the new pelagianism
on therapy, grace and responsibility
For paid subscribers, there’s a review of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy below the paywall. Another post coming with recent reading & recommendations. On Tuesday I’m getting a train to Paris and then onto Geneva, Milan and Venice for the Triduum and Easter. Please give me your Venice recommendations in the comments. Holy Week begins.
In 413, a fourteen-year-old girl named Demetrias rejected a proposal of marriage in favour of a life of consecrated virginity. Her family, members of the Christian aristocracy who had fled Rome for North Africa prior to Alaric’s sack of the city, wrote to several eminent theologians to ask them to counsel Demetrias as she prepared for a life of holiness. It was typical in this period for the wealthy, senatorial families of the distintegrating Roman Empire to surround themselves with spiritual guides—a kind of late antique life coach. Pelagius, a British monk who had found a following amongst the Roman elite, wrote back to Demetrias. In late antiquity, major theological controversies were played out not only in church councils but also in this more domestic arena: letters to teenage girls.
Pelagius’s letter to Demetrias is one of the best surviving sources for his teachings on free will and the ability of each individual Christian to become perfect through their own efforts—teachings which, within five years, would be declared heretical by the Church. He tells her that the path to virtue rests, first of all, on a recognition that each person is free to choose either good or evil. This God-given autonomy, which he describes as ‘a sort of natural sanctity in our minds’, gives us an absolute moral responsibility. Evil comes from bad habits and the force of habit can exercise a kind of compulsion—but if instruction is given young, before bad habits set in, each person can attain ‘perfection in life itself.’ He writes, in terms a nineteenth-century liberal might recognise, of ‘the quality of human nature and what it is capable of achieving.’ Those who deny this sovereign autonomy trap themselves in sluggish resignation, a kind of false consciousness which condemns them to hell.
In response to these ideas, Augustine was developing his doctrines of original sin and the fallenness of the will. The idea that one could simply choose to be good was, for Augustine, dangerously misleading. It denied the frailty of human nature and the inclination of the will towards evil. Even if we want to be good, we will be drawn again and again to sin. A life of virtue is possible, but it relies on a recognition that we cannot be good through our own efforts. Only by reliance on the grace of God could a person hope to live a good life. Given our fallen nature, moral perfection is impossible in this world; we can only hope to keep trying, failing and turning to God for help. He wrote, not to Demetrias, but to her mother, warning her not to accept the heretical teaching that we can become perfect through our own efforts.
In these letters, Pelagius and Augustine presented two different visions of human nature. Their advice concerning practicalities was broadly similar—both recommended prayer, chastity and the study of scripture. But the underlying frameworks could not have been more different. For Pelagius, virtue began with a recognition of our freedom to choose; for Augustine, it began with an admission of our total dependence on God. These foundational assumptions about the capacity of the individual will had huge implications for how people understood themselves and their behaviour. Pelagius’s teaching, despite its empowering and optimistic appearance, was in practice far crueller than Augustine’s. If each person was capable of perfection, anything less was failure. It meant that a person had deliberately chosen evil. There could be no excuses for failing to live up to Christ’s example.
The Church, ultimately, sided with Augustine, recognising the limitations of human choice and the necessity of relying on grace. The balance of effort and grace was always a delicate one for Christian theology. Too much emphasis on grace and you have a completely passive subject, thrown about by the apparently arbitrary whims of an unjust God. Too much emphasis on effort and Jesus becomes an example rather than a saviour, the power to change resting ultimately with the human subject. At the reformation, Luther and Calvin emphasised the total depravity of the will and the absolute reliance on grace. At the Enlightenment, the pendulum swung the other way. The Enlightenment ideal of the rational individual man, capable of unlimited progress and self-mastery, has given us the culture we know today. Grace has been shunted out of the equation. Pelagianism, translated into the secular language of liberalism, rules the day.
When, in weaker moments, I’ve re-downloaded Hinge or Tinder, I’ve swiped through dozens of profiles where men cite ‘being in therapy’ among their credentials. A survey by dating app Pure (weird name, btw) found that 92% of women feel more positively about going on a date with a man who mentions going to therapy in his profile. Over the last couple of years, a spate of articles have picked up on this preference for men who go to therapy. Others have addressed the intrusion of ‘therapy-speak’ into our everyday vocabulary—we are now accustomed to discussing interpersonal relations with terms like emotional labour, narcissism, gaslighting, boundaries, trauma bonding, holding space, etc. This language has less to do with actual experience of psychotherapy and more to do with the phenomenon of ‘instagram therapy’—and, more broadly, the increasing tendency to look to podcasts and YouTube videos for bitesize life coaching, quick-fixes to optimise psychological and interpersonal functioning.
What are we talking about when we talk about therapy? When a friend who’s heard far too much about my love life resignedly intones that he needs therapy, she’s unlikely to have in mind a particular therapeutic programme or approach. The women who swipe right on men who ‘go to therapy’ don’t expect that he’s honed his interpersonal effectiveness skills through a course of dialectical behaviour therapy or worked through his Oedipal neuroses with a psychoanalyst. Therapy, in this usage, is shorthand for a willingness to work on oneself. It carries an implicit assumption that the capacity to change—to become better, happier people who have better, healthier relationships—lies within our control. If we’re not changing, we’re not trying hard enough. And if we’re not doing the work, we have abrogated moral responsibility for our lives.
