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Rh adherents. Zosimus at once came round to the side of the Africans. In a circular letter (tractoria) he condemned Coelestius and Pelagianism alike, and required all the bishops of his jurisdiction to signify their adhesion. Thus ended the official support of Pelagius in the West. (On Augustine's view of Zosimus, see Reuter, pp. 312‒322, and below, § 12 d. On the whole question, see Garnier in Marii Mercat. opp. I p. 19. Zosimus appears to have imperfectly grasped the points at issue, and in this case, as in that of Apiarius in the same year (infra, § 12, c), and in that of the metropolitan rights of Arles, he appears to have been in a greater hurry to assert the claims of his see than to ascertain the merits of the question in debate.

The most able advocate of Pelagianism now appears in the person of Julian, bp. of Eclanum in Southern Italy. He refused to sign the tractoria, accused Zosimus of changing his front under imperial pressure (&#8202;"jussionis terrore perculsos," c. Duas Epp. Pelag. ii. 3), and appealed to a general council. This appeal came to nothing (ib. iv. 34). Julian was deposed by Zosimus, banished by the Government, and took refuge in the East. He is said to have found a friend in Theodore of Mopsuestia. At any rate, in 431 the Westerns secured the condemnation of Pelagianism (without specification of its tenets) along with Nestorianism at the council of Ephesus, on the ground of the kindred nature of the two heresies. This was not without substantial reason. The two heresies rest upon the same fundamental idea of the benefit which the redemptive work of Christ brings to man—viz. moral improvement by perfect teaching and example, rather than atonement for an inherently guilty race (&#8202;"ut vel sero redamaremus eum," Julian in Op. Imperf. I. xciv.). Augustine continued to write against Pelagianism. In 418 he wrote two books, de Gratia Christi et de Peccato Originali; in the two following years the two books de Nuptiis et Concupiscentia, and four de Anima ejusque Origine. These works bore on the transmission of original sin, and the difficult collateral question of the origin of the soul, whether by direct creation or ex traduce. Tertullian had roundly maintained tradux animae, tradux peccati. Pelagius denied both. Augustine cannot decide the question; he half leans to creation, but his theory appears to require the other alternative (see below, § 15). Julian attacked the de Nuptiis hotly. Augustine's four books, ''contra Duas Epp. Pelagianorum (420) are in reply to Julian on this as well as on the historical questions; they were followed by six books contra Julianum'' (about 421). Julian replied with vigour, and Augustine at the time of his death had only finished six books of a rejoinder which he intended to be complete (Opus Imperfectum).

(c) The semi-Pelagians (from about 426).—In the combat with Pelagianism, Augustine cannot be said to have changed his views (supra, § 10, sub init.); but he stated, with increasing clearness and sharper consistency, opinions which he had gathered from his study of St. Paul long before the combat began. These opinions were new to most churchmen, although reaction from the paradoxes of Pelagius, and Augustine's immense authority

throughout the Latin church, gained them widespread acceptance. But there were, especially in monastic circles, grave misgivings as to their soundness. The three points to which most serious objection was felt were the doctrines of the total depravity of fallen man, of irresistible grace, and of absolute predestination, not on the ground of foreseen merit. The Christian, as taught by Augustine, received instruction, baptism, the subsequent beneficia gratiae which went to build up the Christian life and train the soul for its eternal home. But the success or failure, the permanent value of the whole process, depended upon the crowning beneficium gratiae, the Donum Perseverantiae, which even at the very moment of death decides whether the soul departs in Christ or falls from Him. This awful gift, which alone decides between the saved and the lost, may be withheld from many who have lived as good and sincere Christians: it may be granted to those whose lives have been far from Christ. Its giving or withholding depends upon the Divine predestination only; God's foreknowledge of those who will "persevere" is but His own foreknowledge of what He Himself will give or withhold. Only the foreknown in this sense are called with vocatio congrua. If these doctrines were true, if free will was by itself entirely powerless to accept the Divine call or to reject the vocatio congrua, if man's salvation at bottom depended simply and solely upon the Divine predestination, what appeal was possible to the conscience of the wicked (correptio)? Was not preaching deprived of its raison d’étre?

This was the view of John Cassian, the father of Western monachism, and of Vincent and other monks of Lerins on the southern coast of Gaul. These "semi-Pelagians," who may with equal justice be called "semi-Augustinians," were not a sect outside the church, but a party of dissentient Catholics. Excepting the above-mentioned points and certain obvious corollaries, such as the doctrine of "particular" redemption, they accepted the entire Augustinian position. The controversy, which is in reality insoluble, lasted long after Augustine's death. Temporarily laid to rest at Orange (where a modified Augustinianism was adopted by a small council in 529), it burst out again in the Gottschalk troubles in the 9th cent., it ranged the Scotists against the Thomists in the 13th, the Arminians against the Calvinists, the Jesuits against the Jansenists in the 17th. Intellectually it is a case of an "antinomy," in which from obvious truths we are led by irresistible logic to incompatible conclusions. Morally, our crux is to insist on human responsibility while excluding human merit. The religious instinct of deep and genuine self-accusation is not easy to combine with the unreserved acknowledgment that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. We must, with Cassian, appeal to free will from the pulpit, but Augustine is with us in the secret sanctuary of prayer.

Augustine's attention was drawn to these difficulties by Hilary and Prosper of Aquitaine, the latter the most active, and indeed bitter, opponent of the Ingrati, as he calls Cassian and his friends. The works de Gratis et Libero 