Dr. Taylor Patrick O’Neill, an astute theological thinker and friend of The Pat Flynn Show, has recently appeared on The Classical Theism Podcast to critique the position of Jacques Maritain on the mystery of predestination and the permission of evil. Because this critique applies to much of the position that I defend, I thought a few responses were in order.
To be clear, I am not attempting to vindicate Maritain per se, since I do not move in lockstep with Maritain on every issue. I would say the model I defend is a hybrid of insights from St. Thomas, Francisco Marin-Sola, Bernard Lonergan, and Michael Torre. However, I am significantly influenced by Maritain and it would not be unfair to say that I am broadly Maritainian, such that any broad critiques of Maritain will probably apply to my position in some respect or other.
I’ll try to keep this response relatively brief, since I’ve written on this topic previously, and will ink out where appropriate. You may want to start by reading my general sketch of how to think about Predestination here.
Now, onto Dr. O’Neill’s critiques.
First objection: Regarding violations of divine simplicity and/or impassibility, (Dr. O’Neill argues God would be “passively learning” if the creature could resist or shatter the divine impulses, which he claims is problematic for both) I address all this in my article on God’s Impassibility and Knowledge of Sin. To be fair, it’s contestable whether Maritain would have made all the distinctions I do, but Dr. O’Neill seems to overlook the model I propose for making sense of how 1) sin is entirely due to the creature alone, and 2) God’s knowledge of the defective creature is grounded extrinsically to God which is sufficient to preserve divine simplicity, impassibility, and universal causality, even though it is a contingent fact. Because Dr. O’Neill does not engage any critical aspect of my position on the podcast, I have nothing to add at this point, except to encourage the reader to (re)visit what I’ve already written on the subject and evaluate my position in light of Dr. O’Neill’s critiques of Maritain. I believe the position I articulate deals adequately with Dr. O’Neill’s objections and preserves the plausibility of Maritain’s perspective, broadly considered, or at least shows how Maritain’s perspective can be defended in light of contemporary research on divine simplicity and universal causality.
But I will take it one step further. To deal with contemporary (and predominantly Protestant) objections to divine simplicity, specifically via charges of God’s contingent or changing knowledge in relation to what God does or doesn’t create (i.e. that God knows unicorns do not exist, or that He is or is not the creator of unicorns, etc), I’d say we HAVE to adopt the model I propose to overcome such objections and that O’Neill’s model cannot sufficiently handle them. But once we’ve adopted the model I propose to overcome these (seemingly) unrelated objections, there is no reason to then not also apply it to the mystery of predestination and God’s knowledge of sin. Again, read the article to get the full scoop.
In short, it is far easier to resolve difficulties of divine simplicity, impassibility, and universal causality – especially with the extrinsic model of divine simplicity, and relevant distinctions over intrinsic vs extrinsic predication, especially with respect to God’s knowledge – with my broadly Maritainian perspective, than it is to preserve divine innocence with Dr. O’Neill’s neo-Banezianism, where it seems inescapable that God is made to be the indirect (or per accidens) cause of sin, a criticism I will explore shortly. And that is really the issue, isn’t it? How best do we resolve the apparent tension between two intractable theological commitments in view of predestination and the permission of sin? Divine sovereignty (simplicity, impassibility, universal causality, providence), on the one hand, and divine innocence (and goodness), on the other? Naturally, I argue the position I defend is the only one that can satisfactorily resolve all the relevant issues in a philosophically sophisticated, stable, and non-contrived manner, while providing additional upshots to overcome contemporary objections aimed at divine simplicity, more generally. Again, I will go even one step further and argue that only the extrinsic model of divine simplicity can adequately ground libertarian human freedom, as Matthews Grant argues in his book.
