Eleonore Stump endorses a unique interpretation of divine causality on the human will that attempts to avoid problems reconciling traditional models of divine-human interaction between grace and libertarian freedom of will. Her model, defended mainly in Aquinas, has two distinctive features: that grace operates by formal and not efficient causality, and that the will prepares for the grace of God by a kind of non-act, a quiescence, that allows God to infuse grace without violating or changing the orientation of the will. I will examine her theory as presented there and argue that its elements avoid addressing the problem of divine-human causality, nor are they an adequate interpretation of the theory of grace in St. Thomas Aquinas. Giving a new reading of the Spanish Dominican theologian Domingo Bañez theory of physical premotion, I will argue that God's disposition of future free acts, although an efficient cause, is not intra-worldly necessitating action that would violate freedom, but causes states of affairs to be necessary as present action at some given future time beyond the immediate disposition of a given agent – what I call a “Neo-Banezian” solution. This solution preserves both divine causal priority in grace and real indeterminacy required for libertarian freedom.

Eleonore Stump's theory is presented in Aquinas, where she summarizes the general scope of the problem of reconciling human freedom and divine priority in grace as preserving two truths: on one side, the fact that the act of the will is free (and free in the sense of libertarian freedom), while, on the other, “the second-order act of free will in justifying faith is produced in a person by the divine infusion of operating grace; the will does not cooperate with God in this act but is simply moved by him.”Footnote ¹ Her own solution has four steps: first, to realize “that nothing operates on the will with efficient causation”;Footnote ² second, to propose an alternate mode of action that is a “change in configuration”Footnote ³ or formal change; third, this does not violate freedom when the will lacks a form or configuration as quiescent;Footnote ⁴ fourth, to distinguish kinds of lack of configuration and to identify a kind of reasoned “giving in” as the species of quiescence necessary for infusion of grace – this latter quiescence brings justification as a necessary consequence.Footnote ⁵ Her picture is given in summary at the conclusion to her chapter:

It will be important to take this account and show that, while it explains certain cases, it fails to give an adequate explanation for how God causes justification in all ways necessary for preserving the ontological priority required of grace. It directly explains merely one kind of priority: the priority of God's grace to actually assent. No person, on this model, can assent without the action of God informing the will. Its signal weakness is that it does not, however, preserve another traditional kind of priority which has served a key role in many of the debates over grace: the priority of God's grace in causing our preparation. At most, it accounts for the external motives for conversion, but it fails to explain the actual movement toward conversion which is, according to Aquinas (and Catholic doctrine), a product of grace as well.Footnote ⁷ It suffices to say for the moment that the account presumes objections to any attempt to argue that God immediately moves the will to prepare. These, her position argues, can only be detrimental to libertarian freedom. Without engaging in a thorough exposition of Aquinas' texts, it will be helpful to examine some chief texts relevant to the various steps in Eleonore Stump's argument and indicate how Aquinas might conceive of the compatibility of God's efficient causality and human freedom in a way that retains libertarian “ability to do otherwise.”

The first claim Stump makes is that Aquinas believes that “nothing operates on the will with efficient causation.” Her support for this view comes from places where Aquinas speaks of necessitation through compulsion or coercion. Aquinas rejects emphatically the view that the will's acts could be voluntary and compelled by extrinsic agencies. This is ultimately because will-acts must proceed from an interior principle; if they did not, they would proceed from another extrinsic principle and hence not be voluntary.Footnote ⁸ Therefore, if efficient causality implies compulsion, we must look for another way to establish how necessity in the will can result without efficient causality. However, this is a false dilemma. On the contrary, we can ask whether all examples of efficient causation acting upon the will need be of such a kind. While an efficient cause is a “moving” or “agent” cause, which acts on another, there are different species of how such an efficient cause can act. The most basic definition of this kind of causality is that which imparts “movement” to another – it causes a change from one state to another. Aquinas puts it as the principle “from which the first beginning of change or of rest comes.”Footnote ⁹

