On the Proceedings of Pelagius
Augustine’s examination of the minutes of the synod in Palestine that acquitted Pelagius, addressed to Aurelius of Carthage. It reproduces the charges and Pelagius’s answers item by item, and gives Augustine’s own account of how the dispute began.
Read the text at newadvent.org ↗The same translation with one page per chapter (CCEL) ↗
When the record of the Palestinian synod reached Africa, Augustine went through it point by point to show that the fourteen bishops had cleared Pelagius only because he disowned the propositions charged against him, and that the propositions themselves stood condemned. In doing so he copies out the charges, Pelagius’s replies and the synod’s verdict.
The minutes do not survive elsewhere, so this treatise is the main source for the synod. Augustine quotes documents, but he quotes them to make a case, and his reading of Pelagius’s answers as evasions is his own. The closing chapters (46–62) are his first-hand account of when he first heard of Pelagius, of Pelagius’s brief stay in Africa and of the trial of Caelestius at Carthage.
Cited in
- AD 411 to AD 418, estimated date