Dialogue against the Pelagians

The Dialogus adversus Pelagianos is Jerome's last major controversial work, composed at Bethlehem in 415, the year the Synod of Diospolis examined and acquitted Pelagius. Pelagius had been living in Palestine since about 413, teaching that God's commands presuppose the ability to keep them and that a person who wills to be without sin can be so. Jerome had already answered him obliquely in a letter to Ctesiphon in 414; now, in three books of dialogue between Atticus, who speaks for the church, and Critobulus, who speaks for the new teaching, he mounted a sustained refutation. He keeps Pelagius unnamed in the text, but quotes his propositions directly, including material from Pelagius's own collection of scriptural testimonies, so that the opponent is answered in his own words.

The argument turns on a single claim, that human beings can be sinless by their own decision. Jerome lets Critobulus state the case in its strongest form, then has Atticus press it against Scripture: the prayers of the Psalms, the confessions of Job and Paul, the petition for forgiveness in the Lord's Prayer, the plain declaration that if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves. He argues that what God commands he also gives, and that posse, the capacity to obey, is itself a gift continually renewed rather than a possession once conferred. He attacks the Pelagian distinction between ability and act as a verbal shelter for pride. Running beneath the exegesis is a genealogy: Jerome traces the ideal of a will untouched by disordered desire to the Stoic doctrine of apatheia and to Origen and Evagrius, placing Pelagianism within the Origenist controversy he had fought for two decades. He also recognises in it a resurgence of Jovinian's claim that the baptised cannot be overcome by sin, which he had answered in 393. The third book turns to grace and the sin of Adam, though Jerome's emphasis remains on the universal fact of actual sin and the perpetual need for mercy rather than on the inheritance of guilt as Augustine would define it.

The work mattered immediately. Pelagius's supporters attacked the Bethlehem monasteries in 416, and Augustine cited Jerome's testimony in his own writings against the Pelagians, valuing a second Latin voice from the East. Historically the dialogue shows the anti-Pelagian consensus forming before Augustine's full doctrine of original sin was settled, and it preserves fragments of Pelagius that would otherwise be lost. As spiritual writing it is a bracing meditation on why the saint prays for forgiveness daily.

Who should read this: readers studying the Pelagian controversy at its source, anyone wanting to see how Scripture was marshalled against perfectionism in the ascetic world Pelagius actually inhabited, and readers of Jerome who want his mature voice on grace. It is not for those seeking a systematic treatment of original sin, which is Augustine's work, nor for anyone unprepared for Jerome's combative tone.