Saint Prosper of Aquitaine

Little is known of his life apart from his books. The Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, gives the outline in one sentence, translated here: Prosper of Aquitaine, learned in philosophy and letters, led a virtuous and temperate life with his wife, became a monk at Marseilles, defended strenuously against the Pelagians Saint Augustine's doctrine of the grace of God and the gift of perseverance, and served in Rome as chancellor to Pope Saint Leo the Great. ²

The Catholic Encyclopedia adds that he "was neither bishop nor priest." ¹ It also lists among the works that the scholar Valentin thought very likely his a poem of a husband to his wife. ¹ Gennadius of Marseilles, who wrote a few decades later, calls him "a man scholastic in style and vigorous in statement." ³

The first sure date in his life, the encyclopedia says, is a letter. In 428 or 429 a man named Hilary wrote to Augustine in Africa about the difficulties being raised against his teaching in Marseilles and the country around it. ¹ Hilary did not trust himself to explain the situation well, so he persuaded a friend to write as well, a man he described as distinguished for morals, eloquence and zeal. ¹ That friend was Prosper, who had never met Augustine but had written to him before. ¹

The two letters, the encyclopedia says, may be said to have opened the semi-Pelagian controversy. ¹ The question was whether the first movement toward faith comes from ourselves or is already God's gift. ⁴ Augustine answered with two treatises, On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance. ¹ The first begins with an address to "my dearest sons, Prosper and Hilary," and says of their zeal and brotherly affection, "I love more than I can tell." ⁴

In that book Augustine sets out what the monks of Marseilles already held: that the human race is born under the sin of Adam, that men's wills are anticipated by God's grace, and that no one is sufficient by himself to begin or complete any good work. ⁴ Where they still differed from him, he wrote, God would reveal it to them if they walked in what they had already reached. ⁴

About the same time Prosper wrote a short treatise on grace and free will in the form of a letter to a man named Rufinus, and a long poem of more than a thousand lines of hexameter, On the Ungrateful, against the semi-Pelagians, whom he called enemies of grace. ¹ Two short epigrams against a critic of Augustine seem to date from Augustine's lifetime as well. ¹

After Augustine died in 430, Prosper answered three sets of objections to his teaching. ¹ One was a list of fifteen propositions that Augustine's opponents in Gaul attributed to him. ¹ Another, the Vincentian Objections, was more violent and attacked Prosper as well as Augustine; the encyclopedia says their author was probably Vincent of Lérins, though some have contested it, and its article on Vincent calls him "likely, if not certain" the man. ¹⁶ The third answered priests of Genoa who had asked him to explain hard passages in Augustine. ¹

In 431 Prosper and a friend went to Rome to ask Pope Celestine for help. ¹ The pope wrote to the bishops of Gaul, blamed them for their slackness toward the enemies of grace, and praised Augustine. ¹ Back in Gaul, about 433, Prosper wrote his most important prose work, against the "Collator," John Cassian, who had put forward semi-Pelagian views in his Conferences. ¹ Gennadius knew that book as anonymous and wrote of it, "I regard as his also an anonymous book against certain works of Cassianus." ³

The encyclopedia notes a question that has never quite closed: whether Prosper softened Augustine's teaching as time went on. ¹ It says the question has been much debated, that the disagreement may lie more in how Augustine is read than in how Prosper is, and that most Catholic writers have thought he did. ¹

About 440, the encyclopedia says, Prosper was summoned to Rome by Leo the Great. ¹ The Martyrology calls him Leo's chancellor. ² Gennadius reports that the letters of Pope Leo against Eutyches "are also thought to have been dictated by him." ³

Much of his later work was Augustine's, gathered. His explanation of the Psalms is mostly an abridgment of Augustine's commentary, and survives only for the last fifty psalms. ¹ He also made a collection of sentences drawn from Augustine's writings, handling the text freely for the sake of rhythm, and turned a number of them into verse; the encyclopedia dates these to the time of the Council of Chalcedon, and so probably to Rome. ¹ Five canons of the Second Council of Orange, the encyclopedia says, were taken from those sentences. ¹

The Catechism of the Catholic Church credits him with one sentence of his own that the Church still uses. Explaining the old saying lex orandi, lex credendi, the law of prayer is the law of faith, it gives his form of it: "legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi," the law of prayer should establish the law of belief. ⁵ The Church, the Catechism says, "believes as she prays." ⁵

His Chronicle ran from the creation of the world. Up to 378 it abridged Saint Jerome's, with additions such as the consuls for each year from the Passion, and he then carried it forward himself. ¹ There seem to have been three editions, ending in 433, 445 and 455. ¹ Gennadius says it ran to the death of the Emperor Valentinian and the taking of Rome by Genseric, king of the Vandals. ³ That is the last date the sources give for him. ¹³

A second chronicle reckoned by the emperors' reigns was once thought to be his too, or to belong to a different writer called Tiro Prosper; the encyclopedia says it is certainly not his, and that the name Tiro Prosper appears in some manuscripts of his own Chronicle. ¹ Other works are disputed, among them The Call of All Nations, which one scholar thinks probably genuine and another rejects. ¹

A legend made him bishop of Reggio in Italy. The encyclopedia says that story was "exploded" in the seventeenth century. ¹ The Martyrology still remembers a Saint Prosper, bishop of Reggio Emilia, on June 25, the same day, and keeps him as a different man. ²

No source used for this page names a patronage for Saint Prosper of Aquitaine, and none is claimed here. The Martyrology remembers him for his defense of Augustine's doctrine of grace. ²

Saint Prosper of Aquitaine's feast day is June 25. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on that day, and Vatican News lists him then as "St. Prosperus of Aquitaine, Philosopher." ²⁷ No source used gives the day he died. ¹³

He was a married man, then a monk, never a priest, and he gave most of his working life to someone else's ideas. ¹² He wrote to Augustine without ever meeting him and went on defending him for years after Augustine was dead. ¹

The argument he carried was about where faith begins. Augustine's answer, and Prosper's, was that even the first step is God's gift, and it was the answer the monks around him at Marseilles found hard. ¹⁴

He did not win it by himself, and scholars have long argued over how faithfully he kept Augustine's harder lines. ¹ What he left behind most widely is a single phrase on prayer: the way the Church prays should set the way she believes. ⁵