Predestination in the Divine Mind, Reprobation, and Divine Choice and Love (Summa I, Q.23 a.2–4)

Orientation #

He opens: “We’re up to the second article of the twenty-third question,” and refers back to what “has been said above” about providence permitting defects and about the antecedent/consequent will (prev. lecture). He closes by saying the next article “is too long to go into now.” The previous class opened q. 23, a. 1 on predestination after treating providence; the next takes aa. 5–6.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, the objections (“predestination places something in the one predestined”) #

The point: the four objections all try to put predestination in the creature.

1. Every action infers some undergoing; so if predestination is an action in God it is an undergoing in the predestined.
2. Origen on Romans: predestination is of one who is not, destination of one who is; but Augustine (On the Predestination of the Saints): “what is predestination except the destination of someone?” So it is only of someone existing.
3. Preparation is something in the one prepared (“preparing dinner is something in the food, right?”); Augustine calls predestination the preparation of God’s benefits.
4. The temporal is not put in the definition of the eternal; but grace, temporal, is in the definition (“preparation of grace in the present and of glory in the future”); so predestination is not eternal, not in God. Sed contra (Augustine): predestination is foreknowledge of God’s benefits, and foreknowledge is in the knower, not the known. He notes this “sounds like what Father Michael was saying.”

• Aside: he read these books of Augustine in high school from his cousin Donnie’s volumes; “difficult stuff.”

2. The body: predestination is in the predestinator (“a certain reason of the order of things”) #

The point: predestination is a reason in the divine mind; only its carrying-out is in creatures.

1. Predestination is a part of providence.
2. Providence is not in things foreseen but is a reason in the understanding of the one foreseeing (“that’s the syllogism”).
3. Conclusion: predestination is “a certain reason of the order of things to eternal salvation that exists in the divine mind.” But the execution of providence, called governing, is passively in the governed, actively in God; the execution of predestination is the calling and magnifying (Rom.: “whom He predestined, these also He called… magnified”; cf. Mary, “my soul magnifies the Lord”). Student: what has predestination to do with the will of God? Answer: it is a reason of the order, in the mind, but it presupposes the will of the end, as Aristotle’s foresight [ed.: prudence] in the Ethics presupposes the goodness of the will; “reason looks before and after,” hence the link with foresight. Foresight extends to all things; predestination only to rational creatures, “a part of foresight.”

• Example: “if I kick you”: the plan to kick is only in me; the actual kicking is actively in me and passively in you: reason-in-God vs execution-in-creature.
• Why an article on predestination and not on gubernatio here? In this part of the Summa he is treating God in Himself; God’s acting upon things comes later.

3. Replies to a. 2 (“actions that remain in the doer”) #

Reply 1: transitive actions going into exterior matter (heating, cutting) infer an undergoing outside; immanent actions (to understand, to will, and in us to sense, to imagine) do not; predestination is such an action, and only its carrying-out places an effect in things. Reply 2: “destination” has two senses: (a) real sending of something to an end, only of what is; (b) the mission conceived in the mind, “what we propose firmly,” as Eleazar in 2 Maccabees “destined not to admit illicit things” for love of life, which can be of what is not. Predestination, by the antecessio (“coming before”) it implies, is of what is not on either reading. “Little problem with the word destination.” Reply 3 (he calls it “the third article”): twofold preparation: of the undergoer that it may undergo, in the one prepared, vs of the agent that it may act, in the agent, who “preconceives the reason for the work”; God from eternity prepares by predestinating. Whoever influences you for good or ill comes under God’s plan for you. Reply 4: grace is in the definition not as existing in its nature but as predestination bears a relation to it, as cause to effect and act to object; so no temporality follows.

• Aside: St Alphonsus quoting that it is better to go to Mary because her intercession is so powerful, and that she is displeased when you do not come (“a double reason”), like a friend saying “if you’d asked me I would have done it”: God’s plan may have you get grace through Mary or some other way.

4. Article 3, the objections (“it seems that God reprobates no man”) #

The point: “this difficult Article Three”: whether God reprobates (“rejects”) any man.

