Testimonies’ (Eulogiarum or Testimoniorum Liber, arranged after the model of St. Cyprian's ‘Testimonia’), and ‘On St. Paul's Epistles.’ It was also during his stay at Rome that he made the acquaintance of Celestius, afterwards his foremost disciple, and began by writings, especially letters, to show plainly that he had rejected the dominant theology upon the points of human freewill and divine grace.
Pelagius's doctrines dealt with six chief points, as his opponents sometimes divided them: original sin, infant baptism, the effect of the fall of Adam, freewill in man, divine grace, and predestination; but the gist of them all is contained in the single point on which the ninth article of the English church condemns his followers as ‘talking vainly,’ viz. whether or not ‘the condition of man after the fall is such that he … has no power to do good works without the grace of God.’ He annulled that grace, said Augustine, by representing it as the payment of what was strictly due. His position certainly rested on two particular denials—first of the necessity of supernatural and directly assisting grace in order to any true service of God; secondly, of the transmission of the corruption of human nature and of physical death to the descendants of the first man, in consequence of his transgression. Personally he wrote in support of the divinity of Christ, but some of his followers were less explicit, and after his death his party became somewhat connected with the Nestorian. As to the necessity of infant baptism, Pelagius distinguished between an eternal life that the unbaptised could possibly enter, and a kingdom of heaven that was closed to them.
About 409 Pelagius went with Celestius to Sicily, to escape Alaric's attack upon Rome, and soon after passed on to Africa, missing St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, in his own city, but meeting him in Carthage, where the bishop was then busy with the Donatist controversy. Thence Pelagius sailed to Palestine, where he met Jerome at Bethlehem; while Celestius, staying behind in Africa, and going beyond his leader in the boldness and definiteness of his heresy, was accused, tried, and condemned, on seven counts of false doctrine, by a synod at Carthage (412). At the same time Augustine, though strongly opposed to ‘Pelagianism,’ as doctrines in favour of the freedom of the will came to be called, received a letter from Pelagius himself, to which he replied in ‘friendly terms.’ But a little later he received another work by Pelagius, with a letter, from two ‘youths,’ Timasius and James, asking him to satisfy them on various points in it, and this book seems to have alarmed him.
Next year accordingly (415) Orosius, sent by Augustine to Palestine to watch Pelagius, accused him of heresy before a synod at Jerusalem (28 July 415). Pelagius was at first disposed to question the right of the African church to dictate in the matter, but finally decided to plead, and justified his doctrines at length. The presiding bishop, John of Jerusalem, showed him some favour; and the result was the acquittal of Pelagius of any definite false doctrines. On this the ‘Augustinians’ appealed to Rome, declaring that Pelagius's Latin was not properly understood in Syria; that his interpreter was incompetent; and that the Eastern judges had not grasped the facts.
The appeal to Rome was allowed, as a compromise, by the synod of Jerusalem; but at the end of 415 Pelagius was again indicted before a synod at Diospolis, or Lydda, in Palestine, by two (deposed) western prelates—Heros of Arles, and Lazarus of Aix. Fourteen bishops again met together to decide upon an appeal really coming, as was supposed, from Jerome and his party at Bethlehem. The ‘miserable conventicle of Diospolis’ as Jerome calls it, came to the same result as the synod of Jerusalem, and the main hope of the predestinarian party now rested on the expected sympathy and support of Innocent I. The Roman appeal was accordingly repeated in 416 by over sixty-nine bishops in the synod of Carthage, and by sixty-one more in a synod in Numidia; and a letter was addressed to the great western see by Augustine and four other bishops (Aurelius, Alypius, Evodius, and Possidius), who also forwarded to Rome the book of Pelagius which Timasius and James had before sent to Augustine, with the latter's answer in the treatise ‘De Natura et Gratia.’
Innocent answered these various addresses by three letters, written on 27 Jan. 417, in which he condemned Pelagius's distinctive doctrines without reserve, and called upon him to abjure his heresy, or to leave the communion of the church.
But on the death of the ‘first great pope,’ 12 March 417, his successor Zosimus showed a very different spirit. He was mystified, it was said, by Celestius, whose plausible tongue smoothed away difficulties, and who offered boldly to condemn all that Innocent or the apostolic see judged heretical. To the pope his statement appeared to be ‘catholic, plain, and explicit.’ Accordingly Zosimus deprived and anathematised Heros
