Jerome Gives His Own Views as Another’s

So far he has set out a single explanation of the passage, but he has not made clear on whose authority he wants us to accept it. What he has actually done is to cancel this first interpretation by what follows, for he goes on: “But there is another, who tries to show that God is just.” So he is pointing out that the first explanation does not vindicate the justice of God, which of course is contrary to the faith. Then, through the mouth of this ‘other,’ whose statements he plainly wants to present as what is held everywhere as catholic and beyond doubt, he goes on to give a testimony by which, as he claims, he will try to show that God is just. Let us see, then, what this ‘other man’ says, who proclaims the justice of God. [a]

“Another man,” he says, “who tries to vindicate the justice of God, argues that God’s choice of men is decided not by his own prior judgment and knowledge, but by the merit of the elect. He says that before the creation of the visible world, of sky and earth and seas and all that they contain, there existed other, invisible creatures, and among them were souls. These souls, for reasons known to God alone, were cast down into this valley of tears, this place of our mournful pilgrimage. “This, he says, is shown by the prayer of a holy man of old who, though his dwelling was fixed here, still longed to return to his first home: ‘Woe is me that my stay as a stranger is prolonged, that I have my dwelling among the inhabitants of Kedar’; ‘my soul has long been a pilgrim’; and again, ‘O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?’; and in another place, ‘It is better to return and be with Christ’; and elsewhere, ‘Before I was brought low, I sinned’; and other words of the same kind.”

This, they say, refers to the condition of the souls before they were cast down into the world. Anyone who reads this will be inclined to say, “Master, you seem to tell us, and yet you do not really tell us, who these men are who say that the souls of men existed before they were cast down into the world.” Then he will answer, “Was I not right to say that you were blind, no better than a mole? Did I not say before that they are those who assert that God is just? By that, if you had any sense at all, you would understand that I mean myself. For I am not such a heretic as not to count myself among those who vindicate the justice of God, as everyone must who has the least touch of good sense.” Then they will answer, “Tell us, then, master, tell us what these men say, and you among them. We understand you to say that before the souls were cast down into the world, and before the world, which was made up of souls, had been cast down together with its inhabitants into the abyss, God chose Paul and those like him, who were holy and undefiled. But if men are chosen, they are chosen out of a great number; there must be many in a worse condition out of whom the choice is made. “Yet just as in the Babylonian captivity, when Nebuchadnezzar carried the people away into Chaldea, Ezekiel and Daniel and the three young men, and Haggai and Zechariah, were sent with them, not because they deserved to become captives but to be a comfort to those who were carried away, so too in that ‘casting down’ of the world, those whom God had chosen before the world was were sent to instruct and train the sinful souls, so that through their preaching these might return to the place from which they had fallen. “And this is what the words of the eighty-ninth Psalm mean: ‘Lord, you have been our refuge in generation and in offspring, before the mountains were established, or the earth and the world were made.’ That is to say, before the world was made, and before all things began to be generated, God was a refuge to his saints.”