1. No one reprobates whom he loves; God loves every man (Wisdom 11:25, “you hate none of those things which you have made”; “because you didn’t make sin, though”).
2. Reprobation would be to the reprobate as predestination to the predestined; predestination causes salvation, so reprobation would cause loss; but Osee: “your perdition, Israel, is from you; from me only is your help” (“a beautiful text”). He flags here Plato’s saying that likeness is a slippery thing, especially a likeness of ratios between things far apart.
3. No one is blamed for what he cannot avoid; Ecclesiastes 7, “no one is able to correct him whom he despises.” Sed contra, Malachi: “I loved Jacob, but I had Esau in hatred” (“tough, tough words”).

• Aside: Calvin “probably got on the wrong side of some of these questions.”

5. The body: reprobation as permitting and punishing (“it belongs to providence to allow some defect”) #

1. Predestination is a part of providence; it belongs to providence to allow some defect in what is subject to it (providence does not eliminate all evil, “for a number of reasons”).
2. Since men are ordered by providence to eternal life, it belongs to providence to permit some to fall (decidunt: “deciduous,” these fall) from that end; this is to reprobate them.
3. So reprobation is a part of providence regarding those who fall short, as predestination is regarding those ordered to salvation. Reprobation is not foreknowledge only; it adds the will of permitting someone to fall into guilt and of inflicting the punishment of damnation, as predestination includes the will of conferring grace and glory. Student observes the choice of words: “permit” puts it more on the person, whereas predestination directs and gives grace; God moves no one to sin but allows it and then punishes. His answer: “these two aren’t opposites” exactly; back to Plato’s warning on likeness.

6. Digression: in what does a likeness consist? (“four is to six as two is to three”) #

The point: even the most exact proportions must be examined for where the likeness lies.

• 4:6 :: 2:3: one could say 2:3 is prime to prime, so 4:6 is; or 2:3 is even to odd, so 6 is odd. Wrong: the likeness is that four is the same parts (plural) of six that two is of three (six as three twos, four is two of them).
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing I: first matter : man and dog :: clay : sphere and cube. One might infer man and dog are accidents, or first matter an actual substance. The likeness: clay can be sphere or cube but not both at once, and when one, can become the other, ceasing to be the former; so first matter with man and dog.
• Aristotle’s tools of dialectic: the third tool is the ability to find the difference; the fourth is the consideration (Greek skepsis, whence “skeptic,” not in the sense of doubt) of likeness: one is especially exercised in likeness of ratios, which needs consideration because the terms are further apart. He promises the reply to the second objection will spell out the likeness.

7. Replies to a. 3 (“in another way has reprobation in causing”) #

Reply 1: God loves all men and creatures in that He wills some good to all, but not every good to all; insofar as He does not will eternal life to some, He is said to hate or reprobate them. Reply 2 (“the one we’re emphasizing”): predestination causes both what is expected in the future, glory, and what precedes in the present, grace (a psalm: God “the giver of grace and glory”). Reprobation is not the cause of the present thing, guilt, but of being abandoned by God, and it is the cause of what is rendered in the future, punishment. Guilt comes from the free will of the reprobate deserted from grace; thus “your loss is from you.” His summary: reprobation is to punishment as predestination is to glory, but as to the present it is not: predestination causes the good deed, reprobation does not cause the guilt (at most the abandonment). A student’s gloss: “reproved” means you were proved and fell short, so damnation is from you.

• Illustration from Summa Contra Gentiles on the Holy Spirit: heretics argued from “do not sadden the Holy Spirit” that He cannot be God; Thomas reads it as metaphor, like “God is angry”: the likeness is in the effect, not the emotion. Anger issues in punishment, so God punishing is called angry; sadness in company makes one leave, so God abandoning is called saddened. Telling grade-school children “don’t make God sad” works like making daddy sad, but God is not really sad. Shakespeare on study: no delight, no profit; sadness at economics (“the dismal science”) makes you give it up. Reply 3: reprobation takes nothing from the power of the reprobate; “cannot attain grace” is impossibility by condition, not absolute, as the predestined is saved by conditional necessity; freedom of will remains, so falling into this or that sin is from free will and merited as guilt.
• Asides: Calvin “exaggerated the likeness of reprobation to predestination.” Tocqueville, a believer in liberty, rejected determinism; his one-time secretary Gobineau went off into racial ideas popular in anti-Semitic circles around Wagner, down to Hitler, and Tocqueville found them very dangerous. His own joke: do good, thank God; do bad, blame yourself; people find it unfair to be chiefly responsible for the bad but not credited for the good, “missing the truth”: you cannot take the credit but you get the benefit. Grace is “kind of like an IOU from God.”

