From Chapter 5: About Powerlessness
In the fourth century AD, at the dawn of the Dark Ages, not long after Christianity became the official religion of the remnants of the Roman Empire, there lived two wandering teachers.
One was a Christian monk named Pelagius. Born in the remote provinces of the British Isles, he found his way to the imperial capital, and also visited and taught in Carthage and in Palestine. He led an exemplary life of poverty, modesty, and virtue. Even those who opposed his teachings respected his life style. He preached that God had endowed human beings with the power and the freedom to make moral choices, both for evil and for good.
The other teacher was, by his own public admission, a fornicator, a thief, a drinker, and the father of an illegitimate child, among other vices. He was a Manichean – a religion that holds that everything composed of matter, including all living beings, is dark, corrupt, and evil, but that the forces of light, which exist outside of material things, will eventually prevail. His sudden mid-life conversion to Christianity and his quick promotion to bishop of the North African city of Hippo aroused so much popular skepticism that he felt it politic to write a 160,000-word “Confessions” in his own defense. He preached, in opposition to Pelagius, that man was powerless to choose virtue, and could only choose sin; whatever human beings achieve that is good, they achieve exclusively through the power and grace of God, and God alone deserves the credit.
When my chemical dependency counselor on my Day One in 1992 held up for me the two schedules of the two kinds of recovery support group meetings – the groups that became LifeRing, and the 12-step groups -- I had no inkling that I stood before a modern edition of the dispute between the virtuous monk Pelagius and the converted sinner, Augustine of Hippo.