Faustus the Bishop

Faustus, first abbot of the monastery at Lerins and then made bishop of Riez in Gaul, a man devoted to the Divine Scriptures, took his text from the historic creed of the church and composed a book On the Holy Spirit. In it he shows from the belief of the fathers that the Holy Spirit is of one substance and coeternal with the Father and the Son, the fullness of the Trinity, and therefore God. He also published an excellent work, On the Grace of God by Which We Are Saved. In it he teaches that the grace of God always invites, goes before and helps our will, and that whatever gain our freedom of will may win by its devout effort is not its own merit but the gift of grace. I have also read a little book of his Against the Arians and Macedonians, in which he maintains a Trinity of one essence, and another against those who say that there is something bodiless among created things, in which he maintains, from the testimony of the Scriptures and by quotations from the fathers, that nothing is to be regarded as bodiless except God. There is also a letter of his, written in the form of a little book and addressed to a certain deacon named Graecus, who had left the catholic faith and gone over to the Nestorian ungodliness. [a]

In this letter he urges him to believe that the holy Virgin Mary did not give birth to a mere human being who would afterward receive divinity, but to true God in true man. There are still other works by him, but since I have not read them, I do not care to mention them. This excellent teacher is enthusiastically believed in and admired. Later he also wrote to Felix, the praetorian prefect, a man of patrician rank and the son of Magnus the consul, a very devout letter urging the fear of God, a work well fitted to move a person to repent with his whole heart.