Pelagianism

Pelagius was a British-born ascetic teacher who came to Rome in the late fourth century and found the Christianity of the capital slack. People excusing their sins on the grounds that human nature simply could not do better. His answer was that God does not command the impossible: if Scripture tells you to be perfect, then you can be, and the excuse is a lie. Around that conviction gathered a movement of serious, high-minded Christians, including the combative Caelestius and later the bishop Julian of Eclanum, who pushed the argument into hard questions about infant baptism, inherited guilt, and whether grace is help or takeover. Augustine of Hippo fought them for the last twenty years of his life. The African councils condemned them in 418 and the Council of Ephesus did so again in 431, and almost everything Pelagius himself wrote survives only in fragments, in his opponents' quotations, or misfiled for centuries under another man's name.