Julian of Eclanum - Julian's Theology

Julian's Theology

A sympathetic and accessible account of Julian’s Pelagian theology can be found in chapter 32 of Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967, 2000). From the year 419 on, Julian and St. Augustine waged a well-matched war of books, pamphlets, letters, and sermons from which we gain a clear idea of their contrasting views—optimistic for Julian, pessimistic and coercive for Augustine. Their debate is still alive today:

Sin and will: Some Pelagians denied that the original sin of Adam was transmitted to all humans at birth. Babies, therefore, need not be baptized: they are born innocent. Adult baptism does remit sins, but for the Pelagian, this meant that the baptized Christian, after this dramatic fresh start, was now free to perfect himself alone, with or without the aid of the Church. It is worth noting that in the surviving fragments of Pelagius' writings, Pelagius writes that infants must be baptized and that there is no goodness without grace. Julian himself wrote a letter to Rome in which he said “We confess that the grace of Christ is necessary to all, both to grown-up people and to infants; and we athematize those who say that a child born of two baptized people ought not to be baptized.” He also affirmed that grace was necessary for all: “We maintain that men are the work of God, and that no one is forced unwillingly by His power either into evil or good, but that man does either good or ill of his own will; but that in a good work he is always assisted by God’s grace, while in evil he is incited by the suggestions of the devil.” To Augustine, all humans are profoundly tainted by original sin, and the baptized Christian is still an invalid in constant need of the Church’s guidance and absolution. Pelagians viewed sin as a matter of will and not of nature, as a choice that can be reversed. Strengthened by baptism, everyone possesses enough self-control to reject evil. (In this, Pelagians drew on pagan Stoicism.) For Augustine, such optimism was dangerously naive: human will is caught in a dark internal labyrinth of untamable compulsions. No one is strong enough to save himself without God’s grace and the sacraments of the Church.

The equity of God: Julian drew on the Jewish equation of divinity and law. For him, our concept of law as something rational, sensible, and proportionate is divine in origin, and mirrors the attributes of God himself. An unjust God is inconceivable as God. For Pelagians, God would not condemn every human because of one sin committed by Adam; God would not condemn to infinite torment those whose sins were finite or who had simply never heard of Christ (again, Pelagius appears to have felt differently in some of his framents, as he claimed baptism was required for salvation for anyone). Augustine dismissed such notions of justice as too fallible to be attributed to God, whose ways are inscrutable. And his concept of predestination, by which God elects some creatures to be saved and consigns all others to eternal torment before they even sin, goes very far in the opposite direction. Pelagians rejected predestination as incompatible with the freedom of each person to effect his own salvation. Julian charged that Augustine was still Manichean, if only in temperament; Augustine’s concept of sin offered the best evidence of that.

Sexuality: As Brown puts it, “Julian spoke boldly of the sexual instinct as a sixth sense of the body, as a neutral energy that might be used well...delicately poised between reason and animal feeling.” (1) Augustine, after more than 13 years of fornicating with prostitutes and concubines, considered all non-procreative sex sinful (and said that the feelings of arousal that accompanied procreative sex were evil and were the cause of the transmission of original sin), and human sexuality itself a debilitating curse. Julian scorned this as hypocrisy, and instead said “We say that the sexual impulse—that is, that the virility itself, without which there can be no intercourse—is ordained by God.”.

Social reform: Julian’s Pelagianism was a purifying reform movement that sought to inspire morally perfected Christians to remake Roman society from the inside out, countering its brutality and injustice. By contrast, Augustine was always comfortable with the Imperial establishment and used it to persecute dissident movements like the Donatists, relentlessly and brutally.