To recap: a crude over-simplification of the two positions would be to say that Pelagius believed that we are born innocent, free from original sin, and though culturally we cannot avoid the bad influence of Eve's and Adam's sin, we can of ourselves turn to Christ, without absolutely needing grace to do this; Augustine, on the other hand, held that we are born irrevocably damaged by the genetic, sexually transmitted depravity of sin, and cannot even begin to want to have faith in Christ unless we are drawn by grace, often called "prevenient" grace, because it comes before any movement of faith within the human heart. (This concept was later developed by John Calvin and his followers into the doctrine of irresistible grace, that a person, once called, will be saved: they have no choice in the matter.)
One of the greatest writers on, and followers of, broadly, the hesychast tradition in our own time was the Russian-born monk of Mount Athos, Archimandrite Sophrony. In his book His Life is Mine (Mowbray 1977) he quotes approvingly the account of an unnamed former rabbi:
Why did I, a former rabbi, become a Christian? The question sounds strange in my own ears. Did I, of myself, become a Christian, following a plan, a purpose, after due consideration? No, the grace of God made me a Christian. My conversion is a mystery to me before which I bow my head in awe. It was the Holy Spirit, He alone transfigured me. When I accepted Christ, the laws of Deuteronomy ceased to be a means of drawing near to God... And so it was not I of myself who became Christian - it was God who sent down the grace of the Holy Spirit and made me so... This is the process: faith attracts the Holy Spirit, while the Holy Spirit strengthens faith, cares for you, sustains you, encourages your ardent desire for the Kingdom of God... I heard my soul speaking within me, telling me of my new birth in Christ; but she spoke in the language of silence which I cannot find words for.
Here we seem to have an interplay, a collaboration, even a dance. There is faith, there is acceptance, on the part of the nascent Christian; but there is grace, loving grace, powerful, protective, arousing - in a spiritual sense - grace, sent by God through the Holy Spirit. We cannot achieve our own salvation by means of an exercise of will alone; we do not merit it, or work for it through the due processes of the Law, but it is the gift of God in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. And yet it is our faith which "attracts" the Spirit; it is we who accept the gift, just as our Lady accepted the gift of Christ, saying, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."
Surely this is the faith of the Bible? Doesn't this glorious interplay, this dance of the Spirit and our spirit, this perichoresis, sound more like the kind of thing the Jesus of the Gospels was calling his disciples into, than either the grim fatalism of an Augustine or the proto-humanism of a Pelagius? Certainly it is much, much more like my own experience of conversion than either of those extremes. God is love: his greatest commandments are love, and from them depend all the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22.37-40) Really, there is nothing much more to say than that!
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