Aquinas on Predestination

[Aelred_Minor]

Richca, let me just take a quick shot () at responding to some of your difficulties regarding Thomism.

I would not argue that God shows His mercy in sparing sinners. But, does He need to manifest His justice in punishing for all eternity the lost?

Of course He does not need to. The question is, has He opted to do this? A Thomist would, I think, argue that the fact of damnation proves that God has so chosen.

1. Do human beings really have free will or are they only free to sin as Martin Luther would have it. According to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, the eternal divine decrees determines the eternal destiny of every human being before any consideration of an individual person’s use of grace. Indeed, it is these infallible decrees that determines whether a person is saved or not.

Garrigou-Lagrange, and apparently St. Thomas, would argue that the infallible decrees of God concerning free human choices do not conflict with free will. As I discussed in a previous post, the Thomist concept of free will revolves around the idea of the will’s “indifference” to partial goods and the consequent lack of necessity in choosing between partial goods. But in actuality the will does choose one thing or another. Every movement in the universe, every passage from potential to actual, has its source in the Pure Act who is the First Cause and Prime Mover of everything, bar none. This applies to both free and necessary acts, without taking away the either free or necessary character of any particular act.

As you may recall, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange suggests the reason some people have a hard time seeing how God could cause an act without imposing necessity upon it is a failure to distinguish between the First Cause and secondary causes. There is a feeling in the modern world that if God caused something to happen then nothing else did, and that if something else was the cause of some phenomenon then God must have had nothing to do with it, beyond perhaps setting the scene for such occurrences to happen.

From a modern Thomist perspective on the other hand when an apple falls (for example) gravity and God can both be said to be true causes of its fall, just on different levels. Gravity was the true natural cause of the falling. Once the apple’s stem no longer held the fruit to the tree the apple fell of necessity (due to the God-given natures of apples and earth and the laws of nature) to the ground. Yet God was also the true cause of the apple’s fall, and not only through having created apple trees and planets and gravity. God creates, sustains, and moves every creature in existence, since He is the Source of all existence. Every movement from potential to actual is brought about by the omnipotence of God. When the apple was hanging from the tree it was potentially falling. As it fell it was actually falling. That move from potential to actual was brought about by God and constituted a sort of partial participation in the Existence which is God, but this in no way diminishes the fact that gravity truly caused the apple’s fall.

Now with the human will we have a choice that no apple ever has. Once its stem was snapped the apple fell of necessity, whereas when we are, for example, presented with sufficient grace for salvation it is our free choice whether to accept it or reject it. Nature imposes no necessity one way or the other on that choice; the decision lies entirely within the freedom of the chooser. Nevertheless when a person does make a choice (let’s say it’s the choice to accept grace) there is still a movement from potentiality to actuality. While the person was still deliberating his choice he had the potential to accept grace, and when the person did accept it he was actually doing so. This move from potential to actual in a creature is again something that is, and that only can be, brought about by God. So in both necessary and free acts God is the Prime Mover, but considered in their secondary causes (which are true and complete causes) necessary acts are really necessary and free acts are really free.

Usually I dislike split posts and it is my understanding that they break forum rules, but since you raise numerous points I think I can respond to the rest with a later post. So, to be continued.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Ok, let me take a crack at your other concerns.

1. What is the point of commandments, exhortations, or counsels?

The point is the same as in Molinism or any other rival of Thomism. God commands, exhorts, and councils men to do good and avoid evil, while not forcing them to obey. He empowers all to obey His commands (otherwise it would be unjust to punish for infractions), but He leaves the actual obedience up to individual free choice. The difference is that, as described above, Thomism recognizes that even the free choice to cooperate with grace is itself a gift from God, for such a choice is a very great good and all goodness in Creation is a free gift from God.

1. Does the whole history of mankind make any sense according to this doctrine?

Of course it does not, not to the natural human intellect. This is true in the case of any even remotely realistic view of the world. The immensity of evil overwhelms us when we think of it, and even more when we experience it. Why would a good God allow so much bad to happen in His universe? We can offer philosophical explanations that may or may not cover all the bases, but in almost no case can such explanations really satisfy our desire to know why God permitted an individual evil.

Perhaps you have another concern besides the problem of evil, but you did not specify it.

1. Can it be said that God justly expelled the Israelites from their land for not keeping His commandments when they had no power to do so?

