[HarleyD]

"I would like to see the full context of that, if you don't mind.

It was not thus that that pious and humble teacher thought—I speak of the most blessed Cyprian—when he said "that we must boast in nothing, since nothing is our own." And in order to show this, he appealed to the apostle as a witness, where he said, "For what hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received it, why boastest thou as if thou hadst not received it?" [1 Cor. 4.7.] And it was chiefly by this testimony that I myself also was convinced when I was in a similar error, thinking that faith whereby we believe on God is not God's gift, but that it is in us from ourselves, and that by it we obtain the gifts of God, whereby we may live temperately and righteously and piously in this world. For I did not think that faith was preceded by God's grace, so that by its means would be given to us what we might profitably ask, except that we could not believe if the proclamation of the truth did not precede; but that we should consent when the gospel was preached to us I thought was our own doing, and came to us from ourselves. And this my error is sufficiently indicated in some small works of mine written before my episcopate. Among these is that which you have mentioned in your letters,7 wherein is an exposition of certain propositions from the Epistle to the Romans. Eventually, when I was retracting all my small works, and was committing that retractation to writing,—of which task I had already completed two books before I had taken up your more lengthy letters,—when in the first volume I had reached the retractation of this book, I then spoke thus: —"Also discussing, I say, 'what God could have chosen in him who was as yet unborn, whom He said that the elder should serve; and what in the same elder, equally as yet unborn, He could have rejected; concerning whom, on this account, the prophetic testimony is recorded, although declared long subsequently, "Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated,"' [Mal. 1.2,3. Cf. Rom. 9.13.] I carried out my reasoning to the point of saying: 'God did not therefore choose the works of any one in foreknowledge of what He Himself would give them, but he chose the faith, in the foreknowledge that He would choose that very person whom He foreknew would believe on Him,—to whom He would give the Holy Spirit, so that by doing good works he might obtain eternal life also.'I had not yet very carefully sought, nor had I as yet found, what is the nature of the election of grace, of which the apostle says, 'A remnant are saved according to the election of grace.' [Rom. 11.5.] Which assuredly is not grace if any merits precede it; lest what is now given, not according to grace, but according to debt, be rather paid to merits than freely given. Augustine - A Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints CHAP. 7 [III.]

Now I would ask you, what precisely was it that Augustine saw differently to make him retract ALL of his previous works? He was a Christian. He was in the Church. He was publishing and respected.

Here is a clue: "...where he said, "For what hast thou that thou hast not received?"

He recognized the grave error this represents as a teacher of God.

[gbcdoj]

Harley,

Now I would ask you, what precisely was it that Augustine saw differently to make him retract ALL of his previous works?

"Retract" here means something like "to consider again" (it's not a very good translation of retractarem.) He didn't retract all his previous writing on the subject - as he goes on to say, he had realized his error by the time he wrote to Simplician in 397 AD: "if they had been so careful, they would have found that question solved in accordance with the truth of the divine Scriptures in the first book of the two which I wrote in the very beginning of my episcopate to Simplicianus, of blessed memory, Bishop of the Church of Milan ..." (On the Predestination of the Saints, I:8:IV), while his Retractations of course wasn't composed until almost 30 years had passed, around 426-8 AD.

[jo kus]

First, thank you for the full context.

I don't find St. Cyprian writing anything about the Reformed version of predestination or the lack of God's universal salvific will that all men be saved. He is merely stating the obvious vs. Pelagius - that faith comes from God. We cannot boast. And again, I ask, do Catholics say such garbage? That our faith comes from us alone? St. Augustine is not refering to Catholic teaching (as if Catholics believe that faith comes from ourselves) but to his Manichaean days. I find nothing here that states that St. Cyprian condoned that regenerated man will always choose God, or unregenerated man will never choose God or that God predestines the reprobate, or any of that sort of stuff that the Reformers have made up.

As to the second quote you highlight, I humbly believe that St. Augustine had mistakenly applied "Jacob I loved and Esau I hated" to individuals, when both Malachi and Paul was refering to communities - God's community vs. those outside of God's community (the wicked). In both Scriptural sections, the author is not refering to individuals, but the community as a whole.

Regards