STUDIA PATRISTICA

VOL. CXX

Papers presented at the Eighteenth International Conference

on Patristic Studies held
in Oxford 2019

Edited by
MARKUS VINZENT

Volume 17:
Cineres extincti dogmatis refouendo?
“Pelagianism” in the Christian Sources from 431
to the Carolingian Period

Edited by
RAÚL VILLEGAS MARÍN

PEETERS
LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT
2021
 Table of Contents

Raúl VILLEGAS MARÍN

Introduction ......................................................................................... 1

María Victoria ESCRIBANO PAÑO

Honorio, Flavio Constancio y la legislación anti-pelagiana de 418 .. 7

Jérémy DELMULLE
A List of Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works by Prosper of Aquitaine
(c. coll. 21.3) ....................................................................................... 31

Richard FLOWER
‘I cut its neck with its own sword’: Tradition, Subversion and
Heresiological Authority in the Praedestinatus ................................. 55

Matthieu PIGNOT
Baptismal Exorcism as Proof of Original Sin: The Legacy of Augus-
tine’s Liturgical Argument in the Early Medieval West .................... 79

Mickaël RIBREAU
Pélage, Célestius et la controverse pélagienne dans les sermons, de
Léon le Grand à Grégoire le Grand .................................................... 101

Giulio MALAVASI
The Pelagian Controversy in Eastern Sources from the Council of
Ephesus (431) to Photius..................................................................... 117

Raúl VILLEGAS MARÍN

The Traps of the Heresiological Discourse: ‘Pelagianism’ in the
British and Irish Sources ..................................................................... 135
 A List of Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works
by Prosper of Aquitaine (c. coll. 21.3)

Jérémy DELMULLE, Paris, France

ABSTRACT
In his treatise Contra collatorem (c. coll. 21.3), published in 432/3 AD, Prosper of
Aquitaine lists ten anti-Pelagian works written by Augustine, which he advises his
adversaries and other readers to turn to, in order to better understand the unity and
continuity of Augustine’s thinking on grace, free will and predestination. The aim of
the present paper is to try to understand what guided Prosper in the choice of these ten
titles and what his knowledge of this anti-Pelagian corpus might have been. By comparing
the Contra collatorem list with the other lists of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works already
available at that time (in Augustine’s Retractationes or Possidius of Calama’s Indiculus)
and by taking a look at Prosper’s many direct sources, it can be argued that Prosper had
a first-hand knowledge of all the works he cited. Did this anti-Pelagian corpus already
exist as such before Prosper, or did Prosper forge it himself? Even if this list seems to
have had almost no impact after Prosper’s time, it certainly provides a very valuable
testimony with regard to the question of the first diffusion of Augustine’s works in the
years immediately following the death of their author.

1. Introduction

The condemnation by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD of Nestorian heresy

also sounded the definitive death knell – if I may say so – for another heresy:
Pelagianism.1 Many times, indeed, polemists had stressed the strong kinship
between Pelagius’ ideas and those of Nestorius. The decisions taken by the
Council Fathers thus came, in their minds, as a confirmation of the victory of
the doctrine on grace defended by Augustine, who died a few months earlier.2

1
I would like to thank Raúl Villegas Marín for his invitation to participate in the panel he
organized and for his remarks. My thanks also go to Martine Dulaey and Shari Boodts for their
review and their comments on a previous version of this article.
2
The Pelagian question was also the subject of several discussions during the council: see first
and foremost Marie-Théophane Disdier, ‘Le pélagianisme au concile d’Éphèse’, Échos d’Orient
163 (1931), 314-33; Jean Plagnieux, ‘Le grief de complicité entre erreurs nestorienne et pélagienne.
D’Augustin à Cassien par Prosper d’Aquitaine ?’, Mémorial Gustave Bardy = REAug 2.1-4 (1956),
391-402; Jakob Speigl, ‘Der Pelagianismus auf dem Konzil von Ephesus’, AHC 1 (1969), 1-14;
Lionel Wickham, ‘Pelagianism in the East’, in Rowan Williams (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy:
Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1989), 200-13.

Studia Patristica CXX, 31-53.

© Peeters Publishers, 2021.
32 J. DELMULLE

However, in some parts of Gaul, the same people who were delighted with
the outcome of the Ephesian Council were at the same time very concerned
about the troubling surge in their regions of some apparently Pelagian posi-
tions: a few years earlier, a new controversy had indeed erupted in Marseilles
and in Provence, which continued to raise the same problems on grace and
free will.3 This explains why, even after Ephesus and at least until 432 AD,
one could still feel the need to keep reading and explaining the treatises Augus-
tine composed on these questions, essentially on the occasion of the Pelagian
controversy.4
But what exactly was known about Augustine’s polemical production against
the Pelagians in Southern Gaul in these decades? Which of the master’s works
were likely to be reused by his continuators to oppose the new arguments put
forth by the Provençal monks? There are no evident clues to answer this ques-
tion. But there exists a very interesting testimony on this subject which, with
the notable exception of Otto Wermelinger,5 has so far attracted little attention
from scholars: I refer to a list of titles of Augustine’s works against the Pela-
gians, which Prosper of Aquitaine offers to his readers in his Contra colla-
torem, written just some months after the Council of Ephesus. It is this text that
I propose to study in the pages to come, in order to compare it with other
contemporary sources and to try to determine what Augustinian works were
really available in Southern Gaul in the first half of the decade of the 430s AD.

2. Prosper’s ‘bibliography’ in c. coll. 21.3

In his Contra collatorem, composed in 432/3 AD, Prosper of Aquitaine vehe-

mently attacks the doctrine put forth by John Cassian in his thirteenth Collatio
‘On the Protection of God’, which he considers to be an unfair and harsh
criticism of Augustine’s latest works on grace and free will. While his treatise
is based almost exclusively on a meticulous examination of his opponent’s
opuscule, Prosper also uses arguments that cannot, for obvious reasons, be based
directly on Augustine’s authority – which was not fully recognized among the

3
For a general overview of this post-Pelagian controversy and its different phases, see Donato
Ogliari, Gratia et certamen: The Relationship Between Grace and Free Will in the Discussion of
Augustine with the So-Called Semipelagians, Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum Lovanien-
sium 169 (Leuven, Paris, Dudley, MA, 2003); Rebecca Harden Weaver, Divine Grace and
Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-Pelagian Controversy, Patristic Monograph Series 15 (Macon,
GA, 1996).
4
The year 432 AD is precisely the date that Otto Wermelinger chose as the end of the Pelagian
controversy in his seminal book: Rom und Pelagius. Die theologische Position der römischen
Bischöfe im pelagianischen Streit in den Jahren 411-432, Päpste und Papsttum 7 (Stuttgart, 1975).
5
O. Wermelinger, Rom und Pelagius (1975), 248 and note 158; the author proposes a first
assessment on Augustinian works available in Gaul.