The Second Council of Orange

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.

The council did not go on to affirm the strict alternative some later theology drew from Augustine. Its final canon explicitly states that the council does not believe that some are predestined to evil by the power of God, and that anyone who holds otherwise is anathema, distancing Orange's teaching on grace from double predestination even as it insisted on grace's priority over the human will. In this it steered a middle course that later readers on more than one side of the grace and free will question have claimed as a precedent.

Pope Boniface II confirmed the council's canons in 531, and for the following centuries they stood as the Western church's settled answer on grace, prior movement of the will and the limits of human capacity, generally described afterward as semi-Augustinianism rather than by any name of its own. The canons fell into relative obscurity until they were rediscovered and reprinted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Catholic and Reformed theologians on opposite sides of the Reformation both invoked Orange's authority in their own disputes over grace, including in the debate that the Synod of Dort was convened to settle eleven centuries later.

The same canons were invoked again within the Catholic Church itself during the seventeenth century disputes between Jansenists and Jesuit Molinists over grace and free will, each side reading Orange's careful balance, grace's priority without a denial of human freedom, as support for its own position, evidence of how open the council's middle course remained to later argument.