The Canons of the Council of Orange

Pelagius and Augustine

Around 400 a monk named Pelagius, said to have come from Britain, was a respected teacher in Rome. He urged that God had given us a good nature, able to keep his commands; to plead that we cannot is to accuse God of commanding the impossible Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias. Grace, for Pelagius, was that nature and its free will, the law, the teaching and example of Christ, and the forgiveness of past sins. Adam had harmed his descendants by his bad example, not by handing on a damaged nature. This is the teaching the church came to call Pelagianism.

In his Confessions Augustine had asked God to give what he commands, and then to command whatever he wills. By Augustine's own later account, Pelagius could not bear that prayer when he heard it quoted in Rome. Augustine argued that since Adam every person is born with a nature wounded by sin; the will is not destroyed but bound, and it cannot love God until grace heals and frees it Augustine, On Nature and Grace. Grace is not an example but God's power at work within us.

In 418 a council at Carthage confessed that Adam's sin reaches his descendants, that grace not only forgives past sins but gives real help not to sin, and that it does not merely show us what we ought to do but enables us to love it and do it; and it condemned Pelagius's teaching Council of Carthage (418). Pope Zosimus, who had at first hesitated, joined the condemnation, and the Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned Pelagius's followers. Orange's first two canons stand on this ground. Canon 1 calls it "the error of Pelagius" to think that after the fall "the liberty of the soul remained uninjured" and only the body became liable to corruption, and Canon 2 says that not death alone but sin, "which is the death of the soul", passed to the whole human race, quoting Paul:

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.

Romans 5:12

The story is told more fully in Augustine, doctor of grace and Original sin and its effects.

The monks of Gaul and the beginning of faith

Pelagius's defeat left a narrower question open. Almost everyone now agreed that no one is saved without grace. But does the first turning of the heart toward God, the beginning of faith (initium fidei, as the Latin debate put it), come from God or from us?

In the late 420s the question was pressed in the monasteries of southern Gaul, at Marseille and on the island of Lérins. Its best-known voice was John Cassian, who had brought the wisdom of the Egyptian desert monks to the West. Cassian was no Pelagian; grace, he insisted, is always needed. But in his Conferences he taught that God sometimes draws the unwilling, as he drew Paul and Matthew, and sometimes waits for the first stirrings of a good will in us and then strengthens them; Zacchaeus and the thief on the cross were his instances of a will that moved first. Behind this lay a pastoral fear: if everything hangs on grace and predestination, what becomes of exhortation and effort?

Prosper of Aquitaine, a layman (as most scholars think) living in Marseille, reported these views to Augustine, who replied with On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance: even the beginning of faith is God's gift Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints. He had once thought that faith at least was our own contribution, he confessed, until Paul's question changed his mind: "What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7). After Augustine's death in 430, Prosper defended him for years and compiled a book of sentences from his works that would matter at Orange.

The other side had able spokesmen too. Faustus, abbot of Lérins and later bishop of Riez, wrote On Grace in the later fifth century: grace is necessary, but the first movement toward it belongs to the will. Faustus also helped to correct a priest named Lucidus, who taught that God destines some people to perdition: the fear of a predestination that made God the cause of ruin ran through the whole debate.

The position of Cassian and Faustus was named Semi-Pelagianism only in the late sixteenth century, and many historians think the label unfair. These monks counted themselves opponents of Pelagius, and wanted to protect the seriousness of Scripture's calls to turn: "Return to Me, declares the LORD of Hosts, and I will return to you" (Zechariah 1:3). The question was whether such calls mean that the first step is ours. Orange would answer that God gives the turning he commands.

Caesarius and the council

The controversy revived early in the sixth century, when monks from Scythia, active in Constantinople and Rome, attacked Faustus's book, and Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspe in North Africa, wrote against it. In Gaul the cause of Augustine's teaching on grace was taken up by Caesarius, bishop of Arles from about 502 until his death in 542. He had been a monk at Lérins and a pupil of Julianus Pomerius, an African teacher steeped in Augustine.

In July 529 Caesarius and thirteen other bishops gathered at Orange for the dedication of a church built by Liberius, the praetorian prefect of Gaul. (A council had met there in 441, so this one is often called the Second Council of Orange.) The preface records that they had heard of some who held "too careless opinions, and not in accordance with the rule of the Catholic faith, concerning grace and free-will", and so resolved to publish and sign "a few articles sent to us by the Apostolic See" Preface. Many scholars reconstruct the background thus: Caesarius had sent Rome propositions drawn from Augustine; Rome, where Felix IV was pope, sent back articles drawn largely from Prosper's sentences; and the canons combine the two, reworked by Caesarius. The text closes with an unusual touch: wishing the definition to be "a healing not only to clergy but also to laity", the bishops asked "the illustrious and noble men" at the feast to sign it too Conclusion.

