9. See Rom 9:1 l;Gn 25:22-25.
Book VI 309 formed in his own due time. This was when he was establishing the point from which the ages, established by him who is before all ages, were to begin. Some created things, you see, precede others in time, while some precede others in their causes; he though precedes all the things he has made, not only in his pre-eminence as the cause of all causes, but also in his eternity. But this is some thing we may, I hope, discuss later on at more appropriate places in the scrip tures.
A question aired which the author thinks ought not to be pursued
9, 14. Now we must bring to a close what we have begun discussing about man, and show that restraint which requires us, faced with the profundities of scripture, to be painstaking in our researches rather than cavalier in our asser tions. l mean, that God knew Jeremiah before he formed him in the womb we are not permitted to doubt, seeing that he says in the clearest terms, Before lformed you in the womb, l knew you (Jer 1:5). But where he knew him before he thus formed him, whether in his proximate causes, as Levi was tithed in the loins of Abraham, or in Adam himself, in whom the human race was set up as in its root; and in him, whether as he had already been formed out of mud, or only made causally among those works which God created all simultaneously; or whether it was not rather before any creation, in the way he chose and predestined his holy ones before thefoundation of the world (Eph 1 :4); or in fact in all his preceding causes, both ones l have mentioned and ones I have not, before he was formed in the womb—l really do not think we ought to inquire too minutely, as in any case it would be almost, if not totally, beyond our feeble powers to discover.
What has to be agreed is that Jeremiah, from the moment he was born of his parents and saw the light of day, lived his own life, growing up to be capable of living it well or badly; but that in no way at all was he so capable before that, not only before he was formed in the womb, but not even once he had been, and before he was born. There is, after all, not the slightest hesitation in that judg ment of the apostle's about the twins in Rebecca's womb not yet doing anything either good or bad.9
15. Nonetheless it is not for nothing that it is written that not even an infant, whose life on earth has lasted but a day, ispure of sin (Job 14:5, LXX), and in that verse in the psalm that: / in iniquities was conceived, and in sins did my mother nourish me in the womb (Ps 51:5), and that in Adam all die, in whom all sinned (Rom 5:12). For the moment, however, let us hold with complete certainty that, whatever parental merits, whatever divine grace may be passed on to children before they are born, whoever God may sanctify before birth, there is on the one hand no unfairness with God, and nobody on the other does anything as a personal
9. See Rom 9:1 l;Gn 25:22-25.