But they did have power to do so. As mentioned above, Thomism affirms that God gives to all human beings the power to obey His commandments. If He did not give this power there would be no justice in His punishing sin. This really happens in the case of brute beasts, which sometimes do very evil things in terms of causing physical evils (killing innocent people, for example) but because they acted from necessity God does not hold these animals morally responsible. Human choices by contrast are free and not prompted by necessity (though like everything that exists they are from God).

1. Were Adam and Eve justly expelled from paradise if it was inevitable that they would break God’s commandment?

Again, it was not inevitable that they would break God’s commandment, at least not in any sense that would make their punishment unjust. God’s plan for history will of course take place and that includes human choices, but for their part Adam and Eve had free wills and sufficient grace to resist the temptation of the serpent. They freely chose to disobey God and suffered the consequences. Yet this was permitted by God at least in part so that He could bring about the greater good of the Incarnation and Redemption as a merciful response to it.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

1. Does this doctrine make God the author of sin?

It does not. Moral evil, like every evil, is an absence of good, and so God is not the author of it. God merely refrains from filling the void, so to speak, and only does so for some other good purpose. It is true that everything that has positive existence at the moment a man commits a sin is from God. The man himself, his faculty of will, his perception of a partial good that is contrary to a greater good (like salvation), and what Thomists call the “physical act” of choosing that lesser good, all come from God. But the moral dimension of that act by which a man rejects love for God, that is a true evil which does not have positive existence and so cannot be said to have been directly or indirectly caused by God. Admittedly I have always found it difficult to get my head around why the moral evil of sin is not indirectly caused by God through God’s causing the “physical act of sin”, but Thomists like Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange have insisted on that point and I have generally thought it was my own lack of intelligence and full understanding of the issue which has caused this difficulty for me.

1. Is double predestination an evitable consequence of this doctrine?

If “evitable” was a typo for “inevitable”, the answer is “no.” If you really meant the word then the answer is “yes”, we can avoid this error.

Of course you could reduce the doctrine to only those parts of it which are compatible with the heresy or redefine double predestination to mean something orthodox, but both those strategies can be used to make any heresy seem compatible with any orthodox belief. The fact is that Thomism explicitly rejects double predestination. God predestines the elect to heaven (and of course does so logically prior to his foreknowledge of their cooperation with grace since that itself is a free gift of God and a means of bringing their predestined glory to fruition), but those who go to hell do so as a just punishment for sins which they freely chose to commit despite being given sufficient grace to resist those temptations. In other words the elect are predestined and the reprobate are not.

1. Does God really will the salvation of all men as St Paul wrote? How strong is God’s universal salvific will to save? Well, we are taught that Jesus Christ suffered his passion, crucifiction and death for the entire human race.

God wills the salvation of all men antecedently, that is, prior to all other considerations. He does this because of His great love and generosity by which He wishes happiness for all His creatures. However He also takes other considerations into account by which He chooses some men and women to be actually saved while others, much as it goes against His antecedent wish that they be saved, He refrains from actually saving and instead permits that they through their own fault go to damnation. Thus God antecedently wills the salvation of all men, but efficaciously wills (wills in the sense that He omnipotently chooses to really bring it about) the salvation only of the elect.

As far as the death of Christ goes, He died in order to make salvation possible for all men, but to make it actual only in the elect. This is necessary to maintain if one does not wish to assert the absurdity that a creature has the strength to thwart God’s omnipotent actions. This is true even from a Molinist perspective, although in the case of Molinism it gets complicated by the irrational tangle of thought that is the theory of scientia media, by which God’s knowledge would actually be determined by the uncaused (but somehow predictable) choices of creatures. Still, even in this case God would efficaciously will the salvation only of those He foreknows will cooperate with His grace, and will only antecedently, only prior to other considerations, the salvation of those who will in fact go to hell.

This perspective, which is or ought to be agreed upon by all Catholic schools of thought, is also supportable from the Bible. St. Paul says (though he likely has immediate membership in the Church in mind rather than final salvation):

“For to this end we toil and strive,[a] because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe.” (1 Timothy 4:10)

Clearly it is consistent with Biblical thinking to regard Christ as the savior of all men in a broad sense but also of a smaller subset of men in a special sense.

