Fate: Condemned at the Second Council of Orange (529 AD), which affirmed Augustinian grace against both Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian positions. Ironically, the full Augustinian doctrine of double predestination (that God actively predestines some to damnation) was also implicitly rejected at Orange — the council affirmed that grace initiates salvation without endorsing predestination to hell. Semi-Pelagian ideas quietly survived in medieval popular piety and resurface explicitly in Erasmus’s debate with Luther.

John Cassian (~360–435 AD) — the same Cassian who transmitted Desert Father spirituality to the West — could not accept Augustine’s conclusion that God’s grace is irresistible and that the human will plays no role in initiating salvation. Cassian’s position: the human will makes the first movement toward God (even if weakly), and grace responds to and amplifies that movement. This preserves moral responsibility without denying the necessity of grace. His opponents called this Semi-Pelagianism (a later polemical label, not Cassian’s own). The debate maps onto a genuine theological tension that never fully resolves: if grace is irresistible, why evangelize or preach repentance? If the will is genuinely free to initiate, is grace not reduced to reward for human initiative?

What happens when a group is declared heretical: The process is rarely sudden. It typically begins with episcopal letters condemning a teaching, escalates to synodal condemnation at a regional council, and — after Constantine — can be ratified by an ecumenical council backed by imperial authority. Once condemned: (1) Leaders are excommunicated, exiled, or — in later centuries — handed to secular authorities for execution. (2) Writings are ordered burned; possession becomes a criminal offense. Eusebius records that after Nicaea, Constantine ordered Arian books destroyed under penalty of death. The same logic applied to Gnostic texts — which is why the Nag Hammadi library was buried in a sealed jar around 367 AD, the same year Athanasius’s Easter letter listed the NT canon and ordered non-canonical books removed from churches. (3) Communities are dissolved by force where state power reaches; in regions beyond imperial reach they survive for centuries. (4) Memory is controlled — the only surviving accounts of most heresies are hostile summaries by their opponents (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius’s Panarion), meaning we are largely reading prosecution briefs, not the groups’ own self-understanding.