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CHAPTER XI
PELAGIUS’S INTENTIONS FULFILLED
Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he
that loveth not his brother. – 1 John 3:10
Having accomplished the five primary aims which it shares with St. Augustine, the biblical alternative must now confront Pelagius. It must explain how it can at the same time fulfill the two great purposes for which he fought: the preservation of responsibility in a meaningful sense (and not just in name only); and a case for good works based upon a consistent rationale, rather than upon gratuitous insistence. Considering how much has already been conceded to Augustine, Pelagius might well be skeptical of the outcome.
JOINT RESPONSIBILITY
The question of responsibility will be considered first. If the reason why one does not love is that one finds himself in an unloving milieu, how can he be held accountable? The answer does indeed involve a break with the view, as modern as it is Pelagian, that responsibility is an entirely individual matter. For the Bible it is always mutual. Although foreign to contemporary thinking, this conception is entirely consistent with the biblical outlook as a whole. For the Bible nothing is more real than what happens between selves. The conception of moral self-sufficiency, of an individual monad working out a solitary salvation in isolation from his emotional environment, is as alien to the Bible as it is to the psychiatrist. Man is what he is largely in terms of his emotional and volitional relationships.1 Though not widely held at present, there is one alleged fact which, if true, provides this conception with dramatic proof, thereby making individualistic theories appear superficial in comparison: namely, the “wolf-children” occasionally reported from India. According to reports, these pathetic creatures offer positive proof that, without human companionship, man quickly becomes a beast indeed. Their rehabili-
1No one is more responsible for the recovery of this understanding than Martin Buber. G. Ernest Wright’s most recent book, The Biblical Conception of Man in Society (London: SCM Press, 1954), also makes a significant contribution to the subject.
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tation, even after years of human society, has never been complete.
If man only becomes man in community, then it is not unreasonable to speak, as the Bible always does, of his communal destiny. This conception emphatically does not transfer all responsibility from the individual to an abstract, impersonal entity like “the state.” This would only make the state a scapegoat for sin which belonged properly to you and me. The point is rather that they are shared sins. Each individual bears responsibility but not an exclusive responsibility. A classic example of this outlook are the words of Isaiah: “Woe is me, for I am undone. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” (Isaiah 6:5.) The prophet’s own responsibility is inseparable from that of his compatriots.
The moral confusion of our own time is partly due to the loss of this biblical understanding. This was never more strikingly illustrated than during the British Parliamentary debates in 1948 on the proposal to abolish the death penalty. Those who opposed the death sentence based their case on the argument that, since the individual was merely the product of his environment, he could not be held responsible for his crimes. The death penalty was therefore held to be unfair. The other side rightly discerned the disastrous implications of this sociological determinism. They were obliged to link their defense of responsibility, however, with the retention of the death penalty.
Actually, both sides were arguing from the same fallacious premise: namely, that, if there is any such thing as responsibility at all, it must be understood in a strictly individualistic sense. Opponents of the death penalty detected the injustice of holding the criminal solely responsible and were therefore willing to abandon the only kind of responsibility they could conceive of. Their antagonists likewise could imagine no other kind of accountability and were therefore forced into the position of linking responsibility to the death penalty. Here is the point at which the biblical view becomes supremely relevant. On the one hand, as against the determinists, it would insist on the responsibility of the criminal. But, on the other hand, it would also insist that this responsibility be shared by the community as a whole. To commute the sentence to life imprisonment therefore puts the responsibility squarely where it belongs: upon the criminal himself, to be sure, but also upon every member of the community. All are responsible for tolerating conditions which are conducive to crime. Therefore, all ought to contribute to the support of the offender dur-
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ing his imprisonment, as well as to the attempt to rehabilitate him. His execution would merely enable them to ignore their own complicity in the sin, to transfer to a scapegoat the guilt in which all share.
Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ ( Galatians 6:1-3).
It might still be objected that, if the conception of joint responsibility is true, it is impossible to determine the size of each person’s share. This difficulty, however, is more of an advantage than otherwise. It provides a theoretical framework within which no man can either boast of his own sinlessness nor confidently calculate his brother’s share. Nor can he attempt to attain purity by seceding from the human race. As to the final apportionment of responsibility, the Bible has a ready answer, albeit one which, like the rest of Christianity, only “works” when God is taken into account. One of its favorite themes is that, although the human heart may be hidden from man, it is an open book to God:
For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two. edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thought and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do (Hebrews 4:12-13).
By breaking with the idea that responsibility is entirely an individual matter the Bible by no means destroys the conception of responsibility as such. On the contrary, it intensifies it. Whereas Pelagius encourages a man to cut the ties that link him to his fellows, the Bible never lets him forget that his responsibilities extend far beyond an imaginary island of private morals. Only so will he truly understand what it means to pray, “Forgive us our trespasses.”
