Annotation CCXLVIII

”We know that to them that love God all things work together unto good, to such as, according to purpose, are called saints.” — Romans 8:28

Whether all men are chosen and destined to eternal life.

Ambrose, bishop of Compsa, treats this whole passage through to the end of the present chapter, and expounds it point by point according to the doctrine of the dogma On Foreknowledge and Predestination: which he himself, first of all men (unless I am mistaken), devised, and published in a peculiar [special] volume. But the sum of the dogma is [this]: that God, from eternity, by his gratuitous goodness, foreknew, loved, chose, [and] destined all men — none of them excluded — and in time called [them] to eternal life; yet not in the same manner and order. For God distinguished the whole race of men into two parts, or classes: in the former and more excellent of which he took up those whom thou mightest rightly call the foreknown, the fore-beloved, the fore-elected, the predestined, and the fore-called — because God, by a certain excellent prerogative of love, loved them before others, chose them before others, destined them before others, and, by a certain singular privilege, called [them] more and more strongly than the rest: such as are the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, Paul, and others, whom God endowed with so great a gift of grace, and equipped with so great safeguards unto salvation, that — [their] freedom of will remaining even safe [intact] — they cannot fall from salvation, [seeing that] they, by a certain immutable and infallible decree of divine providence (the free arbitrament of the will always standing), have been predestined to eternal life. But in the second class God arranged the remaining multitude of the human race; which he willed to be saved not by a fixed and inevitable decree, but under a certain mutable condition; and on that account he neither deemed them worthy of so great an affluence of graces, nor aided [them] with so many and such helps toward attaining beatitude. Ambrose therefore, referring to the first class of those-to-be-saved whatsoever [things] are recounted at the end of this chapter, says [that] to it pertain those whom Paul writes to have been “called according to purpose”; to whom “all things work together unto good”; whom “God foreknew” — that is, knew before the rest, and knew with the knowledge of approbation; whom “God predestined” — that is, destined before all and before others to the conformity of the image of his Son; whom he “justified” more purely than others, called more powerfully, magnified more splendidly; whom “no one can accuse, no one condemn, no one separate from the charity and glory of Christ” — because they are immovably predestined to glory, and their number can neither be augmented nor diminished; in whom, finally, there is so great a certitude of future glory and present grace, that each one of them, together with Paul, can most confidently say: “For I am certain that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor any creature shall be able to separate us from the charity of God, which is in Christ.”

THIS opinion of Ambrose, my teacher, I myself once believed to be so true, and judged so apt for plucking up certain hard and

—cious opinions concerning predestination, wherewith the heretics of our times had filled the minds of the simple with despair, that I expounded it — from the twentieth to the thirtieth year of my age — in many and chief cities of Italy, in [public] preaching, not without the applause of the hearers, and with fruit to disturbed minds. But afterward, when I had noticed that an assertion of this kind is pressed by not a few difficulties and straits, and on that account is not approved by very many learned and pious theologians, I judged [it] better to desist from preaching it, than to teach [things] disapproved by the pious judgment of the learned. Dominic Soto of Segovia wrote against this opinion in the commentaries which he published on the epistle to the Romans, chapter nine. Read below, Annotation 251.