grace; that Christ died on the cross for all men; that in the end all the predestinated who are now
scattered in the massa perditionis, will be gathered into the fulness of the eternal church in heaven.
Here ended the controversy. It was a defeat of predestinarianism in its rigorous form and a
substantial victory of Semi-Augustinianism, which is almost identical with Semi-Pelagianism
except that it gives greater prominence to divine grace.
Practically, even this difference disappeared. The mediaeval church needed the doctrine of
free will and of universal call, as a basis for maintaining the moral responsibility, the guilt and
merit of man, and as a support to the sacerdotal and sacramental mediation of salvation; while the
strict predestinarian system, which unalterably determines the eternal fate of every soul by a
pre-temporal or ante-mundane decree, seemed in its logical consequences to neutralize the appeal
to the conscience of the sinner, to cut off the powerful inducement of merit and reward, to limit the
efficacy of the sacraments to the elect, and to weaken the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
But while churchly and sacerdotal Semi-Augustinianism or covert Semi-Pelagianism
triumphed in France, where Hincmar had the last word in the controversy, it was not oecumenically
sanctioned. Pope Nicolas, who was dissatisfied with Hincmar on hierarchical grounds, had some
sympathy with Gottschalk, and is reported to have approved the Augustinian canons of the Synods
of Valence and Langres in regard to a "two-fold predestination" and the limitation of the
atonement.^691
Thus the door was left open within the Catholic church itself for a revival of strict
Augustinianism, and this took place on a grand scale in the sixteenth century.
Notes.
The Gottschalk controversy was first made the subject of historical investigation and critical
discussion in the seventeenth century, but was disturbed by the doctrinal antagonism between
Jansenists (Jansen, Mauguin) and Jesuits (Sirmond, Cellot). The Calvinistic historians (Ussher,
Hottinger) sided with Gottschalk and the Jansenists. The controversy has been more calmly and
impartially considered by the Protestant historians of the nineteenth century, but with a slight
difference as to the limits and the result of the controversy; some representing it merely as a conflict
between a stricter and a milder type of Augustinianism (Neander, Kurtz), others as a conflict between
Augustinianism and a revived and triumphant Semi-Pelagianism (Baur, Weizsäcker). The former
view is more correct. Semi-Pelagianism was condemned by the Synod of Orange (Arausio), 529;
again by the Synod of Valence in the same year, and by Pope Boniface II., 530, and has ever since
figured in the Roman catalogue of heresies. The Catholic Church cannot sanction what she has
once condemned.
Both parties in the contest of the ninth century (leaving the isolated Scotus Erigena out of
view) appealed to Augustin as the highest patristic authority in the Latin church. Both agreed in
(^691) The decree of the pope is lost; but the fact rests on the authority of the well-informed Prudentius of Troyes in the
Annales Bertiniani ad ann. 859 (Pertz, Mon. Germ., I. 453 sq.): "Nicolas, pontifex Romanus, de qratia Dei et libero arbitrio,
de veritateGeminaepraedestinationis et sanguine Christi, ut procredentibusomnibus fusus sit, fideliter confirmat et catholice
decernit." Hincmar doubted such a decision, and charged Prudentius with partiality (Ep. 24 addressed to Egilo, Bishop of Sens).
The Jesuits labored hard to set it aside against the Jansenists and Calvinists, but without good reason. Weizsäcker (p. 574),
Hardwick (p. 165), and Möller (in Herzog 2 V. 327) accept the statement of Prudentius, and Weizsäcker says: "Hatte in Gallien
die Hoftheologie des Königs den Semipeligianimus (?) durchgebracht, so hat doch der Papst für Augustin entschieden ... Die
Kirchengeschichte darf ganz unbedenklich in ihre Blätter diese Entscheidung des römischen Stuhls gegen den Semipelagianismus
des neunten Jahrhunderts aufnehmen, die man seit Mauguin niemals hätte bezweifeln sollen." Neander and Gieseler are silent
on this point.