Now the master mind of Western Christendom, Augustine of Hippo, had devised the same theory of caprice in the Most High, predestinating to good or ill without reason, and that before Mohammed was born. Divine Grace, he held, was paramount and irresistible, carrying man to happiness or damnation without man being able to determine his course one way or the other. Man, according to Augustine, was a mere “Lump” of sin, damnable, utterly damnable. But God, in His inscrutable providence, indistinguishable from wantonness, chose to elect some to weal, and leave the rest to woe. This was a doctrine that did away with the necessity of man making the smallest endeavour after righteousness, from exercising the least self-control; of man feeling the slightest compunction after committing the grossest sins. Augustine sent his treatise to Abbot Valentine of Adrumetium. Valentine, in calm self-complacency, sitting among the ashes of dead lusts, highly approved of this scheme of Predestination. But a monk, Felix, when he heard it read, sprang to his feet and uttered his protest. This protest was reported to Augustine, who boiled over with bad temper at any opposition; and he wrote a violent rejoinder “On Grace and Freewill,” in which he insisted again on his doctrine of Fatalism.
The theses of Augustine reached Lerins, the nursery of the Bishops of Gaul, and were read there with indignation and disgust. The monks drew up a reply to Augustine that was temperate in tone and sound in argument. Grace, they said, was mighty, but man had freewill, and could respond to it or rebel against it.
Augustine answered. He attempted to browbeat these insignificant monks and clergy on a petty islet in the sea. But they were not men to be intimidated by his great name and intellectual powers, not even by his sincere piety.
They argued that if his doctrine were true, then farewell for ever and a day to all teaching of Christian morality. Man was but a cloud, blown about by the wind, where the wind listed to carry it.
But for these stubborn monks of Lerins it is possible enough that Western Christendom would have accepted a _kismet_ as fatal as that of Mohammedanism, and that, indeed, it would have differed in name and certain outside trimmings only from the Moslem religion. Rome was much inclined to accept Augustine’s view, and give it definite sanction. But the Gaulish bishops, bred in the nursery of Lerins, would not hear of this. Finally, in the Council of Orange, in 529, they laid down the main principle: “We do not believe,” they boldly said, “that God has predestined any men to be evil.”