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Dear NeoChalcedonian...

An ox-cart is tied to a pole ... with a complicated knot. The man who can free the cart from the pole - will be proclaimed king. (so the legend goes).

But no one seemed to be able to untie the knot! Many tried. But as they loosened one loop looking for the ends) the last loop loosened ... would tighten up again. So on and so forth. Like a Rubic'c cube ... one could search all day but not find the ends to use ... to untie the knot.

The trick of the Gordian knot was that its two ends were woven together so that the knot had no ends by which to untie it. Or - that the rope was knotted in the middle. It makes no difference how it was done ... but that every man thought that the way to free the cart was to untie the knot.

In philosophy, A Gordian knot ... is called ... circular reasoning.

One tries to untie the problem by close examination and breaking down the problem into more and more specific terms and definition searching for an end to untie. Once a new term is coined that new term seems like progress. It seems like the solution is near.

However - no real solution comes about (no matter who tries) because the question itself ... is not correct.

As long as minds continue to accept the framework of previous assumptions ... and these assumptions are wrong to begin with ... ... it will forever be a Gordian knot with no real solution. The best we can hope for is to complicate matters so well that we (as well as anyone else) gets dizzy and disorientated ... can not follow anymore ... and this makes us think that the solution provided .. must be very very intelligent because we are having trouble following it.

When the best minds can't seem to unravel things .. to a solution .. we could say (as some have) "Oh .. this is a mystery of God which he keeps hidden!" which sounds very pious ... but it is also not correct.

The man who did become king (Alexander the Great) did not take the same path that all others were taking .. he instead walked up to the pole and pulled it from the ground .. thus .. freeing the cart from the pole.

Where I work, we buy hand soap in a plastic bottle which we insert into a dispenser. One week our order had not come and I puzzled over how to refill the plastic bottles (the cap of the bottle fit just-so into the dispenser. They must have spent millions of dollar designing this cap so that it could not be twisted off (to fill with new soap)... as anything I tried just damaged the bottle or damaged the cap so that it did not work. One day I was doing something else and it came to me "Stop trying to figure out the cap - that is what they want you to do!!! ... just drill a hole in the plastic bottle and pour the soap in!"

Are you ready to look at predestination in a new way? (after I correct a few bad assumptions). Actually it is not a 'new way' it is Paul's way.

-ray

Ghosty,


If I had to read the whole in order to understand any particular part, then I could never come to understand it, because to read the whole is just to read several individual parts in succession. (That last statement was meant to be somewhat humorous, but I don't know how well stuff like that is communicated online.) I have read all of Book One of the Summa Theologica and Book One of Summa Contra Gentiles; in addition to a couple hundred pages of Augustine's Anti-Pelagian writings. While I think I can understand the content and motivation behind what you're saying, perhaps even why they appear to mean what you think they mean; I still do not agree with it.

On the first point, I think Aquinas would agree with Augustine's interpretation of II Tim. 2:4:



I do not believe that for Augustine and Aquinas the sense in which men do not fulfill or resist God's will does the kind of explanatory work you think it does. Let's distinguish God's will-1 which is simply "anything insofar as it is good" (basically the created order and the proper end of everything generally speaking) from God's will-2 which is whatever God desires and effectually wills to take place in his omnipotence. Acts of rape and murder would oppose God's will-1, but *nothing* in their view could resist will-2.

