Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Phase Four: Discussion with
Monks (427–430)
Concerns of Gallic Monks
The final phase was sparked by Augustine's reading public, notably two groups of monks. One group was based at Hadrumetum in North Africa. These were concerned that Augustine's views seemed to make their personal ascetical practices useless and to render their abbot's admonitions equally useless. To these concerns, Augustine addressed two treatises, On Grace and Free Will (De gratia et libero arbitrio) and On Admonition and Grace (De correptione et gratia). After their publication, further concerns were expressed by influential monks in southern Gaul, especially in the port city of Massilia (modern Marseilles). Around 427, Augustine received letters from two laymen from the area, Hilary and Prosper of Aquitaine. We know almost nothing of Hilary, but Prosper later served as secretary to Pope Leo the Great (d. 461), assisting Leo behind-thescenes in the great debate on Christology that took place at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. While neither letter names the real dissenters, we know of one very well-respected and influential monastic theologian, John Cassian (d. c. 435), who expressed a quiet cautionary disagreement with certain Augustinian views. From Prosper of Aquitaine, preserved in Augustine's corpus as Letter 225:
(2) Many of the servants of Christ who live in the city of Marseilles, having read the writings that your Holiness published against the Pelagian heretics, think that your argument on the calling of the elect according to the design of God is contrary to the opinions of the Fathers and the view of the Church. . . . We have to fear this sharp dissent of theirs, first for their own sake, lest the spirit of Pelagian impiety trick men who are so clear-minded and so exemplary in their pursuit of all the virtues; and second, for less sophisticated people, who hold these others in high esteem because they see their uprightness, for these ordinary people think that the safest opinion they can hold is the one they hear asserted by others whose authority they follow without reflection.
(3) This is a summary of what [these critics] profess: Every human being has sinned in the sin of Adam and no one can be saved through his or her own efforts, but only by rebirth through the grace of God. Moreover, the propitiation which is present in the sacrament of the blood of Christ was offered for all human beings, without exception, such that all who are willing to come to faith and to baptism can be saved. But God foresaw before the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4; Mt 25:34) those who would believe or who would stand firm in the faith (a faith helped afterwards by grace); and He predestined to His kingdom those freely called, those He foresaw would be worthy of election and would depart this life by a good death. Therefore, every human being is warned by divine instructions to believe and to act accordingly so that no one need despair of laying hold of eternal life, since a reward has been prepared for those
Against the Pelagians 427 with willing devotion. But [they claim] this design of God's calling, by which, it is said, a distinction is made between the chosen and the rejected (either before the beginning of the world or in the act of creating the human race such that, according to the Creator's pleasure, some are created "vessels of honor," others, "vessels of dishonor" [Rom 9:21]) deprives the fallen of any motive for rising up from their sins and allows the holy an excuse for lukewarmness. In both cases, all effort is useless if the rejected cannot enter [the Kingdom] no matter how they work, nor if the chosen fall away no matter how negligent. For however they act, the outcome for them cannot be other than what God has determined, and in this uncertainty of hope there can be no consistent course of action because the effort of human striving is useless if the choice of God's predestination rules otherwise. This has the effect of undermining effort and doing away with the virtues if God's ordering comes prior to human willing, and thus under the name of "predestination" a certain inevitability of fate is introduced; or else the Lord is said to be the Creator of different natures if no one can become other than what God has made. . . .
(5) When one raises as an objection to these arguments the countless multitude of little ones who have as yet no will, no actions of their own, ones who, in any case, are set aside by God's judgment for no reason except for original sin (under which all human beings are similarly born to share in the condemnation of the first human being), who are carried off before any experience of this life gives them a discernment of good and evil, some of whom are enrolled among the heirs of the heavenly kingdom because of their rebirth, while others, without baptism, pass over as debtors to eternal death. They say that such children are lost or saved according to what the divine knowledge foresees they would have been in their adult years if they had reached such an age and become active. . . .
(6) Our Lord Jesus Christ, they say, died for the whole human race, and that no one is excluded from the redemption wrought by His blood, not even someone who spends his whole life with a mindset utterly alienated from God, because the sacrament of divine mercy belongs to all human beings. The reason why many are not renewed is because God foresees that they do not have the will to receive it. Therefore, as far as God is concerned, eternal life is prepared for all, but as far as the freedom of choice is concerned, eternal life is grasped by those who believe in God by their own free choice and who receive the help of grace as a reward for their belief. The main reason these people, whose counter-arguments upset us (though they earlier had a better sense of it), preach grace in such a way is this: because if they were to admit that grace comes before all those good merits and that grace makes them possible and confers them, these people would necessarily have to concede that, according to His plan and the determination of His will, by a hidden judgment but by clear action, God "makes one vessel for honor, another for dishonor" (Rom 9:21) since no one is justified except by grace and no one is born except in sin. But they shrink from ad-