Grace for Grace: The Debates after Augustine and Pelagius

2. I Timothy 2:4 and the Beginnings of the Massalian Controversy

14 2 1 TIMOTHY 2:4 AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MASSALIAN CONTROVERSY Roland Teske, SJ In De vocatione omnium gentium, which it is now agreed that Prosper of Aquitaine wrote ca. 450, he says of 1 Tim. 2:4, “When those who love slanderous struggles read these things, they will say that by such arguments we contradict the apostle who states that God wills that all human beings be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”1 The things that Prosper has been saying and that, he suspects, will lead those people to claim that he is contradicting Saint Paul are that scripture at times seems to speak of all human beings when it means only some of them and that it at times seems to speak of peoples of all times when it means only the people of a certain time, that is, the sort of scriptural usage to which Augustine had appealed when he wanted to give a restricted interpreta1 . De vocatione 1. 12. 1; PL 51: 663–64: “Sed cum haec legerint vel audierint qui amant calumniosa certamina, dicent nos per hujusmodi disputationes Apostolo contradicere definienti, quod Deus omnes homines velit salvos fieri, et in agnitionem veritatis venire.” On the authorship of De vocatione omnium gentium, see the introduction in CSEL 97 and my Oxford paper, “The Augustinianism of Prosper of Aquitaine Revisited,” SP 39: 491–504. At present, given the external and internal evidence, there does not seem to be any room for a reasonable doubt about Prosper’s authorship of the work. THE MASSALIAN CONTROVERSY 15 tion to the apparently universal claim in 1 Tim. 2:4. The people who love such calumniosa certamina are the monks of Provence with whom Prosper had been quarreling for the past quarter century , chief among whom was the saintly abbot of the monastery of Saint Victor in Marseilles, John Cassian, who had died in the mid430s .2 By the time of De vocatione, the heat of the first phase of the controversy in Gaul had cooled, and there is good reason to believe that Prosper, who does not mention either Augustine or predestination in the work, was deliberately writing in a more conciliatory tone than he had earlier. In fact, the milder tone of De vocatione was, I believe, the principal reason for supposing that Prosper was not the author of that work.3 In his recent book on Prosper, A. Elberti suggests that by the time of De vocatione Prosper wanted “evitare ogni pretesto che potesse riaccendere la lotta e tentre cosi di convincere più facilmente gli avversari.”4 Furthermore, Cappuyns suggests that, once the heat of the controversy had died down after the death of Cassian, Prosper found in Cassian’s thirteenth conference reasons to modify his position on the restricted interpretation of 1 Tim. 2:4. “La tragique objection de Cassian, si éloquement formulé, a-t-elle fini par lui faire l’impression et par mettre, une fois encore, sa science théologique en défaut? C’est possible. Ce qui est certain c’est que la prédestination n’était plus qu’avant, le souci dominant de Prosper.”5 2. See Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24. Stewart’s book is an excellent study of Cassian’s life and works. 3. See my introduction to the work in the CSEL edition as well as the study of Prosper by A. Elberti, Prospero d’Aquitania: theologo e dicepolo (Rome: Dehoniane, 1999). Elberti provides strong arguments for the Prosperian authorship. A. Hwang, Intrepid Lover of Perfect Grace: The Life and Thought of Prosper of Aquitaine (Washington , D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), does not discuss the question of authorship and simply assumes that the question is settled. A. Casiday, on the other hand, in “Rehabilitating John Cassian: An Evaluation of Prosper of Aquitaine’s Polemic against the ‘Semipelagians,’” SJT 58 (2005): 270–84, does not consider De vocatione among the works of Prosper. 4. Elberti, Prospero, 147. 5. D. M. Cappuyns, “L’augustinisme de Prosper d’Aquintaine,” RTAM 1 (1929): 309–37, here 322. 16 ROLAND TESKE, SJ In De vocatione 1.12. 1, however, Prosper indicates that 1 Tim. 2:4 was a bone of contention in the Massalian controversy, that is, one of the principal reasons that the monks of Provence had for objecting to Augustine’s teaching in his...