I have never been pointed to anything St. Augustine wrote that would convincingly teach Calvinist predestination, that is predestination that negates the free will. Besides, if it did, that would not close any argument because no work of individual fathers is wholly without error. One needs to look for the consensus of the fathers to get to the inspired teaching of the Church. Whatever St. Augistine taught is but one piece of a mosaic that needs to be looked at as one whole.
I guess we all pick and choose what we want.
No we don't. You do. You pick from St. Augistine's voluminous work what you want, force that into your belief system, ignore everything else St. Augistine wrote, and ignore the scripture when it does not say what Calvin thinks. Bishop Minatios's treatise (On Predestination) that Kosta showed us in 956 goes in the scripture to systematically prove, from scripture, that calvinist view on predestination is counterscriptural. It does not do so by picking isolated passages from St. Paul out of context, and it does not go to any of the Church Fathers at the exclusion of everything else. This is exemplary commentary centered on the scripture. To answer Bishop Minatios's treatise by "why don't you just read some Augistine" is running from debate.
Now, as to your reading of St. Augustine, this is what someone who studied Augistine in depth had to say to you:
Like any of the really great theological minds in the history of the Church, Augustine can be read to say opposite things. For goodness sake, that's what the semi-pelagian controversy was about. Cassian read him in a semi-pelagian way (the term is inaccurate--Cassian's views had nothing to do with Pelagius--the term was applied to Cassian's group, including Vincent of Lerins for the first time 1000 years later, in the late 1500s by Protestants who had an axe to grind) but Faustus of Riez and others read Augustine in an extreme opposite direction, along the lines that Calvin and Baius and Jansenius would read him.This issue is which reading of Augustine is most accurate. And Calvin's reading (and Baius and Jansenius and Faustus's) is manifestly false. Augustine refers to "irresistible" grace in one place (in De correptione et gratia found in NPFN 1, vol. 5, ca. p. 470, if I recall correctly), a work from about 427. But in works written in 412 (On the Spirit and the Letter) and 426 and 427 (On Grace and Free Choice, as well as the cover letters for that treatise) he makes equally clear that no matter what he wrote about God's grace shaping us--and he was well aware that he had written strong language--he insisted in this letter and treatise to a group of monks who were arguing exactly as Cassian and Faustus did a few years later, exactly as Calvin and Jansenius and others disagreed over what Augustine "really" meant--in these letters and the treatise from 426/427, Augustine explicitly says that whatever you make of what I have written, you must never forget that God's grace never eliminates human cooperation with it and human cooperation can never be understood in such a way as to overcome or deny God's grace. Augustine himself was well aware that people were reading what he wrote in very different ways. He was well aware that he had written what seemed like contradictory things about grace and works. And in explicit response to that he, Augustine, himself gave the authoritative interpretation: never deny free will cooperating with grace but also never deny that God's grace is always already out in front of our cooperating free will. WIthout grace our wills are captive to sin but still free; God's grace does not force, does not rape, does not coerce; it can be resisted. WE have that clarification from Augustine himself. Calvin, Baius, Jansenius willfully chose to ignore it.
All Bishop Minatios treatise states is that no one can understand predestination. This to me is a spurious argument. If someone states that they understand something how can somebody else say, "No you don't."
People could understand predestination. The problem is they simply don't wish to come to the obvious conclusion. They have man's free will fixed within their tiny brains and nothing is going to bounce that out. Everything revolves around man's will and nothing around what God wills. To be perfectly blunt, this is simply forming God into our own image.
2)Not all men have faith.
3)Therefore God doesn't give faith to all men.
Awesome! Thank you annlex.
Just for the record: the Orthodox East became aware of +Augustine's works in the 15th or so century and rejected some of them (as did +Augustine himself, as redgolum points out), but did not exlcude him from Sainthood. This shows that, while +Augustine features much smaller in the East, his true teachings were never discarded. And while there are some Orhodox theologians who were unfavorably disposed towards +Augustine (just as there are reverse cases), the Church as a whole knew better.