The will, as part of an intellectual nature, is a “natural” cause of movement – it is a principle intrinsic to the thing in question, the human being, that is a source of its activity and state changes. It is unique in being an efficient cause of intellectual consideration and all other powers in the body. It is moved by the intellect insofar as the intellectual apprehension gives it an object to desire – it specifies it as a final cause. So it might seem, initially, as if the only mover necessary for the will is the first motion given to it in the order of final cause by the intellect.Footnote ¹⁰ However, the will is not compelled by any intellectual apprehension to will that object – no object is so presented as to be something willed of necessity (except the Beatific Vision, for reasons that are not here important).Footnote ¹¹ A necessity by which an inclination would be introduced into the will – a movement contrary to its actual movement – is hence a kind of coercion that is incompatible with the will's freedom as efficient cause. But Aquinas also outlines kinds of necessity that are not incompatible with freedom: hypothetical necessity of the end and necessity of nature. The former is that by which I am constrained by a prior choice, as when I will to go somewhere far away and that requires I take a car. The other is a bit more complicated, but deals with the very will toward ultimate happiness itself. The inclination toward desirable or will-able objects in general is the basis for all subsequent choice, and so the will needs to have a basic natural inclination toward the good in general (possession of which is happiness) in order to will any subsequent goods.Footnote ¹² Therefore, the will is not compelled by this will of an ultimate end, as no finite good need be perceived as absolutely necessary to attain the ultimate end, and so it continues to have will of subsidiary goods that serve that end with complete freedom.Footnote ¹³ There is always a reason for the will to have chosen otherwise in choosing any given finite good.

But, if it is an efficient cause, and the first perception of the intellect only gives final-cause motivation to will something but does not incline of necessity, how does the will make its “first move?” If it were to move itself, it would violate Aquinas' dictum that all motion comes from another; even in a self-mover, it requires that something can only move itself when mover and moved are each a different respect of the whole (as part to other parts). Aquinas' answer is simple: the will gets its first efficient movement, simply, from its nature and hence from God acting immediately as first cause of the existence of its very being.Footnote ¹⁴ In the first moment of the will's existence, the will begins to will by a “premotion” from God toward the good as happiness, broadly speaking. This operation is, however, quasi-natural and is merely the principle of all subsequent motion; it is the reason that the devil, for example, could not be created and, in the same first instant, fall from grace. Rather, the devil is created with a first operation of the will orienting him toward happiness and then, in a subsequent moment, chooses to turn against God.Footnote ¹⁵ God causes, as an efficient cause, the very existence of the nature as the intrinsic formal principle of the will, leading it to so act in its first moment by operating “in” the nature, causing it to exist in the way it does. This never violates freedom because, despite acting as efficient cause, God merely causes activity from natural necessity – He is causing the nature, which is necessary for any acts the will performs whatsoever. He is causing freedom, in other words.

While we will return to this point, it brings us to consider the second of Stump's claims: that God acts only by a formal causality on the will. But if the will is acted upon by God directly in the order of formal causality, this poses significant problems. Formal causality is either intrinsic, in terms of an intrinsic principle of change in the will (a habit or power), or extrinsic. Extrinsic formal causality is just the likeness toward which something is made, as a man is the exemplar cause of the statue made in his form.Footnote ¹⁶ Everybody can easily admit that God is the extrinsic formal cause of grace, but that remains non-explanatory in the sense we require. The only alternative, consequently, would be the first – efficient grace being an intrinsic formal principle. But what does this mean in terms of the will? The power of the will is just its own nature. For God to so intervene as to change its intrinsic principle of activity either would involve changing its nature (and so it no longer exists as a human will) or as interposing Himself as the principle of activity or infusing a new habit or potency to kinds of activity. The first two are obviously wrong. What is clearly meant by Dr. Stump is the creation of a new inclination or form in the will – a new principle of activity – where God infuses a habit as an efficient cause. So, on one hand, what is not being denied is that God can act as an efficient cause on the will in terms of bringing about new dispositions within the will. On the other, this solution still seems inadequate: if what is created were a formed potency, an infused habit, this fails to take into account any of Aquinas' own texts, which indicate that preparation for grace cannot be a habit or potency in that sense. Otherwise, it also involves an infinite regress of habits required in the will – one would need a preparatory habit before charity, and another before that, and so on.Footnote ¹⁷

