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Numidian Stallions
You're probably familiar with the adam and eve story. Whether you believe it to be
literal or figurative, it touched off a political battle in 417 A.D. between Pelagius and Augustine. Pelagius argued that individuals have free will. Augustine preached original sin (sinner at
conception). Augustine believed that an individual will choose evil over good without the intervention of god (or the government which is empowered by god).
In the end, Augustine courted the roman emperor and with a bribe of 80 Numidian
stallions (via Augustine's friend and fellow bishop Alypius), swayed emperor Honorius. In 418 pope Zosimus excommunicated Pelagius, and Honorius condemned him as a heretic.
Augustine, as bishop of Carthage: "...abandoned the policy of toleration
practiced by the previous bishop of Carthage...[and] turned increasingly to force. First came laws denying civil rights to non-Catholic Christians; then the imposition of penalties, fines, eviction from
public office; and finally, denial of free discussion... and the use of physical coercion." - Pagels
Augustine justified government and church subjugation of it's citizens based on his
personal inability to choose good over evil and his assumption that everyone else must be as incapable as he. "After various earlier sexual relationships, he lived for years with a lower-class woman
who engaged his passions and bore him a son, but then he abandoned her for the sake of a socially advantageous marriage his [christian] mother arranged for him." - Pagels
Augustine sold this view to the emperor by warning of the dangers of free will to
the status quo... in Peter Browns' words: "the ultimate consequence of [Pelagian] ideas... cut at the roots of episcopal authority... The documents claimed that by appeasing the Palagians the
Catholic church would lose the vast authority it had begun to wield..."
Original sin is not a fact, it was a political tool used to subjugate.
Pagels, Elaine - Adam Eve and the Serpent, 1988
© 1995 Bret Young
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