Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Against the Pelagians 381 tion. Over the next decade, he became Augustine's most relentless and eloquent critic. He was a masterful writer and a skilled polemicist, tarring Augustine with religious slurs (such as "the new Manichee") and an array of ethnic epithets (such as "Punic debater").30 Julian waged what Peter Brown has called a "Punic war of the mind,"31 lambasting Augustine's views on free will, grace, marriage, sexuality, and much else, in a four-volume work, To Turbantius (Ad Turbantium). Augustine felt compelled to answer, initially in book 2 of On Marriage and Concupiscence (De nuptiis et concupiscentia), then in a point-by-point rebuttal in Against Julian (Contra Julianum). Julian answered back with the eightvolume To Florus (Ad Florum). Augustine again responded, this time with a work that occupied his energies virtually to the day he died, the massive six-volume Against Julian, an Incomplete Work (Contra Julianum opus imperfectum), which, as its posthumous title indicates, was left unfinished. The final condemnation of Pelagianism came only after Augustine's death. In 431, Cyril of Alexandria presided over the ecumenical Council of Ephesus, best known for its condemnation of Nestorius and its affirmation of the Virgin Mary as Theotokos ("Mother of God"). The Council also condemned Caelestius's teaching, and in a letter to the West confirmed its condemnations of Pelagius, Caelestius, and Julian. Julian reportedly lived his last years in Sicily, working as a schoolteacher.
A fourth phase occurred in Augustine's final years. Two groups of monks, one in Hadrumetum in North Africa, another in southern Gaul, had followed the course of controversy. While they had little sympathy with Pelagius, they became alarmed at Augustine's increasingly pungent views on grace and predestination, which seemed to render monks' ascetical efforts useless and to make moral exhortations, whether of the Bible or their abbot, irrelevant. Since the seventeenth century, this final phase has been called "the semi Pelagian controversy." The term is a misnomer.32 There is nothing either Pelagian or semi-Pelagian about these monks. The most prominent was John Cassian (c. 360–c. 435), a monk who had settled in Marseilles after spending long years in the Greek East, especially in Egypt, and who, more than anyone else, would translate the spirituality of the Desert Fathers for the Latin West.33 Widely admired, his works would be commended in Benedict's Rule
30. Julian, Ad Florum, quoted in Augustine, c. Jul. imp. 1.7, 1.32, 1.48, 5.11; cf. 4.56 ("patron of asses," patronus asinorum). On this, see Dorothea Weber, " 'For What Is So Monstrous as What the Punic Fellow Says?': Reflections on the Literary Background of Julian's Polemical Attacks on Augustine's Homeland," in Augustinus Afer, 75–82; also Mathijs J. G. P. Lamberigts, "The Italian Julian of Aeclanum about the African Augustine of Hippo," 83–94.
31. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 385. 32. On this, see Rebecca Harden Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-Pelagian Controversy, Patristic Monograph Series 15 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996); and Conrad Leyser, "Semi-Pelagianism," AugEncy, 761–66.
33. See Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Harmless, Desert Christians, 373–409.