Pelagian Audacity

I wonder, how did you experience Saint Symeon's audacious proclamation of his own and our awakening in and as Christ's body? How did that land in your body? What sensations did you experience? And where?

(Would you like to engage that hymn again, or listen to it for the first time? You can access the audio meditation, with gentle musical accompaniment, at anytime. Return to it as often as you like. Prefer to read it? You can do that here.)

I so love his direct and anticipatory question, "Do my words seem blasphemous to you?" Hah. He hits that nail right on the head, doesn't he? He knows right where our minds, and maybe even our bodies, will go.

And no wonder. From very early on in Christian history many church fathers struggled to fully accept, and therefore to go on to integrate, the paradox Jesus modeled for us: namely that of our in-the-image-of-God inherent goodness and our full humanity, which includes a deep forgetfulness of that first scintillating truth.

Many of us learned little or a very limited version of early church history in which two church fathers came head to head on each side of that paradox. One one end stood St. Augustine, whom I was taught to categorically revere, and on the other was Pelagius, whose very name stirred up an uncomfortable feeling in my body last winter as I read John Philip Newell's Sacred Earth Sacred Soul and came upon the chapter entitled "Sacred Soul: Pelagius." My embodied response was so immediate and strong I had to ask myself, "Why does that name make my body feel bad?"

Immediately, up rose the phrase Pelagian fallacy. I had been taught that Pelagius was a heretic. Maybe you had, too? Reading John Phillip Newell's expose' of the history of this debate between Eastern (and also Celtic) Christianity, represented by Pelagius, and a Romanized Western Christianity, represented by Augustine, was both enlightening and angering as I learned how acceptance of our birthright blessing of original goodness had been systematically toppled by Augustine's and the Roman empire's attachment to the doctrine of original sin, which was so accentuated that Western spirituality came to preach "the total depravity of man." If people are divorced from their own goodness, they are much easier to control, aren't they?

Newell, along with many other contemporary Christian leaders —including, but not limited to, Cynthia Borgeault and Richard Rohr— are uncovering for us a theology that was sent underground for centuries, and which is now, due in part to the 20th century discoveries of the Nag Hammadi Codex and the Dead Sea Scrolls. coming back into view. (If you want to read more about this, I strongly recommend Newell's aforementioned Sacred Earth Sacred Soul and also Cynthia Bourgeault's The Wisdom Jesus).

This was a hugely significant loss not only for Western Christians, but for Western culture. When the doctrine of original sin is not held in the balancing context of original goodness, we relate to ourselves and others with constant suspicion. We divide ourselves, each other and reality itself into "good" and "bad." We become fearful of coming toward our own "negative" feelings, much less approaching with honesty our own proclivities toward, patterns and practices of sin. Our entire theology becomes fear and shame based. This divorces us from our in-the-image-of-God goodness and and ensuing agency and makes us easy to control and keeps us in bondage.

Something beautiful, though, in all of this is how that knowledge of and radical insistence upon our inherent goodness persisted through the millenia via poets, saints, and mystics who dared to trust their lived experience of the Divine, even in the face of being labeled heretic.

The story of Pelagius is one delightful case in point. Despite his being banished from the Church and Rome in 418, despite a ban in 421 that banned any follower of Pelagius' teaching from coming within one hundred miles of Rome, and another ban in 428 preventing his followers from being anywhere in Italy, Pelagius returned to his home in Wales and kept writing, often under psuedonyms so that his writings could circulate freely throughout the empire. Wanna take a stab at his favorite pseudonym?

It was Augustine! What an audacious and beautiful sense of humor!

Pelagius' influence continued to be so threatening that a hundred years later, in 529, his' teachings were condemned by another church council.

But truth cannot be banned, especially when we experience it in our very cells!

Consider these words Pelagius wrote to a young woman seeking his counsel:

Have regard for your origin, consider your lineage, respect the honor of your noble stock. Acknowledge you are not only the daughter of a man [and a woman], but the daughter of God as well, graced with the nobility of divine birth. Present yourself in such a way that . . . your divine nobility shines forth clearly.


Soul friend, how long will you pretend it is not true? How long will you resist what your soul knows to be true? How long will you be held captive by fear and shame? My cells need some healing to live out the liberation that is their birthright. Maybe yours do too.

Saint Symeon beckons us to come towards that which seems to us "dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged," and to discover the wholeness and radiance of "the Beloved in every last part of our body." How do we do this? Let me guide you. Over the course of this Advent I will be offering you practices to help you do just that. Let's embrace some Pelagian audacity!