PRÆDESTINATUS, LIBER: A work of the first half of the fifth century by an unknown author; so called because the list of heresies in the first book closes with the hæresis prædestinatorum. The treatise is in three parts: the first being a brief description of ninety heresies, plagiarized from the similar list by Augustine, the notes by the author being without value. The second and third books contain a detailed refutation of the heresy stigmatized as predestinational, this being presented in the second book as a treatise of the opponents, and assailed section by section in the third book. The second book is alleged by the author of the Liber prædestinatus to be a forged work of Augustine, designed to propagate dangerous errors concerning predestination and to lead to moral laxity. While this portion might have been written by some adherent of Augustine, it seems rather a figment of the author of the Prædestinatus, who skilfully availed himself of Augustinian concepts and methods to present those points of the doctrine of predestination which Were most vulnerable to the Pelagians. Whether, or to what extent, the author made use of earlier Pelagian compositions of Similar tendency can not be determined. In the third book the Auzustinian doctrines are boldly assailed. Free will precedes grace, got is the greater power of the latter effectual without the antecedence of the former. The fall did not destroy the freedom of the will, but first revealed it; and the end of man is voluntary obedience to God after the pattern of

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Christ. The book, though ostensibly orthodox, is Pelagian; and the formal condemnation of Pelagianism is probably a clever effort to blind the simple reader. The Liber præ:destinatus can not have been written by Arnobius the Younger (q.v.), and it may be the work of several hands, its purpose perhaps being to induce the pope to intervene in favor of the Pelagians. Such a proceeding would not have been at variance with the methods of Julian of Eclanum (q.v.).

(ERWIN PREUSCHEN.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: The editio princeps, ed. J. Sirmond, appeared Paris 1643, reprint with a Censura . . . , 1645; best ed. by La Baum in Opera varia J. Sirmondi, i. 449 sqq., ib. 1696; it is in MPL, liii. 583 sqq.; and in CSEL. The earlier literature is antiquated by H. von Schubert, in TU, xxiv (1903), part 4; cf. A. Faure, Die Widerlepung der Horetiker im 1. Buch des Prædestinatus, Göttingen, 1903.