Aquinas makes the same distinction between habit and act throughout the questions in the Summa Theologiae on grace, referencing in the second case God “moving” the will “simply.”Footnote ¹⁸ The language of a “moving” cause reappears throughout the section as opposed to God acting as infusing a habit – the “habituale donum” versus “interiorem Dei motionem”Footnote ¹⁹ or “donum habituale in anima” versus “auxilium gratuitum Dei interius moventis.”Footnote ²⁰ A “moving” cause, when used by Aquinas in this kind of causal terminology as the causing of motion by an agent, is nothing other than an “efficient” cause. This is why Thomas has no problem calling the human will an “instrumental” cause, in a certain order, within God's providence.Footnote ²¹

Even in Stump's own example in Aquinas, a selection from the Quaestiones de Veritate, Aquinas makes the distinction between a kind of movement where God moves the will to will by infusing an inclination (the part Stump references) and another way by “purely” efficient causality: “He [changes the will in one way] merely by moving it. This occurs, for instance, when He moves the will to want something without introducing any form into the will. Thus He sometimes without the addition of any habit causes a man to want what he did not want before.”Footnote ²² Thus, when Aquinas references in the next line that God also moves man by infusing an inclination in cases of either “grace or virtue,” which Stump takes as meaning all occasions of grace acting on free will, we should read this as “habitual” and not “actual” or efficient grace. Aquinas really cannot hold that grace is “formally causative” when it is an actual grace that causes conversion – it must be efficient.

So, especially in preparing for grace, it seems that God acts to move the will directly to an action. Similarly, as was already pointed out, even the case of infusing a new formal principle, a habit, involves “efficient” activity on the will. So there does not seem to be any reason to say that God cannot act as an efficient cause on the will. The problem, however, remains: how is the will free and not compelled if God can move it directly and efficaciously to choose this particular choice? Aquinas would seem to get himself into significant difficulty, as he admits:

One way out is “quiescence.” Stump could modify her position to hold, for example, that God only efficiently infuses a new habit in the will through sanctifying grace in such a way that the first act of the will proceeds from the new habit necessarily toward a general will of the supernatural good – it would be like getting a new nature. There is no efficient movement of the will to a particular choice, but the efficient causality is purely “formal” in this new sense; it specifies the exercise of the will. This would be closer to the theory of Bernard Lonergan, who held in his Gratia Operans that God never moves the will directly to a particular choice of the means, but only to a general supernatural will of the end.Footnote ²⁴ This would be analogous to the way in which God causes the first act of a nature, and consequently all its particular acts through the “means” of the nature itself. What Stump's picture uniquely adds to it is the preceding freedom of choice in preparing for grace. What precedes this infusion, in order for the will to remain “free,” is that the will could dispose itself to attain this new formal quality. It can abandon itself, through quiescence, into the hands of its loving Creator and cease resisting the call of grace.

The problems with this theory remain significant, although not as apparent. In terms of the reduction of actual grace to the infusing of a new inclination alone, a new will of the end, one has two problems. The first is that this is, in fact, contrary to freedom. It requires that the new end was not chosen by any preceding deliberation of the will. While the first natural intention of the will toward its ultimate end is not deliberated upon, all subsequent ends, toward lower-level intentions, are, in fact, chosen at some real point in time.Footnote ²⁵ So, my choice to seek to go to the store needs to really be in my power, even though it functions as an end when I deliberate about how to go to the store (e.g., with my car or pogo-stick). Necessitating the will to choose one end which is not the ultimate end of the nature is contrary to freedom. Stump's theory of quiescence requires that one not actually deliberate about the Gospel in such a way that the deliberation allows one to elect an option leading to justification; this is the point, it seems, of denying that one is acting in “quiescing.” One deliberates about the Gospel but merely ceases to act and then the new form is infused. And so one falls into this same trap – the end chosen is not actually chosen by the act of deliberation.

