Jerome Explains the Foundation of the World as a Casting Down

But now let us go on to discuss what he writes further about God’s judgment, for this too is a matter of the faith. We shall find that, just as he alters the faith about the resurrection of the flesh on other points, so he does with regard to God’s judgment. In the first book of his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, he deals with the passage where the apostle says, “Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish before him.” On this he says: [a]

“For ‘the foundation of the world’ the Greek has katabolēs kosmou. The word katabolē does not mean the same as what we understand by ‘foundation.’ So we will not try to render it word for word, which is impossible here because of the poverty of our language and the novelty of the sense, and because, as someone has said, the Greeks have a richer vocabulary and a happier tongue than ours. We must explain the force of the word by some kind of roundabout phrase. “Katabolē is properly used when something is thrown down and cast from a higher place into a lower one, or else when something is taking its beginning. That is why those who lay the first foundations of houses to be built are said to have katabeblēkenai, that is, to have thrown down the first foundations. Paul used the word, then, to show that God made all things out of nothing. He assigned to him not a creation, nor a building up, nor a making, but a katabolē, that is, the beginning of a foundation. He wants to show that there was not some other thing existing before created things, out of which they were formed, as the Manichaeans and other heretics hold, who begin with a maker and a material, but that all things were made out of nothing. “But our election to be holy and without blemish before him, that is, before God, before the making of the world, of which the apostle speaks, belongs to the foreknowledge of God. To him all future things are as if they were already done, and all things are known before they come into being. So Paul is predestined in his mother’s womb, and Jeremiah before his birth is sanctified, chosen and confirmed, and, as a type of Christ, is sent to be a prophet to the nations.”