Gottschalk of Orbais
Gottschalk was the son of Count Berno, a Saxon noble, who sent him in childhood to the monastery of Fulda “as a pious offering.” As a young man he sought release from vows he had not chosen, which brought him into conflict with his abbot, Rabanus Maurus. He moved to the monastery of Orbais, where he gave himself to the study of Augustine.1
At the Synod of Mainz on October 1, 848, Gottschalk, as Philip Schaff writes, “boldly professed his belief in a two-fold predestination, to life and to death.” He was the first significant theologian to teach double predestination plainly, and he held that Christ died for the elect alone.2
Mainz condemned him and sent him to Archbishop Hincmar of Reims. At the Synod of Chiersy in 849 he was deposed, publicly scourged “most atrociously,” and made to throw his own books into the fire. He was then shut up in the monastery of Hautvilliers for about twenty years. Remigius of Lyons called the treatment “unheard of impiety and cruelty.” Gottschalk died in 868 or 869, never recanting, and was buried in unconsecrated ground.3
He had to suffer bitter persecution for re-asserting what the great African divine had elaborated.4 Philip Schaffon Gottschalk and Augustine
His Legacy
Gottschalk’s fate shows how far the medieval church had drifted from Augustine, whom it still honored in name. The councils that followed swung back and forth, but the Semi-Augustinian middle way of Gregory the Great held the field. His teaching anticipated the doctrine of predestination later confessed by Calvin and the Reformed churches.
