Faustus of Riez
405 CE–490 CE · Britain (probable birthplace)
Faustus of Riez (c. 405–c. 490) was a Gallic bishop and theologian who served first as abbot of the celebrated monastery of Lérins and then as bishop of Riez in southern Gaul for several decades. He is the principal systematic voice of what later scholars call Semi-Pelagianism: in his major treatise De gratia Dei he argued that divine grace and a residual human capacity for faith must cooperate in salvation, navigating between what he saw as the determinism of strict Augustinianism and the self-sufficiency of Pelagianism. A strong defender of Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism, he was expelled from his see by the Visigoth king Euric around 477 and lived in exile for roughly eight years before returning to Riez. His theology was condemned by the Synod of Orange in 529, yet his writings remained influential and his standing as a saint in local Gallic tradition was never formally revoked.
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Britain (probable birthplace)United Kingdom
What they did here
Contemporaries Avitus of Vienne and Sidonius Apollinaris both attest a British origin; some scholars propose Brittany and a handful of ancient sources call him a Gaul, making this the one genuinely contested fact in his biography.
About Britain (probable birthplace)
Britain (Roman/post-Roman Britannia), in the modern United Kingdom. It is given as the probable birthplace of Faustus of Riez, the 5th-century Gallic monk-bishop and Semi-Pelagian theologian.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Faustus of Riez’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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