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ca. 354—ca. 430

Wealth and Violence

Pelagius, who may have been born somewhere in the British Isles, is quite possibly the earliest Christian humanist. A monk and theologian of the Celtic Johannine Christian Order, he argued against the doctrine of original sin and defended the position that humans, made in the likeness of a good God, are capable of willing and performing good works on their own. In saying this, he placed himself squarely on the side of those who taught that humans possess inherent dignity and a native attunement to virtue. This humanistic and hopeful position was blasted by Augustine, Pelagius was excommunicated in 417, and his writings were condemned as heretical by the Council of Carthage a year later.

Because of the Church’s suppression of his works, not many of Pelagius’s writings survive. But one of them, On Riches, is a thoughtful analysis of why, in his estimation, the acquisition of wealth is incompatible with a commitment to Christ. The heart of his argument is that there is an inseparable connection between wealth and violence, and violence is antithetical to Christian discipleship.

Pelagius argues for the connection between wealth and violence in three ways. First, he says, the temperament of a person who possesses wealth is prone to moods and responses that corrode his character, potentially harm others, and certainly fail to reflect Christ’s example. The rich man is haughty, proud, full of fury and anger, boastful, and disdainful of the poor. Christ and his disciples, on the other hand, are downcast, humble, gentle, long-suffering, self-effacing, and compassionate of the poor. In the second place, wealth breeds violence because of the lengths the rich will go to in order to protect what they own. They will “oppress, rob, torture, and finally kill” to make sure that no one threatens their possessions. Finally, given the way the world is, it’s entirely likely that the wealthy acquired their riches in the first place by force of arms or some kind of skulduggery. “It is difficult,” writes Pelagius, “to acquire riches without committing every kind of evil. They are procured by calculated lies or clever theft or fraudulent deceit or robbery with violence or barefaced falsification. They are frequently accumulated by plunder of widows or oppression of orphans or bribery or, much crueler still, by the shedding of innocent blood.”

It’s clear from what Pelagius says that he doesn’t think material possessions are wicked in themselves, but rather that their owners are tempted by violence in their pursuit or their protection and eventually succumb to greed, the foundation of all human sin. It’s not accidental, he says, that Jesus embraced poverty, knowing as he did that ownership leads to greed and greed leads to violence. People who “profess themselves as Christ’s disciples,” concludes Pelagius, “should follow their teacher’s example” and avoid falling into the spiral of wealth and violence.