Aquinas on Predestination (ST I, Q.23, Arts. 7–8) and the Book of Life (Q.24, Art. 1): How Many Are Predestined, Whether Prayer Helps, and What the Book of Life Is

Orientation #

He refers back to “the discussion of infinity of God” (prev. lecture) and to the certitude of predestination “about which we have already spoken” (prev. lecture, a. 6); he also recalls “we talked about how Augustine explains one fifty-three” without saying when. He ends: “Should we stop or go on? Let’s stop.” The previous class covered q. 23, aa. 5–6, and the next continues the book of life (q. 24) and introduces the divine operations.

The class, in order #

1. Article 7: the objections and Augustine (“whether the number of the predestined is certain”) #

Point: the three objections against a certain number, and the sed contra from Augustine.

• Opening joke: “we’re not going to tell you what the number is” — the Jehovah’s Witnesses already told us: 144,000.
• Translation aside: “certain” is the Latin word, “sure” the English; better to use the native word when you can.
• Obj. 1: a number to which addition can be made is not certain; Deuteronomy 1, “the Lord our God added to this number many thousands.”
• Obj. 2: no reason can be assigned why God foreordained this many to salvation rather than that many; but God disposes nothing without reason.
• Obj. 3: God’s operation is more perfect than nature’s; in nature good is found for the most part, defect rarely; so if God set the number, more would be saved than damned — against Matthew 7 (wide the way to perdition, narrow the gate to life) and the sapiential text “the number of fools is infinite.”
• Sed contra: Augustine, in the book “on correcting” [ed.: De correptione et gratia] — the number is certain and can be neither increased nor diminished. Aside: Augustine is the most-quoted author in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, more than Thomas.

2. The body: formally and materially, by knowledge and by choice (“every agent intends to make something limited”) #

Point: the number is certain to God not only formally but materially, and not only by knowledge but by choice.

• Formally vs materially: some say the number is certain (a hundred, a thousand) but not who fills it. Student examples he accepts: so many thrones in heaven but who sits in them; “I need three of you guys,” the number fixed before the three are picked; a cabinet of ten posts before the ministers are named. Thomas: this takes away the certitude of predestination already established, so the number is certain materially too.
• Certain by knowledge vs by choice: God also knows the number of raindrops and grains of sand; the predestined are certain “by reason of his choice and his definition of each.”
• Argument for the choice:
  1. Every agent intends to make something limited (from the treatise on the infinite: “infinite” says endless; Aristotle opposes endless to end; an agent acting for an end aims at something with an end).
  2. Whoever intends a determined measure in his effect thinks out a number in its essential parts, required for the perfection of the whole; but he takes only as many of the secondary things as are needed on account of another.
  3. House-builder: a determined measure of the house, a determined number of rooms and measures of the wall — but not a determined number of stones; as many as fill the wall. (“That’s been my experience of house builders.”)
  4. So God foreorders the measure of the whole universe and the number of its essential parts, which have order to its perpetuity: spheres, stars, elements, species. Corruptible individuals are ordered to the good of the universe only secondarily, insofar as the good of the species is saved in them; God knows the number of all individuals, but the number of cattle or [unclear in recording; perhaps gnats] is not per se preordained — his example: God knows how many ants there are but orders only enough to preserve the species.
  5. Rational creatures, being incorruptible, are chiefly ordered to the good of the universe (“a sign that we’re not just there for the species”); most of all those who attain beatitude, reaching immediately the last end, God himself. Hence the number of the predestined is certain by way of what is chiefly defined.
• The reprobates: not entirely so, because they seem preordained for the good of the elect, “for whom all things cooperate in the good” — the same distinction between predestination and reprobation as before.

3. What the number is (“to God alone is known the number of the elect”) #

Point: Thomas reports opinions but says the number is known to God alone.

• (a) As many men saved as angels fell — filling up the ranks; he calls this “a very probable opinion.” (b) As many as angels remained — “as probable as the first” (student: guardian angels, democratic equality). (c) As many as angels fell plus as many as angels were created — “I don’t see what the reason for that is.” Thomas: better to say God alone knows.
• 144,000 (footnote four in the text) and the 153 fish of John’s last chapter: taken symbolically, as Augustine explained 153; 144,000 is tied to the twelve tribes and twelve apostles.
• Student: out of six billion? — those are only the living; Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”: we don’t decide truth by voting among those who happen to be alive.

