The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

not? If orife cannot evade it, there is no evil in committing it and then it does not exist : if one can evade it, it must be evil to commit it and therefore it exists : its very existence is born of the free will, and proves it." The dogma of original sin [continued Pelagius] is absurd and unjust to God; for a creature which does not exist would not be an accomplice of a bad action; and it outrages divine justice, to say that God punishes him as guilty of this action * Man [added Pelagius] has therefore a real power of doing good and evil, and he is free in these two respects. But the liberty of doing a thing supposes necessarily the union of all causes and of all conditions requisite for doing that thing; and one is not free regarding an effect, every time that one of the causes or conditioris naturally exigent for producing this effect is lacking. Therefore, to have the liberty of seeing the subjects, it is necessary not only that the sense of sight be well developed, but also that the subjects be discriminated, and placed at an equitable distance.'

This far, the doctrine of Pelagius was wholly similar to that of Pythagoras, as explained by Hierocles''; but it differs from it afterwards, in what the EngUsh monk asserted, that since man is born with the liberty of doing good and evil, he receives from nature and unites in him all the conditions and all the causes naturally necessary for good and evil; which robs him of his most beautiful prerogative, — ^perfectibility ; whereas Pythagoras held, on the contrary, that these causes and these effects were only accorded to those who, on their part, concurred in acquiring them, and who, by the work that they have done for themselves in seeking to know themselves, have succeeded in possessing them more and more perfectly.

However mitigated the doctrine of Pelagius might be, it appeared still to accord too much with free will and was condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, who declared,

- Plucquet, commt ci-dessus, t. ii., p. 454.

Pelag., apud S. August., De Nat. et GraU, 1. iii., c. 9.

- Pelag., apud August., De Grat. Christ., c. 4. <* Comment, in Aur. Carm., v. 62.

Examinations of the Golden Verses 257

through the medium of several councils, that man can do nothing of himself without the aid of grace.

Saint Augustine, who had been the soul of these councils, pressed by the disciple of Pelagius to explain the nature of this grace and to say how God accorded it to one man rather than to another without being induced by the difference of their merits, replied that man being in the masse de perdition, and God having no need of them, and being furthermore independent and all-powerful, he gave grace to whom he willed, without the one to whom he did not give it having the right to complain; everything coming to pass as a result of his will, which had foreseen all and determined all.

Assuredly one could not establish more forcibly the necessity of all things, nor submit men to a sterner fatality, since the want of grace deprived them, not only of virtue in the fleeting cotirse of this life, but delivered them without hope to the torments of an eternal hell.

But Saint Augustine, who , obeyed a severe and consistent reason, felt very well that he cotild not speak otherwise, without renouncing the dogma of original sin and overthrowing the foundation of Christianity.

All the rigid Christians, aU those who, at different times, have undertaken to restore Christianity to its constitutive principles, have thought as Saint Augustine, and although the church, alarmed at the terrible inferences that were drawn from the canonical doctrine, may have essayed to temper it, by condemning, as I have said, the Predestinarians and by approving of the persecutions directed against Gotescalc; and, at the time when Luther drew in his reform a great part of Christendom toward the dogma of predestination, this did not prevent Baius, who remained faithful to orthodoxy, from preaching the same dogma; nor Calvin, soon after, from adding new lights to what Luther had left doubtful, and Jansenius, finally, corroborating what Baius had only outlined, from raising in the very midst of the