Back to Pelagius?

I saw a link to an article in The Tablet about evolution and religion by Jack Mahoney, but it was behind the paywall and couldn't get to it.  (The Tablet offers very little for free.)

Anyway, a bit of Googling shows that Jack Mahoney is a Jesuit and has recently published a book "Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration".

It sounds very interesting.  As the review in The Independent notes:

Mainstream Christianity long ago dropped overt hostility to Darwin, and even manages to speak of him fondly on occasion, but it has held back from the next logical step, bringing theology and evolution into meaningful dialogue. Christianity, Mahoney argues, "has been strangely silent about the doctrine of evolution" because to accept it wholeheartedly would then involve a redrawing of the theological map. Yet that is precisely what he wants it to do.

It's true: there's an unresolved tension in the modern Catholic Church between the scientific understanding of evolution and the traditional understanding of the role of Christ; it is being ignored rather than dealt with adequately.  The fundamental problem is that evolution erodes the concept of Original Sin.   It certainly can't be understood in the previous sense of being the reason why death and suffering came to the Earth.

Thus, it is not surprising that Mahoney follows the path previously trod by another Jesuit interested in evolution, Teilhard de Chardin, in throwing doubt on the traditional understanding of Original Sin.  Of course, once you start questioning one traditional theological understanding, it can have a bit of a domino effect. From another review from a Jesuit website:

 Mahoney suggests that more traditional understandings of Original Sin, the Fall, Atonement, Justification and similar concepts no longer sit comfortably in an evolutionary context. His own position on sin in this context is very helpful: ‘Sin emerges as humanity’s yielding to evolutionary selfishness and declining to accept the invitation to self-transcendence: it is a refusal to transcend oneself in the interests of others.’ (p.43) Put like that, it makes sense of Paul VI’s claim that ‘the world is sick’ (Populorum Progressio, §66) and his diagnosis of its sickness as ‘the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples’. I also liked Mahoney’s comment: ‘What people in today’s culture need most is not the recovery of a sense of sin but the acquiring of a sense of purpose in their lives.’ (p.66)

I don't know:  I kind of miss the emphasis on personal sin in the Church these days.  But anyway, the review also notes:

He carries this approach to the Incarnation through to offer an interpretation of Christ’s death and resurrection, too, suggesting that evolutionary theology:

proposes that the motive for the Word becoming flesh was not to save humanity from any inherited congenital sinfulness; it was for Christ to lead and conduct the human species through the common evolutionary fate of individual extinction to a new level of living with God. Nor was this done by the offering of Christ as an expiatory sacrifice to placate an injured God; it was achieved by Christ’s freely confronting death and winning through to a new phase of existence to be imparted to his fellow humans in their evolutionary destiny to share fully in the life of God. (pp.14-15)

Such suggestions will, one would think, not endear Mahoney to Pope Benedict; but then again, some people took the latter's mention of Teilhard de Chardin with brief approval in 2009 as indicating a softening of the previous Vatican warnings against his theological thoughts.

The problem, of course, is that Original Sin in its traditional form has been solidly maintained by the Church virtually since its inception.  Pelagius' views on the topic (that Adam merely set a bad example to humanity), which presumably can be more easily accommodated within modern understanding of evolution, lost out in the ideological battle with St Augustine.  (I see from Wikipedia that there was also Semipelangianism, which was an attempt to find a compromise between Augustinian and Pelagian views, but it was also promptly condemned as heresy.)

I would expect that Pelagianism gets covered in Mahoney's book, as it certainly seems he is effectively arguing that the modern understanding of evolution forces us to return to something resembling it.

Finally, while Googling around on the topic, I found this chapter of an online book * which deals with the theological response in the Catholic Church to evolution.   It is very detailed, but rather good.  Amongst other points if makes, it seems that it may have been well into the 20 th century before a majority of theologians really started believing that evolution was completely true.   This does not surprise me.  My own father, for example, never fully accepted evolution, and as it was a topic that the Church chose not to preach about, I expect many Catholics born in the first (say) third of the last century found evolution a topic easy to ignore, and a little hard to believe, and as such it did not represent much of a challenge their faith.

* the website it is from is said to be "Where Christian mysticism, theology and metaphysics meet Eastern religions, Jungian psychology and a new sense of the earth", and appears to be mostly the work of James Arraj, a psychologist who died a year or two ago.  I don't know about the quality of everything he has written, but the chapter I have linked to here seems pretty good.