Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Against the Pelagians
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.
and powerfully shape medieval monasticism. Cassian insisted on the constant necessity of grace. In his Conferences (Collationes), he alluded to Augustinian views, and if at times he disagreed, he did so politely and without polemic. One of Cassian's contemporaries in Marseilles, Prosper of Aquitaine, wrote Augustine a letter, complaining that local holy men were questioning his views. Augustine responded with two treatises, On the Predestination of the Saints (De praedestinatione sanctorum) and On the Gift of Perseverance (De dono perseverantiae). He stated his own views sharply, but stressed seeing these monastic critics as "brothers," not heretics. Over the next century, Gallic monks and bishops, for all their genuine respect for Augustine, stood closer to Cassian and would struggle to reconcile this dual theological inheritance.
Almost everything about the Pelagian controversy is complicated. First, the volume of surviving documents is enormous. Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings alone are several times the length of City of God. Second, the unfolding of events is both crucial and intricate. That should be evident from my cursory summary, which glosses over the often intense dramas that both preceded and played themselves out when those tribunals and councils and popes set out their momentous, but nuanced decisions. As in modern court cases, it is one thing to recognize the big issues being fought over, and quite another to follow the back-and-forth of the courtroom battles. For that, one has to plunge into technical arguments on disputed evidence, to be sensitive to precedents and procedures, and to be attuned to what final verdicts say and do not say. Third, there is the large cast of characters who, at one point or another, take center stage in the drama. One has to be alert to their often hardto-decipher personal motives and their often limited knowledge of one another and of what was happening elsewhere. Fourth, there is the wide array of theological issues. While grace remained the point of contention, around it and flowing from it other theological issues came to the fore: human nature and free will; virtue and holiness; infant baptism and original sin; the origin of the soul; marriage, sexuality, and carnal desire; salvation history and God's predestining will; and, at the very outset and beneath it all, the fundamental Christian claim that Jesus is the one and only Savior of the world. Finally, because this controversy set off reverberations that have rumbled down through the centuries, notably during the Protestant Reformation, when similar debates on grace, free will, and predestination, repeated themselves with new variations and in new contexts, it is difficult to step back and see the original dispute with fresh eyes and savor its unique contours. Scholars have sifted through the huge mass of evidence, and on this controversy, perhaps more than on any other of Augustine's career and thought, interpretations vary widely, as scholars work to reconstruct lost theologies, chart events, diagnose personalities, and speculate discerningly on behind-the-scenes happenings and beneath-the-surface motives. Therefore, this chapter, despite its length, has quite modest aims: providing the basics of and a framework for following this many-sided debate. To capture the back-and-forth of the debate and Augustine's unfolding response to events and ideas, I have organized the texts under its four phases: (1) the debate against Caelestius, (2) the debate against Pelagius, (3) the debate against Julian, and (4) the discussion with the monks. These are not evenly distributed. The second phase gets the bulk of attention not because it has the bulkiest texts (the third has that claim to fame), but because it proved the most consequential.
Background Texts
Pelagius Anticipated
Augustine's old mentor, Simplicianus, had read some of his early exegetical works and asked his perspectives on two perplexing texts from Paul's Letter to the Romans. In 396, Augustine answered with his first work after becoming bishop of Hippo, To Simplicianus on Various Questions. Thirty years later, on the far side of the Pelagian controversy, Augustine looked back on these essays as a watershed moment, as a collection of breakthrough insights into Paul's teaching on grace, free will, and divine election. The work seemed, in retrospect, a God-inspired rebuttal to Pelagius years before he had ever heard of Pelagius. Thus, its place in this chapter. However much it anticipates the later debate, we need to bear in mind that it comes from Augustine of 396, that is, Augustine the new bishop struggling to pastor an all-too-human congregation; Augustine the exegete returning to Pauline texts he had wrestled with earlier; Augustine the polemicist worried about defending free will against the Manichees; and Augustine the convert deeply aware of his own graced conversion experience and his ongoing struggles. To Simplicianus, while a watershed, is not an easy one to savor. It is, first and foremost, a work of exegesis. To appreciate it, one first needs to ruminate on the same biblical texts that so puzzled Simplicianus and Augustine. It is also not an easy work to excerpt, given its tightly threaded arguments. Its insights appear within a dense exegetical shorthand, and their scope would require the later Pelagian controversy to let them unfold into a fuller symphonic exposition.