Faustus of Riez

Faustus was born about 405, most likely in Britain, and came young to Lérins, the island monastery off the Provençal coast that produced a generation of Gallic bishops. He became its abbot around 433 and led it for nearly thirty years. About 460 he was made bishop of Riez, inland in Provence, and he kept living like a monk after he had the mitre.

He was famous in his own lifetime as a preacher and as an ascetic. Sidonius Apollinaris, the poet and bishop who knew him, wrote about him with open admiration. He was also a working bishop in a province where Roman government had dissolved and a Visigothic kingdom had taken its place, and the Visigoths were Arians.

Faustus attacked Arianism directly. About 477 King Euric exiled him, and he stayed in exile until Euric died in 484, then returned to Riez and lived out his last years there. He died around 490 and was venerated locally as a saint; a basilica was built over his tomb.

His lasting controversy is over grace. A priest named Lucidus was teaching an extreme predestinarianism, that God has determined some to be lost and that Christ did not die for them. Faustus opposed him, and the councils of Arles and Lyons around 474 condemned Lucidus, who recanted. Faustus then wrote On Grace to state the positive case.

His position: grace goes first and nothing is possible without it, but the human will genuinely cooperates and is not overridden; God's foreknowledge is not the cause of anyone's damnation; Christ died for all. He was defending, against what he saw as fatalism, the reality of human responsibility.

Augustine's stricter followers judged that he had conceded too much, and the label attached to his position, semi-Pelagianism, was coined much later. The Council of Orange in 529, presided over by Caesarius of Arles, decided the question against him, affirming that even the beginning of faith and the desire to believe are gifts of grace. Faustus's book was censured, though the council also rejected the doctrine of a predestination to evil that he had fought.

He also wrote On the Holy Spirit, defending the Spirit's full deity against those who denied it, and a body of sermons that circulated widely, a good number of them inside the collection later called Eusebius Gallicanus.

Sources: Gennadius of Massilia, De viris illustribus, 86; Faustus of Riez, De gratia and De spiritu sancto (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 21); Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters and Poems; the canons of the Second Council of Orange (529).