The question for Augustine and Aquinas was: Why does God give the gift of faith to some and not others? Both of them make it clear that they do NOT believe that God predestines and reprobates based on his foreknowledge of their actions. God does not predestine me to salvation because He saw I would accept the Gospel; that I would accept the Gospel and that I had the disposition to do so were themselves effects of predestination, and His decision to predestine me to salvation had no external enabling/necessitating conditions, meaning that if we ask why God predestined X to heaven and Y to hell there is no answer other than an appeal to mystery (or the necessity of God's goodness to be manifest in different ways.) From my perspective, it is clear that Aquinas' position on the relation between foreknowledge and predestination is not compatible with that of St. John of Damascus, who believes that predestination is based on foreknowledge of response to grace:



So the contention that "St. Thomas is simply directly reiterating what St. John of Damascus wrote in the East centuries earlier" does not stand up to scrutiny. Moving on:



What we can't grasp according to them is not merely how the mechanisms of predestination work but why God chose to manifest his goodness by showing mercy to one and administering justice to another given the equal merits of both parties. Why does God choose to give the gift of faith to one and not another? Why does He prepare "unequal lots for not unequal things?" That He does so not based on foreknowledge of response Augustine and Aquinas deduce from Scripture and reason; mystery begins when I ask why and exactly how (I can have only some idea how) He did so. Aquinas is not simply "putting this traditional mystery into Scholastic terms;" he is adding his own foreign conceptual content into the mix.

On the last point, I know that for Aquinas that human free will (and not God) is the cause of sin, but the problem is that the sin of unbelief is an effect of His choice to not grant the gift of faith. If it is true that "why He chooses some for glory, and reprobates others, has no reason, except the divine will," , then it is impossible that God is simply acting based on foreknowledge of positive or negative responses to grace or that those responses are not effects of God's prior choice to give or not to give saving grace.

Ray,



All I am trying to do in this thread (as I stated in the beginning) is to accurately describe Aquinas' view of predestination. I am not trying to untie any Gordian knot; I have not presented my own views on the issue in this thread so you have no means of contrasting my 'old view' (or set of assumptions) with your 'new way' of looking at the issue. Nevertheless, I am certainly interested in whatever you have to say on the matter.

Dear NeoChalcedonian...


I have an interest in the concept of predestination and so I was eager to get involved in the thread. (perhaps too eager )

My implied (by the Gordian knot) was that many men have struggled with the concept of predestination (Calvin, Aquinas, etc) and they do so from a very difficult view which often (and habitually) includes a few wrong assumptions.

The major wrong assumption being ... that (before our birth) God (on account of his foreknowledge of what we shall do in life).... does will some people to a final damnation ... and others to a final salvation.

Such a concept is actually a confusion of Providence ... with ... destiny or fate.

Providence being the governance of God on all things and events ... and destiny/fate being a governance by necessity which is devoid of any governance by Providence. In other words: the 'will of God' (governance by Providence) or not the 'will of God' (governance by destiny and fate).

I myself understand and agree with Origen...


Which is to say: either a person is not at the destination of governance by God (and God is trying to get the person to that destination) .. or one is at the destination (has arrived) is is being governed by the will of God.

The concept of damnation (used to mean an opposite of salvation) as a place ... that God does will some to go ... is faulty. It is a literal interpretation according to the senses (as if heaven were a place and had a location). It is trying to work with two levels of theology by assuming the same context for both levels.

On one level (the level of Paul and Origen) ... Either we are sons of God (meaning that we are cooperating with God's will) or we are not sons of God (meaning that we are not cooperating with God's will and God is wanting us to get to the cooperation). This is also the level of theology which Jesus used most often and is the level which I prefer.

WE often treat haven as if it were someone in the future - a place we can go in the future - which Jesus treated heaven as ... himself. "The kingdom of heaven is upon you' here and now in the fact of my presence.

On another level ... we either have the habit of cooperating with the will or God or we do not have the habit of cooperating with the will of God. Which is to say that either we gain that habit (in this life) or we do not gain that habit. This final reality (at the end of our lives here) remains conditional and contingent ... until its time comes. God has not determined it � it is our determination to make. God's foreknowledge of it is also contingent upon our own free-will will and our free-will determination. God does not pre-determine it for us. That is to say that: the governance of Providence upon all things and all events is contingent upon and determinant upon our present free-will choices at any moment.

