Shadi Bartsch, professor of Classics at the University of Chicago called it “weird.” “It” here refers to an excerpt from a New York Times article written by Katherine Stewart. Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed tweeted an excerpt from the Times on January 11, and Bartsch retweeted Reed’s post. Reed is an NYU professor of Religious Studies and watchdog of how right-wing politicians make use of religion. “It,” the Times article, was about Senator Joshua Hawley, infamous for his January 6 clenched-fist salute to the mob at the Capitol. In her tweet, Reed called Hawley a “seditionist” – not, however, for his clenched fist. It was rather Senator Hawley’s seeming obsession with Pelagius, featured both in the Times piece and in his commencement address at King’s College, published in Christianity Today as “The Age of Pelagius.”
Finding Pelagius mentioned in one’s daily news browsing stands out the way Duchamp’s urinal must have the day it was displayed at an art exhibition in 1917. By coincidence, in the same week that experts in Classics and Religious Studies rubbed their eyes after seeing Pelagius in social media, a philosophy book appeared, Peter Kaufman’s On Agamben, Donatism, Pelagianism, and the Missing Links. At that point, some must have supposed they were suffering from apophenia. Who is Pelagius? Why would anyone be anti-Pelagius? More importantly, why has Senator Hawley made Pelagius the subject of his commencement speech? At stake in those answers is nothing less than the political future of the U.S., especially for those who see themselves as the beneficiaries of God’s grace.
Sources for Pelagius’s biography lack complete agreement. Most scholars count Pelagius, contemporary of Saint Augustine, as a well-educated British theologian of the fourth and fifth century who became a popular preacher and advisor. In his later life, he journeyed to Rome, the Holy Land, and to North Africa, where he encountered opposition. Pelagius advocated asceticism for a group of Christians who were persecuted, out of power, at odds with society. However, once Christianity became the state religion of Rome under Constantine, things changed. Christians began enjoying power and affluence. Christian outsiders became insiders. Self-denial became an unwelcome option. As the Christian call to an ascetic life faded, Pelagius was unwavering in advocating asceticism as the way Christians should live.
Pelagius believed that humans are intrinsically good and denied that humans are condemned by Adam’s sin. Human goodness is not dependent on God’s grace. Pelagius insisted on free will and moderation. Our fate is up to us. We need not be part of a “chosen” group for salvation. Despite some early cheerleading by Augustine of Hippo, who, Kaufman reports, lauded “Pelagius as a person of integrity and intelligence,” Pelagius’s views eventually irritated powerful Church figures. Even the previously supportive Augustine turned on Pelagius to promote Augustine’s own doctrines. The Pope excommunicated Pelagius, and the Council of Carthage declared Pelagius a heretic in 418.
Pelagius might have been forgotten had it not been for Augustine of Hippo, who saw Pelagius as a foil for his own theological brand. According to University of Cambridge professor Ali Bonner, Augustine constructed Pelagianism out of a warped set of Pelagius’s positions, and a wish to replace a mainstream understanding of Christianity with a new orthodoxy. Furthermore, Bonner holds that Pelagius’s program is not his own but flows from an ascetic tradition preceding Pelagius. Bonner rejects anything called “Pelagianism,” even though Augustine used that term to set up a program of social change with himself as driver.
What has grown out of “the most important theological controversy in the history of Christianity” is, according to philosopher Hans Blumenberg, a justification of God “accomplished at the expense of human beings, to whom a new concept of freedom is ascribed [by Augustine] expressly in order to let the whole of an enormous responsibility and guilt be imputed to it.” Some philosophers have been uncomfortable with Augustine’s success. Kaufman’s new book is about Continental philosophy’s opposition to Augustine through the works of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, student of Martin Heidegger, who made news recently for opposing public health measures in Italy to prevent Covid-19, efforts Agamben called “techno-medical despotism.” For Agamben’s followers, like Kaufman, Agamben’s position on Coronavirus comes as no surprise. After all, Agamben is a fan of figures he champions as freedom fighters like Bartleby the Scrivener and Pelagius. Kaufman writes, “Agamben make[s] Pelagius the early medieval paladin of potentiality.” The philosopher of “whateverism” embraces Pelagius as an anti-establishment hero of free will, which is exactly the Pelagius Senator Hawley wants Christians to ostracize again.
Adoption of “a particular philosophy of freedom,” Hawley writes, characterized by “unfettered free choice,” has produced a “crisis.” Hawley says Pelagius “precipitated our present crisis.” For Hawley, Pelagius’s teachings have permeated the nation. In “The Age of Pelagius,” Hawley offers but one unattributed quotation from Pelagius about human perfection but seems most upset by the notion that humans might not need “God’s grace” to flourish. Then Hawley uses Augustine to cudgel Pelagius and any “enemies of grace” who think they can achieve their own salvation.
Hawley links what he sees as the senselessness of self-assertion with the selfie society. Instead of valorizing humility, American society has chosen “self-promotion” and “self-aggrandizement.” Hawley laments, “A Pelagian society is one that celebrates the wealthy, prioritizes the powerful, rewards the privileged. And for too long now, that has described modern America.” Hawley utters this statement at King’s College, a Christian liberal arts college in New York City’s financial district, where tuition is $37k a year. If Hawley’s pro-pecunious Pelagius doesn’t mesh with the historical Pelagius pushing asceticism, that’s because it doesn’t.
Academics versed in the history of Christianity have been puzzled by Hawley’s Pelagius. Caroline Humfress, historian of Late Antiquity at the University of St. Andrews, said in an e-mail exchange, “[Hawley’s] ‘pelagianism’ looks to have about as much to do with Pelagius as medieval / modern ‘Augustinianism’ has to do with Augustine!” Similarly, Adam Rasmussen, who teaches religion at Georgetown University, told me, “I don’t know where Senator Hawley got his ideas about Pelagius. They are so detached from history that I don’t think they could have come from a primary source.”
Pelagius is on the curriculum at the Seminary of the Southwest where Rev. Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski teaches. He asks his students to read Pelagius’s Letter to Demetrias. In helping me to understand how Senator Hawley’s “Age of Pelagius” would sound to a religious audience, Rev. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski responded: “I don’t think this is a common term but a riff on the ‘Age of Aquarius.’ Accusing someone of being a Pelagian is a pretty common thing in various theological circles. I think anxiety about creeping Pelagianism has been a common feature of Reformed thought since the 16th century. Hawley’s article is a superficial entry into those polemics.”
Like Augustine, Hawley seems to have projected his own version of Pelagius for his audience, without grappling with the historical evidence, most of which fails to verify Hawley’s portrait. It doesn’t help that contemporary philosophers, historians, and religious scholars do not form a unifying choral voice about the matter. For example, Charlotte Allen, arguing on behalf of Augustine and in ways Hawley endorses in his commencement address, challenges Ali Bonner’s book on Pelagius. You won’t want to miss Bonner’s response. It might be easy to dismiss these disputes as ongoing, benign doctrinal turbulence among different sects of Christianity, until Christian nationalists appeared at the Capitol on January 6 bent on overthrowing a countrywide election — and Senator Hawley there with his gesture of solidarity.
Bruce J. Krajewski
Bruce J. Krajewski is a translator and editor of Salomo Friedlaender's Kant for Children (forthcoming in 2024 from De Gruyter).
