The Essential Augustine
DIMENSIONS OF GRACE 185 not to attribute to the will of men or of angels or of any created spirit, but rather to His will who gives power to wills. It is not the case, therefore, that because God forekuew what would be in the power of our wills, there is for that reason nothing in the power of our wills. For he who foreknew this did not foreknow nothing. Moreover, if He who foreknew what would be in the power of our wills did not foreknow nothing, but something, assuredly, even though He did foreknow, there is something in the power of our wills. Therefore we are by no means compelled either, retaining the prescience of God, to take away the freedom of the will or, retaining the freedom of the will, to deny that He is prescient of future things, which is impious, But we embrace both. We faithfully and sincerely confess both. The former, that we may believe well; the latter, that we may live well. For he lives ill who does not believe well concerning God. Wherefore be it far from us, in order to maintain our freedom, to deny the prescience of Him by whose help we are or shall be free. Consequently, it is not in vain that laws are enacted, and that reproaches, exhortations, praises, and vituperations are had recourse to; for these also He foreknew, and they are of great avail, even as great as He foreknew that they would be of. Prayers, also, are of avail to procure those things which He foreknew that He would grant to those who offered them; and with justice have rewards been appointed for good deeds, and punishments for sins. For a man does not therefore sin because God foreknew that he would sin. Nay, it cannot be doubted but that it is the man himself who sins when he does sin, because He, whose foreknowledge is infallible, foreknew not that fate or fortune or something else would sin, but that the man himself would sin who, if he wills not, sins not. But if he shall not will to sin, even this did God foreknow.
GRACE BEFORE AND AFTER THE FALL*
Wherefore, God would have been willing to preserve 104. even the first man in that state of salvation in which he was created, and after he had begotten sons to remove him at a fit time, without the intervention of death, to a better place, where he should have been not only free from sin but free even from the desire of sinning, if He had foreseen that man would have the steadfast will to persist in * Enchiridion, 104-106; trans. Dods.