Letter 8

From: Salvian of Marseille, priest and writer To: Salonius, Bishop of Geneva Date: ~450 AD Context: Salvian writes to Bishop Salonius of Geneva [son of Bishop Eucherius of Lyon, also a former monk of Lerins] on matters of theology and the governance of the church in a time of crisis. To the most holy Lord Salonius, bishop of Geneva, from Salvian, greetings. The question you raise about the relationship between divine providence and human freedom in the context of the barbarian catastrophe is one I have been wrestling with in the work I am currently writing, and I want to share my current thinking. The collapse of Roman power in the West does not happen in spite of God's governance of history; it happens within it. This does not mean that God willed the specific violence, the specific suffering, the specific injustices that accompany the collapse. It means that God permits history to take the course that human choices have set in motion, while remaining capable of bringing good out of what human choices have broken. The Roman empire's trajectory was set, in my reading, by the long corruption of a civilization that claimed Christian identity while living by pagan values. The catastrophe is not punishment in the crude sense of direct divine intervention to harm; it is the natural consequence of a disordered civilization reaching the point where its disorders can no longer be sustained. The appropriate response: not passivity before fate, but repentance and genuine conversion of life. We cannot reverse the historical trajectory, but we can choose how to live within it. Your servant in Christ, Salvian