? Granted that we will face temptation into this life, but if we seek not to enter “into it,” that is, be taken in by it, we require the Lord’s grace. When God gives us grace to do good, it is still we who are doing it, Augustine affirms, and so our will is still free. But because grace effects our good works, we must never forget that the glory for our good works belongs to God: “I worked harder than the rest of the apostles, or rather, it was God’s grace that was working in me” (1 Cor 15:10), proclaims St. Paul, whom Augustine quotes.

Augustine will return to this argument ex oratione regularly in order to show how, if we do not assume the priority of grace in the choices that constitute our Christian living, then the very logic of our basic faith practices dissolves into incoherence. If you cannot answer in a simple fashion the question “Why pray for grace?,” something has gone awry in your theology. We pray because grace re-orders our loves, and it is under the weight of our loves that we will exercise our freedom.

The Scope of Salvation

I earlier defined Pelagianism’s basic error as a mistake in explanation. I can now be more precise in the diagnosis. Where commonsense Pelagianism goes wrong is not that it explains salvation—both the initial and all subsequent conversions—as involving and indeed requiring human free choices; that insight is verifiable in our experience. But free choice is not the ultimate explanation of any person’s conversion or salvation. It is just as correct, but also just as incomplete an explanation, to appeal to any secondary created cause as the complete explanation of whatever conditioned effect it produces. In giving explanations for the movements and being of creatures, we cannot stop at created causes: this is what it means to say, in a theologically explanatory mode, that God is “Creator of all.” It follows therefore that no exercise of human freedom can, from a Catholic perspective, be understood in disconnection from God’s impartation of grace.

This commonsense Pelagianism is felt acutely in contemporary theological debate concerning the scope of salvation. It is not unusual, for example, to find objections to arguments for universal salvation that run as follows: however merciful God may be, and despite the fact that God wills “everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4), divine omnipotence faces an obstacle in the freedom of the human will. Yet this criticism of universalism fails on the grounds of a Catholic understanding of grace and divine causality. Hence Augustine’s cry of exasperation at this Pelagianism: “Who is so irreligious and foolish as to say that God cannot turn to God any of the evil wills of men he wishes, when and where he wishes?”[10] By confessing God the Father almighty, Augustine reasons, we affirm implicitly that “the effectiveness of the will of the almighty is not impeded by the will of any creature whatsoever.”[11] Contrary to C.S. Lewis’s understanding of divine omnipotence, in which God’s power is most visible in God’s creating creatures who can resist the divine will, the Catechism teaches that “God shows forth his almighty power by converting us from our sins and restoring us to his friendship by grace. ‘God, you show your almighty power above all in your mercy and forgiveness’ (Roman Missal, 26th Sunday, Opening Prayer).”[12]

I mention these points not to argue that universal salvation is Catholic magisterial teaching (it is not), but because Pelagianism is often running interference in debates about whether Catholic teaching on hell may ever develop into an affirmation that hell will in fact prove empty. Because of his refusal of Pelagianism, and his proper understanding of divine causality as non-competitive, Augustine rejected the idea that human freedom on its own could ever be the ultimate explanation for why eschatological fates are distributed (so he thought) diversely, as beatitude and condemnation. That is, just as the complete explanation of why a sinner is saved must refer to God’s decision to impart converting and sustaining grace, so too must the total explication of why any sinner is damned account for God’s free choice not to impart the grace that, were it given, would inexorably produce its intended result.

This logic led Augustine, infamously, to his denial that God grants grace for salvation to all: whatever “God wills all people to be saved” means, Augustine thought, it cannot mean that God universally bestows grace sufficient for salvation, but that this grace in the long run never accomplishes the purpose for which God gave it. That would be simply to deny the divine priority in salvation, to enthrone Pelagius as the true doctor of grace. And so God does not will the salvation of every person, Augustine concluded—in clear contradiction to the plain meaning of 1 Timothy 2:4.[13] The Church’s broad tradition, however, has never subscribed to this aspect of Augustine’s vision.[14] The contemporary Catechism is clear that “God wills the salvation of everyone through the knowledge of the truth.”[15] But notice that, taken together, these commitments—that God’s causality is non-competitive with ours, that grace effects conversion and perseverance in the faith, and that God’s salvific will truly is universal—raise insistently the question of universal salvation. If, per Augustine (and Aquinas), it is incoherent to understand a sinner’s rejection of saving grace as ultimately explained by that sinner’s throwing up obstacles in the way of grace; and if, pace Augustine, God does indeed distribute grace universally to human hearts, then can it be a concrete possibility—and not simply an abstract possibility derived from considering the human freedom in isolation—that any soul will finally be lost?

