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| Concerning Prescience and Predestination.
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Chapter
XXX.—Concerning Prescience and
Predestination.
We ought to understand1911
| 1911 Chrys., Hom.
12 in Epist. ad. Ephes. |
that while God knows all things beforehand, yet He does not
predetermine all things1912
| 1912 Cf.
Maximus, Vita, n. 8; Just. Martyr, Apol. 1; Tatian,
Or. ad Græcos; Origen, Ep. ad Rom. 1; Jerome, on
Ezek. c. xxiv., &c. | . For He
knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but He does not
predetermine them. For it is not His will that there should be
wickedness nor does He choose to compel virtue. So that
predetermination is the work of the divine command based on
fore-knowledge1913
. But on
the other hand God predetermines those things which are not within our
power in accordance with His prescience. For already God in His
prescience has prejudged all things in accordance with His goodness and
justice.
Bear in mind, too1914
| 1914 Cf. Clem.
Alex., Strom., bk. vi.; Jerome, on Ep. ad Gal., ch.
1; Greg. Naz, Carmen de virt. hum. | ,
that virtue is a gift from God implanted in our nature, and that He
Himself is the source and cause of all good, and without His co-operation1915
| 1915 Cf. Clem.
Alex., Quis dives salvetur; Greg. Naz.,
Orat. 31; Chrysost., Hom. 45in Joann., Hom. in Ep.
ad Hebr. xii. 2, Hom. 15 in Ep. ad Rom.; Cyril, De
ador. in Spir. et ver., p. 25; Petavius, Dogm., vol. i., bk.
ix. c. 4, &c. | and help we cannot will or do any good
thing. But we have it in our power either to abide in virtue and
follow God, Who calls us into ways of virtue, or to stray from paths of
virtue, which is to dwell in wickedness, and to follow the devil who
summons but cannot compel us. For wickedness is nothing else than
the withdrawal of goodness, just as darkness is nothing else than the
withdrawal of light. While then we abide in the natural state we
abide in virtue, but when we deviate from the natural state, that is
from virtue, we come into an unnatural state and dwell in
wickedness1916
| 1916 Cf.
infra, bk. iii. ch. 14. | .
Repentance is the returning from the unnatural into the
natural state, from the devil to God, through discipline and
effort.
Man then the Creator made male, giving him to share in
His own divine grace, and bringing him thus into communion with
Himself: and thus it was that he gave in the manner of a prophet
the names to living things, with authority as though they were given to
be his slaves. For having been endowed with reason and mind, and
free-will after the image of God, he was fitly entrusted with dominion
over earthly things by the common Creator and Master of all.
But since God in His prescience1917
| 1917 ὁ προγνώστης
Θεός. See Athanas., in
Psalm 1; Chrysost. in Hom. 18 in Gen.; Greg.
Nyss., De opif. hom.; Athanas., Minor, Quest. 50 ad
Antioch.; Thomas Aquinas I., Quæst. 98,
Art. 2. | knew that man would transgress and become
liable to destruction, He made from him a female to be a help to him
like himself; a help, indeed, for the conservation of the race after
the transgression from age to age by generation. For the earliest
formation is called ‘making’ and not
‘generation.’ For ‘making’ is the
original formation at God’s hands, while ‘generation’
is the succession from each other made necessary by the sentence of
death imposed on us on account of the transgression.
This man He1918
| 1918 Greg. Nyss., De
opif., ch. 20. | placed in
Paradise, a home that was alike spiritual and sensible. For he
lived in the body on the earth in the realm of sense, while he dwelt in
the spirit among the angels, cultivating divine thoughts, and being
supported by them: living in naked simplicity a life free from
artificiality, and being led up through His creations to the one and
only Creator, in Whose contemplation he found joy and gladness1919
| 1919 Text, εὐφραινόμενος.
Variant, σεμνυνόμενος. | .
When therefore He had furnished his nature with
free-will, He imposed a law on him, not to taste of the tree of
knowledge. Concerning this tree, we have said as much as is
necessary in the chapter about Paradise, at least as much as it was in
our power to say. And with this command He gave the promise that,
if he should preserve the dignity of the soul by giving the victory to
reason, and acknowledging his Creator and observing His command, he
should share eternal blessedness and live to all eternity, proving
mightier than death: but if forsooth he should subject the soul
to the body, and prefer the delights of the body, comparing himself in
ignorance of his true dignity to the senseless beasts1920
, and shaking off His Creator’s yoke,
and neglecting His divine injunction, he will be liable to death and
corruption, and will be compelled to labour throughout a miserable
life. For it was no profit to man to obtain incorruption while
still untried and unproved, lest he should fall into pride and under
the judgment of the devil. For through his incorruption the
devil, when he had fallen as the result of his own free choice, was
firmly established in wickedness, so that there was no room for
repentance and no hope of change: just as, moreover, the angels
also, when they had made free choice of virtue became through grace
immoveably rooted in goodness.
It was necessary, therefore, that man should first
be put to the test (for man untried and unproved1921
| 1921 ἀδοκιμος; in
Cod. R. 2 ἀδοκίμαστον. | would be worth nothing1922
| 1922 This parenthesis is
absent in almost all codices and in the translations of Faber,
&c. | ), and being made perfect by the trial
through the observance of the command should thus receive incorruption
as the prize of his virtue. For being intermediate between God
and matter he was destined, if he kept the command, to be delivered
from his natural relation to existing things and to be made one with
God’s estate, and to be immoveably established in goodness, but,
if he transgressed and inclined the rather to what was material, and
tore his mind from the Author of his being, I mean God, his fate was to
be corruption, and he was to become subject to passion instead of
passionless, and mortal instead of immortal, and dependent on
connection and unsettled generation. And in his desire for life
he would cling to pleasures as though they were necessary to maintain
it, and would fearlessly abhor those who sought to deprive him of
these, and transfer his desire from God to matter, and his anger from
the real enemy of his salvation to his own brethren. The
envy of the1923
| 1923 Cf. Greg.
Naz., Orat. 38 and 42; Cyril Alex., Cont. Anthrop., I. 8;
Anast. II. Antioch., Hexaëm. vi; Chrysost., Hom. 10
in Ep. ad Rom., Hom. 5 in Ep. ad Epes.,
&c. | devil then was the reason of man’s
fall. For that same demon, so full of envy and with such a hatred
of good, would not suffer us to enjoy the pleasures of heaven, when he
himself was kept below on account of his arrogance, and hence the false
one tempts miserable man with the hope of Godhead, and leading him up
to as great a height of arrogance as himself, he hurls him down into a
pit of destruction just as deep.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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