8. Article 4, the objections (“whether the predestined are chosen by God”) #

1. Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4: as the sun emits light on all bodies without choosing, so God, who is goodness, communicates grace and glory without choice. He notes “light is a slippery thing”: everything gets some goodness from God, “but maybe not all the same goodness.”
2. Choice is of things which are; predestination from eternity is of things which are not; so some are predestined without choice (“maybe he’s thinking a little too much of our choice”).
3. Choice implies discrimination; God wills all men to be saved (1 Tim 2). Sed contra, Ephesians: “He chose us in Himself before the constitution of the world” (“a beautiful quote”: thank God for choosing you to be, to begin with). Student (“Father”): why this article? Answer: choice names more the act of the will (though it involves reason); the will follows what is known, so it comes after the earlier articles; the question is whether choice is a cause of predestination.

9. The body: love, choice, predestination (“predestination presupposes choice, and choice presupposes love”) #

1. Predestination is a part of providence; providence, like prudence, is a reason in the understanding commanding the order of things to an end.
2. Nothing is commanded to be ordered to an end unless there is a will of the end.
3. So predestination to eternal life presupposes that God wills their salvation, to which belong love (willing this good to them; “to love is to will good to someone,” Aristotle, Rhetoric) and choice (willing this good to some before others). In us vs in God: in us the will does not cause the good; the pre-existing good arouses us to love it, so we choose whom we love and choice precedes love. In God the will by which He wills good by loving is the cause that the good is had by one before another; so love is presupposed to choice, choice to predestination; all the predestined are chosen and loved.

• Note on the word: the Latin is dilectio, from the word for choice; in the treatise on love in the prima secundae he had amor; he sometimes translates dilectio “chosen love.”

10. Reply 1 and the question of inequality (“He does not give it without choice”) #

Reply 1: communicating goodness in general is without choice (nothing fails to partake of it); communicating this or that good is with choice, since some goods He gives to some and not others; so in bestowing grace and glory attend to choice (“Thomas, a much better mind than me”). Example: He chose Mary to be Mother of God, hence a collatio of grace, “full of grace.” So in some ways God is like the sun, in some not. Panos: so He loved her first, then chose her, gave the grace? Answer: yes. Note on Wisdom 11 in a. 3 obj. 1: diligit omnia quae sunt; you would not say He chose all things, since choice implies giving to one what you do not give another. Origen thought all creatures created equal, later stationed by sinning more or less; the truth is God chose creatures unequal, partly for order among them, partly so there be cause and effect and creatures partake of causality (“if we all did the same things there wouldn’t be any teaching”); Thomas: the order of causes is better than the order of effects.

• Asides: reading Aristotle (e.g. the fourteen books of the Metaphysics) without Thomas’s commentary; modern scholars working on their own cannot understand him; early commentators only paraphrase inaccurately; one needs De Koninck or Monsignor Dionne “to proportion Aristotle and Thomas to them”; you must realize how carefully to read. Student: did Thomas learn from Averroes and Avicenna? Yes, and saw their mistakes. Albert and Thomas call Plato and Aristotle the chief philosophers, but not equal: Aristotle is “the philosopher” by antonomasia, as Homer “the poet.” Plato’s “the mind of the school is here”; Albert on the “dumb ox,” later going to Paris to defend Thomas; Haydn and Mozart: no envy. Envy behind the Pharisees’ rejection of Christ; Wisdom: “by the envy of the devil death came into the world”; English novelists: harder for friends to bear a man’s good fortune than for him; Americans’ generosity to strangers vs envy; Hume dismissing Aristotle, yet more papers on Aristotle than anyone, and Plato’s Apology the commonest introduction; Canadian study of lottery winners less happy, divorced; the high-school cynic: “money isn’t everything, but it’s a good buy” [ed.: recording garbled].

