Intrepid Lover of Perfect Grace: The Life and Thought of Prosper of Aquitaine (review)

Anyone researching Prosper of Aquitaine has lamented the absence of a thorough guide to the subject. Alexander Y. Hwang has filled this lacuna with a pleasantly readable and well-organized intellectual biography of this elusive figure. Hwang gathers the scattered scholarship on Prosper, supplements it with fresh insights, and organizes into one coherent whole what can be determined about Prosper's life and thought on the basis of available evidence. The resulting portrait emphasizes Prosper's lifelong "insatiable and fanatical desire to know the deepest mysteries of grace" (7).

This study strikingly demonstrates that changes in Prosper's ecclesiology drive changes in his views of divine grace and human free will. Prosper's ecclesiology develops from practically nonexistent, to equating Augustine's teachings with the Catholic faith, and finally to centering on the authority of the bishops of Rome. In a direct parallel, Prosper's teachings on grace develop from naively biblical, to strictly Augustinian, and finally to an Augustinianism substantially modified according to the teachings and practices of the Roman church.

As Prosper moves from the obscurity of a powerless refugee in the monk-dominated ecclesiastical scene of Marseilles (416–440) to the celebrity of being Pope Leo's trusted advisor in Rome (440–455), one constant remains: implacable opposition to what Prosper considers the Pelagian leanings of the doctores Gallicani. Rejecting the label "semi-Pelagians," Hwang opts for doctores Gallicani to designate the powerful faction of ecclesiastics in Provence, including John Cassian, who opposed Augustine's teaching on grace and free will, and especially predestination. Against them, Prosper along with a less influential faction of "Augustinians" struggled in what Hwang terms "the Augustinian controversy." Much of the introduction addresses this terminology in light of recent discussions; future students of the controversy will do well to follow Hwang in this regard.

The first chapter is a bibliographical essay on the works attributed to Prosper. Hwang for the most part gathers and evaluates the weight of scholarly consensus, thereby providing a handy reference for researchers. This attention to primary sources is continued in later chapters, which provide historical context, summaries, and "observations" on Prosper's seventeen authentic works and several sources representing other views in the controversy.

The subsequent five chapters consider Prosper's life and writings in chronological order. Hwang clearly demonstrates the shift from strict fidelity to Augustine's later teaching on predestination that first occurs in Prosper's Pro Augustino responsiones ad capitula obiectionum Gallorum and Responsiones ad capitula obiectionum Vincentiarum, both dating to 433–435 (176–179). Especially illuminating is Hwang's convincing argument that Arnobius the Younger's Commentarii in Psalmos and Praedestinatus, written in the 430s, served as the catalyst for the three companion works—Expositio psalmorum, Liber sententiarum, and Epigrammata—in which Prosper subtly corrects Augustinianism in accordance with papal teachings (200–205). Hwang creatively interprets the Auctoritates appended to Celestine's Apostolici verba as the endpoint in Prosper's intellectual development. Taking the decrees of the Roman church as definitive, the Auctoritates demonstrate "belief in the priority of and the absolute need for God's grace to accomplish anything good, and that free will is set free in order that it may cooperate with God's grace," while leaving aside "more difficult" questions such as predestination (225).

Hwang's study is noteworthy for the clarity of its arguments, although that clarity occasions some repetition. Scholars may quibble with a number of claims. For example, Hwang's insistence that the "real purpose" of Vincent of Lerin's Commonitorium "was to refute Prosper's Contra collatorem" (168) seems a bit stretched. The Commonitorium is occupied more with christological questions, and the possible attribution of other works to Vincent is insufficiently analyzed. Too much is made of arguments from silence, for example in the case of the Chronicon, which belongs to an exceedingly terse genre. Prosper is assumed to be a layman on...