 

[Richca]

Now with the human will we have a choice that no apple ever has. Once its stem was snapped the apple fell of necessity, whereas when we are, for example, presented with sufficient grace for salvation it is our free choice whether to accept it or reject it. Nature imposes no necessity one way or the other on that choice; the decision lies entirely within the freedom of the chooser. Nevertheless when a person does make a choice (let’s say it’s the choice to accept grace) there is still a movement from potentiality to actuality. While the person was still deliberating his choice he had the potential to accept grace, and when the person did accept it he was actually doing so. This move from potential to actual in a creature is again something that is, and that only can be, brought about by God. So in both necessary and free acts God is the Prime Mover, but considered in their secondary causes (which are true and complete causes) necessary acts are really necessary and free acts are really free.

Usually I dislike split posts and it is my understanding that they break forum rules, but since you raise numerous points I think I can respond to the rest with a later post. So, to be continued.

Hello Aelred Minor and thank you for posting. I think you made a very good post.

I have no problem with the above paragraph you wrote nor would Fr. Most. In fact, Fr. Most in his book “Predestination, Grace, and the Salvific Will of God,” describes the interplay of grace and free will in terms of God’s universal causality as First Cause and man as secondary cause. However, in Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s system, sufficient grace is not sufficient for man not to resist grace. Man needs an efficacious grace to overcome his resistance to grace. And, according to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, God simply does not give every human being efficacious grace.
Fr. Most, as well as the Molinists and at the very least some Thomists, disagree with this system of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange. They say sufficient grace is indeed sufficient and it will be efficacious if man does not resist it. Aquinas says that the ability to impede or not to impede the reception of divine grace is within the scope of free choice (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 3, Chapter 159). And the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cf. #1993), quoting the Council of Trent, says we can reject the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.
Now, no theologian would deny that man can choose to sin and that God is not the author of sin. Can man choose not to sin?
Fr. Most describes the process of grace as follows:
God begins to move a man’s intellect and will by grace. If the man does not resist this grace ( the non resistance is a non-being or ontological zero, the man is doing nothing, grace is moving him), grace will continue to move the man’s intellect and will and eventually elicit a positive response from him. This positive response from the man is a real being. It is caused by God as the first cause with the man cooperating, the secondary cause.
If the man resists the grace from God, this is obviously an evil, a defect in the creature, and God is not the cause of it. The man by resisting can drop out of act, the act which began by God moving him. It is a negative, not a movement from potency to act but from act to potency, a dropping out of act, and thus God does not need to move man for the resistance.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Hello Aelred Minor and thank you for posting. I think you made a very good post.

I have no problem with the above paragraph you wrote nor would Fr. Most. In fact, Fr. Most in his book “Predestination, Grace, and the Salvific Will of God,” describes the interplay of grace and free will in terms of God’s universal causality as First Cause and man as secondary cause. However, in Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s system, sufficient grace is not sufficient for man not to resist grace. Man needs an efficacious grace to overcome his resistance to grace. And, according to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, God simply does not give every human being efficacious grace.
Fr. Most, as well as the Molinists and at the very least some Thomists, disagree with this system of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange. They say sufficient grace is indeed sufficient and it will be efficacious if man does not resist it. Aquinas says that the ability to impede or not to impede the reception of divine grace is within the scope of free choice (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 3, Chapter 159). And the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cf. #1993), quoting the Council of Trent, says we can reject the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.
Now, no theologian would deny that man can choose to sin and that God is not the author of sin. Can man choose not to sin?
Fr. Most describes the process of grace as follows:
God begins to move a man’s intellect and will by grace. If the man does not resist this grace ( the non resistance is a non-being or ontological zero, the man is doing nothing, grace is moving him), grace will continue to move the man’s intellect and will and eventually elicit a positive response from him. This positive response from the man is a real being. It is caused by God as the first cause with the man cooperating, the secondary cause.
If the man resists the grace from God, this is obviously an evil, a defect in the creature, and God is not the cause of it. The man by resisting can drop out of act, the act which began by God moving him. It is a negative, not a movement from potency to act but from act to potency, a dropping out of act, and thus God does not need to move man for the resistance.

To be clear, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange and other Thomists do not say that sufficient grace is not sufficient to resist temptation. Quite the opposite. Sufficient grace is emphatically insisted upon, for otherwise God would not be just in punishing sinners. The only sense in which sufficient grace is not sufficient for salvation is that it does not become efficacious if it is not accepted, and if it can be either accepted or rejected by the person who receives it (as it can) then we must look to something outside the sufficient grace itself as the cause. That something else is free will, which like everything in the universe is moved by God.

