The unanimous consent of the Fathers of both the East and West prior to St. Augustine, as well as the Greek Fathers post-Augustine and Latin theologians such as St. Albertus Magnus post-Augustine, amounts to a clear espousal of a belief in Predestination post praevisa merita (after prevision of merits) and by that I mean logically rather than chronologically (since there is no time in God, He being Eternity Itself)… St. Thomas Aquinas is completely ambiguous on the issue, at times sounding like Augustine and teaching unconditional election whereas in other places he seems insistent that God does not predestine before prevision of merits. It is obvious that even he is out of his depth on this issue and was unable to reconcile Augustinianism with the teaching of the Church for the first four centuries along with the Greek Fathers.
Between St. Augustine and the Reformation, other than among the Scholastics, ‘predestination’ was not a topic that was given any great attention by theologians.
Only following the Reformation and with the spread of Calvinism, did the Banezian and Molinist theories explicitly dealing with this emerge in Catholic thought.
Other than condemning Pelagianism (salvation through works) on the one hand and Jansenism (along with Calvinist double predestination) on the other as heresies, the Church has never delineated an official teaching on how predestination actually works. It has never had any practical impact on the lives of Catholic laity, hence why it is rarely catechized on other than being held up as a divine mystery.
St. Frances de Sales, the Jesuit Lessius and St. Alphonsus de Ligouri endorsed the pre-Augustinian belief in conditional predestination and following the displacement of Thomism by the ‘New Theology’ of resourcemment (return to the patristics) and aggiornamento (updating) at Vatican II, the conciliar documents such as Lumen Gentium and the Catechism appear to very clearly endorse the pre-Augustinian conception of predestination posterior to foreseen merits, albeit recognizing that all meritorious acts have their origin from the grace of God as opposed to the efforts of man.
When theologians returned to the sources at Vatican II, they realized that unconditional predestination before prevision of merits had absolutely no basis or foundation in any Patristic source prior to the advent of St. Augustine. The Orthodox, consequently, have never believed in unconditional election.
