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

To be amenable to intellectual biography, a writer should attract wide notice from contemporaries, discourse freely about himself or herself, and leave behind an ample series of securely datable literary works. Aside from the Doctors of the Churches, few early Christian writers meet these requirements. Prosper "of Aquitaine" is not obvious among them. De providentia Dei, a nearly 1000-line poem, gives a shadowy impression of someone who suffered from the passage of the Goths and Vandals through southwestern Gaul in the early-fifth century. During the period c. 426-35 Prosper energetically defended St. Augustine's teaching on grace and predestination against critics in the region of Marseille, composing controversial works in several genres and betaking himself to Rome in 431 to obtain a ruling from Pope Celestine. In 433, 445, and 455, he expanded St. Jerome's Chronicle. None of these more or less precisely datable works, together accounting for roughly half the oeuvre now attributed to Prosper, yields much circumstantial detail about him. The remainder of the oeuvre, which includes extensive summarizing, excerpting, and versifying of Augustine, is harder to distribute across a career. Our only significant external notice of Prosper is the sketchy and tendentious one provided several decades later by Gennadius. "It is not without good reason that a comprehensive biography of Prosper has not been attempted in the past," writes Alexander Y. Hwang (p. 6).

His attempt builds on the work of earlier scholars (notably G. de Plinval and M. Cappuyns) who have plotted the progressive moderation of Prosper's "Augustinianism" on the subject of grace and predestination, and who have associated that development with the influence of Leo the Great. Hwang divides Prosper's writings into three periods: (1) a pre-Augustinian phase represented solely by the De providentia Dei of c. 416, (2) a hard-line Augustinian phase c. 426-35, and (3) a "mature" phase c. 440-55, characterized by Prosper's adherence to a fully (Roman) catholic ecclesiology. In these two long intervals (417-25, 435-40) between these periods of literary activity, Prosper is supposed to have stopped writing while pausing for "reflection and contemplation" (p. 187). The first period of reflection would coincide with his textual encounter with Augustine. The second, on Hwang's account, would culminate with his leaving Gaul in 440 in the entourage of the newly elected Pope Leo, who had decided to make him his adviser; henceforth, the ex-combatant Prosper "would find himself under the peaceful theological sky of Rome in the service of the Roman Church" (p. 186; cf. 190 and 31n94; the figurative phrase is taken from Cappuyns). There are two problems with this narrative. The first is the shoe-horning of all agreeably "Roman" texts into the "final" phase of Prosper's literary career, sometimes on the flimsiest pretexts (e.g., pp. 199-205 for the Expositio psalmorum and other works de longue haleine adapted from Augustine; pp. 220-22 for the Auctoritates or Capitula, a set of papal pronouncements on grace, available to Prosper by the early 430s). The second is the fanciful nature of the personal and official connection postulated between Prosper and Leo the Great, already partly exposed by Robert Markus in a 1986 paper and soon to be made plainer in a forthcoming study by R.W. Burgess.

Hwang can be commended for providing careful and well-informed summaries of the arguments of several of Prosper's most important controversial works, and for judicious splicing of the scanty evidence for the latter's life into the more colorful picture of his (putative) milieux derivable from contemporary sources. Regrettably, however, his work does little to advance the critical study of Prosper as a framer of Christian doctrine in Latin verse and prose.