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Chapter Five: Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination, and Human Freedom
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Five Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination, and Human Freedom Aquinas maintains that divine foreknowledge, providence, and predestination are compatible with creaturely contingency and freedom. He does so throughout his career and in many of his texts, from the early commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, written in the mid-s, to his letter to the abbot of Monte Cassino, written around mid-February , about three weeks before he died.1 It is, however, less clear how exactly Aquinas argues for that compatibility, and whether his arguments are cogent. The first question, how to interpret Aquinas’ texts, was one of the points over which a fierce debate arose among Catholic theologians around the end of the sixteenth century, known as the De Auxiliis controversy . The theological issue at stake was the coherence of God’s foreknowledge , predestination, the efficacy of grace, and human freedom. In this debate, each of the two rival parties claimed that its position was supported by Aquinas, who had been proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius V in . But both parties also assumed that Aquinas had not fully explicated his view, and they sought to supplement the Thomistic doctrine. The Dominican party, led by Domingo Bañez, introduced the notion of “physical premotion” (praemotio physica). According to the Dominican theory, God has predetermined the eternal decrees of his will to concur in an irresistibly efficacious way with the activities of creatures in time, even when they act freely.Their major adversaries were Harm Goris the Jesuits Luis de Molina and Francesco Suárez, who saw in “physical premotion ” a denial of human freedom. As an alternative, they developed the theory of the scientia media, the contingent knowledge God has of what a possible creature would actually choose, given any possible set of circumstances. The controversy came officially to an end in , when the pope intervened. Both parties were directed not to charge each other with heresy—either Calvinism or (semi-) Pelagianism—and to submit all writings on the subject to the Inquisition prior to publication. The Holy See would promulgate its decision in the matter at an opportune moment—which, apparently, is still pending.2 Although officially the dispute was left undecided, the Dominican Bañezians emerged victorious, in the sense that their theory became generally recognized as the Thomistic doctrine. From the s on, analytical philosophers of religion have regained interest in the classical question of whether and how God’s foreknowledge and providence are compatible with human freedom. While the Molinist theory of the scientia media, or middle knowledge, features prominently in this present-day debate, Aquinas’ views have received relatively little attention.3 It seems that the predominance of the Bañezian interpretation, with its deterministic implications in particular, is the major reason for this neglect. Only in recent times have some begun to question the identification of the Bañezian theory with Aquinas’ own view. Apart from the systematic problem of determinism, it has been pointed out that the expression praemotio (or praedeterminatio ) physica does not appear in Aquinas’ texts at all. Moreover, if God’s will and causality suffice to account for the certainty of God’s foreknowledge, then the argument that Aquinas usually offers, namely, that God foreknows because all of time is present to his eternity, becomes superfluous.4 Finally, it has been argued that Bañez’s theory does not do justice to God’s transcendence because it suggests that God is merely the first element of a physical chain of movement.5 In order to get a better grasp of Aquinas’ own views, I first present some elements from his discussions on theological language. An analysis of the terms “foreknowledge,” “providence,” and “predestination” make it clear that Aquinas distinguishes two different problems when it comes to the compatibility of divine agency with contingency in the world. One problem has to do with the dia chronic relation of foreknowledge and future contingents, and the other with the synchronic relation of a necessary cause and its effect. Divine Names Aquinas does not aim at constructing a watertight, logically deducible theologi cal system from scratch. He analyzes and reflects on what has been given to him: [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:58 GMT) the Catholic faith and its religious language, as it is used and handed down by Scripture and the Church. As a theology professor, he wants to gain, and pass on, insight into the mysteries...