God’s Permission of Sin: Negative or Conditioned Decree? A Defense of the Doctrine of Francisco Marín-Sola, O.P., based on the Principles of Thomas Aquinas by Michael D. Torre (review)

305 BOOK REVIEWS God’s Permission of Sin: Negative or Conditioned Decree? A Defense of the Doctrine of Francisco Marín-Sola, O.P., based on the Principles of Thomas Aquinas. Studia Friburgensia 107. By MICHAEL D. TORRE. Fribourg: Academic Press, 2009. Pp. viii + 537. 65.00 i (paper). ISBN: 978-37278 -1659-8. In the mid-1920s, Francisco Marín-Sola, O.P., published three substantive articles on the nature of the divine permission of sin and the nature of sufficient grace, systematizing what he understood to be elements of a common doctrine among Thomists antecedent to the De auxiliis controversy and subsequent to the Jansenist controversy. Proposing that God’s permission of sin must be understood as a conditional (instead of an unconditional negative) decree and sufficient grace as an actual, transient, albeit impedible divine motion, MarínSola was concerned to maintain the absolute innocence of God in regard to moral evil—God neither directly nor indirectly causes moral evil—and to argue that the first cause of the absence of grace comes from the human being (STh I-II, q. 79, a. 1; q. 112, a. 3, ad 2). His proposal set off a controversy with Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., who in 1926 attacked what he regarded as MarínSola ’s crypto-Molinist doctrine. Very little has been published about Marín-Sola in the past few decades, but in 1983 Michael Torre completed a dissertation on Marín-Sola at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, and this has now been published by the Dominican editors of the Studia Friburgensia. Torre’s study is as relevant in the second decade of the twenty-first century as it was when it was defended in 1983. For at the same time it offers a commendably careful, rigorous, and extensive examination of the philosophical and theological substance of the controversy—the precise nature of God’s permission of sin and of sufficient grace—and provides a window into the mind and the works of an exceedingly erudite, rigorous, and brilliant yet unjustly forgotten modern Catholic theologian, who was one of the great Dominican Thomists to have taught dogmatic theology at the University of Fribourg. In order fully to appreciate the importance and ongoing relevance of Torre’s study a word about Marín-Sola’s life is necessary. Francisco Marín-Sola was born in 1873 in Cárcar, Spain, and made his vows as a Dominican in 1889 in Ocaña. After his studies in philosophy (Ocaña) and theology (Ávila), he was ordained a BOOK REVIEWS 306 priest in 1897 in the Philippines, where he first worked as a missionary and later as a lecturer at the Colegio de San Juan and at the University of Santo Tomás in Manila, where he received his doctorate in theology in 1909. From 1911 to 1913 he taught at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, which in 1916 bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in Civil Law. From 1913 to 1918 he taught at the studium generale of his Spanish missionary province in Rosaryville, Louisiana, and finally from 1918 to 1927 at the University of Fribourg, where in 1920 he received the Master of Sacred Theology of the Dominican Order. The controversy with Garrigou-Lagrange led in 1927 to Marín-Sola’s dismissal by Master General Paredes from the chair of dogmatic theology at Fribourg. Reassigned to the Dominican convent in Ocaña, Spain (together with Paredes, who had to step down as Master General at the order of the Holy See), he was reassigned a year later to Manila, where he continued teaching at the University of Santo Tomás until his death in 1932. He is remembered best for his magisterial work, La Evolución homogenea del dogma católico (1923; French trans., 1924; English trans., 1988). Marín-Sola’s texts that pertain to the questions of the nature of the divine permission of sin and of the nature of sufficient grace consist first and foremost of three substantive articles buried in the 1925 and 1926 issues of the Spanish Thomistic periodical, Ciencia Tomista. There Marín-Sola argues that the majority of...