Framing our experience in these terms changes how we think about ourselves, our relationships and the lives of others. This is even more the case now that ‘going to therapy’ is recommended not only for the mentally ill but for anyone struggling with existential or interpersonal issues—in short, the domain of morality. But the growing popularity of this framework seems to have less to do with psychotherapy per se and more to do with how we articulate concepts of human freedom, moral responsibility and the capacity for growth. It’s the latest iteration of an ancient debate: can we become better people through individual effort or must we rely on something beyond ourselves, something like grace?
We tend to overlook the philosophical baggage of various psychotherapies. We are accustomed to finding a therapist, or being referred to therapy, without understanding the differences in each approach. The fine points are left to practitioners and psychologists. But the philosophical assumptions matter: they condition how we think of our minds, our capacity for living well and our expectations of success. When we talk about therapy, tell our friends to go to therapy, say we’ll only date someone who’s been in therapy, we are implicitly subscribing to an optimistic model of human agency. We think, or seem to think, that we will become happier, healthier and more interpersonally successful if only we put in enough effort, do the work and develop more effective self-regulation strategies.
These assumptions are reflected in many contemporary approaches to psychotherapy, particularly the humanistic therapies associated with the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s. Whereas psychoanalysis saw the mind as dominated by unconscious, irrational forces, humanistic therapies looked to the potential of the conscious mind. They assumed an inbuilt, natural tendency towards self-actualisation and emphasised the freedom to choose and the moral responsibility which accompanies it. Behavioural therapy similarly jettisoned the unconscious, focusing instead on the empirically quantifiable results which could be obtained by behavioural conditioning. In cognitive behaviour therapy, behaviour modification was joined to cognition; thoughts, which are essentially mental behaviours, could be modified by other thoughts. Despite differences of approach, humanistic and cognitive-behavioural therapies brought to psychotherapy a new focus on the conscious, rational mind and its capacity for self-improvement.
Some newer therapeutic approaches have begun to redress the balance in favour of grace—or rather, a de-theologised set of concepts like acceptance and willingness. These are often termed ‘third-wave behavioural therapies’ and include acceptance commitment therapy (ACT) and dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT). DBT centres on a dialectical relationship between change and acceptance, bringing together cognitive-behavioural skills with a practice of acceptance drawn from Zen Buddhism. Instead of wilfulness (‘trying to fix every situation’ and ‘insisting on being in control’), DBT teaches willingness and radical acceptance. Both ACT and DBT are based on the principle that acceptance is a necessary precondition for change. The same principle forms the basis for Twelve Steps programmes like Alcoholics Anonymous, which psychologists Keith Humphreys and Lee Ann Kaskutas describe as ‘the inheritor of counter-Enlightenment influences.’ These are still programmes of action, but they retain and older, more tempered view of the capacity of the individual will to reform itself. Change begins with an admission of powerlessness or limitation and a willingness to accept situations beyond one’s control. The starting principles of DBT include ‘people need to do better, try harder, and be more motivated to change’ and ‘people are doing the best they can.’
These therapies are far less accessible in the UK than earlier types of behavioural therapy. ACT is usually delivered privately and DBT requires a full team of professionals with provision for group therapy and phone support, which is too expensive for most NHS trusts to countenance (instead, they send you away from A&E with a collection of skills-based handouts.) I recently completed twelve court-ordered sessions of ‘emotional regulation therapy’, a mixture of DBT skills and approaches like behavioural activation drawn from CBT. The majority of patients referred to NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services are offered short courses of CBT or guided self-help. Outcomes are measured by questionnaires, providing quantifiable data on recovery rates (which hover between 40-50%). These are efficient, time-limited interventions preferred for their low delivery cost.
For those whose diagnoses fall within the bracket of ‘severe mental illness’, therapeutic approaches tend to be lengthier and more expensive, requiring long-term client-practitioner relationships and teams of therapists. These therapies are significantly harder to access, with little transparency around service provision and waiting times. DBT services, where they exist, usually fall short of full compliance with the therapeutic model. For most people who’ve accessed mental health services on the NHS, ‘therapy’ begins and ends with CBT and self-help. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the way we talk about therapy—as a quick-fix solution for a troublesome thought or behaviour. We’re largely unfamiliar with therapeutic paradigms that suggest a fuller picture of human life, where our capacity to choose is joined to an awareness of our essential dependence.
Writing in 1990, Christopher Lasch argued that the best hope of emotional maturity ‘appears to lie in the recognition of our need for and dependence on people who nevertheless remain separate from ourselves and refuse to submit to our whims… More broadly, it lies in acceptance of our limits.’ The Enlightenment ideal of the individual as self-sufficient, completely able to subdue his environment, had gone into hyperspeed with the explosion of technological growth; this is even more the case today, where cloud-seeding start-ups vowing to alleviate droughts and forest fires by controlling the weather and AI therapy bots promise to optimise our mental health. ‘In religious terms,’ he wrote, ‘the revolt against nature is also a revolt against God—that is, against the reality of our dependence on forces external to ourselves.’
