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The Divine Concurrence and Freewill
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
Extract
In our previous article we discussed the ninth chapter of Fr. Joyce’s book. Another chapter, which in our opinion spoils an otherwise most excellent work, is chapter xvi on ‘Conservation and Concurrence.’ In this chapter Fr. Joyce again abandons the teaching of the Angelic Doctor for a modern theory which is wholly inconsistent with the teaching of Augustine and Thomas and indeed of the Holy Scripture. The problem here concerned has to do with the Divine Causality and the freewill. If God is the cause of all being and all modes of being, how comes it that the will is free in its choices? St. Thomas has a very definite doctrine on this point: God premoves the will to its choice, yet so supereminent and so transcendent is the Divine motion that the will is not necessitated in its act, for the Divine motion, so efficacious, premoves the will to determine itself (by deliberation) to this rather than to that. Hence the determination of the will comes not only from God but also from the will.
Both Molina and Suarez refuse to subscribe to this doctrine : for them predetermination is wholly destructive of freewill. Briefly, their doctrine comes to this : ‘The Divine motion is not prior to the action of the freewill; the motion therefore is not received into the will; on the contrary it is received into the will’s effect or action in order to effect what is proper to God alone, namely the being of the action; hence, it is said, God simultaneously concurs with the will as a partial cause to produce the will’s action: this partial causality is to be understood on the part of the cause (ex farte causæ) and not on the part of the effect (ex parte effectus), because the effect is wholly produced by God as the First Cause and wholly by the will as secondary cause.
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- Copyright © 1924 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Principles of Natural Theology, by George Hayward Joyce, S.J. (Longmans, Green & Co.).
2 Concordia 14, a. 13, disp. 27, Adde.
3 Suarez Op. De Conc. Dei cum voluntate, Lib. 1, Cap. 11, n. 16.
4 Pp. 541–545.
5 St. Thomas explicitly rejects this theory and refutes the very example Molina uses to uphold his theory. Cfr. Contra Errores Græcorum, Cap. 23.
6 Contra Gent. III, Cap. 89.
7 Cont. Gent. III, Cap. 91.—De verit: q. 28, a. 4, ad 2.—Resp. ad Joann. Vercell, De Artic. 108, q. 38.—De Verit: q. 22, a, 8.—Ia IIæ, q. 10, a. 4.—Cont. Gent. III, Cap. 92.—Ia IIæ, q. 10, a. 4, ad 3.
8 Italics ours.
9 Consciousness perceives only this, that we are the immediate principles of our determinations. Far from denying this, Thomists insistently assert that physical premonition makes us determine ourselves to this or that; but they deny that we are the first principles of our determinations. Now as to this last point, consciousness tells us nothing, nor can it tell us anything; just as it tells us nothing concerning our conservation whereby God, without ceasing, communicates existence to us. Could it therefore be said that we conserve ourselves in existence independently of any higher cause? As to reason; we arrive at this, the only logical conclusion; no creature in its acts can escape the efficient causality of the Prime Mover: no creature can be the first cause of anything whatsoever except of imperfection and defect; whatever there is, then, in our choices, of movement, of perfection, of reality, of determination, is caused by God.
10 In Fr. Joyce's own words: ‘We should be driven to admit that a being can confer on itself a new reality it does not possess, giving to itself that which it has not got to give’ (p. 537).
11 Contra Gent. III, Cap. 89.
12 De Pot. III, a. 7, obj. 13.
13 De Pot. III, a. 7, ad 13.
14 Ia Q. 105, a. 4, ad 3.
15 Ibid. ad 2.
16 Summa Ia, Q. 63, a. 5; and ad 3.
17 Ia IIæ, Q. 10, a. 4, obj. 1 and 3.
18 Ia IIæ, Q. 10, a. 4, ad 3.
19 And not because of its foreseen consent, as Molinists say.
20 St. Thomas says the same, IIa IIæ, Q. 24, a. 11.
21 Cfr. St. Thomas, De Carit: a. 12.
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