Ironically, Aquinas only gives one example of “quiescence” in this sense – where one can be justified without a preceding choice to be justified – which applies only to infants and insane people. But this can only happen because of the sacramental efficacy of baptism – which functions, in their case, just like the above circumstances. Instead of making a choice to be converted, they are justified as if through a process of carnal generation and so have grace merely as habitual. But, as he says, “…in the case of one who has had the use of his free-will and afterwards has lost it either through sickness or sleep, he does not obtain justifying grace by the exterior rite of Baptism, or of any other sacrament, unless he intended to make use of this sacrament, and this can only be by the use of his free-will.” This is because “God's motion to justice does not take place without a movement of the free-will; but He so infuses the gift of justifying grace that at the same time He moves the free-will to accept the gift of grace, in such as are capable of being moved thus.”Footnote ²⁶ Choice of our new end – choice to convert – is integral to the process, even if it is caused by God's direct movement of the will.

The second problem is that the view of infusing a new end as the essence of actual grace obviates the need for sufficient grace – all grace is efficacious. If “to be able to choose God” in an act of justification one needs to get a new form and a new end thereby, it presumes a justified “good will” that wills God as end in order to account for the choice to turn toward God. This is to say that the Gospel call to turn toward God as one's end has to be an object of choice at some point; pointing to the will of the end does not indicate how it arose in the first place. On the contrary, it is Catholic doctrine that all men receive sufficient grace. If this theory was correct, one is led to posit that all were actually justified and then some fell (a problematic thesis) or that not all were given sufficient grace in the first place (directly contrary to dogma). Neither of these is seen as acceptable by Dr. Stump.

Stump's theory tries to avoid this by claiming, roughly, that “anyone can quiesce” – all were given sufficient external means to deliberate about God and cease deliberating in the right way.Footnote ²⁷ This would seem to be Pelagian, if it were the case that the individual were choosing or electing to stop deliberation in such a way as to infallibly merit God's grace as a result of that electing. But this ceasing deliberation is not an act of will, Stump claims: “…the will's ceasing to act is not itself an act of will of any kind; a fortiori, the will's quiescing is not a good act of will.”Footnote ²⁸ She characterizes will-acts of the quiescent sort in two camps: willing not to choose at all, or willing in what were traditionally called “velleities” - ineffectual wishes. In the latter, one wills ineffectually that one should want to will the good.Footnote ²⁹ Therefore, even in cases where an individual knows and ineffectually desires grace to come after an act of quiescing, the actual choice to convert is never deliberated upon effectually; one merely knows that justification will follow the ineffectual velleity and “giving in” to grace. One never has conversion as a choice. The will is divided in the act of deliberating – “divided against itself” – and can consequently find no good reasons to make a choice.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, the whole point is that one does not actually choose to convert. One merely stops deciding and lets God make the converting happen.

But this answer still fails to solve the problem. The question remains as to why the individual decided to stop deliberating in the right way. One might say there were no intrinsic reasons for the decision-maker as such. If it were because of external circumstances, as are indicated when she says “the circumstances which help to produce the division in the intellect – and Aquinas would take these to be providentially ordered – also make a contribution,”Footnote ³¹ one runs into “determinism of circumstances.” One would quiesce because of external circumstances ordered by God, and hence circumstances would determine why one could not do otherwise. God's disposition of a certain set of causal circumstances that necessitate free acts is simply determinism with God at the top. Knowledge of future action seems to be the only way that one could predispose something as free without necessitating the action, because one knows it through necessity of the present as actual, rather than as one would in cases where one foreknew causal factors which produced actions with necessity (as in “determinism of circumstances”). So, if the decision to stop deliberating were truly indeterminate, and no grace of God caused the person efficiently to stop deliberating, how does God go about giving grace in the subsequent moment based on foreknowledge of future acts? One option is simply Molinism: God foresaw in His scientia media (knowledge of all future free contingent possibilia) that I would stop deliberating in the right way at time X and so decided to give grace following that. This is coherent, insofar as it provides an explanation for how this grace was given efficaciously. It fails, as many point out, to give any basis for the truth of scientia media-type propositions. Further, counter-factuals of free acts, even in God, seem prejudicial to freedom.Footnote ³² It seems to imply a kind of determinism of circumstances – God foreknew all my possible free acts and so disposed grace to be given when it was necessary that I respond by conversion. I was not, consequently, free to do otherwise.

