Jovinian and Pelagius

Posted on April 2, 2004 in Myths & Mysticism

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.
W.B. Yeats, Leda and the Swan

How different the history of Christianity might be if we spoke of St. Jovinian and St. Pelagius instead of St. Jerome and St. Augustine. The latter faces we know well from the iconography of the Church Militant. We only know the former as word demons described in tracts published by the victors of the spiritual battle that raged in the fourth century.

To hear the cantankerous Jerome speak of Jovinian, one would conclude that the latter led a free love colony, advocating a sensual lifestyle that would have had Carpocrates drooling in envy. Jovinian, himself, lived the life of a modest monk who ate only simple food, refused to wash or bath, and avoided all contact with women. Jerome, on the other hand, never said a Mass and kissed up to rich Roman widows who sought to live monastic existences in their humble palaces. He championed the cause of Virginity over the married life which is what brought him into conflict with Jovinian who felt that while celibacy was an admirable vocation and discipline, it did not entitle its practitioners to believe themselves more holy than those who had children. Some sources say that Jovinian went so far as to claim that the Virgin Mary had other children — tainted by Original Sin.

No one liked Jerome — he took criticism poorly and attacked his friends including St. Augustine. But, key to his success in the canonization sweepstakes, he held that the See of Rome had the surest lock on the Truth. Where Jovinian’s views were moved by the Spirit, Jerome could not fail to impress people with his extensive education and ability in translating the Bible. The chastity issue benefited the Church which could ill afford to tussle with the claims of natural and affinal heirs over the property owned by its clergy. Pope Siricius excommunicated the humble Jovinian and exalted the haughty Jerome.

Another monk ran afoul of the other great mouthpiece for the Church, St. Augustine. Pelagius arrived in Rome from Wales around 400 AD. The corruption of the big city — the brothels, the love of luxury, the simony — threw him into estatic conniptions. He rejected the concept of original sin, writing:

In the freedom to choose good or evil lies the preeminence of the rational soul. In this lies the honor of our nature and our dignity….There would be no virtue in him who perserveres in the good if he had not the possibility of going over to evil.

How could a just and a merciful God hold the sins of Adam and Eve against all their descendants who themselves had not, at birth, committed any sins? Against this view stood that of Augustine of Hippo, a former wastrel who had left his pagan wife when his mother attempted to arrange a better marriage for him. Ultimately, Augustine wrote his lengthy Confessions which did not include the sin of abandonment and, like Jerome, celebrated the goodness of the See of Rome and its sacraments.

Augustine believed in Original Sin, the idea that we are born corrupted thanks to the act of sexual intercourse by our parents. All of Nature reeked of semen and vaginal fluid, the ecclesiast felt, but fortunately God loved Man. Baptism washed away the stink and the Church was the only authorized source of this redemption.

When Pelagius met Augustine in person, the monk found the bishop’s intolerance unbearable. Augustine not only insisted on the baptism monopoly, but he went on to claim that God had selected only certain people for salvation. The Welsh monk, Augustine insisted, was a heretic for his political correctness. Pelagius shook his head and continued to preach the Good News as he lived it until his death in 420 A.D.

The decision of the church — that moment when the hands of the Pope went to paper to sign the excommunication against Jovinian and to canonize Jerome and Augustine — resounded like the paten falling to the floor in a Cathedral. In their decision, we see the dooms of future Christianity: the extirpation of those who attempted to live in direct communion with God rather than through the Church’s sacraments; biblioidolatry which is the idea that the Bible is letter by letter the Word of God (even where Paul writes “this isn’t God speaking”); the corruption of the Church by her accumulation of wealth; Martin Luther and John Calvin; the Inquisition; the Peasant Wars; the Burning Times; Fundamentalism; perhaps the Holocaust; and, most recently, the efforts by the Church to protect clerical sexual molesters and harass homosexuals as pedophiles.

All this because the Church became more obsessed with empire-building rather than in allowing the people to know Christ on their own terms.