Paul Tournier, a Swiss physician who wrote extensively about the need for a spiritual dimension in medical and psychological treatment, dated this revolt back to the Renaissance, which he saw as a violent reaction to the Middle Ages; ‘for a spiritual, religious and poetic view of the world, it substituted a scientific, realistic, economic view,’ he wrote in The Whole Person in a Broken World. Modernity, in psychoanalytic terms, is characterised by a failure to reach integration. Questions about our ultimate destiny and purpose are repressed into the unconscious; however much man seeks to optimise himself and increase his production, he cannot put an end to his anxiety, because the true problem lies elsewhere.
‘Here we come back to what we said about the Renaissance. Abruptly humanity rejected that which it had hitherto allowed to guide it. It resolved to pay no more attention to any judgement of value, no longer to trust any metaphysical intuition, any poetic inspiration, any supernatural revelation, and to build its civilisation solely upon material realities and objective knowledge.’
The neurosis produced by modernity, which he terms the ‘neurosis of defiance’, comes from a repression of conscience. ‘The cause of it is that our materialistic and amoral civilisation no longer answers the deepest needs of the soul.’ We know there are things that matter, other things, but we no longer know what they are or how to find them. We live in a society that refuses to recognise questions about ultimate purpose as questions worth answering. Tournier argues that this violent separation from telos produces anxiety. I would go further and suggest that this creates the sort of invalidating environment that forms the aetiological context for the development of personality disorders.
What if the way we think about therapy is making us sick? The perennial appeal of Pelagian ideas about human freedom is easy to understand—we want to believe that we’re in control, that we can remake our environments and our own minds, that the capacity for moral growth and perfection is within us. But on the level of culture, this produces a set of expectations which would have been familiar to the followers of Pelagius. If we are capable of perfection, we can be blamed for anything less. Our flaws—our unkindness, anger, selfishness, irresponsibility—are not normal aspects of human experience but black marks against our character. Where there is an impetus to present ourselves as beyond reproach, a split develops between our self-image and the image we present to the world. From this: anxiety about being found out, a pervasive sense of guilt and dishonesty, a tendency to judge others to feel better about ourselves.
I discuss the Pelagian controversy at length because it demonstrates very clearly the importance of paying attention to the philosophical issues at stake in various therapeutic paradigms. The assumptions underlying Pelagian or Augustinian theology weren’t just abstract talking points for theologians. In a highly religious culture, where theology was communicated in pastoral contexts like letters and sermons, they filtered quickly into the hearts and minds of late antique Christians and formed the starting points for self-perception. For both Augustine and Pelagius, the crucial issue was not how to be good but how to understand our capacity for goodness—from there, everything else followed.
Similarly, the ideas underlying modern therapies don’t stay in the therapist’s office; they filter into the broader culture and implicitly condition how we experience our entire social world. Where the Pelagian paradigm is ascendent, a culture will be exclusive and intolerant of weakness—a tiny elite closing in on itself, guarding its boundaries jealously. Where the capacity for self-improvement is tempered by an awareness of our limitations, we will be more gracious, more forgiving of each other as we struggle on towards an impossible perfection.
Catholic theology strikes a balance: while baptism releases us from bondage to original sin, it doesn’t deliver us from the weakness of our nature. The will is still fallen and given to concupiscence, inclined towards evil and sin. The Council of Trent stated that ‘the sacrament of Penance is necessary for salvation for those who have fallen after Baptism.’ The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that the Christian life is ‘the struggle of conversion directed towards holiness and eternal life to which the Lord never ceases to call us.’ It emphasises a communitarian dimension to this conversion: we are called to help our brothers and sisters in Christ, to call them to repentance, to set good examples and not to provoke scandal. This is why the sacrament of penance is also called the sacrament of reconciliation—through confession, one is reconciled not only to God but to the mystical body of Christ manifest in the Church and all its members. This is one dimension in which Catholic practice stands radically apart from secular psychotherapy in their individualistic approaches to healing the psyche.
It didn’t surprise me when I found out that Marsha Linehan, the woman who developed DBT, was raised Catholic and lived for a time as a religious sister. The therapeutic approach she developed fits well with the spiritual discipline I’ve developed since being received into the Church. I am aware of my faults and limitations, my need for grace, but I’m also aware of my responsibility to resist temptation and live in accordance with virtue wherever I possibly can. Daily practices like the Ignatian examen or a nightly inventory recommended in recovery programmes allow this to become a regular habit of the mind. Where I have sinned and fallen short, I have a responsibility to make amends and be reconciled—both in a sacramental context and wherever else it may be needed. This means getting honest with yourself. As Augustine put it, ‘the beginning of good works is the confession of evil works. You do the truth and come to the light.’ Taking responsibility for one’s failings is itself a training in virtue, requiring fortitude, honesty and trust in God. It’s very difficult to take responsibility for oneself in a culture which has jettisoned forgiveness and sees a person as the sum total of their faults.