The early modern controversy between Dominicans and Jesuits over predestination to heaven, divine grace, and human freedom is well known, with the Thomist Domingo Báñez OP and the doctrine of ‘physical premotion’ on the one side, and Luis de Molina SJ and ‘middle knowledge’ on the other. However, only a little is said about Molinism in this book's introductory chapter. This comprehensive and useful study is instead about another less well-known controversy, this time among Thomists themselves, in the twentieth century and especially in the 1920s. It concerned predestination, grace and freedom, but in a special way the divine will to permit sin.
The first controversy had ended in a stalemate when closed by the pope, at least officially, in 1607, though it has never truly gone away. The second controversy was not officially ended, and a current revival of interest in scholasticism, and Thomas Aquinas and his school in particular, is the occasion of Taylor Patrick O'Neill's analysis of the approaches of the various figures involved, including the Angelicum's Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP (chapter four), Francisco Marín-Sola OP of Manila and Fribourg (chapter five), the neo-Thomist French philosopher Jacques Maritain (chapter six), and Jean-Hervé Nicolas OP of Toulouse and Fribourg (chapter seven). At issue among them was not so much the ‘line of good’ – predestination to grace and glory, and physical premotion – as the ‘line of evil’ – reprobation and permission of sin, with the focus on divine innocence and human responsibility: Is God not to be held accountable for the evil that falls under his will?
These participants took no great issue with Aquinas's account of God infallibly moving us to exercise our freedom well, but some were concerned that the traditional Thomist theory did not adequately guarantee God's innocence when he willed to permit sin and did not grant efficacious grace. Chapter eight adds in problems with Bernard Lonergan SJ's alternative account of divine causation, which employs notions of contact and divine application rather than physical premotion, but the chapter feels out of place in the book as a whole as it does not draw out the implications of Lonergan's interpretation for the issues of grace, predestination, and the permissive decree. Regarding these, which constitute the nub of the debate, O'Neill's overall conclusion in chapters nine and ten is that those who dissented from the traditional account failed in their attempts to better secure divine innocence, and he himself recommends the traditional position he attributes to Aquinas, Báñez, Garrigou-Lagrange, and the early Nicolas.
Because it is sometimes doubted among his commentators that Aquinas himself held to what would be the traditional Thomist approach to these questions, O'Neill's first chapter sets out to make the case that the relevant elements are indeed found in his writings. This he does by a certain preference for Aquinas's more mature works, although he does not properly deal here with the question of whether there was historical development in Aquinas's thought on these matters and the methodological question of whether Aquinas's later thinking should always be taken as more authentic by his school. This would have been interesting because some challenges to the traditional position have drawn on such historical approaches, and in the case of Nicolas O'Neill instead prefers his earlier opinions to his later ones.
The second chapter gives a welcome and illuminating outline of Báñez's teaching and secures its essential continuity with Aquinas. However, despite his awareness of recent criticism of Báñez - he cites R. J. Matava's work a number of times, and gives a good response in an appendix to Matava's own thesis that human acts are not moved but created by God – O'Neill does not engage very much here either with such criticism or, except in footnotes, with the widespread view that Báñez differed from, or even distorted, Aquinas's doctrine. To some extent, reading O'Neill's main text is like reading the corpus of an article of the Summa Theologiae without reading the objections marshalled by Aquinas and the answers he gives them. The reader sees the main line of argument well put, but is not necessarily equipped to grasp all that is at stake.
With chapter three we encounter the apex of the traditional position in the works of Garrigou-Lagrange. O'Neill again argues convincingly for continuity between Garrigou and his predecessors, including on the permissive decree. He shows how Garrigou distanced himself from the more extreme view of ‘positive reprobation’ proposed by Jean Poinsot (John of St Thomas), and embraced a more moderate ‘negative’ view that can be traced back to Aquinas and Báñez. Once O'Neill has set out the traditional position, he then tests the alternatives proffered. Marín-Sola proposed inefficacious and fallible divine motions in the line of evil, and Maritain ‘shatterable’ motions. O'Neill says that their overall positions differ, but the reader would have been aided by a more detailed comparison of the two in addition to O'Neill's robust individual presentations. Nevertheless, armed with the Thomist metaphysics of act and potency and so on, O'Neill in each case successfully exposes the metaphysical problems in their theories.
He turns then to Nicolas, who originally made a comprehensive defence of the traditional position, tracing its theological root back to divine simplicity. But in 1992, in the face of concerns about divine innocence of the kind raised by Maritain, Nicolas withdrew his assent to it, drawing back from the idea of an antecedent permissive decree without replacing it except with a certain agnosticism. O'Neill judges that the difficulties felt by the later Nicolas were in fact already well addressed by the early Nicolas. He interestingly notes that Nicolas's later position has also recently been effectively affirmed by Matthew Levering. This suggests to me that, if the debate is not over, and if no one is going to take up the mantle of Maritain or Marín-Sola with any vigour, then its main form may be between the traditional position, ever more alert to the challenge of defending divine innocence, and a cautious alternative that is hardly speculative at all.