4. Replies: present justice, proportion to the whole, the rare excelling good (“the good which excels the common state of nature”) #

Point: each objection is met, and the third reply yields that fewer are saved — where God’s mercy most appears.

• Ad 1: Deuteronomy speaks of those noted beforehand with respect to present justice; that number increases and diminishes (the number of people in churches), not the number of the predestined. Same distinction as the previous article.
• Ad 2: the quantity of a part has its reason from its proportion to the whole — so many stars, so many species, so many predestined from the ratio of the chief parts to the good of the universe. (“I hope there’s some ratio of me to the good universe.”) He connects the number to the perfection of the Church; aside about 750,000 saints canonized or not and the saints “losing their throne in heaven to angels” (a joke).
• Ad 3: the good proportioned to the common state of nature happens for the most part, defect rarely; the good that excels the common state is in fewer, its defect in more. Most men have knowledge enough to rule their own life (driving a car); few lack it — “morons,” Latin moriones; but very few attain profound knowledge of intelligible things. Aside: “only three men understand relativity and Einstein is not one of them”; Heisenberg’s father taking him to the mathematician, who said reading physics means “your mind is contaminated by the material world”; a mathematician consulted by quantum physicists who wonders what they use it for. Hence, since beatitude in the vision of God exceeds nature, especially nature destitute of grace by original sin, fewer are saved — and in this, Thomas says, God’s mercy most appears, that he draws some up from what most fail at through nature’s common inclination (“we’re animals… we follow what is sensible as more known”).
• Thomas, Augustine and others hold that more are lost than saved — “very undemocratic.” Cassian: only two of the desert generation reached the promised land; St Paul: “these things were done for a figure for us,” with most of them God was not pleased. So fear of the Lord is necessary: Anselm’s “meditations to gain the fear of the Lord,” Bellarmine’s tract on hell, the four last things preached at parish missions; a man dropping dead on the church steps after a sermon.
• Asides: Ananias and Sapphira; Paul striking the magician blind; prelates having such power by office, rarely exercised (Julian); the sisters’ story of a priest cursing a town; parents never to curse children; the host in a handkerchief turned blood-red; the Santarém Eucharistic miracle. Break.

5. Article 8: objections and the case of Isaac (“nothing eternal is preceded by something temporal”) #

Point: the objections against prayers aiding predestination, and the sed contra from Genesis 25.

• He frames it as the more general question whether prayers affect providence.
• Obj. 1: nothing temporal precedes or aids the eternal; predestination is eternal, prayers temporal.
• Obj. 2: as nothing needs counsel except from defect of knowledge, nothing needs aid except from defect of power; neither belongs to God — Romans 11, “who aids the Spirit of the Lord, or who is his counselor?” Aside: in the treatise on the Trinity Thomas shows Spiritus Dei names the Holy Spirit, analogous to “Son of God”; “Spirit of the Lord” is scriptural though not among the names he treats.
• Obj. 3: it belongs to the same to aid and to impede; predestination cannot be impeded, so it cannot be aided — “has some probability at least.”
• Sed contra: Isaac prayed the Lord for Rebecca; Jacob, who was predestined, was born of that conception; the predestination would not have been fulfilled had he not been born.
• Aside: the morning’s reading from Tobit — Sarah’s seven husbands dead on the wedding night, Tobias getting up to pray; it should be among the readings offered for weddings.

6. Two errors and the distinction that steers between them (“sail between Scylla and Charybdis”) #

Point: prayers do not cause the preordering but fall under it as second causes of its effect.

• Error 1: because predestination is certain, prayers and good works are superfluous — against all Scripture’s exhortations to prayer and good works.
• Error 2: prayers change predestination — the Egyptians held their “fate” could be impeded by sacrifices and prayers — against 1 Kings [ed.: 1 Samuel], “the triumphant one in Israel does not repent,” and Romans 11:29, the gifts of God are without repentance. Aside on why “Kings” (Thomas: the books narrate the lives of the prophets), and on history: political-military history has sharp dates (the end of Napoleon), social-economic history doesn’t (when the car replaced the horse).
• The distinction: (1) the divine preordering itself — in no way aided by prayers; nobody is predestined because of prayers; (2) its effect — aided by prayers and good works, because providence, of which predestination is a part, does not remove second causes but orders them, as natural causes are ordered to natural effects without which those effects would not occur. So whatever promotes a man’s salvation — his own prayers, others’ prayers, good works — falls under the ordering. Hence the predestined must do well and pray; 2 Peter, “strive by good works to make certain your vocation and election.”
• Monica and Augustine: is Augustine predestined because of his mother’s prayers? No — God’s plan of predestination included that he receive the graces of conversion through Monica’s prayers (“the prayers of such a woman cannot be in vain”); an application of providence extending to contingent causes, her free choice moved by grace.
• Fate as necessity (“the Epicureans,” he says) misses that providence extends to the order of second causes. Student: since we don’t know who is predestined, better to pray — a kind of Pascal’s wager; devotion to the Blessed Mother a sign of predestination. St Gertrude: prayers are never wasted, they line up and push a person the right way.

