Fulgentius of Ruspe

God through Jeremiah reproaches the evil of the human will in such a way that he teaches that it is foreign to him. He says, “Yet I planted you as a choice vine.… How then did you turn degenerate and become a wild vine?” He says that the vine is foreign to him not because of some defect in the divine creation but by the avoidance of his own will, which is justly blamed because it brought forth bitterness, something God did not produce in it. It had the bitterness not from God’s predestination or from God’s work but from the evil of its own will. Because of that bitterness, God rebukes it a second time through the prophet mentioned above: “Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God: the fear of me is not in you.” Since, therefore, it is evil and bitter for a person to have left the Lord and not to have in him a fear of God, who is contrary to the truth in such a way that he thinks it comes from a good and kind God.

Just as there is no illness that is incurable for our physician, so the heavenly medicine cannot be powerless in any wound or for any length of time. Therefore, the physician testifies that he is always able to restore health to the one converted. He says, “In returning and rest, you shall be saved.” Hence God, through Jeremiah, does not cease to reprove the hardheartedness of certain ones. Instead he says in this way: “When people fall, do they not get up again? If they go astray, do they not turn back? Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? They have held fast to deceit. They have refused to return.” God does not punish the sins in the sinner, if the neck of the sinner is not stiffened.

Accordingly, we must consider that one and the same nature of the Trinity fills the whole in such a way that there is no place where it is not. So, it is everywhere complete and in no way contained in a place. It is complete in individual spirits and bodies and complete at the same time in all creatures. Now we are not speaking about grace by which God with a free gift of his mercy offers himself to human beings for their salvation, but about nature by which God both fills and contains all the things which he made; according to this, he says, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?”