And so .. without knowing your own views (you said you did not present your own views) but only knowing that you take issue with Aquinas ... I would have to agree with you (I take issue with Aquinas also but perhaps not for the same reasons that you do).

I have a wonderful (I think) analogy for this if you would like to hear it - in the form of dominoes falling on a table.

These are my thoughts which I would like to throw on the table.

Peace to you and your church.
-ray

I meant to write: that we often treat heaven as if it were some place in the future. Yet Jesus called himself 'the kingdom of the heavens' on account of his always cooperating with the will of his father. Heaven is - cooperating with God's will. When we do that we are joined to Jesus who is also doing God's will at all times, and the cause of us doing God's will. We become sons of God. The son is like the father and in the image of the father.

-ray

Ray,

I'm ready to hear the analogy that accompanies this description of predestination. I believe that the errors you have identified in others' views to stem from a flawed theology proper and failure to take Christology seriously.

That's "double predestination," which is what Clavin expounded.

Luther expounded "single predestination"--this only provided for salvation by predestination.

And the cocktail party word for tonight, much better than antidisestablishmentarianism, is "superelapsarian doublepredestenarianism": before time time began, God chose both the elect and the damned.

Yes, I ended up with some advanced Protestant theology at my Jesuit college.

hawk

We can't say that he would agree with St. Augustine on this point at all, since he cites both St. John of Damascus' and St. Augustine's answers to this given verse, and only after supplying St. John of Damascus' answer to this very text does he elucidate his own response, which I have cited, about the general will and the particular (contingent) will. If he agreed with St. Augustine as surely as you think, there is no reason why he would give St. John of Damascus' response and then elucidate upon it rather than utilize St. Augustine's. You can read his answer here [newadvent.org].


I was referring to the matter of reprobation and predestination, and specifically the general versus particular will of God. That is what St. Thomas draws directly from the writings of St. John of Damascus, almost verbatim.

As for St. John teaching that God gives us Grace in response to his knowledge of what we will do with it (essentially the Molinist argument, and one that is perfectly valid and accepted in the Latin tradition), I've not read anything of St. John's to indicate that he held to this. Do you have a citation for such a view?

Peace and God bless!

Ghosty,


Merely restating a claim is not equivalent to engaging my argument that it is false. I know that he cites St. John and Augustine's answers to the exegetical question; why I do not see the relevance of that point for our purposes is that their answers do not even cover the same ground. St. Augustine is saying that the passage means that no one is saved without divine power, and St. John is making a conceptual distinction the nature of which I elaborated upon earlier:


I do not believe that for Augustine and Aquinas the sense in which men do not fulfill or resist God's will does the kind of explanatory work you think it does. Let's distinguish God's will-1 which is simply "anything insofar as it is good" (basically the created order and the proper end of everything generally speaking) from God's will-2 which is whatever God desires and effectually wills to take place in his omnipotence. Acts of rape and murder would oppose God's will-1, but *nothing* in their view could resist will-2.



Here are two from the Exposition:



The bold cannot occur within Augustine's and Aquinas' predestinarian systems because one's disposition to believe and free act of belief are themselves effects of predestination.

Peace,

Yes, and Aquinas cites both as authorities, and develops his fullest answer from St. John of Damascus, so we can't simply assert that "Aquinas would go along with St. Augustine here". The fact is that he doesn't simply "go along" with either, but rather presents both. I do think it's worth noting, however, that he develops the idea of St. John rather than of St. Augustine, though I would never state so plainly as you that "St. Thomas would go along with St. John of Damascus on this".

Essentially my point is that you are making a strong claim without any strong evidence to back it up; we aren't capable of making statements about who St. Thomas would agree with, especially since he doesn't seem to view their positions as contradictory (neither do I, incidentally) and cites them both.


