But let us proceed to another matter—the
fact that some of them assert that predestination to life or to death is in God’s
control and not in ours. They say, ‘Why should we try to live [well] when it is
in God’s control?’, while others say, ‘Why should we pray to God not to be
conquered by temptation, when it is in our control, through freedom of the
will?’ Truly, they are unable to offer or accept anything in accordance with
reason, in their ignorance of the opuscula addressed by the blessed bishop Fulgentius
to the presbyter Eugippius against the sermon of a certain Pelagian. After much
else this father adds these words of teaching: ‘Those people, while they
reprehensibly admit grace only for themselves, have damnably spurned themselves,
when they assert that some are destined to life and others to death. Note the
bonds of impiety in which they are entangled! If I am predestined to the good
[they say], I shall have no need to resist evil, while if I am born for evil, I
shall not benefit by doing good. And so on both sides no scope is left for
seeking praise and glory: one of them will be slothful through unconcern and
the other through despair. As a result the practice of righteousness will be abhorred,
prayer will cease, action will languish. But all of this is false; let us rather
pray incessantly, for the Lord himself says, “Pray without cease not to enter
into temptation.” All the same, we must strive against every sin not only
through prayer but also through labour, since the Lord himself testified in today’s
reading that “everyone will receive his proper rewards according to his labor”.
We shall prove with God’s help that these words, with which the author of this
sermon tries to attack the truth of predestination, were uttered without care
or thought.’ And further on: ‘The works of mercy and righteousness God prepared
in the eternity of his immutability and just as he was never ignorant of his
future works, so he was never thoughtless in his preparation of them. He
therefore prepared the merits that were going to justify men, and prepared the
rewards with which these men were to be glorified. As for the wicked, he did
not prepare their evil volitions and evil deeds; what he did prepare for them
were us and eternal punishments. This is God’s eternal predestination of future
works, which we preach faithfully, just as we know well, the apostolic doctrine
has always taught it. The blessed Paul clearly and frequently teaches the predestination
of those whom God saves through grace. For he says of God, “For those whom he
foreknew he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he
would be the firstborn among many brethren,” and then, “Those whom he
predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and
those he justified he also glorified.” Nothing wavers in uncertainty in the
works of God, because nothing is without his predestination. God begins his works
with the call of predestination, and complete them with glorification, not,
however, in all those he calls but in those he calls according to his purpose: ‘For
those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according
to his purpose.’” And much further on: ‘The truth of predestination should
therefore be held by all the faithful, because whoever does not believe in this
divine plan of predestination will not attain the glorious effects of this predestination,
and whoever is not predestined to glory is foreknown as marked for the penalty
predestined by the preparation of God, so that as a result infidelity and
iniquity may be punished. For this reason the blessed apostle Jude says
that some people are predestined for judgment in these words, “Certain impious
people have crept in who were long ago prescribed and predestined for this judgment
issued by our God.” Alert in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, he does not say
that the impious are predestined to sin but that they are predestined to
judgment, that is, not to impiety, but to punishment. For they are predestined
not to committing vicious impiety, but to what they will receive by a judgment
of divine equity. For it is the work that they do what is impious, while it is
God’s work that they receive what is just.’ (Codex Epistolaris Carolinus:
Letters from the Popes to the Frankish Rulers, 739-791 [trans. Richard
Price; Translated Texts for Historians 77; Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2021], 424-25; Hadrian is repeating what he wrote previously to Bishop Egila
and the presbyter John in a letter c. 772-791; see ibid., 408-10)