I postponed making a decision in the matter of de auxiliis [the great controversy between the Molinists and the Dominicans] for three reasons: the first, in order to be conscientious, and also considering that time teaches and shows the truth about everything, acting like a great judge and censor of all things. The second, because both parties are in substantial agreement with Catholic truth, namely that God through his efficacious grace makes us act and turns us from unwilling to willing subjects, bending and changing human will. There is disagreement about that, but only concerning the manner in which God does this: the Dominicans say that he predetermines our wills in a physical manner, namely, really and efficaciously, while the Jesuits claim that he does so congruously and morally. Both opinions can be defended. The third reason is that in our day and age, in which there are many heresies, it is most appropriate to preserve and uphold the reputation and credibility of both religious orders, since to discredit either one may turn out to be greatly harmful. If we were to ask what we are to believe in this matter, I would say that we must uphold and follow the teachings of the Council of Trent, Session VI, On Justification, which are very clear and straightforward about what was the error and heresy of Pelagians and Semipelagians, as well as Calvin's. This session also teaches the Catholic doctrine according to which it is necessary for human free will to be moved, excited and helped by God's grace, and that the will can freely assent or dissent. The Council did not entertain the question of how grace works, but merely touched upon it and left the explanation alone, regarding it useless and unnecessary, thus imitating Pope Celestine, who, having, defined some issues or propositions on this matter, said he did not want to condemn or elaborate on more difficult or subtler ones. (Footnote 114: "Denzinger, 1997 a.")
- Pope Paul V, explaining to the Spanish ambassador why he did not make a formal decision regarding the De Auxiliis controversy (from Guido Stucco, The Catholic Doctrine of Predestination: From Luther to Jansenius, p. 198)
Following up from my previous two articles (here and here) on the rehabilitation and defense of Molinism from an Augustinian point of view, I wanted to address another concern that I have had in the past and that often arises about the orthodoxy of Molinism. Again, I have not read Molina directly, except for a few excerpts here and there. (Most of his Concordia has not been translated into English yet.) I am dependent for my knowledge of Molina's views and the views of his followers on several sources, especially the work of Dr. Alfred J. Freddoso, Fr. John Hardon, and Dr. Guido Stucco. Dr. Stucco in particular has been immensely helpful as his book, The Catholic Doctrine of Predestination: From Luther to Jansenius, contains a blow-by-blow account of Molina's Concordia and a blow-by-blow account of the De Auxiliis controversy (the incredibly detailed and long-lasting debate between the Jesuits and the Dominicans over Molinism and related issues), as well as a wonderful collection of primary text translations that provide a very helpful window into the thinking of the people involved in the debates of that time. I also, just the other day, came across a fascinating article by Dr. Kirk R. MacGregor arguing that one can be a Calvinist Molinist. It was actually reading that article that was the immediate trigger for the writing of this post.
Anyway, I wanted to address another objection that has been made against the Molinist position. Molina was very concerned about the idea, present in the Dominican ideas about predestination as well as elsewhere, that God decides by his free choice what a particular person will choose in a given situation and then makes that choice happen by his direct action. So, if Bob chooses X, Molina was very concerned about anyone saying that the reason Bob chose X is because God, by a free choice of God's will, decided to cause Bob to choose X. Instead, Molina wanted to say that Bob's choosing of X was a given characteristic of the world that God did not directly freely bring about but which he found in the world as a natural part of it. For obvious reasons, this idea of Molina's struck his critics as a threat to God's sovereignty and his status as the one First Cause, as well as a threat to the graciousness of salvation. It seemed as if Molina was making Bob's choice a First Cause in its own right, which would mean that there is something in creation that doesn't come from God, and it would also mean that Bob's good choices (especially his choice to follow Christ) are not gifts from God but are owing ultimately solely to Bob himself, providing Bob a ground for boasting.
I dealt with this to some degree in my previous post, where I pointed out that Molina is not opposed to the idea that God's grace is the source of our good will; he was simply concerned that we not talk about God's being the source of our good will in such a way as to give the impression that God directly causes our actions in the way of a kind of physical cause that would circumvent or even go against the free will of the person. We don't want to say that God overrode Bob's will or circumvented it, taking him over and directly causing his acts or forcing him to do them. Instead, we want to recognize that God's moving of Bob's will towards good is a kind of movement consistent with the nature of the will - a movement of effective persuasion, whereby Bob will certainly choose to follow the prompting of grace but where he is left free to choose otherwise if he wanted to.