7. Replies: two ways of being aided; the beauty of order and the dignity of causality (“someone is said to be aided by another in two ways”) #

Point: God is aided not by receiving power but by ministers carrying out his order.

• Ad 1: granted for the preordering itself.
• Ad 2: aided (a) by receiving power from another — belongs to the infirm, not to God (“who aids the Spirit of the Lord?”); (b) through one who carries out one’s operation, as a lord through his servant — so God is aided by us: 1 Corinthians, Dei adiutores sumus. Not from defect of power, but because he uses middle causes so that the beauty of order is kept and the dignity of causality communicated to creatures. Thomas elsewhere: causes are superior to effects, so the order of causes is better than the order of effects; God wants creatures to share his goodness and to be like him even as cause.
• Aside on memory: Thomas’s scriptural memory; a high-school student and a college professor with photographic memory (the professor who read Aristotle in Greek with him and his brother, Dante with his brother, played the organ flawlessly); Augustine’s Trinity built from scattered scriptural texts.
• Aside on the order of teachers (Monsignor Dionne): Thomas unfolds Aristotle, and someone is needed to unfold Thomas; Greek commentators can only paraphrase Aristotle, often incorrectly. Church fathers “proportion the text to you”: the wedding garment is charity (parishioners left to themselves thought the host mean); Dominican books with the golden chain and fathers’ sermons on each Sunday gospel; Caesar’s coin — give to God what bears God’s image, your soul; Cana disposes toward the Eucharist, the wine’s own accidents being sensible evidence of the power to transubstantiate, the miracle done at Mary’s request, preparing for John 6.
• Ad 3: second causes cannot escape the order of the first universal cause but carry it out; so predestination can be aided by creatures but not impeded — “I can curse and swear, but it’s not going to help; but my prayers can help somebody.”

8. Question 24, article 1: the book of life and predestination (“the book of life in God is said metaphorically”) #

Point: the book of life is a metaphor for God’s knowledge of those chosen to eternal life.

• Three questions of q. 24: what the book of life is; of what life; whether someone can be rubbed out of it (joke: “written in indelible ink?”).
• Obj. 1: Ecclesiasticus, “all these things are the book of life” — the gloss: the Old and New Testament, not predestination. Obj. 2: Augustine, City of God 20 — a divine power reducing each one’s deeds to memory; that pertains to the attribute of power (next question). Obj. 3: reprobation is opposed to predestination, so there would be a book of death. He calls this “a little excursion into symbolic theology.”
• Sed contra: gloss on Psalm 68, “deleted from the book of the living” — this book is God’s knowledge by which he predestines to life those he foreknows (gloss ascribed to Cassiodorus, also Augustine).
• Body: said metaphorically, from a likeness to human things — those chosen for something are written in a book, as soldiers, or the senators called patres conscripti. All the predestined are chosen to eternal life, so their conscription is the book of life. What is written in the mind is what is firmly held in memory: Proverbs 3, keep my precepts, write them on the tables of your heart; material books aid memory. So God’s knowledge firmly retaining someone predestined to eternal life is the book of life; as writing is a sign of what ought to come about, God’s knowledge is a sign before him of those to be led to life — 2 Timothy, “the firm foundation stands, having this sign: God knows those who are his.” (“Names written in heaven” — written in the book of life.)
• Ad 1 and 2: book of life said two ways — the writing down of those chosen to life (our sense); or of the things leading to life, either as to be done (the two Testaments) or as done (the divine power recalling deeds — Shakespeare’s “book” brought out to be wept over). As liber militiae: the roll of those chosen, the treatise on the military art, or the record of soldiers’ deeds. The first two objections rest on the fallacy of equivocation.
• Ad 3: it is not customary to write down the repudiated but the chosen; so no book of death corresponds — because the metaphor is from human custom, and the difference already seen between reprobation and predestination. Student objection: Moses commanded a libellum of repudiation (divorce). His answer, tentative: that was allowed for hardness of heart; “I got to find that now” — left open.
• Ad 4 (to the sed contra): by definition the book of life differs from predestination, for it implies the knowledge of predestination: liber hic est notitia Dei qua praedestinavit ad vitam. “Interesting question.” Stop.

