We can frustrate God’s uncircumstanced will but not his universal providence.
To preserve divine innocence with respect to the problem of pain and the possibility of Hell, we must, I am ever more certain, posit that the creature of fallible liberty can *in some sense* frustrate the will of God. It is clear in Scripture that God wills that all shall be saved and come to a knowledge of truth (call this God’s uncircumstanced will). That some – as is also clear in Scripture – may not attain to heaven, we must now reconcile the issue. What gives?
I should add that it is also a philosophical consideration – since we can deduce that God is all-loving and all-good – that God would, by default, will the salvation of all. So, again, that some may not attain to heaven, there must be something on the creature’s part that makes this failure possible, if we are going to preserve divine innocence alongside a proper philosophical conception of God. This is where I depart from the “harder Thomists” and certainly Calvinists. It is repugnant to me – if not self-evidently false – that God could will (seemingly arbitrarily) from all eternity that some are saved and some are damned. Admittedly, there are crafty philosophical expositions which attempt to demonstrate such an order of providence may still be *technically* just and to all those attempts I simply say, “Give me a break.” Cleverness =/= wisdom.
I have argued that the best account of the matter of predestination/grace and human freedom/etc is found in thinkers such as Jacques Maritain (Existence and the Existent; God and the Permission of Evil), Francisco Marin-Sola (Do Not Resist the Spirit’s Call), and contemporaries such as Dr. Michael Torres.
Perhaps the best way to summarize the view is to begin with an objection towards it. Harder Thomists (neo-Banezians, mostly) and Calvinists argue that if creature can frustrate the will of God – that is, if a creature can independently fail – this poses a problem, for it then seems the creature somehow either escapes divine universal causality or divine universal providence, and possibly there is a problem for divine simplicity, also.
But all these objections can be overcome, and quite easily, I think. To the first concern, the failure of the fallibly free creature does not escape divine universal causality because nothing created is introduced into reality by our independent failure. That is precisely the point of Maritain’s “line of good vs line of evil”: that only the line of good requires God’s causal line of support, for the line of evil begins first with a negation (a non-consideration of the rule; a failure to consider what we could in fact have considered) and then a judgement/act to which that rule *should* have been applied – and so now we have a privation, of something missing from the order of being which otherwise should have been there. Thus, as Lonergan puts it, sin is a “surd”; an objective falsehood. And because we only need God to explain real being and not nothingness, Maritain’s distinction with the line of the evil shows how human beings can be the unique first cause of only one thing: nonsense. So divine universal causality is not impugned.
As for divine providence, surely it is admitted that God still permits the sin to occur, since every positive action involved in the sin (a person’s existing fist ramming into another person’s existing face, for example) is upheld in being by God, but it is precisely that which is not there (the consideration of the rule not to ram a fist into an innocent person’s face because they don’t agree with you politically, or whatever) that is the unique result of sin, and so is not caused by god, either directly or indirectly. It is simply a failure to have considered which we have habitually known; and that fault is entirely on us.
Here I quote Dr. Torre from a recent email exchange, “Common sense, theological balance, and good philosophy requires that one simultaneously affirm two principles of equal weight in this matter: God is the first cause of all being, free creatures never being the first causes of it; and free creatures are the first causes of sin and thus the non-being in their sin. To sacrifice either of those principles is to commit intellectual suicide. Much better to affirm them both and not see how they can be joined. That at least makes sense.
… the position is not that something OPERATES outside “God’s universal causality” but that it FAILS to operate. And the only explanation for this that is possible (and that has been clear ever since Augustine said ‘do not look for an efficient cause of deficiency’) is that the will FAILS ON ITS OWN. In order to ‘explain’ moral failure all one needs is a will that can fail (fallibility) and that is moved such that it can fail–which makes sin IN FACT POSSIBLE—AND that the creature then fails. It can and it does. Which is WHAT THOMAS SAYS: for this non-use and non-consideration one does not need to look beyond the will itself, which can act [well under and by the movement of God] or fail to act [well, by its OWN INDEPENDENT failure]. There is NO problem.”
Now, regarding providence, there is no issue either, because, as Dr. Torres elaborates:
“Indeed, it is classic to say that one can act ‘outside’ God’s operation or absolute will of the good, but that one can never act outside God’s permission, since permission is defined as a non-preventive will and is specifically described as both a non-will of (x) and a non-will of of non-(x), and thus neither (x) nor non-(x) is against or outside God’s permission, which makes sin or non-sin both possible. This is also Thomas’s clear doctrine and it is defended by many Thomists.”
In other words, when we sin we merely “slip” from one order of God’s providence (say, his providence of mercy) into another (say, his providence of justice), and so that fallible creatures can in fact fail independently of God impugns neither divine universal causality nor divine universal providence. Also, “independently” in this context does not mean creatures exist independently of God (that would surely be nonsense), just that we need only look at the creature itself for the source of its failure and not God. (Contrary, say, to God failing to uphold the creature in the moral good, which would be a calamitous mistake and surely impugn divine innocence!)
As for any worry over divine simplicity, Lonergan handled that concern handily, which I summarized in a previous post. When keeping in mind God’s eternity, and working through a series of common fallacies, we see there is no threat to divine simplicity (especially when speaking of God’s knowledge) with the fact that fallible, free creatures can independently fail.
This view (that is, of Maritain and M-S, and broadly Lonergan, though his approach is distinctly his own) has major advantages. First, it is good metaphysics. Second, both divine innocence and divine providence are preserved, even if the latter requires a little more clean up duty given the obvious reality of our ability to introduce a certain degree of nonsense into God’s created order. Admittedly, in a sense, the neo-Banezian view is simpler, because there is just God’s “yes or no,” but simpler theories which lack explanatory power are not to be preferred just because they’re simpler. Rather, the “three-lane highway” of Maritain and M-S, “God’s yes or no,” alongside our ability to independently fail, is the correct view, and not altogether complicated once the proper distinctions are made – distinctions which are absolutely crucial.
So, it is true that we can in our ability to fail frustrate God’s particular will regarding ourselves (that all shall be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth), but never can we frustrate God’s general will of producing an overall good universe. At most we can just slip into different orders of God’s providence, but never can we escape it.
Also molinism is false.