This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Pelagius was, by most contemporary accounts, a serious ascetic teacher rather than a provocateur, alarmed less by a theory than by what he saw as a moral excuse. He objected to a line in Augustine own Confessions, give what you command and command what you will, reading it as inviting believers to blame grace for their own laziness. His own teaching held that God command implies the ability to obey it, so human nature, though weakened by habit, retains a real freedom to choose the good.
Augustine, who had already spent years working out his own doctrine of grace from Paul letter to the Romans, read the same claim as erasing the need for grace altogether and, worse, as making Christ death a matter of good example rather than of rescue. The two positions were argued out across councils rather than settled by either side conceding: a council at Carthage in 418 and the Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned Pelagius teaching directly.
The argument did not end there. A mitigated form, holding that the first move toward faith could still come from the unaided will even if everything after it needed grace, persisted among monastic writers in southern Gaul for another century, and it was this semi-Pelagian position that the Second Council of Orange finally addressed in 529, ruling that even the beginning of faith requires grace, a position the Western church has held since.