A Note on Pelagius

The selection criteria do not rule out passages from Pelagius's commentaries at those points at which they provide good exegesis. This requires special explanation, if we are to hold fast to our criterion of consensuality.

10 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gregory of Nazianzuff Rhetor and Philosopher (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1969); Rosemary Radford Ruether, ed., Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York Simon and Schuster, 1974); David C. Rord: «Men and Women in the Early Church: The Full Views of St. John Chrysostom» (So, Canann Penn.: St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, 1995). Cf. related works by John Meyendorff. Stephen B. Clark and Paul K. Jewett.

The literary corpus of Pelagius remains highly controverted. Though Pelagius was by general consent the arch-heretic of the early fifth century. Pelagius’s edited commentaries, as we now have them highly worked over by later orthodox writers, were widely read and preserved for future generations under other names. So Pelagius presents us with a textual dilemma.

Until 1934 all we had was a corrupted text of his Pauline commentary and fragments quoted by Augustine.

Since then his works have been much studied and debated, and we now know that the Pelagian corpus has been so warped by a history of later redactors that we might be tempted not to quote it at all. But it does remain a significant source of fifth-century comment on Paul. So we cannot simply ignore it. My suggestion is that the reader is well advised not to equate the fifth-century Pelagius too easily with later standard stereotypes of the arch-heresy of Pelagianism. 11

It has to be remembered that the text of Pelagius on Paul as we now have it was preserved in the corpus of Jerome and probably reworked in the sixth century by either Primasius or Cassiodorus or both. These commentaries were repeatedly recycled and redacted, so what we have today may be regarded as consonant with much standard later patristic thought and exegesis, excluding, of course, that which is ecumenically censured as “Pelagianism.”

Pelagius’s original text was in specific ways presumably explicitly heretical, but what we have now is largely unexceptional, even if it is still possible to detect points of disagreement with Augustine. We may have been ill-advised to quote this material as «Pelagius» and perhaps might have quoted it as «Pseudo-Pelagius» or

«Anonymous», but here we follow contemporary reference practice.