The Mystery of Sin

It may be objected that the account of divine action and grace I have defended here makes the occurrence of sin incomprehensible. For if it is true that God’s will cannot be defeated by creatures, and that God can convert any person at any time, then how is sin possible? Why does God not prevent moral evil on earth, if it is within God’s power to do so, and if God’s will is for the salvation of mankind? To feel the impossibility of squaring this circle is to encounter, perhaps for the first time, the true “mystery of iniquity.”[16] We should not let our customary language fool us: to say God “permits” but does not “will” sin is not to communicate anything we actually understand. It is, rather, only to confess the mystery that God’s will is universally efficacious and yet moral evil exists. Yet it is a perennial temptation for Christians, in their desire to reduce this mystery to manageable proportions and so to annul it, to revert to a Pelagian account of grace and divine causality. In that case, there is no problem: sin is possible, and it occurs, because human freedom is a “no-fly zone” for God.[17] What we do with our freedom is out of God’s hands, and this is what divine “permission” of sin commonsensically means.

We have already explicated how Augustine (and Aquinas) refused these Pelagian answers, on pain of theological and metaphysical incoherence.[18] To embrace them is simply to abandon the Gospel of God’s victory over sin while also, ironically, rendering sin intelligible. Yet while we cannot give any concrete answers to the question of why God permits this or that particular sin, Augustine does provide us a heuristic. It is simply that a God who is good would not permit evil unless omnipotence could bring good out of it.[19] For Augustine, this goodness to be wrought from evil was either redemption for those predestined to receive grace or the justice of damnation for those on whom God does not choose to bestow his deifying gifts. But we can deny Augustine’s limitation on God’s diffusion of grace while remaining bold enough with him to claim that even in the status viatoris we can discern the shape of God’s purposes for the human race and world history: to bring life out of death, good out of evil. So integral is this heuristic to Catholic understanding of divine goodness and the occurrence of sin that at the Easter Vigil we even sing of humanity’s fall as that felix culpa, whose darkness is by the light of the resurrection now irradiated with the glory of God’s power and love. This is all we are given this side of the beatific vision in which we shall at last know the causes of all things, but it is sufficient to inspire confident faith in God’s unrestricted power and goodness, even in the face of sin. Yet such faith can only be reasonable faith if we deny the Pelagian strictures that would restrict God’s omnipotence and the efficacy of grace.

The Spiritual Consequences of Commonsense Pelagianism

What has been said is enough to reveal contemporary Catholic commonsense Pelagianism to be common nonsense. It is an understandable error, born of considering human freedom in abstraction from God’s creative and salvific activity or generated by a desire to resolve the mystery of sin through denying God’s omnipotence and the efficacy of grace in its intended purpose. For Augustine, however, Pelagianism was not only a theoretical error. It bore serious spiritual consequences. Even those only casually acquainted with Augustine’s writings will not be surprised to learn that for him the greatest danger in Pelagianism was the pride it could inculcate in those who, whether consciously or not, would pat themselves on the back for their moral heroism in saying “yes” to God’s grace when so many others around us seem to say “no.” If pride was our first sin, as Augustine thought, then a clear and thorough understanding of God as the “author of salvation” is necessary for the complete extirpation of the sin that doomed the human race. On a more ecclesial level, Pelagianism can and does, I believe, prove a continual and grave impediment to the Church understanding itself, and living as, a genuine “hospital for sinners,” in Pope Francis’s memorable phrasing. But there are other, more subtle consequences. Our commonsense Pelagianism also keeps us from cultivating awe and gratitude to God for authoring every aspect of us, from our holy desires to our fruitful decisions. These are truly ours, but they are also gifts. As Augustine was wont to remind his readers, in the words of St. Paul (1 Cor 4:7), what do we have that we have not received?[20]

It therefore constitutes a real goal of Christian contemplation to discover, and even experience, our very desires and choices for God as given to us by God. This would indeed represent an achievement in the spiritual life, but it is no more difficult—or easier—than grasping that we are, at every moment of our life, being called into existence by the Creator God.[21] We are prone to think that “creation” is what God does at the beginning of time, overlooking the fact that as finite creatures intrinsically conditioned on the transcendent, we cannot be at all if God is not continuously fulfilling our conditions for being, if we are not continually being created by God.[22] But when we think our conversion in abstraction from God’s creative and salvific causality, an equally erroneous picture-thinking results, equivalent to imagining creation as something that happened “sometime in the past.” As regards salvation, we fall into the error of thinking of God as “the forlorn, neglected lover, the eternal bore.” And is this not the God of so much contemporary Catholic spirituality and theology? But no:

God is not the infinite exemplar of unrequited love. God is the love that, utterly surprisingly, creeps up on the inside of our sense of ourselves as desirable which normally is awakened from the outside by the person who excited our longing. . . . What we call grace, or the new creation, is that movement within people whereby the infinite desire which constitutes them in being (the “first creation”) happens for them, happens in their consciousness, happens as a new empowering of the heart.[23]

To transcend our commonsense Pelagianism is a task for every age of the Church, but its fruit is to be able to give God our thanks “always and everywhere,” for every thing. And that itself would be a grace, as the liturgy, in the spirit of Augustine, teaches us: “You have no need of our thanks, but the desire to thank You is itself Your gift.”[24]