And St. John of Damascus says exactly the same in the portion you cited:

"Moreover, it is to be observed that the choice of what is to be done is in our own hands: but the final issue depends, in the one case when our actions are good, on the cooperation of God, Who in His justice brings help according to His foreknowledge to such as choose the good with a right conscience, and, in the other case when our actions are to evil, on the desertion by God, Who again in His justice stands aloof in accordance with His foreknowledge."

Remember that for Aquinas predestination is NOT the same as predetermination. Aquinas defines predestination as "the type of the aforesaid direction of a rational creature towards the end of life eternal". Predestination, properly speaking then, is the knowledge on the part of God that this or that individual will be Saved in the end; Aquinas' definition is quite unlike the later Protestant definition that we are used to.

Since predestination is a "type" of the end of Salvation, it is of course moved along by Grace because Grace is the cause of Salvation. So when Aquinas speaks of Grace with regards to predestination, he's speaking of it in terms of facilitating the end of Salvation, not in terms of the predestined receiving Grace while the reprobate do not. Aquinas says it is because of the choice of sinners that they do not arrive in Heaven, not because of reprobation by God:


An analogy could be made using a train: we can say that passengers arive at the final stop of the train by virtue of the train's movement, and that without the train they would not arrive. There are those who never arrive at the final destination, but this tells us nothing about whether or not they rode the train. If we have foreknowledge of who will arrive at the final stop, and we send the train in order to pick them up, we can say that our knowledge is the cause of them ending up at the final stop (because we send the train for them so they can get there), but we can't say that our knowledge is the cause of others getting off early (they chose to leave the train early on their own, though we knew they would do so).


This is true, but not in the sense you are intending. Grace allows us to believe, and without it we can't believe (and can't reach the end of Heaven), and therefore the ability to believe in the predestined is obviously a result of their predestination (God's foreknowledge of their end, and His sending them Grace to reach that end), but this does not at all contradict what St. John of Damascus wrote, who says that our good comes about only through the cooperation of God. It also says nothing of the belief of the reprobate, who certainly could have had Faith at some point and then fallen away (and in the case of the Baptized who fall away this is a certain fact in Aquinas' system, since Baptism imparts Faith). Their falling away is not caused by them not being predestined, but because of their very sins.

Aquinas leaves the cause of damnation in the hands of the damned, though he deals with it from the perspective of God's infallible final knowledge of who is Saved and who is Damned. The known Damned can't be saved, and this is infallibly known by God even as St. John says, but it is by their own actions:


I think the major problem here is that what Aquinas is actually dealing with in these questions is the infallible knowledge of God, but in our post-Reformation minds we think of predestination and reprobation strictly in terms of the actions of God: the predestined receive Grace, and the Reprobrate are damned. Aquinas isn't dealing with the questions of receiving Grace and abandonment by God in the context of our current lives and possible salvation except tangentally as they relate to the infallible and final knowledge of God, of who is Saved and who is Damned. So when Aquinas says that the predestined are certainly saved, and saved by Grace, he's not dealing with the question of who receives Grace, or whether or not the predestined have free will, but simply with the fact that a ) God knows who will end up in Heaven, and sends them the means to do so (that they can't do so without His Grace should be taken as a given, and is stated by St. John of Damascus as well). Likewise when dealing with the reprobate he's not dealing with HOW they end up abandoned by God, and whether God refused to give them the proper graces to avoid sins, but only with the fact that God knows infallibly who will be damned, and allows them to damn themselves.

Aquinas doesn't go further than this because this suffices to deal with the question of God's foreknowledge, which does not determine the choices of us in this life, but rather facilitates the impossible (in the case of the Predestined), and allows for the terrible (in the case of the Damned).

I believe that Aquinas is quite in line with St. John of Damascus because of his constant invocation of free choice enabled by Grace to choose God.

Peace and God bless!

