Appendix: Section 69 and Augustine’s Followers

That Vincent had Augustine and his followers in view in this description will hardly be doubted by anyone who compares it with the following extracts. The first is from Prosper’s letter to Augustine, giving him an account of the complaints the clergy of Marseilles made against his teaching. The second is from Saint Augustine’s treatise On the Gift of Perseverance, written as a result of it. [a]

The Commonitory, section 69: “If someone asks one of the heretics who gives this advice, ‘How do you prove it? What grounds do you have for saying that I ought to cast away the universal and ancient faith of the catholic church?’ he has the answer ready: ‘For it is written.’ At once he produces a thousand testimonies, a thousand examples, a thousand authorities from the Law, from the Psalms, from the apostles, from the prophets. Interpreted on a new and wrong principle, these send the unhappy soul hurtling from the height of catholic truth into the lowest pit of heresy. For they dare to teach and promise that in their church, that is, in the little meeting of their own communion, there is a certain great, special, and altogether personal grace of God. Whoever belongs to their number, without any labor, without any effort, without any diligence, even though they neither ask nor seek nor knock, is so provided for by God that, borne up by angels’ hands, that is, kept safe by the protection of angels, they can never strike their foot against a stone; that is, they can never be made to stumble.” [c]

Prosper to Augustine: “The clergy of Marseilles complain,” he says, “that all effort is done away with and virtues abolished, if God’s decree goes before human wills.” This is from section 3 of his letter. Then, referring to the teaching of the clergy of Marseilles themselves, Prosper goes on: “They would have it belong to the condition of every man that he can direct his will to the knowledge of God and to obedience to his commands, and can come to this grace by which we are born again in Christ by a natural ability, that is, by asking, seeking, and knocking.” Referring to the line of argument taken by himself and others of Augustine’s friends, and the way the clergy of Marseilles dealt with it, he says, “And when we bring forward against them the writings of your Blessedness, armed with very strong and countless testimonies of the divine Scriptures, … they defend their obstinacy with antiquity.” This too is from section 3.

Saint Augustine replied to Prosper not in an ordinary letter but in two short treatises, which must have been written immediately after he received it, for he died in August of the year 430. The first is titled On the Predestination of the Saints, the second On the Gift of Perseverance. The following extract is from the second: “Let them note, then, how they are deceived who think that our asking, seeking, and knocking comes from ourselves and is not given to us. And this, they say, is what it means that grace is preceded by our merit: grace follows when we receive by asking, find by seeking, and have the door opened to us by knocking. They will not understand that this too is part of God’s gift, that we pray, that is, that we ask, seek, and knock.” This is from On the Gift of Perseverance, chapter 23, section 64.

Vincent’s language is in keeping with that of others of Saint Augustine’s opponents, such as Cassian and Faustus, from whom Noris gives extracts. Only, as Noris observes, Vincent uses the term “heresy” of the doctrine he attacks, while they are content to use the milder term “error.” See Noris’s History of the Pelagians, page 246. [d]