The orthodoxy of St. Chrysostom can be positively established by a twofold argument. (1) Pope Celestine the First recommended him as a reliable defender of the Catholic faith against Nestorianism and Pelagianism.(324) (2) Chrysostom rejected Semipelagianism as it were in advance when he taught: “Not even faith is of ourselves; for if He [God] had not come, if He had not called, how should we have been able to believe?”(325) and again when he says in his explanation of the Pauline phrase ἀρχηγὸς τῆς πίστεως:(326) “He Himself hath implanted the faith in us, He Himself hath given the beginning.”(327) These utterances are diametrically opposed to the heretical teaching of the Semipelagians.(328) c) The theological argument for our thesis is effectively formulated by Oswald(329) as follows: “It is faith which first leads man from the sphere of nature into a higher domain,—faith is the beginning of salutary action. That this beginning must come wholly from God, and that it cannot come from man, goes without saying. By beginning we mean the very first beginning. Whether we call this first beginning itself faith, or speak, as the Semipelagians did, of certain preambles of faith,—aspirations, impulses, desires leading to faith (_praeambula fidei: conatus, desideria, credulitatis affectus_), makes no difference. Wherever the supernatural domain of salutary action begins—and it is divided off from the natural by a very sharp line—there it is God who begins and not man, there it is grace which precedes,—_gratia praeveniens_, as it has come to be known by a famous term.” Indeed, if man were able by his own power to merit for himself the first beginnings of grace, then faith itself, and justification which is based on faith, and the beatific vision, would not be strictly graces. As for the precise moment when prevenient grace begins its work in the soul, the common opinion is that the very first judgment which a man forms as to the credibility of divine revelation (_iudicium credibilitatis_) is determined by the immediate grace of the intellect,(330) and that the subsequent _affectus credulitatis_ springs from the strengthening grace of the will. St. Augustine, commenting on 2 Cor. III, 5, demonstrates this as follows: “Let them give attention to this, and well weigh these words, who think that the beginning of faith is of ourselves, and the increase of faith is of God. For who cannot see that thinking is prior to believing? For no one believes anything unless he has first thought that it is to be believed.... Therefore, in what pertains to religion and piety [of which the Apostle was speaking], if we are not capable of thinking anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God, we are certainly not capable of believing anything as of ourselves, since we cannot do this without thinking, but our sufficiency, by which we begin to believe, is of God.”(331)