In the year of our Lord 394, Arcadius, son of Theodosius, forty-third in line from Augustus, became joint-Emperor with his brother Honorius, and ruled for thirteen years. In his time, the Briton Pelagius1 spread far and wide his noxious and abominable teaching that man had no need of God’s grace, and in this he was supported by Julian of Campania, a deposed bishop eager to recover his bishopric. Saint Augustine and other orthodox fathers quoted many thousand Catholic authorities against them, but they refused to abandon their folly; on the contrary, their obstinacy was hardened by contradiction, and they refused to return to the true faith. Prosper the rhetorician has aptly expressed this in heroic verse:
Against the great Augustine see him crawl,
This wretched scribbler with his pen of gall!
In what black caverns was this snakeling bred
That from the dirt presumes to rear its head?
Its food is grain that wave-washed Britain yields,
Or the rank pasture of Campanian fields.
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Pelagius, usually described as a Briton, taught mainly in Rome and Africa, though some trace of his teaching survived in Ireland. He exaggerated the unaided power of the human will to do good, minimizing the need for divine grace and the effects of Original Sin. The Church in Britain was labelled ‘Pelagian’ by foreign churchmen, but Gildas said nothing about it. Bede however wrote the preface to his Song of Songs commentary against the Pelagian Julian of Eclanum. The verse at the end of this chapter was quoted several times by Bede: it is attributed to Prosper of Aquitaine (P.L. li, 149–52). ↩