Another option, chosen by Lonergan, is to say that God determined all of the person's future free decisions as present and actual in eternity. He therefore decided to give grace whenever the person actually stopped deliberating about conversion through the right kind of non-act. The cooperation was just simultaneously concurrent and indistinguishable from God's activity.Footnote ³³ It is very much like His foreknowledge of all contingent things – His knowledge is causal, but need not cause everything to be necessitated. He just knows all actual truths about creaturely contingent possibility. Nevertheless, this solution runs into difficulty when it concerns grace: if God only decided to give grace, which is causally necessary to elict a free supernatural act of justification, in the mode of eternity without foreseeing our possible acts or foredetermining our actual free acts, it requires that there be absolutely no other logically possible worlds. This is because the giving of grace is ante praevisa merita – it is the cause of actual cooperation at a given time, rather than a power to cooperate and choose a given option. If one is foreordained to be given this efficacious grace at a given time, one will infallibly convert. But if God only knows what you will actually do, and there is no knowledge necessary of what we would do, and so there is no possibility, in God's knowledge of all my acts, that I would ever be able to do otherwise. As a consequence, there is only one absolutely possible world – the actual one – which limits God's action as well as mine. So it seems even worse an option than the former.

One is left, consequently, with the option that the quiescence itself was truly indeterminate and free. In which case, which Stump takes to be true, the options are simple: either the act of choosing to quiesce and stop deliberating merits the subsequent grace (Pelagianism), or it is really a non-act and grace is intrinsically efficacious in causing conversion merely temporally subsequent to it. The latter seems to be the only coherent version of the interaction between grace and free will that preserves all truths simultaneously on the quiescence model. However, on the Stump theory of quiescence, the grace must be said to be intrinsically efficacious, but the preceding non-deliberation has literally no role in the giving of grace. As a consequence, the conversion was literally caused without a choice and is not free.

This is not, it seems to me, an adequate solution. It has an element of freedom in conversion, in the sense that one ceases acting because of prior free deliberation, but, insofar as it is not a real will-act to convert, quiescence cannot be a choice for conversion and so conversion cannot really be an act that an individual chooses. One could argue that we cannot have the power “to convert” – this is precisely what grace implies in being beyond our power. However, this view really endorses a species of occasionalism in equivocating on what “power to convert” entails. One has the power to convert when it is really within the range of things you can effectively deliberate on – you can choose the good as presented and make it an end for future action. God must cause both the actual choosing and the power to choose, but neither of the former truths implies that God causes me to convert without my deliberation on or consent to justification. But freedom requires I actually choose to convert in a prior moment.

Quiescence avoids that problem by “cutting the link” between deliberation and election but, as a consequence, leads to no choice “to convert” being made; the choice is to cooperate with the grace given in justification, not a choice toward conversion itself. Second, it only seems to approximate, phenomenologically, some kinds of conversion namely, the instantaneous and miraculous, such as St. Paul, or the long and deliberate process of being internally divided, such as St. Augustine. But not all converts experience this, and it doesn't even seem to be a good description of some of those latter cases, like Augustine. He clearly had a choice to convert presented to him, but was unable to decide. Others have a clear choice to convert, deliberate for some time, and then decide to convert without any internal division at all. Both of these are good reasons, together with serious questions about the position's coherence, to ask whether there is a better solution to conceptualizing the intrinsic efficacy of certain kinds of actual grace.

