Michele Cutino - Prosper and pagans

In this contribution I’m going to show how, better than the initium fidei and the praedestinatio sanctorum, the peculiar theme to the theological discussion on the Provençal setting in the V century is the salvation’s problem of the ancients just, problem that involves also the roll of the profane wisdom in touch with the Christian doctrine. This problem is enunciated fro the first time in Provence in De providentia Dei attributed to Prosper, where, as look as in Pelagius, the existence in the past of sages who knew God with the creation and lived virtuously also without law, is used as an argument to show that salvation is universal and that, also after the Adam’s fall, the man kept a semen recti, a mark of God’s image (Gn 1, 26-27) written inside himself since the creation. Prosper sets oneself against this theory: in his some works from the Epistula ad Rufinum and De ingratis to Liber epigrammatum and De vocatione omnium gentium he instead follows the generals lines of his teacher Augustin of Hippo, who with saint Paul (Rm 14, 23) says that “all that not derives from the belief, is sin” (c. Iulian. 4, 3, 24).