Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

90
The Pelagian Controversy.
CHAP. m.
original sin, he could fall back on no antecedent state of
innocence. He robbed human nature of the glory, the
freshness, and the beauty of its first creation, reduced the
primitive to the level of all that succeeded it, and fixed the
present facts of the world as the standard of our nature.
He made this existing state of sin and pain coeval with the
commencement of things ; and S. Augustine taunted his
opponents with the Pelagian Paradise. * Human nature
in the midst of trials looks back with consolation to the
paradisal state as a sign that pain is the accident and
happiness the law of our being ; and were the rest of the
Old Testament silent, a future state was still preached to
the Jew in the first chapter of Genesis ; but the Pelagian
cut off both the retrospect and the pledge. The paradisal
age was to him nothing more than the first age of the world,
when science, art, and the refinements of life had not yet
arisen, and man was simpler than he was afterwards, only
because he was more rude. He took the same view of it
that a human philosopher would take who pictures to him
self the primitive state of man simply as a state anterior
to civilisation 2 and contrasts it with the ,
law, system, and
social growth of a more advanced age.
And, together with the paradisal life in general, the
created goodness of the first man fell to the ground. The
idea of created virtue jarred with the Pelagian theory of
freewill, according to which virtue was no virtue at all,
unless a man acquired it for himself. An original gift
of righteousness was thus dismissed as a contradiction, and
1
Naturara humanam a Deo ceret irrisorem. Veruntamen eorum
bono conditam bonam magno in- qui nos obedientise peccato fuisse vitiatam,
noverunt, nemo miraretur,
si adderetur nomen restrum adtitu-
Catholica fides dicit. Sed yos qui hoc
negatis, quaeso, paulisper Paradisum
cogitate. Placetne vobis ut ponamus
lum, et scriberetur. Paradisus Pela-
1. gianorum. Op. Imp. 3. c. 154.
Vide 1. 3. c. 95. 147. 1. 6. c. 25.
;
. . . innumerabiles morbos, orbi- 27. 28.
tates, luctus, etc. Certe si talis
2 Homines fuisse primitus nu-
paradisus pingeretur nullus diceret dos,quia ad solertisehumanseoperam
esse paradisum, nee si supra legisset ut se tegerent pertinebat, quae nonhoc
nomen conscriptum : nee diceret dum in illis fuit. Contra Jul. Pel.
erasse pectorem, sed plane agnos- 1. 4. n. 81.