Adolf Harnack · 18 of 20

I b. The Controversy as to Predestination.

I. (b). The Controversy as to Predestination.

The revival of theological science in the ninth century led to a thorough study of Augustine. But the theology of Gregory I. had already accustomed men to combine the formulas of Augustinianism with the Pelagianism required by the system of the cultus. Hence a renewal of the controversy would hardly have taken place had not the monk Gottschalk of Orbais asserted the doctrine of predestination with as much energy as Augustine had done in his latest writings, and had he not been opposed by Hinkmar, whom his jealous colleagues would gladly have charged with heresy. It was not his use of Augustinian formulas that lifted Gottschalk out of the mass of theologians, and gave a startling effect to his confession. It was the fact that the doctrine of predestination had become the strength and support of his being after a misspent life. Here again it is palpable that words are not everything, that they remain a tinkling cymbal as long as they are not the expression of experience. Many joined and followed Gottschalk in speaking as he did at the time; but he alone was persecuted as a heretical teacher, because the opposition felt that he alone was dangerous to their Church system.

Gottschalk’s teaching regarding predestination was not different, either in matter or form, from that of Augustine, Fulgentius, and Isidore; but it must also be said that he taught nothing but predestination. With the devotion, at first of resignation, and afterwards of fanaticism, he committed himself to the hands of God who does all things according to his good pleasure, and does nothing without having determined it irrevocably from the beginning. Predestination is the content of the Gospel, is the object of faith. It is the truth—that twofold predestination to life and death, according to which eternal life is decreed for the good, and death for the sinner, in which, therefore, some are appointed to life, and the rest to death. Nothing is to be set aside that the Church elsewhere teaches, or that it does; but it is a revolt from the Gospel to obscure in the hearts of men the certainty of this eternal unchangeable dispensation of divine grace—for justice and punishment are also good. Until his death Gottschalk defended inflexibly this faith of his, in the living and original language of the convinced advocate.

But what did the historical Christ, or the Christ of the sacramentally ordered Church, mean here? If the hidden God with his hidden will was a comfort to Gottschalk, then that comfort consisted in the assurance that this God had also predestinated some to life, and the assurance flowed from the economy which culminated in Christ. For from what other source was it known that eternal predestination also embraced the pardon of a section of mankind? The assurance of the individual gained nothing by this; but among the opposition also no one would have anything to do with certainty of salvation; the individual did not count for much to himself or others. Individualism was not yet developed. Christ accordingly was not in question. Even the resolute defender of predestination looked to him when he thought of election to life. But the system of the Sacraments, legal demands and works, which constituted the Church itself, tottered, as it must always totter, wherever religion is recalled from externality to the inner life. This recall was accomplished in a much more abstract way in the present instance than by Augustine. The most profound of the African’s expositions on liberating grace and the blessed necessity of goodness (beata necessitas boni), which form the background of the doctrine of predestination, do not tell strongly upon Gottschalk. Nor had the Frankish monk been able to appropriate the Neoplatonic speculation, that had been toned down or transferred to a wholly different sphere of ideas by Augustine’s teaching. And, again, he did not know the dialectic of the notion of time, which is inseparable from Augustine’s conception. Yet he was not unfamiliar with dialectics; indeed, if we may trust the accounts given us, he at first took pleasure in the problem on dialectical grounds; but the fire he played with afterwards mastered him. The subject matter itself became precious to him. It corresponded to his own mood, ever growing gloomier, and he championed it with the zeal of the missionary. It was not original sin, or sin that he regarded as the chief subject, but the unchangeableness and wisdom of God. He was a theologian in the narrowest sense of the term.

