These are the principles of Augustinism. Its an- thropological principle, of the native corruption of man, and of his utter incapacity to do good apart from divine grace, has remained fixed in the church to this day. Pelagius maintained, on the contrary, that "every man, in respect to his moral nature, is born in precisely the same condition in which Adam was ere .ted, and has the capacity of willing and do- ing good without Cod's special aid. It was Augus- tine's mission to enunciate clearly and to fix forever the Christian doctrine as to the condition of human na- ture in its fallen state. But the anxiety of Augustine to save the divine glory in the work of man's salva- tion led him to the doctrine of unconditional election and predestination — a doctrine to which the mind and heart of the church, as a whole, has never acceded. It has been a stumbling-block from Augustine's day until now. But Augustine, in his combat against Pelagius,
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was entirety successful. The church of his times sided with him, and Pelagius and his adherents were con- demned by a numher of synods, and by Zosimus, the bishop of Rome. After the death of Augustine, the controversy about the chief points of his system con- tinued for a long time to agitate the entire church. The General Synod of Ephesus (431) condemned the Pelagians, together with the Nestorians ; yet, on the whole, the Greek Church did not take any real inter- est in the controversy, and never adopted the doc- trines of absolute predestination and irresistible grace. In Africa and Rome a tendency to Augustinism pre- vailed ; and at the synods of Arausio (Orange) and Valentia (529) a decision was obtained in favor of the exclusive operation of divine grace, although predesti- nation was evidently evaded. In Gaul Augustinism did not exercise the same influence ; and although the authority of Augustine was too great to permit an open opposition to his system, Semi -Pelagian tendencies seemed to be for a long time in the ascendency.
The authority of Augustine's name remained unim- paired, although his peculiar doctrines were but little understood by the church of the Middle Ages. The first important controversy concerning Augustinism was that called forth by the monk Gottschalk (q. v.), who in the most decided forms of expression announced the doctrine of a double predestination, founded upon the absolute foreknowledge of God, according to which some were devoted to life, and others were consigned to destruction. Gottschalk, who pretended to be a strict follower of Augustine, was condemned by the Synod of Mayence (848), and died in prison (8G8). His doctrine was a development, not of the good side of Augustinism, viz. its anthropology, but of the false side, viz. its view of the relations between God and man in the work of salvation. Augustine maintained unconditional election, but not reprobation; he held that God chose from the massa i>erditionis such and such persons to be saved, because he pleased to choose them, and for no other reason whatever; while the rest were lost, not because God chose to damn them, but because they were sinners. Gottschalk was the first to announce in clear terms the doctrine of the di- vine reprobation of sinners, i. e. that they are damned, not simply because of their sins, but because of God's decree to damn them, for no other reason than because it pleased him so to do. In the subsequent centuries, the rise of scholasticism and mysticism, and the con- troversy between these two systems, diverted the at- tention of the church from Augustinism. Anselm, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas endeavored to retain Augustine's doctrine of an unconditional elec- tion, though with many limitations. The current of theological opinion in the church in general was in a direction toward Pelagianism, and the learned Thom- ist, Thomas de Bradwardina (q. v.), a professor at Oxford, and subsequently archbishop at Canterbury (d. 1349), charged the whole age with having adopted Pelagianism. On the whole, the Thomists claimed to stand on the same ground as Augustine ; yet, while they regarded original sin as a culpable of- fence, and divine grace as predestination, they never- theless believed that man has some remnants of power by which he may make himself worthy of divine fa- vor (meritum e congmo\ and regarded divine grace as dependent upon divine foreknowledge. The Scotists (adherents of Duns Scotus), on the other hand, de- scribed both original sin and grace as rather the inva- riable condition of all men, and as developments of the spiritual world in the course of Providence. As Thomas was a Dominican and Duns Scotus a Fran- ciscan, the controversy between Thomists and Sco- tists on the subject of original sin and divine grace gradually became a controversy between the two or- ders of mendicant friars. After the Reformation, the Jesuits, in accordance with the moral system of their school, adopted the views of the Scotists. Augustin-
ism found very zealous champions in the professors of the University of Louvain. One of them, Bams (q. v.), was denounced by the Franciscans to Pope Pius V, who in 15G7 condemned 79 propositions extracted from the writings of Baius, a sentence which was confirmed j by Gregory XIII (1579). In return, the theological faculty of Louvain censured 34 propositions in the works of the Jesuits Less and Hamel, as opposed to the teachings of St. Augustine, and to the absolute authority of the Scriptures. As the controversy wax- 1 ed very warm, Sixtus V forbade its continuance; but when this proved fruitless, a committee (the celebrated congrrgatio de mtxilus) was appointed by Clement VIII for the full decision of the question, "In what way is the assistance of divine grace concerned in the con- version of the sinner?" The congregation was, how- : ever, dismissed in 1607, without having accomplished 1 its object, and the antagonism between the Augustin- \ ian school and its opponents continued as before. An ■ elaborate representation of the Augustinian and Pela- gian systems was given by Bishop Jansenius, of Ypres, in his work August inus s. "doctrina Augustini de humance i natural sanitate, osgritudine, et meditina adversus Pela- \ glum et Massilknses, which was published after the death of the author, and gave rise to the celebrated Jansenist controversy, and to the exclusion of the Jan- senists from the church. See Jansenius and Jan- senists. The condemnation of Jansenius and the Jansenists did, however, not terminate the controver- ; sy in the Roman Catholic Church concerning the Au- gustinian theology, though the subsequent history of the controversy is not marked by any prominent event. ! But the Roman Catholic Church, as a whole, rejects ! that part of Augustinism which teaches absolute pre-