The council met at Orange in 529, under the presidency of Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, to close a controversy that had continued for more than a century after the British monk Pelagius was first condemned. Pelagius had taught that human beings could take the first steps toward righteousness by their own unaided will, with grace assisting rather than initiating the process; his teaching was rejected at Carthage in 418 and again at the Council of Ephesus in 431. What remained unsettled was a milder position, associated with monastic teachers in southern Gaul such as those at Lerins, holding that while grace was necessary for salvation, the initial movement of the will toward faith could still arise on its own, with God's grace responding to and completing it rather than causing it.
Orange's twenty five canons, drawing heavily on the writings of Augustine of Hippo and on earlier statements assembled by Prosper of Aquitaine, rejected this position directly. They held that even the beginning of faith is itself a gift of grace, worked in the human will by God rather than offered afterward in response to it, so that no one can be said to seek God before grace has first moved them to do so.
The canons work largely by citing scripture alongside Augustine's own writings, point by point, and several close by declaring the rejected position anathema, the same term the earlier councils at Carthage and Ephesus had used against Pelagius's own more thoroughgoing teaching, so that Orange presented itself as completing a settled line of judgment rather than opening a new one.