His words #

• certain / sure: the Latin word and the native English word; prefer the native.
• formally vs materially certain: the count fixed vs. which persons fill it.
• infinite: contradicts “finition”; endless vs. having an end (Aristotle).
• essential parts of the universe: spheres, stars, elements, species — ordered to its perpetuity.
• moriones: “morons,” those lacking knowledge enough to rule their own life.
• present justice: the state those “noted beforehand” are in; its number rises and falls.
• democracy of the dead (Chesterton): not judging truth by a vote of the living.
• Spiritus Domini / Spiritus Dei: scriptural names of the Holy Spirit, analogous to “Son of God.”
• fate (Egyptians): the divine ordering, thought changeable by sacrifices and prayers.
• preordering vs. effect of predestination: the two things to be distinguished in it.
• second causes: fall under providence, carry out the first cause’s order, cannot escape it.
• Dei adiutores sumus: aid as ministers carrying out God’s order, not as giving him power.
• beauty of order; dignity of causality: why God uses middle causes.
• symbolic theology: speaking of God metaphorically, as with the book of life.
• patres conscripti: “fathers written down,” the senators; model of the book.
• liber militiae: three senses of “the military book,” parallel to three senses of “book of life.”
• fallacy of equivocation: what the first two objections of q. 24 a. 1 commit.
• liber hic est notitia Dei qua praedestinavit ad vitam: the book is God’s knowledge of predestination.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, a. 7 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 23, a. 8 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 24, prologue and a. 1 (whole article)

Mentioned

• Deuteronomy 1; Matthew 7; a sapiential text (“the number of fools is infinite”); John, last chapter (153 fish); Genesis 25; Romans 11 and 11:29; 1 Kings (1 Samuel); 2 Peter; 1 Corinthians (“Dei adiutores sumus”); Ecclesiasticus; Psalm 68 with gloss (Cassiodorus/Augustine); Proverbs 3; 2 Timothy; Tobit; Acts (Ananias and Sapphira; the magician struck blind)
• Augustine, De correptione et gratia (inferred title for “the book on correcting”); City of God, book 20; Augustine on the Trinity
• Aristotle on the infinite; Thomas’s treatise on the infinite and on the Trinity (earlier in the Summa); Thomas’s prologue on the books of Kings
• Cassian on the desert generation; St Paul, “these things were done for a figure”; Anselm, meditations on the fear of the Lord; Bellarmine, on hell and its torments; Chesterton (democracy of the dead); St Gertrude the Great; Catechism of the Catholic Church; Shakespeare’s “book”; Dominican Sunday-gospel volumes with the golden chain

His questions #

• What does it mean to say the number is certain formally but not materially? The count is fixed but not who fills it (thrones, three helpers, ten cabinet posts); Thomas rejects this as removing the certitude of predestination.
• Why is the number of the reprobates not thus certain? They seem preordained for the good of the elect, for whom all things cooperate.
• Which opinion on the number is most probable? That as many men are saved as angels fell, or as remained; but better, God alone knows.
• Why are fewer saved when God’s operation is more perfect than nature’s? Beatitude exceeds the common state of nature; the excelling good is found in fewer — and there God’s mercy most appears.
• Is Augustine predestined because of Monica’s prayers? No; her prayers were part of the plan of predestination, not its cause.
• Does God need our help? Not as receiving power; he is aided through us as ministers carrying out his ordering.
• Why can predestination be aided but not impeded? Second causes carry out the first cause’s order and cannot escape it.
• Why a book of life and no book of death? Men customarily write down the chosen, not the rejected.
• What of Moses’ libellum of repudiation? Allowed for hardness of heart; left open (“I got to find that now”).
• How does the book of life differ from predestination? It implies the knowledge of predestination — God’s notitia by which he predestines to life.