Here we reach the point that the quote from Fr. Most, which I think Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange would mostly find unobjectionable (thought it’s a shame we can’t go back in time and pose the questions to them) does not make sufficiently clear. There is still a free human choice made when one chooses to cooperate with grace. Why do some men make this choice while others do not? Surely Fr. Most did not mean to imply that the human will only acts freely by rejecting grace but not in accepting it. And if sufficient grace can be resisted through this negative non-acceptance then surely it is not the sufficient grace itself that moves the will to accept it. It is another kind of gift of God, the “physical premovement” of the will to accept divine assistance which is present when sufficient grace is accepted and absent when sufficient grace is rejected.

I know that Molinists often believe the Thomist concept of sufficient grace is not sufficient (pun intended), just as Thomists often believe, rightly in my opinion, that scientia media means necessarily that man does not have free will. Indeed, both camps end up seeing the other as determinists and themselves as the champions of free will. This is the point at which we have to acknowledge that there are irreconcilable differences between the theological positions and that we must await the Church’s judgement on the matter, if it ever comes. Personally, as someone inclined towards the Thomist position, I think the fact that the Church has not dogmatically endorsed Molinism despite all the prejudices of post-Luther Catholicism being in its favor is the work of the Holy Spirit preventing the Church from formally falling into error.

 

[Richca]

To be clear, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange and other Thomists do not

say that sufficient grace is not sufficient to resist temptation. Quite the opposite. Sufficient grace is emphatically insisted upon, for otherwise God would not be just in punishing sinners. The only sense in which sufficient grace is not sufficient for salvation is that it does not become efficacious if it is not accepted, and if it can be either accepted or rejected by the person who receives it (as it can) then we must look to something outside the sufficient grace itself as the cause. That something else is free will, which like everything in the universe is moved by God.

This sounds reasonable and Fr. Most would agree with the above I believe. However, in Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s system and Thomists who would agree with him, sufficient grace does not produce a salutary meritorious act conducive to salvation. An efficacious grace is necessary for this. And God simply does not give all human beings efficacious grace and this decree from God is prior to any good or evil a man may do. How you reconcile this with God’s will to save all mankind is beyond me. In Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s system, the end result of sufficient grace is damnation, the end result of efficacious grace is salvation.

Here we reach the point that the quote from Fr. Most, which I think Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange would mostly find unobjectionable (thought it’s a shame we can’t go back in time and pose the questions to them) does not make sufficiently clear. There is still a free human choice made when one chooses to cooperate with grace. Why do some men make this choice while others do not?

 

[Daniel_Monroe]

Aelred Minor. I don’t have the time and resources to really do a good job here, giving sources and so forth.
Dan. My life has just become very busy, so don’t apologize–I doubt I can do anybody justice now.
Aelred Minor. But St. Thomas Aquinas certainly affirmed free will.
Dan. He certainly did, but his position that “God elects some and rejects others” is due to the preservation of the different grades of being, and that this multiformity in turn is based on the inability of the university to exhibit the simplicity of God puts his belief in free will in a very tight spot (Q. 23, A. 5). Such a view undermines free will very forcibly. His claims that “that which flows from free-will is also of predestination” (ibid.), that “the order of predestination is certain; yet free-will is not destroyed; whence the effect of predestination has its contingency” (Q. 23, A. 6) and that “guilt proceeds from the free-will of the person who is reprobated and deserted by grace” (Q. 23, A. 3) seem to suggest that Aquinas was aware of the discrepancy between predestination and his defence of free will (Q. 83).

Aelred Minor. More immediately to the point, Aquinas is not rebutting Damascene, but is attempting (even if wrongly) to demonstrate that he and Damascene are in agreement. He attempts this, as I’ve said, by claiming that what Damascene was really talking about was the imposition of necessity upon the human will, and Aquinas (like later Thomists) rejected the idea that predestination means the imposition of necessity.
Dan. I disagree, but lack the qualifications to speak creditably any further.

