see them: they would have appeared to him as points along the great circle of problems raised by the Christian religion". John Cassian argued for a middle way between Pelagianism and Augustinianism, in which the human will is not negated but presented as intermittent, sick, and weak, and Jerome held a middle position on sinlessness. In Gaul, the so-called "semi-Pelagians" disagreed with Augustine on predestination (but recognized the three Pelagian doctrines as heretical) and were accused by Augustine of being seduced by Pelagian ideas. According to Ali Bonner, the crusade against Pelagianism and other heresies narrowed the range of acceptable opinions and reduced the intellectual freedom of classical Rome. When it came to grace and especially predestination, it was Augustine's ideas, not Pelagius', which were novel. According to Nelson, Pelagianism is a solution to the problem of evil that invokes libertarian free will as both the cause of human suffering and a sufficient good to justify it. By positing that man could choose between good and evil without divine intercession, Pelagianism brought into question Christianity's core doctrine of Jesus' act of substitutionary atonement to expiate the sins of mankind. For this reason, Pelagianism became associated with nontrinitarian interpretations of Christianity which rejected the divinity of Jesus, as well as other heresies such as Arianism, Socinianism, and mortalism (which rejected the existence of hell). Augustine argued that if man "could have become just by the law of nature and free will . . . amounts to rendering the cross of Christ void". He argued that no suffering was truly undeserved, and that grace was equally undeserved but bestowed by God's benevolence. Augustine's solution, while it was faithful to orthodox Christology, worsened the problem of evil because according to Augustinian interpretations, God punishes sinners who by their very nature are unable not to sin. The Augustinian defense of God's grace against accusations of arbitrariness is that God's ways are incomprehensible to mere mortals. Yet, as later critics such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz asserted, asking "it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just?", this defense (although accepted by many Catholic and Reformed theologians) creates a God-centered morality, which, in Leibniz' view "would destroy the justice of God" and make him into a tyrant. Pelagianism and Judaism One of the most important distinctions between Christianity and Judaism is that the former conventionally