Ghosty,




I think that Aquinas would agree with Augustine's interpretation of II Timothy 2:4 because I believe that what he says about predestination points in that direction, so my evidence for the first claim just is my evidence for the latter one. That St. John and St. Augustine do not contradict one another would only be surprising if they were talking about the same thing, and I already presented sufficient evidence that their claims do not overlap (or at least to show that I did not think they do.) It was neither explicitly stated nor implied that I thought he was choosing between two mutually exclusive positions; I am starting to wonder if you carefully read what I wrote.

I do not think your description of Aquinas' view of foreknowledge is accurate for two reasons. The first is that in your model God is "looking" (though infallibily) as a passive observer at some future that just happens to be the case; for Augustine and Aquinas there is no such state of affairs because whatever possible future obtains is the one God desired and willed to be. Secondly, while creatures know that something is the case by discovery, God simply knows whatever He wills to be. Everything beyond the reality of God is a contingent fact. God doesn't know Judas' betrayal because it "just happened" and saw it was the case; He knew it because among the plurality of possible futures He willed that one to be (with Judas remaining a free agent.) Aquinas' answer to the question of why God did not choose the possible future in which everyone is saved is that God wanted to manifest His Glory in a plurality of ways. THAT is the view I am taking issue with here; I never identified predestination with fatalism. I hope this clarifies my position.

NeoChalcedonian,

Look up the meaning of argumentum convenientiae.

Best,
Michael

Michael,

Sorry, I don't have a Latin dictionary handy.

Best,

His argument for predestination is simply that God supplies the Grace that brings the predestined to Heaven, and that much is attested by ALL the Fathers and Scriptures (including St. John of Damascus). You haven't shown where St. Thomas breaks with St. John of Damascus in saying that good works depend upon God, and the Grace that enables those good works depends on God's foreknowledge.


I'm not describing a passive view on the part of God, but rather pointing out that what is known (the end of individuals) is equally bound with the cause (Grace or reprobation). This is simply the logical consequence of God's omniscience and omnipresence, and is beyond our ability to truly comprehend. Even in Eastern theology God can not be truly "passive", because even in matters of free-will He continuously supplies the being and energy that enables those free actions; we have nothing apart from God's constant action within us on the level of nature.

Now it is true that God is the maker of the universe in which Judas betrayed Christ, and "selected" such a universe to make out of any other possibilities, but again this is simply the logical consequence of God's omnipotence (He could make anything He wanted, and is not even constrained by our free-will except insofar as He allows our free-choices to stand); even when taking into consideration God's permissiveness towards our own sins, He has it in His power to make a universe in which no sin was possible.

All of this is beside the original issue of whether or not God wills the salvation of all, however. Can we at least agree now that your statement in the previous thread (that Aquinas believed that God didn't wish the salvation of all) was an insufficient presentation of Aquinas' viewpoint, which is far more nuanced and directly cites St. John of Damascus?

BTW, that Latin phrase means "argument from fittingness". It basically says that given multiple possible "correct" answers, the most fitting applies. In the case of theology and predestination it is typically used to explain why this universe was chosen over any of the other infinite possibilities, namely that ours is the "most fitting" of God's Glory.

Peace and God bless!

Ghosty,

Thank you for having the patience to dialogue with me up to this point; I feel that in this last post of yours you touched upon what are for me the matters of truly ultimate concern under the murky theological waters.



Based on the patristic theology I have studied thus far, I do not believe that this option (a world in which all creation obtained deification without the *possibility* of a fall) was open to God, and I believe that both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology imply that it was, but then that means *all* actual evil (moral & natural) is an apparent evil or a justified good from God's perspective or that He is the author of sin, evil, and death, which have *absolutely* no other reason for their existence other than that God wanted to manifest his glory through them. The "free will defense" is ruled out by the fact that a potential world exists where deification is achieved without the possibility of a fall. This is one (among the many) reasons I decided to be Orthodox.

Well, final exams are over and I'm finally back home so I'm probably going to lay off the polemics and relax for a bit. Thanks again for conversing with me. I'll let you have the last word.

Peace,