Gottschalk was first opposed by Rabanus in his letters to Noting and Eberard—shortly before A.D. 848. He was accused of teaching that right faith and good works were of no avail to him who was not appointed to salvation, and that God forced men to sin and perdition (invitum hominem facit peccare). Other opponents soon arose, and it was declared that he taught a predestination to sin. At the Council of Mainz (848) Rabanus got him condemned, and handed over, by command of King Lewis, to Hinkmar to whose province as monk he belonged. In his letter to Hinkmar, Rabanus declares a predestination as regards wickedness to be simply erroneous, and he is able to tell already of people, who, seduced by Gottschalk, gave up pious practices because, forsooth, they were wholly useless. Hinkmar got the judgment against the “miserable monk” repeated at an imperial synodal diet at Chiersey (849). He was deposed from his office, scourged, and rendered harmless in prison. Neither Rabanus nor Hinkmar seems at first to have formed as yet any idea of the difficulty of the whole question—caused by the authority of Augustine and other Fathers. Hinkmar contented himself with referring God’s prescience to good or evil, but predestination to goodness alone. But the position of the case soon changed. Gottschalk composed two confessions, in which he stated his teaching, supporting it from Scripture and the Fathers, and he also wrote essays in which he emphasised the particularism of Christ’s saving work, subordinating the latter strictly to the premundane decree of God. He also, in a letter to Amolo, gave expression to the particularly objectionable principle “that baptism and the other sacraments were given in vain to those who perished after receiving them;” for “those of the number of the faithful who perish were never incorporated in Christ and the Church.” But it was perceived in the more cultured South, apart from Mainz and Rheims, that it was not Gottschalk but his opponents who diverged from Augustine’s teaching. The best theologians ranged themselves on the side of the Confessor e.g., Prudentius of Troyes, Ratramnus of Corbie, then also the learned and acute Lupus of Ferrières, the priest Servatus Lupus and Remigius of Lyons, for the most part disciples of Alcuin.

There now began a lively theological controversy (849-50), which was not, however, violent enough to involve the rest of the Church and the Pope, and which was unspeakably unsatisfactory, because staunch Augustinians neither could nor would abandon the ruling ecclesiastical system, and had therefore to seek for compromises where Gottschalk’s results endangered it, and because the Frankish Semi-Pelagians soon saw that they would have to approximate their phraseology to Augustinianism. Among the writings in defence of Gottschalk there were accordingly many shades of opinion, but so were there also on the other side. Florus Magister, e.g., advocated the twofold (gemina) predestination, but yet opposed Gottschalk, since he rejected the thought of the irresistibleness of grace. Amolo of Lyons treated him in a friendly spirit; but no one else showed so emphatically that Gottschalk’s teaching did away with the historical redemption, the fruits of Christ’s death, and sacramental grace. The only one who took up a consistent standpoint, and from it opposed the monk, was John Scotus. His teaching did not rest on Augustine’s doctrine of predestination but on the Neoplatonic and Augustinian ontology, which he developed boldly. According to this, evil and death were nothing. Unchangeable being had only one unchangeable will, namely itself, and it evolved itself alone. Everything else consisted in negation, was nothing actual, and bore this very not-being in itself as a punishment. Applying this to the question of predestination, it followed that those were right who would only admit one predestination. But friend and foe felt, without seeing through the pantheism of Scotus, that this was a case of casting out the devil by the aid of Beelzebub (“commentum diaboli”). There was only one way out of the difficulty besides that given by Scotus. This was to give up altogether putting the question in the form of the predestination problem, to hold to the historical Christ, and to do justice to Augustine’s doctrine of grace by reducing the Church system to the experience of the new birth and faith. But no one discovered this expedient, and so the whole controversy necessarily became a maze of insincerity, partly objective, partly conscious. Augustine’s authority, however, was so powerful that the result, if we may speak of such a thing, came nearer Gottschalk’s teaching in words than to the original utterances of Rabanus and his comrades (of whom Pardulus also was one). The latter sought to carry their distinction between prescience and predestination (as regards evil and punishment), and would therefore have nothing said of persons being predestined to punishment. When God foresaw evil, he predestined punishment for those who should not deserve to be redeemed by grace; room, accordingly, is left indirectly to free-will, although, so far as words go, the saved are saved solely in virtue of election. The artificial distinction here made (predestination of life and of the good, prescience of the wicked, predestination of punishment) is apparently defensible, even on an Augustinian basis, since Hinkmar now spoke of a complete loss of freedom through Adam’s Fall. But the distinction was in truth meant to open a door for the entrance of Semi-Pelagianism. This doctrine was adopted at a new Synod of Chiersey (853) under Hinkmar’s leadership.

