Annotation CCLXXXVI

”He chose us before the constitution of the world.” — Ephesians 1:4

Whether souls [were] created before the world, and thrust into bodies for their offenses.

Origen, [in] the first book of the commentaries on the Ephesians, narrating this clause, taught that souls were created before this visible world, and then, on account of their sins, were thrust into bodies. Which sentence Jerome, the name of Origen being suppressed, recounts in the first commentary on the Ephesians in these words: “ANOTHER, indeed, who tries to show God just — [namely] that he chooses each one not from the prejudgment of his [own] knowledge, but from the merit of the elect — says [that] before the visible creatures — heaven, earth, seas, and all [things] which are within them — there were other, invisible creatures; among which [were] also souls, which, for certain causes known to God alone, were cast down below into this vale of tears, into the place of our affliction and pilgrimage: in which the holy man, [being] placed, prayed to return to [his] pristine seat, saying:¹ ‘Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged; I have dwelt with the inhabitants of Cedar; my soul has much been a pilgrim.’ And in another place:² ‘Wretched man that I am, who shall free me from the body of this death?’ And,³ ‘It is better to return, and to be with Christ.’ And elsewhere,⁴ ‘Before I was humbled, I sinned’: and other [things] similar to these. And so,

—than the souls, they say, were precipitated into the world, and the world was made out of souls — [God] himself [being] cast down into the lowest [place] with its [own] inhabitants — God chose Paul, and those like him before his [sight], who were holy and immaculate. But no one is chosen except from many: and where there are some baser [ones], there election is perpetrated. But [just] as in the Babylonian captivity, when the people were led away by Nebuchadnezzar into Chaldaea, prophets were sent — Ezekiel, Daniel, the three boys, Haggai, Zechariah — not because they too had merited the captivity, but that they might be for the solace of the captives: so also in that casting-down of the world, those who, before the world was made, had been chosen by God, were sent for the erudition and mastership of the sinful souls; that, at their preaching, they might return to that place whence they had fallen. And that this is [that] which is said by Moses in the eighty-ninth psalm:⁵ ‘Lord, thou hast been made a refuge for us, from generation and into generation. Before the mountains were made firm, and the earth was made, and the round world’ — that is, before the world was made, and the universal generation took [its] beginning, God was a refuge to his saints.” This, then, is the Origenist opinion; which, as Jerome reports, the same Origen confirmed, and explained more fully, upon that [text] Eph. 1, “According to the good pleasure of his will”; and upon that Eph. 1, “Unto the praise of the glory of his grace”; and upon that Eph. 1, “That we may be unto the praise of his glory”; and upon that Eph. 1, “The eyes [of your heart] illumined in the knowledge of him”; and Eph. 3, upon that, “I Paul, bound in the Lord”; and Eph. 6, upon that, “For which I perform an embassy in a chain.” The confutation of this error, from Cyril, thou hast [in] the fifth book, Annotation 185.