Next, Dr. O’Neill claims the human creature can escape divine omnipotence or overcome the divine will. But this, I believe, is a strawman. God wills to govern fallible creatures with fallible (or shatterable, if you prefer) motions IN THE GENERAL RUN and that some creatures can “sterilize” the divine impulse is only because God wills that to be. And because we can resist interior grace – a teaching of the Catholic Church – nothing positive is ever introduced into reality by us, only negations and privations; that is, only “holes” in being where there should not be. Thus, it is incorrect for Dr. O’Neill to say that Maritain’s position is worse than Molina’s. Molina’s position really does have something operating beyond God’s causal influence – some free-willing feature of the human agent, say – whereas Maritain does not. To paraphrase Lonergan, the neo-Banezian position seems to boil everything down to God’s yes or no; Molina’s to God’s yes or no AND a human being’s yes or no. We have, then, a two-lane highway on the one hand, and a four-lane highway on the other. Maritain’s is a three-lane highway. There is God’s yes or no, and a human being’s no (or non-co-operation) – that is, our ability to “non-act,” and more specifically to first not consider the moral rule in any given situation and then make a particular judgment where the moral rule SHOULD have applied – and hence a surd or objective falsity is introduced into reality. But that surd is not a “thing;” it is precisely nothing and that’s exactly it. It is nothing where there should be something (a consideration and application of the moral rule, say). Hence sin need only be caused by us and our failure to do what we really could have done under the motions God has given us. Divine universal causality is thus preserved. (And the issue of divine impassibility or God passively learning is resolved by appreciating the distinctions drawn in my preceding article.) The matter, then, is largely one of getting clear on what order of providence God wills. As I contend, a perfectly wise God governs creatures according to their mode of being, and because we are, by metaphysical necessity, fallibly free, God wills to govern us as such – he wills to make it possible that we can fail, and that willing is infallible.
But another part of the issue, as DeRosa points out, comes down to people not being clear on their terms. Take permission for example. Here, I believe the neo-Banezian is apt to assume that if God permits some creaturely defect, then infallibly that creaturely defect will occur. I deny this. Permission as I see it is simply God willing neither (x) nor not-(x). God’s permission only makes it possible that a free creaturely defect could occur. Now, IF a defect has occurred, obviously God permitted it. So, from defect we can infer permission. But can we infer defect from permission? I argue in the negative. Because God permits the possibility of defect does not entail the actuality of defect. God creates free creatures which are naturally detectible (again, this is true by metaphysical necessity, since only God is his own rule as the subsistent good itself), but the transition from being naturally detectible to actually defective is due entirely and solely to the creature alone and their failure to do what they could have done under the impetus of God. God permits that defection, but he does not cause that defection. O’Neill’s position it seems to me entails that God does cause that defection, at least indirectly.
The critical analogy is this. If God annihilated the world most of us would say it was God’s fault the world was annihilated, and that it would not be enough to say, “Well God didn’t cause anything positive to happen!” which is true, because the annihilation of the world is merely a withdrawing of God’s causal influx. But that is obviously not sufficient to get God off the hook since God would still be the indirect (or per accidens) cause of the world’s annihilation and still bear ultimate responsibility for it. This, of course, is common sense, and technical distinctions about God not introducing anything positive into reality and thereby not being the active cause of anything, while true, are inadequate. I argue this analogy translates into the moral realm with Dr. O’Neil’s position and God’s “permission” of creaturely sin. Just because sin doesn’t involve anything positive coming into reality, if God either does not sustain us in the moral good (withdraws His hand, so to speak) or arbitrarily fails to provide us with what we need to consider the moral rule (such that we could not have possibly succeeded in the first place), then divine innocence is ruined. God is thus the indirect or per accidens cause of sin. Nothing positive is there – true enough – but so what? God is still ultimately responsible for the occurrence of sin, not us.
Dr. O’Neill is a top notch thinker which is why I felt compelled to engage with his recent criticisms. However, I believe his objections to what De Rosa calls a “possible middle ground” can be overcome and that we should adopt the broadly Maritain perspective on the predestination issue, even if we should want to supplement his insights with recent contributions from thinkers such as Bernard Longergan, Michael Torre, and W. Matthews Grant. My friend Karlo Broussard has recently poked fun at me for using the word “upshot” as much as I do, but again I must emphasize that the position I am promoting, once the proper distinctions are in hand, is almost nothing but upshots: we can at once affirm divine sovereignty, simplicity, impassibility, universal causality, libertarian human freedom, and divine innocence – and with enough on the table to provide a soft free-will defense and escape temptations toward universalism. Upshots indeed!
Related
Chik-Fil-A, Predestination, and Human Freedom with Fr. Gregory Pine
The Mystery of Evil, Providence, and Human Freedom with Dr. Michael Torre