Molinism is untenable philosophically. God gives EVERYONE sufficient grace to be saved, both Aquinas and Augustine agree. For them, it is most beautiful to let them choose the good of salvation without the extra push of efficacious grace. To others, their individual story is different. Different people, different plan, all done most beautifully. Not everyone saved, which leads to the question of why God created people who He knew would go to hell. But to give them the chance of salvation was most beautiful of all.
Not so. Someone of greater insight into this admittedly opaque and mind-numbing area of theology is entitled to correct me, but as far as I am aware according to St. Thomas and St. Augustine one actually will not be saved without so-called “efficacious grace”. In other words, those who receive merely sufficient grace, will never attain to salvation but always fail without that “extra push”.
In other words then, according to Domingo Banez’s interpretation of Aquinas, God does not predestine anyone positively to hell but denies the efficacious grace necessary for salvation to all but an “elect” group arbitrarily chosen not according to foreseen merits, thereby knowing that the others will never be able reach heaven. How is this not “Calvinism-Lite”? I know that I am not allowed to label Thomism as semi-Calvinism, just as Thomists are not allowed to label Molinism as semipelagianism, however I fail in all honesty to see how it isn’t and I apologize for saying so.
The result is therefore the same as Calvin’s reprehensible doctrine of double predestination, even if the Thomist model stays within the bounds of orthodoxy, since without efficacious grace no one will attain to salvation.
The Thomist model therefore creates what is to me a purposeless universe: a group of elect are eternally predestined to heaven and will receive the efficacious grace to make this a reality, while the rest are doomed without it.
If I am wrong please correct me but as far as I see it, the Thomist universe is one run by a tyrannical Deity who arbitrarily chooses to grant the grace needed for absolutely attaining salvation only to a select group, while knowing that without this special grace all the rest are doomed.
For me, this destroys the very gift of freewill that makes life, cooperating with saving grace and the entire meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice meaningful.
The frustrating thing is that scholars are agreed that prior to Augustine, NO CHURCH FATHER SUBSCRIBED TO THIS MODEL OF PREDESTINATION. And in the East where Augustine’s sanctity was accepted but not his works or theology, it never took ground either.
Ludwig Ott admits this openly:
While the pre-Augustinian tradition is in favour of the Molinistic explanation, St. Augustine, at least in his later writings, is more in favour of the Thomistic explanation. The Thomist view emphasizes God’s universal causality while the other view stresses the universality of the Divine salvific will, man’s freedom and his cooperation in his salvation.
(Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1974 {orig. 1952}, 242-245)
This is reinforced by Calvin himself, who had read the Greek Fathers and knew that they did not teach the same as Augustine. He wrote:
Calvin’s low opinion of the Greek fathers comes across loud and clear in the following sentence:
Further, even though the Greeks above the rest—and Chrysostom especially among them—extol the ability of the human will, yet all the ancients, save Augustine, so differ, waver, or speak confusedly on this subject, that almost nothing certain can be derived from their writings.
In other words, Calvin is stating that while he was fully aware that the early fathers (“all the ancients”) did not affirm his understanding of predestination, Augustine is the sole exception and so nothing the others said mattered a jot.
How can I not feel bitterness towards St. Augustine, despite his greatness and indisputable sanctity, for this miserable conception of salvation?
He started out as what modern scholars would call, in hindsight, a ‘Molinist’ and then moved to an extreme predestinarian position so as to crush the opposing extreme heresy of Pelagianism.
It is obvious to anyone who genuinely studies the earliest fathers that Augustine’s conception of predestination did not as yet exist. Indeed St. Vincent of Lerins thought Augustine’s model of predestination a “dangerous novelty”…yet St. Thomas embraced it???
This leads me to the conclusion that the Christian East, both Orthodox and Eastern Catholic in Communion with Rome, has preserved the purest and most original approach to predestination whereas the West has followed the thoughts of one man - and one whom we know was highly fallible in other areas of his thought too.
I just cannot accept the Thomist/Augustinian conception of predestination.
. Preference in God is on Faith and choices of men (before during after in a unique present), but not just because some men are better “from the beginning”.
