COMMENTARY: Conflicting visions of humankind keep Ireland divided

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) OXFORD, England _ A fundamental religious, moral, and political question in the West has […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

OXFORD, England _ A fundamental religious, moral, and political question in the West has been whether human nature is good or bad. Is humankind by itself able to do anything worthwhile, or is the only virtue humans display totally dependent on some external force?


The debate does not exist anywhere else in the world. It is a secular version of the great debate that raged in the late 4th and early 5th centuries between St. Augustine and the philosopher Pelagius.

It occurs to me, as I attend a conference here about Ireland, North and South, that Ireland could be the last place in the world where Pelagians and Augustinians still face each other.

Augustine, especially in his latter years, believed that humankind was so fundamentally flawed that it was capable of no virtue unless God intervened. Grace and nature were so at odds with one another, Augustine thought, that only a dramatic and transforming intervention of God’s grace made salvation possible. Moreover, this intervention was totally gratuitous because God owed humankind nothing.

Pelagius, on the other hand, did not believe in the fundamental evil of human nature. Quite the contrary, he thought that the border between grace and nature was thin and that humankind could cross the border by itself, meeting God, as it were, halfway.

In retrospect, their arguments seem artificial because in the real world humankind and the deity are constantly interacting and God’s grace is everywhere.

But Augustine railed against Pelagius and even more strongly against the council of Greek theologians who refused to condemn Pelagius as a heretic. For the Greeks and the Russians to this day, humankind is not all that bad.

Pelagius was, however, condemned by various local councils until the beginning of the later Middle Ages.


Theologically, the Reformation (which was driven by political energies more than theological energies) represented the Augustinian wing of the Catholic heritage breaking away from the scholastic wing _ and from Thomas Aquinas, whom many Protestants, even until very recently, considered a”semi-Pelagian.” More than 1,000 years later, ecumenical theologians have finessed the issue, but the debate continues in its secular form. Most ecologists do not believe that humankind can escape self-destruction unless it is forced to do so by some over-arching world power.

Contemporary Pelagians believe that humankind can regulate itself once it realizes the problems and the risks.

The boundary that separates Northern Ireland from Southern Ireland is not religious, but geo-political: It is the border that separates the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland from the six northern counties that are currently part of the United Kingdom.

Of the 29 countries I have studied as a sociologist, only New Zealand scores higher than the Irish of the south on a scale that measures the notion that humans can control their own destiny. Only in the Philippines and Poland is there a higher score than Northern Ireland on a scale that measures the conviction that humankind is fundamentally powerless.

The Catholics in Northern Ireland are grimly Augustinian, even more so than their Protestant neighbors.

Pelagius, it must be remembered, was Irish. How the Southern Irish came to have such an optimistic religious”story”is a fascinating question. Perhaps it is a survival of ancient Celtic optimism.


However, the point here is that the religious”story”of Northern Catholicism in many respects has more in common with Northern Protestantism than it does with Southern Catholicism.

The Northern”story”sustains a religious devotion and faith very much like that of the South, but it interprets that faith very differently than Catholics in the South.

The Irish Catholics of the North look very much like any religion of the oppressed loyal to its heritage but shaped, almost caricatured, by the grim world view of its oppressor.

This tension between optimism and pessimism, between the dim view Augustine had of the human condition and the sunnier outlook of Pelagius only highlights the complexity of the situation as Ireland makes such slow progress on the road to peace.

MJP END GREELEY

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