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  • Divine Causality and Human Free Choice: Domingo Báñez, Physical Premotion and the Controversy "de auxiliis" Revisited by R. J. Matava
  • Trent Pomplun
Divine Causality and Human Free Choice: Domingo Báñez, Physical Premotion and the Controversy "de auxiliis" Revisited. By R. J. Matava. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xii + 365. $194.00 (hardback). ISBN: 978-90-04-31030-8.

Divine Causality and Human Free Choice is an adventurous, if occasionally unsteady, attempt to summarize the infamous controversy de auxiliis and to offer a Thomist solution to the problems of divine causality and human freedom. Matava characterizes his work as "an exercise in historically informed philosophical theology" (8) that seeks to understand the "less-studied" side of the controversy, namely, the development of the "classical Thomist" position of Domingo Báñez, rather than the more commonly studied position of his great rival, the Jesuit Luis de Molina. The first four chapters are historical. Matava introduces readers to the controversy between Báñez and Molina, outlines Báñez's position on divine causality and human free choice, explains Báñez's critique of Molina, and explains Molina's critique of Báñez. After a transitional fifth chapter on Bernard Lonergan's critique of Báñez and Molina, Matava offers his own interpretation of Aquinas with a close reading of STh I, q. 45, a. 3. In his historical treatment of the controversy, Matava treats all of the classical loci, both medieval and modern: physical premotion, middle knowledge, sufficient and efficacious grace, predestination, providence, free choice, indifference, the composed and divided senses, de dicto and de re modality, the "grounding objection," and so forth. In his more systematic proposal, Matava expands this already wide field to include technical questions about the relation of creation in order to argue that God's causality of human free choices is best construed as one instance of the broader mystery of creation.

Matava's work is a must-read for anyone interested in these issues, although I suspect many will find points on which to disagree with him. Unlike most [End Page 493] modern theologians who enter into the ready-made academic debate about "compatibilism" and "libertarianism," Matava quotes liberally from the texts of Báñez and Molina. For this reason alone, Divine Causality and Human Free Choice marks a great advance over most works on the subject. Although Matava sometimes depends too much on William Lane Craig and Thomas Flint for his understanding of Molina, his work is especially useful for reminding us of the theological resurgence of these debates with Norbert del Prado and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. After Matava notes Báñez's "uncompromising commitment" to what he calls "classical Thomism," one might expect Divine Causality and Human Free Choice to be a spirited defense of the great Dominican Scholastic, but Matava's account is more neatly dialectical: "both Báñez and Molina," he argues, "are right in their critiques of each other and, consequently … both of their own respective positions are deficient" (322). Both share suppositions that rendered the controversy unavoidable and unsolvable at the time. It comes as little surprise, then, that Matava interprets the controversy de auxiliis as a key moment in the genealogy of modernity.

As a result, Divine Causality and Human Free Choice is marred by some dubious historical claims. Matava presents Ockham as the leader of nominalists and speaks of "classical Thomism" as representing the dominant theological paradigm in early modern Scholastic Catholicism. In truth, few agreed with Ockham, and Thomism was but one school among many during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Nor was the Thomist tradition unified. The "classical Thomism" of Báñez and Medina attacked the humanistic Thomism of Cajetan, Vitoria, Las Casas, and Cano as readily as it attacked Franciscans and Jesuits. One also hears echoes of the old Lutheran historiography adopted by Catholic historians like Joseph Lortz and Erwin Iserloh—and subsequently adopted by both existentialist and transcendental Thomists—when Matava says that the Church lacked the theological resources to deal decisively with the issues raised by the controversy. The implicit promise is that modern theologians now possess the requisite sophistication to deal with these issues once and for...

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