Predestination as Divine Foreknowledge: Its Dual Perspectives and Implications for Grace and Human Freedom in the Thought of Saint Anselm

Implicit in the writings of Saint Anselm of Canterbury is a distinct conception of the cooperative integration of primary and secondary causality. In this paper I explore this topic in Anselm’s De Concordia, and I propose an interpretation of Anselm’s unique contribution to our understanding of how faith, hope, and grace affirm the authenticity of human freedom, and serve as intermediaries between primary causality (the eternal expanse of divine omniscience) and secondary causality (the temporal span of human experience in creation). Described in this paper as a duality of epistemic perspectives, and crucial for integrating the human, temporal perspective with the divine, eternal perspective, this implicit conception reflects the theological notion of salvific becoming as a movement from believing to seeing, from hoping to possessing, from the partial to the complete, from the potential to the actual, and from time to eternity.