11. Replies 2 and 3 of a. 4 (“God wishes all men to be saved antecedently”) #

Reply 2: when the will is provoked to choose by a good already in the thing, choice is of things which are, as in our choice (Aristotle on friendship: you choose your friends, not mere feeling); in God it is otherwise, so, as Augustine says, God chooses those which are not, yet does not err in choosing. Reply 3: God wills all men saved antecedently, which is not simply but secundum quid; not consequently, which is to will simpliciter. Example: as a college teacher, antecedently he wants all to pass; after correcting exams, considering merits and demerits (skipping, sleeping in class), he does not simply will it. He stops at 4:15: “next article is too long to go into now.”

His words #

• “reprobate” / “reject”: his renderings of reprobare; not sure there is a better word.
• “foresight”: providentia [ed.: providence]; extends to all things; predestination is a part of it, for rational creatures.
• “governing” (gubernatio): the execution of providence, passively in the governed.
• “magnifying”: his rendering of the Romans text (magnificavit), “made great.”
• “transitive actions” vs “actions that remain in the doer”: heating/cutting vs understanding, willing, sensing, imagining.
• “destination”: real sending to an end vs the mission conceived mentally (“what we propose firmly”).
• antecessio: “the coming before” implied by pre-destination.
• “preparation”: of the undergoer vs of the agent preconceiving the reason for the work.
• decidunt: “fall away,” linked to “deciduous.”
• “likeness is a slippery thing” (Plato): especially a likeness of ratios between things far apart.
• skepsis: “consideration” of likeness, the fourth tool of dialectic; not skepticism.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• dilectio: “chosen love,” from the word for choice; amor the word in the prima secundae.
• “by antonomasia”: Aristotle “the philosopher,” Homer “the poet.”
• collatio: bestowal (of grace to Mary).
• simpliciter / secundum quid: consequent vs antecedent will.
• “grace is like an IOU from God.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, a. 2 (whole article, all four replies)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, a. 3 (whole article, three replies)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, a. 4 (objections, body, replies 1–3)
• Handout “Note for Book One, Reading Thirteen,” p. 4 (verified source; not named in the transcript)
• DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 364 (verified source; not named in the transcript)

Mentioned

• Romans (Origen’s comment; “whom He predestined… called… magnified”); Luke, Magnificat
• Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints; Augustine on God choosing what is not
• 2 Maccabees (Eleazar); Wisdom 11:25; Osee (“your perdition is from you”); Ecclesiastes 7; Malachi (Jacob/Esau); a psalm (“giver of grace and glory”); 1 Timothy 2; Ephesians (“chose us before the constitution of the world”); Wisdom on the envy of the devil; St Paul “do not sadden the Holy Spirit”
• Aristotle, Ethics (foresight presupposes good will; friendship); Rhetoric (to love is to will good); Natural Hearing [Physics] I; the tools of dialectic (Topics, inferred); Metaphysics, fourteen books; Plato’s Apology
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (on the Holy Spirit); Summa Theologiae I-II, treatise on love (amor)
• St Alphonsus (on going to Mary); Calvin; Origen (equal creation); Tocqueville, Gobineau; De Koninck, Msgr Dionne; David Hume on Aristotle; Shakespeare on study and delight; English novelists on envy

His questions #

• What does predestination have to do with the will of God? It is a reason of the order in the divine mind, but presupposes the will of the end, as foresight presupposes the good will.
• Why an article on predestination here and not on governing? Here he treats God in Himself; God’s acting on things comes later.
• In what way is four to six as two is to three? Four is the same parts of six that two is of three; not prime-to-prime or even-to-odd.
• In what does the likeness of first matter to clay consist? Each can be either of two things, not both at once, and becoming one ceases to be the other.
• Is reprobation to the reprobate as predestination to the predestined? As to punishment/glory, yes; as to the present, no: reprobation does not cause guilt, which is from free will.
• Why is God said to be saddened or angry? Metaphor from the effect: He punishes as the angry do, abandons as the saddened leave.
• Why this article on choice, and why here? Choice names the act of the will, which follows knowing; the question is whether choice is a cause of predestination.
• In what way is God like the sun, and in what way not? Goodness in general is given to all without choice; this or that good, grace and glory, is given with choice.
• Did He love Our Lady first and then choose her? Yes: in God love precedes choice, choice precedes predestination.
• Why did God make creatures unequal? For order among them and so that they could partake of causality; the order of causes is better than that of effects.