As we saw, the problem is that the grace's preparation and its acceptance requires two truths to be both simultaneously held: that God's action is causally prior to my own in causing me to convert (I do not earn conversion), and that I am able to do otherwise and remain a real, free agent even in conversion. How both truths can come together requires a view of God's predetermination of my acts which, rather than depending on His foreknowledge of my future actions, reconciles His causal priority with human freedom. I propose returning to the Thomistic-Banezian model of intrinsic efficacy known as “physical premotion” as an adequate explanation for this kind of change. It is, in my mind, the only adequate framework within which to propose a solution to the problem. As I understand it, the model proposes two truths implied by the terms: grace is intrinsically efficacious in the order of efficient causality (“physical” causality as opposed to moral causality) and is logically prior in having my own will-act as an effect (pre-motion). This is merely the outline of the solution, which is why I want to supplement the model and propose a “Neo-Banezian” reading, in which we add that [1] God efficiently causes the will-act's existence, [2] the act only has necessity of the present, and [3] no intra-worldly cause compels the will.

This solution seems to offer a way through the problems outlined above by relying on Aquinas' own analysis of the situation. In cases of nature as a whole, as Aquinas remarks, God acts within and through every created agent by causing the very being of the agent and the being of its acts.Footnote ³⁴ Grace is ontologically prior in the order of causality, but its efficiency need not involve an intra-worldly efficient cause compelling the movement of the will. This has been the “straw man” attack on physical premotion, which confuses premotion with a created object or movement which “pushes” the will.Footnote ³⁵ On the contrary, actual efficacious grace has God's transcendence of the created order of causality, and it merely brings into being, in the case of efficacious grace, a new supernatural act.Footnote ³⁶ Further, it only has a necessity of the present. The will-act, consequently, remains both necessitated in the sensus divisus (present possibility) and free in the sensus compositus (absolute possibility). God moves a person to convert and seek justification, for example, after a preveniently initiated process of supernaturally-induced and guided deliberation to convert (sufficient grace), which has no objectively compelling force in prompting a decision. This sufficient grace gives a real power to accept or reject grace but, as it is a movement to preparation and not a power, does not confer habitual grace or justification. It begins and makes possible a deliberation to convert.

One's choosing to convert is thus both within someone's power, in the sense of present possibility to prepare one's self for conversion, and not in one's power, in the sense of a future contingent act qua future (that is also supernatural). But that is not an obstacle to freedom, as future acts qua future are never in my power – to be free, I need not be able to effectively choose whether I will get to the store, only whether I can make a choice in the present to so dispose myself to go to the store. God's efficacious grace completes the deliberation not by making it possible to choose, but by making the choice of conversion actual; no matter how much deliberating is done, it only has a remote material relation to the act of justification, although it remains within human power to defect at any time (to stop deliberating). So it is logically possible, on one hand, that St. Paul can be converted freely by being given a grace in one instant that elicited both the presentation of the choice and the choosing without deliberation at all, and that those who cease deliberating (choosing not to convert) and do not cooperate with the movement of grace are culpable because they could have done otherwise, like shutting their eyes to the sun.Footnote ³⁷ It is thus a premotion in the sense of bringing into existence a present-tense act of the will; “I choose now to turn to God.” And that is entirely outside of the power of the created human being which requires His grace to bring that will-act into being. Hence, Pelagianism is avoided.

Rather than engage in lengthy analysis of Aquinas' texts or those of the classical Banezian expositors, I would remark that this model seems to both avoid the problems presented and safeguard both divine priority and libertarian freedom. I believe it fits quite nicely as an interpretation of Aquinas' texts, alongside classical expositions of Banezian premotion. It has some sympathy with Dr. Stump's model in that formal causality induces a new disposition in the will and we “give in” to the grace of God offered. In the case of the Neo-Banezian model, God efficiently causes a new disposition in causing a whole new will-act in a similar fashion, and we submit to the process of conversion in the call offered. Both therefore understand the creation of a new will-act succeeding another as integral to the solution. As a consequence, Stump's theory of quiescence points the way toward a possibly more satisfactory reconciliation of grace and freedom. What remains is the working out of this model further, especially as it deals with God's foreknowledge in predestination. The latter problem, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.