§ 159. SEMI-PELAGIANISM. 85S
the pale of the Catholic church, and never produced a separate sect.
We glance now at the main features of the origin and progress of tliis school.
The Pelagian system had been vanquished by Angusthie, and rejected and condemned as heresy by the church. Thi? result, however, did not in itself necessarily imply the complete approval of sthe Augustinian system. Many, even opponents of Pelagius, recoiled from a position so wide of the older fathers as Augustine's doctrines of the bondage of man and the absolute election of grace, and preferred a middle ground.
First the monks of the convent of Adrumetum in North Africa differed among themselves over the doctrine of predestination ; some perverting it to carnal security, others plunging from it into anguish and desperation, and yet otherg feeling compelled to lay more stress than Augustine upon human freedom and responsibility. Augustine endeavored to allay the scruples of these monks by his two treatises, De gratia et lihero arbitrio^ and De correjptione et gratia. Tho abbot Valentinus answered these in the name of the monks in a reverent and submissive tone.'
But simultaneously a more dangerous opposition to the doctrine of predestination arose in Southern Gaul, in the form of a regular theological school within the Catholic church. The members of this school were first called "remnants of the Pelagians," " but commonly Massilians, from Massilia (Marseilles), their chief centre, and afterwards Semi-Pelagians. Augustine received an account of this from two learned and pious lay friends, Prosper, and Hilarius,^ who begged that he himself would take the pen against it. This was the occasion of his two works, De jprcedestinatione sanctorum, and De done
' His answer is found in the Epistles of Augustine, Ep. 216, and in Opera, torn. s. f. 746 (ed. Bened.).
' " Reliquiae Pelagianorum," So Prosper calls tliem in his letter to Augustine^ He saw in them disguised, and therefore only so much the more dangerous, Pela gians.
* Not to be confounded with Hilarius, bishop of Aries, in distinction from whonj he is called Hilarius Prosperi. Hilary calls himself a layman (Aug, Ep. 226^ 5 <*) Comp. the Benedictines in torn. x. f. 785 ; Wiggers, iL 187).
VGO THIED PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
per siver entice, witli which he worthily closed liis labors as at author. He deals with these disputants more gently than with tlie Pelagians, and addresses them as brethren. After his death (430) the discussion was continued principally in Gaul ; for then North Africa was disquieted by the victorious invasion of the Vandals, which for several decades shut it out fruni the circle of theological and ecclesiastical activity.
At the head of the Semi-Pelagian party stood John Cas- 8IAN, the founder and abbot of the monastery at Massilia, a man of thorough cultivation, rich experience, and unquestioned orthodoxy.' lie was a grateful disciple of Chrysostom, who ordained him deacon, and apparently also presbyter. His Greek training and his predilection for monasticism w^ere a favorable soil for his Semi-Pelagian theory. He labored awhile in Rome with Pelagius, and afterwards in Southern France, in the cause of monastic piety, w^hich he efficientl}'- promoted by exhortation and example. Monasticism sought in cloistered retreats a protection against the allurements of sin, the desolating incursions of the barbarians, and the wretchedness of an age of tumult and confusion. But the enthusiasm for the monastic life tended strongly to over-value external acts and ascetic discipline, and resisted the free evangelical bent of the Augustinian theology. Cassian wrote twelve boohs De coenohiorum institutls, in which he first describes the outward life of the monks, and then their inward conflicts and victories over the eight capital vices: intemperance, unchastity, avarice, anger, sadness, dulncss, ambition, and pride. More important are his fourteen Collationes Patrum, conversations which Cassian and his friend Gerraanus had had with the most expe-
1 Wiggcrs treats thoroughly and at length of him, in the above cited monograph, vol. ii. pp. 7-l;i(). He has been mistakenly supposed a Seythian, His name and his fluent Latinity indicate an occidental origin. Yet he was in part educated at Bethlehem and in Constantinople, and spent seven years among the anchoritns in Egypt. He mentioned John Chrysostom even in the evening of his life with grateful veneration. (De incarn. vii. 30 sq.). " What I have written," he says, " Johu has taught me, and therefore account it not so much mine as his. For a brook rises from a spring, and what is ascribed to the pupil, must bo reckoned wholly to the honor of the teacher." On the life and writings of Cassian compare also ScuoNKMANN, BibUotheca, vol. ii. (reprinted in Migne's ed. vol. i.). Best edition of his Opera by Petschenig, Vienna, 188t>, 2 vols.