Free Creatures of an Eternal God: Thomas Aquinas on God’s Infallible Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will by Harm J. M. J. Goris (review)

312 BOOK REVIEWS among them. It is by virtue of our being persons that we resemble God. Though our human personhood is limited in various ways, personhood as such is not limited. In Crosby's words: "we human persons, limited though we are, are not limited because we are persons." We come to know God by knowing the human person, and to know the person through knowing God. Lenoir-Rhyne College Hickory, North Carolina PHILIP BLOSSER Free Creatures of an Eternal God: Thomas Aquinas on God's Infallible Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will. By HARM J. M. J. GORIS. Leuven: Peeters, 1997. Pp. 335. 1260 BEF (cloth). ISBN 90-6831-866-7. The very title of this book raises some immediate suspicions: is there not a contradiction between the claims (1) that God is eternal in the sense of being beyond temporality and (2) that God has infallible foreknowledge of human free choices (where fore connotes knowledge that is located temporally prior to its object)? As far as I am able to tell, St. Thomas Aquinas thought them incompatible. Goris's work, however, curiously takes another point of view. The first part of the book lays out his angle of approach. He wants to contextualize Aquinas's doctrine within the contemporary foreknowledgefreedom problematic wherein it has not been adequately understood for a number of reasons. The first cause of misunderstanding arises from a general failure to recall the essentially theological character of Aquinas's treatment. Goris asserts that there are three theological keys to Aquinas's approach: Scripture, the via negativa, and a keen sensitivity to the ways in which our creaturely modus significandi affects our discourse about God. While the first key does not figure in the rest of the book, the latter two (especially the third) receive extended consideration. With respect to the via negativa, Goris argues persuasively that Aquinas's doctrine of eternity is primarily an exercise in negative theology: eternity essentially amounts to a denial of temporal limitation in God. Once this aspect of Aquinas's treatment is taken into account, Goris shows how it is possible to refute the standard contemporary objections to timeless eternity. He emphasizes that the negative approach means that we must continually remind ourselves that we do not have any positive grasp on what eternity, foreknowledge, providence, etc. are really like in God. A major emphasis of the study is the claim that we are perennially prone to getting tripped up in articulating the grammar of the problem by the irreducibly tensed nature of our knowing and our linguistic .usage. BOOK REVIEWS 313 Goris concludes the introductory section with a programmatic chapter in which he alleges that the basic confusion surrounding Aquinas's doctrine is the failure to distinguish the problems of (1) temporal fatalism and (2) causal determinism. "Temporal fatalism has to do with the relation between God's fore-acts [foreknowledge, predestination, providence] and their objects considered from a diachronic perspective: it focuses on the prefix 'fore' (prae) and deals with the relation between present (or past) and future" (56). The standard interpretation of Aquinas holds that an appeal to divine eternity (the so-called eternity solution) neutralizes this problem by denying that there is any real diachronic relationship between God's knowledge and contingent events. Goris, however, argues that an appeal to divine eternity does not solve the problem of temporal fatalism because "there is still a temporal relation between our present (or past) statement (be it a present-tense or past-tense statement) about God's foreknowledge and the future object of God's knowledge.... the immutability of God's eternal knowledge, signified in human language by a past tense, seems to lead to fatalism" (57, 61). Goris acknowledges that he is not the first person to claim that an appeal to eternity leaves such a problem still standing. He is the first one that I know of, however, to make the claim (on 57) that Aquinas himself thought an appeal to timeless eternity left a diachronic divine foreknowledge problem. I believe Goris to be in error on both counts. While I will not stop to argue for it here, I would claim that our temporal propositional expression...