A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

There could not have been a more sensitive issue to choose in North Africa, where much of the argument between Catholics and Donatists had centred on both sides’ claim to be the true heir

Eventually

it is an entirely arbitrary decision on the part of God as to who receives this grace.

a predestined group of the elect.

The arbitrariness is fully justified by the monstrousness of Adam’s original fall,

associating it with Latin words for ‘loss’, ‘sin’, ‘filth’.

‘Augustinian predestination is not the doctrine of the Church but only the opinion of a distinguished Catholic theologian.’

Calvin arrived at it himself, and took Augustine for support of going back to the Fathers.

Eastern theologians,

have never found Augustine’s approach to grace congenial.

he was heir to the world-denying impulses of Platonists and Stoics.

inspired Western Christians to imitate the monastic life of the Eastern Church.

Martin,

An ex-s...

he abandoned his military career in Gaul (France) to live a life ...

Around him, probably in the year 361, there gathered the West’s first kn...

Poitiers),

one of the first ascetics anywhere in the Church to be chosen as a bishop, in the Gaulish city far north of Poitiers called Civitas Turonum

Tours).

Martin

Bishop Martin

‘little cloak’, capella in Latin,

capellae.

Haha

Bishop Martin’s

Vincent of Beauvais,

the thirteenth-century Dominican friar who wrote the most widely esteemed compendium of knowledge of the high Middle Ages:

Priscillian,

in 385, the usurping emperor in Gaul, Magnus Maximus, took over an ecclesiastical case against Priscillian;

Maximus had the ascetic leader and some of his close circle executed for heresy,

Haha

John Cassian,

Marseilles)

Origenist,

Evagrian

‘purity of heart’

another favourite term of Evagrius, ‘passionlessness’ or ‘s...

the aim of purifying the heart, like the aim of stripping out the passions from human consciousness, was to lead on to a union with the glorified, resurrected Christ.

Augustine.

It is doubtful whether Cassian and Augustine would have differed much in their everyday practice of an austere Christian life,

Augustine’s view of grace offended Cassian’s theology of salvation, grounded as it was in the rival tradition of Origen and Evagrius.

‘Semi-Pelagians’.

Vincent,

He gave a definition of how doctrine should be judged properly Catholic or universal. It was what had been believed everywhere in the Church, always and by everyone

Haha

ecclesiastical history left Cassian under a cloud of disapproval, like Origen and Evagrius before him.

Much as Cassian admired the Egyptian hermits, he felt that their life represented a way of perfection which was not for all, and that most ascetics should live in community.

Benedict,

Pope Gregory I

Pope 590-604