 

[Daniel_Monroe]

Richca. Obviously, the doctrine of predestination comes from Holy Scripture.
Daniel. Please forgive me for not being able to respond in detail to many interesting points. I will confine myself to only this claim, because it touches the most important point of all. I concede that the notion of predestination comes from Holy Scripture. However, the doctrine over which so many men have labored for so many centuries to beat into some kind of universally acceptable proposition can only be dated to the Blessed Augustine at the earliest. As people often observe, wistfully or resentfully, it never comes up in the East, nor (as far as I know) in the West, until Augustine.
If Augustine is right, and if what he is right about really matters to our salvation, then what does that fact say about the first several centuries of Christians? It is easier for me to believe that he is wrong on this. If Augustine is wrong, though, then several centuries have been wasted in trying to unite mutually repugnant propositions.

 

[empther]

bump

 

[Aelred_Minor]

This sounds reasonable and Fr. Most would agree with the above I believe. However, in Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s system and Thomists who would agree with him, sufficient grace does not produce a salutary meritorious act conducive to salvation. An efficacious grace is necessary for this. And God simply does not give all human beings efficacious grace and this decree from God is prior to any good or evil a man may do. How you reconcile this with God’s will to save all mankind is beyond me. In Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s system, the end result of sufficient grace is damnation, the end result of efficacious grace is salvation.

The “end result” of sufficient grace is the potential for salvation. It does not, simply as sufficient grace, bring about actual salvation. That’s just not what it is for. By definition it is efficacious grace that bestows an actual effect. Sufficient grace is that grace which makes salvation possible, not necessarily actual.

Grace that is not merely sufficient but also efficacious is needed for salvation that is not merely possible but also actual. This efficacious grace is not in fact given to everyone in such a way that they are actually saved, otherwise all would be saved. Anyone who is not a universalist accepts this. It is or ought to be uncontroversial among Catholics, since it is the only logical conclusion one can draw from the damnation of some men. The real question is, on what basis does God grant efficacious grace to some and not to others?

As for God’s will to save all mankind, as I have already written this salvific will is universal antecedently but is clearly non-universal efficaciously (otherwise all would be saved).

Some men resist God’s grace because human beings have free will.

Agreed. Sufficient grace gives a man the potential to choose God, but if he does not choose God it is because efficacious grace never moved him to actually choose God. Instead he freely chose to sin. Again, this is or ought to be uncontrovercial.

God can move man’s will efficaciously (forestall man’s resistance to grace) if He wants too and I’m sure He probably does this at times. However, this is outside His ordinary providence and not in keeping with man’s nature.

I think you must have made mistake expressing yourself here. You have already acknowledged (if I may take for granted that you are endorsing Fr. Most’s position) that efficacious grace physically premoves the will. This is the very definition of efficacious grace at least according to Thomists: grace that really moves the will. If the kind of movement you are talking about here is not “physical promotion” but a kind of violent forcing of the will then I would argue God would never do such a thing as it would degrade human dignity, and any such forced action would lack any merit or demerit.

Why not? sufficient grace is efficacious if man does not resist it. What is the point of a sufficient grace if it cannot produce a salutary effect? It should rather be called a deficient grace.

The point of sufficient grace, as I have said, is to make salvation possible. It always succeeds in doing this, so it is not deficient. The point of efficacious grace, by contrast, is to make salvation actual. It also always succeeds. The reason both forms of grace always accomplish their purpose is that they are acts of God, and God is omnipotent. This is still another point that ought to be uncontroversial, even if one takes the position (irrational, in my opinion) that God grants or does not grant efficacious grace as a result of His foreknowledge of a person’s choices, rather than His foreknowledge of the person’s choices being based on His freely chosen granting of efficacious grace to the person.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Where do you get this from? It appears you are saying efficacious grace involves a physical pre-motion of the intellect or will or both and sufficient grace does not. Fr. Most agrees that grace causes a physical pre-motion of the will and intellect in man, but as Aquinas says, to resist or not resist the reception of grace is in the power of free choice. Now, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange would say that not to resist grace is already some good and thus must have God for its cause (he seems to be at variance with Aquinas here). Fr. Most says that in not resisting grace, man is not doing anything, non-resistance in this sense is an ontological zero and thus doesn’t need God for its cause. Grace moves man and if man does not resist it, it will continue to move man to make a positive consent. The positive consent is the result of grace, God and man cooperating.

I get this from Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, who explained the Renaissance-era evolution of the term “physical premotion” from St. Thomas’ simpler statements about “motion.” The point is that efficacious grace, from the Thomist perspective, is grace that actually moves the will to a salutary act rather than merely making such an act possible (as sufficient grace always does).

