ABSTRACT
There is no hedging on predestination in Augustine’s letter of AD 418 to the Roman presbyter Sixtus. All human beings inherit the guilt of original sin and are thus of ‘one and the same clay of damnation’, justly to be forsaken; a select few are destined, nevertheless, to be singled out from common clay and restored to God’s favour, not because they have in some way, however meagre, distinguished themselves, but because of God’s unfathomable will to redeem.1 Augustine draws his paradigm case of election from Rom 9, where Paul mentions two famous sons of Israel, Jacob and Esau, and attributes the ascendancy of one over the other to a divine decision, in place before either brother is born. As such, the decision to favour the younger brother, Jacob, could not have been made based on what Jacob deserved, unless God were to have made it based on what Jacob would end up deserving. There is no room for compromise here, insists Augustine, who finds in the appeal to God’s foreknowledge an overly subtle attempt to subvert the priority of election over human merit; those who resort to it ‘jump off cliffs’ in order to evade ‘snares of truth’.2