Orange was a small provincial gathering, and not every bishop in Gaul agreed with Caesarius: his biographers tell of a council at Valence where his teaching on grace was challenged, though whether it met before or after Orange is uncertain. Caesarius sought Rome's support, and in 531 Pope Boniface II wrote approving its confession as agreeing with the catholic rules of the Fathers. That gave the canons a weight far beyond their local origin.

The text has three parts. Canons 1 to 8 are condemnations, each beginning "If any one": Canons 1 and 2 answer Pelagius on the fall, and Canons 3 to 8 answer the Gallic view, tracing to grace our asking for grace, our wish to be cleansed, the beginning of faith, our assent to the gospel and our coming to baptism. Canons 9 to 25 are short sentences under headings, most of them taken from Augustine by way of Prosper. The Conclusion, probably by Caesarius, draws the whole into a definition of faith. The English on this page is F. H. Woods's translation of 1882.

Grace goes before

When Woods's English says that God's mercy "prevents" us, it uses the word in its old sense, from the Latin praevenire: to come before, to go out and meet. Canon 14 quotes a psalm in the Latin form "His mercy will prevent me". A modern translation renders the same verse, "My God of loving devotion will come to meet me" (Psalm 59:10). That is Orange in a phrase, and what theologians mean by prevenient grace: before we set out toward God, God has come out to meet us.

Canon 3 sets the pattern. Whoever says "that the grace of God can be conferred at man's call, and not rather that grace itself makes us call for it" contradicts Isaiah, and the apostle who applies the prophet's words to the calling of the Gentiles: "I was found by those who did not seek Me; I revealed Myself to those who did not ask for Me" (Romans 10:20). Canon 4 goes deeper. God does not wait for our will before cleansing us; "our very wish to be cleansed is put into us by the infusion and operation of the Holy Spirit." The proof is Paul: "For it is God who works in you to will and to act on behalf of His good purpose" (Philippians 2:13). (Its other text, "The will is prepared by the Lord", is Proverbs 8:35 in the Greek Septuagint and the old Latin Bible; the Hebrew reads differently.)

The heart of the canons is Canon 5: "That the beginning of faith is not of ourselves, but of the grace of God". Not only the growth of faith but its beginning, and "the very feeling of belief" that brings us to baptism, come "by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit correcting our will from infidelity to faith, from impiety to piety." Among its texts is this:

For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.

Ephesians 2:8-9

Those who say that faith comes by nature, the canon observes, "define all those who do not belong to the Church of Christ as in a certain sense 'faithful.'" A natural capacity would be no gift.

Canon 7 and Canon 8 carry this to the hearing of the gospel. No one can assent to the gospel by the strength of nature, without the Holy Spirit, "who gives to all pleasure in agreeing and believing the truth", for Jesus said, "apart from Me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). Canon 8 refuses a compromise, that some are saved by mercy while others come to baptism by free choice. The Lord testifies "not that some, but that no one can come to Him unless the Father draw him":

No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:44

Augustine's comment on that verse could summarise Orange: "no one can say, I believed, and therefore He called me: rather the preventing mercy of God called him, that he might believe" Augustine.

The sentences of the second part turn the same truth to the light. Grace is not wages: "grace which is not owed precedes to enable them to be done" Canon 18. So God's love does not rest on what we are now:

God loves us for what we shall be by His gift, not for what we are by our own merit.

Canon 12

Nor does grace stop once faith has begun: "as often as we do good, God works in us and with us that we may work" Canon 9, and even "those who are reborn and sanctified" must always ask for God's help to endure Canon 10. Even a vow returns what was given (Canon 11): "from Your own hand we have given to You" (1 Chronicles 29:14). The last canon names love itself as a gift: "To love God is entirely God's gift" Canon 25.

And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us.

Romans 5:5

The definition, and what it leaves unsaid

The Conclusion gathers all this into a definition:

we ought by God's mercy both to teach and believe this, that through the sin of the first man free choice was so biassed and weakened that no one can afterwards either love God as he ought, or believe in God, or work for God's sake what is good, unless the grace of Divine mercy prevents him.

Conclusion

Free choice is "biassed and weakened", not abolished: fallen people still will and choose, but without grace going before they cannot love God, believe in him or do good for his sake as they ought. The Conclusion adds that the faith of Abel, Noah, Abraham and "the whole multitude of old fathers" was God's gift, not natural goodness, and it ends with three examples: the robber welcomed into Paradise, the centurion Cornelius, and Zacchaeus, whose "very praiseworthy faith … was not of nature, but was given by the bounty of Divine grace." Zacchaeus and the thief were among Cassian's examples of a will that moved first, and the council seems to answer from the very stories its opponents used. Before Zacchaeus climbed the tree, the Son of Man had come looking for him: "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10).

