(Updated July 13, 2025)
This Author Quote Archive collects pertinent quotes from the Church Father, St. Prosper of Aquitaine.
Next to each quote are the Topic Quote Archives in which they are included.
This Quote Archive is being continuously updated as research continues. Quotes marked with “***” have not yet been organized into their respective Topic Quote Archives.
Treatises
St. Prosper of Aquitaine, Answers to the Gauls
- Development of Doctrine | Art. 13
(Art. 6)1 ***
It is wrong to say that free will is nothing or does not exist; but it is also wrong to deny that, before it is illumined 144 | 145 by the light of faith, it moves about “in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Ps. 107:10). Before man is freed from the slavery of the devil by the grace of God, he lies in the depth of the abyss in which he threw himself headlong through his own free will. He then loves his weakness and because he is unaware of his disease, he fancies he is in good health. The beginning of the cure of this sick man is that he realizes his sickness and is enabled to desire the help of the Physician who will cure him. When, then, a man is justified, that is, from sinner made into a just man, he receives, without any previous merit of his own, a gift by which he is able to gain merits. And the goodness which the grace of God started in him must grow by his own free co-operation, though never without God’s help, without which man can neither advance nor persevere in virtue.
(Art. 13)2
Even as regards the errors which God allows to arise in the Church [from heretics], we should understand how His goodness turns them to our good, not of course by fostering them but by fostering through them the zeal of His sons for the search and preservation of the truth. That is what the Apostle says: “There must also be heresies, that that also who are approved may be made manifest among you” (1 Cor. 11:19).
Footnotes
- St. Prosper of Aquitaine, P. de Letter, S.J., trans., Ancient Christian Writers, Vol. 32: Prosper of Aquitaine: Defense of St. Augustine (New York: Newman Press, 1963), 144-45. ↩︎
- St. Prosper of Aquitaine, P. de Letter, S.J., trans., Ancient Christian Writers, Vol. 32: Prosper of Aquitaine: Defense of St. Augustine (New York: Newman Press, 1963), 154. ↩︎
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