Pelagius was a well-regarded British monk full of self-improvement platitudes and a “you can do it” attitude.  So he went to Rome in order to spread his good news.

His news was that he found a principle in which humans could work their way to salvation.  He had figured out that the immaterial principle that bound anima to caro could be moulded by reason and good practice, which he had by the bushel and was ready to sell to the highest bidder.

He was selling “free will without grace” or maybe, “good works without grace”.  Good works were the way to earn passage to heaven.

This upset the Bishop of Carthage, whose previous career as a scam artist – er, Manichean philosopher – allowed him to smell a rat.  He countered forcefully.  There could be no salvation without grace, no good works without grace, nothing without God’s inspiration.

But did Augustine have a model for how the person comes to be?  Drawing on the resources of his previous career, he proposed a model very similar to the pagans: The anima – created for each person by God – joined the caro – from the union of man and woman – by way of spiritual descent.

The caveat: Because of Adam’s transgression, the “landing point” was lower than Adam and Eve as they were created by sanctifying grace, lower than humans in their natural state of animalistic freedom, lower than the imaginary humans chained inside of Plato’s cave.  Every human was born into Original Sin.

Help.  I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

The only way to get up is to get baptized.  Baptism is the first, crucial installment of divine grace, the remission of Original Sin.  That remission will allow the solution: an ascent to the Father through his divine grace.  Jesus is the minister of that grace.  Jesus will lift you up.

With this caveat in mind, Augustine’s apparently stupid proposals begin to make sense.  Augustine did everything he could to make the Fall such a huge transition that, when it was coupled to the (formerly pagan) model of descent of the soul, the end point was so deep that emergency steps had to be taken to get out of the hole.