Augustine's Views on Predestination

I am finishing up a very good biography called Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown. Brown spent a whole chapter explaining Augustine's view of predestination towards the end of his life. I copied a few of the more striking passages.

For Augustine's doctrine of predestination, as he elaborated it, was a doctrine for fighting men. A monk might waste his leisure worrying about his utlimate identity: to Augustine, such an anxiety was misplaced. A doctrine of predestination divorced from action was inconceivable to him. He has never written to deny freedom, merely to make it more effective in the harsh environment of a fallen world. The world demanded, among other things, unremitting intellectual labour to gain truth, stern rebuke to move men. (p. 406)

The following quote is from an Augustinian commentary on Deuteronomy.

Say not in thy heart: My strength and the power of my hand has wrought this great wonder: but thou shalt remember the Lord thy God, for He it is Who gives the strength to do great deeds.

Augustine consoled the victims of the sack of Rome by using the doctrine of predestination and reminding the victims that their future is secure in heaven with bodies that will be glorified.

What is more, such views made the world readily intelligible. The doctrine of predestination was developed by Augustine mainly as a doctrine, in which every event was charged with a precise meaning as a deliberate act of God, of mercy for the elect, of judgement for the damned...
Similarly, every tribulation of the elect was a calculated mercy. This alone was no small thing: for in the anthology of the works of Augustine, later compiled by Prosper, the opening book of the City of God, with the record of the still-distant news of unburied corpses, of nuns raped, of the enslavement of prisoners of war, will now appear as relevant to the every day experience of a man of the fifth century. (pp. 406-407)

Augustine at the end of his life wrote on perseverance. He tried to answer the question, what keeps a Christian on his walk throughout his life through pain and suffering?

What preoccupied Augustine, therefore, was no longer the mobilization of love that caused a man to act, but the mysterious resilience that would enable some men to maintain this love for the full course of their lives.(p. 408)

The 'gift of perseverance', as he [Augustine] had said , was the greatest of God's gifts to the individual. For it bestowed on frail human beings the same unshakeable stablility as the human nature in Christ had enjoyed: by this gift, a man was joined forever to the Divine, could be confident that the 'hand of God' would stretched above him to shield him, unfailingly, against the world. 'Human nature could not have been raised higher.' (p. 409)

Predestination, an abstract stumbling-block to the sheltered communities of Hadrumetum and Marseilles, as it would be to so many future Christians, had only one meaning for Augustine: it was a doctrine of survival, a fierce insistence that God alone could provide men with an irreducible inner core. (p. 410)