Garrigou-Lagrange, and Aquinas as you mention, both agree that whether sufficient grace blossoms into the act it makes possible depends on the free decision of the human will. This is still another uncontroversial point. Also obviously non-resistance like non-anything is an ontological zero. But the point is that, as your summary of Most’s position also acknowledges, something positive really happens when a man cooperates with grace. He really makes a free choice to do the right thing. This is the positive element of the act, and this choice like every other movement in the universe is from God. Likewise, when a man makes a sinful choice the evil aspect of it, the way in which it resists sufficient grace by not doing the good thing which that grace had made possible, is a negative reality not caused by God as you/Most point out. But at the same time there is the choice of the lesser good which has been preferred to the higher one. The positive aspects of this choice are also something with real being, with a movement from potential to actual, and so necessarily God is the First Cause of it as well.

It is my opinion that we need to get away from the very dark and austere conception of God that both, i’m not saying all, Molinists and Thomists have put forward in the past. A doctrine of predestination whereby God decreed to create the human race, and then decreed that He would provide salutary help for some to merit eternal life, the rest He would permit to fall into sin and thus punish them for all eternity is a very dark doctrine and if I’m not mistaken, very contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church. No wonder the theologians thought it an unfathomable mystery. I think the whole problem here lies in denying that human beings really do have a role of their own to play in shaping their eternal destiny.

Holy Mother Church teaches that God wills the salvation of all mankind and that Jesus Christ died for and loves every human being without exception. God has revealed Himself as our Father. She also teaches that God created mankind with free will and that man can resist God’s offer of grace. Fr. Most elaborates on all these points and more in his book.

It is a dark doctrine in the sense of being, as you say, an “unfathomable mystery.” Really it is the ultimate example of the problem of evil, and that is not one that any of us are going to solve in this life.

Thomism acknowledges and often stresses all the points of Church teaching that you mention. I think the perception that it somehow takes away from the real role people play in their own salvation, freely choosing to cooperate with grace or not, comes from a tendency to conflate First and secondary causes, so that if something has a First Cause we have difficulty acknowledging that the secondary cause is a real cause at all.

I do think that for some people non-Congruist Molinism, pop-Arminianism, and some miscellaneous odd theories like that of Fr. Most seem to offer an easy out to the problem of evil at least on a psychological level, by making God apparently more distant from human choices and allowing one to possibly consider free will itself the “greater good” for the sake of which God allows evil. Personally I don’t see it really working out, and in any case I tend to be suspicious of any approach to the problem of evil that reduces its mysteriousness to a minimum.

 

[Flimmy]

It seems that men are not predestined by God, for Damascene says (De Fide Orth. ii, 30): “It must be borne in mind that God foreknows but does not predetermine everything, since He foreknows all that is in us, but does not predetermine it all.”

He knows all.

 

[Richca]

Garrigou-Lagrange, and Aquinas as you mention, both agree that whether sufficient grace blossoms into the act it makes possible depends on the free decision of the human will. This is still another uncontroversial point.

Hello Aelred Minor,
The distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace as the Thomists in line with the Thomism of Fr. Garrigou-lagrange see it is a development of Thomism after St Thomas Aquinas. From what I understand, this distinction is not found in Aquinas’ writings. Thomists cull the distinction from certain texts of Aquinas.
“Whether sufficient grace blossoms into the act it makes possible depends on the free decision of the human will,” I believe Aquinas would agree. However, I don’t believe the Thomism of Fr Garrigou-Lagrange understands this to be the case. For in their Thomism, the human being can claim nothing of their own in the performance of a salutary good act, not even non-resistance which is an ontological zero. This is why they have the distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace. They say that in order for a man to perform a salutary act, God must efficaciously move man’s will to accept and to not resist His grace.

Also obviously non-resistance like non-anything is an ontological zero.

 

[Jerry-Jet]

The Catholic Church chose not to decide the arguments between the Molinistrs/Congruists and the Thomists.

What if Pope Francis were to reopen the question? Could any amalgamation of Mostianism/syncertism ala Robet Bellarmine win out against the Thomists?

Sometimes I almost think that the Catholic Church has decided that St. Thomas Aquinas is incapable of error. Why would such a supposition be extreme?