But let's go a little deeper. Molina talks about three aspects of God's knowledge. Now, of course, Molina knew and accepted (I presume) that God is a simple being, outside of time, etc. So when we make distinctions in God's knowledge, or in the order in which God does things, or in any other aspect of God's nature, we are not saying that God is in time, or that God has actual divisions in his nature. It is simply helpful for us, with our human spatio-temporal limitations and the limitations of our language, to make distinctions in order to help us to get a better idea of the logic of God's nature.
The first aspect of God's knowledge is his natural knowledge. This refers to God's knowledge of necessary truths - truths that couldn't have been otherwise. For example, 2+2=4. It is not as if 2+2 could have equaled five, but God simply decided to have it equal 4. No, 2+2 has to equal 4 by definition, necessarily. So this is a truth that is not a result of God choosing among multiple possible options which to actualize. It is a necessary truth of God's own logical nature.
Free knowledge, on the other hand, refers to God's knowledge of contingent truths - that is, truths that might have been otherwise. In this case, we can imagine God choosing among multiple options which to actualize. Perhaps the greenness of the grass might be an example here. For all we know, the grass might have been red instead of green. We cannot perceive a logical necessity in the grass being green. Well then, why is the grass green rather than red? Because God chose freely (non-necessarily) to actualize that option rather than the other.
(It is important to note that both the objects of God's natural knowledge and of his free knowledge are derived from God. There is no idea of anything here coming from any ultimate source outside of God. The question is only whether these objects are contingent or necessary realities. Necessary realities are just as grounded in God as contingent realities are, but in a different way. Necessary truths flow from how God necessarily sees things when they could not be seen otherwise. Contingent truths flow from God's choice to actualize certain states of affairs among other possibilities. Of course, even here, we must recognize the limitations of human language and human categorization. These are helpful and valid distinctions, but we are describing things from our limited, divisible human point of view and not from God's single, undivided point of view.)
Molina famously added a third category to the two above: middle knowledge. God's middle knowledge is his knowledge of hypotheticals. We can imagine him asking, "If I were to actualize some particular contingent state of affairs, what would happen then?" So middle knowledge is logically derived from natural knowledge. It is God's awareness of the logical consequences of the various possibilities.
So let's apply all of this to Bob's choice to follow Christ to the end and be saved. God knew all the possible worlds with all their possible histories he might create. (This is God's natural knowledge.) In one of those worlds (at least), God knew that if it was actualized, one of the things that would happen is that Bob would choose to follow Christ and be saved. (This is God's middle knowledge.) God then chose to actualize that particular possible world. Then, having made that choice, God knew that Bob would in fact choose to follow Christ and be saved. (This is God's free knowledge.)
Now we can understand Molina's concern about the Dominican viewpoint. The Dominicans were saying that God directly and freely caused Bob's choice to follow Christ. Molina objected to this, because it sounded to him like this would mean that Bob's choice to follow Christ was disconnected from Bob himself, as if even within the possible world that God chose to actualize, Bob might or might not have chosen to follow Christ, and God had to step in and directly intervene to create Bob's specific choice ex nihilo. Molina wanted to say instead that Bob's choice to follow Christ was a given that God "discovered" by means of his middle knowledge. In other words, according to Molina, God did not arbitrarily cause Bob to choose to follow Christ. Rather, that choice flowed from Bob himself, as a logical consequence of the world God chose to actualize - a world in which a person named Bob would come to be, would be given the ability to choose, would have a particular life history, a particular personality, particular desires and motives, and a particular set of circumstances at any given moment of his life history. Given all of that, God deduced - not decided arbitrarily - that Bob would choose to follow Christ. In yet other words, it is not, said Molina, that God simply randomly decided to make Bob follow Christ. It is that God knew that if he actualized the particular possible world he in fact did end up choosing to actualize, one of the things that would happen in it would be that Bob would choose to follow Christ. Bob's choice was not some arbitrary add-on, but flowed logically and naturally from the characteristics of Bob himself combined with the circumstances in which Bob found himself.
Molina's critics found this way of thinking very suspicious, because it made it sound like the fact of Bob's choice was something God had to discover rather than being an effect of his will, and this sounded for all the world like saying that God is not the ultimate First Cause of all things, because he is not the ultimate cause of Bob's choice, and also that, as Bob's choice to follow Christ was not a result of God's free choice to cause him to do so, Bob's good choice could not be considered a gift from God, contrary to established Catholic doctrine.
