Predestination

But perhaps this particular passage escaped his notice, although he thought he had revised these books so as to make them perfectly clear, and put them forward as a statement of his faith, to the prejudice of all the rest. Let us see, then, what his opinions are in other places. In the same book, when he comes to the passage where it is written, “According to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glory,” he makes these remarks, among others: [a]

“Here certain men seize the opportunity to bring in their own peculiar views. They believe that before the foundation of the world the souls of men lived in the heavenly Jerusalem with the angels and with all the other heavenly powers. “They think it would be impossible, consistently with the good pleasure of God and the praise of his glory and of his grace, to explain why some men are born poor and barbarian, in slavery and weakness, while others are born wealthy Roman citizens, free and in strong health; why some are born in a low station and some in a high one, in different countries and in different parts of the world; unless there are some earlier causes for which each individual soul had its lot assigned according to its merits. “Moreover, there is the passage which some think they understand, though they do not, the passage of the Letter to the Romans that says, ‘Does not the potter have a right over the clay, from the same lump to make one part a vessel for honor and another for dishonor?’ These men take it as support for this same view. “For they argue that, just as the difference between leading a good life or a bad one, a life of labor or of self-indulgence, would count for little if we did not believe in the judgment of God that is to come, so the difference in the conditions under which men are born would call the justice of God into question, unless those conditions were the results of the soul’s earlier deserts. “For if we do not accept this view, they say, it cannot be ‘the good pleasure of God’ or ‘to the praise of his glory and grace’ that he should have chosen some before the foundation of the world to be holy and undefiled and to share in adoption through Jesus Christ, and should have appointed others to the lowest position and to everlasting punishment. Nor could he have loved Jacob before he came out of the womb, and hated Esau before he had done anything to deserve hatred, unless there were some earlier causes which, if we knew them, would prove God to be just.”