Pelagianism: Purity from Innocence

Christianity was (and remains) vexatiously concerned with the purity and purification of the soul. The answer as to why there is injustice in the world was answered by the Apostle Paul, who declared human beings to be fundamentally sinful creatures. And why is that? Paul responded that it is because we all carry the "stain" of Adam's disobedience to God by eating of the Tree of Knowledge. This spiritual stain with which every child is born would prevent any of us, as Paul argues, from obtaining salvation, despite our best intentions and efforts. It is only through God's sacrifice of his Son in the form of Jesus that we have the hope of salvation. Acceptance of the gravity of this sacrificial gift and repentance of one's sins are the necessary ingredients to salvation. Yet Paul, though an Apostle, was not one of Jesus' original disciples. Paul never knew Jesus while Jesus lived as an earthly being. Despite this, Christianity as we know it is more a creation of Paul's theology than of Jesus' own teachings. Yet the difference did not go unnoticed by some Christians, chief among them, the Pelagians. Pelagius, their eponymous founder, was a Celtic Christian of Roman Britain, and in the Ancient world, he started the only heresy native to Britain during that age of history. Incidentally, there was not to be another heresy to arise in that Island until many centuries later during the Middle Ages in the form of Lollardy. Pelagius' teachings represented a heresy in that it went directly against Paul's fundamental precept that we are all born into sin. Pelagianism argued that we are all born innocent and carry no stain from any primal ancestor such as Adam, nor even our own parents, however fallen into moral error they might be. Pelagius taught that we are faced with a variety of challenges to our moral being in this world, and in every case, it is in our power to surmount these challenges, whether immediately through disciplined fidelity to to one's true, natural, God-given soul, or in self-rectification after initial failure. Jesus, provided us with the tools in his teachings alone to carry out the means to our salvation in our own spiritual hands. Because we are all born pure, it is a far easier matter to cleanse ourselves and recover our natural virtue despite the negative effects of the worldly environment in which we must live. For Pelagians, there was no inescapable cosmic inheritance predisposing us to a sinful nature. Sinfulness lay not at the heart of our being, as Paul would have it, and therefore we do not need to abase ourselves before some grand Christological sacrifice. Rather, salvation comes from cultivation of the childlike innocence Christ prescribed to restore the proper orientation of the soul for it moral purpose in life.