Note 61 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

If then it were to be seriously understood that the future lot of all was foreordained, all expenditure on masses for the dead, or to secure in advance a lightening of purgatorial penance, or even to buy off penance on earth, was so much waste; and the Teutons were still as ready as other barbarians to make their transactions with Church, God, and the saints a matter of explicit bargain.61 Gottschalk, accordingly, had to be put down, in the general interests of the Church. It could not truthfully be pretended that he deviated from Augustine, for he actually held by the “semi-Pelagian” inconsistency that God predestinates good, but merely foreknows evil.62 There was in fact no clear opposition between his affirmations and those of Rabanus Maurus, who also professed to be an Augustinian; but the latter laid forensic stress on the “desire” of God that all men should be saved, and on the formula that Christ died for all; while Gottschalk, more honestly, insisted that predestination is predestination, and applied the principle not merely, as had been customary, to the future state of the good, but to that of the bad,63 insisting on a prædestinatio duplex. His own fate was thus economically predestinate; and he was actually tortured by the scourge till he cast into the fire his written defence, “a document which contained nothing but a compilation of testimonies from Scripture, and from the older church-teachers.”64