But what took place here was not authoritative in the Archbishopric of Sens and the Empire of Lothar. Remigius of Lyons sharply attacked the four chapters of Chiersey as running counter to Scripture and the Fathers. At the great Synod held at Valencia of the provinces of Lyons, Vienne and Arles (855), canons were adopted which adhered much more closely to Augustine, and contained the teaching of Remigius. Dislike to the powerful Hinkmar also played a part in their composition. The Synod rejected the four chapters: they had been entered on with too little prudence (“minus prospecte suscepta.”) It taught the double predestination, applied the latter to persons also, and maintained that Christ shed his blood for believers. The question whether God willed to save all men was carefully evaded. If the Synod disowned a predestination to sin, it did not thereby abandon strictly Augustinian ground. On the contrary, the contention that condemnation was based on prescience, and that in the Church’s Sacraments “nothing was futile or delusive” (nihil sit cassum, nihil ludificatorium) shows the anxiety felt not to give up what was held valid by the Church. If we compare the resolutions of the two Synods word for word, the differences are extremely subtle, and yet the little addition (plus) of the alien co-efficient attached to Augustinianism in the Chiersey decrees is highly significant. Rabanus, Hinkmar, and Charles’s Synod take their stand on ecclesiastical empiricism, and try, because they must, to come to terms with Augustinianism, therein yielding more than can have been agreeable to them. Remigius, Prudentius, and Lothar’s Synod take their stand on Augustinianism, and yet would not give up this ecclesiastical empiricism. But in neither case did anyone permit the suggestion of a doubt as to whether this empiricism and Augustinianism were compatible.

Political affairs prevented the threatened breach from being consummated. The matter was taken up again in the reign of King Charles, Lothar’s son. A few slight modifications of the chapters of Valencia were decided on at Langres (859) in order to enable Charles the Bald, who had subscribed those of Chiersey, to approve of them. The great Synod of Savonieres (859), at which there were present bishops from three kingdoms, as well as the sovereigns themselves, Charles the Bald, Charles of Provence, and Lothar of Lothringen, adopted the modified chapters of Valencia, and also, as it appears, those passed at Chiersey; the members did not condemn one another on account of disbelief or belief in twofold predestination (gemina predestinatio), and this meant the greatest advance towards peace. Hinkmar, indeed, did not doubt that there had been and was a predestinationist heresy, which it was necessary to oppose, and whose adherents appealed unjustifiably to Augustine. He composed at the time his prolix work, De prædestinatione (against Remigius and others), under the auspices of his theological king. But the kings’ need of peace was stronger than the zeal of bishops fighting in the dark. At the great Synod of the three realms at Toucy (860), the case postponed at Savonières was brought to an end in a comprehensive synodal edict, which dealt indefinitely with the real kernel of the question, and was destitute of meaning and badly arranged. Controversial points were left alone, and those were confessed on which all were agreed. Hinkmar composed this document. Besides predestination to life, which was set forth in good Augustinian language, it was declared that God willed to save all, that Christ died for all, and that while free-will required to be redeemed and healed after the Fall, it had never been wholly lost. If the worth of a confession depends on its really expressing the existing belief, then the triumph of Hinkmar’s formula was really more valuable than would have been that of the contrary doctrine. The avowal of twofold predestination, in itself even more the expression of a theological speculation than of Christian faith in God the Father, would have meant less than nothing coupled with the retention of ecclesiastical empiricism. Of course the formula of Hinkmar, which no artifice could reconcile with that of Orange, did not mean much either; for, in spite of words, Augustine remained deposed. Gregory I.’s system of doctrine held the field. Men thought of the sacramental Christ, as they rejected, along with Adoptianism, the Augustinian Christology, and it was still this Christ and the good works of believers to which they looked, when, along with twofold predestination, they in fact set aside Augustine’s doctrine of grace.

Gottschalk died in prison, irreconcilable and unreconciled (869), clinging to the prædestinatio ad mortem, which he understood in so “erroneous a sense” that he did not abandon it as Remigius seems to have done. He had prophesied in vain the unmasking and fall of his mortal enemy Hinkmar as Antichrist, that great exemplar of predestination to death.