The Conclusion also speaks of baptism. The grace that brings people to it is "bestowed upon them by the bounty of Christ", not dependent on free choice; and "when grace has been received by baptism, all baptized persons, by the help and co-operation of Christ, may and ought, if they wish to labour faithfully, accomplish all things which pertain to the salvation of the soul." Grace that goes first, in other words, does not make effort pointless; it makes effort possible. Orange speaks here as the sixth-century church did, for which baptism was where grace was given; Canon 13 says that the choice of the will, weakened in the first man, "cannot be restored but by the grace of baptism". Catholics, the Orthodox and Lutherans still teach that baptism bestows the grace of new birth. Reformed churches confess it as a sign and seal of the covenant of grace whose efficacy "is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered", though by its right use the promised grace is truly given by the Spirit, in God's time, to those to whom it belongs Westminster Confession 28.6.

On predestination the Conclusion says one thing only:

But that any are by the Divine power predestined to evil, we not only do not believe, but if there are any who would believe such an evil doctrine, we altogether detest them and anathematize them.

Conclusion

The sentence is brief, and it is usually read as rejecting the idea that God by his power drives people into evil, that is, into sin: "God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone" (James 1:13). Beyond that the council does not go. It says nothing about God's choosing some for life or passing others by, or about whether grace always prevails. Many historians describe Orange as affirming Augustine's doctrine of grace while leaving his later teaching on predestination undefined.

The Reformed confessions in this library say more. The Westminster Confession teaches that "some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others fore-ordained to everlasting death" Westminster Confession 3.3, and the Canons of Dort speak of those "passed by in the eternal decree" Canons of Dort I.15. Yet both reject as firmly as Orange any teaching that God pushes people into sin. Dort says that reprobation "by no means makes God the author of sin (the very thought of which is blasphemy)"; Westminster, that God ordains whatever comes to pass, "yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures" 3.1, and that those passed by are ordained to wrath "for their sin" 3.7. Other traditions read Scripture differently: the Lutheran Formula of Concord teaches that no one is predestined to damnation Formula of Concord, Article 11, as do Catholic and Wesleyan teaching. Orange does not settle that difference, but all these traditions confess with it that God is not the author of evil, and that he says, "I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked should turn from their ways and live" (Ezekiel 33:11). The views are set side by side in Grace and election and What is predestination?

Forgotten and found again

Orange seems to have been little known through much of the Middle Ages; Thomas Aquinas, for one, apparently did not know its text, though he too taught that fallen man cannot will or do the good that leads to eternal life without grace Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II.109.2. The canons reappeared in the printed collections of the councils in the sixteenth century, and from then on Protestant and Catholic writers alike appealed to them.

The Council of Trent's Decree on Justification (1547) says that after Adam's sin free will was not extinguished, though weakened and bent in its powers, close to the very words of Orange's Conclusion; and it teaches that no one can believe, hope, love or repent as he ought without the prevenient inspiration and help of the Holy Spirit Council of Trent, Decree on Justification. Lutheran and Reformed theologians cited Orange as the ancient church's witness against any teaching that the will moves before grace, and the Reformation confessions say the same in their own words. The Thirty-nine Articles echo Orange's language: we cannot do good works pleasing to God "without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will" Article 10. The Canons of Dort, rejecting the view that grace does not go before the will in conversion, add that "the ancient Church has long ago condemned this doctrine of the Pelagians" Canons of Dort III/IV, rejection 9.

The two sides have read the same canons differently. The Catholic Church receives them, confirmed by a pope, as an authoritative statement of its faith, and hears in "the help and co-operation of Christ" the free response of a will that grace has enabled. Protestants hear in the canons' insistence that grace goes before all merit an ancient witness to grace alone (see Grace alone, faith alone). The Orthodox churches never took this Western provincial council as a standard and honour Cassian as a saint; they speak of salvation as the cooperation of grace and freedom, while confessing that no one is saved without grace.

Read today, Orange does not explain how grace and the will fit together; it tells believers where every good thing in them came from. The first desire for God, the moment the gospel first seemed true and sweet, the love that now answers God's love: all of it was received. What is left is not boasting but thanks, and prayer. Augustine's counsel to one who does not yet feel drawn is the fitting response: "if you are not drawn, pray that you may be" Augustine.

Nor does Orange leave room for idleness. Canon 6 quotes the verse in which Paul holds grace and labour together:

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace to me was not in vain. No, I worked harder than all of them — yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.

1 Corinthians 15:10

For a gentler introduction, see What is grace?