GOOD WORKS DE JURE
It remains to show how the Bible accomplishes the second purpose which it shares with Pelagius, the provision of an adequate rationale for good works, without making his mistakes. His own incentive to, good works rests upon the belief that by means of them a man can bargain his way into heaven. Augustine and Luther rightly reject this
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motive. But it is as though they cannot conceive of good works being done for any other reason. In that event the only alternative would indeed be to disparage good works as such. The result would be an excessive self-scrutiny which either shrinks from helping the neighbor for fear of an impure motive or else refuses to discriminate between good and bad works on the ground that they are all impure anyway. This morbid scrupulosity is, in fact, another point at which neither Augustine nor Luther has broken sufficiently with Pelagius. Their writings, like the moralist’s, reflect an excessive preoccupation with self..
The biblical alternative is to restore love to its primacy. Once this is done, then good works, though they cannot save a man, remain well-pleasing both to God and neighbor. This is a sufficient motive for doing them. St. Paul says, “Although I give my body to be burned, and have not agape, it profiteth me nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:3.) Though indeed it profit me nothing, it may nevertheless be what God wants done. Nor need the Christian be deterred by a possible mixed motive. Rather, he asks God’s forgiveness for it. Even when he cannot love, a good deed can stand as a concrete token of the “good that I would.” A Christian does good works, then, not in a spirit of “what a good boy am I,” but rather, “Lord, have mercy - I had to do it more from duty than from agape.”
This is one half of the biblical rationale for good works. The other is that, although they cannot by themselves create love, “bad works” can destroy it. Since love is a bilateral relation, not simply a one-way efflux, it follows that whether or not my neighbor loves me will depend partly on me. On the level of personal relations the most obvious obstacles which I can erect are acts of insolence, contempt, patronage, deceit, and the like. Conversely, acts of respect and courtesy, while unable in themselves to generate love, do at least provide a milieu in which it is possible.
On the level of society as a whole it has been established statistically that certain economic conditions and policies are the breeding ground of resentment and hatred. While it has also been shown that improvement of these conditions does not in itself effect a miracle in the heart of man, it can at least remove some of the impediments to a harmonious society. Although “nothing can separate us from the love of God,” we can still separate ourselves and each other from him. One of the most effective ways of doing this is to
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acquiesce in institutions or laws which tend to perpetuate, rather than ameliorate, human misery.
This is the basis of Christianity’s explosive social dynamic. A Christian is, by definition, one who has an intense concern for problems of justice on all levels of communal life, whether economic, political, or social. Those who urge the Church to “mind its own business” and to confine itself to “saving individual souls” are in fact addressing themselves to a different religion. For Christianity, since we are members one of another, there is no such thing as individual salvation. Rather, the volitional health of the individual is inseparable from that of his neighbor. A sore spot in the body social is consequently of more than passing concern to every one of its members. Whether they know it or not (and, if they do not, the Church ought to remind them), the affliction of a part of society does in fact discharge the venom of resentment and vindictiveness into the emotional fabric of the whole. The classic New Testament expression of this is the figure, “many members yet one body” (1 Corinthians 12:20).
The potent implications of this metaphor were vividly pointed out in a recent address by Sir George McCleod on the subject of religious healing. It is both foolish and blasphemous, he said, to pray for an indigent person’s recovery from tuberculosis as long as one remains indifferent to the noxious housing conditions where the disease is bred. This statement stands in the direct line which stretches all the way back to the Hebrew prophets. None is more eloquent than Amos:
They sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes . . . . For as much therefore as your trading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them. . . . They afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right . . . . But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 2:6; 5:11, 12, 24).
The twentieth-century reader of these remarkable words will scarcely be surprised at the reaction which they produced when they were first uttered. The high priest reported to the king that Amos was subversive (7:10).
A defender of the extreme Augustinian position might here recoil in horror at the thought of works being admitted to the realm of redemption. This only betrays a lapse into a legalistic conception of
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good works. Such a definition would indeed tempt men to try to achieve goodness by their own efforts and would correspondingly evoke the theologian’s strictures. John Wesley detected this tendency in Martin Luther when he remarked of the latter’s Commentary on Galatians, “How blasphemously does he [Luther] speak of good works and of the law of God.”2
When, on the contrary, goodness is conceived as a quality of relation between persons, then “works of the law” can be seen in their proper perspective and appropriated to serve the ends of agape. Actually the strong biblical emphasis on the unity of human personality makes it impossible to speak of love apart from deeds. Love is only fully actualized in actions. If man is the “psychosomatic” unity which the Bible declares him to be, then, Augustine to the contrary notwithstanding, a further conclusion inevitably follows. Not only do one’s inner feelings influence one’s outward actions, but the converse may also be true. External acts may affect the orientation of the heart. There is no reason in principle why they could not contribute to agape, always granted that they can never generate it by themselves alone.
It is no accident that the clearest expression of this biblical truth in our time should come from the Hebraic tradition. Rabbi Abraham Heschel has expressed it with characteristic eloquence:
Faith is but a seed, while the deed is its growth or decay. Faith disembodied, faith that tries to grow in splendid isolation, is but a ghost, for which there is no place in our psychophysical world .... Religion cannot be divorced from conduct. Judaism is lived in deed, not only in thought.3
One should always do the good, even though it is not done for its own sake. It is the act that teaches us the meaning of the act . . . . Serving sacred goals may change mean motives .... There is power in the deed that purifies desires. It is the act, life itself, that educates the will. The good motive may come into being while doing the good.4
If this sounds like Pelagianism, it is only because one has still failed to throw off the tendency to think of goodness in forensic terms.
