Free will versus predestination in A Clockwork OrangeBurgess raises the oppositions between free will and predestination in several of his novels, A Clockwork Orange. The author describes his faith as alternating between residues of Pelagianism and Augustinianism. Pelagianism denies that God has predestined, or preordained, or planned, our lives. A consequence of this is that salvation is actually within man's reach (since God has not established it for each of us, it is within our control), which ultimately leads to the denial of original sin. The refutation of this ultimately came from Augustine, who (a) fiercely upheld the doctrine of original sin, and (b) defended the orthodox doctrine of predestination from the paradox implicit with the free choice of salvation (i.e., while God created us, and effectively writes the entire story of each of our lives, the ultimate choice between accepting or rejecting His salvation is up to us) with the assertion that yes, our nature is established when it creates us, but in fact it looks the other way (a "left" "hand that doesn't know what the right hand is doing") when it comes to that final decision, so that the decision of salvation (though not the absolute power over it described by Pelagius) is ours. Or at least that's how Burgess saw it. In the history of the Church the classic controversy over the nature of the Fall and its effects is that waged by Augustine at the beginning of the fifth century against the supporters of the Pelagian heresy. The latter taught that Adam's sin affected only himself and not the human race as a whole, that every individual was born free from sin and capable according to his own strength of living a life without sin, and that there had also been people that they had managed to do SO. The controversy and its implications can be profitably studied in Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings. Pelagianism, with its assertion of the total capacity of man, came to the fore in the Socinianism of the 16th and 17th centuries, and continues in the guise of modern humanistic religion. An intermediate position is taken by the Roman Catholic Church, which teaches that what man lost with the fall was a supernatural gift of original justice which did not properly belong to his being man, but was something more added by God (donum superadditum), with the consequence that the Fall left man in his natural state of creation (in puris naturalibus): he suffered a negative rather than positive evil; deprivation rather than depravity.