I personally think that Most was pretty close to the truth. I also believe that syncretists who say that our salvation also depends on prayer are correct.

In the scripture it says that whosoever cries out to the Lord will be saved. A person can’t say to himself–I’ll wait for the Lord to MOVE me to shout out. If He doesn’t MOVE me then nothing I do will save me because He didn’t WILL to MOVE me!

I do believe that God does all the saving. I believe that non reistance is a POSITIVE ZERO. Within that paradoxical statement lies the centrality of the truth involved in God’s will and our cooperation.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Sorry for the delay, I’ve been away from CAF for a while.

“Whether sufficient grace blossoms into the act it makes possible depends on the free decision of the human will,” I believe Aquinas would agree. However, I don’t believe the Thomism of Fr Garrigou-Lagrange understands this to be the case. For in their Thomism, the human being can claim nothing of their own in the performance of a salutary good act, not even non-resistance which is an ontological zero. This is why they have the distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace. They say that in order for a man to perform a salutary act, God must efficaciously move man’s will to accept and to not resist His grace.

I got the botanical metaphor from Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange himself, though I don’t remember his exact words. The basic idea is that since sufficient grace gives the potential and efficacious grace gives the actual the latter is a sort of continuation and flourishing of the former which always occurs if the person does not abuse his free will and resist grace. But that growth itself is also a gift of God. This is one of those matters which may seem contradictory if you are operating on the basis of a distorted caricature of Thomism, but it is really quite Thomist.

By the way, I seem to detect the conflation of primary and secondary causes again here. The fact that God moves the will in no way takes away from the fact that the will is free to choose between any partial goods the intellect perceives.

I’m not sure the Thomism of Garrigou-lagrange saw this distinction, i.e., that in not resisting God’s grace, man is doing nothing. God does not need to be causing being here. They may have been more pre-occupied with other doctrines of theirs such as the principle of predilection, God’s predetermining decrees, predestination, and the distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace where Fr. Most’s analysis of the interaction of grace and free will would just not fit in. If one accepts Fr. Most’s solution, then the Thomists’ doctrines of sufficent and efficacious grace, God’s predetermining decrees, and the principle of predilection is not needed. God wills the salvation of all and gives His grace to all. Man can resist or not resist this grace by his own free will.

As I believe I have explained in earlier posts, though maybe not to well, the positive consent to grace which is a command of the will, is man cooperating with grace with God as First Cause. This will be effected if their is non-resistance. If man does not resist, grace will help man make a positive consent.

I may have improperly conceded a point here.

Sure, the prefix “non-” denotes an absence or negation. But we are really talking about something positive here: cooperation with grace. To reduce free cooperation with grace to non-resistance would be analogous to reducing obedience to non-rebellion, love to non-apathy, goodness to non-evil, truth to non-falsehood, etc.

Is non-falsehood an ontological zero? Is non-falsehood “present” wherever truth is present? Is the presence of truth made possible by the absence of falsehood? Maybe, in a sense, but let’s not play word games here. The fact is that when the will is moved to cooperate with grace something positive is happening.

Evidently Fr. Most agrees that this movement takes place and even describes it with the “Banezian” Thomist language of “physical premotion.” The absence of resistance to this grace is the necessary negative corollary to the fact of acceptance, but the relevant truth is that cooperation with grace is something positive and non-cooperation with grace is something negative. Why does God give this gift to some and not to others? This is an inscrutable mystery, but the mystery is not penetrated simply by saying “He doesn’t give it to the people he doesn’t give it to.”

The Catholic Church teaches as a matter of faith and Holy Scripture attests that man’s free will (the cause of the angels’ fall was their free will) is the cause of moral evil. God is not directly, or indirectly the cause of moral evil. Their is no mystery here. However, it may seem mysterious to us who have faith why a person would reject God and choose hell.

Of course Thomists like all Catholics agree that the cause of evil is man’s and angel’s free will and that God is not directly or indirectly its cause. But does this mean that there is no mystery to God’s permission of evil? I really don’t know what to say to that. I suppose I could pull out the old Holocaust example. God could have stopped it, but He didn’t. True, Nazis had free will, but answering the problem with this fact is about as satisfying as telling a mother whose child has just fallen to his death that gravity was just exercising its God-given properties. If this is not evident to you then perhaps we are too different as people to hope for a meeting of minds on the subject.