2See John Wesley’s journal for June 15, 1741.
3Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), p. 110.
4These lines were taken from the manuscript copy of Dr. Heschel’s chapter in the forthcoming volume, The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: The Macmillan Company). An excellent criticism of the doctrine of justification by “faith alone” is the chapter of that title in Walter Lowrie’s What Is Christianity? (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953).
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When one realizes that the law was made for agape, and not man for the law, it loses its tyrannical character and becomes the servant of love. The ramifications of this insight on the social plane having been discussed above, it remains to apply it to person-to-person relations. The best illustration is the subject of good manners, which, in fact, contains the whole problem of “good works” in miniature: Manners are currently in retreat before the leveling effect of a purely scientific world view. Our own intellectuals sometimes seem to echo the Communist taunt that manners are simply a vestige of “bourgeois formalism.” This attitude reflects the habit of mind for which knowledge and truth have become ends in themselves. According to this outlook, the great virtue is “frankness” (“open covenants openly arrived at”). When frankness takes precedence, then tact and discrimination are branded “irrational.” Modern man has no frame of reference in which to understand that he may be “factually right but morally wrong.”5 He can neither account for nor deal with the considerations upon which manners rest, which happen also to be the same considerations which Christianity takes most seriously: respect for personal dignity; the interplay of complex motives; and the consequent fact that the same word or deed might be quite appropriate in one situation and highly out of place in another. Each situation is different precisely because it involves unique emotional and volitional relations which, in turn, instead of being dismissed as “subjective” and irrelevant, are of decisive import.
Like any “rules of the game,” manners serve a twofold function, the one protective, the other positive. Without rules, no holds are barred. Without manners, if human sin is a fact, then my neighbor is at the mercy of my own aggressiveness and disrespect. Especially when tempers are short and nerves are frayed, manners insulate against the sparks of animus which can so easily set off an explosion. They help prevent the kind of outburst which strains human relations past the breaking point.
Besides this negative function, rules provide the positive framework within which to exercise creative imagination in every situation. Without them, as satirists so often observe, the best of intentions become a bungling good will which often defeats its own aim. By structuring these amorphous sentiments, manners help to translate
5This pointed phrase, which contains the germ of an entire biblical theology, is used by Canon Edward N. West in his Meditations on the Gospel of St. John (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), p. 176.
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them into concrete fact. Manners are important for Christianity precisely because it knows what the road to hell is paved with.
Like any good works, they are subject to abuse. They may become the vehicle of hypocrisy, where outward act is performed with intent to deceive. Christianity’s remedy is not to abolish manners but rather to transform the motive. One of the reasons for the early growth of Christianity was that it possessed the resources for doing precisely this.
Again, when misunderstood, manners can also degenerate into “the letter that killeth,” to the stultification of human relations. And again the answer does not lie in their abolition. Actually any such attempt is impossible. It only makes unruliness into a rule.6 Moreover, the effect upon human relations is quite as lethal as the dead hand of formalism. By renouncing any principle of discrimination it robs man of his birthright as “discriminating animal” par excellence. Without such a principle nothing that a man says or does makes any appreciable difference. Life has gone stale. On the contrary, when manners are properly understood and applied, every word and every gesture acquire significance. They align themselves with either the creative or the destructive possibilities inherent in every situation. Christianity no more recognizes a separation between manners and morals than between morality and religion.
CONCLUSION
The biblical alternative is thus able to satisfy not only Augustine but Pelagius too. Its conception of joint responsibility is both truer to fact and far more serious than Pelagian individualism. By remembering that the good is not law but love it is free to appropriate the works of the law for its own creative purposes. He who does them from motives of self-salvation or the accumulation of merit is chasing after wind, for works alone cannot generate the only true goodness, love. The recognition that neither act nor theory alone can guarantee purity of motive is an additional strength of the biblical view. For, as has been shown above, the root error of the Augustinian and Reformation position is to try to prevent undesirable motives by means of a doctrine.
The biblical rationale for doing good works is simply that they can be well-pleasing to God and neighbor, and this in itself is the best of
6This point is made by Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity, translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), p. 55.
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reasons for doing them. Moreover, though they cannot create agape, they can create a milieu favorable to it. The primacy of love banishes the fear that one might be cheating if he tried to prepare for agape instead of just waiting for it to “happen.” He who shrinks from “works” for fear of an impure motive cuts off his nose to spite his face.
There is no doubt, as Augustine and the Reformers saw, that good works can become the archenemy of love. But the same thing can happen to them that happened to another of Christianity’s most zealous persecutors - St. Paul. Love will settle for nothing less than this: to transform its worst antagonist into an even more redoubtable ally.