I don't think that these criticisms of Molina's perspective are ultimately successful. Here are two reasons why:
1. First, Molina never said that Bob's choice to follow Christ was something that came out of nowhere, ex nihilo, as if it were itself a First Cause rivaling God's unique First Causal status. If he had said this, or if his system implied it, the critics would, of course, have been right in condemning Molina's view as fundamentally contrary to Catholic doctrine. In fact, the very idea of middle knowledge implies the exact opposite. If Bob's choice to follow Christ was an ex nihilo, First Causal act, God could not deduce it from his natural knowledge. That is, he could not look at one particularly hypothetical world, not yet existing, and say, "If I were to actualize this world, then I know it would happen that Bob would choose to follow Christ." God could only make this deduction if Bob's choice was logically related to and derived from the various givens in the possible world God had in mind. Bob's choice does not come out of nowhere; rather, it is a natural (and, indeed, infallible) consequence of Bob's personality, his desires and motives, his past history, his memories, and all the details of his particular circumstances at the time of his choice. The Bob that God has in mind has a particular personality. He has particular desires and motives and a particular life history. If put in certain circumstances, with particular influences, this particular Bob is the sort of person who would in fact choose to do some things and not other things. Bob's choice are not disconnected from but flow logically from all the truths about Bob combined with all the truths about the circumstances he is in. (Think of an author inventing a character. Given the invention of a particular character, with a particular personality, particular motives, a particular history, etc., certain actions would be, as we say, "in character" for that character to do, and other actions would be "out of character." Once the author has the idea of this particular character in mind, he can deduce from that what the character would do in various circumstances.)
Of course, one of the most important factors in the life of Bob would be the grace of God. God knows that without grace, Bob could never and would never choose Christ. Grace is necessary to bring Bob's will to the point that it will accept Christ. And God knows, in his middle knowledge, that if he gives particular graces to Bob in particular ways at particular times and in particular circumstances, grace will successfully persuade Bob to choose Christ. Bob will not be necessitated to choose Christ. He will always have the option of rejecting Christ, and he could really do this if he wanted to. Bob has to freely choose to follow Christ among other possible options. But God knows that if he gives grace to Bob in a certain way, etc., it will infallibly have the effect of persuading Bob to choose freely to follow Christ.
So there are no First Causes other than God here. All the truths involved in all of this flow ultimately from God - all the truths of natural knowledge which are rooted in God's being, all the truths of middle knowledge which flow logically from natural knowledge, and, of course, all the truths of free knowledge that flow from the possibilities God finally decides to actualize.
2. Secondly, remember that in Molina's view, although the truths of God's middle knowledge flow logically from the truths of God's natural knowledge, yet it is God's free choice that determines which possibilities are actualized. So it may be that Bob's choice to follow Christ flows logically from the realities in existence in Possible World A. But it is also true that Possible World A and all the other possible worlds are contingent. It is up to God's free choice among all the existing options which possible world he will choose to actualize. So if God chooses to actualize Possible World A, all the events in that world, including the event of Bob's choosing to follow Christ, are freely chosen by God and only actually happen because of his free choice to actualize them. So it is not only that God knows that Bob, given a certain personality and history, put in particular circumstances, and given grace in particular ways, will choose to follow Christ; it is also that God has freely chosen to actualize the possible world in which all these things actually come to be and to happen. So it is due to God's free choice that Bob exists, that he has the personality that he has, that he is put in the particular circumstances that he is put in, that he is given the particular graces he is given, etc. Thus, although Bob's choice to follow Christ follows logically upon all these conditions, yet God, being the free actualizer of the conditions, is the one who has freely chosen to bring it about that Bob will choose to follow Christ. This is why Molina insists that predestination is ultimately unconditional. There is nothing in Bob that is the cause of God's choice to actualize the world in which Bob will choose to follow Christ and be saved. How could there be, since Bob does not exist until God decides to actualize the particular world in which he will come into existence? God freely actualizes the world he wants to actualize, and in doing so he freely preordains all the events that will happen in that world, including Bob's choice to follow Christ to the end and his consequent eternal salvation.
So I see no problem with Molina's view from an Augustinian point of view or from the point of view of Catholic doctrine. God is sovereign. He is the First Cause of all reality. All other realities come from him. He has freely preordained all that comes to pass, including who will and who will not be saved. His predestination of individuals to receive the particular graces that will lead them effectively to come to Christ and follow him to the end and thus end up in eternal salvation is not caused by anything in the individual, for all that individuals have is the result of God's free preordination of all things. The good will of the saved, whereby they choose to follow Christ, is a gift of God's ultimate free predestination, and is also a product of God's grace as that grace is given freely and infallibly persuades the will to choose aright. I do not say that one must see things just as Molina saw them, or that I prefer Molina's view to other views (like the Dominican view), or that I agree with Molina's criticism of other views. Up until now, I have not yet seen a good reason to side definitively with one side or another, so long as all hold to the fundamental teachings of Catholic doctrine.
For more on the doctrines of predestination and grace in Catholic theology, see here.
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